How did Elizabeth Short get the nickname the Black Dahlia?
A. The nickname is frequently misattributed (as in Jack Webb’s “The Badge,” among many others writers who followed) to reporters. It’s true that the Los Angeles newspapers, particularly the Herald-Express, prided themselves on nicknaming murders, usually after flowers. There was the “Red Hibiscus Murder” and the “White Gardenia Murder” and the “Red Rose Nude” (the latter was given by a pulp detective magazine), among many others. But Elizabeth Short was known in her lifetime as the Black Dahlia as a play on the movie title “The Blue Dahlia” that came out in the summer of 1946, when she was in Long Beach. This original Jan. 17, 1947, clipping from the Los Angeles Daily News (no relation to the current newspaper, which is technically the Daily News of Los Angeles) gives the most authentic information because rewrite man Jack Smith got it from Arnold Lander, the pharmacist in Long Beach.
