IMPLOSION Magazine

SEX, DEATH
AND THE

HOLLYWOOD MYSTIQUE
by L. Wessel

John Gilmore has spent the last three decades - and five books - writing about death,
celebrity and the ugly truth that hides behind the mask of Hollywood glamour.

One of John's books, Cold-Blooded Feral House, 1996) - the saga of Charles Schmid Jr., the notorious "Pied Piper Of Tucson" - had quite an impact on me. Especially chilling is the photograph of Schmid's manacled hands unearthing the skull of teenager Alleen Rowe.

A cross between Elvis Presley and Charles Manson, Schmid, or Smitty, as he was known to his friends, was quite a colorful psychopath. He fronted a rock 'n' roll band as vocalist and lead guitar player. There was only one problem: He couldn't play guitar! He would rig up a tape recorder that he hid inside an amplifier, then would pantomime the guitar riffs, fooling all the teenage girls who worshipped him. He wore long pointy boots with crushed tin cans stuffed inside to make him seem taller. He also wore a lot of make-up, including a big black greasepaint mole that he applied to his face as a beauty mark. Gilmore began covering the case as a freelance journalist when triple-murder charges were brought against the 23-year-old Schmid in 1965.

After reading Gilmore's book, I am excited when the author calls me to say, "We are on the same wavelength."  He tells me he watched my four Wesselmania video documentaries and liked them - particularly Ultramegapolis, my documentary on Los Angeles.

I tell John that I am about to begin post-production on a fifth documentary, Tattoo Deluxe, which I have been shooting for two years at a tattoo parlor in San Pedro, California, but I would love my next documentary to be about Gilmore and the themes of all his books. Up until this point, I have been shooting documentaries in a cinema verite style, or candid realism, I'd like to inject more fantasy and imagination into my work - a more Felliniesque approach to the documentary form - and this seems like an ideal opportunity. My friend Kelly, I tell John, would be great for a part. Kelly once had dreams of being a sexy movie star but ended up a drug addict and now is a professional call girl. John comes up with the title. Sex, Death and the Hollywood Mystique, and we immediately make plans to videotape a fantasy sequence in which John buries Kelly's nude corpse into a shallow grave in the Angeles Crest Forest.

On Dec. 18, 1997, I begin shooting Sex, Death and the Hollywood Mystique at The Hollywood Hills Hotel. After knocking at the door of Room 404, I am greeted by John's gun-wielding 12-year-old son, Carson. Carson is a child prodigy who has been showing his paintings at galleries since he was 9. Death is the primary subject matter of his art. He waves me inside the hotel room with the long barrel of the 1932 Colt ,38 police special. I fire up my video camera, point it at Carson and ask him about the human skulls that pop up in most all of his paintings.

"I do not see death as a negative," he says. "To civilization, death is an alien thing. People are afraid of what they do not understand, and people do not understand death whatsoever. That's why people have invented the afterlife . . . but I think differently. Death is it."

Marie, Carson's stepmother, offers me a cocktail and mentions that John has had a head start. Marie is a psychologist who has been studying Shaolin-style kung fu, Yang-style Tai Chi and competition-style Tai Chi for the past 10 years. The initials "J.G." are inscribed within a flaming pearl that hovers over the head of a Chinese dragon tattooed on the calf of her left leg. We drink, and the handgun gets passed around among the four of us. Then, after making sure the gun is not loaded, we engage in a playful game of Russian roulette. Gilmore, 62, presses the barrel of the gun into his wavy hair, bulges his big, blue eyes and slowly squeezes the trigger . . . Click!  

After many more glasses of Johnny Walker, I turn the camera off and agree to meet the Gilmore family in the hotel restaurant for breakfast tomorrow morning. The next morning I bring fire-eater, actress and adventurer Carmen Feliciana to breakfast with the Gilmores. I point the camera at John, and he tells me that the first story he ever sold was about a fire-eater. I videotape Carmen placing a long nail into her nose and John tapping the nail all the way into her head with a hammer!

After breakfast, we travel deeper into the bowels of Hollywood and end up at 1842 Cherokee Ave., Apartment 501 -The Black Dahlia's apartment! "The Black Dahlia" was a nickname that 22-year-old Elizabeth Short gave herself after seeing the film The Blue Dahlia and then dying her hair black and teasing it into a big, black blossom. She was a wannabe actress who yearned to be discovered while hanging out in bars in Hollywood and downtown L.A. One morning she was indeed discovered - not by a big-time movie producer or agent, but by a paperboy on his morning route. Her body had been severed at the waist and both halves of her were lying in a vacant lot. John reminisces about Elizabeth Short, the bisected beauty of his second true-crime book, Severed When he was 10 and living with his grandmother, Sarah Short, they were visited by a stranger one afternoon.

"My grandmother took in boarders," he says. "This boarder, an actor, brought a young woman over who wanted to discuss her relationship with the Shorts. And . . . looking back at all this, I realize this was Elizabeth Short, who was trying to trace her father. The girl was there for a long time. I remember talking to her. I remember her very clearly."

At the time, John's father was a police officer working on the Black Dahlia case. "He had these photographs of the girl's face inside this portfolio," John says. "My grandmother made me promise that I would not tell my father that that person [Elizabeth] had been in the house. She thought that it might reflect badly [on my father] and would have gotten him in trouble with the LAPD.  Why would a murder victim come to the house?"

Whatever motivated the killer remains a mystery, but one thing is certainly clear to John about Elizabeth Short: "She encountered somebody who absolutely believed she had to die. And, in so doing, left this parcel on the doorstep of popular culture that we will never, ever, ever forget."

Gilmore's monologue makes me recall an L.A. Times article I had read about the Black Dahlia murder case. Los Angeles Times writer Jack Smith had been working at the Daily News when a police call came in the early morning of Jan.15,1947.

"Within the minute, I had written what i nay have been the first sentence ever written on the Black Dahlia case," Smith remembered.

"My lead went pretty much like this: 'The nude body of a young woman, neatly cut in two at the waist, was found early today on a vacant lot near Crenshaw and Exposition boulevards.'"

But, Smith said, when he opened the paper, he noted a small but significant addition: the word "beautiful" placed between "a" and "young woman."

"Our city editor, of course, no more knew what the unfortunate young woman had looked like than I did. But the lesson was clear: at the Daily News, at least, all young women whose nude bodies were found in two pieces on vacant lots were beautiful. I never forgot it."

I videotape Gilmore exploring the Dahlia's apartment and remarking on all of the remodeling that has occurred over the years. There's a knock on the door.

Dawn La Rue, music supervisor and composer of the soundtrack for Sex, Death and the Hollywood Mystique shows up in full Black Dahlia drag. I stalk her with my video camera through the fifth floor hallway of the apartment building before we move on to the beautiful Bradbury building where John had an office while researching his book Severed (which has been optioned three years in a row by David Lynch, director of Eraserhead).

Our next stop is The Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery. The "Hollywood" sign, the Griffith Park Observatory and the Paramount Studios water tower can all be seen from this sacred dead-celebrity sanctuary. I videotape underground screen sirens Kerrine Eikins (star of J. Michael McCarthy's The Sore Losers} and Eva Ford (Star of Emmy Collins's Headshot) dancing in the Cathedral Mausoleum and tearfully placing flowers at the graves of Rudolph Valentine, Cecil B. DeMille and Tyron Power. John leans against a tombstone and tries to define the "Hollywood mystique."

"Hollywood has its own separate way of life. It's a hermetically sealed environment, and what goes on here, nobody knows about in the outside world. The fans know one side of it, but that side really doesn't exist. That's not how it really is. The mystique of Hollywood is really because it's a mystery. What's manufactured here is motion pictures - an imitation of life, basically what is understood by the world at large as a real fact, but it's not. Ifs not the real life that goes on here. The real life is right here - death. The image dies. The man dies ... What is an icon? I recently was asked about James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley as icons, but an icon is something that we manufacture. It's a product. It's a big, big business to manufacture icons. However, there are some people who are buried here who really gave a lot more of themselves to the world."

The next day, accompanied by Carmen Feliciana and The Goddess Bunny (star of my transgender documentary, Sugar and Spice}, I videotape an homage to Sharon Tate and her unborn child, Paul Richard Polanski, at The Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City. Bela Lugosi, Rita Hayworth, Bing Crosby, Jackie Coogan, Ray Bolger and Mario Lanza are a few of the movie stars buried at Holy Cross.

In the foreword to The Garbage People, Gilmore's book about the killers of Sharon Tate, he describes Charles Manson: "He was a very imaginative and energetic and charismatic man, and Polanski is right in a sense, that he was an artist, and he was spurned, as was Smitty, and Starkweather - all would-be artists, thwarted or spurned, and getting even by their murderous rages. . . . Others have killed but the chemical ingredients to make them stars just weren't on the menu. We're in a 'star system,' and being a star is what it's all about. Jimmy Dean and Janis Joplin and Lenny Bruce became stars in other ways. Manson is a star. It's no wonder his face is on T-shirts."

As of this writing, I continue to shoot Sex, Death and the Hollywood Mystique.. It's evening now, and, with camcorder rolling, I continue to travel through the heart of darkest Hollywood. I look up at the Hollywood sign that hovers over Los Angeles like a hungry vulture. I think about the British actress, Peg Entwhistle, who in 1932 committed suicide by Jumping off the big letter H. Carmen Feliciana and I drive out of Los Angeles into the Mojave desert. We step out of the car. Gazing into the night sky, we smile . . . real stars!

Official John Gilmore Site