Early Scandal In Hollywood

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The Early Scandals of Hollywood A sad but true fact is that from its founding Los Angeles has had a bad reputation. That’s odd, isn’t it? It translates to being the City of Angels. Eastern newspapers promised immigrants that California offered sunshine, warm weather, easy living and fortunes to be made in California’s gold fields. So they flocked to the west coast to find poverty and death instead. A large number of them returned home. Murder is the Name of the Game In the mid 1800s you wouldn’t have wanted to roam the streets of Los Angeles since the city was full of murderers, thieves and prostitutes. The streets were actually only dirt paths along which animals roamed and even garbage was dumped. In 1871 the city gained notoriety when…show more content…
From this we can conclude that things today are still as primitive as they were then and nothing much has changed except that a whole lot more people are getting killed. After this happened a huge crowd of white men swarmed along the narrow street lynching, burning, stabbing and beating any Chinese man they could get a hold of. In the end 19 men were killed and the Grand Jury indicted 156 men out of which only 6 went to jail. Several days later these 6 men were released due to lack of evidence and this would not be the first time nor the last that charges of corruption would be leveled at local…show more content…
This case has also become a part of Hollywood’s supernatural history. The murder had an interesting combination of gangsters, gambling and a fur-clad corpse slumped over the wheel of a luxury car. Afterwards there were stories about the supernatural and spirits that could not rest. There will be more about Thelma Todd at another time. Private investigator Harry Raymond was killed in 1938 while looking into reports of police corruption. Elizabeth Short was murdered in January 1947. Her severed and bloodless body was discovered in a vacant lot in L.A. This would become one of the most famous murders in the city’s history known as the murder of “The Black Dahlia”. Short had come to Hollywood like so many other seeking fame and fortune. It is another unsolved case. That same year Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Hollywood’s most notorious gangster met his demise. Death was waiting for him at his girlfriend Virginia Hill’s Beverly Hills home. It was supposedly a mob hit. Thing just kept getting worse that year with the murder of Jeanne French. This case became known as the “Red Lipstick”. French’s battered nude body was found in a vacant lot in the Mar Vista section of L.A. Her torso has an obscene message inscribed upon it with the words “B.D. – Tex Andy”. The killer was never
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