Osborn turned, locking his eyes onto the trembling man. His wife’s honor was worth a great deal, Osborn declared.
The salesman agreed.
In that case, Osborn said, maybe they could work out a deal.
After a bit of haggling over just how much Rose’s honor was worth, the traveling salesman wrote Osborn a check. Then he packed his bags and hightailed it out of the hotel as quickly as he could, scrambling back to wherever it was that he had come from—Iowa, perhaps, or Michigan or Wisconsin or North Carolina.
And Osborn and Rose took the check to the bank.
Gibby, of course, got her cut for setting the jig into motion.
The hapless traveling salesman was their first chump. He was certainly not their last.
People did what they had to do in Tinseltown. No one was getting any work. With the studios struggling to unload their backlog of unreleased pictures, Variety reported, actors without long-term contracts—people like Gibby and Osborn—weren’t being hired.
Meanwhile, Gibby’s rent was due. She had to do something.
She’d tried playing by the rules. She’d tried going high-class. But no offers had been forthcoming after Greater Than Love. So she’d had to drag herself back, tail between her legs, to Al Christie and his Gayety shorts. The area around Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, where Christie and other low-budget comedy producers had their studios, was called the “Corner of Last Hope” wthin the industry. For Gibby, a return to Christie meant more slapstick. More silly, inconsequential roles for which she was paid pennies. To make matters worse, Christie sent out a humiliating press release marking her return. “Patricia Palmer is back in comedy, following her desertion, for she found that work in the dramatic field was not all that it was declared to be.” Talk about rubbing salt in her wounds.
It wasn’t fair. Gibby had worked so hard. She’d come up with scenarios, budgets, and production schedules for her proposed picture, but no one was willing to take a chance on her. Nearly a decade she’d spent in front of the camera. She knew as much about making movies as anybody. Why couldn’t she catch a break? Why did everyone else get to have nice things except for her? Mary Miles Minter in her luxurious rented mansions—Minter didn’t even want to make movies! Gibby would’ve killed for one of Mary’s rejects. And Mabel Normand! She’d just gotten a million-dollar contract, even though her pictures hadn’t been making real money for years. A million dollars! When Gibby couldn’t even pay her rent!
Why was the world so out of balance?
At Osborn’s house on South Bronson Avenue, the locusts thronged. Rae would come home late at night after performing at a downtown burlesque theater to find her husband and George Weh, or Fred Moore, or out-of-work director Jack Nelson, completely intoxicated. And there was a new character, too, brought into the group by Weh, who sat drinking his whiskey off to one side, coiled like a snake, seemingly ready to strike at any point.
His name was Blackie Madsen. A long history of barroom brawls and back-alley fights was etched into his coarse features. His face was like a living mug shot, with small, devious black eyes over a prominent nose. Heavyset, in his fifties, Madsen walked slowly and was bowlegged. On his left wrist was tattooed a blue star.
At the moment Madsen was on the lam from the San Diego police for fleecing a tourist out of $16,000 through a fake stock exchange. Clearly this Blackie character knew how to make money. That was why Weh had brought him to Osborn’s.
But Madsen had no interest in motion pictures. He had other ideas about how they might earn a living.
Madsen told Osborn that the pigeons at the Melrose Hotel were rinky-dink. If he ever hoped to make more than pocket change, he’d need to start casting for bigger fish.
And so they started compiling a list.
The movie colony was a limitless source of easy marks. Ambitious young writers could be swindled with the promise of a producer reading their scripts. Out-of-work actors would pay anything for a chance at landing a part. Thousands of gullible stooges, moping around soda fountains and loitering in pool halls, could be swayed by get-rich-quick stories.
According to a report that would come later, Osborn and Madsen started “looking around for victims for their bunco schemes.” Rose and “other women” often served as bait.
But Blackie Madsen pointed out that they didn’t need to go to all the trouble of setting someone up. In Tinseltown, after all, most everyone had secrets. How much easier it was to just rattle a few skeletons in various closets than concoct some elaborate racket. A simple blackmail job could bring in a lot of cash, with far less overhead.
Among their first victims during the spring and summer of 1921 were “a film exchange man who was cheating on his wife” and a man who “owed a great deal of money to the government.” By July, Osborn and Madsen were counting out their payola with glee, throwing the bills onto the bed so Rose could roll around on top of them in ecstasy. Their minds raced. Who else could they shake down? Who else had secrets? How easy this blackmail game was!
Over the next few months Osborn and Madsen would put together “a long list of names” of potential victims. And they almost certainly had help in compiling it. Gibby had assisted Osborn before; she could easily have come up with a few ideas again. After all, Gibby knew lots of people who had secrets.
Chief among them William Desmond Taylor.
That spring of 1921, Gibby was feeling no love for her old friend Billy. When she’d made the rounds of studios the previous summer, traipsing across Hollywood on a sweltering day, practically begging for a job, she’d visited every contact she’d ever had, which surely included Taylor. And here she was, more than half a year later, still unemployed, forced to resort to bunco schemes to make a few dollars.
Thanks for nothing, Billy Taylor.
What different directions they had traveled since starting out together. Eight years earlier, Illustrated Films Monthly had carried a serialization of their picture The Night Riders of Petersham, along with a photograph of Taylor standing beside his horse, staring lovingly down at Gibby, holding her hand. In The Kiss, Gibby had played a discontented shopgirl who sets her eyes on a wealthy man, played by Taylor, believing he can get her the pretty things she wants. An ironic bit of foreshadowing, perhaps.
But in fact Gibby had known Taylor—or known of him—even longer than that.
When he directed Judge Ben Lindsey in The Soul of Youth, Taylor had told the magistrate an interesting story, one of the few occasions he ever discussed his past. As he related to Lindsey, around 1910 he’d been mining for gold in the mountain town of Ouray, Colorado. During this period, he would make “frequent visits” to Denver. On one such trip, Taylor told the judge, he’d been arrested. Despite insisting that he was a victim of mistaken identity, Taylor was beaten by the arresting officer and tossed in jail overnight. In the morning, when his identity was proven, Taylor was released with extravagant apologies. He made no complaint and returned to Ouray. At least, that was the version he told Judge Lindsey.
During that same period, Gibby was also in Denver. She was fourteen at the time, singing and dancing in the city’s Pantages Theatre, trying to earn a living for herself and her mother. Gibby might well have been aware of Taylor’s “frequent visits” to the city. In May of that year, Taylor was on the Denver stage himself, advertised in newspapers as appearing at the Tabor Grand Opera House in As the Sun Went Down. So at the very same time Gibby danced and sang at the Pantages, Taylor was appearing at a theater just a block away. Did they meet? Did Gibby know something about Taylor’s night in jail? Did she hear talk that the incident involved more than just a case of mistaken identity?
Maybe Taylor’s arrest was just as he told it to Judge Lindsey. Nonetheless, Gibby had been nearby when it happened—just as she was present for other key moments in Taylor’s life, when she had the chance to witness things he might have preferred to keep private.
When Taylor was fired by Vitagraph, Gibby was there. Taylor would insist that he had q
uit, but a notice in the Moving Picture World proved otherwise. Just why the company would sack the star of their important upcoming picture Captain Alvarez was perplexing. Clearly there’d been some bad blood. When Captain Alvarez turned out to be a giant hit, Taylor’s name was sometimes omitted from the credits. Had someone discovered that his name wasn’t actually Taylor? Or was he fired for other reasons? Some kind of transgression, perhaps?
And how much had Gibby observed or overheard?
Even now she still had connections to Taylor. One of her acquaintances was a twenty-one-year-old Tennessee-born actor and dancer named Starke Patteson, with whom she and Osborn had appeared in The Tempest. Patteson, also a friend of George Hopkins, was preparing to play a small role in Taylor’s forthcoming picture Morals, scheduled to begin shooting that summer. And a year earlier, Patteson had acted in Sweet Lavender with Mary Miles Minter, not long after the young actress’s obsession with Taylor began.
So not only was it possible that Gibby knew, through her connection with Patteson, all about Taylor’s relationship with Hopkins, but she might also have heard a few juicy stories of the director’s troubles with his fanatical admirer.
If Gibby did decide to add Taylor’s name to a list of patsies for Osborn and Madsen, she would have had plenty of goods on him.
Everybody in Tinseltown had secrets. But few had more than William Desmond Taylor.
CHAPTER 21
AMONG THE LIONS
The ballroom of the West Hotel in downtown Minneapolis stank of smoke, sweat, and testosterone. On the excruciatingly hot afternoon of June 28, 1921, three thousand theater men gathered for their annual convention. Shedding their coats and removing their collars, they argued among themselves about everything from tariffs to censorship. But then, all at once, their squabbling ceased. Silence fell over the great sweltering hall. The only sound was the squeak of the ceiling fans overhead. All eyes turned as a little man in a fedora hat filed into the room.
Adolph Zukor.
For the last few days Zukor’s photograph had dominated the newspapers. He was the central figure in an exploding scandal out of Boston, involving prostitutes and a corrupt district attorney. The exhibitors, many of them union men and fervently anticapitalist, had gotten some good chuckles observing Zukor’s predicament.
BIG MOVIE MEN SAID TO HAVE PAID
THOUSANDS TO ESCAPE PROSECUTION
Zukor and Hiram Abrams had been revealed as two of the men involved in the $100,000 shakedown in Boston. For the past two days in Minneapolis, salacious details of the Mishawum Manor dinner had been passed around the convention hall like bottles of beer in a saloon. The imperious Adolph Zukor, caught with his pants down!
Zukor paid no attention to the smirking faces as he proceeded through the muggy ballroom, his hooded eyes staring straight ahead. He took his seat with several of his Famous Players lieutenants.
He could have stayed away from this gathering of his enemies. But there he was, sitting among three thousand men who wanted his head. Zukor had promised to be there, and so he was. He’d come to Minneapolis to answer the charges the exhibitors had against him. To back out after the scandal broke would have been seen as cowardly. So he braced himself and made the trip.
Besides, as difficult as it was, heading to Minneapolis might have been preferable to staying home and witnessing the hurt on Lottie’s face.
She had seen the headlines about her husband, and yet she had not turned her back on him. What “great strength and understanding” Lottie had, Zukor would say. She endured this trial as she had others: selflessly. When Lottie worried about things, her husband would say, “her concern was never added to mine.” Yet Lottie’s magnanimity likely made Zukor’s guilt only more difficult to bear.
So he sat among the barbarians, a wounded man. His enemies may have smelled blood, but they were also impressed that he hadn’t backed down. No one could call Zukor chicken.
Across the aisle, Marcus Loew held court like a king, standing out from the crowd in his snazzy suit and brightly colored tie. Loew seemed to be anticipating quite the show now that his rival had arrived. When word got out that Zukor would attend the Minneapolis convention, Loew was asked if he planned to be there, too. “Try and keep me away,” he’d answered to a chorus of laughter. Fireworks were inevitable, and Loew wanted to see them.
He didn’t have to wait long. As speaker after speaker took the podium, Zukor was excoriated as a greedy oligarch out to destroy them all. His worst sin, the exhibitors declared, was the practice of “block-booking,” wherein theater owners were forced to take second-rate pictures if they wanted top-of-the-line product as well. To keep Fatty Arbuckle or Wallace Reid on their screens, they had to buy dreary low-budget romances or cheap westerns as well—which meant half-empty houses much of the time. The injustice was blamed squarely on Zukor.
The film chief made no response. He just sat there stoically, his tie still knotted at his throat, his collar tight despite the sweltering heat. But surely his blood was boiling as the next speaker strutted up the podium to a chorus of cheers and whistles.
Senator Jimmy Walker.
Locking eyes with Zukor, Walker called a spade a spade. Famous Players’ acquisition of theaters, he said, amounted to a “trustification” of the industry. Walker spoke of “powerful Wall Street interests” that were “exerting pressure on banks not to advance any loans to independent producers.” Struggling young filmmakers, he charged, fired with the same dreams that had once propelled Zukor forward, were now being denied the same opportunities the Famous Players chief once enjoyed. And even if some young filmmaker could find the financing to make a movie, Walker asked, “Where will this man show his picture—up the alley?”
Don Osborn would have applauded.
Zukor’s corporate greed was hurting real people, Walker declared. Poor Mrs. Pauline Dodge, the mother of a three-year-old son, had watched as her little theater in Morrisville, Vermont, was stolen right out from under her by Famous Players agents. Behind on her mortgage payments, Mrs. Dodge was elbowed aside by one of Zukor’s “henchmen” who cajoled the bank into reverting the theater to its previous owner—who, of course, had a deal to turn it over to Famous Players.
“Don’t forget, Mr. Zukor,” Senator Walker said, speaking directly to the mogul, “that while you had your early struggles, Mrs. Dodge is having hers now.”
The men roared in defense of the little lady from Vermont.
Zukor burned in his seat, but he gave no indication of his ire. These exhibitors were certainly a coarse lot. They’d been waiting a long time for this moment, to confront him face-to-face. Ill-bred boors. And Democrats, which to Zukor was often the same thing. Uneducated, illiterate Irish, Italians, Poles, and Greeks. Worst of all, to Zukor, were the lower-class Jews, the kind to whom he felt no kinship. Some Jews, Zukor believed, “were not very well liked because their behavior wasn’t such that people could admire.” As the raspberries and catcalls flew all around him, Zukor saw multiple examples of such loathsome behavior.
Still, he’d given his word to be there. He had appeared at the exhibitors’ New York gathering a few weeks earlier to tell them he resented being called “a liar and a crook.” He’d spent the best years of his life in this business, he said, and “I have my reputation at stake.” So he had agreed to come here to Minneapolis and submit himself to their abuse. No one could ever say Adolph Zukor ducked a fight.
It was about much more than that, however.
The old proverb “It never rains but it pours” was especially true that summer of 1921. Exhibitor agitation, the lingering effects of the recession, and the scandal of Nathan Tufts and Mishawum Manor were all bad enough. But potentially worse than any of that was Zukor’s greatest worry, which seemed at last to be at hand.
The Federal Trade Commission was considering action against Famous Players. The repeated use of the word trust by Jimmy Walker and Sydney Cohen had finally reached the ears of Washington.
Zukor, of course, resisted
any idea that he was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, that Wilson-era law prohibiting restraint of trade. Famous Players wasn’t restraining anybody’s trade, its chief insisted haughtily. The company was simply a superior competitor. Yet the FTC apparently disagreed, as rumors spread that an investigation was imminent.
Zukor quickly placed a call to Washington.
A short time later George B. Christian, President Harding’s private secretary, summoned the head of the trade commission, Houston Thompson, to a meeting at the White House. “I understand you have issued a complaint against the Famous Players Corporation,” Christian said. “What do you mean by issuing a complaint without giving these people a hearing?”
Thompson replied that the commission had not yet issued a complaint, but acknowledged that one was under consideration. Without asking him directly to halt the investigation, Christian made sure Thompson understood that the president was not pleased with this situation. “This case will never go through,” Thompson believed Christian was telling him.
Zukor could only hope that pressure from the White House would deter the Federal Trade Commission from pressing on with its complaint. But there were ways he could maybe help bring about that outcome himself. Some very public overtures to the exhibitors would be extremely prudent at this juncture. That, more than anything else, was why Zukor had come to Minneapolis.
And so the little movie chief stood when his name was called and made his way to the podium past all the staring eyes and hardened faces.
He opened with a grand gesture. He would write a check, right there at the convention, to pay poor Mrs. Dodge a fair rate for her theater as well as to cover all her legal expenses. Henceforth, Zukor promised, he would “protect the exhibitor from the sort of treatment” Mrs. Dodge had endured at the hands of those ruffians.
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