Now the orphan from Hungary had the ear of the man who would be the president of the United States. Where else could that be possible but in this great land? The only time Zukor would ever show emotion in public was when he expressed “his gratitude to his adopted country.”
As the rising sun sent its long pink fingers between the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the final presidential returns rolled in. Zukor was tired, but he was smiling. Noisemakers blew, and the room at the Ritz exploded in confetti. Harding won the election with more than 60 percent of the vote, the largest share of the popular vote in a hundred years.
Now Zukor could forge ahead with a free hand, without fear of government intrusion. He was so close to his dream that he could taste victory on his tongue.
Only the church ladies still had the power to keep him awake at night.
Adolph Zukor might have been the most powerful man in the film industry, but in some ways the women who sat on national boards and ran civic clubs and wrote letters to newspapers had more influence than even he did. No matter who was in the White House, the church ladies still had the ability to organize boycotts, pressure lawmakers, and drive public opinion. They could vote now, too. The 1920 election was the first in which women had the right to cast ballots. To underestimate the power of these women would have been foolish. And Adolph Zukor hadn’t gotten where he was by underestimating his foes.
These reform-minded women seemed to be everywhere. The National Board of Review, the organization charged by the industry to ensure that all films released were suitable for the screen, depended on the service of 150 volunteer reviewers, and a good number of them were conservative Christian women. On the various affiliated Committees for Better Films scattered throughout the country, such women as Mrs. Thomas H. Eggert of Houston, Texas; Mrs. Neil Wallace of Birmingham, Alabama; and Mrs. Eugene Reilley of Charlotte, North Carolina, exerted tremendous authority. One word from one of these matrons could be enough for a local municipality to forbid the showing of a particular film, which often led to the film being banned in surrounding communities.
And then there was Mrs. Ellen O’Grady in Manhattan.
Mrs. O’Grady had made history as one of the first policewomen in the New York Police Department. Irish-born, a widowed mother of three daughters, Mrs. O’Grady had been charged with the protection of young girls and investigation into prostitution rings. She was known for her bravery, her compassion, her efficiency, and her strict adherence to the rules.
She was also a devout Roman Catholic. In a speech before the National Conference of Catholic Charities in September, Mrs. O’Grady said that “the elimination of sin” guided her work. To the Women’s City Club, she insisted, “Girls should not paint or powder. There should be no improper dress. I know how hard it is when tight skirts are in fashion.”
This was the woman the NYPD placed in charge of the city’s public welfare laws as they related to motion picture theaters. Not surprisingly, Mrs. O’Grady had some pretty strong opinions about the movies. If a picture wasn’t “clean,” she argued, the police “must have the power to stop the showing.” She added, “Our foreign-born citizens get their ideas of our institutions from the moving pictures. Some kind of censorship is needed.”
On the afternoon of Sunday, November 14, 1920, a tragedy occurred that brought many of the reformers’ simmering resentments against the movies to the surface. An audience of nearly three hundred people, most of them children, had crowded into the New Catherine Theatre on the city’s Lower East Side for the latest installment of the Vitagraph serial The Veiled Mystery, starring Antonio Moreno. When smoke from a faulty furnace began billowing up through the floorboards, someone shouted “Fire!” and panic ensued. In the mad rush for the exits, six children were trampled to death. In the chaos outside, mothers screamed for their babies in half a dozen different languages. Initial reports said one door was locked, which led to the theater owners being charged with manslaughter. But charges were dropped once an investigation determined that the doors were actually open, and the owners had followed all safety regulations.
That, however, did not satisfy Mrs. O’Grady. She used the tragedy of the New Catherine fire to further her goal of getting children out of movies entirely. Rounding up eighty-seven fellow officers in the Police Welfare Bureau, she announced a crackdown on New York’s movie houses. “Some theatre proprietors are unscrupulous and money mad,” she declared. “It is up to you to show no leniency where violations are detected.” Any manager who admitted children without a parent or guardian would be arrested. Officers would patrol the aisles and pluck out any child not accompanied by an adult. And of course, the children’s tickets would be refunded.
That, of course, would have spelled financial disaster for the film industry. The theaters depended on children for a large percentage of their receipts. But now, with the city’s women’s clubs and many religious groups backing Mrs. O’Grady in her campaign, exhibitors had little recourse. People were angry. The present system wasn’t working, the reformers charged, and they were tired of broken promises from the film industry. Censorship was the only solution.
Even President Harding might not be able to stop this groundswell.
But in New York City, the reformers lost the battle. Zukor had little love for Sydney Cohen of the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America, but in this case the two found common cause. In early December the organization, whose members forked over a great deal of taxes to the city, sent Cohen to call on the chief of police. Shortly thereafter, Mrs. O’Grady was stripped of her oversight of the movie houses. The chief called her work there “too strenuous.” Outraged, Mrs. O’Grady removed her badge and handed it to the chief. “I’m through with the police department,” she said, and walked out.
Zukor could only have been pleased by this takedown of one of the movies’ most vocal opponents. But the film industry hadn’t heard the last from the church ladies.
Least of all Mrs. Ellen O’Grady.
CHAPTER 10
GOOD-TIME GIRL
The weeks after Olive Thomas’s funeral were among the worst in Mabel’s life. She dropped out of sight. Few friends knew where she was or how to get in touch with her.
In such situations, confronted by tragedies that could have been their own, some addicts are scared straight. Others, overcome, feeling trapped and helpless, spiral into self-destruction, gorging on drugs and booze. What Mabel’s reaction was, no one knew.
But whatever hell she went through in those terrible weeks after Ollie’s funeral, at the end of it, she had finally reached a turning point.
With trembling fingers, she placed a transcontinental phone call to Billy Taylor.
From Los Angeles, Taylor encouraged her to take the next step. It would be difficult, but it would also be the most courageous decision of Mabel’s life.
In the late fall of 1920 she checked into the Glen Springs Sanatorium above Seneca Lake in the little town of Watkins Glen in central New York. Mabel immersed herself in the black, briny healing waters of the natural springs. She meandered across the rolling green hills, playing golf and picking autumn vegetables for the supper table. She “went to bed when the moon came up and arose at the crack of dawn,” she’d recall later.
No doubt the cravings still gnawed at her, threatening at times to overwhelm her. But out in rural Schuyler County there were no dealers to call, and eventually the need ebbed.
From three thousand miles away, Billy Taylor called to cheer her on. Some in the film colony believed that Taylor himself was footing the bill for her stay at Glen Springs. Mabel had been spending her earnings on drugs—up to $2,000 a month, some whispered—and even if that was exaggerated, it was easy to see where her money had gone, and why she likely needed Taylor’s financial help.
It was a long and painful process. But Mabel wasn’t just purging herself of her addictions at Glen Springs. She had other, even more profound healing to accomplish as well.
For all the heartbreak Mabel had endure
d with Sennett, it couldn’t compare to the hell she’d gone through with Sam Goldwyn.
How persistent he’d been in his advances. Eventually Mabel had given in. After all, Sam was her boss. As much as Mabel loathed it, sleeping with Sam Goldwyn was job security.
Goldwyn was nearsighted, squat, bald, and selfish. Cocaine was the only thing that helped Mabel tolerate sex with him. Once, on a train, she’d excused herself from his sweaty clutches and hurried into her compartment to snort a couple of lines. When she returned she was glassy-eyed and frenzied, the better to deal with Goldwyn’s pawing hands and sloppy kisses.
But what was even worse was his Napoleonic presumption of power. Goldwyn wanted to change Mabel, to refine her. That was perhaps the worst thing of all. With each new etiquette lesson he arranged for her, Mabel’s resentment toward him grew.
Sitting in the shadows of a movie set with Frances Marion, she nursed her discontent like a gin and tonic. “Look at him,” Mabel seethed under her breath, pointing her finger at Goldwyn as he waddled through the studio, hunched over and beady-eyed. “That stuck-up bastard! That—” And she proceeded to “let fly a string of cuss words that no longshoreman could improve on,” Marion recalled. At last, out of breath, Mabel said, “Excuse me, Frances, for pointing.”
When it came to Sam Goldwyn, Mabel’s anger ran deep. But it wasn’t just because of the unwanted sexual passes and hectoring about etiquette.
Julia Brew, her companion-nurse, knew just how deeply Mabel despised Goldwyn. Julia had come to work for Mabel fresh from the nursing school at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Assigned her first case—“a movie star at Seventh and Vermont”—Julia was told the job was top-secret. So the bespectacled young woman took the trolley five miles to Mabel’s apartment without telling a soul.
On Mabel’s door hung a brass knocker shaped like the Mask of Thalia, the smiling muse of comedy. Julia took hold and rapped hard. A maid let her inside. The apartment was deathly still. Julia was told her patient was upstairs.
In the second-floor hallway the nurse spotted “a young balding man with wire-rimmed glasses” looking “pale and quite nervous.”
It was Sam Goldwyn.
Opening the door to Mabel’s room, Julia found the actress in pigtails and a flannel nightgown, rocking on the bed in terrible pain. She was in labor, Julia realized, and losing a great deal of blood.
Immediately Julia went to work delivering the baby. Mabel’s “large eyes closed with pain and then opened again.” The five-month-old male fetus was born dead.
When Mabel had learned she was pregnant, she hadn’t demanded Goldwyn marry her, as many other young women in her position might have done. She didn’t love Goldwyn, so she wasn’t going to marry him. Neither had she undergone an abortion. A network of doctors and midwives stood ready to provide the illegal procedure; Mary Miles Minter knew that firsthand. But not Mabel. What she’d been planning to do when the baby came, she told no one. She might have dropped out of sight for several months and then given the child up for adoption—or adopted the boy herself, from a sympathetic orphanage, some months later.
But in the end she was spared any of those decisions.
Mabel looked down at her dead baby. “Miss Normand was in a terrible state,” Julia would remember.
Goldwyn came into the room and kissed Mabel on the forehead. “I’m so terribly sorry,” he said. Mabel didn’t answer. She didn’t want to see him. This was what happened when she gave in, when she let a man run her life.
From now on, she was on her own.
Mabel spent about a month at Glen Springs. Then, suddenly, she resurfaced.
“Mabel Normand has a pair of callused hands to prove she has been rusticating in Staten Island,” columnist Louella Parsons reported. A few nights earlier, Parsons had spied Mabel at the Times Square Theater at a performance of The Mirage. Mabel regaled the columnist with stories of “her efforts to conquer that fascinating game called golf,” and revealed that she was putting on weight, adding “a pound a week.”
All true—except it wasn’t Staten Island where Mabel had been rusticating.
She had fallen far, but Mabel was determined to prove to her doubters that she was made of tougher stuff than they gave her credit for. She was not Olive Thomas. She had survived not only drugs but betrayal and exploitation, and the loss of a beautiful baby boy.
Mabel returned to Manhattan with a new gleam in her eye.
There would be no orchid-covered casket for her.
CHAPTER 11
LOCUSTS
“They loitered on the corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed,” Nathanael West would write in The Day of the Locust, describing those who lived in the margins, who’d been denied their share of fortune in the land of sunshine and dreams. “When their stare was returned,” West continued, “their eyes filled with hatred.” Little could be discovered about them, West wrote, “except that they had come to California to die.”
Gibby had yet to turn as sour as all that. For now, her dreams still held. But a dull, dead look moldered in the eyes of the lost souls who congregated on the stairs of the Wallace Apartments, a building full of hookers and dealers on Georgia Street downtown. Leaning against cracked stucco walls, they chain-smoked cigarettes and watched as Gibby climbed past.
She’d come here at the invitation of a new friend, Don Osborn, who shared her determination to make it to the top. Osborn, just a month younger than Gibby, had big plans. Like so many of the postwar generation, Osborn thought everyone could be millionaires if they just put their minds to it. Not for long would he be stuck living at the Wallace. Palatial homes awaited him. Fancy automobiles. Big-budget pictures. Just as they awaited Gibby.
They’d gotten to know each other on the set of The Tempest, a two-reel film based loosely on the Shakespeare play, starring the veteran actor Tom Santschi. But The Tempest was hardly a prestige picture. Made by independent producer Cyrus J. Williams and released by Pathé, the film flickered across only those few screens still uncontrolled by Adolph Zukor or the other big chains. Although Williams renewed his contract with Pathé for another series of pictures with Santschi, he had not rehired Gibby. Had her past caught up with her yet again?
By now, she’d run out of people to turn to. She had, in her own words, asked “every one” of her contacts for help by now. And none of them had come through.
Enter Don Osborn.
Sitting with her new friend in the courtyard of the Wallace Apartments, the yellow paint peeling off the walls, Gibby listened eagerly as Osborn told her how he planned to rewrite the rules. Osborn might not be high-class—yet—but he had high-class ideas. The big studios might be closed off to people like them, Osborn told her, but the trick was to team with an independent like Williams and make a picture that generated so much publicity that audiences would beg theaters to book it. Even Adolph Zukor would be powerless to stop exhibitors from showing a film if the public demanded it strongly enough. All they needed, Osborn insisted, was a little hype. He had friends who wanted to invest money in pictures. So he was going to direct a fantastic picture and beat Hollywood at its own game.
Gibby was entranced. Don Osborn was Joe Pepa without the criminal record. Shrewd, smart, spontaneous, Osborn had the same fatal charm with women as Pepa. He was six feet three, lean and muscled at a hundred and sixty-eight pounds. His dark hair was offset by striking blue eyes, and he sported the pencil-thin mustache that was all the rage on the motion-picture screen. Most important, he was ambitious. He’d help Gibby get what she wanted, and he’d do it more cleverly than Pepa had with his inelegant schemes. Don Osborn was just the man Gibby was looking for. Soon they were “intimately associated and involved,” as she put it.
But their passion wasn’t so much for each other as it was for what they might accomplish. It was greed, not sex, that aroused them. Their Cupid was cupidity. Osborn was married; Gibby knew and didn’t care. Pepa had been married, too. What mattered was what they c
ould do for each other. Nathanael West wrote of the relationship between two of his fictional locusts: “She wasn’t sentimental and had no use for tenderness, even if he were capable of it.” He might have been describing Margaret Gibson and Don Osborn.
If Gibby believed Don Osborn’s schemes were aboveboard, she’d soon find out how mistaken she was.
When he was nineteen, Osborn had masterminded a profitable forgery business out of his downtown apartment at 312 South Flower Street. Knowing the cops were squeamish about arresting women, Osborn had used his new bride, the former Florence Vennum, to sign the checks. Their “worthless paper,” according to newspaper reports, was “scattered throughout Southern California.” When police finally closed in, Osborn blamed it all on Florence; the police took pity on her and let her go. Just as her husband had counted on.
Not surprisingly, Florence left Osborn soon after this, taking their infant son, Earl, with her and suing for child support, though Osborn rarely gave her a cent. Moving back in with his mother, Osborn found day jobs at the movie studios. In the last five years, he’d walked though the backgrounds of dozens, maybe hundreds, of pictures from a variety of studios. When he registered for the draft during World War I, he was working for the Triangle Motion Picture Company in Culver City. But Osborn’s name would not be found on the Triangle payroll: he probably never held a job on the lot for more than a few days at a time.
Osborn firmly believed that the rules were stacked against people like him. If he was going to succeed, he’d need to go around the rules. He’d also need money. That was the basis for his friendship with George Weh, a middle-aged bachelor and the moderately successful owner of a sheet-metal company. One night, as they luxuriated in the saltwater plunge at the Sultan Baths on South Hill Street, across from Pershing Square, Osborn struck up a conversation with Weh. Osborn told Weh about his dream—to make an independent picture that could crash through the gates erected by the big producers and distributors. All he needed was financing. Weh was intrigued by the younger man. Soon he was frequenting Osborn’s “drinking parties” with their bootleg booze and attractive girls, most of them would-be movie actresses, the kind casting agents used as dress extras and called “soft goods.”
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