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

by William J. Mann

  Rose was a very pretty woman, dark and petite, and seven years older than her twenty-five-year-old uncle. The anomaly was explained by the wide difference in age between Don and his eldest sister, Rose’s mother. But even at thirty-two, Rose was still a looker, pretty enough to stir up feelings of envy and unease in Don’s wife Rae, who had just turned twenty-one.

  Rae didn’t understand her husband’s fascination with his niece, nor could she have articulated the reasons it bothered her. Since coming to Los Angeles, Rose and Don had become “thick as thieves,” Rae observed. She would walk into a room and find her husband and Rose whispering together, only to fall silent when they caught sight of her. What on earth was going on?

  Gibby wondered the same thing. Osborn no longer had time to see her. He brushed her aside when she came to visit. Gibby was likely only momentarily bothered by the loss of their personal relationship; it was the disruption of their professional plans that truly unsettled her. When she demanded to see the script Osborn had written, he made excuses, claiming it wasn’t ready. Gibby realized he’d produced nothing of substance since Rose had arrived.

  She was furious. Here she was, working for Associated Producers, one of the few organizations that could go up against the Zukor machine, and Osborn had failed to put together a proposal she could take to Read. Osborn argued they didn’t need Associated Producers. He’d start his own production-distribution company with George Weh’s money. Why be beholden to J. Parker Read and Tom Ince? Gibby was flabbergasted.

  Osborn might be willing to let the opportunity pass, but Gibby wouldn’t be that foolish. As soon as Greater Than Love wrapped, she strode into the Ince studio armed with scenarios and broadsheets. She “made inquiries about setting up a production company of her own, possibly to produce Westerns,” as she’d tell one reporter—modern, daring, sexy westerns, no doubt.

  To Read, she projected confidence and professionalism. But the producer barely looked at her proposals. He thanked her but declined. He didn’t even offer her a contract for a second picture with Glaum.

  The industry, it seemed, really was stacked against people like her.

  All of Gibby’s noble ideas about doing things honestly—of insisting on high-class—shattered at her feet.

  Don Osborn’s little house at 1533 South Bronson Avenue was becoming a gathering place for the down-on-their-luck. In April he and Rae moved into their own home, a cheap stucco cube with a postage-stamp backyard. There were always people hanging around the place, smoking cigarettes on the front steps or crashing in the second bedroom. George Weh came around, still hoping Osborn could help him make good. Fred Moore and other struggling actors drank and bitched and moaned. And Gibby was there, too, once she got over her pique at Osborn for botching their chance with J. Parker Read.

  Those who packed Osborn’s place, swilling rotgut booze and snorting cut-rate hop, had never enjoyed much success in an industry that had made a rarefied few rich and famous. They burned with envy and resentment against people like Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter and William Desmond Taylor—and Adolph Zukor himself—who had made much of themselves while starting with less. Was it merely a matter of luck and connections, as those griping at Osborn’s house insisted? Or was it greater determination, discipline, and talent?

  In some ways, the reasons didn’t matter. For the scowling mob congregating at Osborn’s house, it was simply unfair. Their resentment was left to bake inside those cramped, stuffy rooms, pulsing off the stucco walls like heat from an oven on a sultry afternoon.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE SEX THRILL

  On Adolph Zukor’s sprawling country estate in the wooded hills of Nyack, New York, his caretaker, Patrick Murphy, loaded a trap gun full of buckshot and hung it opposite the front door. Tying a string to the trigger and threading it through a pulley on the ceiling, Murphy secured the other end to the knob on the door. If anyone broke into the house when the Zukors weren’t there, the gun would discharge, pumping the intruder full of buckshot.

  Adolph Zukor trusted no one.

  There were people out there, he believed, waiting to snatch everything he’d achieved. At his five-hundred-acre estate on the banks of the Hudson River—Zukor called the place “his farm”—the studio chief kept many valuable antiques and paintings. Even more precious was the large stock of bonded (legal) liquor stored in his basement. To patrol the place, Zukor had hired an armed watchman, but the trap gun would give him added peace of mind.

  If only it were so easy to protect the rest of his empire.

  The latest marauders at the gate were a particularly militant band of zealots called the Lord’s Day Alliance. They were led by seventy-one-year-old Brother Wilbur F. Crafts, a self-proclaimed “Christian lobbyist” and a speaker of such fire and brimstone that Jonathan Edwards would have been impressed. Crafts was a tall, thin scarecrow with a short beard of gray straw. Beneath heavily drooping lids, his eyes burned with all the passion of the true believer. Crafts’s International Reform Bureau had been instrumental in bringing about Prohibition. Now the skeletal spiritual soldier turned his eyes toward other causes, like cigarettes, close dancing, “joy rides” in automobiles, and—most especially—the movies.

  As its name implied, the Lord’s Day Alliance had initially focused on banning all amusements on Sundays. But that wouldn’t be enough to cleanse the nation of the sins Hollywood had perpetrated. The film industry, Crafts charged, was in the hands of “the devil and 500 non-Christian Jews” (as if there were any other kind). Federal censorship, he declared, was the only way to halt the corruption of American youth by the movies. “I do not ask autocratic exclusion of films,” Crafts said, trying to seem less fanatical in the press, “but only such supervision as the Government gives to all other great financial interests.”

  In his eighth-floor office, Zukor brooded.

  Only such supervision as the government gives to all other great financial interests.

  President Harding had pledged to protect the studios from regulation. But for how long?

  If industries like railroads and banking were regulated, the reformers were arguing, movies should be too. Conservative lawmakers, who controlled both houses of Congress, tended to dislike regulation, but many were also sympathetic (and accountable) to the country’s strong religious constituencies, who were the ones calling for federal censorship.

  Only a few months after Harding’s election, Zukor was starting to worry again.

  In Washington, DC, Brother Crafts was marching his flock, mostly somber-faced women in long gray dresses, to the steps of City Hall, his long black coattails flapping in the breeze. Turning to the gathered newspapermen, he dramatically lifted a file of papers over his head, like Moses wielding a stone tablet. The “flickering filums,” he announced to the newsmen, were endangering the public’s morals. He had just spent two months hunkered down in the dark, watching every film shown in the theaters of the nation’s capital, and he could say without a doubt that “the sex thrill was the great objective” of the vast majority of motion pictures. Crafts had taken pains to compile every kiss, every flash of a woman’s leg, in the study he now held in his hands. “The sex thrill,” Crafts charged, was taking the place of “the alcoholic thrill” of the saloon. His flock responded with a cacophony of amens, and with that Crafts turned and entered City Hall, ready to make his case to the district commissioners.

  Editorial cartoons across the country satirized and ridiculed Brother Crafts, but Zukor viewed him with deadly seriousness. Crafts was part of a movement that, despite all the industry’s best efforts, seemed unstoppable. Another censorship bill awaited the California legislature. Pro-censorship governors had been elected in Massachusetts and New York, two of the biggest markets for moving pictures. Still struggling to climb out of its pool of red ink, the industry remained extremely vulnerable to this kind of assault. Zukor knew that until the ever-looming threat of censorship was vanquished once and for all, he could not fully push forward with his dream of in
dustry domination.

  With all that on his mind, he picked up his phone and placed several key calls. It was time to put his distrust aside and meet with his rivals, including Marcus Loew. It was time to make common cause.

  The building that housed Delmonico’s restaurant, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Fourth Street, was a six-story confection crowned with spires. The venerable New York eatery was known for creating lobster Newburg, Baked Alaska, French-fried potatoes, and the Delmonico steak. On a cold night in February 1921, in a private dining room above the main hall, a gathering of some of the most important men in the movie business was taking place.

  Zukor, of course, presided from the head of the table. His partner, Jesse Lasky, sat as usual on his right. The rest of the gathering included William Fox, Sam Goldwyn, D. W. Griffith, Carl Laemmle, Lewis Selznick, Joseph Schenck, and William A. Brady, president of the national association. Loew arrived late, glad-handing around the table, laughing and joking with the others, until Zukor’s steely eyes stopped him cold. It was time to get serious.

  Something had to be done, Zukor declared. If they didn’t act to protect themselves, they would be controlled by state, and possibly federal, regulations. He’d gathered everyone together because he had a plan. With that, he turned the discussion over to Lasky.

  Zukor’s partner was the good cop to his bad, as easygoing as Zukor was hardline. A former vaudevillian, Lasky had never fit comfortably around a corporate table. He was far from a prude, but he’d come to the conclusion that the reformers had outmaneuvered them, and that the film industry was fighting a losing battle. It was either federal censorship imposed on them from the outside, Lasky told the film execs, or self-regulation managed from within.

  He snapped open his briefcase, withdrew a stack of carbons—a “code of rules,” he said—and passed them around the table. All Famous Players directors would be directed to follow these guidelines, Lasky announced, and he urged his fellow producers to do the same with theirs. Fourteen specific recommendations were outlined. The first was perhaps the broadest: “No picture showing sex attraction in a suggestive or improper manner will be presented.” Movies should only depict “wholesome love and avoid sensuality.”

  Eyebrows shot up all around the table.

  They had no other choice, Lasky argued.

  He reviewed the rest of his points with the stunned movie men. No depictions of “white slavery.” In other words, no prostitutes. No illicit love affairs unless accompanied by a moral lesson. No nudity or “inciting dances.” (“All close-ups of stomach dancing must be cut absolutely,” Lasky had written.) No “unnecessarily prolonged passionate love scenes.” No stories predominately focused on vice and crime. No films that “might instruct the morally feeble in the methods of committing crime.” No insults to any religious belief or disrespect to religious symbols. (“Scenes showing a crucifix kicked about or pages torn from the Bible should be eliminated,” Lasky advised.) No suggestive comedy. No unnecessary bloodshed. No “salacious” titles, stills, or advertising.

  The executives were dumbstruck. Lasky’s fourteen points would have wiped out most of the successful pictures of the past year.

  Again Lasky insisted it was the only way. He claimed that all their directors—“even including Cecil B. DeMille,” one of the most frequent transgressors of those fourteen points—were “in sympathy.”

  Reluctantly, the group agreed that Lasky was right. They pledged to sign an agreement among themselves adopting the fourteen points. Their intention, clearly, was to beat the censors at their own game. If pictures had to be neutered, they’d rather do the castration themselves.

  To Lasky’s mind, the meeting at Delmonico’s was “epoch-making.” Galvanized, he wanted to go public with their new code of rules. “We cannot fight this censorship situation behind closed doors and with secret meetings,” he argued to Zukor. Public opinion would “swing over to our side immediately” if they announced the actions they were taking.

  But Zukor had other plans. That night at Delmonico’s, he let Lasky run the show. His silence implied that he agreed with his partner’s code of rules. But he was adamant that there should be no public announcement for now. He had his reasons.

  The other film execs agreed with Zukor, but Lasky wasn’t pleased. After nearly a decade of partnership, Lasky was tired of always ceding final authority to Zukor, of having to seek his approval on spending and hiring decisions. And as the partner more involved in the actual day-to-day production of motion pictures, Lasky was eager for a nuts-and-bolts solution to the looming threat of censorship. Going public with his fourteen points, he believed, would be a public relations bonanza for the company.

  On his way back to Hollywood, as the farms of the Midwest passed outside his train window, Lasky decided that for once he wouldn’t abide by Creepy’s wishes.

  On the morning of February 25, Zukor arrived at his New York office. As always, he slipped in without speaking to anyone and rode the elevator in silence up to the eighth floor. As usual, his newspapers were waiting for him on his desk. That week’s Variety was among them.

  Opening the trade paper to the “Pictures” section, Zukor was stopped short by a headline.

  FAMOUS PLAYERS-LASKY BAN SEX FILMS BY

  FOURTEEN “DON’TS” TO STUDIO OFFICE

  “For the first time in history,” the article read, “a ‘production code’ has been issued, which all executives associated in the making of Famous Players pictures will have to follow.”

  Zukor felt the blood rise in his neck. He was not one for showy displays of anger. He did not boil over. Instead, as many employees attested, his pique would manifest itself in subtle ways: a sudden tightening of his lips, a reddening of his neck and cheeks.

  He called his secretary in to take a letter. When she asked who it would be addressed to, Zukor responded coldly: Jesse Lasky.

  In no uncertain terms, he accused Lasky of “a breach of faith.” He was terribly embarrassed, he said, as they’d all agreed not to go public with the fourteen points. Now Lasky’s impertinence had made Famous Players look bad in front of their competitors.

  But that was hardly Zukor’s chief complaint.

  True to form, Zukor had played devious at the meeting at Delmonico’s. While he’d agreed that self-policing was better than government intrusion, he’d also known that eliminating sensuality, suggestive comedy, and stories about crime and vice would also eliminate profits. It was one thing to agree to such sanitization in theory. It was quite another to spell it out so precisely, publishing the details of how they were going to achieve it. One false move—one leer too many from Fatty Arbuckle toward a pretty girl—and they’d have the church ladies wagging their fingers at them, accusing them of breaking their own code.

  The majority of Lasky’s fourteen points were impractical, Zukor believed, and he had no intention of ever enforcing them. But if his competitors had adopted them—now, there was a benefit to Lasky’s ridiculous code. Let Fox and Laemmle and Marcus Loew churn out films devoid of inciting dances, passionate love scenes, and crime. Zukor would have enjoyed watching their profits plummet.

  But now those damn fourteen points were public. Now Famous Players–Lasky was actually expected to follow them. The National Board of Review declared it would use the fourteen points as guidelines to award seals of approval.

  Zukor grumbled.

  But as always, he would do his best to salvage the situation.

  He knew his top directors had never intended to follow the memo Lasky was busy tacking up on all their sets. Cecil B. DeMille, supposedly “in sympathy” with the code of rules, was at that very moment making The Affairs of Anatol, in which Wallace Reid cheats on his wife, Gloria Swanson, and Swanson retaliates with her own sexy fun. Into this one picture DeMille was packing just about every sin that gave the church ladies palpitations. Swanson shows off her legs and strips in front of men. Marriage vows are made, broken, and made again—with other people. Reid visits the mirrored den
of a prostitute named, of all things, Satan Synne. It was no surprise that the National Board of Review, when it saw a rough cut of the film later that year, recommended major revisions to the picture or risk critics calling the film “an attack upon the sanctity of the home.”

  Zukor had no intention of making cuts to The Affairs of Anatol or any film. But those fourteen points were now on everybody’s lips.

  He had an idea. A meeting was scheduled with Brother Wilbur Crafts in a few weeks. Maybe Lasky’s fourteen points could work to their advantage after all.

  On the cold gray morning of March 14, Brother Crafts stepped off the train from Washington and made his way across town to the offices of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry. The wind whipped the sparse white hair on the old man’s head, and he and his followers had to turn their faces against the rain. But they walked decisively on, ready to announce a major national campaign for federal censorship when they arrived for the meeting.

  At the Times Square office, the wet, chilled crusaders were greeted by a select group of movie men. Zukor was noticeably absent. Given Crafts’s anti-Semitism, the film industry was represented by NAMPI’s president, William Brady, an Irishman with the gift of gab. Brady was backed up by other gentiles like Charles L. Pettijohn of the Selznick studio and lawyer J. W. Glennister. Crafts had his own heavyweights with him. Flocking to his side as he took his seat were Mrs. Ella Boole, state president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and Mrs. Clarence Waterman, head of the Committee on Moving Pictures of the City Federation of Women’s Clubs. There were handshakes all around, but the mood in the room was tense. The meeting’s organizers were so afraid it might founder that they’d arranged for former justice Peter A. Hendrick of the state supreme court to mediate.