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

by William J. Mann

  A smattering of surprised, suspicious applause followed his words.

  But then Zukor narrowed his canny eyes and lowered his voice. The exhibitors should not, he cautioned, pit themselves against him. The only way to proceed, Zukor asserted, was through cooperation. He pledged to do his part. Would they do the same?

  The room was mostly silent as Creepy returned to his seat.

  What did he mean by that? How would Zukor cooperate with them? He hadn’t promised to do away with block-booking. There were so many other issues, from tariffs to unfair acquisitions, that he hadn’t addressed. The exhibitors started to grumble. Zukor wasn’t looking for cooperation, they murmured among themselves. He was hoping for capitulation.

  Some of the speakers who took the podium after Zukor said his word wasn’t good with them. There was talk of forming an exhibitors-producers alliance led by Lewis Selznick to oppose Famous Players. Listening to this, the film chief seethed. Why had these oafs insisted he come to their damn convention if they had no intention of working with him? If all they intended to do was continue to oppose him?

  Zukor had had enough. Early on the morning of June 29, he walked out. Since he had not been “accorded convention courtesies,” he instructed a spokesman “to tell President Sydney S. Cohen what he thought about it.” He took the train back to New York.

  Marcus Loew sat in his seat on the convention floor, his chin in his hand.

  He wasn’t smiling anymore. The laughter and backslapping had ceased, and Loew was stewing over the way Zukor had been treated. Watching his former partner hold his own against that hostile crowd, standing up to those jeering exhibitors, his head barely clearing the podium, Loew had felt a wave of sympathy for Zukor. They’d been through so much together. Zukor might be cutthroat, driven largely by self-interest. But he’d also done more to create this industry than anyone else, and he deserved respect for that at least. Loew, who saw the good in people before he saw anything bad, wasn’t thinking about how Zukor’s appearance in Minneapolis might benefit him in the eyes of the Federal Trade Commission. Instead, he simply saw the fact that the Famous Players chief had had the courage and the decency to meet the exhibitors on their own turf, that he had walked into the lion’s den with his chin held high.

  Risking the backlash of the exhibitors whose support he needed to retain, Loew strode up to the podium himself and asked for a chance to speak.

  “It took a damned big man to apologize as Zukor has done,” he told the crowd. If Zukor came here asking for cooperation, then they should take him at his word, Loew insisted. They could work with Zukor if they talked to him “in the proper vein.” To provoke him further, Loew cautioned his fellow theater owners, would only make him fight back harder.

  Much of the crowd muttered and groaned as Loew tried to defend the man they all loved to hate. A few, however, were won over by his appeal. Jimmy Walker, of all people, admitted he’d felt some grudging admiration watching “that little man” move through a roomful of irate exhibitors, who shouted “cruelly unkind things” at him as if they were tossing rotten fruit.

  When Zukor learned of Loew’s defense of him, he was surprised. In a similar circumstance, it was hard to imagine Zukor rising to plead for Loew. But that was the sort of man Marcus Loew was. He might do his best to beat Zukor in the height of his skyscraper or in the number of theaters he owned. He might buy a house right next door to Zukor’s country estate, just to stay in competition with him. But then he’d turn around and do something like this.

  “Business has nothing on me once I go home at night,” Loew told Zukor at one point, lugging over a basket of cucumbers he’d grown himself to Zukor’s country house, sitting with his old rival on the front porch and sharing a cigar.

  Zukor looked over at him with a bewildered expression. What did he mean about not bringing business home with you? To Zukor, Loew seemed to be speaking a foreign language he didn’t understand.

  Yet Loew was right about one thing. He understood Zukor better than anybody, and he knew just how hard his competitior would fight. Backed into a corner by the triple threats of Nathan Tufts, the FTC, and the exhibitors’ campaign against him, Zukor would come back at them swinging. He had come too far, gained too much, to shy away from the battle now.

  But his fight wasn’t just about the money, or even the control, and this Loew understood as well. Yes, Zukor liked being rich, and yes, he intended to get a lot richer. It was true that Zukor was a megalomaniac and had no interest in sharing power with anyone. But the reason he fought went much deeper than that.

  Nearly two decades earlier, Zukor had glimpsed the promise of the movies before anyone else. “There was nothing to the whole industry but terrible products in little doses [and] cheap methods,” William Brady wrote. “No actor of any standing would have anything to do with celluloid. Zukor was about the only living human being who could guess what was going to happen.”

  Seeing beyond the five-minute quickie comedies that played on vaudeville bills in those days, Zukor envisioned longer, more complex narratives for films. He took the movies out of their makeshift storefront theaters and enshrined them in grand palaces of entertainment. More magnificent possibilities, he believed, were still to come.

  Adolph Zukor loved the movies. They were part of his soul. They were the core of his past, and certainly of his future. Right now movies were silent and black and white, with piano accompaniment and occasional hand-tinted frames. What if someday they could be synchronized with music scores? What if they could be shot in color? What if movies could talk?

  Right now, nearly every city and town in America had a movie house, but Zukor dreamed of the day when every city and town around the world would have one too. What if movie theaters became more than just places to screen the latest releases? What if they got bigger and more elaborate? What if, someday, movies were taken as seriously as the legitimate stage, as an art form in their own right? What if movies could be, as some now imagined, brought into the homes, shown on screens or on devices not yet invented? What was the future of moving images? What forms might they take? How prevalent might they become in everyday life?

  Zukor was eager to find out. He didn’t think just about today, or even tomorrow. He imagined what things might be like ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years in the future.

  That was what set him apart from the others.

  To some, Zukor’s long eyes were ferocious and threatening. But the theatrical impresario Robert Grau thought the president of Famous Players had “the face and eyes of a dreamer.” Both observations were correct.

  That was why, in the end, Marcus Loew expected that Zukor would prevail.

  CHAPTER 22

  DEPRAVITY

  Pretty little Rae Osborn had no idea where her husband Don was getting all his money. He hadn’t worked in months. But suddenly Don was wearing new suits and drinking high-grade contraband booze. And his niece Rose Putnam flaunted some very fancy new dresses when she came around, which was practically every day.

  Still naive after three years in Hollywood, Rae was terribly confused. Every morning when she left for her job as a stenographer, her husband would still be sound asleep. Rae would type letters all day, then dance all night at the burlesque theater. When she finally staggered home well after midnight, she’d find Don stinking drunk with Rose, or Gibby Gibson, or Blackie Madsen. Often Madsen brought along his much younger common-law wife, the dope fiend May Ryan. Retreating to her bedroom, Rae would cry herself to sleep. If she ventured out to the kitchen, she’d have to hold her breath not to inhale all the opium being passed around by crazy-eyed May.

  Rae thought she couldn’t get any unhappier. She was wrong.

  Late one sultry evening in the early summer of 1921, she stepped off the trolley and trudged back to the little house on South Bronson Avenue. Even before she reached the door she could smell the cigarette smoke wafting from the windows and hear the honky-tonk music playing on the old Victrola. Rae braced herself and stepped inside
. As usual, Don was sitting with some friends, soused. Perched close to Don’s side was Rose—too close, Rae thought.

  “I went on to bed,” Rae would later reveal, “and let them go on with their party.”

  Around three o’clock she woke up with a start.

  Rae looked around. The house was very quiet. Her husband was not beside her. Rae tiptoed out of bed and peered from her bedroom door. She had a clear view across the hall into the second bedroom.

  What she saw sickened her.

  Osborn and his niece Rose were naked in bed together, in each other’s arms.

  Rae screamed. Her husband bolted out of bed and ran toward her, “making all sorts of excuses.” Somehow he was able to mollify Rae, and returned to bed with her. But in the morning Rae still felt sick to her stomach. Although she managed to drag herself off to work at nine o’clock, two hours later she became violently ill and returned home.

  She found Don and Rose back in bed together.

  Ever since she first arrived in Hollywood, when she was just eighteen, Rae had been devoted to Don. Without Don, Rae feared she’d be nothing. Where would she go in this terrible town? She had tried walking out on Don before—she had even tried taking her own life—but each time she failed. Each attempt to leave him left her feeling worse without him than she had with him. Rae was trapped.

  Even in the face of her husband’s depravity, Rae couldn’t walk away.

  A few nights after finding Don and Rose together, Rae came home from the burlesque theater, desperate to find a way to make the marriage work. But Osborn had other ideas.

  He met her at the door with a gun. Swinging the weapon around in the air, he ordered his terrified wife out of the house.

  Rae ran to the police, but they escorted her right back to Osborn. A wife shouldn’t walk out on her husband, the police counseled. Had she disobeyed him in some way?

  Rae was horrified. Was every man in Los Angeles insane?

  In utter terror she passed the night. Although the police had promised to keep watch on the house, Rae was convinced that Don would burst into the room at any moment and shoot her dead for what she had witnessed between him and Rose.

  But as terrifying as the night was, it proved an epiphany.

  In the morning, Rae packed her things and finally bid Osborn good-bye.

  Osborn raged.

  Rae had walked out on him. No woman walked out on Don Osborn.

  Worse, Rae had something on him. That Osborn couldn’t abide. In a divorce suit, she could destroy him with what she knew. So the only answer was to get something on Rae as well.

  Osborn found the hotel where his wife was staying. With Blackie Madsen posing as his father, he took the room across from Rae’s.

  If his foolish little wife thought she’d escaped him, she was mistaken.

  No one got away from Don Osborn.

  CHAPTER 23

  QUESTIONS OF LOYALTY

  Just back from a trip to London, refreshed and relaxed, William Desmond Taylor opened the door to the garage at Alvarado Court and stared in horror at his cherished car.

  The McFarlan was a wreck. Its front end was smashed in, its windows shattered.

  Taylor grinned, that strange way he had of expressing anger. Then he went looking for Earl Tiffany, demanding answers. The chauffeur told him that Edward Sands had run amok while Taylor was abroad. He had smashed the car and then taken off.

  Taylor decided to check the house for other damages. In his room, he discovered that seven of his custom suits were missing. Downstairs at his desk, he opened the bank statement that had arrived in the mail and found inside a canceled check for $4,500—a check he hadn’t written. Turning the check over, Taylor saw that Sands had forged his name. More evidence of the valet’s perfidy lay on the desk: twenty checks on which Sands had practiced signing his employer’s name, each attempt a little better than the last.

  Taylor stepped into the telephone nook under the stairs and rang the police.

  A short time later, Detectives E. R. Cato and William Cahill arrived in their big black police car. After looking around, they issued a felony warrant for the arrest of Edward Sands.

  But Taylor doubted the rogue would ever be found.

  A fortnight later, he fired Earl Tiffany. The chauffeur had done nothing to stop Sands’s spree, and besides, he was threatening now to keep a diary of where he went and what he did for the director. A man with as many secrets as Taylor was not keen on his chauffeur keeping a diary.

  Now Taylor had two posts to fill.

  A new chauffeur proved easy to obtain. Harry Fellows had been dependable and discreet, so Taylor tapped his younger brother Howard to take over the job. A trustworthy valet, however, was going to take a while longer to find, since this time Taylor would make sure to check references.

  In the meantime, he had other matters to attend to.

  In a name, Mary.

  The heartbroken nineteen-year-old weighed heavily on Taylor’s conscience. For so long, he’d kept Mary at arm’s length—for her own good, the director believed. But her entreaties had finally worn him down. When Mary arrived back in Los Angeles after her own trip abroad, she’d reached out yet again, asking to see him. This time Taylor agreed.

  He was trying to be magnanimous. But he was playing with fire.

  Mary’s spirits leaped. This was what she’d been waiting for. She fixed her hair and wore her prettiest dress. How fortunate that Shelby had been delayed in Chicago. If her horrible mother were home, Mary would never have been able to enjoy this reunion with her one true love. When Mr. Taylor arrived, he had flowers for her. And, Mary believed, “a lovelight in his eyes that told me his affection for me had not diminished during my absence.”

  Taylor’s attempt at kindness accomplished the exact opposite of his intention. Instead of healing Mary’s broken heart, he only welded it more securely to his own. After that meeting, the lovesick little actress came by Taylor’s house several more times. He tried to be patient with her. But he knew he’d soon have to set limits again, even as he dreaded the scene it would cause.

  He was saved from such an ordeal by the return of Charlotte Shelby, who once again laid down the law and forbade her daughter ever to see the director again.

  And if that old lech Taylor ever came near her delicate little cash cow again, Shelby told Mary, she’d kill him.

  That summer, without a valet, Taylor was a very solitary man.

  His neighbors noticed him returning from the studio at night, walking through the courtyard so elegantly, so ramrod straight, so carefully buttoned up in his tweeds and gabardines. A single light would go on when he entered his house, his silhouette flickering through the blinds as he sat down at his desk. There he would stay for hours at a time. Rarely did anyone stop by. Occasionally his scenic director from the studio, George Hopkins, visited. But his only other regular guest, Mabel Normand, was in New York that summer.

  Such a private man, that William Desmond Taylor.

  Late one August night, his neighbor across the courtyard, Neil J. Harrington, spotted movement around the director’s bungalow. Watching carefully, Harrington discerned a figure peering into one of Taylor’s windows. Whether Taylor was at home, Harrington wasn’t sure, but he did think the behavior of the person lurking outside was odd.

  Finally, Taylor found his new valet.

  Henry Peavey wore bright-colored golf stockings and knickers that made Mabel laugh when she met him later that fall. “A funny colored boy with lots of mannerisms,” she said of Taylor’s new man. Yet despite being illiterate, Peavey possessed “the assurance of one accustomed to associate only with the ‘best people,’” in the opinion of one observer. The valet had come highly recommended by Vivien Cabanne, the former wife of movie director Christy Cabanne. The two had known each other since they were both youngsters in Berkeley, California, where Vivien’s mother, a seamstress, had made Peavey’s first pair of long pants. After the Cabannes divorced, Vivien had brought her old friend Henry do
wn to Los Angeles to work for her, a far better gig than Peavey’s last job, traipsing around San Francisco as a messenger for the Corona Typewriter Company. Perpetually smiling, Peavey seemed very grateful for this chance at a new life.

  He was efficient, too, even if he lacked the military precision of Sands. But Taylor’s new valet was honest. After everything Taylor had just been through, that made all the difference.

  Still, he chose not to have Peavey live with him. With so many secrets stashed away in his closets and his drawers, Taylor figured it was better if his man arrived before breakfast and left after dinner. To compensate for the lack of room and board, Taylor paid his valet an additional $5 a week for rent on top of his $25 salary. Taking a room on East Third Street, Peavey rode the trolley every morning to report for work by seven thirty sharp.

  It seemed like an arrangement that would last.

  CHAPTER 24

  A CLUSTER OF CALAMITIES

  Marcus Loew, wearing a large boutonnière of roses and baby’s breath, greeted guests as they entered the Ritz-Carlton ballroom as if he were the king of the movies. With his new skyscraper towering over Times Square, Loew seemed more puffed up than ever to Adolph Zukor. Kissing Lillian Gish and Norma Talmadge on the cheeks, Loew strutted through the ballroom with a huge smile on his face. Zukor fumed.

  He’d come out tonight, September 7, 1921, for a private preview of Loew’s production of Dumas’s Camille, a modern, stylized adaptation starring Madame Alla Nazimova. The eccentric Russian diva, in extravagant furs and feathers, had flown out from the Coast to be there herself. At her side was her slinky-eyed, pomaded costar, the year’s hottest new sensation, Rudolph Valentino, whose previous film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, was still raking in cash for Loew’s Metro Pictures. The nascent producer stood there beaming, confident he had another smash hit on his hands with Camille.