For several years, because of what she posted on her blog and now what’s in her so-called memoir, people have been badgering me about what Mamie Van Doren (age 95) thinks she “remembers” about her old pal Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia. I ignored them as long as possible, but I reached my limit with this story by Ryan Coleman in Entertainment Weekly.

Titled You Thought I Was Dead: My Life of Celebrities, Sex, and Champagne, published in May by the Permuted Press, the book apparently features what Van Doren (presumably with the assistance of an uncredited ghostwriter) claims to recall about the 1940s in Hollywood. Life is far too brief to waste time fact-checking the alleged autobiography of a superannuated starlet of 1950s drive-in movies famed for her figure and fortunately, Amazon’s sample doesn’t include the Black Dahlia chapter or I would be forced to read it.

It’s enough to say that Van Doren’s main claims, as reported in Entertainment Weekly, are utterly untrue.

She says that she met Elizabeth Short, who was waitressing at the Florentine Gardens, and worked with her “for a number of years.” This is, of course, impossible as Elizabeth Short was only in Los Angeles for the last half of 1946, not for “a number of years,” and never had a job. Not at the Florentine Gardens, not anywhere. I should note that nightclubs of the era had age requirements for employees and that Van Doren’s claims of working at various nightspots while in her early teens are quite dubious.

Van Doren also makes the staggering claim:

Which, of course, is impossible for a number of reasons, but mostly because on the morning of January 15, 1947, the murder had yet to be reported to the LAPD.

I’m sure there is more (there is always more), but good grief. Van Doren’s book and the Entertainment Weekly article are a strong warning to beware of the supermarket media’s one-source stories, what elderly movie figures think they remember decades later, and that Hollywood of the 1940s remains fertile ground for invention.