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

by William J. Mann

  The show opened in Stamford, Connecticut, and played in Washington, DC, and Asbury Park, New Jersey, before closing in Providence, Rhode Island, in September 1925, never making it to Broadway. A myth would arise that The Little Mouse was an abject failure, and that the disaster could be laid at Mabel’s doorstep, since her health and vitality had been destroyed by drugs and scandal. In fact, the play wasn’t as bad as all that, or at least Mabel wasn’t. She was greeted with an ovation every time she walked onstage—and the applause returned at each curtain call. The main criticism of her was that she didn’t speak loudly enough, perhaps inevitable for a silent-picture star. In a slow theatrical season, The Little Mouse did better than most tryouts. Mabel’s name proved to be “magic at the box offices of the road,” the New York Times reported.

  Yet from this point on, myths and distortions would obscure the reality of Mabel’s life. She must have been a flop in The Little Mouse, people concluded. She must have been terribly unhappy, a failure, a tragic alcoholic. For some reason, people seemed to need to believe the worst about Mabel; her story had to be a tragedy. Even decades later, her otherwise sympathetic biographer would paint her last years as those of a sad, pathetic drunk.

  But on what evidence? True, Mabel was a regular at Texas Guinan’s soirees at the 300 Club at 151 West Fifty-Fourth Street, where fan dancers and bootleg liquor abounded. But so were such giants of the New York theater and literary scene as George Gershwin, Al Jolson, Jeanne Eagels, and Edmund Wilson. If Mabel knocked back her share of sidecars and bee’s knees in the cafés and salons of New York—and sometimes more than her share—that hardly made her a drunk. It certainly didn’t make her tragic.

  What it made her, at last, was happy. Julia Brew had come back to live with her, and take care of her, and Mabel thrived in her beloved New York. Remaining under contract to Woods, Mabel no longer had to worry about money. She brought in $1,550 a week, and while some of that surely went to her bootlegger—some of everybody’s salary did—a good deal more went to books and theater tickets. She entertained the writer Carl Van Vechten, the painter Miguel Covarrubias, the journalist Heywood Broun, and the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  How proud Billy Taylor would have been of his protégée. For that matter, how proud her father would have been. Mabel had made a place for herself, finally, in the big wide world.

  In October 1925 fashion columnist Betsy Schuyler spotted the former star at the premiere of the Maxwell Anderson play The Buccaneer, drawing all eyes to her as she glittered in a white chiffon gown, white cape, and rhinestones. And at a party for the actress Irene Rich around the same time, a reporter from Photoplay noticed Mabel in an ermine wrap, “looking well and happy.”

  She didn’t stay well forever. In 1927 Mabel was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Clearly she’d been suffering with the disease for years—the reason she was sick so often, and why people thought she was still using drugs when she wasn’t. Yet even as her health declined, Mabel persevered. She made some well-received comedy shorts for Hal Roach and survived a brief, impulsive marriage to fellow merrymaker Lew Cody. Mostly she kept up her rounds of salons and sophisticated speakeasies, writing poetry and exchanging letters about art with the illustrator James Montgomery Flagg.

  Mabel had escaped the confines of Tinseltown. She had fought back, spoken her truth, and reclaimed her life from those who thought they could buy it, sell it, judge it, consume it.

  The same could not be said for Gibby and Mary.

  “Don’t get too big,” the director Allan Dwan was known to warn his friends. “Let the other fellow get the kudos if he wants it. You can last forever at the bottom—or in the middle—but you get to the top and you’re doomed.”

  Gibby should have counted her blessings that she’d never made it to the top. Her fall would have been that much more steep and injurious. As it was, she simply slipped into obscurity, going back to work for Al Christie on the Corner of Last Hope, playing bits and uncredited walk-ons. Now and then she secured a minor character part in a minor independent film. But any plans to produce her own pictures were abandoned.

  Her marriage to Arthur McGinness didn’t last, now that she no longer needed to fear his testifying against her. The parties that had once lit up the night along Beachwood Drive became echoes of the past. With Osborn and Madsen in jail, the locusts scattered like vermin after a spray of pesticide. Leonard Clapham still lived nearby, starting a new life as Tom London. Gibby might have warned him not to invest too much hope in a simple name change, but the two were likely keeping their distance by now.

  And yet, every couple of years, she still paid for new headshots, emblazoned with the name “Patricia Palmer” across the bottom, even as her face filled out and she developed a double chin. Gibby hadn’t given up, not altogether.

  Hope, after all, dies hard. But in fact her mother would pass away without ever getting the nice things Gibby had promised her on that rocky mountain road so long ago.

  And Mary? Like Mabel, she left Hollywood for New York, hoping to carve out a new career for herself on the stage. After all, she’d been a great star of the New York theater when she was a little girl. People still remembered her, Mary insisted. Lots of them!

  At the train station, a reporter asked her when she would be coming back to Hollywood.

  “I hope never,” Mary replied.

  Yet one thing was certain. No matter where she fled, Detective Sergeant King would keep her in his sights.

  CHAPTER 70

  END OF AN ERA

  Out at the windswept corner of Forty-Third and Broadway, Adolph Zukor, now fifty-two years old, gestured dramatically at the foremen and pointed up toward the clouds. Throughout the fall and winter of 1925, the Paramount Building grew taller every day behind giant scaffolding. Muffs on his ears during the colder months, Zukor stopped by often to check on the progress and hurry the workers along. The skyscraper was now slated to have thirty-five floors, dwarfing Loew’s sixteen. That included a six-story tower boasting the largest office clock in New York. Every hour a set of chimes, cast in Europe, would sound over Times Square. Zukor’s magnificent monument would complete the ring of skyscrapers around the square, fringed until recently by one- and two-story frame buildings.

  The film chief was feeling emboldened. It had become clear to everyone that he would survive the Federal Trade Commission assault against him. After two years of hearings, the government still hadn’t proven any illegality on the part of Famous Players. Shrewdly, Zukor had made a major concession by ending his policy of block booking, eliminating one of the FTC’s major complaints against him. Besides, with so many other producers now expanding into exhibition, and exhibitor chains like First National financing new films, it was increasingly difficult to single Famous Players out. Observers predicted it would be years before the commission could win a judgment against the company, and maybe not even then.

  And so Zukor had resumed what he’d been busy doing before the government stuck its nose into his business: acquiring more theaters. In November 1923, Famous Players took full control of Sid Grauman’s theaters on the West Coast; many more theaters followed in the succeeding months and years. The government had been Zukor’s biggest worry. Now, feeling safe, he was giving the raspberry to the relentless federal prosecutors.

  Yet for all his bluster, his autocratic reign over the movies had ended.

  And the one who had ended it was Marcus Loew.

  In April 1924, Zukor’s longtime rival had formed a giant combine that would “surpass in capitalization, influence and physical scope any other film organization in the world.” Loew’s Metro Pictures had merged with a host of others—with Goldwyn, with Louis B. Mayer’s eponymous company, and with William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures—creating a company worth an astonishing $65 million in combined authorized capital stock. Not only had the new MGM, as the industry was calling it, immediately become a financial powerhouse, but its formation gave Marcus Loew control of more theaters nationwide than Zu
kor. And MGM produced and distributed about as many films a year as Famous Players–Lasky.

  In one fell swoop, Loew had become Zukor’s equal.

  FILM WAR LOOMS AS NEW COMBINE SEEKS SUPREMACY, read one headline. “A war to wrest supremacy in the film world from Famous Players–Lasky is freely predicted now that Metro, Goldwyn, Mayer and Cosmopolitan have united under Marcus Loew, making him a powerful figure rivaled only by Adolph Zukor,” the syndicated article declared.

  In some ways, Loew was more than Zukor’s equal; he was his superior. In March 1924 came a new Variety headline: RADIO IS BOX OFFICE DANGER. Increasing numbers of people were choosing to stay at home and listen to concerts and prizefights on the newfangled squawk box instead of going out to the movies. Loew had anticipated radio’s power in a way Zukor hadn’t. He’d purchased radio station WHN and relocated its transmitting station to high above his State Theatre on Broadway, where he regularly broadcast his movie premieres as well as the sounds of Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor.

  For once, someone other than Zukor was ahead of the curve.

  Yet when he was finally corralled into testifying at the FTC hearings, Loew had said nothing to damage his rival. In fact, he had steadfastly defended Zukor against charges of industry control. What a peculiar man! What motivated him? Zukor couldn’t figure Loew out.

  A few years earlier, sitting with his rival on his country estate veranda, Zukor had mused about the nature of competition, about the need for dogs to eat dogs lest “they get eaten first.” Loew didn’t necessarily disagree in most cases. But he surprised Zukor with a rather different perspective. Sometimes, Loew said, what Zukor thought was competition was really “just the other fellow doing his business.”

  Zukor had no idea what he was talking about.

  Those veranda chats were in the past now. The Hudson River Valley was no longer good enough for Marcus Loew. Now that he was the head of MGM, he’d purchased Pembroke, a sprawling multimillion-dollar estate in Glen Cove, Long Island, with twelve master bedrooms, twelve baths, a mosaic tile swimming pool seventy feet in circumference, and a garage that accommodated twenty cars. Set on forty-six acres, much of it on the water, the mansion was called by some in real estate “the most beautiful home in the world.” Loew had the residence of a king, making Zukor look like a country squire in comparison.

  But Zukor would show him. The Paramount Building was almost done.

  With the coming of MGM, the push to finish Zukor’s signature headquarters took on a new urgency. “Zukor is about the wisest manipulator in pictures,” Variety noted. “It is pride in being the biggest man in the picture industry and Zukor is going to keep that status as long as possible.” His skyscraper would tell the world that no one would ever be bigger than he.

  At the last minute, he made sure the plans included a radio station.

  On May 19, 1926, the cornerstone was laid, using a gold trowel wielded by the mayor of New York—none other than Jimmy Walker, Zukor’s old nemesis and now fast friend. Will Hays was there too, smiling his crooked smile from ear to floppy ear.

  Hays seemed content to indulge Zukor’s illusions of grandeur. Let him have the highest skyscraper. Let him maintain the pretense that he was still the most powerful man in the industry. But Hays had helped ensure that was no longer true.

  When Hays had signed the renewal of his contract on April 1, 1924, he’d known that Marcus Loew’s merger was in the works, and that Zukor’s reign was about to end. Hays had encouraged Loew in the move, staying in the loop through J. Robert Rudin, Loew’s attorney and an adviser to the MPPDA. He was cheered by MGM’s quick success: by its second year, Loew’s studio was the biggest moneymaker in the industry, with profits over $6 million. Never again would Zukor hold the kind of power he had enjoyed from 1920 to 1924. And that diminution ensured Hays’s elevation.

  The little film czar now stood apart, dependent upon the studios for funding but increasingly independent of them in most other matters. Hays had succeeded splendidly in his primary objective, forestalling outside regulation by disarming the opposition through his brilliant public relations campaign. To tamp down any lingering calls for censorship, he’d developed what he called “the Formula,” a loose set of guidelines based on Lasky’s fourteen points, whereby producers were asked—not required—to submit questionable scripts to Hays’s office for review. Although the Formula had no teeth for enforcement, it did disarm critics like Canon Chase. No wonder the board of the MPPDA had renewed Hays’s contract. The original agreement had run until 1925. But the new contract that the film czar signed so enthusiastically in April 1924 extended his tenure through 1928.

  Despite all the rumors, Will Hays wasn’t going away.

  Neither was Zukor, though he’d have to get used to sharing power.

  And not just with Hays and Loew. In August 1925, to offset the FTC’s repeated assertions that Famous Players “conspired to seize control of and monopolize the motion picture industry,” Zukor had found it prudent to take on some partners. Transferring management of his theaters to the theatrical company Balaban & Katz of Chicago was a shrewd move, once again muddying the FTC’s argument against him. Neither a merger nor a sale, the arrangement merely gave Balaban & Katz managerial control over Paramount theaters, with money continuing to flow vertically into Zukor’s coffers. But he had also gained collaborators in Barney Balaban and Sam Katz who were far more independent and influential than his nominal partner, Jesse Lasky, ever was.

  Zukor had relished his rule as an absolute monarch. But that was in the past. Being part of an oligarchy would take some getting used to.

  At least he’d sit higher than any of them in the sky.

  On August 2, 1926, the Paramount Building reached its peak when its highest girder, 450 feet above street level, was swung into place. Extra police had to be called out to control the crowds that gathered in the square to witness the milestone. At noon exactly, whistles blew and two marines walked out onto the beams of the thirty-fifth floor and hoisted the Stars and Stripes on the flagpole. Far below, a US Navy band played the national anthem. Zukor blinked back tears.

  The building opened in October, but the real gala came on November 19, with the theater’s official premiere. Guests flowed into the marble lobby under an enormous dome of solid gold. Socialites, Wall Street money men, and Broadway impresarios stared up in awe at a magnificent chandelier of bronze and crystal. During the day a gargantuan ornamental window flooded the lobby with sunlight that reflected majestically off all the gold and crystal. At night, the hall sparkled with thousands of colored electric lights.

  The theater itself was grander than anything New York had seen before—grander than even Loew’s State, which had so impressed everybody back in the day. The French Renaissance auditorium was draped in red and gold satin damask. The great Wurlitzer organ, one of the largest in the world, occupied four chambers on both sides of the elaborate proscenium arch, overlaid and intertwined with crystal. Thomas Edison was there for the opening, looking a bit dazed to see his little novelty housed in such sumptuous surroundings.

  The crowd featured a pantheon of New York’s elite: Florenz Ziegfeld. Conde Nast. Frank Crowninshield. Arthur Hammerstein. Irving Berlin. Otto Kahn. Charles M. Schwab. Senator-elect Robert Wagner. Mayor Walker. Four thousand guests in all, the maximum number of seats allowed by law—matching the Capitol, which was now in Loew’s control after his acquisition of Goldwyn’s chain. The stalemate couldn’t have been lost on Zukor. If only he could have crammed in four thousand and one.

  Still, in its first day of official operation, the Paramount admitted fifteen thousand paying customers from morning until night, collecting first-day receipts of an astonishing $8,000.

  He might not be the sole emperor of Tinseltown anymore, but Adolph Zukor had the biggest, grandest palace of them all.

  Some of the joy in that, however, was diminished by an unexpected factor: Marcus Loew’s health was failing. Suffering from heart trouble, Zukor’s granddaughter’s ot
her grandfather missed the opening of the Paramount. Instead he sent the man to whom he’d handed over MGM, Nicholas Schenck, who’d been with Zukor and Hays the infamous day they’d banned Fatty Arbuckle from the screen. But those days were long gone. The scandals had all been forgotten. There were new stars and new directors and new pictures. In a few years, it was said, movies might even talk and sing. A technological revolution was in the air.

  Marcus Loew wouldn’t live to see it.

  On September 4, 1927, Zukor paid his old adversary a visit at his magnificent Long Island estate. He knew that Loew was failing, and he sat at his bedside for some time. A nurse was in constant attendance. Finally Zukor told the frail man in the shiny satin robe—dandy to the end!—that he would see him again soon, and made his farewells.

  At six o’clock the next morning, Loew died in his sleep from a heart seizure.

  Zukor received the news a short time later. He was overcome. “All I can say now,” he told a reporter who called, “is that I feel his loss more than that of any man in the world.”

  Loew had been there from the start with Zukor. No one else but Lottie went back as far with him. But as they’d both climbed the ladder to success, Loew had been loved by those around him, while Zukor had been feared. The Film Daily eulogized the MGM chief as leaving “a heritage of reputation, of honesty, of kindliness, and of charity.” Photoplay thought that Loew’s honesty often seemed “like a beacon in a dark world.” The humorist Will Rogers quipped that that Loew “would have been a credit even to a respectable business.”

  Will Hays was deeply moved by Loew’s death. “A man is great or small,” he said, “as he rises above or sinks below his generation. Marcus Loew had characteristics of real greatness.”