Black Dahlia murder of 1947. The Gardenia first appeared in the February–March issue of Today's Woman magazine: however the film rights for the novella had been acquired almost a full year earlier, it being announced in April 1951 that its filmation - purportedly entitled Gardenia - would be a production of the Howard Welsch-helmed Fidelity Pictures, who originally negotiated with Dorothy McGuire to play the female lead, which was subsequently offered to Linda Darnell, Joan Fontaine, and Margaret Sullavan (had Sullavan played the film's female lead, [The Blue] Gardenia would have been her final film rather than No Sad Songs for Me in 1950; Sullavan, who died in 1960, would have three television roles in the 1950s, one of them later than 1953). In September 1952, the rights for The Gardenia were sold to independent producer Alex Gottlieb with the film henceforth referred to as The Blue Gardenia: despite reports of the female lead role being assigned to Darnell and also to the little-known Vicky Lane, Anne Baxter was announced for the role in November – The Blue Gardenia being considered the second of Baxter's two-picture pact with Warner Bros. as that studio signed to distribute the film – with the film's two other top-billed stars announced the same month. Being cast as the film's second female lead would afford Ann Sothern her first cinematic role since being dropped by Metro Goldwyn Mayer in 1950 due to her health issues. Prior to filming The Blue Gardenia, Sothern had signed with CBS to star in the sitcom Private Secretary, filming the first episodes in the latter half of December 1952 immediately after her eight days of filming on The Blue Gardenia: Sothern's focus would remain focused on television roles with occasional cinematic forays, her next cinematic credit subsequent to The Blue Gardenia being the 1964 film The Best Man. The last of the film's stars to be announced was male lead Richard Conte, who had previously starred for Alex Gottlieb Productions in The Fighter: Fritz Lang, hired by Gottlieb to direct The Blue Gardenia, had hoped to cast Dana Andrews, established as the top actor of the film noir genre, but Andrews had recently begun a sabbatical from film work. In 1965, Fritz Lang – responding to the assertion by Peter Bogdanovich that The Blue Gardenia was "a particularly venomous picture of American life" – recalled the film as "my first