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

by William J. Mann

“Newspaper reporters?” The men laughed. “We’re not newspaper reporters. We’re officers from New York and we have authority to come down here and get you and have you go over your statements.” They wanted him to go with them to the Examiner office and answer just one question.

  Peavey was suspicious. Why would police officers take him to a newspaper office? And what question did they want to ask him there that they couldn’t ask him here?

  The so-called officers pleaded ignorance when Peavey tried to argue with them. They simply added, “There’s a thousand dollars in it for you.”

  A grand was a lot of cash. Peavey had recently been hired back by his friend Vivien Cabanne, but $1,000 could completely change his life. So he put aside his suspicions and agreed to their request.

  The “officers” exchanged covert smiles. Their scheme was proceeding as planned.

  Meanwhile, over at the Examiner, a fireplug of a man named Frank Carson was gleefully awaiting Peavey’s arrival.

  Forty years old, balding, with beady little eyes that darted back and forth behind his round spectacles, Carson had recently arrived from the offices of Hearst’s Chicago Examiner, determined to succeed where his West Coast counterparts had failed: he would find the killer of William Desmond Taylor. For a good story, Carson didn’t let anything get in the way. In his desk he kept blank search warrants, writs, and summonses, as well as phony badges for police, coroners, and federal agents. When a story broke, Carson simply faked the appropriate document and impersonated an official, allowing him to get his scoop. “Muscle journalism,” he called it.

  Henry Peavey fascinated Carson. He believed the former valet knew more than he was saying. “Carson became convinced,” said Florabel Muir, a reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner who had a front-row seat on her colleague’s shenanigans, “that the secret of who fired the fatal shot could be forced out of [Peavey] under pressure.” So Carson laid a trap for him, and Peavey walked right into it.

  Those two “New York officers” who had shown up at his door were in actuality Carson’s paid collaborators, drawn from the ranks of gangsters and con men.

  A little after noon, they brought Peavey up to Carson’s office in the Examiner building.

  The valet was grumbling. Instead of being taken directly to the newspaper office, he’d been driven around town and badgered with questions. Something very fishy was going on.

  Surrounded by interrogators, the thousand bucks nowhere in sight, Peavey demanded to see a lawyer.

  Carson smooth-talked him. He insisted Peavey didn’t need a lawyer. He just wanted to know what movie man in Hollywood was paying him to keep his mouth shut. Peavey became indignant. “Nobody has ever given me a penny for anything,” he huffed.

  Carson left Peavey alone in a locked room to stew for a while.

  The afternoon dragged on. Peavey banged on the door and complained that he was hungry. Carson sent out for food. He went back in to grill Peavey some more.

  Under further questioning, Peavey’s dislike of Mabel Normand became clear. Mabel used to laugh at him, and Peavey was tired of being laughed at. He had no idea who killed Taylor, Peavey said, but if he had to lay odds, he’d bet on Mabel.

  Carson knew that was ridiculous. He thought Peavey was holding out on him.

  An idea came to him. A wild but—he was certain—surefire idea.

  “Carson had the notion that Peavey, a Negro, would go out of his mind if he saw ghosts,” Florabel Muir said. And so the newspaperman told the valet that they’d enlisted the aid of a spiritualist to get in touch with Taylor from beyond the grave.

  Peavey lifted an eyebrow at him, as if he’d gone mad.

  The sun was setting. “Hocus-pocus talk” filled the Examiner press room. Carson announced that the spiritualist had informed them that Peavey would “meet the spirit of his late master, who would advise him to tell the truth about the foul murder.”

  Peavey was having none of it. He kept threatening to report them to the DA.

  Florabel Muir, watching from the sidelines, thought that no one in the room “was as calm and collected as the victim of the plot.”

  Once darkness had settled over the city, Carson gave his henchmen the signal to move. Peavey was hustled out onto the street and shoved into a car. Carson went along for the ride, but not before nodding to another accomplice to head out as well, by another route.

  Their destination was Hollywood Memorial Cemetery.

  Carson’s accomplice was Al Weinshank, a hulking young man who “knew how to muscle his way through almost any emergency,” Muir observed. He was thick-necked and thick-headed, a gangster and bootlegger from Chicago’s underworld. And this night, he’d be Carson’s “meat” for the stunt they planned for Peavey.

  Under cover of darkness, Weinshank snuck into the cemetery just moments before the car bearing Peavey and Carson pulled in from Santa Monica Boulevard.

  Inside the automobile, Carson was feigning fear. “It makes me nervous to drive into a cemetery at night,” he said. “How do you feel, Henry?”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” Peavey replied tartly.

  The car pulled up in front of the vault where Taylor had been entombed. The driver switched off the lights, and they were left in darkness. Only the moon offered any illumination as they stepped out of the car onto the cemetery lawn.

  Carson couldn’t understand it. He’d been sure that Peavey would be quaking in his shoes. But the valet was angry, not scared. Weren’t all Negroes terrified of spooks?

  They approached the mausoleum.

  Suddenly, from the darkness, arose a ghostly apparition.

  “Look, look, look!” Carson shouted. “It’s Taylor!”

  Peavey made a face in disgust as he looked over at the “ghost.” It was clearly nothing more than a man with a white sheet draped over his head. And Peavey knew enough about men in white sheets to understand they were nothing but cowards and posers.

  The “ghost” moaned. Peavey stood his ground. The phony specter dropped to its feet and grabbed hold of the valet’s ankles.

  “Run, Henry!” Carson yelled. “Run!”

  Peavey spun at him. “What in the hell are you trying to make out of me, a fool?”

  The man in the sheet let go of Peavey’s ankles and stood up. He spoke the valet’s name and demanded he identify the killer. Peavey’s expression deepened in its contempt. How peculiar that in death Mr. Taylor should acquire a Chicago accent.

  Peavey strode forward and grabbed the sheeted fellow by his throat. His hands “locked on the windpipe of the ghost like an iron vise,” Florabel Muir would learn. “The fingers that so adroitly manipulated the knitting needles were deceptively strong.” The man under the sheet began to gasp for breath, and finally Carson had to come to his aid.

  The sheet was pulled off to reveal Al Weinshank.

  “Dat guy just ain’t natural,” Weinshank wheezed, backing away from Peavey. “He ain’t scared of nothin’!”

  Their scheme exposed, Carson and his men ran for the car.

  Arms akimbo, eyes flashing, Peavey shouted after the fleeing newsmen, reading them the riot act and promising that the DA would hear all about this. They’d pay for kidnapping him, Peavey vowed. Really, what did these stupid white men think he was? A fool?

  His dignity intact, Henry Peavey strode out of the cemetery.

  Early the next morning, Carson and his entourage hightailed it back to Chicago before the district attorney could apprehend them. Although the NAACP filed a formal complaint with the Examiner on Peavey’s behalf, Carson escaped any punishment for the kidnapping. But a few years later, Al Weinshank got his, when the forces of Al Capone gunned him down during the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  CHAPTER 45

  MR. HAYS GOES TO WORK

  On the evening of March 16, 1922, the ballroom of the Astor Hotel in New York was filled with movers and shakers in the film industry. Adolph Zukor had come back from the West Coast. Marcus Loew was also present, as were Sam Goldwyn, Lewis S
elznick, and Sydney Cohen, all there to welcome the new “leader” of the movie industry: Will H. Hays.

  The place was packed. More than a thousand people sat at more than a hundred tables. Secretary of Labor James Davis, Hugh Frayne of the American Federation of Labor, and Albert Lasker of the US Shipping Board were among the most prominent. William Randolph Hearst was present as well, not as a newspaper magnate—his chief editor, Arthur Brisbane, represented Hearst’s print empire—but as head of Cosmopolitan Pictures, which released through Famous Players. Dozens of Wall Street moneymen were also in attendance, as were a few movie stars to add a bit of glamour: Mae Murray, Constance Talmadge, Betty Blythe.

  Glamour was needed, since the man of the hour was anything but. In the place of honor sat the little birdlike figure of Will Hays, pecking at his mignonette de sole glacé and pointes d’asperges, dwarfed by the big table around him. On either side of him were the directors Sidney Olcott and John Emerson, the latter serving as toastmaster. Two chairs away sat Adolph Zukor. Whenever Emerson was up at the microphone, Zukor would lean in toward Hays to speak to him, easily and closely—as Loew, Selznick, and the others no doubt attempted to read their lips.

  Hays had expected this fishbowl. Plunked down in the midst of some of the most famous faces on the planet, the modest, plainspoken midwesterner couldn’t help feeling a little self-conscious. Just before he’d left Washington, Hays had consulted a dentist about fixing those chipmunk teeth of his. Clearly, the possibility of photographs alongside Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino had daunted him, and so he’d had some kind of work done. On March 9 Hays’s dentist had written to assure him that his X-rays showed “satisfactory progress.” But photographs in the papers revealed that his mouth was still full of crooked chompers.

  Yet Hays was also tanned and rested from his Florida vacation. He’d arrived in New York eager to start work. His new office was located in the Guaranty Trust Company building at 522 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of Forty-Fourth Street, just a block away from Adolph Zukor. In the days before Prohibition, Hays’s luxurious suite had been a private dining apartment above the famous Sherry’s restaurant. Merry ghosts danced on the spot where Hays was now charged with making the movies respectable.

  Each morning the former postmaster general could be spotted swinging his briefcase on his way to work, arriving a little after eight, “an extremely early hour for Fifth Avenue,” one observer noted, where most clerks didn’t show up until nine. But Hays had a lot to learn, and very little time to learn it. “I am reminded,” he wrote to a friend, “of a picture I once saw of a big seven passenger automobile going down a country road at sixty miles an hour, filled with prosperous looking people, and a little dog barking frantically at it, trying to eat it up. Underneath were the words: ‘Go ahead, let him have it once—see what he will do with it.’” Hays hoped he wouldn’t get run over by his new job.

  His duties had been defined very broadly. He’d been hired, as Hays understood it, to do two things: “To attain and maintain the highest possible standard of motion picture production [and] to develop to the highest possible degree the spiritual, moral and educational value of the industry.” What his job was not, he made clear to anyone who asked, was moral arbitration. There would be no “clean-up campaign in the sense some have described,” he insisted on day one. His job was far more “practical” than that, Hays explained. Commercial and artistic concerns would drive him as much as any moral ones.

  His number-one goal, Hays explained, was “developing economies within the industry.” He wanted to see the movie business adopt the “sanity and conservatism . . . of the banking world.” His first priorities therefore would be resolving tariff issues with the government and negotiating contracts with the exhibitors. He would not play censor. That was a role he absolutely refused to adopt.

  The moralists, of course, had different ideas. They were expecting the movies’ new leader to “purify” Tinseltown. But Hays believed purification, if it was to occur, would happen on its own. “If the public does indeed feel entitled to a better and higher form of motion picture amusement,” he argued, “then it is up to the public to patronize only those places that least offend its taste. A man may be imbued with the ideas of a vegetarian, but he can’t run a vegetarian restaurant successfully when all his patrons demand beef.” In other words: let the market decide—a position that certainly pleased the producers he was working for, especially Zukor, who rose that night at the Hotel Astor to offer the warmest of welcomes to Hays.

  The microphone had to be lowered, of course, before he could speak into it.

  Looking out over the sea of tables, Zukor gazed upon virtually all of his colleagues, employees, and competitors, gathered together in one room. They had come to toast Hays, their new “czar,” as the papers were calling him. But every last one of them knew who held the real reins of power.

  In his soft, almost whispery voice, Zukor laid out the challenges and opportunities ahead for the industry. He hoped that Hays would “never have to turn red in the face on our account.” Just as important, though, he implored Hays not to “permit us all to be maligned because of wrongdoing on the part of some in the industry.” Those wrongdoers, he said, should be “quickly condemned and ostracized by the rest of us.” Everyone knew who he was talking about. Even on this night of new beginnings, the specters of Roscoe Arbuckle, whose third trial had just gotten under way, and the myriad players in the Taylor scandal hovered over the ballroom.

  After Zukor finished speaking, he headed back to his seat, pausing on the way to shake Hays’s hand.

  Hays had watched Zukor’s every move. He knew his greatest challenge in his new role would be finding a way to accommodate Zukor without marching in lockstep with him. He’d been doing his research. A friend at the New York Trust Company had warned him that many on Wall Street were concerned about the financial extravagance of the film companies. The growing domination of one company, Famous Players, was inhibiting growth throughout the film business. Hays understood that the industry could not long sustain itself if megalomaniacs like Adolph Zukor kept acquiring more and more of it to run as their own personal fiefdoms. But Hays was working for those megalomaniacs, who were paying him a hundred grand a year.

  Therein lay his dilemma.

  Securing the independence he’d need to stabilize the industry, both to prevent censorship and develop sustainable economies, would be Hays’s most difficult task. Clearly Adolph Zukor wasn’t a man who willingly shared power.

  Everything depended on what kind of accommodation could be found between these two diminutive men, whose view of the world and their place in it couldn’t have been more different.

  Finally it was Hays’s turn to speak.

  His voice was nasal and reedy. At first the audience likely cringed a bit, maybe smiled among themselves. This little elf was their new leader? But Will Hays had long ago learned to disregard the mockery. He had learned to trust himself, to believe in his mission. How else had he managed to win so many campaigns for his candidates?

  His confidence was rooted in a firm moral conviction—not the hard, dogmatic morality of a Wilbur Crafts, but an ethic informed by character and principle. That made Hays a rather odd choice to lead an industry predicated on selling illusion, in which right and wrong were often determined by their relative effect on the bottom line.

  But as he talked, Hays realized that the people in the ballroom were responding to him. This funny-looking creature actually had something to say. Slowly at first, then more rapidly—a technique he’d learned in grange halls and town squares across Indiana—Hays spoke to them of determination, and commitment, and honor. His words soon had the entire ballroom transfixed. He spoke for half an hour, frequently interrupted by applause, and wrapped in a flourish of fiery rhetoric.

  “The motion picture industry accepts the challenge,” Hays shouted, pumping the air with his fist, “in the demand of the American public for the highest quality of art! The industry accepts
the challenge in the demand of the American youth that its pictures shall give to them the right kind of entertainment and instruction! We accept the challenge in the righteous demand of the American mother that the entertainment of that youth be worthy of their value as the most potent factor in the country’s future!”

  People rose in approval, applauding and whistling. Some stood on their chairs.

  “By our opportunities are our responsibilities measured,” Hays continued. “From him to whom much is given, much is required. That responsibility I accept for the motion-picture industry right now. Our association is dedicated to the aid of the industry and the discharge of these obligations, and to that I am dedicating my life and my best years!”

  The cheers echoed up to the roof.

  Those in attendance were stunned by Hays’s oratory powers. “Mr. Hays talked at them right from the shoulder with the force he used when he was running the Republican national campaign,” a scribe from the New York Times observed. “Judging by the roars of applause and the way men and women, actors and actresses, jumped to their feet, they like their new boss.”

  Whether the reformers would agree remained to be seen. Only one thing seemed certain: unless Hays did as he was told, no one expected Adolph Zukor to tolerate such a silver-tongued pretender for very long.

  CHAPTER 46

  THE MORBIDLY CURIOUS

  Mabel couldn’t be faulted if she’d begun to think she was a jinx.

  On the night of March 6, finally feeling safe enough to venture out for a social evening with some friends, she’d once again run headfirst into tragedy. At “a cozy little place where jazz music exerts its soothing effect, especially to the nerve-broken and weary,” she’d met George S. Patterson, a young businessman and well-known golfer. They’d had a pleasant evening, sharing a few cocktails.

  Now, a couple of days later, Mabel glanced down at her newspaper to find that, soon after leaving the party, Patterson had been killed in an accident on the San Diego highway.