By June 1932, George had graduated from Berkeley pre-med and immediately enrolled in medical school at the University of California San Francisco. At the same time, though living with Emilia and raising Duncan, he became enamored of another woman, Dorothy Anthony. Not wanting to give up Emilia, he convinced her — a testament to his enormous powers of persuasion — that it would be best if they formed a romantic alliance and shared their home with Dorothy Anthony. This arrangement quickly resulted in another pregnancy, and Dorothy, in the spring of 1935, bore George a daughter, Tamar.
George Hodel's exceptional eye-hand coordination made him a natural as a surgeon, and his professors vied with one another to obtain his services as their assistant in many of their operations. It seemed that my father had found his
As per tradition at the graduation ceremonies of all physicians, on that balmy summer day in June 1936, George Hill Hodel, a tall, handsome man of twenty-eight, stood on the campus of UCSF, raised his right hand, and, with his classmates, took the Hippocratic oath. In those years, doctors took the original oath, longer than the one administered today, which included:
I will abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practise my Art.
I will not cut persons labouring under the stone, but will leave this to be done by such men as are practitioners of this work. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and, further, from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves.
While I continue to keep this Oath unviolated, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and practice of the Art, respected by all men, in all times. But should I trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse be my lot.
George's life was now dedicated to preserving and healing human life. It would be his duty forthwith to alleviate pain and suffering.
Still not yet thirty, my father was now an M.D. with a residency in surgery, having added many more lifetimes to his biography: longshoreman, artist/photographer, weekly travel columnist for the
In 1936, Dad completed his internship at San Francisco General Hospital and accepted a position with the New Mexico State Department of Public Health as a district health officer. With Emilia and seven-year-old Duncan, he moved to a small town near Prescott, Arizona, where he served as the lone doctor at a logging camp. Then he became a public health officer to the Indian reservations and pueblos near Gallup, New Mexico, where he befriended Tom Dodge, chief of the Navajo Indians.
Probably because George had convinced her that he wanted more freedom, Emilia and Duncan returned without him to San Francisco, where she would soon marry a popular local artist/painter, Franz Bergmann. Emilia took a job as a columnist, this time with the
Again, however, Father apparently felt too confined, and convinced Dorothy to return with their daughter to San Francisco without him.
In 1938, Dad was offered a job with the Los Angeles County Health Department as a social hygiene physician. He accepted the position and moved back to L.A., where he initially moved into his old guesthouse at his father's residence in South Pasadena. That same year he took a post-graduate course in venereal disease control at University of California Medical School in San Francisco, and was certified as a specialist in the field.
In 1939, he was promoted to head of the division in the L.A. County Health Department and then appointed venereal disease control officer for the whole department. At the same time, he opened his own private practice in downtown Los Angeles and became medical director and chief of staff of his own office, the First Street Medical Clinic, for which he hired a staff of physicians. Its main focus was the treatment of venereal disease, which at that time, before the introduction of penicillin, had reached near-epidemic numbers in Los Angeles County.
In Los Angeles, George was reunited with my mother, Dorothy Harvey Huston, who by then had divorced John Huston. My parents had a whirlwind romance and my older brother Michael was born the following July. George renamed Dorothy 'Dorero' — a combination of two Greek words:
George purchased a home on Valentine Street in the Elysian Park district of Los Angeles, a ten-minute drive from his downtown office, and my mother and infant brother moved in with him. There was a rumor in the family that John Huston, not my dad, might have fathered Michael. In any case, immediately after Michael's birth both John and his father, Walter, who at that time badly wanted but was still without a grandchild, visited the house daily. As Mother told me later, 'Both John and Walter would sit and stare at Michael in his crib for long periods of time, trying to discern whether or not a likeness between John and Michael existed.' Mother said that it finally became so embarrassing that she had to order both of them out of the house with a firm 'Forget it John, he's not your son.' Michael would grow up to be one of the more celebrated FM radio announcers in Los Angeles on station KPFK, and a writer and editor of detective stories and science fiction.
Dorero, at age thirty-three, though intellectually a full-blown bohemian, was also a mother who wanted her young son to have a name as well as a stake in his father's growing fortune. She was territorial about her own house. Mother pushed George to marriage, and during a weekend trip to Sonora, Mexico, George and Dorero were married. My twin, John Dion, and I were born the following November, and Kelvin, the youngest of Mother's four sons, followed just eleven months later.
On May 18, 1942, six months after the United States entered the war, my father received a commission as a surgeon in the U.S. Public Health Service as a reserve officer. Because he wanted to join the active military service like his friend John Huston, however, Dad resigned his commission from Public Health. But, because of a chronic heart condition, he failed his physical and remained in Los Angeles during the war years, practicing medicine, primarily as chief of the Division of Social Hygiene for the Los Angeles County Health Department. He also maintained his private practice at the First Street Medical Clinic and was hired as medical director of the Ruth Home and Hospital in El Monte, where he treated young women with venereal disease.
During the war years my parents' marriage fell apart. Upset and unhappy, Mother began drinking heavily, and Father stayed away from the house most of the time. After their four-year marriage, they separated in September 1944, and Mother filed a complaint for divorce, alleging 'extreme cruelty.'
During the next three years we lived apart from Father, and from December 1944 through March 1946, on three occasions, the police were called out to arrest Mother for drunk-and-disorderly complaints and child neglect. On two
