Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories Read Free

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