Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (39 page)

Out there in the quietude, the man entombed in Hollywood Memorial Cemetery was never far from Mary’s thoughts. Her diary was filled with her musings of their great, tragic love.
“I’ve stood in the stillness of the night with the blazing stars overhead listening for him,” Mary wrote. “He is out there, beyond. Our love is as a white hot star that has met the heavens with its glory.”

To her fellow cast members, she evinced no embarrassment over the scandal. Indeed, seeing her letters published in the
Examiner
had seemed to comfort her, to keep her love alive.
“Many of those letters were written two years before he died,” Mary said in wonder. “And he kept them.” The thought lodged itself in her brain. He kept them. “Surely he must have loved me deeply, sincerely,” Mary concluded, “to have kept them for so long.”

Under the big western moon, Mary’s new friends may well have nodded in agreement.

The company was a curious lot. They weren’t the usual faces who populated the supporting casts of Paramount films. Viora Daniel’s last work, like Gibby’s, had been at the Christie studio. Leonard Clapham was a neighbor of Gibby’s from Beachwood Drive, a friend of Don Osborn’s who, until now, had appeared mostly in low-budget fare for Universal. And how delighted Gibby was to have been hired for a picture at the biggest studio in Hollywood.

The status-conscious Mrs. Shelby, however, shuddered at these down-market players. She, like everyone else, wondered why Patricia Palmer, with all her troubled history, had been given a contract by Mr. Lasky and Mr. Zukor, who were usually far more discriminating.

Gibby, of course, was ecstatic.

At long last, her name was appearing under the Paramount banner—the most glamorous brand in Tinseltown. And just in time, too, since her plan to make her own pictures had been temporarily put on hold. She’d broken her contract with James Calnay after discovering he was an embezzler;
later that year a warrant would be issued for his arrest, and he’d eventually serve time in Leavenworth prison for fraud. But Gibby didn’t despair. Even as she went searching for a new producing partner, she had been given the chance to costar in a Paramount film, which would certainly keep the cash flowing and raise her profile and prestige.

How good her life had suddenly become. Patricia Palmer—a Paramount star!

No one in Hollywood could quite comprehend it.

Least of all Charlotte Shelby.

As Mary fell deeper under the influence of her costars, her mother’s worries deepened. The daily harassments of reporters and investigators that had plagued them both after Taylor’s murder had finally abated, and Shelby was thankful for that. But she was also aware that the nightmare could come back. One reckless moment, and everything could come crashing in on them. The police would return, asking more questions. That fear gnawed at Shelby.

The sooner they got home from Wyoming, the better.

On August 15 Maigne called his final cut, and the company prepared to return to Los Angeles.
They boarded the Oregon Short Line Railroad in Jackson.

At Victor, Idaho, the train stopped momentarily. Mary, Gibby, and some others decided to take advantage of the warm afternoon and gathered outside on the open platform of their special Pullman car. Not far away, a switch engine was backing up. Thinking he had plenty of room to turn around, the driver was traveling about fifteen miles an hour. Looking the other way, Mary, Gibby, and the others never saw the engine coming. But they certainly heard and felt it.

In an awful scrape of metal against metal, the engine rammed into their car. Gibby was flung onto her back. Mary was thrown into a glass window. The pretty little actress threw her arms up to cover her face, instinctively protecting her most valuable asset. But her arms were studded with shards of glass and dripping with blood.

Since there were no doctors in Victor, the train sped on to the town of Ashton, forty-three miles away. There, shocked and bleeding, Mary and the others were treated by a railroad physician. But Mary’s wounds were too deep for the makeshift operating room in the little dirt-road town. So on for another seven hours the train chugged, reaching Pocatello around ten at night. Mary was rushed to the hospital and given fourteen stitches.

Finally, at midnight, the company set off for home.

The next morning, Mary was all smiles. “These things are bound to happen,” she gamely told a reporter who came on board during a stopover in Salt Lake City. While Gibby and the others were resting from their injuries, Mary held forth at the breakfast table, devouring her catsup on toast. “I will continue on with my work,” she said. “Fourteen stitches will not stop me.”

If Charlotte Shelby, banished to her berth, had been eavesdropping, she might have wondered just what would.

As the car he was riding in reached the top of Cahuenga Boulevard, Will Hays couldn’t quite believe his eyes.

Thirty thousand people filled the newly built Hollywood Bowl, cheering for him and shouting his name. White flowers fell from a battalion of passing airplanes like snowflakes in July. The boom of a cannon announced Hays’s arrival.

All of this, for him.

Not for some political candidate whose campaign he was managing. Not for some statesman or movie star. Him. Little bat-eared, buck-toothed Will Hays, who’d never turned any heads. Him. They were cheering for him.

Hays stepped out of the car. The Bowl’s small wooden stage was surrounded by a smattering of benches that were filled with movie stars and studio executives: Gloria Swanson, the Talmadge sisters, Joe Schenck. Wallace Reid was there, too, probably strung out on morphine, which might have helped make the blazing sun tolerable.

The vast majority of the throng, however, stood on tiptoe throughout the vast, dusty amphitheater, trying to get a glimpse of the stage. For an hour and a half they’d sweltered there, though many had stood even longer in line outside the Bowl, just to make sure they got in to see the man the newspapers were calling
“the Caesar of the Cinema.”

Hays’s handlers hustled him up the back stairs of the stage. “Slipping almost unnoticed by the crowd,” one observer recounted, “Hays’ sudden appearance immediately in front of the immense gathering, together with his friendly gestures of welcome, acted as a signal for the turning loose of all the noise that could be obtained from human lungs.”

Hays was overcome.

He’d been in Hollywood now for six days, arriving late on the California Limited on July 23. Ever since, he’d been meeting with industry officials and touring the studios—starting with Famous Players, of course, but hitting them all, from Universal City to Culver City, from big to small, just to show he played no favorites.
From the roof of every studio flapped banners proclaiming W
ELCOME
W
ILL
H
AYS
. Nearly every theater was festooned in red, white, and blue bunting. S
UPREME
F
ILM
D
ICTATOR
H
ERE TO
S
EE AND
L
EARN
, read the
Los Angeles Times
headline. Tinseltown was giving Hays the kind of rush usually reserved for European royalty.

But the “supreme dictator” wasn’t really so supreme. That had become all too clear to Hays. In the weeks before his trip, he had allowed Adolph Zukor to dictate all his plans.
“I wish you would let me have your ideas about my going to California,” Hays had written to Zukor. Requests for speeches and visits were coming in, but before he agreed to anything, he solicited Zukor’s “real judgment” on each invitation.

And what Zukor arranged for Hays was a visit that was showy and symbolic. No meetings of any substance, just propaganda and public relations. Hollywood was heralding the arrival of its savior. Hays was there to meet and greet, to win hearts and minds. Now, at the end of the week, he’d shaken so many hands that he had to send out for arnica, a homeopathic remedy, for his sore arm. He gave no interviews to hard-core journalists, but he did sit down with the beautiful actress Helen Ferguson, who wrote a stirring piece about him for the
Los Angeles Times
.
“Unquenchable enthusiasm shone from his keen, kind eyes,” Ferguson declared, “when I expressed the thought that upon the screen rested the task of bringing into closer understanding the antagonistic nations . . . and of unifying men.”

Forget just hearts and minds: he was there to win over people’s souls. Over the past week, Hays’s role was marketed to the public as spiritually uplifting, even quasi divine. Every action the film czar took during his week in Hollywood highlighted his messianic mission, from the banners waving from roofs and street posts to the assemblage of the multitudes at the Hollywood Bowl. During his tour of the studios, some workers literally dropped to their knees before him. The symbolism was just what Zukor and the other film chiefs wanted.

After all the troubles the industry had faced the last few years, the world was awaiting a verdict on the future of Hollywood from its appointed savior. Hays was prepared to give it to them.

At one studio, he watched the filming of a tender scene from an upcoming melodrama: an old woman on her deathbed bidding good-bye to a grandchild. Stepping outside with tears in his eyes, Hays was besieged by reporters wanting to know what he thought of “America’s Sodom.” His hands gesturing wildly as usual, the film czar insisted he’d seen nothing but clean pictures being produced in Hollywood, and every person he’d met in the film colony had been decent and upstanding.
“For the life of me,” Hays declared, “I cannot see the horrors of Hollywood.”

That sentence alone was worth the price of the trip. In fact, it summed up the whole point of why he’d come. For all the platitudes about the movies’ great potential and the un-American dangers of censorship that Hays had delivered at various gatherings since he’d been on the coast, all he’d really needed to say was that one simple sentence.

“I cannot see the horrors of Hollywood.”

He had to hope that those who needed to hear it were listening.

The cheers for him at the Hollywood Bowl went on for a full fifteen minutes.

Then the pumped-up
“little Napoleon of the Movies,” as one newspaper described him, shouted out to his followers. “Is Metro here? Is Lasky here?” On he went, calling out the names of more than a dozen studios. In turn, delegations from each cheered back at him wildly. Famous Players–Lasky, with seven hundred employees in attendance, was the loudest.

“Come on, let’s go!” Hays whooped, before delivering his usual pep-rally speech about all “the wonderful things planned for the pictures,” with even more adrenaline than usual.

How good it was to be there, in the California sun, surrounded by people cheering for him. How good it was to be out of Washington, which had exploded in partisan warfare now that the Harding administration was caught up in a bribery scandal over leasing naval petroleum reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming. That kind of crooked dealing and backstabbing was exactly why Hays had wanted out of politics.

He’d found the same roguery in Hollywood. He’d known his new job would have its share of pressures, but he’d had no idea how vicious it could get. The Arbuckle ban still weighed heavily on Hays’s conscience.

But everything was politics. For the past five months, he’d been cutting deals and pulling strings for his new masters much as he had his old. In May Hays had earned the gratitude of the industry by preventing another scandal just as the Arbuckle and Taylor headlines were fading away. Ed Roberts, a fan magazine editor, had published an eighty-page booklet, available by mail order, called
The Sins of Hollywood
. Behind a cover featuring a horned, tailed, and cloven-hoofed Satan cranking a motion picture camera, Roberts breathlessly exposed dope parties, orgies, and various other lewd goings-on in the film colony. No names were used, but the aliases were easily punctured: the cocaine-snorting, morphine-injecting “Walter” was clearly Wallace Reid; the party-throwing “Rostrand” was obviously Roscoe Arbuckle; and the battling couple “Jack” and “Molly” were plainly Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand. The booklet was selling briskly.

This couldn’t go on. In the hands of the church ladies, such a booklet could be lethal. But how to stop it?

Hays had the answer. He picked up the phone and called deputy US Attorney Mark L. Herron, who’d been
“an active young Republican” during Hays’s tenure as party chairman. Herron’s appointment to the state Republican committee had been made with Hays’s approval, and Hays had likely also recommended him when Attorney General Daugherty appointed him to the state attorney’s office in March 1921. So Herron owed Hays. Whatever the new film czar needed, Herron was only too glad to oblige.

Accordingly, within days,
The Sins of Hollywood
was declared obscene and its distribution by mail banned on order of Mark Herron. The order was enforced by Los Angeles postal inspector Clark E. Webster, another Republican and a colleague of Hays’s from his time as postmaster general. A warrant was then issued for Roberts’s arrest.

These things didn’t just happen.
The Sins of Hollywood
was obscure enough not to have drawn the unsolicited attention of the authorities. But with Hays’s network of connections, the offensive little booklet quickly disappeared.

As far as Adolph Zukor was concerned, that was why Hays had been hired.

But for all the glory, for all the cheering crowds at the Hollywood Bowl, Hays remained uneasy about being perceived as the producers’ lackey, their attack dog. To last in this position, he needed to establish an autonomous role for himself.

That was why, in the months leading up to his trip west, Hays had been busy putting together a plan. If his plan worked, he would not only end the reformers’ criticisms of the movies, but also guarantee himself a measure of independence from the long arm of Adolph Zukor.

For now, Hays was calling it his Public Relations Committee. His plan required the personal investment of civic, religious, and educational leaders in the MPPDA, in much the same way he’d once enticed outside groups to become involved in the post office. To join his committee, Hays had invited the national leaders of the Chamber of Commerce, the Parent-Teachers Associations, the Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the YMCA, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Federation of Labor, the National Catholic Welfare Council, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ, the American Legion, the Salvation Army, the Jewish Welfare Board, and dozens of others that, to his mind, represented
a cross-section of decent, law-abiding America.