Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (37 page)

Where Mrs. Shelby had been brusque and defensive, Mrs. Miles was just the opposite—sweet and cooperative. King asked if she recalled the night Taylor was shot. Her granddaughter, Mary, had already revealed that Mrs. Shelby was not with the family that night. Did Mrs. Miles know where her daughter had been?

The old woman gave it some thought. It was true, she said, that Shelby had not been with them. She’d been visiting friends, Mrs. Miles said, and got back to the house on New Hampshire Avenue around nine o’clock. At least, that was what Mrs. Shelby had told her.

Who were these friends that Shelby had been visiting, the detectives wanted to know, and could they offer an alibi for her whereabouts that night?

Mrs. Miles wasn’t sure. And of course Mrs. Shelby wasn’t talking.

Just what was the lady trying to hide, King wanted to know.

Even more critically, why was the DA helping her to hide it?

At some point after the detectives’ visit, old Mrs. Miles, like her daughter, embarked on a cross-country trip.

She was heading back to Louisiana, at least temporarily. It was a long train ride for a frail seventy-year-old woman, traveling alone, steaming through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Mrs. Miles claimed her trip had to do with settling family estates, but it actually had more to do with a certain item that was concealed deep down inside her luggage, something that was best not to have lying around if those pesky detectives ever returned with search warrants.

Arriving in New Orleans, Mrs. Miles transferred to another train that took her nearly three hundred more miles, up to the northeast corner of the state. Debarking at Bastrop, where the family still owned a plantation, the old woman trudged across the muddy grounds—a small, determined figure in a black dress and bonnet. Finally Mrs. Miles came to a stop at the edge of a swampy bayou. She rummaged through her bag. She withdrew a pistol.

Charlotte Shelby’s .38.

The sooner this was out of their lives, the better.

Mrs. Miles flung the filthy thing away from her. The gun splashed down into the bayou. Through her rheumy old eyes, Julia Miles watched as her daughter’s gun disappeared beneath the dark, murky waters.

On April 12, in a San Francisco courtroom, the jurors in the third Arbuckle trial returned to their box just six minutes after they’d adjourned. The defense attorneys smiled tentatively, convinced that the short deliberation meant exoneration for their client. But Arbuckle, scarred by dozens of disappointments over the past seven months, stood there rock-still, a stricken look on his face.

The judge asked if a verdict had been reached. It had.

The foreman stood.

“We, the jury, find Roscoe Arbuckle not guilty.”

The judge had cautioned the courtroom against demonstrating after the verdict, but Arbuckle couldn’t contain his jubilation.
“Every inch of his huge frame radiated happiness,” one observer noted. When the judge banged his final gavel, cheers erupted in the gallery, and Arbuckle blew kisses to everyone.

But a lack of guilt was not all the jurors had found.

“Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle,” they wrote in an extraordinary public statement passed out to reporters as they left the courthouse. “We feel a great injustice has been done him. The happening at the hotel was an unfortunate affair for which Arbuckle, so the evidence shows, was in no way responsible. We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and women who have sat listening for thirty-one days to the evidence, that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.”

Three thousand miles away, the telephone shattered the stillness in Adolph Zukor’s New York town house. Taking the phone, the mogul learned of Arbuckle’s acquittal.

It was the outcome he had feared most.

Soon afterward, his phone was jangling again. Reporters, wanting a statement. But Zukor was not accommodating. For now, Zukor decided, the best response from the studio was silence.

Back in Hollywood, though, Jesse Lasky didn’t get that memo. Much to his partner’s displeasure, Lasky told the press he was
“very pleased” by the acquittal. It was what “all persons connected with motion pictures had hoped for and believed would happen.”

Not all persons. Late into the night, Zukor was on the phone with his lawyers and financial advisers, trying to determine his next step. As dawn finally arrived, the consensus was to proceed with caution.

Later that morning, Zukor finally issued a statement. Within the next thirty days, he said, Famous Players would release one of the Arbuckle pictures that they’d been holding back. It would be an experiment, Zukor explained,
“for the purpose of gauging public sentiment.” If the picture did well, the studio would release others. “We will not force the pictures,” Zukor added, mindful of the accusations he knew were coming, “but will supply them if the public demand exists.” Supply and demand. The American way. Who could object to that?

But Zukor knew as well as anyone that reason wasn’t what moved the industry’s critics.

On the announcement that Famous Players would release
Gasoline Gus
, the company’s stock surged to nearly $4 a share. That was encouraging, but Zukor knew the truth: he was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. If audiences stayed away from Arbuckle’s pictures, as the moralists predicted, he’d never make back his investment. But if audiences turned out in droves, his problems might be even worse. As the
Evening Telegraph
in Alton, Illinois, explained the next morning,
“If [audiences] flock to see [Arbuckle’s pictures], then it may be inferred . . . that stars may go on living the life of a tomcat, regardless of the moral laws of God and man.” Decent people, the editorial argued, could only hope that the new Arbuckle releases lost money. “If these motion picture stars learn that they are to lose their income by continuing to lead such immoral lives as they do, they might cease to occupy so much space in the reports of criminal and scandalous proceedings in the newspapers.”

But what if the opposite lesson was learned?

Well before ten o’clock in the morning on Saturday, April 15—Holy Saturday, the day before Easter—lines began forming outside the Garrick Theatre in Los Angeles, stretching all the way down Broadway to the corner of Eighth Street and beyond. Men and women laughed and joked. Children ran about excitedly, impatient to see the picture. The marquee on the theater read F
ATTY
A
RBUCKLE IN
G
ASOLINE
G
US
. Newspaper advertisements bannered F
ATTY
I
S
B
ACK
! and promised continuous screenings of
Gasoline Gus
from ten a.m. to eleven p.m.

“If the comedian had arranged a professional comeback himself,” Grace Kingsley wrote in the
Los Angeles Times
, “he couldn’t have stage-maneuvered the job as Fate did it for him.” The Garrick was filled with
“the fans who have waited all this time for another booming laugh, such as only Fatty can give them,” Kingsley wrote. “They cheered his first appearance on the screen, and applauded when the picture was finished, and laughed in between.” The Garrick did a bang-up business all day long, and the same numbers crowded in the next day, even though it was Easter Sunday.

The crowds that filled the Garrick to capacity—on the holiest days of the Christian calendar!—belied the moralists’ vision of America. So did the little children who met Arbuckle at the train station with their parents, throwing their arms around his neck. The welcome Arbuckle received debunked the claim that the public would rise against him, that a majority of Americans were repulsed by the permissive, cosmopolitan, secular lifestyle Hollywood both presented and represented. If America had ever been the country the moralists described, it wasn’t anymore. A world war and the changes it brought to society had seen to that.

In Chicago, the censor board took a new, progressive stand, announcing that Fatty was welcome once again on the city’s screens. Films were to be judged on their individual merits, the board said,
“without any reference to the private life of the actors.” And while it was no surprise that
Gasoline Gus
would attract capacity crowds in big cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, Paramount exchanges were getting enthusiastic responses from all around the country. In the little city of Washington, Indiana, the
Liberty Theatre polled its audiences that weekend—and the vote was 1,066 to 140 in favor of Arbuckle. From Great Falls, Montana, came an appeal from a theater manager asking for
“the privilege to be the first [in the region] to show an Arbuckle photoplay.” One Paramount agent noted ironically, “Practically all the same managers who ordered the films cancelled out of their theaters when Arbuckle became involved in the Rappé case are the first to ask that his productions be reissued now.”

Buoyed by such support, Famous Players scheduled a gala New York premiere for
Gasoline Gus
at the Rivoli Theatre on April 23.

But the moralists weren’t conceding defeat quite yet.

“The public knows full well,” wrote the
Kokomo Tribune
, in Will Hays’s home state of Indiana, “even if Arbuckle has been acquitted, that the party he gave was an affair of disgusting debauchery and unspeakable licentiousness.” That alone, the moralists believed, should be enough to bar him from the screen.

In an open letter to Will Hays, the Lord’s Day Alliance, Wilbur Crafts’s organization, implored the new head of the MPPDA to use his authority
“to intervene and prevent the outrage to the moral sensitivities to the citizens of this country threatened by the proposal to again exhibit Arbuckle films.” And “in case it should be that the exercise of such authority” was not within the bounds of Hays’s power at the MPPDA (it wasn’t), then the group urged him to use his “great personal influence for the accomplishment of this end.”

Others weren’t willing to wait for Hays. In Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the local paper pressured its common council to ban Arbuckle films.
In Hartford, Connecticut, after calls from religious organizations, theater owners pledged that Fatty’s face would never again be seen on their screens. This included the Majestic Theatre, a Paramount licensee. Zukor had meant it when he said he wouldn’t “force” the pictures on his theaters; he knew what kind of backlash that would cause. For practically the first time in his career, he ceded a shred of authority to his exhibitors: Arbuckle pictures would be released to Paramount theaters, but no one would be compelled to accept them.

That was still not good enough for Zukor’s antagonists.

The Lord’s Day Alliance threatened to protest outside theaters that dared screen
Gasoline Gus
. Petitions from conservative religious groups piled up on Hays’s desk, overwhelming his first weeks on the job. To get the results they wanted,
reformers made sure to stack local theaters whenever public debates over Arbuckle were scheduled; there would be no more of those embarrassing polls if they could help it. In St. Louis, the boos were louder than the applause when one theater asked its patrons whether they ought to show Arbuckle. The powerful Federation of Women’s Clubs sent its members into battle, targeting any theater that presented Arbuckle films. A group of Chicago women disregarded their own censor board and stormed the screen at the Blackstone Theatre when an old Arbuckle two-reeler appeared, forcing the owners to shut down the exhibition.

And in Washington, the Federal Trade Commission took note of just how unmanageable, how unregulated, the film industry had become.

Only days after his “experiment” of releasing Arbuckle’s film, Zukor knew what he had to do. The pushback from the reformers was not going to end. They would mobilize; they would boycott; they would tear films out of projectors if they had to. They would bring down government regulation. The reformers had won.

Even though Zukor had ten thousand contracts with theaters across the country to show
Gasoline Gus
—even though the film was pumping a steady supply of nickels, dimes, and quarters into his coffers, on schedule to recoup the million dollars he had feared lost—he would have to turn off the tap. He had to willingly give up all that income—another first for Zukor’s career.

Arbuckle’s comeback had to be halted. It was the only way. And only one person could make that happen.

On Tuesday, April 18, Will
Hays was summoned to a meeting with Zukor at the Famous Players office, a block and a half down Fifth Avenue. Despite being what wags called the “highest paid executive the avenue knows,” Hays obeyed the order from Zukor and made the trip.

Jesse Lasky and Nicholas Schenck, representing his brother Joe, were also summoned. Once they were all present, Zukor made his wishes clear: with all the agitation and threats of boycotts, Arbuckle’s films had to be banned.

The men were shocked. But the public wanted Fatty!
Gasoline Gus
was making money!

Zukor silenced the arguments. The industry could not be seen as pandering to the public’s lowest common denominator—the only explanation the moralists could give for the thousands who were flocking to see
Gasoline Gus
and demanding more Arbuckle pictures. That would leave them vulnerable to threats far greater than any temporary loss of income. The headlines about the Taylor murder had only recently died down. If they didn’t move to stop Arbuckle’s comeback, they’d be mired in controversy for months to come—controversy that could only encourage the government to move against them.

Zukor knew what was needed: a statement banishing Arbuckle from the screen. He turned to the new man in the room, the man they’d chosen to protect the industry.

Hays blanched.

This was not why he had been hired. He had frequently insisted that he would not be put in the position “of being a judge of the morals of those who are in the industry.” As a Christian, Hays recoiled at the idea of passing judgment, of casting stones. Arbuckle had been found innocent in a court of law, he argued. Who was Will Hays to second-guess that? The poor soul was also
“well-nigh bankrupt,” Hays had heard. How could he “stand in the man’s way of earning a living in the only business he knew”?