Artists and Models and Film Noir

My sister is telling me the story of the Black Dahlia, an as yet unsolved gruesome murder in LA in the late 40's that was explored by a detective, the author, who ultimately came to the conclusion that it was his own father who committed the crime! A tale of incestuous criminal doings in the blank time after the end of WW II when the Greatest Generation returned in stunned silence to the changed world of their bitter past and tried to create lives shrouded in the silence of their shell shocked souls. Most of the tales were kept hidden, and horror was only made worse by the giddy prosperity and mindlessness of the next decades. Within this contrast, the traumatic Depression and war ravaged past and the shiny Formica future, lies the fertile soil for Noir. Settings are always tied to artist's studios and department stores, places she says are public places of dress and undress.

In this story, Black Dahlia, the artists are John Huston, Man Ray, and a third tier fellow who, it turns out, was someone my mother studied with when she was a 26 year old zaftig hottie living out of Brooklyn for the first time in her life. She looked just like the victim then, and this book claims that this artist was one of the perpetrators in this ring of sick murderers, killing this woman and others.

"I don't believe it" my mother says, denying lots about her past in that statement.

I recall my own brush with artists, models and murders.

There was the pair in the 70's who I worked with at the art supply store, selling paints to Salvador Dali and helping to create his then degenerate canvases while he tottered around the Saint Regis in his leopard print bathrobe. I later learned while reading page 3 of the NY Post over someone's shoulder on a crowded 6 train that they were found hanging upside down in an abandoned warehouse in New Jersey, drained of all blood in their bodies. Still unsolved.

And there was Amy.

THE LIFE MODEL

We said good night the evening before

the news reported that Amy was killed.

She modeled at the drawing session while

I silently sat trying to preserve her young body

in lines and measured tones on paper sheets.

The sessions move at a ritualized pace.

The poses are quick at first to loosen the hand but then, increasingly, they become longer, and slower until the model, Amy, lay hardly moving

like fruit on the rumpled cloth of a well laid table

not life drawing but nature morte.

It was probably a mugging gone bad. She lay still surrounded by spilling bags, stopped forever while innocently heading home. The sidewalk was unstained with blood, her heavy shrouding coat caught the flow.

The night had turned bitterly cold, she accepted a ride wedged beside me on the collapsed bench of the pick-up, her bicycle stowed in the back.

We talked of her efforts to help battered women in the Bronx

by painting a mural and my work restoring public statues

but polite ideals of justice, healing and virtue expressed through art

were unable to deflect the forces moving a 10 inch kitchen knife

on its cruel path.

Amy's death leaves worthless eddies of contradictory feelings

Our few moments of conversation made us acquaintances only,

hardly more than strangers

yet the exposure of her nakedness, rightly reserved for lovers,

produced a semblence of intimacy I reexperience

in the photos of her smiling eyes that accompany the news reports of the killing.

I've tried to look at the drawings again but can't find her in them.

Real gestures are replaced by her imagined final pose

and I was only able to represent my own limits in the

graphite and conte crayon stains spread like evidence across pages

in a book of her now stilled life.