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

by William J. Mann

  She also became sixteen when she was only ten. Slathered with lipstick and mascara, she was dressed in high heels and long skirts. “These things have an effect upon a child that all the training and coaching in the world cannot eliminate,” Mary would say. Shelby wanted her daughter all grown up fast. One day she snatched Mary’s favorite doll from her hands and burned it in the oven in front of her. The bereft child cried for weeks. “They never would let me be a girl,” Mary said, “to have a girl’s pleasures, to do the things that other girls would do.”

  Only one thing mattered in life, Mrs. Shelby taught her daughter. “From morning till night,” Mary said, “I had money, money, money talked and preached to me.”

  Money, of course, was something Mrs. Shelby was very good at getting. Although Mary made movies for producers in New York and Santa Barbara, California, Mrs. Shelby always had her eye on a bigger prize. She was determined to get her daughter the most lucrative contract in the film business, even if that meant going toe-to-toe with the biggest man in the industry, Adolph Zukor.

  When she finally got an offer from Zukor, Shelby had the nerve to play it against one from Lewis J. Selznick of Select Pictures, watching smugly as the two moguls fought for Mary’s services. Zukor won—Zukor never lost—to the tune of $1.3 million, making Mary “the little girl with the biggest motion-picture contract in the world.” Zukor used the teenager as the linchpin in his newly formed Realart Picture Corporation, which had its own studio out on Occidental Boulevard near Wilshire.

  Mary was an instant hit with audiences, her innocent smile and curvy little body especially popular with men. She had, in her own words, “matured very quickly in this glorious sunshine and gorgeous setting of California.” The men who flocked around her made her feel very grown up, but they made Mrs. Shelby very uneasy. Mary believed her mother was simply afraid some man would steal away her golden goose. But Shelby had other reasons to worry, even if Mary didn’t like to remember them.

  She’d been barely fifteen, a budding rose of adolescent charm and sexuality. James Kirkwood had been her charismatic forty-two-year-old director.

  Predictably, Mary had fallen in love.

  Standing with Kirkwood in a field of wildflowers overlooking the Santa Barbara coast, Mary took her director’s hands in her own. He’d wanted her for so long, Kirkwood told her. But since Mary was still a virgin, he would never think of debasing her honor. So here, under the brilliant blue sky, Kirkwood proclaimed he would marry her, before God.

  With strong hands, the director lifted Mary and placed her on a rock. She stood above him like a goddess, her ringlets blowing in the wind. Kirkwood dropped to one knee. With the sun and the sky their only witnesses, they pledged themselves to each other. Mary was enraptured.

  Then Kirkwood took her down from the rock, yanked off her dress, and had sex with her in the grass.

  Soon afterward, Mary was pregnant. She was deliriously happy, certain that Kirkwood would take her away from her unhappy home; together they’d raise their baby and have many more. But soon Kirkwood was gone, off to New York. Mary wrote him passionate letters, begging him to come back. One of the letters was intercepted by Mrs. Shelby.

  Shaking with rage, Shelby dragged the terrified girl to a doctor who provided clandestine services for women who could afford it. Mary was strapped to a table, her legs pulled apart and secured. Given only the mildest anesthesia, she shuddered as a long, cold, sharp tool was inserted inside of her. The doctor dilated Mary’s cervix and carefully, painfully, scraped out her uterus with a curette.

  After the procedure, it was common to try to reassemble the pieces of the fetus to make sure nothing was left inside the woman’s womb.

  Mary had many reasons to hate her mother. But surely this topped the list.

  The Kirkwood affair had been devastating, but it hadn’t ended Mary’s interest in men, nor theirs in her. Before long, she had fallen in love again. But her latest love was very different from James Kirkwood. True, William Desmond Taylor was another older man, another authority figure. But the new director assigned to Mary was polite, deferential, distant, and reserved, with none of Kirkwood’s prurience, which only made Taylor more appealing.

  On their first day working together, on an adaptation of the novel Anne of Green Gables, Taylor addressed his leading lady as “Miss Minter.” That won her over. Usually her directors called her “Mary,” as they might talk to a child. But Taylor was different: he saw her, Mary believed, as a woman. “Heart hungry as I was,” she would remember, “I loved him the first time I saw him.” She looked into his face and thought, “This is God.”

  Taylor was tall, distinguished, and austerely handsome. He was also even older than James Kirkwood, forty-seven to Mary’s seventeen. Mary watched his every move with puppy-dog eyes.

  Mr. Taylor decided to shoot Anne of Green Gables outside Boston, where it would be easier to evoke the story’s Prince Edward Island location than in Southern California. Cast and crew packed their bags. Mrs. Shelby and Mary’s grandmother went along as chaperones.

  In the little town of Dedham, Massachusetts, Mary lay awake in their guesthouse, listening for Mr. Taylor’s footsteps. “I recognized them as they went up the stairway and into his room,” she said. More and more, Mr. Taylor filled her every waking thought.

  On a trip into Boston, the director took a seat in the chauffeur-driven automobile between Mary and her grandmother. “The road was rough and bumpy,” Mary recalled, “and his arms were spread across the rear of the backseat. One bump threw grandmother against him and he said, ‘I guess I will have to hold you.’ But his arm did not embrace me.” Desperate, Mary thought, “Dare I? Dare I?” She did indeed. She “reached up and tugged at his coat sleeve” until Taylor dropped his arm about her waist. “The thrill of that innocent act thrilled me for days and days,” Mary said.

  Despite what had happened with Kirkwood, she remained an innocent. One day she and Mr. Taylor were walking when it started to rain. Wrapping his coat around her, Taylor hurried Mary back to the guesthouse, only to run into Mrs. Shelby, who was “fairly raging.” As Mary would remember, “She accused Mr. Taylor before the entire company of taking me out, humiliating him most shamefully.” Later, when Mary apologized to him for her mother’s outburst, Taylor replied, “Your mother is right, Mary. You must always obey her.”

  Mary didn’t. Back in Hollywood, she went riding with her beloved and wrote poetry to him. He was always “Mr. Taylor” to her. Unlike Mabel or Gibby, she never called him Billy. “The man was too wonderful for that,” she said.

  Finally Mary confessed her feelings to him. Mr. Taylor was gallant and tender, and probably flattered. But he thought of her only as “a nice little girl,” his chauffeur Harry Fellows understood. Taylor told her, as gently as he could, that she was May and he was December, and it was best they not see each other socially anymore. “I can’t give you what a boy your age could give you,” he told her kindly.

  And he thought that would be that.

  But Taylor’s very remoteness only made him more attractive to his admirer. To her mind, Mr. Taylor wasn’t rebuffing her. “He reciprocated my love,” Mary fervently believed. He was only trying to protect her honor. “He never by look, by word, or by deed gave me any reason to doubt any of my ideals that were placed in him absolutely,” she said. He just wanted to wait until she was old enough to be free of her mother before they could be together. The only obstacle to their happiness, Mary believed, was Mrs. Shelby.

  When Mr. Taylor was promoted to the main Famous Players studio on Sunset Boulevard, his absence only made Mary’s heart grow fonder. On one occasion, when her true love visited the set where she was working, Mary maneuvered a seat very close to him. At that moment her mother walked in. Charging up to Taylor, Mrs. Shelby thundered, “If I ever catch you hanging around Mary again, I will blow your goddamned brains out!”

  Shelby’s secretary, Charlotte Whitney, witnessed the episode. “She was livid with rage,” Whitney said, “
and shook her fist in his face and swore dozens of times.”

  This was the woman Mary now faced from across the room.

  “Have you been out with Taylor?” Mrs. Shelby demanded.

  Mary resented the question. How dare her mother even ask such a thing? After all, it was Shelby herself who’d driven Mr. Taylor away from her.

  The two women stood glaring at each other. There was a time when Mary had wanted her mother’s love. When she was younger, she had tried cuddling up to her, “to kiss and fondle her,” but she’d been pushed away and told not to be silly. Now there was no love left.

  Shelby accused Mary of being intimate with Taylor.

  “Do you really mean that?” Mary asked, full of indignation.

  “I certainly do,” Shelby told her.

  Mary screamed in rage. To cool her down, Shelby tossed a glass of water in her face.

  The young woman’s eyes popped. Her wet hair dripping down in front of her eyes, Mary cried, “I’m going to end it all!” and ran up the stairs.

  Mrs. Shelby, her mother, and her secretary followed, only to hear Mary lock herself in Mrs. Shelby’s room. They pounded on the door but got no reply.

  Suddenly there was a shot from inside the room. Then another one.

  Shelby screamed down the stairs to Frank Brown, her security guard, and Chauncey Eaton, her chauffeur. The two men came running. Shelby told them to break into the room.

  Eaton and Brown rammed their shoulders against the door. It fell inward.

  “And there,” Shelby would tell investigators later, “lay Mary on my bedroom floor.” Her mother’s gun was beside her.

  With extreme tenderness, Eaton picked the young woman up in his arms.

  “Why, Mrs. Shelby,” the chauffeur said, “there’s no blood on her.”

  It was Mary’s grandmother who had the presence of mind to inspect the limp figure in Eaton’s arms. “Why, no,” Mrs. Miles concluded, “she is not shot.” The old woman took a step back. “Stand her up, Chauncey.”

  Eaton put Mary down on her feet. The pretty little movie actress opened her eyes and looked around defiantly at everyone staring at her.

  “I thought I would give you all a jolt,” she said.

  As Mary stalked off to her room to sulk, Mrs. Shelby told Eaton to search the room for the spent bullets. He found one lodged in the closet, the other in the ceiling.

  Later, when she told the story to police, Shelby would insist she was “afraid of pistols.” But when her statement was repeated to Charlotte Whitney, the secretary laughed. “Mrs. Shelby,” she insisted, “is not afraid of anything.”

  CHAPTER 9

  RIVALS AND THREATS

  A steady rain beat down across Manhattan on the night of November 2, but that didn’t deter thousands from gathering outside City Hall to watch the presidential election returns. In the age of motion pictures, waiting for the next day’s papers to learn who’d won was very nineteenth century. Tonight the results were being projected onto giant screens set up outside the offices of the New York Tribune. In between returns, newsreels of the candidates were shown. When images of the Republican candidate, Warren G. Harding, flashed on the screen, the crowd of ten thousand, cold and drenched, “with only their high spirits to protect them,” erupted with cheers. Pictures of the Democratic candidate, James Cox, elicited mostly boos.

  Uptown at the Ritz, cigar and brandy in hand, Adolph Zukor was cheering Harding too. During the campaign Zukor had met several times with Harding’s manager, a tenacious little bird of a man named Will H. Hays. Hays assured the mogul that Harding would do nothing to hinder any attempts to consolidate business holdings. Under a pro-business Harding administration, Zukor would have nothing to fear.

  In return for such promises, Zukor—indeed, all of Hollywood—had gone all out to put Harding in the White House. Newsreels suddenly became ubiquitous—except that audiences saw virtually none of Cox. Instead they soaked up images of Harding on his front porch in Marion, Ohio, receiving distinguished visitors, many of them from the film colony. Pickford and Fairbanks were the ones moviegoers were most excited to see. Poll watchers believed the newsreels had had an effect. Who could vote against a guy endorsed by Mary and Doug?

  But Zukor was keeping his eye on another race that wasn’t quite as comforting. That was the contest in New York’s twelfth senatorial district, where the Democrat, the flamboyant young James J. Walker, was cruising to an easy reelection. A former Tin Pan Alley songwriter, Walker spent more time in the city’s speakeasies than he did the state house in Albany. But working stiffs loved the guy. The ambitious Walker made sport of hounding fat-cat capitalists, and he was counting on riding a populist wave to ever-higher office.

  What made Zukor despise Walker most, though, was his role providing legal counsel for the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America. Walker, Sydney Cohen, and Marcus Loew were bosom buddies. Zukor would see them at Shanley’s or Delmonico’s, laughing and carrying on, everyone stopping by their table to say hello.

  There had been a time, many years ago, when Zukor had laughed like that in public. Those were the days when he and Loew, flush with the stunning profits from Automatic Vaudeville, had knocked back their share of whiskies and pulled more than a few chorus girls onto their laps. Zukor had been young then, high-spirited. He hadn’t yet become cautious, or cagey, or circumspect. He hadn’t yet become paranoid.

  These days, when he spotted Loew across the room, raising a glass of ale spiked with rum at a table with Walker or Cohen, he marveled at how easy it was for his old friend to laugh. People from all walks of life were drawn to Marcus. What was it? What made everyone like Marcus Loew? What must it feel like to be everybody’s friend?

  Zukor had no idea.

  “There is no question,” the vile Jimmy Walker had told a rally of exhibitors during the campaign, “that what Famous Players is doing with its acquisition of movie theaters should be investigated by the trade commission under federal anti-trust laws.”

  Lately it seemed everyone was challenging Zukor’s power. Filmmaker Thomas Ince, who’d previously released his films through Paramount, had suddenly broken ranks, launching his own distribution company, Associated Producers, with partners including Mack Sennett. There was also a challenge from W. W. Hodkinson and Hiram Abrams, two former associates with personal vendettas against Zukor. Hodkinson, the founder of Paramount, had been ousted after Zukor cajoled stockholders into replacing him with Abrams—an underhanded move, perhaps, but a necessary step in his quest to merge production and distribution. A few years later Abrams himself had been unceremoniously dumped, the fall guy for the Mishawum Manor affair. Now both Hodkinson and Abrams were back to bedevil Zukor, Hodkinson distributing the sort of independent productions Zukor felt were drains on the industry and Abrams working for United Artists in their quest to merge with some or all of the Associated Producers.

  Zukor intended to squash them all underfoot like insects.

  He’d rather be feared and loathed, and come out on top, than be loved and admired and come in second—which was the fate Zukor believed awaited Loew.

  From his comfortable chair at the Ritz, Zukor lifted his eyes to check the latest returns. No way could Cox catch up with Harding now. Zukor was pleased.

  Soon after arriving in America, the ambitious immigrant had become a Republican, “because all the people I knew were Republicans.” He hadn’t gotten where he was by playing the outsider. Shrugging off the old country like a peasant’s shawl, Zukor had enthusiastically embraced everything about America. He took up baseball. He boxed with Italians and Irish, forever proud of his cauliflower ear. He ate lobster with gusto and decorated an enormous fir tree every Christmas. Zukor’s Americanism came first, his Jewishness second. Back in Hungary, his uncle, a devout Talmudist, had urged him to become a rabbi, but there was “never a danger” of that, Zukor would say. The only part of his religious education that had ever interested the future moviemaker was the Bible itself, because it was a primer in h
ow to tell good stories.

  Now Zukor lived in an elegant town house on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, stuffed full of antique Oriental rugs and Chippendale sofas and original artworks by some of the great masters. He owned another house in rural Hudson River Valley and drove an expensive Pierce-Arrow automobile—“a self-indulgence,” he’d say, “since I enjoy good things.” Zukor believed a man should surround himself with good things, for in doing so “he sets a standard in his own eyes as well as those of others.”

  As a young man, sweeping the floors of a dry-goods store in Hungary, the young Adolph had seen “nothing but darkness” in his future if he didn’t somehow get to America. His parents had died when he was very young; Zukor had never known the nurturance of a mother or a father. Wearing the rags issued by the government to orphans, he’d felt as if he’d been “dipped in a sewer.” As one biographer wrote, Zukor’s life was “the story of a man who had been emptied out in childhood, who had lost or been deprived of love and who then set about to fill himself back up again, even if that meant appropriating everything around him.”

  When he stepped off the boat at New York’s Castle Garden, Zukor had only a tenth-grade education and spoke no English. His pockets were filled with nothing but ambition. His fellow movie chiefs all came from similar humble beginnings: William Fox toiled in New York’s garment industry until he invested in a penny arcade in 1903; Universal’s Carl Laemmle was a bookkeeper who opened a Chicago movie theater on a whim in 1906; and Thomas Ince was a struggling vaudevillian before taking a job as a movie actor for $5 a day in 1908. Now they ran three of the most profitable film factories in the world.

  But Zukor had moved faster and further than any of them. Even before the turn of the century, the impoverished immigrant had already transformed his start-up furrier business into a profitable enterprise. At nineteen, he was “swimming in money.” Zukor believed he was different from his competitors because he made his first fortune before he went into the movies. That made him more “level-headed” than the others, more comfortable with money—and that confidence enabled him to expand his business empire with the swiftness of a prairie fire.