by Nancie Clare
Like everything else, Hollywood and the business of making movies was changing, though. Back in 1910 when D. W. Griffith and Mary Pickford had first traveled to Hollywood to make movies in the February sunshine, filmmaking was still new enough that there was an air of adventure about the whole enterprise. Making a moving picture in 1910 really was the equivalent of kids putting on a show; by 1920 the kids who had been putting on those shows had evolved into corporations. The movie business had matured into an industry with its companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Government scrutiny had become a cost of doing business. Men such as Adolph Zukor had set up their studios as vertical monopolies; they controlled the entire pipeline for the movies the public consumed, from hiring writers and actors to filming to distribution and exhibition. It was exactly the sort of monopoly that “trustbusters” on the Federal Trade Commission, which had been established in 1915 by the administration of President Wilson primarily to break up railroad monopolies, were seeking to eliminate. For the movie business in the early 1920s, the stakes were high; real money was involved. Zukor and his fellow studio chiefs depended on Harding to keep the regulators’ eyes focused anywhere but on the motion picture industry.
But it wasn’t just the scrutiny of federal government agencies that the moviemakers wanted to dodge. With each passing year it seemed there were more and more civilian organizations howling for the right to censor films.
Once the Volstead Act had passed in 1919 outlawing the sale and consumption of alcohol, those who had what California historian Kevin Starr termed “fundamentalist rectitude,”1 the kind that populated the Christian Temperance Union and other like-minded organizations, turned their attention to cleaning up the rest of the moral morass into which they felt the United States was devolving. This battle, for no less than the souls of the country according to those who were taking up figurative arms, pitted newly minted Hollywood moguls, like Adolph Zukor2 and Jesse Lasky, along with the actors and actresses in front of the cameras, against the decency brigade of church ladies (and gentlemen) who felt that the movies were just another example, like alcohol, of the perfidy and moral corruption that was destroying America. For Zukor and other producers and exhibitors, it was no less than a war on two fronts: deflecting the growing interest of the Department of Justice in the vertical integration of studios, which made movies and also owned the theaters that exhibited them, and keeping the ever-growing numbers of censors from exacting control over the movies’ content.
The late teens and early twenties was a strange time. Running concurrently to optimism and high spirits that followed the end of the War to End All Wars and ushered in the Roaring Twenties, there was a groundswell of righteous indignation on the part of a self-appointed morals police to rid society of base influences like sex, drugs, alcohol, jazz—all debasements, they believed, encouraged by movies. True believers and sanctimonious hypocrites alike decried the outsize influence movies had on the young and impressionable. It was a roiling time of progressive and regressive changes coming along practically hand in hand. Just before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote in national elections, had come the Eighteenth Amendment outlawing alcohol, a law that enjoyed a great deal of support from women. Reactionary forces were doing their best to hang on to the last vestiges of the Victorian era’s suffocating propriety, while new technologies like projectors and Victrolas were delivering entertainment like movies and music, often jazz, to the masses. Committees were formed to sit in judgment on the wholesomeness of movie content. Unlike the pressure the Committee for Public Information, which had been disbanded in 1918 at the end of the war, brought on the film community to create content that supported the war effort, this was censorship plain and simple masquerading as “protection.” In a way it was a manifestation of the question posed in one of the songs popular during the war about getting the young men who had experienced European city life and culture to settle back down to their prosaic lives. “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree’ / How ya gonna keep ’em away from Broadway, jazzin’ around and paintin’ the town.”3 The fact was, no one could, but nothing was going to stop the country’s reactionary forces from trying.
Every city, it seemed, had at least one committee in place to review the content of films and judge their appropriateness. It was a maddening situation for the film distributors. Something that was acceptable in San Francisco could be anathema in Pittsburgh. Even in one city, something that would pass muster by one committee would be shot down by the other. Film releases could be held up for indeterminate amounts of time.
In spite of the work Hollywood’s War Cooperating Committee, which included William Fox, D. W. Griffith, Thomas H. Ince, Jesse L. Lasky, Carl Laemmle, Marcus Loew, Joseph M. Schenck, Lewis J. Selznick, and Adolph Zukor, had done during the war to help the government, the fact that most of the men who ran the movie studios were Jewish did not help their cause. Even though a strong case could be made that much of the public’s idea of the American Dream was developed through movies made by the same Jews who now ran the studios, anti-Semitism was rampant and systemic. Their Jewishness was but one more reason the various decency committees cast a gimlet eye on movies coming out of Hollywood. The Jews who invented Hollywood may have embraced and extolled the American Dream, sharing their starry-eyed vision with their fellow citizens, but much of Christian America did not return the favor by accepting them as anything approaching equal. The question that roared from pulpits from coast to coast was how could Jews possibly uphold Christian morals? And nothing could bridge that religious divide, including Adolph Zukor having the largest Christmas tree in town.
Then there were the actors and actresses themselves. It was a nightmare scenario for those filled with fundamentalist rectitude: beautiful and restless young men and women (mostly women, it seemed) descending on Hollywood, unfettered by supervision, with hopes for fame, fortune, and adventure fueled by the proliferation of movie magazines. Morality Leagues, churches, Women’s Clubs, and other organizations viewed the young people pouring into Hollywood as sybarites who were setting a bad example for the rest of the youth of America, plain and simple. And, to a great extent, the new arrivals in Hollywood did little to help their own cause in the eyes of the morals’ monitors. They partied often and they partied hard.
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The actual town of Hollywood had changed. In 1910, when Mary Pickford first came west to make movies, the teetotaler city, which was still mostly orchards, had just voted to annex itself to Los Angeles. By 1920, when Mary moved to Beverly Hills from the Craftsman bungalow in Hollywood that she shared with her mother (rather than her husband Owen Moore), the population had skyrocketed. Between 1910 and 1920 the population of Los Angeles nearly doubled, from 319,198 to 576,673, fueled in part by the growth of the movie industry. According to the 1910 census there were about 400 actors and just north of 200 actresses; by 1920 the number of actors and actresses had multiplied almost sixfold to 2,300 and 1,300, respectively. In addition to talent in front of the camera there were also legions of people such as producers, directors, cameramen, lighting technicians, costumers, scenarists, carpenters, costumers, hairdressers, makeup artists, scene painters, and so on who had moved to Hollywood to work in the new industry.4 It was a boomtown.
Even if her commute between home and studio wasn’t via chauffeured cars, Mary Pickford would probably have been able to handle the crowds well enough. She had lived in New York and had taken her share of public transportation and even done her share of walking between home and work to save bus and subway fare. What she was extremely averse to was scandal. As bad as Mary may have felt about the brouhaha surrounding her divorce and her new husband’s separation and divorce from his first wife, she was savvy enough to realize she had dodged a bullet. Her popularity—and even more importantly, her pocketbook—emerged from the experience intact. But instinctively she knew that bad publicity attached to a scandal could s
tem from little more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the time between when she settled into Pickfair, which Douglas Fairbanks had given her as a wedding gift, and the first rumblings of a proposed annexation of Beverly Hills to Los Angeles, three scandals rocked the moviemaking world. These were no ordinary tales of people behaving badly, getting caught in flagrante delicto, suing for divorce, being arrested for buying or consuming alcohol, or getting caught (or arrested) for driving drunk. The three scandals that roiled Hollywood—and the world, for that matter—were soaked in sin (alcohol, drugs, and sex) that had resulted in death, both accidental and murder.
The first of the trio of high-profile scandals to brush up against the Hollywood community may have happened almost half a world away in Paris, France, but the death by accidental poisoning—after a night of copious consumption of drugs and alcohol—of Olive Thomas, who was married to Mary Pickford’s younger brother, Jack, hit close to home.
Olive Thomas, born Olive Duffy in Pennsylvania in 1894, moved to New York City in 1913 following the end of a brief marriage to Bernard Thomas. She started her show business career in 1914 at the age of twenty by winning “The Most Beautiful Girl in New York City” contest. The contest was held by renowned illustrator Howard Chandler Christy, and the winner was to become the model for what Christy dubbed “The Christy Girl.” His illustrations of the Christy Girl came to replace illustrator Charles Dana Gibson’s fin de siècle Gibson Girl as the romanticized archetype of American womanhood. Olive Thomas also posed for other prominent New York illustrators including Harrison Fisher, Raphael Kirchner, and Haskell Coffin. She appeared on a cover of the Saturday Evening Post and posed nude from the waist up for Peruvian artist Alberto Vargas before being hired for the Ziegfeld Follies. (There was a bit of a dispute over how she got the Ziegfeld job. According to Fisher, he wrote her a letter of recommendation to Florenz Ziegfeld; Olive Thomas claimed she approached Ziegfeld herself and asked. Such are the makings of personal legend.)
Olive is reputed to have cut a wide swath through the prominent men of the time before marrying Jack Pickford. She had an affair with Florenz Ziegfeld, which she is said to have ended when he wouldn’t leave his wife at the time, Billie Burke. In 1916, Olive started her film career in a serial for International Film Company. By 1917 she had graduated to feature films—and a high-profile love interest. In the second half of 1916, Olive had met Jack Pickford and Mary Pickford at a café at the Santa Monica Pier. According to Mary’s close friend and frequent collaborator, screenwriter Frances Marion, Jack and Olive were like peas in a pod when it came to a predilection for hard partying. Marion called them “the gayest, wildest brats who ever stirred the stardust on Broadway. Both were talented, but they were much more interested in playing the roulette of life than in concentrating on their careers.”5 Although Olive announced her engagement to Jack Pickford in 1917, the couple had married in October 1916 in New Jersey. Mary was not amused. In her autobiography she wrote, “I regret to say that none of us approved. Mother thought Jack was too young, and Lottie and I felt that Olive, being in musical comedy, belonged to an alien world.”6 A bit rich on Mary’s part, as, at the time she married Jack, Olive had fully made the transition to movies from the Ziegfeld Follies and would go on to appear in a number of feature-length films, including her penultimate film in 1920, The Flapper, by Frances Marion, which introduced the term to the American lexicon.
It was a tumultuous union, to say the least. There were huge fights followed by excessive outpourings of affection and the presentation of costly gifts from Jack to Olive. In 1920, the couple decided to take a trip to Europe to give their marriage another chance. Their companion on the trip? None other than Mary’s ex-husband Owen Moore. Talk about keeping it all in the family. The proliferation of movie mags that had sprung up to cover the young industry and its beautiful denizens followed Olive and Jack’s relationship closely and covered it breathlessly.
According to the articles in newspapers, on the fateful night, the couple partied well into the early hours, imbibing champagne and, according to some accounts, ingesting huge quantities of cocaine. After returning to their hotel, Olive drank from a bottle that contained the mercury bichloride that Jack was using as a topical treatment for his chronic syphilis. Jack and Owen Moore rushed her to American Hospital, where she died five days later. The press on both sides of the Atlantic went wild with speculation that Olive had committed suicide for any number of reasons: Jack’s infidelities or that Jack had infected her with syphilis. Some reports speculated that she was a hopeless drug fiend and others suggested Jack had murdered her for the insurance money. While there was no love lost between Mary and her late sister-in-law, Mary felt responsible for her wayward brother Jack’s welfare. Nevertheless, each and every one of these journalistic screeds, in which her name was always mentioned, must have hit Mary like a physical blow. Adding insult to injury, the reports never failed to mention the loathsome Owen, further reminding readers that Mary was a divorced woman who was part of a family that engaged in drug-fueled goings-on and had members being treated for syphilis.
Jack Pickford brought his wife’s body back for her funeral at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church in New York City on September 28, 1920. It became the first celebrity-fueled frenzy since Mary and Doug’s triumphant return from their honeymoon just a few weeks earlier. The church was jammed, women fainted, and everyone was packed tight in the queue to see the casket. The media were in attack mode, struggling to recognize the celebrity contingent attending. Necks were craned to their breaking point looking for the deceased’s famous sister-in-law, Mary Pickford. But Mary, along with Doug, stayed in Beverly Hills and did not attend. However, both had been front and center at the memorial Adolph Zukor had thrown together in Hollywood a few days before. The event had the dual purpose of memorializing those in the movie industry who had died in filming accidents, under mysterious circumstances and of “accidental” self-inflicted gunshot wounds, and of demonstrating to the world that there was dignity to be found among moving picture folk. The memorial had already been in the works, but when news of Olive Thomas’ death reached Hollywood a moving tribute was seamlessly added. The setting was Brunton Studios and Zukor called on William Desmond Taylor, one of the industry’s most respected, and seemingly respectable, members to deliver what amounted to a eulogy for its fallen members. The stakes were high; this event would be reported in newspapers around the world and the crusaders for moral decency and church ladies were poised. There were prayers delivered by The Reverend Neal Dodd of Saint Mary of the Angels Episcopal Church, which was attended by many in the motion picture community, and hymns sung by a choir. When Taylor finally spoke to the audience of eight hundred or so, he never mentioned the scandals. In his cultured British accent, Taylor talked about the respect, honor, duty, friendship, and love that was shared within the motion picture community not just by those who had died, but by those who remained. And he accomplished his goal of imbuing the tragedies that had befallen Olive Thomas and the others with dignity as opposed to prurience. Outwardly, Taylor was the poster child for all that Hollywood wanted to project about its citizens. That he had dark secrets of his own was his business. At that point in September 1920, Taylor couldn’t have known that his murder, which would take place on the evening of February 1, 1922, would be the third major scandal to rock Hollywood.
Between Olive Thomas’ death and William Desmond Taylor’s murder was a scandal that would not only shake the Hollywood community to its core, but also deliver devastating ammunition to those who would sit in judgment of its product: the trials of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.
Exactly a year after Olive Thomas’ death, over the Labor Day weekend in September 1921, Arbuckle, one of Hollywood’s most popular and successful comedic actors, had taken a break from his hectic career and gone to San Francisco with two friends, actor-director Lowell Sherman and cameraman Fred Fischbach, to cut loose, checking into three suites at the St. Francis Hotel. The trio invited a nu
mber of women to join them, including model and bit-part actress Virginia Rappe, whom Arbuckle knew from Hollywood. She was, by all accounts, someone who loved to party with abandon. During the weekend she became seriously ill. There would be speculation that she perhaps became sick from a recent abortion, or possibly from imbibing the questionable Prohibition era alcohol. Regardless, two days after the September 5 party, Maude Delmont, who had met and befriended Virginia at the party, took her to a hospital, where she died a few days later, on September 9, 1921, of peritonitis that developed from a ruptured bladder. After Virginia’s death, Delmont claimed that Arbuckle had raped Rappe in spite of the fact that she was not actually present when the alleged sexual assault took place. In fact, because of her extensive criminal background, which included accusations of blackmail and extortion, Maude Delmont never took the stand to testify against Arbuckle in any of his three trials. But that did not stop the San Francisco district attorney Matthew Brady, who had ambitions for the California governorship, from pursuing the case.
The God squad went wild. The events leading up to Roscoe Arbuckle’s arrest and subsequent trials fed into every preconceived notion the church ladies and their fellow travelers held, and more. There was sex, booze, drugs, and more sex. And the wages of all this sin? Well, death, of course. First for Virginia Rappe, and then, the moralists fervently hoped, for Arbuckle. In fact, there were calls for his execution from the day the news broke in the press. Those who lined up against Arbuckle were bitterly disappointed that the charge filed was for manslaughter, which took death by hanging off the table. So inflamed was the public that during the first trial someone took a shot at Arbuckle’s estranged wife Minta Durfee, who attended the proceedings in support of her husband. After two weeks of testimony of sixty witnesses, eighteen of whom were physicians, the case went to the jury. Five days later the jury declared itself hopelessly deadlocked with a vote of ten-to-two to acquit. A mistrial was declared and the charges were refiled. The drama would continue and would be covered in exhaustive, sensationalized detail by the press, especially William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, which included the Los Angeles Examiner. This criminal proceeding was not going to fade from the public eye. The coverage would be there for the duration and would exacerbate the tragedy to such a degree that Arbuckle’s innocence alone would never be enough to diffuse the scandal. Which made Hearst happy—he is reported to have said that Arbuckle’s trial had sold more newspapers “than any event since the sinking of the Lusitania.”
