Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (3 page)

Of all the studios, Zukor’s Famous Players–Lasky was the most profitable, with
total assets of $49 million and a net working capital of about $10 million. Once an impoverished orphan from Hungary, Adolph Zukor was now a very rich man.

In that summer of 1920, however, the economic boom that had followed the end of the Great War had been wrenched off course by steel, coal, and railroad strikes. Unemployment was rocketing toward 8 percent. Theater owners were noting declines in their weekly receipts; by the end of the year, they would post a $20 million loss against the previous twelve months. Famous Players felt the pinch particularly hard.
Its stock-market value had just plunged to its lowest point in a year. Adding to the woes was an extraordinarily hot summer, which kept people away from the movies in those days before air-conditioning.
“As a consequence,” the trade paper
Variety
reported, “film renters are reluctant to sign up for next season.”

So it was an extremely inopportune moment to absorb a scandal—like this business with Bobby Harron’s gun.

Zukor was quickly on the phone to find out what was up.
“Mr. Zukor finds out anything just by picking up the phone on his desk and making a single call,” one employee said. No doubt he did just that on the morning he read about Harron’s misfortune.

The shooting, Zukor quickly learned, had been no accident. Depressed after being demoted by his longtime director, D. W. Griffith, Bobby had shot himself in despair.

Foolish actors, indeed. Always so emotional, putting their hearts before their heads. If Zukor could have made movies without them, he would have done so gladly.

Now the industry would have to bury any rumors of attempted suicide. Zukor had to hope that Griffith, one of his chief rivals, was up to the job.

As the film chief well knew, the industry had more to fear than the occasional column of red ink. Scandals like Harron’s were extremely dangerous. They emboldened those civic reformers and church ladies who saw the handiwork of Satan in the silvery shadow plays that flickered across the nation’s screens. Movies glorified sex and sin, these bluenoses charged, and the movie players, with all their affairs and divorces, were agents of the devil. Thanks to the movies, big-city values and the mores of middle America, traditionally kept far apart, were now rubbing up against each other. And the church ladies were going to do something about it.

Five years earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled that motion pictures were not protected by the First Amendment in the same manner as literature and theater. As a result, the country had become infected with a rash of creeping censorship laws. In Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Kansas, as well as in several US cities, censors were busy cutting or banning films they deemed too sexy or subversive. If such laws continued to proliferate—or worse, if federal censorship was implemented—the fortunes Zukor and the other film chiefs had accumulated over the last decade would be whittled away. Zukor knew it could happen. The Eighteenth Amendment had just been passed, forbidding the sale of alcohol throughout the United States—and the campaign that led to Prohibition had been very similar to the one currently being waged against the movies, and often by the very same people.

Yet Zukor could be thankful for one thing: none of
his
employees was causing any trouble—at least not yet. In fact, he could think of only one person at Famous Players–Lasky whose private antics might prove troublesome if they ever became known to the public.

Much to his secret chagrin, that person was his great and powerful self.

In the industry Zukor was known as a man of supreme self-control, a model of discipline and propriety. But three years earlier, the man they called Creepy had revealed another side of himself.

In the parlor of a house in Woburn, Massachusetts, a buxom young woman tickled the ivories of an upright piano. Zukor settled back into a comfortable chair and lit himself a cigar. A thick, low cloud of gray smoke hung over the room. With Prohibition still two years in the future, the champagne flowed freely. The assembled men, all executives of Paramount, the distribution arm of Famous Players, were in high spirits, laughing and egging each other on.

They all had wives. Zukor had been married for twenty years. There was a time when his wife, Lottie, had entranced him with her
“beautiful dark eyes and exquisite skin.” Indeed, as a young man, struggling to find his fortune, the young Adolph had courted Lottie with all the passion and determination he now brought to his movie operations. Zukor still adored his wife—no one understood him better—but these days she was fat and fussy, forever bustling off with gaggles of clucking society ladies her husband despised. So it was no surprise that Zukor accepted the invitation of Brownie Kennedy, a Boston madam, to visit her Woburn home, dubbed Mishawum Manor, with a group of his colleagues.

“The revelries began at once,” said one report of the evening, “and continued until long after daybreak. Choice drinks were served throughout the night and many of the girls danced in scant costume.” The young women had been recruited from Brownie’s well-thumbed red-leather phone book, and the madam “exacted heavy fees” from the movie men in exchange for introductions. The rate depended “largely upon the ability of the guest to pay, with $100 being the average.” The women themselves received only a fifth of that.

But they certainly earned their pay. “More than a score of girls, most of them in their teens, and all pretty, kissed every man in the party,” the report continued.

With those fierce, staring eyes of his, Zukor zeroed in on one of the prettiest of Brownie’s girls. Her name was Eva Lord. Taking her hand, he led the young woman upstairs to a private room, where they might get to know each other. There they spent the remainder of the night.

When the sun finally rose, Hiram Abrams, the president of Paramount, who had arranged the party, paid Brownie $1,050 for fifty-two bottles of champagne and “other services.” Sated, tired, and happy, the film executives returned to New York.

That would have been the end of it. But two months later a letter arrived from a
Mr. Fred Lord, a garage mechanic from Worcester, Massachusetts. He said his wife’s name was Eva, and he charged that Zukor had “alienated her affections.”

The elevator boy at the Famous Players office was kept extra busy that night, running nearly a dozen lawyers up to Mr. Zukor’s office. The men all looked stricken.

The lawyers gave Zukor the bad news. Other complainants had come forward, including the father of a seventeen-year-old girl. Other Famous Players execs were also being charged, including Abrams and Zukor’s partner, Jesse Lasky. Boston district attorney Nathan A. Tufts had all of their names.

Zukor’s long eyes narrowed as he took charge. He ordered a battery of lawyers to hop on the next train to Boston to persuade the DA to drop the charges.

Tufts proved receptive. His manner as slick as the pomade in his hair, the DA assured Zukor’s lawyers he had “no wish to prosecute innocent men.” If the complainants could be “gotten off his back,” Tufts insinuated, there would be no prosecution.

Zukor knew extortion when he saw it. But he was desperate. He’d come so far, so fast, gained so much, and he still had a very long way to go. He couldn’t allow this stupid little indiscretion to derail all his plans.

Back in New York, one of Zukor’s lawyers argued that they should refuse to pay a cent. The complainants had no chance of winning a conviction, he said. But Zukor wouldn’t take the risk. He ordered that Tufts be sent his money. A hundred grand sufficed to placate everyone involved, from the aggrieved husbands and fathers to Tufts and his lawyers.

Zukor took one other action. He fired Hiram Abrams as president of Paramount. Abrams had gotten him into the mess by arranging the party, so he had to go. No matter that Abrams had built Paramount into a world-class distributor, he was now a liability. In business, as often in life, Zukor had no room for sentiment.

And so the lesson became clear. Scandal had to be contained at all costs.

When Robert Harron died from his gunshot wound on September 5, Zukor was surely pleased with the way his competitors handled the story. The official spin from D. W. Griffith’s publicists was that Bobby had bought the revolver from a homeless man as a kind gesture, and that, as a Catholic, he would never have committed suicide. Bobby’s death became a sympathetic tragedy. Had the young man lived, of course—and perhaps been led out in handcuffs in front of a judge on felony charges—the newspaper coverage wouldn’t have been so affectionate. For the moment, they all breathed a little easier.

But there would be other scandals, Zukor knew. Perhaps even his own.

If the church ladies ever got wind of Brownie Kennedy, Zukor would have holy hell to pay. The fact that so many of the movie bosses were Jewish already made them suspect in the minds of the reformers, most of whom were evangelical Protestants. The party in Boston—and the money paid to cover it up—would simply confirm the belief that the movies and the men who made them were debauched and dismissive of Christian values.

In their attempts to slow down, and hopefully reverse, the march toward censorship, Zukor and his rivals had banded together to create a pair of organizations. The National Board of Review scrutinized every film of every major movie studio before its release, suggesting changes to appease local censorship boards. The National Association of the Motion Picture Industry lobbied for legislation beneficial to the industry and against censorship. But what they really needed, Zukor knew, was a human face, a personal first line of defense.

As its champion, the industry required an articulate spokesman who could put forward an intelligent argument against censorship. The ideal candidate would be conversant in all aspects of picture-making and express as much passion in his calls for artistic freedom as he did for the movies’ moral responsibilities—a strategy to disarm the industry’s critics.

And one more thing: he had to be from Los Angeles. While the studios’ headquarters were all still based in New York, it was Los Angeles, and particularly the subdivision of the city called Hollywood, that was fast becoming the industry’s center of production. An effective spokesman for the industry couldn’t be drawn from the smoke-filled boardrooms of New York. He had to toil in the California sun, socialize with Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, and play a vital part in that place beneath the palms that was already becoming mythical to millions of people around the world.

Not surprisingly, Zukor had such a man on his payroll.

His name was William Desmond Taylor.

The day after Bobby Harron’s funeral, Zukor once more glanced down at the newspapers on his desk. There, in headlines bolder than ever, exploded the industry’s next scandal—the one Zukor had known was coming, but couldn’t have foreseen arriving quite this quickly.

In Paris, the glamorous, top-ranked star Olive Thomas had swallowed poison after a night of carousing in the nightclubs of Montmartre. The church ladies were already grumbling.

Zukor’s man Taylor would have his work cut out for him.

Like a tsunami wave, the rising sun burst over the eastern wall of the San Gabriel Mountains and flooded the verdant plain of the Los Angeles Basin. Golden sunshine spilled across roads and between buildings and through the neat, orderly rows of orange and lemon groves. It rushed in to fill up the natural amphitheater known as the Daisy Dell—soon to become the Hollywood Bowl—and bounced off the shiny aluminum roofs of the movie factories. It warmed up swimming pools, opened the petals of poppies, tanned the faces of highway workers, and chased the prostitutes and drug dealers away from the street corners of downtown. Finally the sun’s rays reached land’s end, dissolving in a milky haze over the Pacific Ocean.

Just twenty years earlier, this bustling little city had been mostly farmland and alfalfa lots, studded here and there with oil wells in constant genuflection to the earth. With the arrival of the first film producers in the winter of 1907, that began to change. Before the invention of high-intensity arc lamps, movies had to be shot in the open air or in studios with retractable roofs. So the moviemakers had come west in search of light during the dreary eastern winter months. Eventually many of them settled down, opening storefront studios in the land of the eternal sun.

The influx of movie people nearly doubled the population of Los Angeles between 1910 and 1920, from 319,198 to 576,673, making the city, practically overnight, the tenth largest in the nation. In 1910
the census had counted 399 actors and 216 actresses; now there were 2,289 and 1,311, respectively. Directors, scenarists, cameramen, electricians, carpenters, painters, bookkeepers, publicists, managers, and other movie workers numbered thousands more. Although some pictures were still made in New York, more and more producers were basing their studios in Los Angeles. Practically obscure a decade before, the city now found itself the focal point of the world’s obsession with the movies.

“The sudden and grandiose rise of the motion picture,” journalist R. L. Duffus wrote, had brought about an unprecedented cultural transformation. Thirty-five million Americans—one out of three—went to the movies at least once a week. The “flickers” were “transforming the dress, the manners, the thoughts and the emotions of millions of people,” Duffus observed. Fashions, trends, and ideas now flashed across the globe in the twinkling of an eye. “There has never been anything like this before in the history of the human race,” Duffus noted. “The motion picture is the school, the diversion, perhaps even
the church of the future.”

And every day young men and women from small towns all across America stepped off trains and buses into the bewilderness of Hollywood, hoping they might become gods.

Folks back home had told them they were good-looking enough to be in the movies, and so, like those first filmmakers, these beautiful young people had headed west. In 1920, beauty was all you needed to make it in Hollywood. It didn’t matter what your voice sounded like, or if you could sing or even act. The camera could take care of that. And so the city was overrun with thousands of beautiful people. They were everywhere: on the trolleys, in the drugstores, outside the studios angling for jobs as extras.