South Pasadena Review Editor-Veteran Journalist/Son of Famous Father Interviews Veteran Homicide Detective/Son of Infamous Father

November 9, 2018
Los Angeles, California

Here is a November 9, 2018  article “Black Dahlia Murder Comes Full-Circle at So Pas Library,” by South Pasadena Review Editor, Steve Whitmore. Steve met and interviewed me at the library. It was a first meet for both of us.

Here’s an introductory link and personal bio written by Steve when he took over the helm of the South Pasadena Review in July 2018.

Small World Department- A Little Hollywood Trivia- 

One of my all-time favorite film-noir classics is Director John Huston’s THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (MGM 1950)
(If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.)

A poster for John Huston’s 1950 crime film ‘The Asphalt Jungle’ starring Marilyn Monroe, Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Jean Hagen, James Whitmore, Sam Jaffe, and John McIntire, and Roy Ward Baker’s 1952 drama ‘Don’t Bother to Knock’ starring Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe. (Photo by Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images)

As many of my reader’s know, my mother, Dorothy, was married to John Huston for seven years (1926-1933) and she and John remained friends after their divorce and my mother’s marriage to my father, Dr. George Hill Hodel in 1940. George Hodel and John Huston were friends since their high school days in Los Angeles in the 1920s.

Below photo  (left) Walter Huston meeting newlyweds Dorothy and his son John at the train station in Los Angeles circa 1927.  Photo (right) of Dorothy in 1944, now married to Huston’s friend, my father, Dr. George Hodel. Photo taken by our family photographer and father’s Surrealist friend, Man  Ray.

              

The Asphalt Jungle was filmed in Los Angeles from Oct-Dec 1949, which was the exact time that Huston’s good friend, Dr. George Hodel was arrested for Incest and Child Molestation by LAPD (Oct 6th) and then bound over for a jury trial, which lasted three weeks in December 1949.

Adding insult to irony, Huston edited the crime noir film in Feb/March 1950 during the exact time the LADA and LAPD were conducting electronic surveillance of George Hodel at his Hollywood mansion where they obtained tape-recorded admissions and confessions to his multiple crimes, police payoffs and the murders of his secretary, Ruth Spaulding and of Elizabeth “Black Dahlia” Short.

At first handshake with Editor, Steve Whitmore at the South Pasadena Library last week,  to my eye, was the striking resemblance to his father, actor James Whitmore.  Below photo (left) we see Steve compared to his father, James, in a scene from Asphalt Jungle.  At scene right, “Gus” is being questioned by police.

A common Hollywood legend/myth has it that “John Huston filmed actress Marilyn Monroe in her first film (The Asphalt Jungle) and her last (The Misfits).  Well not quite.  Marilyn had seven-bit parts in films from 1947-1950 before her small role as Angela Phinlay in The Asphalt Jungle. According to IMDB her last film credit came one-year after Huston’s “The Misfits” (1961) in the role of “Ellen Arden” in “Something’s Got to Give.” (1962)

Marilyn Monroe as “Angela Phinlay” in The Asphalt Jungle  in a scene with her sugar daddy Alonzo D. Emmerich played by actor, Louis Calhern. 

MM’s last film 1962 I quote from IMDB:

Something’s Got to Give (1962) -“Unfinished remake of “My Favorite Wife,” due to the firing of Marilyn Monroe from the film. She was eventually re-hired but died in August 1962. The film was never completed.”