The next morning we once again made our way towards Hollywood. The heat was stifling, the sun blazing like the apocalypse. I wound down the window and breathed in the city air, a familiar mix of smoke and gasoline. Brushfires in the north left a brown haze across the horizon and smoke drifted dreamily over the surrounding hills. We didn’t give it a second’s thought. Something was always burning in Los Angeles.
I leafed through Benji’s copy of Hollywood Hell, the pages yellow and well thumbed. It was a pocketbook guide to LA’s seedier attractions, offering tourists an alternative to the corporate tourist traps like Disneyland and Universal Studios. Listed in its pages was information on Hollywood’s sordid, secret past, with detailed maps to guide the way. There was no listing for Graumann’s Chinese Theatre, no directions to Knott’s Berry Farm. Instead you could find the location of the Beverly Hills house where Lana Turner’s daughter allegedly killed her mother’s boyfriend, the infamous standover man Johnny Stompanato. The apartment where the actor from Seaquest hung himself. The street where Robert Blake’s wife was shot.
We drove to Leimert Park where The Black Dahlia’s body was found in 1947. The Black Dahlia was a young actress struggling to make it in Hollywood. She was a transient floating from one lonely part of Los Angeles to the next, hanging out with sailors and letting strange men buy her meals. Her naked body was found in a vacant lot close to the side of the road, severed at the waist and drained of blood. Cigarette burns scarred her breasts, a piece of flesh was carved from her side, and a grin had been slashed into her mouth with a sharp object, most probably a straight razor.
Benji and I got out of the car and stood next to the spot where her body was found. The vacant lot had been replaced by a neat row of family homes; the exact spot where her body had lain was now a driveway. A kid’s bike lay on its side on the front lawn, its back wheel spinning slowly in the air. Benji and I stood side by side, entranced. Benji was infatuated with The Black Dahlia. Many were. With her ravishing black hair and full pouting lips, she was the epitome of the untouched innocent destroyed by the evils of Hollywood. Her mysterious death was an obsession Los Angeles couldn’t quite shake off.
Benji stared at the spot where her body had been discarded. An old man walked his dog across the road, watching us with suspicion, and the tiny dog started yapping in our direction. He was old enough to know what had happened here, and why two teenagers dressed in black were standing at the side of the road staring at the sidewalk. He could see right through us. The little dog kept yapping and I felt the urge to flee, ashamed that we had roused awful memories on this glorious sunny day. I didn’t blame him for being angry. Wherever we went we stirred up memories people had been trying to forget, brought darkness back to what were now nice neighbourhoods. Benji pulled out his camera and took a picture of the sidewalk.
‘Time to go,’ I said, the old man and his dog still watching us. Benji took one more photo then reluctantly got back in the car.
‘Did you hear about that new book?’ Benji asked as we drove away. ‘Apparently John Huston was involved in The Black Dahlia’s murder.’
‘John Huston?’
‘Yeah.’
‘The director of The Maltese Falcon?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Father of Angelica and the perpetually underrated Danny?’
‘What’s your point?’
‘My point is, every day there is a new book about who killed The Black Dahlia. One day it’s an evil abortionist, the next it’s some vagrant who burned to death in a hotel room.’
‘But Huston could have done it. You could see it in his eyes. When he was in Chinatown he totally freaked me out. That guy is one evil dude.’
‘Benji, he was playing a role in a movie! Do you think Anthony Hopkins really bites people’s faces off?’
Benji found a spot of dirt on the dashboard and wiped it off with a wetted finger. ‘All I’m saying is, to play a role like that in Chinatown, a guy so evil, and to do it so well, you’ve gotta have something going on inside. He had it in him. He could have done it.’
‘Yeah, and Christopher Reeve was faster than a speeding bullet in that wheelchair.’
Many of the sites listed in the guidebook were gone, or had been altered forever. Hotels were now car parks. Schwab’s Drug Store, where a young composer scribbled ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ on a napkin while Lana Turner sipped malts in the back booth, was now a strip mall. The last place that James Dean ever lived, a large house in Sherman Oaks, had been renovated until it was unrecognisable.
We stopped at a food stand on Ventura Boulevard and bought French Dip Sandwiches for lunch. The stand was next to a florist that was used in our favorite TV show, ‘Six Feet Under’. We sat under an umbrella and watched the cars come and go, loading up with bouquets and posies. Benji dripped mustard on his Nine Inch Nails T-shirt and swore.
Our next stop was the highlight of the day, the one we had been waiting for. We drove through Laurel Canyon and passed the Canyon Country store, an iconic grocery shop frequented by boho musicians like Jim Morrison, who would drink orange juice on the porch before scoring drugs from the neighbourhood dealer in the parking lot. We only caught a glimpse of the ruins of Houdini’s mansion, set high up on Laurel Canyon Boulevard above the racing traffic, obscured by trees. The staircase that led to the mansion fell haphazardly down the cliff face, the servant quarters the only part of the house still remaining. I had read on the internet that many believed Houdini still haunted the ruins of his mansion, that the walls of his Hollywood Hills home would forever be the only ones he would never escape.
The Hollywood Hills were beautiful, wild and deadly. This was where coyotes attacked the pets of movie stars, where George Reeves, the original Superman, went upstairs during a party at his house on Benedict Canyon and shot himself. Errol Flynn held orgies at his infamous House of Pleasure, and speeding cars regularly ran off the road along Mulholland Drive, plunging down the cliff face. As we drove up Laurel Canyon, cars hurtled back down the hill at terrifying speeds, and a passing truck nearly took off one of our side mirrors. On the radio Courtney Love sang about flying away to Malibu. There were always songs about our town on the radio. Even with the murders and the rapes and the car jackings and earthquakes, the radio played songs like ‘LA Woman’ and ‘California Dreaming’, convincing us this was the only place we would ever want to be.
We drove past quaint chateaux and larger, more extravagant homes. Cielo Drive was easy to find. A brand new street sign had been erected higher than the others, to discourage theft. Another sign, ‘Not A Through Street’, was erected next to it. The houses were inconspicuous in their plainness; lawns were trimmed and walls whitewashed. Two neighbours stood on the corner, coffees and papers in hands, oblivious to the scrutiny of the world and the prying eyes of curiosity seekers. One of them tipped his cap to the other and set off in a jog, sneakers hitting the pavement hard. Above them the sky suddenly turned grey and threatened rain.
‘Here,’ Benji said, pointing to a concealed driveway. ‘This looks like it.’
We made a tight turn onto a dirt road with a sharp and steady incline. After a few houses we came across a wooden sign that read ‘Private Driveway’ and listed five house numbers, each one carved on a quaint piece of oak and hung one above the other. The house number we were looking for changed every six months, moving up or down a digit, and Benji had been careful to check the latest incarnation on the internet. We came to the end of the road and stopped at a set of gates higher than the others, the walls flanked by security cameras. Benji shut off the engine and picked up his camera. I leant back in my seat, overwhelmed.
‘Are you coming?’ Benji asked impatiently. I opened my door, heaved myself out into the grey day and shivered.
On a hot August evening in 1969, actress Sharon Tate and four other people were murdered in her home by the Manson Family. Sharon was pregnant, and her baby did not survive. All that remained of the house where she lived and died was the original telephone pole; everything else had been levelled. I touched the stone of the gate with an outstretched hand. It was still warm from the morning’s sunlight, had not yet cooled under the rain clouds that had started to gather. I placed my face against it, felt the thick texture, and ran my hand along its surface. Sharon Tate was only twenty-six when she died. A millionaire had bought the property a few years ago and destroyed it, erecting a modern structure in its place. I had seen photographs of Sharon Tate and her friends dead in the front yard and the living room. Now, the places where their bodies lay had been smoothed over, purged of demons.
I listened. The canyons loomed around us, silent and patient. I was sad that so little remained in the spot where it actually happened. I believed that life was made up of energy. When someone committed a violent act, that energy would become even stronger, fuelled by anger and hatred, fear and desperation. That energy wouldn’t dissipate. It could hang in the air, even years later. The canyons were the perfect place for that kind of energy. The hills trapped the impulses inside, where they fermented, growing stronger every day. I could feel it in the ground. It ran through my hands like bolts of electricity. It reminded me of the day my parents died, the static that hung in the air that night, and for one brief moment I felt closer to them. I was back there.
I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. I heard the whirr of a surveillance camera as it zeroed in on me.
‘Better go,’ Benji said, putting the lens cap on his camera. We got in the car and drove away. My head didn’t clear until we were back amongst the noise and traffic on Sunset Boulevard.