Black Dahlia, and Martinis at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles

For Terry’s and my ten year wedding anniversary, I decided that I wanted to stay in one of Los Angeles’s many historical hotels. I chose the Roosevelt Hotel, on Hollywood Blvd, and I chose poorly. What I didn’t realize while I was booking our room was that the ground floor of the Roosevelt is a night club. And so, imagine my lame thirty-six-year-old self calling room service at eleven o’clock at night to ask for some ear plugs. Because it wasn’t just the boom boom boom coming from the night club, it was the people running up and down the halls hooting and hollering to each other all through the night. I’d experienced enough of that living in the dorms at UCLA.

Anyway—the hotel I should have chosen was the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. I honestly don’t know now why I didn’t choose this hotel, as I have a scene in it in my vampire novel, Moon Flower: Vampires of Los Angeles. Here I have my couple, Sonia and Alex, out of their first date to hear some jazz at the Gallery Bar and Cognac Room. They order Black Dahlia martinis. It wouldn’t be for another ten years that I learned just why the Biltmore Hotel has a drink called the Black Dahlia. I just thought it was a hip and sexy and spooky name to give to a drink, given the famed Black Dahlia case from the forties. For anyone not familiar with the case, on January 15, 1947, a housewife in Leimert Park in central Los Angeles by the name of Betty Bersinger came across what she thought was a mannequin sprawled on the grass by the sidewalk where she was walking her three-year-old daughter. It was white as stone, had appeared to have been cut in half, and was covered in flies. Betty went to a nearby house to call the police because she didn’t think it was the sort of thing that children should be seeing (5).

What Betty had actually found was, of course, not a mannequin, but the bisected body of Elizabeth Short, an aspiring starlet who the dust jacket of Piu Eatwell’s book, Black Dahlia, Red Rose, claims to have through her death found the fame she always sought. Now, if you are the squeamish sort, just jump to the next paragraph, because I’m going to give a tally of her injuries. Elizabeth Short’s “arms were bent in right angles at the elbows and raised above the shoulders: in supplication, it seemed in death, in reality, the consequence of having been strung up by the wrists when alive. The legs were spread apart.  There were bruises and cuts on the forehead. The face had been severely beaten. The hair was blood-matted. The eyes, which were closed, seemed strangely peaceful in contrast to the mouth, which had been slashed from ear to ear in a satanic smile. Most shockingly of all, the body had been cut in half through the abdomen, under the ribs. The two sections were ten or twelve inches apart. The liver hung out of the torso. A deep, gaping slit had been cut from the pubic area to just under the navel.” (8). All but the body’s dissection and the slit in the pubic area happened while the victim was still alive. Coroners  ruled that she died from the blows to her head, and possibly from shock at the slits in her face.

 Ok, now it’s safe to read again. The murderer was never found. Or at least, he was never brought forth to answer for his crimes. Piu Eatwell makes a pretty solid case that the murderer was found, and that police corruption and entanglement with mobsters cause the killer to go free.  The three main suspects were George Hodel, a celebrity Hollywood doctor who held orgies at his house, Leslie Duane Dillon, a twenty-seven-year-old drifter and hotel bellhop. And Corporal Joseph Dumais, one of over five hundred “confessing Sams” who claimed to have committed the murder. Well, I won’t hold you in suspense. Eatwell thinks Leslie Duane Dillon did it, and she makes a pretty solid case. But I’ve heard from others who have gone down the rabbit hole of police corruption conspiracy theories (not much of a theory for the 1940’s) that they think George Hodel did it. Now, I read Eatwell’s book. Rather, I devoured it on a rather unfortunate weekend I was home alone while the kids were camping with Terry. And I think Eatwell makes here case pretty well, but I also find flaws. One of the main pieces of evidence from Dr. Paul De River, the police psychiatrist to LAPD from 1937-1950 was that the unfortunate Leslie Duane Dillon had a shockingly small penis, as in the size of a child’s penis, and that, the doctor thought, was why he mutilated Short’s body in the pubic area. Now the reason why the doctor knew that Dillon had a small penis was that he very freely dropped his trousers when Dillon asked to examine him. Now, I am not a man, but I think that if I had a penis the size of a child’s and that it was bugging me enough to kill and mutilate someone over it, I wouldn’t be too eager to drop my pants under the critical gaze of another man.

But anyway. What has all this to do with the Biltmore and the Black Dahlia martini? The Biltmore hotel was the last place Elizabeth Short was seen alive. Just before the mysterious week in which she vanished (Eatwell thinks into  the Aster Motel on Flower Street, where she was drugged, strung up, and killed, sometime during the week of January 9-15).

After driving up from San Diego with a man named Red, she requested to be left at the Biltmore where she planned to meet her sister and from there go back to her home in Boston. Red left the Dahlia at the Biltmore at 6:30. The doorman at the Biltmore was later to corroborate Red’s story, and said that she spent several hours alone in the lobby of the Biltmore after Red had left. She made some telephone calls, and finally left the hotel via the Olive Street exit at about 10:00pm. “The doorman saw her figure retreating into the fog, southward down Olive. It was the last reported sighting of Elizabeth Short to be confirmed, before her bisected body was found in the vacant lot at Leimert Park.” (31-2.)

So, that is why the Biltmore is a little spooky. And that is why it has a drink featured in its cocktail lounge called the Black Dahlia. So what are the things to take away from this blog? Do your due diligence when booking a hotel in Los Angeles. If you are looking for quiet and spooky, stay off of Hollywood Blvd. If, however, you are looking for some amazing people watching in the lobby, as in rockstars checking out of their rooms and complaining to the staff that they got a bruise on their shin from the bed corner (I got the same bruise), then by all means, stay on the boulevard.