Is I Am The Night A True Story? Fauna Hodel & Black Dahlia Explained

TNT's I Am the Night is based on a sordid true Hollywood tale but the prestige miniseries makes a lot of changes to real history for the sake of its dramatic narrative. Created by Patty Jenkins (who directed the first two episodes) and her husband, screenwriter Sam Sheridan (Warrior), I Am the Night stars Chris Pine as reporter Jay Singletary and India Eisley as Fauna Hodel.

The six-episode event is now at its midpoint, and it's starting to handle the actual murder it's built around, the Black Dahlia. Thus far, I Am the Night has told two simultaneous tales that gradually synched up: Jay Singletary is a disgraced Los Angeles-based reporter who lost his career after his story on the scandalous 1949 trial of famed surgeon George Hill Hodel (Jefferson Mays) for the alleged sexual assault of his daughter Tamar was refuted. When I Am the Night begins, it's now 1965 and Jay becomes involved in a new case that echoes the infamous 1947 Black Dahlia murder, of which George Hodel was a suspect.

Meanwhile, 16-year-old Fauna Hodel was living in Sparks, NV; she was raised by a black woman named Jimmie Lee Greenwade (Golden Brooks) and grew up believing her name was Patty and that she was mixed-race. However, Fauna always sensed she was somehow different. When she discovers her birth certificate that states her name is Fauna Hodel, her real mother's name is Tamar, and her father is listed as "Negro", Fauna contacts her grandfather George and is invited to visit him in Los Angeles. When Fauna goes to LA, she is plunged into a confusing web of deceit as she tries to determine the truth about her heritage. Jimmie Lee then anonymously contacts Jay and points him back in the direction of investigating George Hodel, which makes Jay and Fauna cross paths as they seem to be seeking the same answers.

But what does the Black Dahlia murder have to do with this story and who were the real Fauna and George Hodel? Let's look closer at the true story of I Am the Night:

This Page: I Am the Night Is Based On A True Story (Sort Of)
Page 2: The Real Black Dahlia & What I Am The Night Doesn't Include

I Am the Night Is Based On A True Story (Sort Of)

I Am the Night is built around the Black Dahlia murder but the story of Fauna Hodel is based on the life of the real Fauna and her 2008 memoir, One Day She'll Darken: The Mysterious Beginnings of Fauna Hodel. The real Fauna was a friend of Patty Jenkins, who wanted to bring her story to the screen; the director got Chris Pine interested when she told the actor Fauna's story while they were shooting Wonder Woman.

As for George Hill Hodel, he was a real person and a sinister character. Just as I Am the Night portrays him, George was a prominent and well-connected Los Angeles-based physician and gynecologist. He was of Russian descent and he was a child prodigy pianist who possessed a genius-level IQ of 186. He was also an art collector and artist who was enamored with Surrealism and sadomasochism. Hodel lived in Hollywood's famous Sowden House designed by Lloyd Wright and was notorious for throwing decadent parties involving sex and debauchery with many powerful figures of Hollywood's Golden Age.

In I Am the Night, Jay Singletary's exposé on Hodel that ruined his journalism career was about how he ran an illegal abortion clinic, which the miniseries fused with the real-life scandal and 1949 trial where Hodel's teenage daughter, Tamar (Fauna's mother), accused him of statuatory rape and sexual assault. However, Hodel was also one of the suspects of the Black Dahlia murder and, according to his own son, former LA police detective Steve Hodel, the doctor was indeed the Black Dahlia killer.

Page 2 of 2: The Real Black Dahlia & What I Am The Night Doesn't Include

I Am The Night's True Story: The Black Dahlia

The Black Dahlia is arguably the most famous unsolved Hollywood murder and cold case. In 1947, the body of 22-year-old actress Elizabeth Short was found in an empty lot in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her body was cut in half and mutilated, which sparked a lurid scandal in Hollywood and where the investigation included hundreds of suspects, such as George Hodel. However, the case was never solved and no suspect was indicted.

George Hodel was linked to the Black Dahlia (the name given to Elizabeth Short by the LA press) because Short was seen at parties Hodel threw at Sowden House. In addition, Hodel's skills as a surgeon drew suspicion; the way Short's body was mutilated indicated some level of surgical skill. Lastly, during the 1949 trial where Hodel was acquitted of sexual abuse charges, Tamar Hodel accused her father of being the Black Dahlia killer. Hodel has also been suspected of other murders, including the 1945 death of his secretary, Ruth Spaulding, whom Hodel was suspected of killing to cover up his financial fraud relating to his illegal abortion clinic.

I Am The Night's True Story: Fauna Hodel

Tamar Hodel was 16 when she gave birth to Fauna. Despite Fauna's light skin and blue eyes, Tamar claimed her father was black. Tamar's mother, Dorothy, gave the baby Fauna to Jimmie Lee, a black maid in a Nevada casino. Jimmie Lee struggled to raise Fauna in Sparks, NV. They dealt with relentless bigotry Fauna experienced for claiming to be "mixed race" as well as extreme poverty, Jimmie Lee's alcoholism, sexual abuse, and starvation. When Fauna did learn her real mother was Tamar Hodel, she vowed to meet her and eventually learned about her grandfather George and his ties to the Black Dahlia murder.

Fauna did meet her mother Tamar in the 1970s. Tamar died in 2015 and Fauna passed away in 2017 after battling cancer. Fauna left behind two daughters, Rasha and Yvette; Rasha co-hosts Root of Evil: The True Story of the Hodel Family and the Black Dahlia, the companion podcast to I Am the Night.

What I Am The Night Doesn't Include

The biggest divergence between I Am the Night and real-life events is that the Jay Singletary character Chris Pine portrays doesn't exist; Jay is a composite of different reporters and detectives who investigated the Black Dahlia murder. So the miniseries' central tale of Fauna, a teenage girl, and Jay, a reporter seeking redemption, investigating her origins together is fictional.

Another major character who is invented for the miniseries is Corinna Hodel-Huntington (Connie Nielsen), who is George Hodel's ex-wife and reluctantly helped raise Tamar in I Am the Night. The Corinna character serves as a stand-in for George's real ex-wives; the real doctor was a polygamist who lived in Sowden House with Emilia, his first common-law wife; Dorothy Anthony, his first legal wife and the mother of Tamar, and Dorothy Huston-Hodel (the ex-wife of George's friend director John Huston), who was the doctor's legal second wife. (Hodel also married twice more, in 1950 and 1990.) George also had numerous other children by his many wives who are not mentioned in I Am the Night to keep the focus on Fauna and Jay uncovering the mystery of her grandfather without her half-siblings complicating the narrative.

After George Hodel died in 1999, his son Steve, a former LA homicide detective, investigated his father's sordid life and concluded that George was the Black Dahlia killer. Steve also believed his father was a serial killer responsible for other murders; Steve suspected George of being the 1940s Chicago "Lipstick Killer" of the late 1940s, the 1967 "Jigsaw Murderer" in Manila, Philippines, and even San Francisco "Zodiac Killer" in the late-1960s. Steve Hodel published several books about George Hodel's suspected crimes, including The Black Dahlia Avenger. It remains to be seen in the final three chapters how I Am the Night will resolve Jay Singletary's suspicion that George Hodel was the Black Dahlia killer and how this will change Fauna Hodel's life.