The late father of retired detective Steve Hodel (1, 2) was Los Angeles' leading specialist on STDs and a possible provider of abortions in the 1940s. The younger Hodel believes Dr. George Hodel was in a position to know the most guarded secrets of the powerful, which in turn helped to guard his own heinous secrets.
Before marrying/divorcing George, Steve's mother was married/divorced from George's pal, famed actor/director John Huston. Around 1950, George left the U.S. after being acquitted of incest with his own young teen daughter. In retrospect, Steve thinks George may have been the "inspiration" for the father played by John Huston in Roman Polanski's Chinatown.
The Hodel family lived in Sowden House, featured in 1997's L.A. Confidential, which was reportedly a haven for an avant garde crowd. Steve tells us that his father was an enormous fan of surrealistic "art," to which he devoted a magazine, "Fantasia":
"To the portrayal of bizarre beauty in the arts, to the delineation of the stranger harmonies and the rarer fragrances....Such beauty we may find...in a temple or a brothel...in prayer or perversity or sin"Steve intimates that his dad traveled in circles, which were open to what others would view as perversity.
Another of George's pals was the "artist" Man Ray. As per a NY Times review,
"Elizabeth Short, an aspiring starlet of questionable morals... in 1947 [she] was murdered by person or persons unknown. What made the case particularly unsettling was the fact that Elizabeth's body was sliced neatly in two, with every ounce of blood drained from her body."Steve maintains that it was his father who murdered Elizabeth Short, posing her dismembered body in an absolutely bizarre tribute to Man Ray's bizarre Minotaur.
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