Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (17 page)

There was no time for greetings.
Otello
has no overture. The curtain rose abruptly, almost violently. There on the stage, as Schallert would describe, was a scene “breathtaking in its action and pictorial realism.” Otello was returning on his ship to Cyprus after a long voyage. Many in the audience gasped at “the flare and flash of real stage lightning,” while Charles Marshall, playing the title character, overwhelmed everyone with “the fullness of his voice.”

At that moment—in the midst of one of the great scenes of the opera stage, as the stink of magnesium wafted over the crowd from the theatrical lightning—Mary turned again to glare at Taylor and Hopkins. Her blue eyes flashed in the dark.

“So this is what is going on!” she hissed.

She spun back around, curls swinging.

Hopkins felt Taylor tense. For the rest of the act, the young man wasn’t able to concentrate. He suspected his companion suffered similarly.

At intermission, even before the lights were fully up, Taylor bolted from his seat. He told Hopkins he had a migraine and fled from the auditorium. Hopkins followed. At the car, Taylor shook his sleeping chauffeur awake and climbed into the backseat of the McFarlan. Without even a good-bye, he left Hopkins standing there alone, trembling.

After a few moments, the young designer returned to his seat, burning with rage. The “little ninny” in front of him had ruined his special night with the man he loved. For the rest of the opera, Hopkins was deaf and blind to the sound and spectacle thundering from the stage. “All that went through my mind,” he would remember, “was an overwhelming urge to smash my fists down on top of Mary’s golden head.”

Adolph Zukor slowly exhaled the smoke from his cigar, filling his office with the fragrance of spicy cedarwood. No, he said, his voice soft yet firm. He would not sell the Putnam Building.

In front of him, the accountants from the firm of Dominick & Dominick shifted uncomfortably in their seats as their most important client snubbed their advice. Zukor told them he didn’t care if a sale of the Putnam property would pay off Famous Players’ debt. Didn’t they understand? This was going to be his skyscraper. His monument. No way was he giving it up.

Marcus Loew had a skyscraper. Zukor wanted one too.

The accountants again tried to make their case, but Zukor was still resistant. Just back from Europe, he was getting bombarded from all sides.
On his desk lay a financial statement that was not at all encouraging. Every week, cash on hand was plummeting. Famous Players had gone from about $2.3 million at the start of April to about $2.1 million at the end of the month, and that figure was expected to keep dropping. To offset this decline, borrowing from banks had risen from about $3.1 million to about $3.3 million in the same period of time, while revenues remained stubbornly static and sluggish, totaling only about half a million dollars a week. If something didn’t change soon, the accountants feared prosperity would never return.

Zukor accepted part of the blame. As the recession had subsided, he and Lasky had optimistically increased production. But now the studio was bulging at the seams with unreleased films.
“Motion pictures is the only industry in the world where fortunes can be tied up for months in a few tin cans,” the ever-loyal William Desmond Taylor had told the press, explaining his bosses’ predicament. “The producer pays cash for story, production costs, salaries—everything. He must wait three months, six months, even a year for his returns.”

From Zukor’s point of view, the problem was that too many theaters remained outside his control. If he owned all the theaters in the country—in the world!—he could show whatever films he chose, whenever he liked. Under such conditions, there would be no pileup of cans of unreleased celluloid. There would be no waiting for returns on his investment.

Since that wouldn’t happen soon enough to offset the current crisis, however, Zukor had agreed to make some major production cost cuts. But he adamantly refused to sell the Putnam Building. When his accountants made one last plea for him to change his mind, he cut them off with an icy stare. How myopic could these halfwits be? Didn’t they understand the value of possessing the biggest flagship theater in New York? Especially now, as Marcus Loew’s imperial headquarters was rising into the sky just down the street? Zukor had seen Loew out there at the site, wearing his ridiculous fur coats, blathering loudly and rashly, rubbing shoulders with that execrable Senator Jimmy Walker. How he longed to show them both up.

Zukor hadn’t worked so hard for eighteen years just to turn back now. These accountants had no idea what it meant to work, to plot, to scheme, to take risks. They came from families where the money was as old as the dirt under their Connecticut mansions, their paths worn smooth for them by their fathers and grandfathers. They didn’t understand what it felt like to stand empty and alone, without a family, without a country, on the pier at Castle Garden. They had no clew where Zukor came from or where he was going.

Zukor would have his skyscraper, and it would make Loew’s seem puny by comparison.

He was grateful that Otto Kahn, at least, agreed with him that selling the Putnam Building would be a shortsighted remedy. Divestiture had never been Zukor’s policy. Growth and consolidation was the only way he knew.

It was a riskier strategy, perhaps. But Zukor didn’t fear risks, not when the rewards were so great.

Even if the invaders were already climbing over the walls.

Mrs. Ellen O’Grady, late of the New York Police Department, was weaving a path through the crowded assembly chamber of the state capitol as all around her the buzz of hundreds of conversations echoed into the vaulted ceiling. Mrs. O’Grady was in Albany on a mission. She was preparing to testify before a legislative committee about the evils of the movies.

Censorship was about to come to the state of New York.

Not long ago, with his shrewd deception of Wilbur Crafts, Zukor had brushed off the possibility. But now censorship seemed like a fait accompli, with Governor Nathan Miller’s advocacy and a surprising number of pro-censorship votes in both the senate and the assembly. But still William Brady was there, huffing and puffing, once again promising
“a clean sweep from coast to coast” of all objectionable pictures. “We ask you to hold this measure over until next year,” Brady pleaded with legislators, “in order to give the industry an opportunity to demonstrate that it can handle this situation.”

But Mrs. O’Grady and her cohorts had heard it all before. Lasky’s fourteen points were unenforceable, with objectionable films still showing up every week in theaters all across the state. Mrs. Clarence Waterman, who had stood at Wilbur Crafts’s side at that meeting with those duplicitous movie men not a month before, had taken it upon herself to sit through as many of the devil’s entertainments as she could tolerate, cataloging every sin. She’d brought her list of shame to the state capitol, where she sat stiffly beside Mrs. O’Grady, waiting to testify. The church ladies could see through the spin being promulgated by industry agents like William Desmond Taylor, calling
“sex plays moral lessons.” Mrs. Waterman held in her hands proof that for every “fifty feet of moral film” there were “five thousand feet of immorality.” Let the film chiefs try to wriggle out of these cold hard facts!

The committee chairman banged his gavel and called Mrs. O’Grady to the stand.

“I am fond of motion pictures,” the former policewoman told the packed chamber. “But the industry has passed into the hands of unscrupulous men whose God is Mammon. I could cite you case after case of boys and girls gone wrong because of films. It makes my blood boil. I have been to those places where evil pictures are shown and I have often wished that I were a thousand men so I might tear the films into shreds. These men are not fighting for their art as they tell you. They are fighting because the market is flooded with filth and they would lose money if they could not show it on the screens.”

Suddenly overcome with emotion, Mrs. O’Grady concluded her testimony with the story of an immigrant girl who’d expressed her wish to become an American lady.
“Her idea of such a lady,” Mrs. O’Grady sniffed, “was one who went to cabarets and enjoyed a constant lively time.” Where had she gotten such a perverse idea of womanhood? “From the moving picture shows,” Mrs. O’Grady said with indignation.

There was grumbling from the gallery. Many were fed up with the sanctimony. As Mrs. O’Grady made her way back to her seat, she was harangued with boos. The author Rex Beach, whose novel
The Spoilers
had been made into a major movie hit some years earlier, stomped past her up to the podium to seize the moment and denounce censorship advocates as
“narrow-minded bigots.” That brought more hissing from the gallery, this time from the other side.

But it was all theater. The end result was no longer in doubt. Dr. William Sheafe Chase, canon of Christ Church in Brooklyn, had personally collected thousands of pro-censorship signatures. Now he dropped them dramatically, like a lead weight, on the table in front of the assembly. A few days later the state senate passed a bill setting up a board of censors. Shortly thereafter the assembly did the same, crushing the free-speechers 102 to 38. On May 14, 1921, Governor Miller signed censorship into law for the state of New York.

The film industry had just lost huge revenues from its most important domestic market, and Senator Jimmy Walker lost no time in pointing the finger. It was the movie producers who were to blame, he said. Walker and the exhibitors had proposed a compromise that would have watered down the bill. If the
“matter had been handled properly,” Walker insisted, they wouldn’t have found themselves in this pickle. But since “certain producers” had controlled the negotiations, New York was now stuck with one of the strictest censorship laws in the nation. Everyone knew who Walker was accusing. The National Association of the Moving Picture Industry took its marching orders from Famous Players and its crafty chief.

Zukor loathed Walker more than ever.

But Walker was the devil he knew. There were others he still didn’t know about.

The passage of censorship in New York was a dark day for Zukor. But things were about to get much worse.

In his office in Boston, J. Weston Allen, the brilliant, ambitious attorney general for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, put the finishing touches on his case against District Attorney Nathan Tufts. The charges against Tufts grew out of that memorable party at Mishawum Manor, presided over by the notorious madam Brownie Kennedy. Allen knew that when the details of the report were made public, he would face
“one of the greatest legal battles ever fought in the Commonwealth” as he endeavored to remove Tufts from office.

After three fraught years, the secret Zukor had been hiding was about to explode.

Among other crimes, Allen had incontrovertible evidence that Tufts had engineered the extortion of $100,000 from Adolph Zukor and other Famous Players executives. The attorney general understood that those executives had friends in high places—like the Oval Office—who preferred that no names be brought out in court. But Allen had only so much power over that.

The news broke on May 27, in a flurry of enormous headlines. Tufts, Allen charged, had conspired with certain persons
“to defraud certain men upon a fictitious charge, upon which he threatened to indict them in order to aid [his co-conspirators] with obtaining large sums of money.” For now, the public did not know who these “certain men” were. No clew appeared in any newspaper that the movies were involved at all. But surely, soon after his arrival back into New York, Zukor had received word about what was afoot, likely from his contacts within the Harding administration. At some point he was also formally notified by Allen.

Ruminating in his New York office, smoking eight to ten “very black cigars” a day, the most powerful man in the film industry feared personal ruin. This wasn’t merely the loss of revenues from the state of New York. This could mean losing everything. Zukor had long believed his enemies were out to get him. Now the assault had finally arrived. They were aiming for his heart. It was one thing to be called out by Jimmy Walker for failing to stop censorship—quite another to see his own name join those of Robert Harron, Olive Thomas, and Margaret “Gibby” Gibson in the scandal headlines.

But the worst part was the embarrassment he’d bring to Lottie. His faithful, devoted wife.

How beautiful Lottie had been when they’d first met. Back then, Lottie had been the catch, the prize, not Zukor. Lottie was the pretty niece of the wealthy backer of Zukor’s furrier business; he’d been just another guy trying to make good, a slightly awkward, taciturn fellow, whose Hungarian accent had not yet been sandpapered down. How much Zukor had wanted Lottie to notice him, to gift him with a smile. Instead she’d been distant, too good for him. He decided to win her over. Another gamble—but Zukor never lost.

One day he invited Lottie to come watch him play baseball. Barely out of his teens, the young Adolph looked ludicrous in his ill-fitting, oversize uniform. But he took his ball playing very seriously. Those long eyes of his fixed on the pitch. He swung and—crack!—he hit the ball. His little legs frantically carried him around the bases before sliding home.

In her lacy dress and parasol, Lottie watched. Something about the short, spunky slugger won her over. Not long afterward, Lottie agreed to marry him, and Zukor was the happiest man in the world.

Through all the lean years, Lottie had been at his side. Whenever they’d endured hard times, Lottie had taken charge.
“Well, so we move again,” she’d say. “I’ll find a place. How much can we afford?” Zukor believed he “could never have survived” his early, difficult years without his wife. He’d never have become a success without her by his side.

He trudged home to break the news to Lottie about the impending scandal.

Of all the deals he’d brokered, all the decisions he’d made, and all the actions he’d taken, this was probably the hardest thing Zukor had ever done.