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

by William J. Mann

  From town to town they had traveled, Gibby singing and dancing on the stages of run-down theaters, hoping some famous company would take her on. “Her life has been one long succession of hotels and theaters,” one early press report said about Gibby. “Her one desire to have a home of her own prompted her to enter pictures.”

  Her early, fleeting success had brought her enough cash to buy a couple of small properties on North Beachwood Drive, but these were hardly movie-star residences. So Gibby used the income from the little houses to pay her rent at the Melrose. After a couple of years, she figured, she could sell the Beachwood properties and move into a glamorous mansion.

  But things hadn’t quite worked out that way.

  No wonder she had turned to Joe Pepa. Joe had shown her there were other ways to get what she wanted. And for a while, he’d been right. But the cost had been too high: it was because of Joe that Gibby had been arrested for prostitution at “a house of ill fame” in Little Tokyo on that terrible afternoon of August 25, 1917. Her dreams had nearly died right then and there.

  The whole sordid tale began in a downtown taproom popular among picture players—in the days before Prohibition, of course—where Gibby first met Joe Pepa.

  At that moment, Joe was enjoying a dash of notoriety. His right arm was draped in a sling, broken in twenty-two places by police bullets, and he was suing the department for $15,863 to cover his medical costs. When Gibby came across him, he was holding forth at his table, gesturing dramatically with a glass of whisky in his left hand. Everyone there had read his story in the papers: Suspecting him of smuggling opium over the Mexican border, the cops had followed him to his little stucco house on Rodgers Street and demanded to search his car. Standing outside the front door, Joe had told the cops to beat it. At that point, according to the official police report, Joe reached for his gun, although Joe insisted he was only raising his hands as ordered. In any event, one of the officers fired. An explosion of gunfire rattled the quiet street. When the smoke cleared, Joe was lying on the ground with a shattered arm.

  A search of Joe’s car found no opium. Of course not: Joe was too clever for that.

  So instead the cops arrested him for bigamy. It was this little detail that had turned Joe, a low-rent drug smuggler, into a citywide celebrity. While in Mexico, Joe had married an actress, Betty Benson, who was a bit notorious herself, having just served as a key witness in a scandalous alienation-of-affection case between two Chicago businessmen. The fact that Pepa was already married was irrelevant. Betty Benson was a knockout, and he’d wanted her, so he’d married her in Tijuana. The cops ended up arresting Betty, too, after finding an opium pipe in her room.

  But that was just the beginning of Joe’s fame. When Betty died after her stint in the city jail, newspaper sob sisters turned her death into a cause célèbre, claiming that unsanitary conditions in the lockup had killed her. What really did poor Betty in, according to her death certificate, was “acute yellow atrophy” of her liver—alcohol poisoning. Still, Betty’s grieving, two-timing “widower” suddenly became the guy everybody wanted to meet.

  Despite a record stretching back a full decade, Joe boasted that “he would never be convicted of any charge because of his cleverness.” In all his dozens of arrests, he’d gone to jail only a couple of times, and then for very short stays. In most cases he’d weaseled out of the charges by paying off corrupt cops or by dazzling judges with his wit and his intense black eyes. Joe was an incredibly magnetic man, the son of Italian immigrants, strikingly handsome, with wavy black hair and a solid, stocky frame. When Gibby met him that night in the early spring of 1917, he was just twenty-four years old. She was twenty-two, and instantly enamored.

  Joe drove a fancy car and wore expensive fur coats—things he didn’t buy with the money he made at his regular job as a driver for a wholesale liquor company. He told Gibby that she too could earn a little extra income to buy herself some pretty things. She may have been shocked at the idea he had in mind—at least at first. But she went along with the plan.

  In Little Tokyo, Joe introduced Gibby to his friends Ralph and Lola Rodriguez. The couple advertised “furnished rooms” at 432½ Commercial Street. The neighborhood was rough. Robberies were frequent; drug deals flourished in back alleys; a man had just been killed at a dance hall run by Rodriguez’s brother. Such danger only electrified Joe Pepa. He and his brother-in-law, the shrewd defense attorney Sammy Hahn, were frequent visitors to the Rodriguezes’ house. They knew the police were keeping tabs on the place, but they didn’t care. Hahn told Lola Rodriguez he’d gladly defend her in court if she were ever accused of killing a cop.

  Across the street, their elbows sticking to the greasy tabletops of a restaurant, Officers Lester E. Trebilcock and James C. Douglas watched the front door of the house. They’d been keeping their eyes on the place for days, taking note of those who came and went. On this day they counted no less than seventy-one men, all of them Japanese. And every day the same young woman with golden brown hair.

  Inside Gibby slipped into a silk kimono, apron-style, with ties in the back. “The top was quite low,” an observer recalled, “and the bottom dropped scarcely below her knees.” Gibby kept her shoes and socks on, however, and took her seat with the other girls. “Japanese men entered the hall,” one of Gibby’s fellow geishas, Ruth Slauson, testified in court. “They would either tap us on the shoulder or motion to us, and we would accompany them to a room.”

  All at once there was commotion at the front of the house. Two policemen were pushing their way inside, flashing badges, barking that they were all under arrest. Four johns were marched out to the paddy wagon, pulling up their pants. For the cops, the real treat was nabbing Joe Pepa: they charged him with lewdness, and the Rodriguezes with running a disorderly house.

  Through it all, Gibby was cool as an April breeze. Sauntering up to one of the officers, she asked sweetly if she might put on her street clothes. He allowed her to do so. Once properly dressed, Gibby laughingly told another officer that she was an actress, visiting the house to soak up some “local color” for a vaudeville sketch, and she ought to be “turned loose.” She’d never been at the Rodriguezes’ before that day, she insisted. When that line didn’t work, she tried flirting with Officer Trebilcock, but that didn’t work, either. “Don’t try to love me up,” the cop snapped.

  One of his colleagues wasn’t so righteous, however. As Gibby stood waiting to be ushered out to the paddy wagon, another officer pushed her against the wall and kissed her hard. Looming over her, he said she was an “unusually pretty girl to be found in such a place.” Gibby was frightened. She wasn’t laughing anymore.

  Her mother posted the $250 bail to save her from spending the night in jail. The other girls, not so fortunate, pleaded guilty and got ninety days. Gibby knew the only way to salvage her dreams was to fight the charges and demand a jury trial.

  She’d need a lawyer, and a good one. Not Sammy Hahn; Gibby knew she couldn’t be linked to Joe anymore. So she turned, no doubt with tears and contrition, to the movie industry. Only someone with clout could have hooked up a two-reel comedy player like Gibby with Frank Dominguez, “one of the most entertaining political orators in the state,” whose law partner Earl Rogers had defended Clarence Darrow. It might have been Al Christie who made the connection, or possibly Rogers’s daughter, Los Angeles Herald reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns, who knew lots of movie people. Or maybe it was Gibby’s old pal Billy Taylor.

  Whoever got him, Dominguez was the perfect choice to defend Gibby. He strode into the courtroom bellowing out his client’s innocence, his white hair and eyebrows in striking contrast with his olive skin. His adversary was deputy city prosecutor Margaret Gardner. With seven women on the jury, it was thought wise to have a woman prosecuting the case; female defendants were much more likely to be acquitted than their male counterparts. But Gardner came off like a starchy scold, frequently being told to sit down by police judge Ray L. Chesebro. Meanwhile Dominguez strutt
ed around the courtroom, gesturing over at his client and calling her “this little girl.” When Ruth Slauson took the stand, giving her halting account of a kimono-clad Gibby escorting men to the back rooms, Dominguez “severely arraigned her in an effort to impeach her testimony.” By the time he was through, Slauson was weeping “so copiously that she was excused.”

  Then it was Gibby’s turn to testify.

  How small she seemed on the stand, how delicate. Reporters were surprised when Gibby gave her age; they thought she looked like a schoolgirl. The actress was dressed in a dark green suit, her golden-brown hair “forming a halo beneath a black hat.” Gibby repeated her claim that she’d been in Little Tokyo merely to gain atmosphere. “When she saw the character of the place,” one reporter wrote, “she declared it interested her, and she went three more times to study it, hoping it would help her in her film work.” With “flashing eyes,” Gibby denied that she had ever worn a kimono. Looking over at the women on the jury, she described how one lecherous cop had stolen a kiss from her. The ladies were horrified.

  When Dominguez asked Gibby about her childhood, her eyes welled with tears. “Since I was twelve years old, I have been engaged in the show business,” she said. “My father left my mother at that time and I have been her only support ever since.” The jury saw her look over at her mother, seated in the courtroom, tears slipping down her cheeks.

  The trial lasted four days. At five o’clock on September 19, the defense rested its case. The jury took only fifteen minutes to deliberate. The foreman read a verdict of not guilty.

  Gibby had gambled. And she had won.

  Joe Pepa wasn’t so lucky. At his trial, prosecutors brought up every blot on his record, enraging Joe so much that several times he “started to leave the witness stand as though he were going to whip the attorney.” Finally Joe was found guilty of “being a lewd and dissolute person and of resorting in a house of ill fame” and was sentenced to six months in city jail. They’d finally gotten him. The cops and the court took no small satisfaction in that.

  Gibby had learned a valuable lesson. She couldn’t be waiting for Joe when he got out. “Underworld gunmen” were threatening those witnesses who’d testified against him. Gibby could have nothing more to do with that sort of world. Patricia Palmer needed to be sweet and innocent. Patricia Palmer had never known Joe Pepa, and had never set foot anywhere near Little Tokyo in her entire life.

  Despite her determination to start over, however, Gibby made little headway with her “high-class” contacts. Every day she checked, but no one from the big studios ever left messages for her at the Melrose Hotel.

  She was running out of ideas. She knew there were whispers that Margaret Gibson and Patricia Palmer were one and the same, and the whispers may have been loud enough to keep her contacts from helping her. Billy Taylor, for instance. If he had helped her in the past, he seemed to have washed his hands of her now. When they’d worked at Vitagraph, both of them just starting out, Gibby had shared her dreams for the future with Billy. But now that he’d made it big, he offered no help whatsoever. And it wasn’t as if Gibby hadn’t asked.

  From the Christie plant, she could look over at the sprawling backlot of Famous Players. No doubt Gibby had watched, many times, as the company’s biggest stars—Gloria Swanson, Billie Burke, Alice Brady, Mary Miles Minter—were driven up to the front gates by uniformed chauffeurs in their shiny town cars. Now that was class.

  If Billy had wanted to help Gibby, he had the power to do so.

  He might have been high and mighty now, but Billy hadn’t always been so irreproachable. What most everyone in the industry seemed to have forgotten was that, long before he was so well known, Taylor had been rather ingloriously fired by Vitagraph. No reason for his dismissal had ever been made public, but Gibby was there when it happened and likely knew why. Indeed, she likely knew a number of the secrets Taylor kept so deeply hidden from Hollywood.

  And if Joe Pepa had taught Gibby anything, it was that you used any means at your disposal to get the nice things you wanted.

  CHAPTER 8

  MARY

  She knew her mother was likely to blow her top like a geyser in Yosemite National Park, but Mary had stopped giving a damn one way or another.

  Mary Miles Minter steered her eight-cylinder Cadillac roadster down Wilshire Boulevard. The car had been built just for her, with a driver’s seat specially designed to fit her diminutive frame: Mary stood just five-two and weighed barely a hundred pounds. She’d ordered the car in her favorite color, robin’s-egg blue, and loved seeing how fast she could get it to go. Forty, fifty, sometimes sixty miles an hour. Next, she told the studio, she wanted to take flying lessons. The life insurance companies warned her that if she ever took to the air, they’d declare her policies just “scraps of paper.”

  Mary laughed. She’d only been joking. Well, half joking, anyway.

  She was out past her curfew. Whether she cared about her mother’s rules or not, it was always better to avoid a scene than to cause one. “Mrs. Shelby,” Mary called her; sometimes, out of earshot, she dropped the “Mrs.” It was a made-up name, anyway, an attempt to claim descent from Isaac Shelby, the first governor of Kentucky. Their real name was Reilly. There were lots of ruses like that in their lives, and Mary was expected to keep them all straight.

  How tired Mary had become of her mother’s rules. Lately she’d been testing Mrs. Shelby’s patience more and more. Mary was getting braver, or maybe just more foolhardy. But after all, she was now eighteen years of age. That gave her certain rights.

  At least, Mary liked to think so. Shelby thought otherwise.

  They’d just returned from a vacation in Yosemite. They’d stayed at Lake Tahoe—she and Mrs. Shelby and Mary’s older sister Margaret, as well as Mary’s grandmother, the only one in the family Mary felt any affection for. It was her grandmother whom she called “Mama,” even as Mrs. Shelby treated her own sixty-seven-year-old mother “as a glorified servant girl at her beck and call.” But that was how they’d all lived these past fifteen years: in service to Mrs. Shelby.

  Driving through the elegant columned gateway of Fremont Place, Mary couldn’t deny that her mother, for all her tyranny, had accomplished a great deal for her family, shepherding them from a rather dreary “there” to a very fashionable “here.” When they moved to Los Angeles, Mrs. Shelby had insisted that they “find a suitable millionaire’s home to rent.” Their home was an ornate two-story neoclassical mansion on spacious grounds, with a garage, a tennis court, swimming pools, and stables. The house had been Mary Pickford’s for a couple of years—undoubtedly the reason Mrs. Shelby had thought it perfect for her Mary, whom everyone was calling Pickford’s heir.

  That was Mrs. Shelby’s goal: to see her daughter become one of the biggest stars in moving pictures. Mary heard that refrain every day, and she was getting tired of it. Mabel had achieved that status, and now wanted something else; Gibby yearned for it, and would have killed for a stage mother as determined as Shelby; but Mary simply didn’t care. True, she enjoyed the life her stardom gave her. Her fancy little roadster and the fabulous parties would be hard to give up. But if it meant escaping from Mrs. Shelby, Mary would have chucked it all in an instant.

  How she ached to be free to live her own life. She despised being told “when to go to bed, when to get up, whom to meet and whom not to meet.” There had to be a way out of her mother’s clutches.

  Mary turned the knob of the front door and stepped inside.

  Charlotte Shelby was only a couple of inches taller than her daughter, but somehow even the biggest, most brutish studio guards always stepped aside to let her through. Her kewpie-doll face was invariably pinched, her clenched smile signaling either pleasure or anger. Shelby was feared and loathed by nearly everyone who knew her, including her own family.

  But even her detractors couldn’t contest her brilliance or her ability. To succeed in a world run by men without resorting to sex or trickery was virtually impossibl
e for a woman in Tinseltown. But Mrs. Shelby had managed to do just that. Fifteen years ago she’d left the stink of her husband’s linotype shop and found a new world for her daughters and herself, propelled only by her dreams and her belief in herself.

  Charlotte Shelby had been born Lilla Pearl Miles, the bloom of a faded aristocracy, her speech still edged with the flowery Louisiana lilt of her youth. Mary later described the “gentility” of her mother’s family, part of an old South “where Negroes knelt to pull on the gloves of the plantation owners.” Lilla Pearl grew up determined to reclaim her birthright. When she married her struggling husband, some predicted she wouldn’t last long as a newspaper printer’s wife. They were right. As soon as her two daughters were school age, Lilla Pearl packed them up and took them to New York, without telling her husband when they’d be back.

  “When I was a baby, just four years old,” Mary lamented, “[Shelby] took me away from my home and my daddy.” To Mary’s mother’s way of thinking, there was no life for them in the bayous. Their names were changed so her husband couldn’t find them.

  In Manhattan, the newly christened Mrs. Shelby advertised herself as an acting coach, despite never having acted a day in her life—unless playing the part of a working-class Shreveport wife and mother counted. She taught her pupils the Delsarte method of applied aesthetics, while her widowed mother, Julia Miles, served as babysitter and cook.

  Within a short time Shelby had pushed both her daughters out onto the stage. But it was little Juliet—Mary’s birth name—who became the star. Before she was ten, Juliet was signed by theater impresario Charles Frohman and packed his houses with her sexy nymphet act. When child labor laws caught up with them, Mrs. Shelby sent back to Louisiana for the birth certificate of a deceased cousin, Mary Minter, and slammed it down on producers’ desks, claiming it revealed Juliet’s real age and name. From that point on, the little girl became Mary Miles Minter.