Enter the Dahlia
Beth was seeing a boy who worked at an airbase in Long Beach, another pilot. She was staying nearby. It was at a drug store soda fountain there that she earned the moniker, "The Black Dahlia" because of her penchant for wearing black. It was not a name she was called during her lifetime, rather something picked up by the papers later. The name comes from the movie The Blue Dahlia, a 1946 film starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, where an ex-bomber pilot is accused of killing his adulterous wife. Beth was a mercurial girl, described as shining with warmth and sympathy, but quick to turn to distant ice. These highs and lows became part of her the character she played, bolstered by her natural beauty and unique style. For Beth, it must have seemed that she had wrought herself from nothing, a poor girl, without school smarts in Massachusetts to someone who might have walked out of a movie and into The Pig'n'Whistle or Steve Boardner's Bar. It's possible that her transformation was less deliberate than that. Perhaps it came from a dreamy place, something she could barely control. One moment she was a swan, but the next she was a phoenix, all light and fire, with no one close to give these changes any context.
Life was a dream and she drifted fitfully on its currents, unaware that her beauty and her solitude were part of heady mixture that would make her a legend.
posted by kuaptic. @ 1:29 PM
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