Photo: 1206 N. Kingsley Drive via Google’s Street View.
I was watching a certain film the other day and what should flash by but a California driver’s license. Google would reveal the answer, so the character’s name has been snipped. Who lived at 1206 N. Kingsley Drive?
As Arye Michael Bender realized, this is the 1944 film “Murder, My Sweet.” This is the driver’s license of a white male, a blonde with blue eyes, who is 5-11 and weighs 145 pounds. That excludes Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell), Jules Amthor (Otto Kruger) and Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki).
It is, in fact, the license of the character Lindsay Marriott, played by Douglas Walton. Congratulations to Greg Clancey, LC and Mary Mallory for figuring it out.
What interested me about the license is that Elizabeth Short’s father, Cleo, lived on Kingsley. At first I thought it would be a great coincidence if they used the address of the apartment house where Cleo Short was living in 1947. But they didn’t.
In the film, the shot isn’t on the screen long enough to be read, which is probably why the prop master used an actual address.
Also in the film, Marlowe uses the Los Angeles City Directory (notice the edge printing!) last published in 1942, to look up the address of Jessie Florian.
This is a fake page inserted into the directory. But the house would have been here.
3744 W. 54th Street as shown in Google’s Street View.
