![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Black Dahlia theory #247
Dec. 8th, 2006 10:18 amIntriguing paragraph of the week: on p. 377 of Hello Americans, the second volume of his biography on Orson Welles, the actor and author Simon Callow discusses one of the more notorious theories out there- that Welles may somehow have been involved in the Black Dahlia murders (the subject of the recent, bad De Palma movie). In discussing Welles’s film The Lady From Shanghai, Callow discusses how Welles was under a great deal of strain during its making, quite a bit of it due to his estrangement from wife Rita Hayworth; he specifically mentions how scenes edited from The Lady From Shanghai’s Crazy House sequence allegedly featured mannequins with severed limbs, skeletons severed at the waist, and the like. Callow then goes on to discuss how Mary Pacios, a childhood friend of Short’s who became determined to find her murderer, explores in her book Childhood Shadows the notion that Orson Welles might have been the Black Dahlia murderer. Callow discusses Pacios’s allegations:
“It seems that the production shut down on 15 January, the day of the murder, and the following day; that Welles took out a passport a few days later; and that, most bizarrely of all, a few days before he had made a formal written application to register as an assistant with the local mortuary (this application is to be found in the Mercury archive at the Lilly library). In the way of these things, Miss Pacios kept on finding more clues: that Bette Short was seeing a man called George (Welles’s real first name, used by certain of his intimates) an ate in a restaurant that Welles frequented, Brittingham’s near the Columbia studios; that the body was left, carefully arranged, on the former site of The Mercury Wonder Show on Cahuenga Boulevard- where, of course, Welles had so famously sawn a woman in half; and a collage message from the murderer sent to the police with the girl’s address book and birth certificate, which heavily features the letters O and W. Miss Pacios rather overplays her hand by triumphantly revealing that the next play Welles did was Macbeth, in which…”
I find this fascinating, not so much as a literal possibility (Callow goes in, in his next paragraph, to claim that the book Black Dahlia Avenger names the Black Dahlia murderer (not Welles, of course) beyond any reasonable doubt), but for its odd resonance with the imagination, and with elements of Welles’s own work (the crazy house sequence aside). As Callow himself states: “…it is irresistible to reflect how he (Welles) would have loved the story. It had all the elements of a perfect Wellesian film, a la Touch of Evil, with crooked cops, seedy club-owners, girls on the brink of prostitution and an innocent who, determined to prove that her murdered friend was not a whore, finds herself blocked at every turn, finally stumbling on a terrible truth, to which everything points but it is now impossible to prove.” Legal implications aside- one can only imagine the reaction of the Welles estate to such a film- it would’ve made a fascinating narrative for a movie.
“It seems that the production shut down on 15 January, the day of the murder, and the following day; that Welles took out a passport a few days later; and that, most bizarrely of all, a few days before he had made a formal written application to register as an assistant with the local mortuary (this application is to be found in the Mercury archive at the Lilly library). In the way of these things, Miss Pacios kept on finding more clues: that Bette Short was seeing a man called George (Welles’s real first name, used by certain of his intimates) an ate in a restaurant that Welles frequented, Brittingham’s near the Columbia studios; that the body was left, carefully arranged, on the former site of The Mercury Wonder Show on Cahuenga Boulevard- where, of course, Welles had so famously sawn a woman in half; and a collage message from the murderer sent to the police with the girl’s address book and birth certificate, which heavily features the letters O and W. Miss Pacios rather overplays her hand by triumphantly revealing that the next play Welles did was Macbeth, in which…”
I find this fascinating, not so much as a literal possibility (Callow goes in, in his next paragraph, to claim that the book Black Dahlia Avenger names the Black Dahlia murderer (not Welles, of course) beyond any reasonable doubt), but for its odd resonance with the imagination, and with elements of Welles’s own work (the crazy house sequence aside). As Callow himself states: “…it is irresistible to reflect how he (Welles) would have loved the story. It had all the elements of a perfect Wellesian film, a la Touch of Evil, with crooked cops, seedy club-owners, girls on the brink of prostitution and an innocent who, determined to prove that her murdered friend was not a whore, finds herself blocked at every turn, finally stumbling on a terrible truth, to which everything points but it is now impossible to prove.” Legal implications aside- one can only imagine the reaction of the Welles estate to such a film- it would’ve made a fascinating narrative for a movie.
