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

by William J. Mann

  The Furnace wasn’t the first time Taylor and Hopkins had pushed the envelope. For The Soul of Youth, they’d made nightly forays into the red-light districts of Los Angeles, along Commercial Street and deep into Little Tokyo, searching out materials, props, and extras. Such outings were in search of “color,” one friend reported. “[Taylor] was always seeking the bizarre, the unbelievable, the unusual.” In one establishment, opium and morphine were “wheeled in on tea carts.” Despite the attitude he displayed toward Mabel’s drug use, Taylor was apparently not averse to the occasional opium party, if it were held in one of his favorite clubs. As one journalist would describe the scene, “The men would lie in silk kimonos, smoke the essence of the poppy flower, and so commence their ritual, old as Sodom.”

  The inference was clear: the club Taylor belonged to was a homosexual society—or “cult,” as the journalist called it—“held together by a bond, unthinkable, unnameable, unbelievable,” in which each man swore “an oath of undying affection for the others.” One friend would later admit to Taylor’s “visiting the queer places in Los Angeles.”

  Here, then, was one of the secrets Taylor was keeping from Hollywood. Since coming to the movie colony, he’d formed relationships with both women and men. Until a little more than a year previous, he’d been engaged to marry Neva Gerber. Now he was involved in another relationship, one that bridged the professional and the personal. George James Hopkins was not only his collaborator but also his lover.

  Hopkins would later describe how his heart had raced the day he’d first laid eyes on Taylor, striding aristocratically onto the set. Just eighteen at the time, Hopkins had developed a powerful crush on the handsome, confident director, much as Mary Miles Minter would do a little later, and at about the same age. But Hopkins’s mother, one of the studio’s designers, was far more open-minded than Charlotte Shelby, encouraging the match between her son and the prominent director. An “affair of the heart, discreet but passionate,” as Hopkins called it, blossomed under the nose of Taylor’s unsuspecting fiancée, who eventually broke their engagement. One of Gerber’s chief complaints had been the director’s melancholic moods. Now, with Hopkins at his side, Taylor’s outlook brightened.

  Yet while the relationship with Hopkins was kept circumspect, it was far from Taylor’s direst secret. Throughout the film colony, other gay couplings flourished. Leading man J. Warren Kerrigan lived with his “secretary,” James Vincent. The actor Gareth Hughes and the producer Ryszard Ordynski moved in relatively undisguised gay social circles that occasionally overlapped with those of Taylor and Hopkins. The press showed no strong desire to unmask such people, unless their behavior provided an excuse for titillating blind items—exactly the same criteria applied to their heterosexual counterparts. As long as Taylor continued to lead his discreet, even reclusive private life—underworld visits notwithstanding—he needn’t worry about exposure.

  Indeed, the secrets Taylor shielded from the world—and from his employers, who counted on him for so much—went far deeper than his relationship with Hopkins. His young lover was as much in the dark about them as anyone else.

  Only his prying valet, snooping through his drawers and in the dark corners of his closet, would discover what they were.

  CHAPTER 14

  DOPE FIENDS

  Thirty pounds was a lot of weight. To lose thirty pounds meant the hollowing of cheeks, the shriveling of arms and legs. To gain thirty pounds meant the opposite. Cheeks filled out, breasts swelled and rose. Thirty pounds brought color back to the complexion and restored a bounce to the step. Thirty pounds, either way, could mean the difference between life and death.

  It certainly did for Mabel.

  Stepping off the California Limited in San Bernardino, Mabel hoped to avoid the press and slip discreetly back into town. But she was just too plump, too healthy, for people not to notice. A group of photographers chased after her as she hurried, laughing, to a waiting car.

  “Looking like the Mabel of five years ago,” the Los Angeles Times reported on Christmas Eve, “Miss Normand has just returned to town from the East.” Once again, the report noted, she was rosy-cheeked and curvy. To those in the know, word spread that the cure had worked.

  “How did you do it?” Adela Rogers St. John asked Mabel when she visited.

  “I don’t know,” she said with a shrug.

  How could she tell St. John about all she’d been through at Glen Springs? The times when she’d tried to give up? The times the craving had felt like an animal trapped inside her, clawing and biting its way out?

  But she had come back, whole, to Tinseltown. By living and not dying, Mabel had surprised them all.

  And no one was more thrilled or proud of her than Billy Taylor.

  Usually Mabel visited Billy at his place, but this night he came to see her at her apartment on West Seventh Street. The upscale building contained three other duplex residences, one occupied by Charlie Chaplin’s brother Sydney.

  Taylor found Mabel fired up, excited about getting her career back on track. “I refuse to make another picture until I can get the story I want,” she declared. Knowing the struggle with Goldwyn that would involve, she was now pursuing the once-unimaginable idea of breaking her contract with him. Remembering that terrible kiss he’d given her after the stillbirth of their son, the pathetic apology he’d offered, Mabel never wanted to see the man again.

  There had to be more to life than pain and suffering. There had to be a way back to the fun and the laughter. More than a decade earlier, Mabel had left Staten Island because she’d wanted to experience the world. As disillusioned as she might have become with her career, she still knew there was more out there for her to see and do—especially now that she was “off the hop,” as the saying went.

  These were the things Mabel talked about with Billy Taylor. He’d stuck by her through thick and thin. Now he encouraged her to go after her dreams.

  But their conversation was interrupted by a knock at the back door.

  Mabel stood, telling Taylor it must be a salesman calling. That was odd, given the late hour. But she promised to get rid of him and be right back.

  It was a salesman, all right. Mabel’s drug dealer was there to welcome her back to Hollywood with some goodies, just like old times. She was looking for fun and laughter. Here it was.

  Taylor waited for Mabel to return. When the minutes ticked by, he grew suspicious. Making his way to the back door, he found Mabel speaking to someone. Whether the visitor had been invited or not, Taylor didn’t know. But he recognized the bundle the man was holding in his hands.

  Taylor exploded.

  As he’d tell an investigator later, he “not only forcibly ejected the peddler from the house but threatened to do him bodily harm” if he ever came around to harass Mabel again.

  Skulking off into the night, the dealer shouted back at Taylor, “I’ll get you sometime! You can’t butt into my trade!”

  Mabel was horrified. Had she weakened? Had she attempted to buy a gram or two of cocaine? Taylor wasn’t sure. But for the moment, all that mattered was that he had chased the man from her door. Mabel felt he had saved her life, yet again.

  A short time after the incident at Mabel’s, Taylor sat waiting in his office at the Famous Players studio at the corner of Sunset and Vine. He was expecting a visitor, someone he hoped would end Mabel’s troubles once and for all.

  The studio occupied two city blocks, the first block crammed with offices, stockrooms, warehouses, labs, wardrobe buildings, various small stages, and the large Stage 4, with its retractable glass roof. The second block was the studio’s “back ranch,” a wonderland of exterior facades. One path led to a European village, another to a Lower East Side Manhattan neighborhood, another to a western outpost. Along Sunset, the small wooden buildings adorned with green awnings gave no indication of the fantasy inside. To an observer, the world’s biggest, most influential movie company would have looked like a block from any small-town Main Street.
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  Taylor’s visitor was US Attorney Tom Green, who’d been invited onto the lot by general manager Charles Eyton. Green was the federal attorney in charge of alcohol and narcotics control for the Los Angeles district. That Eyton had asked Green, a law enforcement official, to nose around inside their operation was an extraordinary move. Clearly the dope situation had gotten out of hand.

  In the more innocent days before the war, dope had been a source of humor on the screen. Douglas Fairbanks had played a jolly opium-smoking detective in The Mystery of the Leaping Fish. Everyone partook. Adela Rogers St. Johns recalled Cecil B. DeMille handing out a psychedelic combination of hyoscine and morphine at parties. But the war had institutionalized the drug traffic, and the prohibition of alcohol had only made illicit drugs more popular—a recipe for widespread addiction.

  By going to Green, Eyton was clearly trying to take care of the problem before the press got wind of it. At Famous Players, dope had become a serious problem. Wally Reid, he of the McFarlans and dashing public profile, was what the press commonly called a “dope fiend.” The studio knew all about Reid’s addiction and was paying for treatments from a string of doctors and therapists to get its big moneymaker off the stuff. Originally Reid’s supply of morphine had been delivered by his chauffeur, who’d gotten it from a ring so deeply infiltrated into the studio that Charles Eyton was forced to call in Tom Green for help.

  And when Green showed up, one of the people Eyton suggested he speak to was William Desmond Taylor.

  The director offered to tell the investigator everything he knew. “It was then Green learned the extent to which the drug traffic had injected itself into the motion picture industry,” a newspaperman would report. Right away Green could see that for Taylor, this fight was personal. The problem went well beyond Famous Players, Taylor explained. “One woman in particular,” working at another studio, “was being pressed in every way” to keep up her expensive habit. This woman was “a film star of the first magnitude,” Taylor told Green; it was clear that he cared a great deal for her. Taylor’s determination, Green surmised, was “not so much to wipe out the ring generally but to save the actress from the clutches of these parasites.”

  The US attorney agreed to assign two men to investigate the matter. Taylor promised to give them all the help he could—names, places, identifications. For several weeks, federal agents fanned out across the Famous Players lot.

  Ultimately, however, Green’s investigation went nowhere. The attorney blamed the failure on the “wealthy and powerful” drug users themselves, movie stars like Wallace Reid who—unlike the locusts who congregated at places like the Wallace Apartments—had the means to thwart the investigators at every turn.

  No arrests were made. But Green learned just how dangerous the enterprise had become in Tinseltown. One of his agents had asked specifically about Mabel. A source replied, “Before she’s through, somebody’s going to get killed on her behalf.”

  For all of Taylor’s worries, though, Mabel did not relapse. Her weight stayed on. Her cheeks remained rosy. And she moved ahead with her plan to break away from Goldwyn.

  Goldwyn did little to dissuade her. Her pictures hadn’t been bombs, but neither had they made the kind of money Mabel used to pull in for Sennett. Goldwyn was also weary of her—the drugs, surely, but no doubt the accusation and the blame he saw in Mabel’s eyes troubled him as well. So when someone came along and offered to take Mabel off his hands, Goldwyn didn’t hesitate to let her out of her contract.

  To everyone’s great surprise—Mabel’s especially—that someone was Mack Sennett.

  He was still in love with Mabel. “If I had been a farmer, a mechanic, or an ironworker,” Sennett mused, “and if she had been an average girl in an average town, we would have been married long ago.” But Mabel never wanted to be an average girl.

  Mack had written a script just for her, “a big romantic comedy” he was calling Molly O’. He professed high hopes for the picture—and for the two of them. He wanted the team of Sennett and Normand reunited, personally as well as professionally.

  Mabel had other ideas. She was stronger now, no longer the compliant little girl Sennett had once exploited and cheated on. She decided to accept his offer, but insisted they keep everything strictly business. “She looked on me coldly,” Sennett recalled, “and refused to talk to me on the old basis.” Mabel “made it plain” that their relationship was now simply actress and producer.

  She liked this new sense of control.

  Just how much stronger Mabel had become was demonstrated by the “weeks of negotiations” that followed before she was satisfied with the terms of the deal with Sennett. No way was Mabel about to enslave herself again. Her deal was for Molly O’, and Molly O’ only. Maybe she’d do a picture after that, or maybe not. Mabel wasn’t committing herself.

  She got everything she asked for. The exact amount of money Sennett was paying her was kept a secret, but word around Hollywood suggested it was close to $1 million.

  Mabel might be back with Sennett, but this time she was calling the shots. If this was what her new life would be like, she would do just fine.

  As long as she never answered those late-night knocks on her door.

  CHAPTER 15

  GREATER THAN LOVE

  One day in the early winter of 1921, Gibby stepped off the Big Red trolley at the Ince studios on Washington Boulevard in Culver City. At long last, one of her contacts had come through for her. Louise Glaum, a popular actress known for playing vamps, had gotten her cast in a big, expensive first-class picture. No more cheap comedies for Gibby.

  Six years earlier she’d made another picture with Glaum, a low-budget western called The Golden Trail. Back then, however, Gibby had been the leading lady, and Glaum just a supporting player. Now their roles were reversed. Glaum was the glittering star, Gibby the sidekick. Still, it was a start. And as always, Gibby had a plan.

  The director of Gibby’s film was Fred Niblo, who’d just helmed The Mark of Zorro for Douglas Fairbanks. Quite a change for a young woman used to working with C-listers. The film’s producer, J. Parker Read, was in the process of building his own company, and Gibby had a proposal for him. A proposal that would take her and Don Osborn out of their seedy hotels and turn them into power players in Tinseltown.

  The thirty-five-year-old Read had recently joined Associated Producers—Tom Ince’s “Big Six,” established to counter Adolph Zukor’s growing control of the industry. Alongside heavyweights like Ince and Sennett, Read was eager to prove himself. His biggest success so far had been Sex, also starring Louise Glaum, which had raked in the cash while sending the moralists over the edge. Read hoped to make a name for himself with sex pictures.

  Gibby, of course, knew a few things about selling sex. She and Read seemed like a perfect fit.

  At her meeting with the producer, she shared the idea that she and Don Osborn were cooking up. It was to be a “very modern and daring” picture. Gibby would star and Osborn would direct. Read seemed interested—but he wouldn’t give her a definite answer until their current project wrapped. Gibby left the meeting encouraged. Perhaps she was finally about to make good on that promise to her mother all those years ago.

  Out on the sprawling Ince lot, Gibby got down to work on the current film, which was called Greater Than Love. She was playing a prostitute. Her past hadn’t hurt her this time; it might have even helped. Louise Glaum certainly knew the truth behind the Patricia Palmer alias, so maybe Read did too, and maybe that was the real reason he’d cast Gibby as Elsie Brown, the little hooker with a heart of gold.

  Certainly Gibby had leaped at the chance to play her. Although Elsie dies early in the picture, it’s her death around which the whole movie turns. When Elsie’s bereaved mother arrives at the brothel, the other girls, led by Glaum, pretend it’s just an innocent boardinghouse to protect the memory of Elsie, a conceit that unravels dramatically at the picture’s conclusion. Gibby might have been billed third, but hers was the
part that audiences would remember.

  Every day at the Ince studio, she poured her emotions, her history, and her ambitions into her portrayal of Elsie Brown. How right she’d been to put the likes of Joe Pepa behind her; for once, Gibby was going after her dreams honestly and aboveboard. How refreshing that she didn’t need to lie or cheat or sell herself to get what she wanted. At night, she’d hurry back downtown on the trolley to encourage Osborn to finish the script that would take them to the top. The payoff, Gibby believed, was finally at hand.

  But Osborn was feeling discouraged. Bank after bank had turned him down when he’d tried to get financing for his independent production. The bankers would pull out maps showing all the theaters controlled by Adolph Zukor and the other big chains nationwide. The number of independent theaters was dwindling. Even if Osborn could raise the money needed to make a picture, the bankers told him, his options for where to show it would be extremely limited. Why should they invest in a nobody like him?

  Osborn was ready to give up, but Gibby tried to rouse him. This was their moment, their chance, she argued. She tried to get Osborn to approach J. Parker Read. But it was difficult to get Osborn to do anything now that his niece Rose had come to town.

  Don Osborn’s intense blue eyes were trained on the young woman across the room. His wife was not pleased.

  Osborn’s wife, Rae, had come back to him yet again, still desperately in love and willing to forgive him everything. They were living with Don’s mother in Highland Park. Also in the house was Don’s niece Rose Putnam, recently arrived from Vermont, licking her wounds after a difficult divorce. At the moment Rose was working as a salesclerk at Hamburger’s department store on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles.