CHAPTER 61
A NEW MAN ON THE JOB
One day in early March 1923, District Attorney Woolwine stepped shakily out of the elevator and headed to his office in the Hall of Records. Employees noted how badly he was trembling. The mighty Fightin’ Prosecutor hadn’t been the same since his devastating defeat in the governor’s race. Once Woolwine had seemed indestructible; now he walked down the hallway with a cane. His face was sunken, and he’d lost a great deal of weight.
He called his staff, including Eddie King, into his office. “I know I am a sick man,” Woolwine admitted to them. “I have been sick for months. I know I need a rest, but I would rather die in office than tender my resignation now.”
That was classic Woolwine. A fighter to the end. But in fact he’d already delegated many of his duties to his chief deputy, Asa Keyes. And Detective Sergeant King, as sorry as he was for his boss’s ill health, could not have been more pleased about that.
If Keyes became district attorney, King felt sure, he could revive the Taylor investigation. He’d be allowed to pursue leads that Woolwine had discouraged or outright forbidden.
In the past five months, the only work King had been able to log on the case had been interviewing “cranks,” as he called them. The American public remained so fascinated by the Taylor murder that many craved some kind of personal connection to it. Dozens had fantasized their way into the case, parading into King’s office and sitting in front of him with sad, vacant eyes, claiming they’d witnessed the murder or even pulled the trigger themselves. Some even claimed they’d seen Taylor very much alive, strolling down the street. A year after the murder, King’s list of cranks exceeded a thousand names.
Meanwhile, he’d been unable to follow up with the two people who mattered.
Mary Miles Minter’s dismissal from Famous Players–Lasky had raised suspicions. True, her pictures hadn’t lived up to their hype, but might there have been something more nefarious going on? “People on the inside of the game” were insisting that Mary had not “voluntarily given up fame and fortune,” as the studio claimed. She’d been driven off the screen, they declared, “by a force which held her in thrall—a force which she had offended in some unknown way.”
King was convinced that the higher-ups at Famous Players–Lasky knew the identity of Taylor’s killer. Had the studio decided to wash its hands of Mary because of her involvement in the crime? Did the papers that Charles Eyton had stolen from the crime scene implicate Charlotte Shelby? To King, it all made perfect sense.
Shelby had the motive. She had the weapon. And she had no alibi for the night of the murder: no one could positively state where she had been at 7:45 in the evening on February 1.
Charlotte Shelby, dressed as a man. That had to be the answer. Maybe she was wearing boots that made her seem taller. And maybe the shadow of her cap made her face look rough and her nose more prominent to Faith MacLean.
Such a theory might be difficult to prove. But at least Asa Keyes would let King try.
On June 6 Woolwine, admitting that his once-fabled “wrought-iron constitution” had failed him and that he was suffering from stomach and intestinal cancer, submitted his resignation to the county board of supervisors. Effective immediately, Asa Keyes became the new district attorney for Los Angeles.
A week later Mary and her mother, who’d been estranged for several months, suddenly reconciled. With their protector gone, they seemed to panic. The two women obtained passports and planned to sail off on an extended tour of Asia.
The fact did not go unnoticed by Detective Sergeant King.
CHAPTER 62
UNFAIR COMPETITION
On the morning of June 13, 1923, dozens of people packed into the Engineering Societies Building at 29 West Thirty-Ninth Street in New York. The day was cloudy and unsettled. Strong winds rattled the glass in the enormous windows of Assembly Room 3. The government’s case against Adolph Zukor was finally in full swing.
The counsel for the Federal Trade Commission, W. Hayes Fuller, gaveled the hearing into order and called the witness so many onlookers had crammed into the room to see.
Sydney S. Cohen took his seat at the front table.
The FTC hearings against Famous Players–Lasky had been going on for two months. But Cohen was the witness everyone had been waiting for. Who better to describe Zukor’s unfair trade practices but the leader of the exhibitors he’d tried to put out of business?
The spectators sat at the edge of their seats, expecting fireworks.
But the president of the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America was calm and collected, speaking in a college-educated cadence Zukor despised. When asked to give his opinion of the case against Famous Players, Cohen thought for a moment. Once, he said, exhibitors had viewed Zukor as their friend. But as the Famous Players chief forced more and more of them out of business, he’d become their “most dangerous enemy.” Cohen recounted the pledge Zukor had made to destroy him and the MPTOA, and how his emissary, Will Hays, had splintered their group in half, pitting exhibitor against exhibitor.
Fuller asked what had happened to change Zukor so dramatically in the past decade.
Cohen didn’t need to think long. “Wall Street,” he answered. Zukor’s alliance with Wall Street had left him obsessed with growing his company’s profits, at the cost of everything else.
Fuller’s grizzled face cracked into a grin. The fifty-three-year-old lawyer didn’t often smile. He was a tall, rangy Oklahoman who picked his words carefully and always spoke with authority. This was exactly the sort of testimony he’d been hoping for from Cohen.
Across the room, defending the film concern and its president, was Robert T. Swaine, thirty-seven, rising star of the law firm of Cravath, Henderson, Leffingwell, and DeGersdorff. Smooth, suave, and a little bit cocky, Swaine was “so well dressed he doesn’t look well dressed,” Variety thought, and “handsome enough to be a picture star.” For the past two months, the contrast between Fuller and Swaine had made for some lively courtroom theatrics.
When Cohen complained about Zukor’s control over the first-run Broadway theaters, Swaine saw an opening for attack. Why didn’t Cohen just build his own first-run Broadway house then?
Cohen smirked. He’d love to, he replied. But there was one problem: all the available property on Broadway between Forty-Second and Fifty-First Streets had already been snatched up by—“yes, sir, you guessed it”—Famous Players–Lasky.
Prosecutor Fuller’s weathered face broke into another smile.
For his part, Zukor paid little outward attention, behaving as if the hearings on Thirty-Ninth Street weren’t happening at all. He sailed off for Europe, convening a meeting on a balcony in Nice overlooking the Mediterranean to plan a counterattack against the Shubert organization’s attempt to expand its Broadway empire. The gall of Shubert—trying to control an entire industry!
Zukor’s brazenness didn’t stop there. When he returned to New York, he made a great show of releasing the blueprints for his skyscraper. Now that Shanley’s lease had expired, he was moving ahead with demolition on the old building and starting work on his new tower.
But his swagger was a masquerade. As the first hearings got under way, Famous Players stocks had plunged. And sitting in the audience, day in and day out, was Canon William Sheafe Chase, who’d assumed Wilbur Crafts’s role as the movie industry’s chief critic. Chase took notes and issued a series of statements in reaction to the proceedings, declaring that any government regulation of the movies should include a morality clause.
A parade of Zukor’s enemies made their way to Thirty-Ninth Street to give testimony. W. W. Hodkinson detailed how Zukor had maneuvered him out of Paramount to seize control of the distribution end of the business. Independent producer Al Lichtman compared Zukor to a crooked gambler in the old West, whose business was backed up by gunmen. H. D. H. Connick, who’d worked for Zukor before being eased out when his loyalty was questioned, thought his former boss had wanted “weekly rec
eipts as large as possible” in order to “dominate the industry.”
Swaine saw the remarks as an opportunity and jumped to his feet. He asked the witness if he would define “domination” as “superiority.”
Connick replied that he would.
The young lawyer beamed. “Then you would say, wouldn’t you, that Caruso dominated the opera field?”
Connick shot him a look. “God Almighty had a lot to do with Caruso, but he had nothing to do with Famous Players.”
Swaine’s confidence melted. Once again, prosecutor Fuller was smiling.
But there was one celebrity witness who hadn’t been called. At the end of one hearing, a reporter asked Fuller when Marcus Loew might testify. “The same day we put Zukor on the stand,” the prosecutor responded dryly.
By now, it was clear to the FTC that Zukor and Loew, rivals and antagonists, were also associates and collaborators. In many ways, Loew could have been charged with the same overreach as Zukor. He owned nearly as many theaters and had his own ambitious plans for expansion. The two former partners found themselves colluding more often these days as their interests aligned. Sidney Kent, Paramount general manager, admitted under oath that Loew houses “received certain preferences in the booking of [Paramount] pictures.” So now the government was also trying to prove that Loew “held a sort of corner on Paramount film in New York.” It was clear that if the two fathers-in-law ever officially merged their companies, they would control more than half the motion-picture industry between them.
But any camaraderie Zukor might have been feeling for his old rival quickly evaporated with Sydney Cohen’s testimony.
Cohen was asked about his relations with Loew. A little more than a year earlier, Cohen revealed, Loew had asked the exhibitors’ organization to “take over Metro,” fearing the studio would “be done for” if Zukor’s ambitions weren’t stopped.
Zukor was furious. He knew that sneaky rat couldn’t be trusted! That dandy had been negotiating with some of his bitterest enemies, those ill-bred theater owners!
Confronted with Cohen’s statement, Loew tried to shrug it off. That was then, he said, and this was now. He wouldn’t make the same request today.
But for Zukor, it was just further evidence that he could trust no one. He was in this for himself and his company only. He had to watch his back at all times.
Every obstacle he’d faced these past three years he had overcome, even the ones he’d feared might sink him. Arbuckle was finally history. And the truth of the Taylor murder, Zukor believed, had been obliterated forever.
But would he survive these infernal government hearings?
When Zukor worried, he walked. Sometimes he walked from midnight to sunrise, all over the city, from his office to downtown and then back again. And when he walked, he plotted. He strategized. He figured out how to win. “When the Sioux started ghost-dancing, it meant trouble along the Big Horn,” one contemporary of Zukor’s observed. “When Zukor starts walking, it’s time for everybody on the reservation to look out.”
Zukor was not a man who dealt well with fear or ambiguity. As the hearings dragged on, he lost his vision of the future. Would the government strip him of everything? Would he wake up one morning and find his bank accounts empty, his companies shuttered, his access to important people gone? Would he once again be that defenseless orphan with nothing to his name?
The hearings rolled on, indifferent to Zukor’s schedule, leaving him constantly wondering when or if he might be called to the stand. In July the commission reconvened in Philadelphia, to meet with exhibitors and distributors there. Later it moved south to Atlanta, and by late summer up to Boston, with more cities still on the docket. The nightmare promised to drag out endlessly.
At an industry dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, Zukor’s primary Wall Street angel, Otto Kahn, angrily defended Famous Players. Democracy was wrong, Kahn declared, when “it countenances government commissions giving to endless innuendo and irresponsible gossip the place and the scope that belong to trustworthy testimony.” Democracy was also wrong, he said, when “it tolerates unwarranted assault on the reputation of businessmen with the resulting damage to the good name and fair fame of business both here and in foreign lands.”
For men like Kahn and Zukor, it seemed, there was such a thing as too much democracy.
Zukor had always been paranoid about losing power. But even the paranoid sometimes had real enemies. That summer of 1923, Zukor walked the leather off his shoes.
A block north on Fifth Avenue, though he didn’t know it yet, Zukor had another reason to worry.
Will Hays picked up the telephone and rang Marcus Loew.
He’d heard the Metro chief was having a meeting with Louis B. Mayer, the plucky independent producer who was coming to New York from Hollywood to scope out possibilities for a merger. Mayer knew that his only chance of becoming a power player in the industry was to become big enough to compete with Famous Players. To do that, however, he’d need partners. And so, among others, he was meeting with Loew.
Just what advice Hays gave Loew, neither of them ever recorded. But if Loew let on that he was considering joining forces with Mayer, Hays certainly signaled his blessing.
CHAPTER 63
TRAPPED LIKE RATS
On the hot, humid morning of Tuesday, July 10, 1923, John L. Bushnell passed beneath his father’s monarchial crest into the Springfield National Bank in Ohio and realized the moment he’d been dreading for the past eight months was now upon him.
Waiting in the lobby were Rose Putnam and her brother. Or rather, as Bushnell now knew from Fred Moore’s letter, her uncle, Don Osborn.
Rose looked exquisite in a black dress, her face covered in net. A squirrel fur, incongruous on such a hot day, hung across her shoulders down to her knees.
Bushnell turned and ran.
Osborn followed. “Do you remember me?” he shouted.
The banker stopped in his tracks and looked around. Yes, he remembered him. “But you are not the man you represented yourself to be,” Bushnell said.
Osborn insisted they speak at once.
Reluctantly, Bushnell returned to the bank with Osborn. He brought his two visitors into his private office, instructing his secretary to hold all his calls.
Rose said nothing. She just sat there looking lovely and vulnerable.
“The federal men are back,” Osborn told the banker. It was going to be “necessary to fix things up” with more money. This time, Osborn said, the Feds wanted fifty grand.
Bushnell was appalled.
Osborn warned the banker that if the Feds didn’t get what they wanted, they’d haul him down to New Orleans and charge him with the Mann Act. Pointing over at Rose, who was weeping, he added that they’d drag her along as a witness. Bushnell didn’t want to put Rose through that, did he?
The millionaire had known this second shakedown was coming. The letter from Fred Moore—Earl Frank Dustin to him—was still in his safe. As a result, Osborn’s theatrics had little effect on him.
When Osborn asked him what he going to do, Bushnell replied, “Nothing.”
Osborn became red in the face. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Did Bushnell want to end up in the penitentiary? What about Rose? How could he put her through all this? He called Rose “sweet and pure and all that sort of bunk,” Bushnell later recalled.
But the banker just shrugged his shoulders.
Osborn got angrier. He told Bushnell that the officer who’d accompanied him in November “had been laughed at for the small amount of money he had obtained.” The higher-ups had refused to turn over the balance of the letters. Did Bushnell want them to end up in the hands of his wife?
The banker kept his cool, explaining he was “not in a position to do anything at this time” as he’d recently suffered some financial losses.
Osborn seemed ready to snap. “If you’re not doing anything,” he seethed, “I will do something.” He leveled his eyes with Bushnell’s. “I ca
n kill you.”
This much Bushnell hadn’t expected. He told Osborn to take it slow.
All six feet three inches of Osborn loomed over him. “There is nothing to prevent me from killing you,” the blackmailer said, “if you don’t fix things up.”
Bushnell promised he’d try to figure something out. He told Osborn to return to the bank at 1:30 that afternoon.
Osborn had no other choice. If he wanted the money, he’d have to come back. He and Rose left the bank.
No doubt Bushnell let out a very long breath.
When he was sure they were gone, he placed a telephone call and told the man who answered to get over to the bank right away.
Back at the Shawnee Hotel, Blackie Madsen’s ruddy face creased in suspicion. Just what did Bushnell have up his sleeve? Why did he want Osborn to bring the federal agents back with him to the bank that afternoon? Why couldn’t he just give Osborn the money? After two decades of scams and con jobs, Blackie could always sniff out a trap.
But what else could they do? They couldn’t just leave now. Osborn was desperate to get his hands on more of Bushnell’s money. How fast that ten grand had disappeared! Back in Hollywood, he’d been forced into some honest work as a director’s assistant with the Sanford Production Company, a low-budget independent. He’d just finished a picture called Shell-Shocked Sammy, photographed by Gibby’s old partner Elmer Dyer and featuring their buddy Leonard Clapham. But Osborn didn’t like to work. How much easier, and more lucrative, it was to bilk money from pigeons like Bushnell.
Osborn had left Los Angeles with Rose and Madsen on July 2. In Chicago they’d met up with John A. Ryan, a fellow conspirator who ran a gambling den in Los Angeles, paying police part of the proceeds so they’d leave him alone. Ryan would play the part of the second federal agent, come to put the screws on Bushnell.
But the banker’s insistence on meeting the agents left Madsen uneasy. Why would someone who was afraid of being arrested over the Mann Act want to meet the guys who might actually do the arresting? Madsen told Osborn to go back by himself to the bank. If the sucker still didn’t cough up the cash, he and Ryan would arrive later and rough him up a little bit.
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