Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (15 page)

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.

F
AMOUS
P
LAYERS
-L
ASKY
B
AN
S
EX
F
ILMS BY

F
OURTEEN
“D
ON
’
TS
”
TO
S
TUDIO
O
FFICE

“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.

But the talks proceeded surprisingly smoothly. Upon arrival Crafts was given a copy of Lasky’s fourteen points, and he read and approved them. His object was
“to cleanse the ‘substance’ of the modern movie,” Crafts declared; how it happened was “a matter of minor consideration.” Since the industry had pledged to follow Lasky’s code, Crafts agreed to call off all agitation for a federal censorship law.

A few blocks away and eight stories up, Adolph Zukor was smiling.

It didn’t matter that, a short time later, Crafts was back to his old ways, calling for a federal commission to compel producers to abide by the fourteen points. All that mattered was that the reformers’ momentum had been slowed. Now the film industry appeared to be the reasonable, rational side: they had come up with a code of rules, and if they failed to live up to that, public opinion, not government censors, would be the final arbiter.

A few months later,
The Affairs of Anatol
was released. Nothing had been cut. Not the extramarital affairs. Not Satan Synne. Not Gloria Swanson’s legs. The closing title read: “All of which goes to prove that there is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it ill behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us.” It was a final raspberry to the reformers, courtesy of Cecil B. DeMille and Adolph Zukor.

And of course it was a gigantic hit. Just as Zukor knew it would be.

W. D. McGuire, head of the National Board of Review, was furious.
“If [a producer] cannot apply the fourteen points to his own product,” he wrote to Zukor, “then he is incapable of enforcing them on his competitor’s product.”

Precisely.

Self-censorship was a ruse, a marketing ploy. Lasky might have intended to apply his fourteen points, but Zukor had merely used them to disarm Crafts, to force the agitators to disperse. It was a temporary solution—the moralists were already regrouping—and Zukor knew it. But he believed they were fighting a losing battle.

What Zukor was counting on was the fundamental American belief in free speech. The previous year, D. W. Griffith had argued against a censorship bill in Virginia, calling it
“un-American, dangerous, misguided, senseless, unjust, artless, unlawful, needless, intolerant.” Virginia legislators had promptly voted the bill down. That, Zukor believed, was the American way. The America he loved, the land of the free that had called to him when he was a poor clerk in Hungary, was not a place that stifled free expression or inhibited free enterprise. That was what made America great, and that was what Zukor was counting on now.

Let the bluenoses make noise about government regulation, Zukor thought. They’d win a few battles. But not the war.

It was a gamble. But Zukor had been gambling his entire life.

On the night of May 1, a twenty-nine-year-old bootlegger and ex-con named Edward Coates snuck through the woods with a companion toward Adolph Zukor’s country house. They’d heard about the treasures inside—especially the alcohol in the basement. Coates was wearing an army pistol and a belt sagging with extra cartridges. Prying open the lock on the front door, he stepped inside—and Zukor’s trap gun fired on cue, hitting him in the stomach.

The two thieves ran. Alerted by the sound of gunfire, Patrick Murphy, the caretaker, took off in pursuit. Coates was losing a lot of blood. His companion got away, but Coates dropped facedown into the dirt. Murphy found him dead a short time later.

Zukor wasn’t home. In fact, he had left some weeks earlier
on board the SS
Aquitania
, bound for England. He and Lottie traveled first class, mingling with such luminaries as
New York Times
publisher Adolph Ochs, Mr. and Mrs. Jacques Cartier of the jewelry family, and General Cornelius Vanderbilt. It was a long way from steerage.

Convinced his American empire was safe for the moment, Zukor was sailing to conquer new worlds: England, France, Belgium, Germany.

But in Boston, a different sort of foe had emerged, an unexpected adversary who had discovered Zukor’s darkest secret. And no chicanery or trap guns could stop this aggressor in his tracks.

“Let’s go up,” said Edward Sands, “and see who slept with the old man last night.”

William Desmond Taylor’s plump, red-cheeked valet was speaking to Manley Tiffany, the director’s new chauffeur, whom everyone called “Earl.” The two of them made an odd-looking pair. Sands was short, stout, and fair. Tiffany was tall, slender, and dark. But they shared a penchant for mischief. Tiffany’s predecessor, Harry Fellows, had been straight-up and trustworthy—so much so that Mr. Taylor had hired him to be his assistant at the studio. Sands wasn’t unhappy that Fellows was gone and Earl Tiffany had taken his place. He told the new chauffeur to call him “Jazz.” All his friends did.

Up the short flight of stairs Jazz and Earl crept toward Taylor’s bedroom. Sands was distinctly bowlegged, so his walk was a little comical.

For months, whenever the director wasn’t home, Sands had been snooping around the Alvarado Court apartment. Now he showed Tiffany the interesting things he’d uncovered:

A douche bag.

Some suppositories.

And a pink silk nightshirt of some kind.

It was a big, boxy thing, not very feminine in appearance, but Sands assumed it must have belonged to a woman. It was pink, after all. Others would call the garment “flesh-colored,” but to Sands it was pink. And what man would wear a pink nightshirt? It had to be a woman, the valet believed.

To find out which woman, Sands had an idea. By folding the garment
“in a trick manner,” he told Tiffany they’d be able to discern if it had been worn the next time they looked.

Not long afterward, Sands and Tiffany snuck up to Taylor’s room again. And eureka! The trick had worked. The garment was folded differently from how they had left it. “The old man” was clearly having sex with some woman! Or at least some woman was spending the night, snuck in after Sands had gone to bed.

But who? Sands “paid particular attention to the visitors to the Taylor home . . . and drew his own conclusion,” according to a later report.
The valet told Tiffany he suspected one of three women: Neva Gerber, Mabel Normand, or Mary Miles Minter.