Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (46 page)

Filled with bravado, Lasher leaned over to Gibby. “I’ll bet you a thousand dollars that I can drink more than you,” he said, his words slurry.

Gibby saw her opening. She took Lasher up on his wager. The idiot had no idea how well she could hold her liquor.

Withdrawing her billfold, Gibby wrote Lasher a check for $1,000. Sliding the check across the table, she told the electrician to write her one as well.

Foolishly, Lasher complied.

One of the other women at the table was watching the transaction with shrewd eyes. She leaned in to Gibby and remarked on “the little game she had going.” The woman cautioned her that someone might snatch her check away from Lasher. Gibby told her she didn’t care, because she didn’t have $1,000 in the bank.

But, she suspected, Lasher did.

The electrician from Burbank got drunker, more disoriented. When he wasn’t looking, Gibby reached across the table and poured some “knockout drops” into his drink.

Around midnight, Lasher staggered outside to vomit.

That was Edward Rucker’s chance to slink over to the table. Gibby, cool and collected despite all the alcohol she’d consumed, endorsed Lasher’s check and handed it over to her friend. The woman watching the scheme asked Gibby if she was certain Lasher’s check was good.

Lasher would make sure it was good, Gibby told her. After all, he was a married man, and she wasn’t “stepping out for nothing.”

In the harsh light of the next morning, Lasher sat up in bed with a start. Where was his check? He was panic-stricken. Gibby made a great show of looking everywhere for it, but concluded the check must have been stolen. Maybe one of the other women at the table had taken it, she suggested. Lasher was distraught. They had to get back to Los Angeles right away and stop payment. His wife could not find out about that check!

They zoomed across the border. Lasher tracked down Jim Dallas, the proprietor of the Vernon, who’d taken the check to cash it in Los Angeles after fronting the money to Rucker. When Lasher showed up and told his story, Dallas realized they’d both been snookered.

Incredibly, Lasher wasn’t angry with Gibby, at least not for long. She had a way with men. There were likely tears, kisses, and professions of love. Plus, she admitted, she really, really needed the money for this new film of hers to become a hit, to prove to all those men who were holding the industry hostage that the little people, like herself, could succeed too.

Lasher melted. A couple of days after the incident with Jim Dallas, he gave Gibby $75 to help her buy a new car. Shortly thereafter came another “loan” for $250, then another $800. Gibby was grateful. How generous Lasher was to her.

He’d be even more generous, she knew, if she ever needed to play her ace in the hole and remind him about a little law called the Mann Act.

In the spring of 1923, Gibby was preparing to head up to Oakland to start shooting the 3D picture for Max Miller. It was to be called
A Pair of Hellions
, and her costar would be “Ranger” Bill Miller, who’d also played opposite her in
The Web of the Law
. As both producer and star, Gibby had a lot riding on the film. Lasher’s $800 came in handy. Don Osborn, still flush with Bushnell’s cash, had
also paid her $585 for the equity in the house he was living in. For the first time in her short producing career, Gibby seemed to have everything under control.

But then Lasher’s wife showed up at Gibby’s house and found them together.

Christine Lasher was spitting mad. When Gibby’s mother heard the women screaming, she threatened to have Lasher arrested if he and his wife didn’t beat it. Lasher was incensed:
“The girl’s ma” had always known he was a married man, he said later, and still she had “smiled her consent” when he took Gibby out for the evening.

Lasher went home with his wife. Gibby was out of a sugar daddy, just when she needed one most. Or maybe she wasn’t.

Not long after, Lasher received a call from Don Osborn.

Osborn had a piece of friendly advice: Lasher might consider paying Gibby a “considerable sum of money,” enough that she could share with her mother. Otherwise, Mrs. Gibson was so upset she might just bring charges against him for violating the Mann Act.

Lasher was horrified. Osborn reported back to Gibby that the sucker seemed scared enough to come through with the cash.

At the house on Beachwood Drive, they all laughed at what a sap Lasher was. As bad as John Bushnell! Rich or poor, suckers were all the same. The funding for Gibby’s new movie was practically in the bag.

But one of the locusts was through laughing.

Fred Moore had grown weary of his friends’ con games. A movie extra and vaudeville player, Moore had become disgusted by their cavalier disregard for other people. When he learned they were planning their second shakedown of Bushnell, he knew he needed to do something. How many other patsies were out there, just waiting to get scammed?

The young man penned a letter to Bushnell.

“I am a stranger to you, sir, but by reading this letter you will undoubtedly say that I am a friend worth having,” Moore wrote. He proceeded to expose the entire scheme, revealing Osborn to be both Rose’s “pimp” and her uncle. He advised Bushnell not to call the police just yet. These crooks were dangerous, Moore said, and he feared for his life if they found out he was ratting on them. To be safe, he was using a pseudonym, Earl Frank Dustin, and could only be reached through general delivery.

But if they worked together, Moore assured Bushnell, they could bring Osborn and Rose and the whole lot of them to justice.

One day in early March 1923, District Attorney Woolwine stepped shakily out of the elevator and headed to his office in the Hall of Records. Employees noted how badly he was trembling. The mighty Fightin’ Prosecutor hadn’t been the same since his devastating defeat in the governor’s race. Once Woolwine had seemed indestructible; now he walked down the hallway with a cane. His face was sunken, and he’d lost a great deal of weight.

He called his staff, including Eddie King, into his office.
“I know I am a sick man,” Woolwine admitted to them. “I have been sick for months. I know I need a rest, but I would rather die in office than tender my resignation now.”

That was classic Woolwine. A fighter to the end. But in fact he’d already delegated many of his duties to his chief deputy, Asa Keyes. And Detective Sergeant King, as sorry as he was for his boss’s ill health, could not have been more pleased about that.

If Keyes became district attorney, King felt sure, he could revive the Taylor investigation. He’d be allowed to pursue leads that Woolwine had discouraged or outright forbidden.

In the past five months, the only work King had been able to log on the case had been interviewing “cranks,” as he called them. The American public remained so fascinated by the Taylor murder that many craved some kind of personal connection to it. Dozens had fantasized their way into the case, parading into King’s office and sitting in front of him with sad, vacant eyes, claiming they’d witnessed the murder or even pulled the trigger themselves. Some even claimed they’d seen Taylor very much alive, strolling down the street. A year after the murder, King’s list of cranks exceeded a thousand names.

Meanwhile, he’d been unable to follow up with the two people who mattered.

Mary Miles Minter’s dismissal from Famous Players–Lasky had raised suspicions. True, her pictures hadn’t lived up to their hype, but might there have been something more nefarious going on?
“People on the inside of the game” were insisting that Mary had not “voluntarily given up fame and fortune,” as the studio claimed. She’d been driven off the screen, they declared, “by a force which held her in thrall—a force which she had offended in some unknown way.”

King was convinced that the higher-ups at Famous Players–Lasky knew the identity of Taylor’s killer. Had the studio decided to wash its hands of Mary because of her involvement in the crime? Did the papers that Charles Eyton had stolen from the crime scene implicate Charlotte Shelby? To King, it all made perfect sense.

Shelby had the motive. She had the weapon. And she had no alibi for the night of the murder: no one could positively state where she had been at 7:45 in the evening on February 1.

Charlotte Shelby, dressed as a man. That had to be the answer. Maybe she was wearing boots that made her seem taller. And maybe the shadow of her cap made her face look rough and her nose more prominent to Faith MacLean.

Such a theory might be difficult to prove. But at least Asa Keyes would let King try.

On June 6 Woolwine, admitting that his once-fabled
“wrought-iron constitution” had failed him and that he was suffering from stomach and intestinal cancer, submitted his resignation to the county board of supervisors. Effective immediately, Asa Keyes became the new district attorney for Los Angeles.

A week later Mary and her mother, who’d been estranged for several months, suddenly reconciled. With their protector gone, they seemed to panic.
The two women obtained passports and planned to sail off on an extended tour of Asia.

The fact did not go unnoticed by Detective Sergeant King.

On the morning of June 13, 1923, dozens of people packed into the Engineering Societies Building at 29 West Thirty-Ninth Street in New York. The day was cloudy and unsettled. Strong winds rattled the glass in the enormous windows of Assembly Room 3. The government’s case against Adolph Zukor was finally in full swing.

The counsel for the Federal Trade Commission, W. Hayes Fuller, gaveled the hearing into order and called the witness so many onlookers had crammed into the room to see.

Sydney S. Cohen took his seat at the front table.

The FTC hearings against Famous Players–Lasky had been going on for two months. But Cohen was the witness everyone had been waiting for. Who better to describe Zukor’s unfair trade practices but the leader of the exhibitors he’d tried to put out of business?

The spectators sat at the edge of their seats, expecting fireworks.

But the president of the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America was calm and collected, speaking in a college-educated cadence Zukor despised. When asked to give his opinion of the case against Famous Players, Cohen thought for a moment. Once, he said, exhibitors had viewed Zukor as their friend. But as the Famous Players chief forced more and more of them out of business, he’d become their “most dangerous enemy.” Cohen recounted the pledge Zukor had made to destroy him and the MPTOA, and how his emissary, Will Hays, had splintered their group in half, pitting exhibitor against exhibitor.

Fuller asked what had happened to change Zukor so dramatically in the past decade.

Cohen didn’t need to think long. “Wall Street,” he answered. Zukor’s alliance with Wall Street had left him obsessed with growing his company’s profits, at the cost of everything else.

Fuller’s grizzled face cracked into a grin. The fifty-three-year-old lawyer didn’t often smile. He was
a tall, rangy Oklahoman who picked his words carefully and always spoke with authority. This was exactly the sort of testimony he’d been hoping for from Cohen.

Across the room, defending the film concern and its president, was Robert T. Swaine, thirty-seven, rising star of the law firm of Cravath, Henderson, Leffingwell, and DeGersdorff. Smooth, suave, and a little bit cocky, Swaine was “so well dressed he doesn’t look well dressed,”
Variety
thought, and “handsome enough to be a picture star.” For the past two months, the contrast between Fuller and Swaine had made for some lively courtroom theatrics.

When Cohen complained about Zukor’s control over the first-run Broadway theaters, Swaine saw an opening for attack. Why didn’t Cohen just build his own first-run Broadway house then?

Cohen smirked. He’d love to, he replied. But there was one problem: all the available property on Broadway between Forty-Second and Fifty-First Streets had already been snatched up by—“yes, sir, you guessed it”—Famous Players–Lasky.

Prosecutor Fuller’s weathered face broke into another smile.

For his part, Zukor paid little outward attention, behaving as if the hearings on Thirty-Ninth Street weren’t happening at all.
He sailed off for Europe, convening a meeting on a balcony in Nice overlooking the Mediterranean to plan a counterattack against the Shubert organization’s attempt to expand its Broadway empire. The gall of Shubert—trying to control an entire industry!

Zukor’s brazenness didn’t stop there. When he returned to New York, he made a great show of releasing the blueprints for his skyscraper. Now that Shanley’s lease had expired, he was moving ahead with demolition on the old building and starting work on his new tower.

But his swagger was a masquerade. As the first hearings got under way, Famous Players stocks had plunged. And sitting in the audience, day in and day out, was Canon William Sheafe Chase, who’d assumed Wilbur Crafts’s role as the movie industry’s chief critic. Chase took notes and issued a series of statements in reaction to the proceedings, declaring that any government regulation of the movies should include a morality clause.

A parade of Zukor’s enemies made their way to Thirty-Ninth Street to give testimony. W. W. Hodkinson detailed how Zukor had maneuvered him out of Paramount to seize control of the distribution end of the business.
Independent producer Al Lichtman compared Zukor to a crooked gambler in the old West, whose business was backed up by gunmen. H. D. H. Connick, who’d worked for Zukor before being eased out when his loyalty was questioned, thought his former boss had wanted
“weekly receipts as large as possible” in order to “dominate the industry.”

Swaine saw the remarks as an opportunity and jumped to his feet. He asked the witness if he would define “domination” as “superiority.”

Connick replied that he would.

The young lawyer beamed. “Then you would say, wouldn’t you, that Caruso dominated the opera field?”

Connick shot him a look. “God Almighty had a lot to do with Caruso, but he had nothing to do with Famous Players.”