Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

by William J. Mann

  CHAPTER 3

  THREE DESPERATE DAMES

  On this late summer morning, as the sun reflected off the shiny chrome and mirrored stages of Tinseltown, three beautiful, desperate young women tottered on the brink.

  The first of these was Mabel Normand. She was twenty-seven years old, but her friends told her she’d never live to see twenty-eight if she didn’t break off a love affair that was destroying her by inches. The affair had started as a lark, full of fun and laughs, but it had ended up wrecking Mabel’s health and depleting her bank account—the way romances with cocaine usually ended.

  With the city around her waking up, mockingbirds jeering from jacaranda trees, and trolley cars jangling their bells, Mabel knew the only answer was to get out of town. She needed to go home, back to the East, away from all this sunshine and make-believe.

  Mabel had been very successful here on the coast. After almost a decade on the screen, her face was one of the most familiar in the world. She was the “Queen of Comedy,” sometimes called the female Chaplin. Her latest picture, The Slim Princess, had just opened in June. But what Mabel needed more than anything else was a long, deep breath of New York air. It might be grimy, it might be smelly, but it was real—unlike the air out here, perpetually perfumed with coyote mint, as if she were living in some absurd fairy kingdom. Packing the last of her things and locking the door of her apartment at 3089 West Seventh Street, Mabel instructed her chauffeur to take her to La Grande Station, at the corner of Second Street and Santa Fe Avenue. She had a train to catch.

  Once, a long time ago, Mabel had liked Hollywood very much. Back then it had been all about laughter and friendship and romance and late-night skinny-dipping in the Pacific Ocean. Now it was only about money and grosses and boardrooms and deceit. How Mabel hated the film colony’s artificiality and hucksterism. She could play “the baloney card,” as she called it, when she needed to, like the way she knocked three years off her age in her official biographies (the public thought Mabel was twenty-four), or the way she told some interviewers she’d been born in Boston and others Atlanta. But Mabel never played the baloney card for money or power. When she regaled the fan magazines with stories of growing up wealthy and being educated at private schools—or sometimes the opposite, growing up as a destitute orphan scrubbing floors—she was indulging a creative imagination that stretched all the way back to her childhood. Rich or poor, it didn’t matter to Mabel. All she had ever cared about was that she never be considered ordinary.

  When Mabel was a little girl—on Staten Island, which she rarely admitted—her father, a carpenter, would take her out on a boat and point at Manhattan. Those glittery lights, he’d tell Mabel, were part of a great big world he hoped she’d see one day. Claude Normand had once wished the same for himself. Instead, he lived vicariously through the local theater company for whom he occasionally built sets, imagining the places they saw on tour—Cleveland, Columbus, Chicago, St. Louis—places he might have seen himself if he hadn’t been a husband and father stuck on Staten Island.

  Mabel’s father was a dreamer, and he imparted his dreams to his little girl. But he also taught her more fundamental lessons, such as the difference between right and wrong, and what was worth giving up and what was not. Out into the world, Mabel had carried the twin gifts of her father’s imagination and his integrity, and sometimes found it hard to square the two. In the movie colony, there were lots of people with the former but only a few with the latter. Mabel was fine with exploiting herself for her own goals—what was the harm in subtracting a few years from your age or pretending you were born in Boston?—but she drew the line at taking advantage of someone else. That set Mabel apart in Tinseltown, where such behavior was common.

  She’d noticed the strange, foreign looks that would cross people’s faces when they’d see her drop a dollar into a hobo’s hat or hand over a pair of shoes to an extra. Mabel’s generosity was well known. Her boss, Sam Goldwyn, struggling to make his payroll one week, was thunderstruck when his star actress presented him with an envelope containing $50,000 worth of Liberty Bonds. “If they will tide you over,” Mabel told him, “you may have them.” Such things just weren’t done in Tinseltown.

  Except by Mabel Normand.

  She was always giving, and by the late summer of 1920, she seemed to have given everything away.

  As her train steamed through the California desert, the reflection glancing back at Mabel from the window looked nothing like her. Her friend, the fan magazine writer Adela Rogers St. Johns, had been horrified when she’d seen her last. Mabel had looked “harassed,” St. Johns thought, “eaten up inside by something that was bitter to her spiritual digestion.”

  For all its promise of high spirits, cocaine wasn’t very flattering to one’s face.

  Neither was booze. They might be living under Prohibition, but that didn’t stop people like Mabel, who had money and connections, from getting what they wanted. Bootleggers were as easy to find in Los Angeles as fresh avocados. As a result, Mabel had one of the “six best cellars” in town, according to the Los Angeles Herald. Two of the other five belonged to Mabel’s friends Roscoe Arbuckle and William Desmond Taylor, whom Mabel called Billy.

  Billy Taylor worried about her. He had no problem mixing Mabel drinks, but he was opposed to her use of drugs, seeing what they’d done to her. Billy promised to do whatever he could to help her break the habit. But first, he said, Mabel had to really want to quit.

  Did she? Mabel wasn’t sure. How could she survive without cocaine in a place like Tinseltown? Could she really “get off the dope,” as the saying went?

  The answer came soon after Mabel’s train chugged into the imposing pink granite structure of New York’s Pennsylvania Station. As taxicabs bleated and smokestacks pumped black soot into the air, Mabel wandered happily along the crowded city sidewalks, exulting in being back home, cherishing the realness, the grittiness, the anonymity.

  Then, all at once, everything changed. Handing a newsboy a penny, Mabel stared down at the headline marching across the front page in three-inch black type. Her good friend Olive Thomas had just died in Paris after drinking a solution of mercury bichloride, apparently by accident. Mabel hurried back to her hotel room at the Ritz, where, for the next week, she hid out.

  Mabel was devastated by Thomas’s death. The two good-time girls had partied together many times, so it was easy for Mabel to imagine her friend’s tragic last night. Strung out on cocaine and booze, Ollie had shaken some tablets into a glass, thinking them to be sleeping pills. But in fact they had come from a medicine bottle, prescribed by a French physician to treat husband Jack Pickford’s syphilis. Intended to cauterize Jack’s sores topically, the mercury had instead burned its way down Ollie’s throat, before embarking on the slow, agonizing process of eating through her stomach and other internal organs. The poor woman’s death had dragged out painfully for several days.

  The sheer horror of it all destroyed Mabel. Her happy homecoming was ruined. The next “accidental death,” she realized, might be her own.

  Back in Hollywood, in the once quiet but now rapidly urbanizing Bunker Hill neighborhood, in the architecturally incongruous Melrose Hotel, the second desperate woman, twenty-five-year-old Margaret Gibson, did not share Mabel’s desire to get out of town. In fact Margaret, whose friends called her Gibby, had overcome great odds in her effort to stay right where she was.

  She might not have been as successful as Mabel, or lived in as swanky an apartment—the Melrose was a faded dowager of the 1890s, home to traveling salesmen and small-time movie players—but Gibby wasn’t forfeiting her place in this land of dreams, no matter how precarious. Not long before she’d endured a terrible, humiliating night in Little Tokyo, one that had nearly ended her aspirations right then and there. But Gibby had cooked up a scheme in response to that disaster that she hoped would still allow her to make it to the top.

  On a late summer day, as the heat rose in shimmering sheets from the sidewalk and the pa
pers in her hands dampened and began to curl, Gibby set out on a round of the studios. On South Grand Avenue she hopped onto one of the Big Reds, the lumbering, noisy streetcars of the Pacific Electric Railway. Mabel had a chauffeur; Gibby had to ride the trolley. But she was determined to meet with “everyone she knew in the business who might give her a job.”

  The résumé she carried did not bear the name Margaret Gibson. Instead, the girl with the golden brown hair in the head shots was identified as Patricia Palmer. How easy it had been for Gibby to rewrite her past in this land of make-believe. By replacing Margaret with Patricia, she’d expunged that night in Little Tokyo and reset her clock by six years—from twenty-five to nineteen—giving herself plenty of time to become a top star.

  True, there might have been some in the audience who recognized Patricia as Margaret, but they had no way of proving it. The films of Margaret Gibson had largely vanished. Once a movie had finished its run, it was dumped into a vault, where its nitrate base soon crumbled into dust. Only the most exceptional films were ever seen again. So if the newspapers and fan magazines declared that Patricia Palmer was a garden-fresh nineteen-year-old new to pictures, then she was. In Tinseltown the truth was unverifiable, so it could be anything Gibby wanted it to be.

  She had come to Hollywood when both were still very young, when movies were made on the cheap and didn’t last longer than ten or fifteen minutes. The Vitagraph company had put out a flyer looking for girls for cowboy pictures. Gibby, who’d grown up in the mountains of Colorado, figured she’d be perfect. “Before Western girls are sent to school,” she explained, “they are taught to ride a horse. By the time they are graduated, they can ride anything that has four feet and wears hair.” No surprise, she got the job.

  But there wasn’t much of a future in westerns, Gibby soon realized, at least not for women. Playing second fiddle to both the hero and his horse meant she’d never make the big bucks, and the whole reason Gibby had gotten into movies was to get rich. She’d seen the salaries top stars like Mary Pickford were making—unheard-of wealth!—and determined she’d snatch some of that for herself.

  Gibby had grown up dirt-poor. Her father had abandoned the family when she was just twelve, after which she and her mother had lived out of the back of a wagon pulled over mountain roads by a tired old horse. They’d made a living singing and dancing in flea-ridden theaters between Colorado and Kansas. One day Gibby had looked over at her mother and declared, “We are going to have nice things.” She had never forgotten that vow.

  For a while, Gibby had seemed on course to get what she wanted. She’d played leading lady to Charles Ray in The Coward, a smash hit five years ago. But then had come the debacle in Little Tokyo, and most everyone in Hollywood had turned their backs on Gibby after that. Only comedy producer Al Christie had stuck by her, keeping Gibby busy in short comedies, which at least paid the rent at the Melrose Hotel. But a life on the receiving end of custard pies was hardly Gibby’s objective. She still wanted to be a star—if not as big as Pickford, then at least of the standing of Mabel Normand or Mary Miles Minter. And why not? Gibby was as pretty as either of them, and had ten times their ambition. Yet she was at that dangerous age—twenty-five—when if she didn’t grab the brass ring soon, it would soon be forever out of her reach.

  So Gibby rode the trolley to every studio and office where she had a connection. Patricia Palmer’s head shots and résumés landed on dozens of desks.

  Among her more important connections was William Desmond Taylor, the prestigious Famous Players–Lasky director. Gibby had known Taylor when he’d been an actor at the Vitagraph company. Six years earlier, they’d starred in a quartet of pictures together, Taylor playing the noble hero to Gibby’s demure leading lady. They’d been “great pals,” one fan magazine reported. Gibby was one of the few who called the aristocratic Taylor “Billy.” Now Billy exerted considerable clout at the biggest, most successful studio in Hollywood, and Gibby hoped her old pal would help her out.

  Head shots in hand, she headed into the Famous Players plant. It couldn’t hurt to ask.

  And finally, in one of the city’s poshest neighborhoods, Fremont Place off Wilshire Boulevard, where the nouveau riche built sprawling Beaux Arts mansions to trumpet their arrival into society, the third desperate woman sat sulking over her breakfast.

  Pretty little Mary Miles Minter, eighteen, was dreading another day at the studio. Despite the servants who curled her hair and laid out her clothes, Mary felt overworked and unloved. To her imperious mother, whose lyrical, Louisiana-laced voice sent tremors of fear through everyone in the house, Mary was little more than a cash cow. At Famous Players, she was being groomed as the new Mary Pickford, but all this Mary wanted was to run away.

  Convinced she wasn’t strong enough to escape her mother on her own, Mary longed for a knight in shining armor to ride in and rescue her, as the gallant heroes did in her films. For a young girl who’d never known her father, every older man became a potential savior, and Mary lost her heart to a number of them. In fact, she had lost more than that to one particularly conniving old lech. That was why Mrs. Shelby, Mary’s mother, watched over her daughter like a guard at the gates of Buckingham Palace.

  Yet of all the older men Mary had fallen in love with, none had mattered more to her than the courtly William Desmond Taylor, who’d been her director. Mr. Taylor, Mary declared, was the love of her life. If not for Mrs. Shelby, Mary was convinced, they would have been married a year ago.

  Impetuous and spoiled, romantic and impressionable, Mary was most of all just very young. She’d been on the stage since she was a toddler, and she’d been forced to play the adult on the screen since her early teens. She’d never had a childhood, and so she lived in her daydreams. Unlike Gibby, Mary didn’t care about fame or being a star. What she wanted instead was to be the pampered, protected wife of some strong man who could take her away from her mother. Unlike Mabel, Mary’s only addiction was love.

  That exasperated Mrs. Shelby. At home, the young actress “made no secret” of her feelings for Mr. Taylor. Remembering what had happened with that other older man, Mrs. Shelby shadowed Mary around the lot, frequently giving Taylor hell if he came too close to her daughter. “They fought all the time,” Mrs. Shelby’s secretary observed. “Always on the set when he was directing.”

  So it was with great relief that Mrs. Shelby learned, about six months ago, that the studio was separating Mary and Taylor. The director was being promoted to the main headquarters on Sunset Boulevard, while Mary would remain making pictures at Famous Players’ subsidiary, Realart. Mrs. Shelby was overjoyed. But Mary was devastated.

  Finishing her breakfast and trooping out to the car with her mother to begin another day of playacting in front of the cameras, Mary was focused on one goal: to find a way to insinuate herself back into Mr. Taylor’s life.

  Mabel, Margaret, and Mary were three very different women, with different dreams and different dilemmas. But it was the same man, William Desmond Taylor, who would unspool the common thread among them.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE ORATOR

  On the afternoon of Sunday, September 26, 1920, the sun filtered through the fronds of the eucalyptus trees along Melrose Avenue, etching a lacy pattern of shadows across the partly dirt road. Steering an open cabriolet automobile around the potholes was a young man by the name of Harry Fellows—blond hair, brown eyes, medium build, professional demeanor. Behind him, perusing some notes, sat his employer, William Desmond Taylor.

  Fellows pulled into a parking lot beside a long concrete building. Taylor stepped out of the car, the afternoon sun casting shadows across the chiseled architecture of his face. Forty-eight years old, clean-shaven, with iron-gray hair, the Irish-born movie director possessed the “bony look of a stone bishop on a medieval tomb,” as one writer would describe him. Striding through the parking lot of the Brunton Studios, Taylor carried himself with the studied grace of an experienced stage actor. As always, he was dressed in m
onochrome grays and tans. There was never “even a bit of jewelry or a striking cravat to relieve the dullness of his costuming,” one studio artist observed.

  Although well regarded in the film colony, Taylor was a bit of a cipher. His prominent participation in the Motion Picture Directors Association notwithstanding, he kept mostly to himself. No one knew much about his past, or what he’d done before he came to Hollywood, besides acting some years on the stage. A confirmed bachelor, Taylor would offer condolences when acquaintances got married. Yet he wasn’t like Tinseltown’s other bachelors, cutting up the rug at the Alexandria Hotel with starlets on weekends. In fact, his neighbors in genteel Alvarado Court observed that Taylor was home from the studio most nights by seven, and usually spent his evenings alone, reading at his desk until late at night.

  The only clew to his past that Taylor ever offered was to say that he had known “great sadness” in his life. That, perhaps, explained why his face seemed perpetually somber and grave. Rarely did a smile curl Taylor’s thin lips, and when it did, it was anger, perversely, that summoned it, not pleasure. In those instances, Taylor’s cool blue eyes hinted at things he preferred to keep hidden from the prying gazes and wagging tongues of the young, impetuous movie colony. A colleague described him as “quiet, like a camouflaged man.”

  Yet while Taylor’s reserved demeanor served as a kind of armor, it also commanded respect. His boss, Mr. Zukor, regarded Taylor highly because he did not let emotion rule his actions—a rare attribute in a town of temperamental artists. For that reason, Taylor had been asked to preside over this afternoon’s gathering of film folk at the Brunton Studios. The movie chiefs hoped the event might serve as an antidote to the recent run of damaging headlines and generate a cycle of more sympathetic press coverage for Hollywood.