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

by William J. Mann

  Patterson had been a married man with two children, the son-in-law of a prominent railway executive, and his fleeting association with the actress immediately set tongues wagging. “Miss Normand today is receiving the sympathy of her friends,” one columnist wrote, “that she should, by unfortunate coincidence, have been so near another tragedy at her re-entry into the life of the colony with a little innocent music and dancing.” For some, however, reports of jazz clubs, dancing, and married men were enough to simply reaffirm their sordid impression of Mabel Normand.

  No matter what she did these days, Mabel was criticized. With half a dozen friends, she had reserved a box to see The London Follies, a revue starring comedian Harry Tate, at the Mason Theatre. After all the horrors of the previous month, Mabel needed a little escapism, but prudes thought it was too soon for her to be out having fun. The following Sunday—a day on which reformers wanted to ban all amusements anyway—Mabel attended the races at the Los Angeles Speedway. “She giggled all afternoon with a group of girl friends, went down into the auto pits to talk with the drivers, and pretty generally enjoyed herself,” one fan magazine observed. Around the country, self-appointed arbiters of good taste looked on in scorn.

  In the wake of all this, Mabel went into hiding in Altadena. If the world didn’t want to see her, she’d disappear. Mack Sennett shut down production of Suzanna while his star took some time off. Left unsaid was whether filming would ever start up again. In Lynn, Massachusetts, Mrs. Engler, the same woman who’d convinced the local theater to ban Mary’s pictures, was now calling on the owners to pull Mabel’s Molly O’.

  Alone in Altadena, Mabel tried to remember how she’d started this whole crazy ride.

  Taking out pen and paper, she wrote to her parents. It was her father, after all, who’d encouraged her to go out into the world, who’d sparked her desire to be something more than ordinary. What did her father think now, after Mabel’s name had been blackened by scandal and innuendo?

  She told her parents not to worry. She’d get through this. She’d done nothing wrong.

  Days later, Mabel’s telephone rang. It was her father. Did she want him to come to California? Mabel was touched. But how could her father help her? What did he know about the world? He’d never left Staten Island, after all. He still imagined the world to be glorious and full of adventure. Mabel knew better than that. She’d seen the world; he hadn’t. Better to leave him with his dreams.

  To reporters, Claude Normand said, “Mabel knows enough to take care of herself.”

  That she did, but as her depression deepened, she found her strength put to the test. With Billy Taylor no longer around to support her, Mabel relied on a network of women to get her through—no surprise, given how men had disappointed her. Julia Brew, after years of devoted service, had married and moved on, but now there were others: Edna Purviance, who’d phoned Mabel with the news of Billy’s death; Juliette Courtell, her friend and secretary; and Mrs. Edith Burns, a fifty-six-year-old widow who’d become a kind of surrogate mother to the heartbroken actress.

  It was Mrs. Burns who was tending to Mabel that winter, as a cold settled in the actress’s lungs and left her unable “to talk above a whisper.” Mabel’s publicist blamed the protracted illness on the “morbidly curious” attention she’d been receiving since Taylor’s death. “If they don’t stop badgering Mabel,” he told the press, “there’ll be crepe hung on the door.”

  The cold turned into flu. The little house at 1150 Foothill Boulevard was quarantined.

  “I talked with Mabel Normand last night over the telephone,” Adela Rogers St. John informed her readers. “Her voice haunted me all night. She was crying. Her nurses didn’t want her to talk, but she wanted to ask me if I believed she had anything to do with the Taylor murder, if anybody back here [in New York] believed it? And I told her what I believed, that no one connected her with it, no one believed she had done anything that had any connection with the shooting. And I told her that I loved her and for her to take care of herself.”

  The week before she got sick, Mabel had met with investigators, doing her best to answer every question they threw at her. She’d spent four hours with District Attorney Woolwine. No longer running from the press, she had posed outside his office with her feet turned in, “a typically Mabel Normand manner,” and let the shutterbugs snap away.

  Although Woolwine announced he believed her story completely, the press had continued to speculate. A certain actress, Wallace Smith reported, had appealed to Taylor for help in paying off extorters. “Following this theory,” Smith wrote, “Taylor alone faced the hired assassin of the dope ring, when the killer, armed with the fatal revolver, entered his study.”

  Could one of her old drug contacts have killed Billy? Mabel must have been racked with guilt and apprehension.

  The theory wasn’t so far-fetched. Marjorie Berger, Taylor’s tax accountant, had revealed that when he’d come into her office on the afternoon of the day he was killed, he’d been carrying “a large roll of bills”—much thicker than the flat wad of cash found later on his body. Taylor had made no deposit that day, so where was that roll of money? Had he handed it to his killer? Or had whoever shot him lifted the roll of cash but left his jewelry and other valuables undisturbed?

  Such nagging questions added to the misery that kept Mabel barricaded inside the little house in the hills of Altadena.

  But then, in a sudden burst of determination, she shook off her lingering ague and depression and went back to work.

  Mabel seemed to remember that she was a fighter, that she was made of tougher stuff than people gave her credit for. She’d gotten through worse than this.

  Bundled into a studio car, Mabel was driven down to the San Luis Rey River in northern San Diego County, where Suzanna resumed filming with a herd of ten thousand longhorn cattle. The director, Richard Jones, estimated that production would be complete by the end of April. And when they were done, Mabel decided, she was going to Europe.

  New York was no longer far enough away from Tinseltown.

  CHAPTER 47

  HER OWN BOSS

  In the office of the Recorder of Deeds, in the nineteenth-century City Hall on Broadway in Los Angeles, Gibby Gibson became, with the simple stroke of a pen, her own boss.

  This was what she had always wanted. No longer an outsider, she was now a mover and a shaker, the head of her own company. Patricia Palmer Productions had a wonderful ring to it. It meant she was no longer dependent on the whims of others. At last Gibby was in a position to make her own dreams come true.

  If the established producers refused to make her a star, then she’d do it herself.

  At her side in the old records room, surrounded by leather-bound volumes of deeds, was James Calnay, a thirty-year-old former advertising man. Like Adolph Zukor, Calnay was an enterprising immigrant from Hungary, and he imagined he could depose his illustrious countryman by waging a populist uprising against the big chains. It was the same quixotic dream that had motivated Don Osborn and Charles Seeling and countless others, and no amount of failure seemed enough to deter more dreamers from following the same path.

  Calnay, like everyone else, believed he’d be the guy to beat the odds. Boasting connections to theaters throughout the United States and Canada, he’d formed the Independent Producers Distributors Syndicate. Gibby was certain Calnay was different from the others. He was the first to actually make her a producer on her own films, for one thing. Together, they planned “a series of six five-reel rural stories” (rural settings were in vogue, following that year’s breakout success, a farm drama called Tol’able David) and Gibby would star in every single one of them. Not only that, she was planning to roust Don Osborn out of his liquored lassitude to direct.

  What gave Gibby confidence that this time around she’d make it was one simple fact: for the first time in her career, her coffers were full. She was the one funding Calnay. No one was quite sure where she’d gotten the money. Some of the locusts presu
med she must have fleeced some big-time spender. Whatever the source of her capital, Gibby was sending out press releases calling herself “the youngest female producer in the independent field.” Patricia Palmer was only twenty-three, after all, even if Gibby was five years older.

  To prepare for her moment in the spotlight, she had moved out of the Melrose Hotel and into the second of her North Beachwood Drive properties, number 2324. It wasn’t much of a house, but at least Gibby would have her own place, as movie stars were supposed to, instead of living in a hotel. The champagne flowed freely that spring and summer of 1922. With everyone living so close, it was easy for Gibby, or Don and Rose, or Leonard Clapham and his wife, Edith, to throw an impromptu champagne and jazz party. And whenever corks were popped, the locusts swarmed.

  These were good times. Success, Gibby was convinced, was at last at hand.

  CHAPTER 48

  NO TIME TO TALK

  Charlotte Shelby had known it was only a matter of time before the police came knocking at her door. Peering from her window, she could see them in her driveway now.

  She was ready for them.

  The formidable lady with the bee-stung lips and luxurious copper hair had been alerted by Tom Woolwine that Detectives King and Winn would be visiting her this afternoon. Shelby’s long friendship with the DA—some said romance—certainly came in handy now. Forewarned, she had summoned a battery of dark-suited lawyers for the occasion. They sat behind her now, waiting for the visitors like birds of prey.

  When the detectives rang the bell, Mrs. Shelby greeted them graciously. What an odd-looking pair they were. King was short, Winn was tall. King was smiling and friendly, Winn was solemn and taciturn.

  They exchanged cordialities as they stood amid piles of two-by-fours and building materials: the mansion was still being renovated, so there was little room for the detectives to sit down, even if Mrs. Shelby had asked them to. With a voice like warm maple syrup, she said she regretted not having the time to speak with them. She was leaving for New York on business and had to finish packing, or she’d miss her six o’clock train. But just to show how cooperative she wanted to be, she had asked her lawyers to be there “for the purpose of answering questions.”

  King insisted he wouldn’t take more than a few minutes of her time. He had only a few simple questions.

  Mrs. Shelby glared at him. What sorts of questions?

  Questions about her interactions with Taylor, King replied, during the time he was directing her daughter.

  People had been talking, Shelby realized. People who hated her. People who were jealous of her and her success. How happy those miserable cretins must have been to tell tales about the times Shelby had blown up at Taylor, or the times she had threatened him.

  Composing herself, Mrs. Shelby declined the detectives’ request in her most charming southern accent. She was simply too busy to delay her trip, King would recall her saying, “to devote any time to an investigation about which she knew nothing.”

  King and Winn didn’t try to detain her. They had no grounds to do so. After choosing not to speak with Shelby’s attorneys, they were shown to the door.

  King was not pleased. How had Shelby known they were coming? Someone must have tipped her off.

  Trudging out of the house, the detective had a pretty good idea who it was.

  His own boss, Thomas Woolwine. The DA was determined to keep his detectives from talking to his ladyfriend. King had increasingly clashed with Woolwine over the past several months about the case. His boss remained firm in his conviction that “whoever killed Taylor had probably been hired to do it and had no emotional connection” to the victim, as Woolwine’s family would later describe his position. He no longer thought the killer was Edward Sands and, directly contradicting King’s theory, he also “did not believe the murder was a crime of passion.”

  Faced with Woolwine’s obstruction, King and Winn had visited Shelby as members of the LAPD, not as representatives of Woolwine’s office. And, denied a conversation with Shelby because of the DA’s interference, they decided on another tack. If they couldn’t speak with the person they most wanted to interview, they’d call on her mother, the aged Julia Miles. The detectives headed over to Hobart Boulevard.

  Where Mrs. Shelby had been brusque and defensive, Mrs. Miles was just the opposite—sweet and cooperative. King asked if she recalled the night Taylor was shot. Her granddaughter, Mary, had already revealed that Mrs. Shelby was not with the family that night. Did Mrs. Miles know where her daughter had been?

  The old woman gave it some thought. It was true, she said, that Shelby had not been with them. She’d been visiting friends, Mrs. Miles said, and got back to the house on New Hampshire Avenue around nine o’clock. At least, that was what Mrs. Shelby had told her.

  Who were these friends that Shelby had been visiting, the detectives wanted to know, and could they offer an alibi for her whereabouts that night?

  Mrs. Miles wasn’t sure. And of course Mrs. Shelby wasn’t talking.

  Just what was the lady trying to hide, King wanted to know.

  Even more critically, why was the DA helping her to hide it?

  At some point after the detectives’ visit, old Mrs. Miles, like her daughter, embarked on a cross-country trip.

  She was heading back to Louisiana, at least temporarily. It was a long train ride for a frail seventy-year-old woman, traveling alone, steaming through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Mrs. Miles claimed her trip had to do with settling family estates, but it actually had more to do with a certain item that was concealed deep down inside her luggage, something that was best not to have lying around if those pesky detectives ever returned with search warrants.

  Arriving in New Orleans, Mrs. Miles transferred to another train that took her nearly three hundred more miles, up to the northeast corner of the state. Debarking at Bastrop, where the family still owned a plantation, the old woman trudged across the muddy grounds—a small, determined figure in a black dress and bonnet. Finally Mrs. Miles came to a stop at the edge of a swampy bayou. She rummaged through her bag. She withdrew a pistol.

  Charlotte Shelby’s .38.

  The sooner this was out of their lives, the better.

  Mrs. Miles flung the filthy thing away from her. The gun splashed down into the bayou. Through her rheumy old eyes, Julia Miles watched as her daughter’s gun disappeared beneath the dark, murky waters.

  CHAPTER 49

  A GREAT INJUSTICE HAS BEEN DONE

  On April 12, in a San Francisco courtroom, the jurors in the third Arbuckle trial returned to their box just six minutes after they’d adjourned. The defense attorneys smiled tentatively, convinced that the short deliberation meant exoneration for their client. But Arbuckle, scarred by dozens of disappointments over the past seven months, stood there rock-still, a stricken look on his face.

  The judge asked if a verdict had been reached. It had.

  The foreman stood.

  “We, the jury, find Roscoe Arbuckle not guilty.”

  The judge had cautioned the courtroom against demonstrating after the verdict, but Arbuckle couldn’t contain his jubilation. “Every inch of his huge frame radiated happiness,” one observer noted. When the judge banged his final gavel, cheers erupted in the gallery, and Arbuckle blew kisses to everyone.

  But a lack of guilt was not all the jurors had found.

  “Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle,” they wrote in an extraordinary public statement passed out to reporters as they left the courthouse. “We feel a great injustice has been done him. The happening at the hotel was an unfortunate affair for which Arbuckle, so the evidence shows, was in no way responsible. We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and women who have sat listening for thirty-one days to the evidence, that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.”

  Three thousand miles away, the telephone shattered the stillness in Adolph Zukor’s New York town house. Taki
ng the phone, the mogul learned of Arbuckle’s acquittal.

  It was the outcome he had feared most.

  Soon afterward, his phone was jangling again. Reporters, wanting a statement. But Zukor was not accommodating. For now, Zukor decided, the best response from the studio was silence.

  Back in Hollywood, though, Jesse Lasky didn’t get that memo. Much to his partner’s displeasure, Lasky told the press he was “very pleased” by the acquittal. It was what “all persons connected with motion pictures had hoped for and believed would happen.”

  Not all persons. Late into the night, Zukor was on the phone with his lawyers and financial advisers, trying to determine his next step. As dawn finally arrived, the consensus was to proceed with caution.

  Later that morning, Zukor finally issued a statement. Within the next thirty days, he said, Famous Players would release one of the Arbuckle pictures that they’d been holding back. It would be an experiment, Zukor explained, “for the purpose of gauging public sentiment.” If the picture did well, the studio would release others. “We will not force the pictures,” Zukor added, mindful of the accusations he knew were coming, “but will supply them if the public demand exists.” Supply and demand. The American way. Who could object to that?

  But Zukor knew as well as anyone that reason wasn’t what moved the industry’s critics.

  On the announcement that Famous Players would release Gasoline Gus, the company’s stock surged to nearly $4 a share. That was encouraging, but Zukor knew the truth: he was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. If audiences stayed away from Arbuckle’s pictures, as the moralists predicted, he’d never make back his investment. But if audiences turned out in droves, his problems might be even worse. As the Evening Telegraph in Alton, Illinois, explained the next morning, “If [audiences] flock to see [Arbuckle’s pictures], then it may be inferred . . . that stars may go on living the life of a tomcat, regardless of the moral laws of God and man.” Decent people, the editorial argued, could only hope that the new Arbuckle releases lost money. “If these motion picture stars learn that they are to lose their income by continuing to lead such immoral lives as they do, they might cease to occupy so much space in the reports of criminal and scandalous proceedings in the newspapers.”