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

by William J. Mann

  Much of what he had accomplished in his year as postmaster general, Hays would admit, “added up to public relations.” He’d spent his time in office crisscrossing the country, appearing at trade conventions, professional gatherings, and women’s club meetings, shaking hands and giving speeches. He was a politician, after all, and he’d just run one of the most effective political campaigns in American history, getting Warren Harding elected to the White House. Hays’s success at the post office was due in large part to how forcefully he had sold that success to those around him. He’d brought people in, made them feel a part of the process, and convinced them that they had a say in his decisions—even if it wasn’t always true.

  That was precisely why the movie men wanted him.

  And they were proposing to pay him $100,000 a year.

  The idea appealed to Hays—“as it must appeal to any man who realizes the ever increasingly important place which the screen will occupy in our advancing civilization,” he wrote to Zukor. Or at least to any man who realized how comfortably he could live on a hundred grand a year. Hays promised Zukor that he would give the matter his full consideration and “let you know as soon as possible.”

  In a postscript, he added that he knew “how thorough” Zukor’s cooperation would be if he took the job. But Hays was savvy enough to know that what the mogul was offering him was less likely to be cooperation than a struggle for control.

  Zukor read Hays’s letter with great interest.

  “I want carefully to consider how much good I can do, how much service I can be to you and to the others,” Hays wrote. And to the others. No doubt that phrase made Zukor wary.

  The postmaster general was not his man. That sneaky independent Lewis Selznick had proposed inviting him. But the Arbuckle situation demanded an immediate solution, so Zukor had little choice but to go along with the letter to Hays. He had nothing personally against him; they’d worked together in the past. But Zukor might have preferred a candidate of his own choosing. Herbert Hoover, for instance, who as secretary of commerce had been an enthusiastic booster of Zukor’s interests overseas. Yet Zukor’s Wall Street angels had nixed the secretary as too independent. They preferred Senator Hiram Johnson of California, but the public wasn’t likely to trust someone whose constituents were the dissolute citizens of Hollywood.

  So Hays it would have to be. If he said yes, that was that.

  Zukor agreed that they needed to replace the NAMPI with a new organization. The association had lost much of its clout when it had failed to stop censorship from passing in New York. Besides, the trade association was irrevocably linked to Brady, its longtime president and an avid Democrat. With the new administration in Washington, what they needed was an influential Republican. In that sense, Hays was ideal.

  And setting up its own supervisory body might be the only way the industry could forestall outside jurisdiction. The time had passed when smoke and mirrors could stave off regulation. No longer could Zukor get away with the kind of stunt he’d pulled on Wilbur Crafts with Lasky’s fourteen points. As the Arbuckle crisis worsened, the obvious parallel was with major-league baseball, which had responded to the Chicago Black Sox gambling scandal in 1919 by hiring the esteemed judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as the sport’s first commissioner. Likewise, the movie industry needed someone equally unimpeachable as a figurehead—someone the church ladies would trust.

  Once again, Will Hays fit the bill. Not only was he a respected cabinet member and adviser to the president but also an esteemed elder in the Presbyterian church. His family stretched back generations in this country, all the way back to the ships that had brought them over from England and Scotland in the eighteenth century.

  In other words, Hays wasn’t Jewish.

  That mattered to the increasingly emboldened reformers. “Word comes from Los Angeles of the almost complete submergence of moviedom into the hands of Jews,” read the diatribe of automaker (and notorious anti-Semite) Henry Ford in his widely circulated newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. Ford placed the Arbuckle scandal firmly at the feet of the Jews. Joseph Schenck and Marcus Loew, he said, were “two Jewish gentlemen who naively assert that the comedian must be innocent because he means a lot of money to them.” But the worst Jews in Ford’s opinion were those “in charge of the destinies of the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation, which is accused of being a motion picture trust.” Zukor and Lasky had promised reform, Ford wrote, but they hadn’t delivered; now, “lacking the courage to write off their losses and publicly proclaim that they have no further use for men of Arbuckle’s caliber,” they were trying to hedge their bets, leaving themselves the option of rehiring their former star if he was acquitted in a second trial.

  Zukor knew that bringing on Hays wouldn’t completely silence bigots like Ford, but it would deprive them of one of their most potent, and loathsome, rallying cries. The leader of the movies would no longer be a Jewish infidel, but a Christian elder.

  At least, Zukor would let them think as much.

  He was confident that the postmaster general shared his view on the issue of censorship. Hays had spoken about the subject in the past. “I have always believed that the principle of self-regulation, in contrast with regulation from without, will take firm root if given a chance,” Hays declared. “Self-regulation educates and strengthens those who practice it.” What surely gave Zukor some comfort was the knowledge that Hays was as much of a believer in the market as he was. “Box office receipts,” Hays argued, “are the surest way of interpreting the mind of the public.”

  Just where Hays stood on other sorts of regulation, however, was not entirely clear. What was his opinion of the Federal Trade Commission? After all, Hays had gotten his start with the trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt and considered himself a progressive Republican, not shy about his support for organized labor. While Zukor, too, had once been gung-ho on Roosevelt, a decade had passed since then, and now he was casting his lot with Harding’s more hard-line Republicans—the “standpats,” as they were called. What would Hays consider “unfair trade”? Would he side with Zukor, or with his smaller competitors?

  That one phrase in Hays’s letter—and to the others—surely left Zukor wondering.

  Looking out his train window across the snow-covered farmland of New Jersey, Will Hays was happy to be getting away from Washington. He was heading to a friend’s home in Yonkers, New York, to retreat from the world and think over his prospects.

  Certainly the salary the movie chiefs had offered him was astounding—four or five times greater than what he was getting from Uncle Sam. How could he turn that down? He had no personal family fortune. But he did have a five-year-old son and a wife who was in and out of hospitals. At the moment, Helen Hays was in the St. Luke’s sanitarium in Chicago. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with her. No doctors ever did.

  Still, Hays was humble enough to care about what people might say. “I knew that if I accepted the offer I would be criticized for yielding to a mercenary object and renouncing, as it were, dignity for gain,” he wrote, “as if being Postmaster General were something priestly, consecrated by vows which a man might not forsake with self-respect.”

  Even if he took the job, would the pressures he’d face as movie czar be worth the money?

  He’d already gotten a glimpse of what his life might be like. When news of the film industry’s offer leaked, a savvy reporter from the New York World got Zukor to admit that a plan was afoot to reorganize the national association. Although the film chief would neither confirm nor deny Hays’s involvement—“We have decided nothing definite as yet”—his words were still enough to fire up presses all across the country.

  Hays was overwhelmed by the attention. When he got to his friend’s house, he went directly to bed. For the next several days, he remained holed up in a darkened room, not even looking at the newspapers.

  On December 18, he got out of bed and issued a statement. To quiet all the speculation, he said he still had not made up his
mind. He worried that what he didn’t know about motion pictures “would fill the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

  But what worried him even more were the church ladies.

  Hays was a deeply religious man. A faithful attendee at the little Presbyterian church in his hometown of Sullivan, Indiana, he often led the congregation in prayers and hymns. But he was not a reformer. “And precisely because I was not a reformer,” he would recall, “I dreaded the blunders the reformers would make in dealing with this new and vital force” of the movies. Hays was thinking of Prohibition, “which had by no means produced the era of national sobriety its proponents had contemplated.” He knew if he took the position that he’d been offered, he’d find himself head-to-head with the reformers—God-fearing Protestants like himself—who would surely call him a traitor to Christ.

  Was he prepared for that? He wasn’t at all sure.

  Because, like everyone else, Will Hays had secrets.

  The man who was being called to uphold the morals of Hollywood—the savior who would instill “the highest possible standards” in the industry—spent as little time with his sickly wife as possible. Not in many years had they lived together as a married couple. Indeed, Hays was sometimes spotted with other ladies in the nation’s capital, some of them divorcées. Although it was highly unlikely that anything improper went on between Hays and these lady friends, the moralists would not be pleased by such goings-on. They would expect Mr. Hays and his wife to be together, side by side.

  Washington had been a fiercely cutthroat working environment. But the private lives and peccadillos of politicians were generally ignored by the press. Not so in Tinseltown.

  Before he decided to step into that morass, Will Hays would have to think long and hard.

  CHAPTER 29

  ON EDGE

  Sashaying through Mr. Taylor’s house, Henry Peavey dusted end tables and straightened his employer’s desk. The valet was enjoying his new job very much. He found Mr. Taylor to be an exceedingly fine man.

  As the holidays approached, though, one thing concerned Peavey: Mr. Taylor’s mood had considerably darkened. He was no longer quite as courtly or gracious when Peavey arrived in the morning. He seemed constantly anxious, jumping at the slightest noise.

  Strangest of all, the house telephone kept ringing—and when Peavey answered, there was no response at the other end of the line. Mr. Taylor was extremely bothered by these calls.

  Peavey wasn’t the only one who noticed the director’s sudden agitation. At the studio, screenwriter Julia Ivers also noticed the furrows in Taylor’s brow. When Ivers asked what was troubling him, Taylor confided in her about the phone calls, which sometimes came in the middle of the night. He had “not the slightest idea” who was calling him “or what the purpose was,” he said. To Ivers, Taylor seemed “annoyed and mystified.”

  At least part of his unease could be easily explained. On the night of December 4, Taylor had come home to find his house burglarized yet again. This time, the thief had taken some jewelry and his entire stock of expensive, imported, gold-tipped cigarettes. Everyone suspected Sands, since he’d robbed the place before. But no one could be absolutely sure.

  One morning, as Peavey bent down to retrieve the newspaper and the bottle of milk from the front steps, he noticed something else: a butt from one of those gold-tipped cigarettes. It hadn’t been there the night before.

  When Peavey showed his employer what he had found, Taylor confirmed that the cigarette was one of his. But he hadn’t replenished his stock since the burglary.

  The realization was chilling: whoever had burglarized his apartment two weeks earlier had returned—and stood right there, smoking a cigarette on the front steps, as Taylor slept upstairs.

  There was more trouble afoot.

  On Friday, December 23, Mary Miles Minter drove her little blue runabout downtown to do some Christmas shopping. At Hamburger’s department store, she bought several gifts, including one for Mr. Taylor. He’d been on her mind even more than usual lately. She’d seen him at the Screen Writers Guild ball a few weeks earlier. Not to speak to, of course. He’d forbidden that. But Mary had watched him carefully all night, her pretty blue eyes riveted on him as he laughed and joked with Mabel Normand, who sat beside him at his table.

  Mary sulked. Why did Mabel get to spend so much time with Mr. Taylor when she couldn’t? What did Mabel have that Mary didn’t?

  Other men wanted her. Why didn’t Mr. Taylor?

  Thomas Dixon, reported to be the heir to the Dixon Ticonderoga lead pencil fortune, had asked her to marry him. “In a freak of despondency,” Mary had agreed, though she didn’t really consider them to be engaged and had more or less stopped seeing him soon afterward. And Marshall Neilan, one of the biggest directors in Hollywood, had popped the question, too, though he was certainly jesting. At least Mary thought he was.

  But the point was: other men saw her as a woman. They weren’t afraid to smile at her, flirt with her. If only Mary could get Mr. Taylor to put aside his concerns about age. And while he was at it, put aside George Hopkins and Mabel Normand as well.

  That day in Hamburger’s, however, she came to the realization that “it was over” between her and Mr. Taylor. Her dreams would never come true. It was a cruel fact, but Mary decided to do her best to accept it. She was nineteen now. She had to move on with her life.

  And then, just as the thought was crossing her mind, she looked up and saw him, standing across the aisle from her in the store.

  Taylor had come downtown to buy a flask at Feagan’s jewelry store. Given how keyed up he’d been the last few weeks, running into Mary in Hamburger’s was probably the last thing he wanted. But he was gracious when she spotted him. “He smiled so sweetly,” Mary said, “bowed, and was gone.”

  At the same time, a clerk came up to her. It might easily have been Rose Putnam. But Mary, dazed by the sight of Mr. Taylor, could barely respond as the clerk displayed various samples. “I told her to wrap it up,” Mary said, hardly even aware of what she was buying, and hurried out of the store.

  For the rest of the day, Mary had only one thing on her mind. If things were really ending between her and Mr. Taylor, the end would come on her terms, not his.

  She had to see him one last time.

  That night, after everyone else had gone to bed, Mary tiptoed into her grandmother’s room. She told the old woman she was going to see Mr. Taylor. If Mrs. Shelby had been home, Mary might not have risked leaving the house so late. But she thought her grandmother would be more understanding. At first Mrs. Miles tried to dissuade her, but when she saw how determined Mary was, she offered to come along.

  Mary shook her head. “This is something I must do alone.”

  In her dramatic style, she walked through the house, gathering up everything Mr. Taylor had ever given her. His photographs. A little mesh bag. Then she sat down at her desk to write him one last note. “Dear William Desmond Taylor,” she inscribed in her flowery script. “This is good-bye. I want you to know that I will always love you.”

  She sealed the note in an envelope, then motored across town to Alvarado Court.

  A light was shining from the first-floor windows. Despite the hour—about five minutes to midnight—Mr. Taylor was apparently still awake. Mary rang the bell.

  When he opened the door, he seemed distracted, and certainly not happy to see her. “It is rather late, isn’t it, Mary?” Mr. Taylor asked.

  It was, she admitted. But she pushed past him into the room.

  Given the events of the past few weeks, the move must have rattled Taylor. He wasn’t in the best frame of mind to deal with a hysterical teenage girl in the middle of the night. Perspiration beaded on his brow; he clenched his fists so tightly that his nails drew blood as they dug into his skin. Mary took his distress to mean that his heart was just as broken as hers.

  But she took no pity on him. They could have been together—if he had only taken her away from her mother! All her long-suppressed rage bo
iled over, and Mary let Taylor have it. Perhaps he’d believed that stringing her along would only hurt her more—“but it wouldn’t have hurt one-millionth as much,” Mary cried, tears flying, “if you had just explained to me and not left me in the dark!”

  Taylor was at a loss. “I can’t explain to you,” he said simply.

  Of course he couldn’t. He had tried, many times. But Mary heard only what she wanted to hear.

  She tried embracing him, but he held her at arm’s length. So she thrust her farewell note at him. Taylor read it, then escorted her out to her car. Slipping behind the wheel, Mary reached up and plucked his handkerchief from his jacket pocket, replacing it with her own.

  One last romantic gesture from a very sentimental young woman.

  Then she sped off, overcome with emotion.

  Taylor shut the door against the night and all its dangers.

  Mary’s midnight visit deeply disturbed him. The way she had tried to embrace him had made him very uncomfortable, as friends would later report. It appeared to frighten him.

  But then again, for the past three weeks, Taylor had been frightened of many things.

  Four days later, on December 27, there was more.

  Taylor glanced down at the mail Peavey had brought in for him. He recognized the handwriting on one large envelope, postmarked Stockton. Tearing open the package, he shook out two pawn tickets for the jewelry that had been stolen from his house. The items had fetched $30, far less than their value.

  The envelope also contained a note. “So sorry to inconvenience you even temporarily,” it read. “Also observe the lesson of the forced sale of assets. A Merry Xmas and a happy and prosperous New Year.” The note was signed “Alias Jimmy V”—a reference to the popular play and film Alias Jimmy Valentine, about a safecracker who was always eluding the police.