Afterward, Tamar remembers, 'I met Dad and his two girlfriends and we went out to Enrico's for dinner. George got quite drunk and I was supporting him as we walked up the hill. That's when he said to me, 'Why did you do it?' I was so stupid. I didn't know what he was talking about because I always loved him. I thought he meant why had I always pursued and loved him. So I said, 'I always loved you, that's why.' Which, of course, was a very strange answer to someone who is really asking me, 'Why did you tell on me?' He was so drunk; we never really understood each other.'
Later on, Tamar asked one of the Asian women whom Dad had brought along why he hadn't smoked the hash pipe. Tamar told her he'd always smoked it in the past, that's why his refusal was so strange. And the woman said, 'Oh no, he doesn't do that anymore.' She explained, 'Before when he smoked hash, he made me lock him in his bathroom. He always made me lock him in there and told me not to let him out. George said to me that when he smokes it sometimes he does terrible things. He would make me lock him in the bathroom and he would cry and stay there all night.'
'It made my hair stand on end,' Tamar said. 'I was so afraid of him because I do believe he has done so many terrible dark things.'
The Los Angeles Hotel, 1969
About two years after the Mamas and the Papas concert, Dad saw Tamar again in Los Angeles when he was making one of his business trips through town from Manila. Tamar was pregnant when Dad took her to lunch at one of the Beverly Hills hotels. As they were walking through the lobby, George suddenly stopped and pointed to a design on the carpet. He asked Tamar, 'What does that remind you of?' She looked at the carpet and said, 'I don't know, some kind of flower or something. Maybe rhododendrons?' George said, 'No,' and pointed around the edges with his finger. Then he said, 'No, look again, it's a vagina and lips.' He said, 'They are nether lips.' Then he stomped hard on the design and he said, 'Did that hurt?' 'God,' Tamar told me, 'I couldn't believe it. It sent chills down my spine. 'Nether lips'. He never used that word before.'
The next day, George took out Tamar's daughter, Fauna 2, who was then thirteen. Fauna 2 is one of Tamar's five children from five different fathers, and is her second daughter, born from her marriage to folk singer Stan Wilson. She was originally named Deborah, but decided to change her name to Fauna as an adult. But her older sister, from a different father, is also named Fauna. So the children differentiated themselves by calling themselves Fauna 1 and Fauna 2.
Fauna 2 kept secret for many years what happened that night, only telling her mother about it after she had become an adult. At dinner, Fauna 2 suddenly became groggy, attempted to stand up, and almost collapsed on the floor. As she described it to Tamar, both the waiter and George rushed to her side, Dad catching her before she fell. Dismissing the waiter, he then helped her walk out of the dining room. The next thing Fauna 2 recalled was waking up in a hotel. She was lying on a bed, completely nude, having been undressed while she was unconscious. Her legs had been spread open, and George was taking pictures of her with a camera. Fauna was convinced she had been drugged.
Tamar was stunned at hearing her daughter's disclosure. Now, she thought, with Fauna 2's supportive testimony, maybe Tamar's mother would believe her. But it was not to be. 'We both went to my mother and told her the story, thinking that finally it might make her believe the truth of what happened to me back at the Franklin House,' Tamar told me. 'Well, she didn't believe either one of us, and said she never wanted to see either of us again. She refused to believe her granddaughter just as she refused to believe her daughter.' To this day, Fauna 2 told her mother, she 'still hopes that the truth about what happened to her in that hotel room with her grandfather would be believed.' As for Tamar, since her truth has been buried for more than fifty years, I suspect she has by now given up all hope of ever being vindicated.
Joe Barrett and the Franklin Years
In early 1948, a year after the murder of Elizabeth Short, a talented twenty-year-old artist named Joe Barrett rented the studio at the north end of the Franklin House, became friends with my father, and lived in the studio through the entire incest trial. Even after the family broke up when Dad left the country, Joe remained a good friend to my mother and kept in touch with her through the years, whenever he could find our gypsy encampment in L.A. He and my mother remained good friends until her death in 1982.
Joe and I saw each other only a few times during my years in the LAPD and we lost touch after I retired and moved to Washington State. But he had kept in occasional contact with my brother Kelvin in Los Angeles. And when the time came for me to talk to him about the past, it was through Kelvin that I was able to reach him in 1999, shortly after my father's death and at the early stages of my investigation.
Joe was an important window to the past. He was a young adult living there right at the time of the rape and the trial, the DA's investigation into my father's behavior, and the comings and goings of Man Ray. In the same way that I approached my interviews with Tamar, I did not tell him I was conducting an investigation. I merely talked with him in the hope of gaining deeper understanding about a father I had just lost and wanted to know more about. I told him I wanted to get an accurate picture of my father as he really was, as Joe knew him from the Franklin years.
Barrett's insights were astonishing, because in addition to providing me with detailed descriptions of Dad, he also informed me, long before I discovered it through my own independent sources and research, that he himself was officially solicited by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office to assist them in their investigation of my father as 'the prime suspect in the Black Dahlia murder.' I would discover through my interviews with Joe Barrett that in early 1950, Barrett was picked up by the DA's detectives, taken to their office, and actively solicited to be their mole inside the Franklin House — 'to be their eyes and ears there' was how they put it — in their effort to establish that Dr. Hodel was indeed the Black Dahlia Avenger.
The Trial
Joe's was an intimate view of the activities at the Franklin House for almost two years, from 1948 to 1950. He told me that Father was gifted with a perfect photographic memory that permitted him to absorb ideas from other people and make them sound as if they were his own. He was super intelligent, but not particularly original.
Joe was not an invitee to my father's parties, but he saw a lot of human traffic going through the house and lots of heads bobbing around in that large middle room between the living room and Dad's bedroom. These were parties, he said, where there was a great deal of intense sexuality and there were lots of people in attendance. Joe reminded me that my father's venereal disease clinic on First Street downtown was also frequented by lots of important people. These were the days before modern drugs, when venereal disease was rampant and those who could afford private treatment were very dependent on the doctors who could provide it. My father was one of those doctors.
Barrett told me that he also knew Man Ray, who was often at the Franklin House. Joe saw him there the last day Man Ray was in Hollywood. He came to visit Dad, and he also visited Joe in the studio, where they talked for an hour or so. Joe said, 'Man Ray was leaving town that day, probably going back to Europe, after the shit hit the fan, at the end of' 49 or maybe it was into 1950. He and Juliet were living over by the Hollywood Ranch Market.' The trial had just concluded, and though Dad had been acquitted everyone in his circle had fallen under the scrutiny of the district attorney. Man Ray's reputation was already such that he did not want to be caught in the web. He must
