Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories (2 page)

You would be led to believe it was the first of many such honors culminating in an Academy Award Oscar for Best Actress . . .

It was the nicest surprise of my life. It was a surprise to change my life.

I had not even entered my own self in the competition but some guys I knew, at Camp Cooke, entered pictures they’d taken of me, when I was cashier at the PX there—all of the soldiers & their officers voted & when the ballots were counted of twelve girls entered it was
ELIZABETH SHORT
who had won the title
CAMP CUTIE OF CAMP COOKE.

This was June 1941. Six & a half years yet to live. On my grave marker it would’ve been such a kindness to carve
ELIZABETH SHORT 1924–1947 CAMP CUTIE OF CAMP COOKE 1941
but not a one of you selfish bastards remembered.

K. KEINHARDT:

Looking through my camera lens sometimes I thought Betty Short was the one. Other times, I thought Norma Jeane Baker.

Betty was the dark-haired beauty—
THE BLACK DAHLIA
. Norma Jeane was
THE WHITE ROSE
to me—in secret—her skin like white-rose-petals & face like a china doll’s.

Betty had the “vivacious” personality—Norma Jeane was shy and withdrawn almost—you’d have to coax her out, to meet the camera lens.

Betty was all over you—it felt like her hands were on you—like she was about to crawl onto your lap and twine her arms around your neck and suck at your mouth like one of Dracula’s sisters.

Sometimes a man wants that. Sometimes not.

Norma Jeane was all quivery and whispery and holding-back even when she finally removed the smock I’d given her—to pose “nude” on the red velvet drapery. (You wouldn’t say “naked”—“naked” is like a corpse. “Nude” is art.) Like if you reached out to position Norma Jeane, just to touch her—she’d be shocked and recoil.
Ohhh!
Norma Jeane’s eyes widened, if I made a move toward her.

I’d just laugh—
For Christ’s sake, Norma! Nobody’s going to rape you OK?

Fact is, I was afraid to touch
THE WHITE ROSE
—you could see the raw pleading in her blue eyes—the orphan-child pleading—no love any man could give Norma would be enough.

& I did not want to
love
any of them—there is a terrible weakness in
love
like a sickness that could kill you—but not “K. Keinhardt”!

THE BLACK DAHLIA
was a different matter. I would not ever have loved Betty Short—but feared being involved with her, so anxious too for a
career
—& if you were close to Betty you would smell just faintly the odor of her badly rotted teeth—her breath was “stale”—so she chewed spearmint gum & smoked & learned to smile with her lips pursed & closed—a hard knowing look in her eyes.

Fact is, I discovered Norma Jeane Baker—
me
.

Lots of guys would claim her—seeing she’d one day be “Marilyn Monroe”—but in 1945 at the Radio Plane factory in Burbank, Norma Jeane was just a girl-worker in denim coveralls—eighteen—not even the prettiest girl at the factory but Norma had something—“photogenic”—nobody else had. I took her picture for
Stars & Stripes
—in those factory-girl coveralls seen from the front, the rear, the side—“to boost the morale of G.I.s overseas.” And the phone rang off the hook—
Who’s the girl? She’s a humdinger.

See, I made her take off her wedding band for the shoot.

All the girlie mags—
Swank, Peek, Yank, Sir!
—wanted Norma Jeane for their covers. But she’d never do a nude—
Ohhhh! Gosh I just c-can’t . . .

I knew she would, though. Just a matter of time—and needing money.

Young girls needing money to live and older guys with money—in L.A.—pretty good setup, eh? Always has been & always will be—that’s human nature & the foundation of Civilization.

Norma Jeane was younger than Betty Short and a lot less experienced—so you’d think. (Actually she’d been married to some jerk at age sixteen—then divorced when he left her to join the Merchant Marines.) Smaller than Betty and dreamy-eyed where Betty was sort of hard-staring and taking everything in with those dark-glassy eyes of hers all smudged in mascara—Norma Jeane was no more than a size two and her body perfectly proportioned—exquisite like something breakable. Betty Short’s pinups were sexy in a crude eye-catching way, kind of sly, dirty-minded—like she’s winking at you.
C’mon I know what you want big boy: do it!
Norma Jeane’s pinups were sexy but angelic—her first nude photo “Miss Golden Dreams” I managed to coax out of her is
the
pinup photo of all recorded history.

See, the trick was getting Norma to lie on the crinkly-crimson-velvet like she was a piece of candy—to be sucked.

Getting Norma to
relax
& to
smile
—like she had not a care in the world & wasn’t desperate for money & broken-hearted, her jerk of a husband had “left her.”

& wasn’t desperate, her movie career was stalled at
zero.

Guess what I paid Norma Jeane? Fifty bucks.

I
made nine hundred!—a record for me, at the time.

Later Norma would come back to me begging—she had not known what she was signing, the waiver I’d pushed at her that day—& I said it was out of my hands by then, the rights to “Miss Golden Dreams” had been bought by the calendar company & beyond that sold & sold & sold—millions of dollars for strangers to this very day.

Don’t argue with me, I told Norma—this is the foundation of Civilization.

What I never told the L.A. detectives—or anyone who came around to ask about Betty Short—was that—(yes I am regretful of this, & wouldn’t want it to get out publicly)—there was this guy, this “gentleman”-like character, called himself “Dr. Mortenson”—an “orthopedic surgeon”—I think that’s what he called himself.

The Bone Doctor he came to be, to me.

Not my fault—all I did was bring them together.

In fact it was Norma Jeane Dr. M. wanted to meet—not the other girls who came through my studio at that time & definitely not Betty Short he thought was
somewhat common—vulgar.

That’s how the Bone Doctor would talk: this prissy way like there’s a bad smell in the room.

Not the black-haired one—her chin is too wide for feminine beauty & she’s got a cross-eye.

The little blond girl. That one. SHE is the feminine beauty like an angel in heaven.

(Did poor Betty Short have a “cross-eye”? Some photos you can see it, kind of—her left eye isn’t looking at you exactly the way the right eye is. So you’d think—something isn’t right about this girl, she’s witchy.)

One day in September 1946 the phone rang—
Hello? Is this K. Keinhardt the pinup photographer I am speaking to?
—this prissy voice & I say
Who the fuck is this?
& he says
Excuse me I am hoping to speak with Mr. Keinhardt on a proposition
& I say
What kind of a proposition?
& he says
I have been led to believe that you take “pinup” photos for the calendars
& I say
I am a studio photographer in the tradition of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand—“nudes” are a small part of my repertoire
& he says
My proposition is: in my profession I see almost exclusively injured, disfigured, or malformed human bodies—particularly the female body is a sorry sight when it is far from “perfect”—and so—I am wondering if I might make a proposition to you, Mr. Keinhardt, who photographs only “perfect” female bodies . . .

The deal was, Dr. M. would pay me twenty-five bucks—(which I later upped to thirty-five)—just to be a secret “observer”: looking through a peephole in the screen behind the camera tripod.

Sure,
I said.
As long as you don’t take pictures of your own.

How many times did Dr. M. come to the studio on Vicente Blvd., that fall and into the winter of 1947?—maybe a dozen times—& he never caused any trouble, just paid me in cash.

Parked his shiny black 1946 Packard sedan across the street.

Sat in the back behind the screen. “Observed.”

Dr. M. had a face like a smudged charcoal drawing of Harry Truman, say. Same kind of glasses as Truman. You could not imagine this man young but only middle-aged with a prim little mouth & sagging jowls.

Starched white shirt, no necktie but a good-quality coat and pressed trousers. Graying-brown hair trimmed and with a part on the left. Kind of stubby fingers for a surgeon but Dr. M. had that quiet air of “authority”—you could imagine this character giving orders to nurses and younger doctors in that voice.

You could imagine the man giving orders to women—in that voice.

Yes he was what you’d call a “gentleman”—“good breeding”—good taste too, he preferred the White Rose to the Black Dahlia—at least, that had been his wish.

Of Betty Short whom he saw photographed on three separate occasions Dr. M. said frowning afterward:

That black-haired vixen. She’s got a dirty mind—you can see it in her eyes—that cross-eye. And always licking her lips like there’s something on her lips she can’t get enough of tasting.

Of Norma Jeane whom he saw photographed just once—(historic “Miss Golden Dreams” which was a session of just forty minutes, surprisingly)—Dr. M. did not speak at all as if tongue-tied.

Dr. M. did request the girls’ names, telephone numbers & addresses & I told him NO.

NO I cannot violate the girls’ privacy—that would be a considerable extra fee, Doctor!

Something in my manner discouraged him. The Bone Doctor mumbled sorry & did not pursue the issue, did not even ask how much the “extra fee” might be—which was unexpected.

After
THE BLACK DAHLIA
in all the papers the Bone Doctor vanished. He did not ever call me again & no one would ever know of his visits to my studio except me—and Betty Short.

And how much Betty Short knew, I don’t know.

Afterward I tried to find out who Dr. M. was—thinking maybe the Bone Doctor might find it worthwhile to pay me not to give the L.A. homicide detectives his name—but I couldn’t track him.

So I thought
Could be just a coincidence.

A year or so before in L.A. there’d been another girl murdered in what was called a “sex frenzy”—in fact a girl Betty Short had known from the Top Hat—ankles and wrists tied with rope in the same way as
The Black Dahlia
—some of the same kind of torture-stab-wounds—and left in a bathtub naked—(but not dissected at the waist like Betty)—so you might think the same guy did both murders—but the detectives couldn’t come up with any actual “suspects”—there just wasn’t evidence & in the meantime there’s kooks confessing to the murder—not just men but some women too!

Could be just a coincidence
, I thought then, & I think now.
Anyway—K.K. is not going to get involved.

NORMA JEANE BAKER:

It was just a n-nightmare.

It was the awfulest—most horrible—thing . . .

You could not ever imagine such a—an awful thing . . .

When I came back to the room that night I was kind of m-mad at Betty ’cause she’d stood me up at the Top Hat—also Betty had not paid me back the thirty dollars she owed me—thirty dollars was a
lot
—also Betty was always in my things—she would “borrow” & never return what she took—like my lipsticks—
that
made me mad!

At 20th Century-Fox I went to auditions all the time. Betty was not on contract but got on a list to audition, too—it costs money for makeup & clothes—& hair—Betty dyed her hair that inky-black color—my hair, that was brown, about the color of Betty’s natural hair, they made me bleach at the Blue Book Agency saying they could get twice as many shoots for me as with my brown hair & this turned out to be correct though an understatement—more like three times as many shoots. Like Anita Loos says—
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
—this is a fact.

But Betty Short had the wrong complexion for blond—so dyed-black hair was perfect for her. & with white makeup & powder & dark lipstick she made herself look really glamorous—“sexy.”

Always wearing black clothes—that wasn’t Betty’s idea but some agent. Trying to get Betty Short work in the studios.
Not who you are but who you know
—they’d tell us. To get a contract you’d have to “entertain” the producers & their friends & then to keep the contract renewed you’d be expected to live in one of their residences like Mr. Hansen’s—he liked us to lie around the pool in the sun in teeny bathing suits & sunglasses—it was just party, party, party night after night & Betty Short thrived on it—& sleeping through the day—but I needed to get to my acting class & my dance class & that was no joke—you can’t audition either, if you are hungover & have shadows under your eyes. So—Betty Short & me—we did not always get along 100 percent—being from different backgrounds too for Betty did actually have a “father”—she’d lived with him before coming to L.A.—she showed me pictures of him—& she said
Oh my father was pretty well-to-do in Medford, Mass. when I was a little girl—see, this is my sisters & me on Daddy’s miniature golf course—then Daddy lost the business—people stopped buying miniature golf courses I guess—in the damn old Depression.

And I was so jealous!—I said
Oh Betty at least you have a f-father—you could go to him in Vallejo even now
& Betty said with this hurt angry look
Like hell I would never crawl back to him or to any God-damn man
,
my drunk father kicked me out saying I was no good, I was not even a good housekeeper like my mother, & Daddy accused me of being a strumpet & a whore—just on the evidence that I dated some boys.

& I said
But maybe your father feels differently now, you are older now & maybe he needs you
& Betty looks as me like I am an idiot saying
Maybe he needs me but I don’t need him, & I don’t need any man to boss me around, I will marry a rich man who adores me & wants to please ME not the other God-damn way around, see?