Excerpt from HILLIKERS: An Afterward To "The Black Dahlia" by James Ellroy

Baby, who were you? How would you grow and who would you love?

Elizabeth Short was born in Boston in 1924. She had four sisters. Her home life shattered early. She left town a la Jean Hilliker and rarely looked back.

She roamed south and west. She landed in postwar L.A. She nursed widespread and undiscerning crushes on young servicemen. She was a more decorous James Ellroy crouched outside bedroom windows.

She was not a porno-film actress or a film-noir succubus. She was not promiscuous by any sane standard. She was a pie-faced Irish girl with bad teeth and asthma. She died at twenty-two. The L.A. Herald-Express called her a "romance seeker." Her last months were a disordered grasp for selfhood and love. I revere her for that. I underestimated her love-hunger in my book. I couldn't feel it then. My own love-hunger blunted me to the real her. I failed to comprehend the force of her pure and headstrong youth.

I survived my youth. Betty didn't. That gap defines my debt to her. My gender and native street circumspection spared me the abyss. Betty led with a callow heart. Yearning and a silly girl's trust took her down. I tried to poise my book between sordidness and goodness. Readers will decide the balance for themselves, in ways I can never assess. I think I know Betty more completely now. I believe her balance tips to goodness in a most fulsome way. A disproportion exists in my portrayal. I filtered the fictive Betty through my own urgent lust. That lust has raged and diminuended in the 20 years from book to film. Betty Short was indestructibly hopeful. Her destruction resulted from it. That stands as her tragedy.

Motion pictures pervade the culture far more broadly and immediately than books. Betty was movie-mad and might have sensed this. She had actress dreams. She dressed and coiffed herself with dramatic intent. She killed time in Hollywood movie theatres and subsisted on snack-bar food. She told whopping lies with no small flair. She concocted grand love affairs with doomed army pilots and stillborn babies. Her stories showed her as the focal point of big lives in duress. She achieved prophecy in that manner. She practiced the conjuror's art. She envisioned herself as storm center and made her lies come true.

I followed her own lead thusly. I culled physical facts and embellished them. I structured L.A. '47 as a passion zone subsumed by Elizabeth Short. Every life touches the Dahlia. Betty rocks definitive. Obscurity defined her life. Celebrity defines her death. Her short time span and narrow purview expand and eclipse great public events. Her ghastly end tells us there is no surcease from human horror. She ramifies in obsessive circuits. She bids artists to fuse truths and lies. I followed her lead. Brian De Palma brilliantly followed mine. My novel. His film. My world as his visual record. The Dahlia as lodestone and magnetic field and arbiter of ambiguous redemption.

De Palma's films circumscribe worlds of obsession. They are rigorously and suffocatingly formed. No outer world exists during their time frame. Colors flare oddly. Movement arrests you. You forfeit control and see only what he wants you to see. He manipulates you in the sole name of passion. He understands relinquishment. The filmgoer needs to succumb. His films are authoritative. He controls response firmly. His hold tightens as his stories veer into chaos. He stands and falls, coheres and decoheres, succeeds and errs behind passion. He was the ideal artist to film "The Black Dahlia."

Now Betty Short's world and my world are his world. It's a world that no other filmmaker could have created. It's casually dangerous and invasively corrupt. It's a boomtown populated by psychically maimed misfits running from World War II. It's a fiend habitat. The Dahlia was meant to die here and nowhere else. The players in her drama knew relinquishment. They understood that she was bigger than they were, and that by touching her spirit she granted them transcendence. The dynamic applies to me and to Brian De Palma. She's bigger than us. She tempted us and seduced us and beckoned us to submission. She gave us this grand strain of her endless story.

James Ellroy ~ San Francisco, 02/27/06

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