A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (16 page)

On the morning of July 14, 1930, Frank Keaton, a disabled and unbalanced machinist, rose at dawn. He dressed hastily and headed downtown to City Hall where the banker Motley Flint was slated to give evidence in a civil trial. Keaton, dour and ordinary, had lost his savings when Julian Pete collapsed. He was one of the herd whose dreams L.A. had shattered. On the other hand, Flint, the suave brother of a former senator, had made millions out of the scam through a privileged investor pool. Perhaps the first banker to see the future in Hollywood and a backer of Warner Bros., Flint was a booster, a player in the drama of making the city happen, a prophet of the golden days that he said would be L.A.’s future in perpetuity. Flint had in the pockets of his slick suit $63,000 cash. Keaton had ten cents, a pack of cigarettes, a copy of Bob Shuler’s pamphlet “Julian Thieves,” and a .38 caliber nickel-plated hammerless revolver. “It felt big as a cannon,” Keaton later said.

Keaton sat in the spectator section while Flint, cool and poised, gave his evidence on behalf of a young motion picture executive named David O. Selznick. By the end of the decade Selznick would produce Gone With the Wind. Motley Flint, on the other hand, was about to meet his doom.

Frank Keaton wasn’t a well man. He’d recently been struck by a falling electric cable. Sitting in the courtroom, he felt his eyes begin to sting and a pain in his head grow sharp. As Flint left the witness stand and got ready to depart the court, pausing only to chat with David Selznick’s mother, Florence Selznick, Keaton sprang to his feet, drawing the .38 from his pocket and firing three times. Motley Flint was dead before he hit the floor. Keaton made no attempt to escape. Instead he slumped in a chair, saying, “Oh God, why did I do it?” Keaton’s trial was a formality; he was found guilty on September 5, sentenced to hang, and the Julian Pete had claimed two more victims.

The murder of Motley Flint was another fatal collision of have and have-not. It was a tragic climax, for the gusher of Julian Pete scandal blew itself once and for all when Dave Clark, acting in his new capacity as head of the complaints department, went to see Buron Fitts and reported that there was insufficient evidence to proceed with the bribery and influence peddling charges against Charlie Crawford and Jack Friedlander. This meeting took place in Fitts’s office, high in the Hall of Justice. From his window Fitts had a view of City Hall with its high white tower. On his desk was a small American flag, in a case were medals he’d won in France, and the walls were lined with shelves of law books. Later Fitts said he was surprised by what Clark told him, and asked Clark if he was really sure.

Clark replied that he’d reviewed all the paperwork, and spoken to Jack Roth and other witnesses; there just wasn’t enough to go on. “I wish we could get Crawford. I wish it as much as you, Buron. But it can’t be done,” he said.

Fitts gave Clark a sharp look but then shrugged, and the two discussed other business. On October 30, 1930, both the
Examiner
and the Times reported that the charges had indeed been dropped. Within days the statute of limitations on potential Julian Pete prosecutions expired. That was it: there could be no further indictments or grand jury inquisitions. Fitts didn’t like this outcome, but there was nothing he could do about it. Later, it would come out that in the weeks prior to the dropping of these charges, Dave Clark had dined twice at Charlie Crawford’s house in Beverly Hills and visited Crawford’s Sunset Boulevard office several times; and it would be alleged that Crawford gave Clark $50,000 to fix things. Clark would laugh at this allegation, but by then he would be on trial for murder, his golden aura in ruins.

In the clear, Charlie Crawford felt free to show his hand. He had big ideas, having donated a further $30,000 to Gustav Briegleb, who used the money to build a grand church, white-walled with rough-hewn rafters. In the basement of the church was a soundproof room intended for the radio station Briegleb planned to use to attack his former captain Bob Shuler over the airwaves while furthering the interests of Charlie Crawford, his new patron. Crawford invested in a magazine, The Critic of Critics, using it as another instrument for propaganda and self-promotion. In 1932 the Olympic Games would arrive in L.A. Crawford’s plan was that by then he would have taken back control of the grand jury and he and Kent Parrot would have orchestrated the defeat of Mayor Porter and once again put their own man in office. “I’ll run things the way they’ve never been run before,” Crawford promised.

The little play with the diamond ring had been a feint to throw off his enemies until Crawford judged the time as right. His wife, Ella, pleaded with him to stay out of politics for good, but that had never been his intention. Ella suffered from bad dreams and bleak daytime thoughts about what could happen to her husband. Crawford was canny and knew he was vulnerable. Hence the security precautions and devices that Leslie White had seen in his office—the locks, the bars on the windows, the steel bars that fell across the doors. These were measures of a man who knew himself to be at risk.

But all his life Crawford had been around violence without resorting to it or having it done to him. He was cautious and clever and, like E. L. Doheny, a sly old fox. Crawford believed in himself as a player and believed, too, that he would ride out the attempted underworld coups and impose the L.A. System on his rivals again. The System, after all, was of proven value, both in terms of profit and viability within the workings of City Hall. The System allowed the rackets to flourish in an orderly way; it was good strategy, good business, how things had always been done. The Gray Wolf, armed now with more modern political weapons, aimed to climb back in the saddle and stay there. He was signing his death warrant.

18

Red Hot Bow

B
uron Fitts failed in his gubernatorial run, but his strong showing in Southern California destroyed the chances of the incumbent C. C. Young, instead gifting the Republican nomination and the governorship to Mayor Sunny James Rolph, Jr., of San Francisco. L.A. had shown its increased electoral muscle in a statewide contest, and Fitts was already starting to look like a political fixture. He had his detractors. “Fitts is an incurable exhibitionist; utterly lacking the legal acumen, ethical conformity and mental balance essential in a competent prosecutor,” wrote local newspaperman Guy Finney. “He is constantly on the hunt for sensations in which he can pose as the hero; thinks of himself as a legal D’Artagnan. He is theatrically intemperate.”

Guy Finney was a hater of Fitts and had an axe to grind, though he was right that Fitts liked publicity and had quickly learned its value. Hollywood, a bottomless well of high-profile crime and scandal, was useful in this regard but had to be handled carefully. No master in court, Fitts nonetheless led the prosecution of theater-chain owner Alexander Pantages, accused of raping Eunice Pringle, a lithe and lovely seventeen-year-old high-school dropout. It was a great show, generating weeks of headlines; the young Jerry Giesler, having already bested Dave Clark, furthered his reputation by securing Pantages’s acquittal on appeal. Buron Fitts was once more displeased, but generally he knew where his bread was buttered. He tended to side with, and not against, men like Pantages, the new Medicis of L.A.

“To put it bluntly, the studios owned Buron Fitts,” wrote Budd Schulberg in his autobiography. Schulberg, author of the legendary Hollywood satire What Makes Sammy Run?, came of age in L.A. in the 1920s, growing up a “Hollywood prince,” as he put it. He was the son of B. P. Schulberg, one of the early moguls and by 1930 head of production at Paramount. “This was in the post–Desmond Taylor and Arbuckle days, when scandals that might have destroyed the reputations of valuable movie stars could be hushed up by the hear-no-evil-see-no-evil approach of the D.A.’s office,” Budd Schulberg wrote. “This was Cover-up, Hollywood style, in the days when the film capital was a self-sufficient oligarchy, sunny and benevolent on the surface but hard and vindictive at the core.”

In the late summer of 1930, B. P. Schulberg called Fitts about his biggest star, Clara Bow. While visiting her boyfriend at Lake Tahoe, Bow played blackjack with what she was told were fifty-cent chips. It was a shakedown, and those fifty-cent chips actually turned out to be worth $100 apiece. To cover the debt, Bow wrote a $20,000 check she later cancelled. Within days two tough customers came to her Beverly Hills home on North Bedford Drive, demanding the money in terms that came straight from a Warner Bros. gangster story. “Either you make that check good tomorrow or you’ll get acid all over your pretty puss. Instead of the It Girl, you’ll be the Ain’t Girl,” one of them said. Jimmy Cagney couldn’t have put it better. Terrified, Bow called B. P. Schulberg, who turned to Fitts, and the two hashed out a plan. Next day, when the goons came to Schulberg to complete the extortion, D.A. investigators sprang out from behind a curtain, pistols at the ready, and arrested them. Chalk one up for Leslie White and his colleagues.

Clara Bow was a gum-chewing beauty whose childhood in a Brooklyn tenement had been poor and hellish. Her father raped her. Her schizophrenic mother beat her and hovered over her bed at night, threatening to slit her throat. But Bow was ambitious and fated to rise. She won a beauty contest, and by 1922 B. P. Schulberg had discovered her and put her in silent films. Huge-eyed, with flaming red hair, she was effervescent, voluptuous, reckless, damaged, and in eight years had made more than forty-five films, notable among them Kiss Me Again, Wings, Mantrap, Dancing Mothers, and, of course, It, Eleanor Glyn’s story of a lingerie salesgirl on the make that associated Bow forever with sex appeal and the Jazz Age. In It Bow was outrageous, flirtatious, and often only half-dressed. “She didn’t need It, she had THOSE,” said Dorothy Parker.

In Free to Love Bow descended a gigantic staircase, leading six tuxedoed men by a leash. In Hula she lived on an island “where volcanoes are often active and maidens always are.” She was having an affair with a young actor, Gary Cooper, and gave him his first big break in Children of Divorce. Cooper, she told reporters, was “hung like a horse.” After making a score of quota-quickies, Bow worked with top directors—Victor Fleming, Ernst Lubitsch, Wesley Ruggles, and William Wellman. Her lack of self-consciousness and even her lack of control made her performances particularly emblematic. She was the queen of the flappers, “hotcha,” “hotsy,” a playful sexual aggressor and Scott Fitzgerald’s “girl of the year, the real thing, someone to stir every pulse in the nation.” On screen Bow had an astonishing spontaneous vibrancy and life. She was the first mass-market love-goddess “communicating with sex,” said Budd Schulberg, “because she had little other vocabulary.” She was a personality and an underrated actress, the Marilyn Monroe or Madonna of her time—a massive star.

In 1930 Bow was Hollywood’s top box-office draw, the recipient of more than 30,000 fan letters a month. Even so, her career was in big trouble. The 1928 release of The Jazz Singer led to an immediate infatuation with the talkie and killed the pantomime art form for which Bow had an instinctive genius. For a while it seemed she might negotiate the switch from silence, though sound stages and looming overhead microphones terrified her and inhibited her natural effervescence. In 1929 she looked fabulous in The Wild Party, and according to the New York Times, her voice was “better than the material, not overly melodious in delivery but suiting her perfectly.” Her second talkie, Dangerous Curves, directed by Lubitsch, was better still.

She might have survived the crashing of the age she had symbolized, but her personal life was a mess. She spoke without a care to reporters and couldn’t keep scandal away. She wasn’t surrounded by minders or agents who protected her. She roared around L.A. in a fire-red Packard, ridding herself of chauffeurs who refused to drive fast enough. Hollywood’s self-appointed aristocracy—Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Irving Thalberg, Norma Shearer—snubbed her because she was low class. B. P. Schulberg took to calling her “Crisis-A-Day Clara” and got tired of the fireball who’d brought him a fortune. Bow made movie after movie, was unfailingly generous, and felt stifled and tortured. “I always wanna cry,” she told Photoplay. “I could cry any minute. Had no childhood. Worked like a dog all my life. Really my nerves is shot.”

With a history of insanity in her family, Bow feared that she’d end up in the madhouse. Maybe all she needed was a rest. After a visit to New York, where she hobnobbed with boxer Jack Dempsey, socialite Jack Whitney, and gangster Dutch Schultz, she announced that she was returning to L.A. because she wanted to have her nervous breakdown “in the proper surroundings.” The girl from the slums had wit. These days such a career would be taken in hand and helped by powers determined to preserve its economic value; but in the fall of 1930, Clara Bow was about to be swept away, another victim of changing times.

The final crisis arose from her friendship with Daisy DeVoe (born DeBoe), a tall, smart, no-nonsense blonde who’d been Bow’s on-set hairdresser during the shooting of It. The two young women became pals, and DeVoe decided to sort out the star’s messed-up life. “She figured Clara needed a strongarmed dame to take charge,” said Paramount publicist Teete Carl. “So she appointed herself.”

DeVoe cleaned up the Beverly Hills house and kept at bay the hangers-on who were bleeding Bow dry. “I worked 24 hours a day for her and if there were 48 hours in a day I would have worked 48. I didn’t kick because I had her best interests at heart,” DeVoe said. She went on doing Clara’s hair and nails, and helped her dress. She took charge of the checkbooks, got the mortgage paid off, and set up a trust fund. “I pulled Clara out of plenty of messes and saved her plenty,” she said.

Trouble started when Bow found a new boyfriend, stuntman and cowboy actor Rex Bell. DeVoe couldn’t stand him, and the two fought for Clara’s attention, for control of the whirlwind. Bell got DeVoe fired, whereupon DeVoe emptied a filing cabinet in Clara’s office, taking away checkbooks, business papers, letters, and telegrams, and transferring them to her own safety deposit box in a Hollywood bank. She did this, she told biographer David Stenn decades later, to keep the stuff out of Rex Bell’s hands. Bell struck back, telling Clara that DeVoe had robbed her and had been stealing from her for years.

“I wrote her checks, but he slept with her,” DeVoe said. “He had the real power.”

The tiff spiraled out of control, and toward the law. Despairing over getting her job back, having been locked out of the Beverly Hills house and seemingly out of Clara’s life, DeVoe resorted to blackmail. She went to Clara’s attorney, W. I. Gilbert, and demanded $125,000, otherwise she’d turn the explosive letters and telegrams over to the press. “One more slam and Clara’s through in pictures,” DeVoe said.

Gilbert, an Oklahoma attorney who’d come to L.A. in 1913, didn’t fall for it. Down the years he cleaned up messes for Chaplin, Cagney, Gable, Kate Hepburn, and a dozen or more other stars. He got on the phone, telling Clara of DeVoe’s demands. DeVoe went to the Beverly Hills house that night, pleading for her job back. Clara was incredulous. “Didn’t you just go to Gilbert and tell him you wanted $125,000?” The matter passed into the hands of Buron Fitts, who had DeVoe’s safety deposit box opened on suspicion of grand larceny. Items of jewelry were recovered, along with the checkbooks and letters and cash that she’d allegedly stolen. On November 6, Daisy DeVoe was arrested and taken to the Hall of Justice where, she later claimed, she was grilled for twenty-seven hours straight without food or the chance to call a lawyer.

Do we believe her? Leslie White offered a much less threatening picture of how the D.A.’s men conducted their interrogations. “We seldom permitted more than one or two people in the room and one detective did the talking. In a casual, conversational tone, we began our questioning,” he wrote. This doesn’t sound like strongarm stuff. But James H. Richardson, for years the city editor of the
Examiner
and a onetime friend of Buron Fitts who later became the troubled D.A.’s fixed enemy, described an incident that occurred in the Hall of Justice at about this time:

There was no one in sight. The long halls were bare and empty. I walked along the corridor, my footsteps echoing against the marble walls. It was eerie, all right, but I liked it that way at night. Then I turned a corner and something hit me in the stomach.

It was a gun. A big, .45 caliber, blue steel revolver.

I saw the finger trembling on the trigger before I looked up.

He was one of Buron’s investigators and he was red-eyed drunk. He was shaking all over.

“I’m going to blow your guts out,” he said.

Richardson was an old-school newsman, a drunk with a nose for a story. His description of this incident, written more than twenty years after the event and published in his autobiography For the Life of Me, may be shaded by the tough-guy conventions that came to be applied to the time, but he’s getting at a truth. At some point in the early 1930s the D.A.’s investigative unit, or a part of it, stopped being a small unit of policing reform and became a part of the disease it had set out to cure, another aspect of the darkness of the time.

Leslie White knew this, even if he didn’t write about it or indulge in the third-degree himself. His feelings about what the D.A.’s office was doing, and what it had failed to achieve, would lead ultimately to his departure from the Hall of Justice. Maybe Daisy DeVoe was indeed “grilled for 27 hours straight.” Fitts was now playing a rough game. He announced that DeVoe had signed a thirty-five-page statement confessing to the theft of more than $35,000 in cash and property. DeVoe’s lawyer, Nathan Freedman, brought a countersuit, claiming that she hadn’t signed the statement and charging false arrest. Fitts went to the grand jury, and on November 25, 1930, an indictment for thirty-seven counts of grand theft was handed down against DeVoe. Each count carried a possible one-to ten-year sentence.

David O. Selznick, B. P. Schulberg’s boy-wonder assistant, was meanwhile arguing that Clara Bow’s career could be saved and made to flourish again by casting her in a quality project. Having read Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon, Selznick hired Dashiell Hammett and brought him out to Hollywood to write an original story. The result, City Streets, in which the daughter of a racketeer falls for a carnival worker, was to be Bow’s next picture. Selznick argued that the charges against DeVoe should be dropped. No possible good would come of a trial, he knew. Bow agreed with Selznick. The prospect of court frightened her. “She didn’t want her fans to see her this way. She was afraid of the reporters and the photographers who would hound her,” writes Budd Schulberg. But B. P. Schulberg did nothing, and Fitts proceeded to trial, appointing his star deputy Dave Clark to lead the prosecution.

Dave Clark had asked for the case. He’d been missing the action while running the complaints department and he wanted to be in court, knowing that, whatever the result, the publicity would be good for his career. It’s possible, too, that he and Buron Fitts had already agreed to part company; Fitts would later suggest as much, saying he’d wanted Dave Clark to have his final hurrah as a servant of the D.A.’s office. “Dave Clark asked for the Bow trial. He was a great performer in court and he knew it would be a big deal. Do I regret that decision? No, not in any way,” Fitts would say, sounding unconvinced.