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

by William J. Mann

  To her friend she lamented she’d be working in Hollywood over Christmas. But her heart, she said, would be in London.

  Three thousand miles away, Mary was proving just as difficult to find.

  An intrepid newswoman from the Los Angeles Times returned frequently to ring the bell at Casa Margarita, only to be told that Mary wasn’t at home. One day the little star would be at the studio, the next she’d be shooting on location. The reporter sensed she was getting the runaround. She’d heard rumors that Mary and Mrs. Shelby had been quarreling. It was clear that Mary had moved out of her mother’s home. But where she had gone was anyone’s guess.

  In fact, the actress had a found a cozy bungalow at the end of long and winding Argyle Street, half a mile away from Gibby Gibson in the Hollywood Hills. She had a magnificent view of downtown Los Angeles. For the first time in her life, Mary was on her own, finally free to “give parties and plan dinners.” Best of all, she was free of Shelby.

  Mother and daughter had indeed been arguing more than ever. Ever since the newspapers had run that story about the psychic, people all over town had been looking suspiciously at Shelby and whispering behind her back. The scuttlebutt, understandably, made Shelby cross. She stormed around the house like a Louisiana cyclone, taking her temper out on Mary. Her troubles were all Mary’s fault, Shelby declared. If Mary hadn’t been so damn lovesick over Mr. Taylor, none of these problems would be plaguing them now.

  So Mary had washed her hands of that despot, that pinchpenny, that murderer of little girls’ dolls and dreams. She’d set up her own household on Argyle. Although she didn’t have much furniture—basically just a grand piano and lots of gilt-framed mirrors—it was still the first step in her new adult life. In just a little more than four months, Mary would be of age. Twenty-one years old. How she was looking forward to taking control of her business affairs.

  But then Mr. Lasky dropped the bomb.

  Famous Players–Lasky would not be renewing Mary’s contract when she finished her current picture.

  When the Times reporter finally found Mary at the top of Argyle Drive, the movie actress was tight-lipped about her discharge and her future plans. All she would say was that she was happy.

  And she was. Mary had longed to be free of both her mother and the studio. Now she had her wish. She could come and go whenever she pleased, see whoever she wanted. Finally Mary was living her own life. If only Mr. Taylor had been there to enjoy it with her!

  When asked how she’d pay her bills, Mary chose not to think about them. Like the child she was, she simply assumed there would always be enough money. Now that she was on her own, she told herself that everything would work out somehow. “Tragedy and scandal,” Mary declared, had been banished from her life. Now there was only “light and love.”

  But tragedy and scandal weren’t banished everywhere.

  On the afternoon of December 15, 1922, the mother-in-law of Wallace Reid, Famous Players’ top male star, sat down with a reporter from the Los Angeles Times.

  On behalf of her son-in-law, Alice Davenport admitted that the rumors that had “spread from coast to coast during the last two years” were true. Wally was indeed struggling with narcotics addiction. He’d checked himself into a sanitarium, where he was “perilously weak” but determined to get better. They were admitting all this, Davenport said, because it was the only way to quiet the rumors and separate facts from falsehoods. She stressed that Wally’s story was hardly a scandal; his “determination to stage a comeback, both personally and on the screen, [was] unshaken, and his will power and cheerfulness unimpaired.” Being upfront and honest about his problems, Davenport hoped, would convince the public—including the church ladies—to support Wally in his hour of need, and not condemn him.

  But then Davenport let slip some graphic details that could only have horrified the reformers. She described the “wild liquor parties” that were common at Reid’s place, which was “more like a roadhouse,” his mother-in-law said. Wally’s friends were there drinking “at all times of the day and night.” Reid’s wife corroborated her mother’s account in a separate statement, adding that Wally had morphine delivered to him daily. “He had to have it,” Mrs. Reid said.

  All across the country, the moralists sat up straight in their chairs. So the stories of wild, drug-and-booze-filled parties weren’t hyperbole after all! They were all true!

  And if the stories were true for Wally Reid, they must have been true for others as well.

  In New York, Mabel panicked in her little Village apartment.

  Evidently she’d gotten advance word that Wally would be making a public confession of his drug use. Likely Alice Davenport, an old friend, had phoned her as a courtesy before giving her statement to the Times. However she learned it, the news must have horrified Mabel. Given all the stories about her own drug problems, she knew the press would find her somehow. Her happy Greenwich Village idyll was over.

  For all the Reid family’s hopes that the public would show compassion toward Wally, Mabel knew exactly what was coming. With Roscoe’s trials and Billy’s murder finally fading from the headlines, the scandal sheets were hungry for something new, and Wally had just given it to them.

  Once, a long time ago, Mabel had considered the men and women of the press her friends. But the scandals of the past two years had sold more newspapers and magazines than anyone had ever thought possible. “With some dailies it’s getting to be a cold-blooded business, about as brutal as it can be,” Variety observed. Entertainment reporters had become “skillful libel dodgers.” Editors no longer worried about whether a story was actually libelous, only about the best way to word it to protect themselves against a libel suit.

  But to blame the press was facile. Just as movie producers had always insisted they only made sex pictures because their audiences wanted them, the press ran scandal stories because the public devoured them. Newspapers had become “brutal in their methods,” Variety pointed out, because “maintaining sensationalism” held readers. “Actors are no longer heralded for their work,” complained one anonymous performer, “but for their divorces and their misdeeds.”

  Mabel knew that Wally Reid’s confession was going to mobilize a new army of moralists. She wished she could never return to Hollywood. Oh, to be in London, where she would be safe!

  At the eleventh hour, Mabel asked herself: Why the hell not?

  The morning the headlines broke about Wally’s addiction, Mabel was hurrying down Fourteenth Street. The New York Times would note that several passengers booked passage to Southampton onboard the Majestic at the last minute, right there on the pier. Mabel, to her great satisfaction, wasn’t recognized. She slipped onto the ship unmolested, leaving reporters hunting for celebrities to content themselves with Pearl White, queen of the serials.

  The Majestic was the last ship to leave New York in time to make it to England for Christmas. Steaming out of the harbor at ten o’clock in the morning, the ship was cheered by a crowd of fifteen hundred.

  Hunkered down in her stateroom, unknown to anyone, Mabel breathed a sigh of relief.

  CHAPTER 59

  NO HAPPY ENDINGS

  This trip wasn’t turning out the way Will Hays had hoped.

  His second visit to Hollywood was supposed to have been as successful as his first. Granted, there wouldn’t be as much “silver-tongued orating.” This was a nuts-and-bolts trip: Hays was there for “business and business alone.” Too many dinners and speeches would have distracted from his meetings with studio accountants and sales reps. Such a schedule would also have exhausted Mrs. Hays, who had gathered the strength to accompany her husband to the West Coast, along with their nine-year-old son. Hays—and perhaps Adolph Zukor—had felt it was time for the world to see him with his wife at his side. Helen did her best to smile for the cameras.

  But no one was smiling on this day.

  Hays and Jesse Lasky made their way to the Banksia Place Sanitarium on Santa Monica Boulevard across from King
sley Drive, a quiet green hideaway of cottages and rose gardens. Cautioned to speak quietly, the two men were ushered into the room where Wallace Reid was convalescing. The husk in the bed looked nothing like the strapping hero of the screen. Reid was sixty pounds lighter than when Hays met him on his first visit to Hollywood. The actor’s cheekbones threatened to poke through his yellow skin.

  Their visit lasted only a few minutes. Reid was in no condition to hold a conversation. He was in and out of consciousness, suffering from pneumonia. When Hays and Lasky emerged from the sanitarium, the reporters who’d followed them there volleyed off some questions, but got no answers. Hays was too overcome to speak. His spokesman said simply that the film czar had extended to Reid and his wife “his sympathy, his hopes for a speedy recovery and his best wishes for a happy new year.”

  That seemed extraordinarily wishful thinking.

  Mabel had been wise to flee. The newspapers had exploded with coverage about Reid’s drug confession. Compassion wasn’t completely absent, but there was plenty of censure as well. The usual names made the usual denunciations. The Methodist Preachers Association urged an official investigation into the drug traffic within the film industry. Canon William Sheafe Chase declared that Reid’s illness was “God’s intercession” in Hollywood’s sinful life. After several relatively quiet months on the scandal front, the papers were once again filled with so-called exposés about the barbaric private lives of movie people.

  Some reports claimed that Hays was personally involved in investigating and cracking down on the drug traffic. In reality, Hays had simply promised cooperation with “those in authority and those who have the matter in charge.” Meanwhile, what he could do was call for sensitivity. “If Reid’s condition is a result of indulgence in narcotics,” Hays told the press, “it’s a matter to be prayed over. The poor boy should be dealt with as a diseased person—not be censured, shunned. Rather, let us all sanely and sympathetically try to help him.”

  But Hays knew that sanity and sympathy were often in short supply among the critics of Hollywood. Such coldheartedness would complicate other tasks as well.

  Despite his public utterances, Hays’s trip to Hollywood wasn’t just about sales taxes and accounting offices. He’d made the journey across the country for another reason, a personal mission of his own. He’d come to help another young man, whose straits were not as immediately critical as Reid’s, but possibly just as dire.

  At long last, Hays was hoping to address Roscoe Arbuckle’s situation. The poor man had been on his conscience for too long. But now the gaunt, sallow-faced Reid, fighting for his life at the Banksia Place Sanitarium, had just made Hays’s task a thousand times more difficult.

  It was Hays’s idea to help Arbuckle. And his idea only.

  He was flexing his muscles. His authority was growing. In November, thanks in large part to his efforts, Massachusetts voters had beaten back a censorship referendum by a whopping 553,173 to 208,252, the first time censorship had failed at the ballot box. Until that point, reformers had always been able to claim that the public wanted such laws. The upset in Massachusetts destroyed that argument, and Hays rightly took much of the credit. He’d provided literature and manpower, and he’d enlisted the support of the American Legion and various women’s groups to help defeat the bill. This victory gave him added clout when dealing with the members of the MPPDA, including Adolph Zukor.

  He’d also successfully negotiated a new contract with exhibitors, thanks to the alliance he’d forged with Jimmy Walker. Without Hays, the war between producers and exhibitors might have continued to escalate, crippling the industry. But now he had managed that, too.

  By the fall of 1922, Hays’s power no longer proceeded from Zukor alone.

  In the privacy of his offices, the film czar was imagining a world in which Famous Players and its autocratic chief didn’t hold all the cards. In his discussions with exhibitors, distributors, and other players, Hays had been trying to figure out a way to establish “neutral channels,” in which the various branches of the industry could work independently yet complementarily. If he had his way, Hays would have “divorced production and distribution” to save money. This, of course, was anathema to Adolph Zukor.

  But what if there came a day when other film studios might be at least as powerful as Famous Players? That day might be sooner than anyone thought, since the Federal Trade Commission had finally announced the start of its hearings into the company’s business practices, much to Zukor’s indignation. With that in mind, Hays had asked his assistants to put together a top-secret memo for him, outlining various consolidations that might occur in a post–Famous Players industry.

  Several possible scenarios were imagined. If Metro joined with First National Pictures, their combined chain of theaters would be “very formidable.” Or if Metro went with Goldwyn, the resulting combine would be a real counterweight to the power of Zukor and Famous Players.

  Hays realized that if anyone was ever going to force Zukor to share power, it would be Marcus Loew. Hays liked Loew. As chair of the MPPDA membership committee, the Metro chief was a frequent visitor in Hays’s office. The two men talked policy and strategy, but also made jokes and shot the breeze. How different Loew was from Zukor, who eschewed small talk.

  In subtle ways, Hays had been encouraging Loew to think about taking the next step. He provided him with data on the financial structure of First National. He inquired with interest when Jesse Lasky, weary of his secondary role in Famous Players, had reached out to talk with Loew about a merger. Nothing came of the idea, but wouldn’t that have been interesting? Hays certainly thought so.

  By encouraging Loew to expand, Hays was preparing for his own future. He liked the position of strength he’d gained from the victory in Massachusetts. And so, at long last, he also felt confident enough to try to help Arbuckle.

  The decision back in April to blackball Fatty had been “unjust,” Hays believed. After “long deliberation,” he had decided it wasn’t his place—nor anyone else’s—to judge a man and keep him from his chance in life. “In a spirit of American fair play, and I hope of Christian charity,” Hays recalled in his memoir, “I proposed that he be given that chance.”

  Cautiously, he broached the idea with Zukor.

  Almost certainly, Zukor’s first response was skeptical. Why stir things up? Especially now, as the FTC was looming down on them? But as always, Zukor weighed ideas against the bottom line. Hays suggested that maybe, at long last, some of the money Famous Players had lost on Arbuckle could be won back.

  Eight months after the ban, calls for Arbuckle’s return were increasing. Public sentiment seemed to be coalescing on his side. Even Matthew Brady, the DA who had originally tried to get Arbuckle hanged, now supported giving the comedian another chance. “I believe that every fair thinking man and woman should encourage the return of Fatty Arbuckle to the screen,” Brady declared.

  Zukor also couldn’t ignore the advice coming from Wall Street. Investors working with one of Arbuckle’s own attorneys, Gavin McNab, were reportedly waiting to invest “unlimited amounts of capital” in the comedian’s comeback. In Europe, Arbuckle’s films were “going stronger than any other American star.” If others were going to make money on Arbuckle, Hays argued, why shouldn’t Zukor? The idea of someone else making a nickel off his property was surely a convincing argument for the film chief.

  So Zukor signaled his tentative approval for Hays to proceed. But his endorsement no doubt came with a caveat: Tread carefully.

  Hays was optimistic. He was also naive. “It seemed a relatively commonplace decision to me,” he said, “and I anticipated no such excitement as ensued.”

  On December 20, 1922, the day after his visit to Reid, Hays summoned reporters to meet him at his suite in the Ambassador Hotel. They were expecting to hear a statement about the drug traffic in Los Angeles, or an update on Wally.

  But Hays had a very different message to deliver.

  In the spirit of C
hristmas, he said, “Roscoe Arbuckle is to have another chance to go to work and make good if he can.” Jaws dropped. Reporters stopped writing midsentence, not sure what they had just heard.

  Hays went on. “Every man in the right and at the proper time is entitled to his chance to make good. I hope we can start the New Year with no yesterdays. Live and let live is not enough. We will try to live and help live.” The ban on Arbuckle, he announced, would be lifted as of January 1, 1923.

  Reporters scrambled to find the nearest phone to call in the news to their editors. Fatty was coming back!

  Hays, meanwhile, boarded the California Limited with his family. He beamed as he waved good-bye to the crowds who had gathered to see the travelers off. Even Helen managed a small smile in their direction. For the first time in eight months, Hays’s conscience was clear.

  But as word spread across the wires, appearing in the evening papers all across the country, reaction was swift. By the time Hays’s train stopped in Kansas City the next morning, he was presented with a stack of telegrams.

  Mrs. J. C. Urquhart, president of the Los Angeles district of the Federation of Women’s Clubs, was one of the first to react. As soon as she heard the news, Mrs. Urquhart had convened a meeting of her group and adopted a motion condemning Hays’s action. The ladies declared they would never support any film that Arbuckle made, and they expected their sisters across the country to follow suit. “With a membership of more than 2 million,” Mrs. Urquhart boasted to the press, “I do not think any film which we do not commend will succeed.”

  Hays tried not to worry too much. After all, he had a representative from the national group on his Public Relations Committee. Surely he’d be able to reason with her.

  But nearly all of the cables delivered to him in Kansas City expressed outrage. The mayors of Indianapolis and Detroit announced that they would forbid any Arbuckle picture to play in their cities. In addition, the Pennsylvania and New Jersey chapters of the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America, allies of Sydney Cohen, still bitter over the split in their organization, voted to condemn Hays, calling him a pawn of the producers “who are helping to pay his salary.”