[Celebrity Murder Case 04] - The Talking Pictures Murder Case

by George Baxt

  An hour later Goldwyn was behind closed doors in a story conference Under discussion was the first talker planned for his major male star, Ronald Colman. “Now then, boys”—he pronounced it “boyess”—”and ladies, it is agreed we begin Ronnie in Bulldog Drummond. Let's be together on this I want it should be an anonymous decision.” It was a unanimous decision Goldwyn beamed with satisfaction “Wasn't that simple? It’s like water falling off a duke's back.” His secretary said Sophie Gang, his henchwoman, needed to speak to him on his private line. The story conference was declared ended and the three men and two women who had participated made hasty departures.

  “What is it, Sophie?”

  “Everybody's meeting at six o’clock in Louis B Mayers office.”

  “Who's everybody?”

  She named every powerful studio head. Laemmle, Warner, Adolph Zukor, William Fox, Alexander Roland Goldwyn nodded and then said, “That's quite an aggravation.” He listened to something Sophie was advising. “Do you take me for a fool? How long have you been working for me? Of course I want to establish a rappaport with them!”

  It had taken over five years for Bertha Craze to win the confidence and the trust of the great, the near-great, the not-so-great, and the never-will-amount-to-anythings of Hollywood. But now she reigned supreme as the official astrologer to the stars. Articles about her appeared in newspapers around the world, and she photographed superbly, although she was built like the stereotype of an operatic soprano. A bosom so huge that Jack Darling had insisted she could accommodate four for dinner on it, hips powerful enough to send steel pillars crashing,- hands that one suspected could crush coconuts without spilling a drop of the milk they contained, but that face, that dear, sweet, angelic face, it was the same enchanting face that had won her a contract with Alexander Roland's Diamond Films ten years earlier. Then she was the winner of a beauty contest held by a popular movie magazine. She arrived in Hollywood at the age of seventeen, slim, blond, and tragically naive. At Diamond Studios she was passed around from executive to executive, from star to star like a tray of after-dinner mints, and they all found her equally refreshing. Two years later, at nineteen years of age, she was a stag party joke.

  But Bertha had evolved from solid Junker German stock and had always taken an interest in astrology. Recognizing that show people were highly superstitious, she had subscribed to a mail-order course in astrology offered in a science magazine. She was a brilliant student. She wisely began operations by recruiting a network of spies who could supply her with information about the denizens of the studios She blackmailed a series of lovers and had enough of a cash reserve to pay premium prices to butlers, maids, housekeepers, secretaries, and chauffeurs. The tidbit Annamary Darling's chauffeur sold her about Dolly Lovelace's black grandfather was especially valuable. Marie Darling was one of her most faithful clients.

  Oddly enough, it was Bertha who had predicted the coming of the talkers When the prediction became a reality, she was as surprised as everyone else and further predicted the talkers would give her a whole new lucrative army of clients.

  After convincing her son, her daughter, and her son-in-law that they would soon be making their debuts in talkers at Alexander Roland's Diamond Studios, Marie, feeling in need of some moral support, phoned Bertha for an appointment. Bertha told her to come right away, Bertha was getting weird vibrations, brought on, she was positive, by the disgraceful behavior of the mobs at Dolly Lovelace’s funeral, and somehow these vibrations put her in mind of Marie and her brood.

  Over a pot of tea and assorted biscuits, Bertha explained her vibrations to Marie, who kept nodding her head in understanding “So you see, my dear, I've since consulted the tarot cards, my Hebrew Kabala, and the crystal ball for confirmation and they tell me I'm right There is an ominous darkness settling over the film industry, an ominous darkness like a shroud knitted by the children of Satan.”

  Marie felt her blood turning to ice water. She interlaced her fingers and held them tightly “I'm not foreseeing the awful horrors that are being inflicted on those unfortunates who were once the greats of the silent screen, though among them there will be an epidemic of degradation and disaster and it won't be fun … but I see something worse. I see death creating mayhem with his bloodied scythe, cutting a swath through the flesh of the young and eager new breed of aspirants descending on Hollywood like the biblical locust plague …”

  Marie blinked her eyes rapidly as Bertha paused to demolish a crisp ladyfinger biscuit. Bertha held her crystal ball in the palm of her left hand, her right hand necessary for the stoking of biscuits into her hot furnace of a mouth.

  Bertha's eyes moved from the crystal ball to Marie's face. “You ask me if Alex Roland will agree to your demands. “ She paused dramatically Though she never could act, her sense of timing was native born and sensational. “You've got him by the short hairs.” Marie smiled at last. “He will agree, reluctantly and swearing revenge …”

  “That's all he ever swears,” growled Marie.

  “He's capable of murder “

  “So am I, sweetie, so am I.”

  THREE

  In Louis B Mayer's imposing conference room at the MGM studios in Culver City, the Hollywood potentates who had gathered to sow the seeds of destruction sat around a table constructed of hewn oak, a gift from William Randolph Hearst. The conspirators smoked expensive cigars, which seemed to be asphyxiating Mayer's comely secretary, who sat behind Mayer taking notes. Seven rugged individualists who had been in motion pictures since their infancy, seven robber barons who listened to the sounds of their own distant drummers - seven men who for once were of one mind: it was time to destroy their overpriced silent screen stars. Those stars were no longer needed. Expendable. Redundant. An unnecessary overhead to be consigned underground. Some would soon be sweeping the rooms they once swept into. Many were in financial thrall to their studios, who were eagerly ready to call in their markers.

  A hardy few would survive the holocaust, but only for another two or three years, by which time the new faces would have replaced them in the hearts of the fickle audiences. Fairbanks and Pickford would fight valiantly to retain their hold on the public. Gloria Swanson, Richard Barthelmess, Betty Compson, Bebe Daniels, and Dorothy Mackaill would enjoy a brief renaissance in the talkers, others would continue in the industry starring or featuring in Poverty Row quickies - some would continue appearing in major productions in small parts or as extras. A lucky handful would make a successful transition as character actors, no longer billed above the title of the film but enjoying steady employment because they were smart enough to accept and adjust to the new career of being a subordinate player To new generations of filmgoers, many of these players were new faces and enjoyed a new prosperity.

  Tragedy stalked too many others. Comedian Karl Dane would commit suicide. John Bowers, husband of actress Marguerite de la Motte, walked into the Pacific Ocean and his body was never recovered, inspiring the many versions of A Star Is Born. John Gilbert would continue at MGM until 1933 because of his unbreakable contract, and then drink himself into death by a heart attack. Marie Prevost was found dead in her furnished room, part of her eaten away by her hungry dog. James Murray also chose drink as a solution and ended up floating in the drink, off a New York pier in the Hudson River.

  Several actresses and actors chose prostitution and found that lying on their back was just as profitable as, and less exhausting than, keeping on their toes.

  There were the lucky silent stars who were even bigger in the talkers: Ronald Colman, Janet Gaynor, Wallace Beery, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Lewis Stone, Jean Hersholt, Gary Cooper, William Powell, Del Rio, and Velez. Talkers proved a blessing to some silent screen actors whose careers seemed destined to go nowhere. Talking pictures refreshed the static careers of Myrna Loy, Fay Wray, Nancy Carroll, Edna Mae Oliver, Conrad Nagel, Bessie Love, and Reginald Denny, if only briefly for some of them. William Haines and Ramon Novarro made successful transitions into talke
rs until Louis B. Mayer put them on the skids because he found their flagrant homosexuality intolerable.

  Louis B, Mayer was summing up the decisions of the meeting. “So it's agreed, boys, once we start dropping our stars, none of the others go after them to buy them up cheaply, all right?”

  Sam Goldwyn pointed an accusing finger at Mayer. “You should talk! I drop Vilma Banky and right away you sign her to do a picture.”

  “I had to!” insisted Mayer impatiently. “I needed Rod La Rocque to play opposite Shearer in Let Us Be Gay. You can imagine what Norma is like when she wants something, especially now she's married to Thalberg. So when Rod says you can have me Louis if you give my wife a job, what am I supposed to do? Anyway, it's a nothing picture with a homely nobody from New York, Edward G. Robinson. Vilma will disappear and so will Robinson.”

  “So will La Rocquc,” predicted Adolph Zukor “I heard his talker test. Silent he has sex, talking he has nothing.”

  Mayer shrugged “Norma likes him She brings in the customers. He doesn't. Anyway, let's get down to the kishkas. I'm unloading Aileen Pringle and Lew Cody and Karl Dane to start with. When their contracts are up, we're not renewing Eleanor Boardman, Roy D'Arcy, or Nils Asther.”

  William Fox said, “You shouldn’t have dropped Lillian Gish. She talks real good “

  “The stubborn bitch! Who could deal with her? She's such an artiste.” He spat the word at them “Pfeh! You tell her to do something and she says, ’Mr Griffith wouldn't dream of asking me to do a thing like that,' or ‘I never worked this way with Mr. Griffith.'“

  Adolph Zukor chimed in. “Were letting go of Raymond Hatton and, while Evelyn Brent's still good, she's beginning to photograph old. As for Clara Bow, well, we'll see. So far her first couple of talkers are profitable, but you know how disgracefully she carries on in private.”

  Jack Warner spoke up “What do we do about Harry Cohn?”

  “What about him?” asked Alexander Roland. “His Columbia Pictures is another quickie operation, he's no threat to us.”

  “He's buying up a lot of has-beens and giving them good parts.”

  “He has to,” said Roland “He can't afford to hire any real names. On the other hand, you have to hand it to him. He casts half a dozen old-timers in a movie and then advertises it as an all-star cast and, you know, it brings in enough customers for him to either break even or show a small profit. But he’s a drop in a pail of water. He's no more a threat then Pathe or Tiffany or this new Radio Pictures bunch that's beginning to operate.

  Listen, boys, I'm the one with the big problem. Mama Marie and her three marionettes.”

  Carl Laemmle finally spoke. “I can understand wanting to lose Jack Darling. He's a wreck But Annamary and Willis Loring? They're still big names.”

  ‘They're costing me millions and I don't need them anymore,” said Roland coldly “Actors aren't the box-office draw It's the movies that talk and sing! I'm planning a dozen musicals to go into production right away “

  “So am I,” said Jack Warner with a sigh “Where are the women singers who are lookers? God, the dogs that are blessed with glorious voices.”

  Alexander Roland said to Adolph Zukor, “I hear Emil Jannings has gone back to Germany He refused to do a voice test.”

  Adolph Zukor ho-ho-ho'd like a dwarf Santa Claus. “Oh yes, he did a test. So did Pola Negri and Paul Lukas. Talk about a melting pot! Emil you couldn't understand a word, Pola was hopeless and knew it and so she quit. But Lukas, you gotta hand it to him. He hired a good teacher so his Hungarian accent is a little less Hungarian every day. Actually, instead of leading men, I'm lining him up some good gangster parts. For some reason audiences find villains more menacing if they have a foreign accent.”

  “Oh yes?” Mayer's eyebrows were arched “Maybe I should hold on to Nils Asther?”

  Laemmle asked, “Is his Swedish accent so thick? Is it as bad as Garbo's?”

  Mayer replied, “Garbo, Carl, is Garbo Believe me, she's going to be bigger than ever and even more impossible. Anyway, now we all understand each other, right?” He chuckled. “How's for some schnapps to seal the agreement?” There was a smattering of applause Mayer signaled his secretary to bring in the whiskey and she fought her way through a sea of cigar smoke into the next office.

  Her girl friend asked her as she entered, “How many heads are dropping?”

  “Don't ask. But listen, Belle, this is a riot. They're talking about finishing off all the actors who have thick accents. Well, can you believe it? Ain't it hot? All seven of them inside come over in steerage and there isn't one of them who hasn't got an accent you could hack with an ax! Listen, be a doll and get the hooch out of the cabinet and set it up on a tray with some seltzer and ice water. I gotta make an important call.” She hurried to her own office. She closed the door behind her, sat at her desk, and gave the switchboard operator a number.

  Bertha Graze was cuddling her calico cat, Mephistopheles, when the phone rang. She draped the cat around her neck, popped a cookie in her mouth, and, while chewing, spoke into the phone “Oh hello, honey. Hmmm? Why sure it's worth ten to me if it's any good.” She listened and chewed, then smiled her very special wicked witch's smile “He thinks he'll get rid of Annamary and Willis. He'll have to get rid of Mama Marie first And let me tell you honey, it'll be easier to transfer the Rocky Mountains to Florida!”

  The great influx of acting hopefuls from Broadway and abroad intensified over the following weeks, causing film director David Wark Griffith to comment to his former star, Mae Marsh, now among the deposed, “It recalls the invasion of my beloved southland by the carpetbaggers at the close of the Civil War.” He always talked like a silent film intertitle. “Ah, my poor lovely Mae, the barbarian hordes are swarming over the territory and a great art is being smothered to death. Are you terribly unhappy, my poor little Mae?”

  “Not really,” replied the actress They were having afternoon tea on the porch of the Hollywood Hotel. “I had ten good years I have a happy marriage I have my children. I'm still young. It's some of the others I feel sorry for. Poor Henry B. Walthall is taking it badly, and accepting small parts. But then, D. W , he was having a hard time of it long before the talkers became a threat. Blanche Sweet is heartbroken, but she's behaving well “

  “She's a good actress.”

  “She's doing something at Metro and she says she has offers from First National and the new Radio Pictures. But I advised her to marry young Raymond Hackett and go back to New York with him and try her luck in the theater.”

  “Isn't he tied to a Metro contract?”

  “It's only for a year. He doesn't like the competition. They've brought out lots of young boys who'll be competing for the same parts. I met some of them at Blanche's party last Sunday There was a Robert Montgomery and an Elliot Nugent and a Kent Douglas and”—she laughed—”so help me, I couldn't tell one from another.”

  Griffith said, 'Blanche had a party last week and didn't ask me?”

  “Oh dear,” said a chagrined Mae Marsh Griffith's face was a gray study. “I wonder if she knows something I don't know “

  A few tables away from Griffith and his guest and well out of earshot sat former silent stars Marie Prevost and Betty Bronson, sipping bourbon out of teacups. Bronson, who had been a major sensation four years earlier as the screen's first Peter Pan, was looking at her friend with astonishment. “You’re not going to do it, are you?”

  “Listen, kid,” said Prevost, who had once starred for Ernest Lubitsch, “I gotta believe what my agent tells me. Marie Prevost in Lubitsch pictures looked chic and sexy and had a certain je ne sais quoi. Prevost in talkers has a voice that goes with nightclub floozies, waitresses, and manicurists. Why kid myself? If Louis B. is offering me a stock deal at three hundred a week, I'd be a dummy to turn him down “

  “But you used to make three thousand a week!”

  Prevost drew herself up with indignation. “Six thousand a week, you mean! Ah, the hell with it. Even my ex”—
actor Kenneth Harlan, who was high on the list of the doomed—”is pleading poverty so he says he can't pay me my alimony no more. Listen, Betty, don't try to kid me. I know you're getting the shaft, too, and we can't fight them “ Bronson dabbed at her eyes with her napkin. “Look at the sunny side, kid. You're still in your twenties and you got a knockout bozo in love with you. Get married and get pregnant, in no particular order. Hell, I'm so up to my neck in hock, my lawyer tells me even if I get a decent price on my house and the furnishings, I’ll still have to pawn some of my jewels. Anyway, kiddo, three hundred smackers will pay for a lot of groceries and it'll feed my precious little poochie and I’m guaranteed good featured billing “

  “But what will your friends say?”

  “What friends? That strong breeze you feel is the backlash of a small tornado created by the departure of my nearest and dearest Anyway, were better off than poor Dolly Lovelace. Wasn't that funeral a scandal? I'm sure glad I didn't go. I thought about it and then I figured, oh what the hell, we never did a picture together I really only knew her to sneer at. Crikey, it took over three hundred cops to bring that mob under control and they took over two hundred people to the hospital. I hope the hell that ain’t the way I go. I hope I die nice and peaceful in my own bed with my poochie-woochie howling over my body which will then be discovered and given a peaceful burial. Did you see that awful picture in the Herald of Jack Darling kissing the corpse? Oh my God, she must have tasted awful of embalming fluid “

  “Stop that, Marie That picture gave me nightmares I once well … you know…“

  “With Jack Darling?” Prevost winked an eye “So we have something else in common “

  In the lobby of the Hollywood Hotel, New York actresses Ruth Chatterton and Nance O'Neil were sharing an afternoon tea and enjoying the music provided by a trio consisting of violin, piano, and triangle There was a sly tone in Chatterton's voice as she asked Miss O'Neil, “Come on, Nance 'Fess up Is it true you and Lizzie Borden were companions those last years before her death?”