Watching Edward L. Cahn’s DESTINATION MURDER (RKO, 1950) recently, I was delighted – delighted in the way only a movie lover can be delighted – to see that the scrappy little B-noir’s opening scene was filmed at the long-defunct Marcal Theater, on Hollywood Boulevard.  The movie itself isn’t half bad, chock-a-block with creeps (Albert Dekker, Hurd Hatfield, Stanley Clements, John Dehner), and a pretty good twist in the tale… but the story of the Marcal Theater is a better one.  Save an aisle seat, because the Black Dahlia will be joining us shortly.  [WARNING: A portion of this essay includes graphic subject matter not for the squeamish or faint of heart.]

First a little bit of history.  The Marcal was built in 1925 and the principal stock holders were silent film actress Alice Calhoun and real estate speculator Mark Hansen, whose surnames were cobbled together to give the movie house a distinctive moniker.  Calhoun had been an actress with Vitagraph in New York and, when that studio was acquired by Warner Brothers, she appeared as a free agent in films from a number of studios.  The Cleveland, Ohio native made something like 50 films, among them PRINCESS JONES (1921), LITTLE WILDCAT (1922) with Oliver Hardy, PAMPERED YOUTH (1925), an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons (future DRAGNET costar Ben Alexander played the juvenile in this!), HIDDEN ACES (1927) and THE ISLE OF FORGOTTEN WOMEN (1927), adapted from a story by Louella Parsons.  Calhoun had done very well for herself since traveling to New York with the express purpose of getting in on the ground floor of the burgeoning motion picture business.  Pathe Pictures thought her significantly talented to try her out on Broadway (not a bad first gig) before putting her in front of a camera and Calhoun seems to have had considerable success in Hollywood without really becoming a name.  (Nevertheless, a star was dedicated to her on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6815 Hollywood Boulevard.)  Alice Calhoun was out of the business before she turned 30 and spent the remainder of her life devoted to philanthropy, financed in part through the buying and selling of real estate.   Her second husband, Max Chotiner, owned several Los Angeles movie houses, most of them bearing his name  – such as Chotiner’s Ravenna and Chotiner’s Parisian.  Prior to that marriage, however, Calhoun became a business partner of Mark Hansen.  Formerly of St. Louis, where he had partnered briefly with the Skouras Brothers (Spyros Skouras would later become the President of 20th Century Fox, a position he held from 1942 until 1962), Hansen was a Danish immigrant and may have been introduced to Calhoun by her brother, a Danish counsel.  In the 1930s, the Marcal served as a revival house for silent films.  Charlie Chaplin opened his 1931 film CITY LIGHTS there.

As the owner of several cinemas in Los Angeles and in Whittier, San Pedro, Oxnard and Walnut Park, Mark Hansen was seemingly floating in cash but his personal life was not nearly as successful.  In the 1930s, Hansen separated from his wife, leaving a Beverly Hills home to his family and occupying one of the seedy residences he owned in the Hollywood area.  One of these properties was directly behind the Marcal Theatre, at 6024 Carlos Avenue.  However inauspicious, this domicile put Hansen at close proximity to The Florentine Gardens, a trendy nightclub in which he had bought an interest and which boasted a chorus line of gorgeous, often under-aged dancers.  (Among the high kicking hopefuls were such fresh faces as Gwen Verdon, Yvonne De Carlo, Lili St. Cyr and Maila Nurmi, who later carved out a niche of cult superstardom as Vampira.)  Hansen’s girlfriend at the time was Ann Toth, a model and aspiring actress whose only known credit is as a stand-in for Helen Heigh in MONSIEUR VERDOUX (1947), Charlie Chaplin’s black comedy about a Lonely Hearts type sociopath who marries rich widows, gains control of their bank accounts, and murders them.  Toth had been one of many hungry starlet wannabes who accepted Hansen’s invitation to live in one of his properties (he also owned a few boarding houses) while they got their careers started.  Hansen and Toth had an open relationship; while she had another semi-steady beau in a gentleman named Leo Hymes, Hansen played the field (while simultaneously being extremely jealous of anyone with an interest in Ann).  According to Ann Toth, Hansen developed an obsession with one of his “discoveries,” a down on her luck would-be actress named Elizabeth Short, known to her friends as Beth.

Ann Toth met Beth Short in October of 1946, at Mark Hansen’s place on Carlos Avenue.  Hansen had met the dark-haired, dark-eyed Bostonian in the spring of that year.  According to various witnesses during the protracted and ultimately fruitless investigation of the horrific January 1947 murder of Beth Short, Hansen had dresses made for her, and hats, which were never delivered.  Ann Toth suggested to investigators that Hansen could be violent with Beth (once over something so petty as a long distance telephone call) and stated that he later evicted her from his home.  At the time of her autopsy, Beth was found to have what is known as vaginal hyperplasia – a foreshortened vaginal canal that would have made sexual intercourse, if not literally impossible, then prohibitively painful.  The extreme nature, the fury of her murder – she was tortured, her mouth slit at the corners (the 2006 Brian DePalma film, THE BLACK DAHLIA, drew a parallel between this grotesque death’s grin and the ghastly countenance of Conrad Veidt’s character in the 1928 silent THE MAN WHO LAUGHS) while she was still alive, a tattoo from her hip cut off and forced into her vagina and her body (mercifully, after her agonizing death) brutally sodomized. Most famously, Beth’s body was, when discovered on January 15, 1947, in a vacant lot in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles, drained of blood and cut precisely in half.  (In The Badge, his landmark 1958 mash note to the LAPD, Jack Webb referred to the carnage as “lavish mutilation.”)  The newspapers (specifically Los Angeles Herald-Examiner crime reporter Bevo Means) dubbed Beth “The Black Dahlia,” a sobriquet that only added fuel to the fire of controversy, speculation and mystery.  The LAPD had their fill of suspects and one of them was Mark Hansen.  Hansen would probably have come under intense questioning even if a newspaper hadn’t received in the weeks following the murder clothes belonging to Beth Short and an address book embossed with Hansen’s name.  Hansen told the police that he had the little black book made to order but that he had never used it, that he had in fact given it to Beth Short.  That Hansen had ordered dresses for Beth, had given her gifts (including hats, sold to him by Ann Toth’s boyfriend, Leo Hymes, who was in the ladies apparel business), had invited her into his home, was known to have had a stalker-ish interest in the girl, and was the last known person to have spoken to her landed him on the list of official suspects.

Hansen was still considered a suspect when DESTINATION MURDER filmed in the lobby of the Marcal in December 1949, and he would remain so until 1951.  (Although Edward L. Cahn and company were ignorant of, or at least remained mum about, the connection of the theater to the Black Dahlia, the case was name-checked in another release that year: Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BLVD.) The previous summer, a young dancer known professionally as Lola Titus (“The Lady in Gold”) shot Hansen in a bungled attempt at murder while he was shaving.  Dragged kicking and screaming into court, Titus was remanded to a mental institution and Hansen moved back in with his wife and children in Beverly Hills.  Police had set up listening devices in his Carlos Avenue home and used the shooting incident as an excuse to conduct a thorough search of the residence;  nothing relevant was found, apart from two photographs of Beth Short.  Ann Toth disappeared after 1950 and was never heard from again.  (Another Florentine Gardens employee, Jeanne Spangler, also disappeared famously in October 1949, with suspicion pointing, however briefly, to movie star Kirk Douglas.)  Mark Hansen died of natural causes in 1964, the year the Marcal was rechristened The World.  (Alice Calhoun succumbed to cancer two years later.)  The World closed for business, business as a movie theater anyway, in 1986.  The site is now the 20,000 square foot Club Vanguard.  Over sixty years later, everyone involved directly or indirectly in the Black Dahlia case is gone, as is the Carlos Avenue home.  All that remains — and remain it does, however obscured in shadow — is the truth.

For further reading on these subjects, click on:

The Black Dahlia in Hollywood

Alice Calhoun: Star of the Silver Screen

Cinema Treasures: The Marcal Theater/The World Theater