Like most adolescents emerging into adulthood I often felt myself the constant outsider. I was raised by my mother, a Eurasian woman who, perhaps reacting against the sheltered life that coming from a wealthy political Filipino family offered her, found her way deep into the American Flower-Power generation. My stepfather (I had never known my biological father), a British citizen, had grown up entertaining (tap-dancing) for the Allied Forces during the War, was never schooled and proudly hailed from the school of ‘hard knocks’. And so I was raised, a child of the 70’s, on a series of sailboats (that we built ourselves) sailing around the world. Living in more than 40 countries, finding myself on foreign shores not speaking a smack of the local tongue, and coming from a multicultural globetrotting family often left me asking just who the heck I was. It was a question that would linger deep into adulthood and continues to linger to this day.
My identity was anchored, however, by my illustrious grandparents on my mother’s side: My grandmother Hortensia, a Filipino agriculturalist who survived the war, cancer, and went on to become a two term Congresswoman - and my beloved Grandfather George - an American surgeon and psychologist with an IQ that rivaled Einstein’s, a former child piano protégée, an avid art patron and close friend of Man Ray and John Huston. I spent childhood summers with grandfather and it was then that I felt good - proud - like I had an identity. He was Zeus, which made me feel that I was invincible as well. Who was I? I was Dr. George Hodel’s grandson. Good enough for me.
My grandfather died on my 27th birthday. While the day was sad, I had somehow negotiated a settlement within myself. With his passing, I should be a man finally and embrace my somewhat scattered origins. I was, in the end, a Hodel offspring and I assumed the ‘Who am I?’ demons were to be put to bed.
And so I found myself an artist living and working in NYC as actor and in 2003, a bombshell exploded in my family. My uncle Steve Hodel, a retired LA police detective published a NYTimes Bestseller, The Black Dahlia Avenger, in which he accuses his father, my grandfather George, of being the notorious killer of Betty Short, aka, the Black Dahlia (as well as many others around the world). This shook the foundation of our family. While the book has some points that are true, there are many claims the truth and accuracy of which even the most staunch readers dispute. While wild in its suggestions, the cases put forth are compelling and in some cases, factual. There had been a dark side to Grandfather. For one, he had been tried, though acquitted, for the rape of his daughter Tamar in a now famous 1949 case.
The ways in which this accusation opened up old wounds for my entire family are too many to list. In my personal experience, in all those years as a kid being the perpetual outsider, my saving grace had been the fact that I was the offspring of a Great Man. But now it turns out he may have been a monster. What did that make me? Who was I? I was sick with this question.
I don’t know if it is to exercise my demons or to embrace them that I have created this play along with playwright P. Seth Bauer. I find that I’m now strangely challenged by the prospect of playing a version of myself onstage – confronting truth and fiction, possibilities and probabilities of what may have been. Does what he may have done change who I am? Perhaps it’s not the answers themselves that I seek – but the fact that I am able to now ask these questions out loud allows me, paradoxically, to feel more a part of the group. Who hasn’t wondered about their true nature? Who hasn’t felt this to some extent? We hope you enjoy our play, Dahlia.
Joshua Spafford, NYC Oct. 2008