Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (27 page)

Julia finally came home last night after a couple of hours. I'd gone to bed and heard the garage door groan and a few minutes later the bedroom door opened and the light from the hall did a
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
thing to Julia's shadow against the wall as she crept into the room. She closed the door and I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep and listened to her change into her nightgown and I felt the equilibrium in the bed shift as she crawled in behind me. She whispered, “Are you awake?” but I didn't answer and with her back to me she rubbed the soles of her feet against my calves. This morning when I woke up she'd already slipped out, leaving a note that she'd gone to the library to get some work done. I've been getting some work done myself. This Welles connection is so clear that I can't believe I didn't pick up on it before. It reconciles so many loose threads in the Black Dahlia story and also makes sense of so much of Welles's behavior documented in his biography. On page 161 of Edie's manuscript, she mentions that before Jack, Betty had been having an affair with Welles. And in the biography, there are countless passages that describe Welles's unstable and even frightening actions. It seems he'd always been unhinged, but this behavior seemed to be escalating around 1946. In 1941, after his production of
Native Son
opened on Broadway, he checked into a sanitarium. There's no information here on the details of this stay—the why, the how long—but the cure clearly didn't take because the
following year, after returning from South America, he checked himself into another sanitarium. He'd been in Brazil filming the never-finished documentary
It's All True
where he'd gotten into trouble with the local authorities for countless violent outbursts, throwing dishes, trashing hotel rooms. He grew even more volatile later that year when RKO took control of
The Magnificent Ambersons
—reports of him striking a studio executive in the face are unconfirmed but surely true. He was growing increasingly violent and uncontrollable, this man who'd been raised to believe that he was—to quote Welles himself—“the axis mundi, the center of it all,” always, even from childhood, told that he could do anything and everything and that he was a true genius—now this man was finding that Hollywood was not bending to his will, was not bowing before him as obediently as he felt it should, was discovering that movie sets, those small worlds where he could control everything with godlike power, could easily rebel, could easily be taken away, so he began looking for other things that he could control: women. So far I haven't been able to find any evidence that he abused Rita Hayworth during their five-year marriage (1943–1948), but it is common knowledge that Hayworth had been abused by her father growing up and women who experience this sort of thing often seek out abusive men later in life, so for now we can safely assume that Welles abused the shit out of her. I plan on verifying this with some more research at UCLA but Chris borrowed my car so I can't get to the library at the moment, but I will. Hayworth finally pulled away from Welles while they were filming
The Lady from Shanghai
, saying, “I can't take his genius anymore.” It would make sense, then, that when he lost one punching bag, he would try to find another. We already know that
Betty Short had been one of his ladies on the side, and the first place every guy goes in this situation is the old Rolodex.

Just got back from UCLA Special Collections. Found out Welles shot most of
Lady
on location in San Francisco. Finished location filming and returned to Los Angeles on or around January 6, 1947—resumed filming on a Columbia Pictures soundstage on January 10, but—this is it!—halted production with no explanation from January 14—the day before Betty Short's body was found in a vacant lot—and resumed filming on January 17 to shoot the mirror scene, that nightmare of bisected bodies.

Julia's home, says she wants to talk. Seems in a better mood.

Welles had a black car! 1944 black Plymouth! Found a new Welles bio today, had to drive all the way to USC's library to get it, but it has a picture of Welles's car. It's not a late-thirties black Ford, like the paperboy saw near the crime scene, but it looks close enough and the paperboy probably didn't know cars very well.

Haven't been able to find any info on whether Welles had a 17-jewel Croton wristwatch with a leather, steel-snapped band, but still checking into it. Really wish book indices were more thorough.

More: a picture of Welles at boarding school in the late twenties, must have been in his early teens, dressed like a circus clown for some sort of theater thing, the red mouth makeup extending slash-like into the cheeks, looking a lot like the Glasgow smile that the killer gave Betty Short. Early obsession with facial mutilation?

The librarians at the library are getting attitudes with me, not being very helpful anymore.

Still looking for confirmation that Welles abused Hayworth.

Today's latest: Found a picture of Welles on set of
Ambersons
, sitting behind the camera, leaning into the viewfinder, wrist plainly visible, clearly wearing a wristwatch, looks like a Croton, can't be sure yet, need more pictures.

Sorry about the stains here—had a nosebleed, dripped on the paper a little.

Found this out: On January 24, the Dahlia investigation heating up, Welles applied for a passport. Eager to fly the coop! I saw his passport photo today at Special Collections. It's a funny picture: He's clearly trying to look his usual suave self—his head cocked slightly, one eyebrow arched into a circumflex—but not even a movie star is spared the unforgiving gaze of the passport-photo camera. The harsh flash and gray backdrop flatten the image out so that it would be no surprise at all to see a rubber stamp from customs smeared across his dimensionless face. But you can imagine him going in to get his photo taken and demanding multiple shots to get just the right one, just as he, as a director, demanded countless takes of countless scenes. When Edie and I were kids—this would have been in the summer of 1956, so I was nine and she was fourteen—Dad took us to get our passport photos taken for a trip to London, and Edie had been poring over French magazines, which (I'm guessing) our mom had given her for the untranslated articles on patriarchy or the sins of the bourgeoisie but which (I know) Edie loved for the photos of androgynously glamorous models. So Edie, excited about the idea of having her photo taken (which was a novelty: Our parents were not ones to document things on film, seemed utterly indifferent to the midcentury miracle of 8 mm Kodachrome, whereas our friends' parents were bent on validating
their every waking moment with an endless ticker tape of the stuff, as if to say, “Yes, we were here, we existed, see us playing in the sprinklers, see us unwrapping presents on this or that holiday, see us smiling and waving into the Grand Canyon and failing to appreciate the horror of its yawning abyss because we only saw it through a centimeter-wide viewfinder, see us”), strutted into the post office pretending to be a supermodel, demanded, in an accent she surely thought was French but which sounded more like she was deaf, the consonants rounded into vowels, that the lights be dimmed and—snap, snap—that the boy bring her an express (transl: espresso), and I could see how embarrassed our father was, this man who never liked to draw attention to himself, who because of this aversion was cursed with children who sought that attention from strangers, but I also saw, in a brief flicker of a smile, quick as a camera flash, to the poor civic cog whose job it was to snap our pictures, a glimmer of pride in his stupid children—Yes, that's my daughter, being a big, loud idiot, now take her picture—and the guy did, and for years Edie was blowing a kiss in her passport picture, and I wish I could see that picture again because I remember sneaking into her room and looking through her stuff and seeing that passport and thinking it was the greatest.

The real point I want to make about Welles, though, has less to do with the events leading up to the crime and more to do with the postmortem: That's the real smoking gun. Just after Shanghai wrapped, just as the Dahlia investigation was reaching a fever pitch, Welles dove into his next film: an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. He filmed it in twenty-three days, and though critics often disregard it as a rush job, it's clear to me now that his hasty pace and the end product's so-called
imperfections reveal it to be not a rush job but rather a desperately and frantically composed confession. Many people have not seen this film. You can't get it at Blockbuster. The copy I have, the one I screen for my English 2 students every semester when we read the play, is one I taped from TV when it aired on The Movie Channel five years ago, taping over parts of the 1988 summer Olympics, so the film is bracketed by static-fuzzed clips of a small Asian woman doing that ribbon-twirling dance on one end and the women's synchronized swimming finales on the other, and I've fast-forwarded through that goddamn Rascal Senior Scooter commercial so many times that last night I dreamt I was being chased by marauding gangs of nonagenarians on souped-up three-wheelers traveling at terrifying speeds. For the last three days, ever since Julia moved out, having found a two-bedroom in Culver City where she says she'll do some thinking, I've been watching the film repeatedly and am now intimately familiar with every one of its numerous shadows. Welles was clearly using Shakespeare's pitch-dark exploration of murder-induced guilt to admit his own guilt.

First, consider the art direction: Welles filmed it entirely on a Republic Pictures soundstage—the sky, which the signature low-angle shots give you many views of, seems more ceiling-like than sky-like, which creates an unnerving claustrophobia. The o'erhanging firmament offers no escape, which is fitting since the real setting here is not eleventh-century Scotland but rather Orson Welles's feverish mind. Also consider the visual motif of the trinity—not the trinity of Christianity but that of the inverted triangle, the mythic symbol of the female: the staffs that the witches carry throughout the film, those two prongs forming a very vaginal shape; the shields the soldiers carry, the
inverted triangle; and all those compositions of three paths converging. Welles is fixated on the image, but it is always at the nexus of violence—which not only hints at murder, the unspeakable violence done to Ms. Short's inverted triangle, but reveals a darker obsession that illuminates why her body was displayed the way it was: her legs splayed in a way so that her whole body formed this shape that clearly haunted Welles.

(That London trip, now that I've been thinking about it, was fun, Edie and I laughing hysterically as we tried to force each other to eat blood sausage, Mom and Dad kissing in Westminster Abbey, touring the Tower of London.)

Welles himself plays the titular Scotsman, the ambitious Thane of Glamis who murders King Duncan and then descends into madness, and it's very telling how Welles chooses to emphasize the passages that inflect “direst cruelty” on women. Ten minutes into the film, Lady Macbeth looks up at that sky and asks the gods to “unsex me here”—just as Betty Short's killer unsexed her—and come to her “women's breasts / And take my milk for gall”—just as one of Short's breasts was mutilated; Lady Macbeth is in effect describing the physical violence done to Short in psychic terms. And in a production that focuses so much on dueling modes of religiosity—Welles playing up the paganism of the witches and even adding a Christian priest to the dramatis personae in order to show them both to be essentially empty, the “Signifying nothing” soliloquy spoken in voiceover while we look out at the same impenetrable sky that Lady Macbeth here is pleading to—then Welles himself, who in a 1972 interview said that the director “is God” on a movie set, becomes the god that Lady Macbeth asks to do violence to
her, and is, by extension, the one responsible for its physical, extradiegetic analogue, Ms. Short's murder—a byzantine but startlingly bold revelation on his part. As the film goes on, though, his confession becomes more and more direct, as at the thirty-minute mark when, just after killing Duncan, Macbeth looks at his bloodstained hands and says in soliloquy, “Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?”—remember that Short's body was drained of blood and washed before being dumped—“No, this my hand will rather / the multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red”—and remember that much was made in the investigation about the bloody (red) shoeprints left on the (green) grass—but most shocking of all is how Welles chooses to frame himself in this scene: We see him from a typically low angle and as he looks at his bloody hand he extends it to the camera, palm up, in effect offering his guilty hand to us. Indeed, Welles's most self-revealing moments are those when he confronts us, the audience, directly, as at the hour mark when, after the witches have revealed to Macbeth prophesies of his fate, and Welles is framed from a high angle, a lonely speck of a man in the middle of darkness, the camera slowly pushing closer until we're bearing down on his panic-stricken face, he looks directly into the camera and says, “What, is this so?” and the disembodied voice of one of the witches responds, “Ay, sir, all this is so,” and suddenly, still staring intently into the camera, Welles cracks a dagger-carved smile just as the screen fades to black. Let me repeat that: He looks directly at the audience, the only time in the film he does this, and admits, through the voice of the witch, that “this”—the murder, the obsession, the guilt—“is so”—and then he smiles—the smile being that of the trickster whose pleasure
in offering a coded confession (toying with us just as those notes the killer sent to the LAPD toyed with the cops, teasing them with clues) momentarily transcends his overwhelming sense of guilt. But not all Welles's confessional moments are this obvious. The scene that I've had to watch more times than any other, in order to ensure that I wasn't just hearing things, doesn't actually have Welles in it at all—or at least not corporeally. About fifteen minutes after the “this is so” scene, we see Macduff—played by Dan O'Herlihy, who was surely cast because he looks remarkably like Welles, the similarities in makeup and facial hair—eyebrows like Groucho's mustache—further emphasizing the fact that we are to see him as Macbeth/Welles's doppelganger—talking to Malcolm and Ross and say, “Cut short all intermission. Front to front.” Now listen closely to the audio track. Just before this line, you hear a slight suture in the white noise, a small, barely perceptible edit, and then O'Herlihy's mouth does not quite move to the shape of the sounds. It's true that Welles pre-recorded much of the dialogue, so the film is filthy with awkward lip-synching, but the question here is: Whose voice do we hear in this line? The timbre and texture of the sound are different from O'Herlihy's, a bit more baritoney, and when I first heard it, I immediately thought of that mouse in that cartoon, the one Chris used to watch, the one whose voice was clearly meant to sound like Welles, and I wanted to consult Chris, to show him this clip, ask him if he heard the similarity too, but he'd left the day before, saying he wanted to stay with Julia for a while, which is fine: I have the house to myself, have plenty of time and space and to get my work done. Point being, though, for this line of Macduff's, Welles dubbed in
his own voice—
and to say what? Listen: “Cut short . . . Front
to front”! “Cut [Betty] Short”! I've been rewinding and playing those few seconds of tape all day and have now listened to Welles himself say “Cut Short” so many times that there is no doubt in my mind that this is his confession.