Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (7 page)

At the curb,
Olive Thomas’s casket rested on a bier, covered in thousands of purple orchids—Ollie’s favorite flowers, final gifts from her husband, Jack Pickford.

For Mabel, the funeral was excruciating. Ollie was her second good friend to die in a six-month period. Young Clarine Seymour, who’d passed away in April, had hero-worshipped Mabel, smoking cigarettes and knocking back shots of gin just like her idol. The producer Hal Roach often scolded Mabel for using off-color language around Clarine, but Mabel would “talk even dirtier” just to get his goat. How that had made Clarine laugh. Mabel thought the teenage actress was the sweetest, dearest little thing.

Then, suddenly, Clarine died. Her family claimed she’d contracted some mysterious intestinal illness. But people whispered it was drugs.

Mabel knew that was possible. She was well aware how much both Clarine and Ollie had partied, having partied with them both herself.

The crowds surged forward. So many fans jammed the street that Ollie’s funeral cortege couldn’t begin its procession to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Police were estimating that fifteen thousand people had turned out. Fifteen thousand! For an actress, not a president or a statesman. It was unfathomable. People stood sobbing in the street. Their heartfelt, often gut-wrenching cries echoed off the Gothic limestone exterior of the church.

Such was the power of their profession, the movie folk on the church steps seemed to realize, perhaps fully for the first time.

Mabel was just one of the movie stars there that day, being shoved by the crowds and pursued by
Daily News
photographers. Box-office champ Thomas Meighan served as a pallbearer. So did Owen Moore, a Selznick star like Ollie and the former husband of Mary Pickford, which meant, briefly, he’d been Ollie’s brother-in-law. Mary herself didn’t show—the queen had paid her respects in Hollywood, at the Brunton Studios memorial—but her sister Lottie, a major serial star, was there, with their mother. Standing prominently on the steps was Mae Murray, the exotic blond Famous Players star, who’d started out with Ollie in the Ziegfeld Follies. The photographers were particularly eager to get a shot of Murray, who was always camera-ready with her bee-stung lips. She didn’t disappoint this day.

Mabel, however, lowered her face into the crowd to avoid the popping flashbulbs. She wasn’t there for publicity. She had come because Ollie was her friend, and now her friend was gone.

Mabel’s nose, almost certainly, was starting to itch.

The cocaine kept her going, armoring her against the agonies of Tinseltown. In the beginning Mabel had used the drug mostly because it made her laugh and feel happy, and Mabel liked to laugh. Young and carefree, she’d thought nothing could slow her down.
“Mabel wanted to be smart,” said the director Allan Dwan, “and being smart meant doing what wasn’t done”—like drinking liquor, and snorting coke, and telling dirty jokes.

“What was the slipperiest day in Jerusalem?” Mabel asked her fellow merrymakers at one party. “When Saul went through on his ass!” They all laughed hysterically, tossing down a shot or snorting another line.

“When she spoke,” her friend Blanche Sweet said, “toads came out of her mouth, but nobody minded.” Everybody loved Mabel.

But now they pitied her too. In the film industry, Mabel’s addiction had become common knowledge. Not long before, the social butterfly Hedda Hopper had paid her a visit. She’d found Mabel in bed,
“a shadow of her former self,” the room reeking of rotting flowers. Dozens of bouquets had been sent to congratulate Mabel on her latest picture, but she’d taken none of them out of their boxes. Hopper hunted around for “the white powder” she knew was there. When she found it, she flushed it down the toilet.

But for Mabel, getting more was just too easy.

Police finally pushed back the crowds and allowed the orchid-covered casket to be loaded into the hearse. Mabel, numb, made her way back to the Ritz-Carlton.

She was distraught. She didn’t like the dependency that had taken over her life. The deaths of Clarine Seymour and Ollie Thomas had served as wake-up calls.

But her cravings were never far away. Liquor was as easy to get in New York as it was in Los Angeles, and all Mabel needed to do to score some cocaine was place a telephone call and speak a few coded words. Sometimes her dealers were even waiting for her at the Ritz when she arrived.

At the hotel, Mabel did what she always did when she needed support. She took out pen and paper and wrote to Billy Taylor. Mabel addressed him as “Desperate Desmond,” after the popular comic strip, and
signed her letters “Blessed Baby,” Taylor’s pet name for her. They understood each other. After all, Mabel knew that Billy lived with “a great sadness,” too, although he’d never revealed the nature of it. Their friendship was based on
“comradeship and understanding,” Mabel said. They “loved so many of the same things—books, music, pictures.”

Mabel trusted Billy like she’d never trusted any other man. Soon after meeting him,
she had confessed her addiction and asked for his help. Billy had vowed to support her any way he could.

This was a new experience for Mabel. Men manipulated her, exploited her, hurt her. They didn’t support her. In fact, all the problems of Mabel’s life could be attributed to men, stretching all the way back to her father.

“From her French father,” Mabel’s biographer would write, “Mabel inherited a love of music, art, romance, and strong drink, along with recklessness and melancholy.” Two decades past their little boat rides off the coast of Staten Island, Claude Normand’s wanderlust had become Mabel’s own. “See the world,” her father had told her, pointing over at Manhattan. If she stayed where she was, he warned, she’d always be ordinary. But in the big world that was waiting for her, Mabel could shine like the very special star her father wanted her to be.

Book learning, Claude told his daughter, wasn’t as important as getting out into the world and finding her place. So by the time she was a young teenager, Mabel had dispensed with much of her schooling and made her way to the mainland using the only asset she had: her looks.

With jet-black hair and inch-long eyelashes, Mabel was pretty in a quirky sort of way, with poached-egg eyes and
“a complexion that makes you think of gardenias,” according to her friend, the writer Frances Marion. But it was Mabel’s sexy figure that landed her on a stool in the Manhattan studio of the famous illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, modeling for postcards. Mabel graced the covers of several magazines and posed for advertisements that were plastered all over New York. In one, she held a strangely shaped glass bottle of a fizzy new drink called Coca-Cola.

Not long afterward, she was making movies.

She got her start at the old Biograph Company on East Fourteenth Street, near Union Square, working for D. W. Griffith. One of her first friends there was a big, bluff Irishman named Mack Sennett. Mabel was sixteen. Mack was twenty-nine.

With his intense hazel eyes, Sennett watched the tiny, impish teenager bounce around the room. Mabel seemed to have springs affixed to her shoes.
“Skittery as a waterbug,” Sennett thought, and always laughing. “She would tell stories, wisecrack, and play practical jokes by the hour. She turned any place she was into an uproar and if she couldn’t think up better things to do, she would pull chairs out from under fat men.” Sennett was enchanted.

The following winter, when the Biograph Company departed to make movies in Los Angeles, Mabel was left behind. Sennett couldn’t stop thinking about her. He sat in the bathtub at the Hotel Alexandria and wrote her a gushy poem, plagiarizing the words from a popular song. Right from the start there was pretense and fraud in his relationship with Mabel, but the smitten teenager pretended she didn’t know. “She wrote me very sweetly,” Sennett would remember, “and said the poem was beautiful.” She signed her letter, “Your girl.”

And for the next six years, Mabel was.

When Sennett started producing his own Keystone comedies, he brought Mabel out to Hollywood to be his leading lady. They made some terrific pictures together:
Mabel at the Wheel. Mabel’s Married Life. Tillie’s Punctured Romance.
Under Mack’s guiding hand, Mabel became a top star. But he pushed her hard. Even through the haze of coke and booze, which many at the studio used, Mabel came to realize that what Sennett really cared about was the money she could make for him.

Still, she was in love with the big lug. She expected she’d marry Mack and have his children. But Sennett had a roving eye. The studio was overrun with pretty young girls, and Mack was a randy fellow. One day Mabel found him with her best friend, the actress Mae Busch. Fists flew. Bottles—and not the prop bottles used on the set—smashed over heads. Not long after, Mabel turned up at the studio in bandages. Some said she had tried to kill herself.

Sennett did everything he could to make things up to her. But Mabel had seen the light. She had been so foolish: after turning her back on an ordinary life by leaving Staten Island, she’d succumbed to the bourgeois dream of love and marriage. How much more ordinary could she get? Never again, Mabel vowed.

Pushing Mack out of her mind,
“she refused to have anything to do” with her former fiancé, according to Sennett’s lawyer, and remained “absolutely unmanageable and unalterable” on the point. Eventually Mabel left Mack’s studio and his bed, replacing him with Sam Goldwyn on both counts.

This time, Mabel thought she could handle work and romance. She didn’t love Goldwyn the way she had loved Sennett, so there were no messy heartstrings to get in the way. But she was wrong. Things only got worse with Goldwyn—far, far worse—but now, two years past the devastation, Mabel never talked about any of that.

Except, possibly, to Billy Taylor.

After Sennett and Goldwyn, William Desmond Taylor was a godsend.

Billy’s interest in Mabel was purely intellectual, and she found his friendship refreshing and liberating. Billy tended to be diffident around women,
“never in the least forward,” as one colleague said. But women adored him because “he was ever ready to talk to them of their interests, their achievements, their hopes and ambitions.” When she was with Billy, Mabel was in heaven.

In his small, cozy apartment in Alvarado Court, Taylor shared his books with Mabel, teaching her about Virgil and Shakespeare and Freud and Nietzsche, catching her up on the education she’d missed. Surrounded by leather-bound books in the soft amber glow of his living room, draped in shades of mulberry and mauve, Taylor helped Mabel cram entire college courses into a single night. Mabel longed for knowledge the way she’d once longed to see the world.

Maybe it wasn’t too late to change course. As the pinched face and puffy eyes in her mirror reminded her, the world hadn’t turned out quite the way she and her father had imagined.

One friend thought Mabel had
“exhausted the incandescence that had set her apart from the ordinary.” She had wanted to be special; now all she wanted was to sit with Billy Taylor and fill her mind with literature and ideas. With Billy, Mabel was happier than she’d ever been.

If only her nose didn’t itch so much.

Margaret “Gibby” Gibson paused under the dusty chandeliers in the lobby of the Melrose Hotel and listened. Over by the old oak bar, word among the fellows was
that the cops were looking for Joe Pepa. Something about a stolen car.

In the past, Gibby might have run upstairs and called Joe to warn him. But not anymore.

Gibby was getting smarter. In the last few months, she’d made some decisions about fame and success, and they were very different from the ones Mabel had made. Unlike Mabel, Gibby hadn’t abandoned her quest for fame and success. In fact, Gibby thought no price was too high to pay for them. She knew she’d need some help in securing the nice things she still dreamed about, but she’d come to understand that con men like Joe could no longer help her get them.

Patricia Palmer was going high-class.

Now that her résumés and head shots were distributed all over town, Gibby climbed the uneven stairs back to her room and waited for her contacts to call. And why wouldn’t they? Patricia Palmer had everything producers wanted. She was pretty and willing to do whatever a director required—and she was only nineteen. Patricia was bound to be snatched up by a big, important producer. High-class. Gibby had to think high-class.

For too long, she’d been depending on two-bit crooks like Joe Pepa. Gibby had to think higher if she was ever going to fulfill the vow she’d made to her mother years ago. On a mountain road between Colorado Springs and Ottawa, Kansas, Gibby had thrown aside the rusty spoons they were using and promised someday they’d have silver. “Father left us with nothing,” the young Margaret had said. “But I will get us everything.”

From town to town they had traveled, Gibby singing and dancing on the stages of run-down theaters, hoping some famous company would take her on.
“Her life has been one long succession of hotels and theaters,” one early press report said about Gibby. “Her one desire to have a home of her own prompted her to enter pictures.”

Her early, fleeting success had brought her enough cash to buy a couple of small properties on North Beachwood Drive, but these were hardly movie-star residences. So Gibby used the income from the little houses to pay her rent at the Melrose. After a couple of years, she figured, she could sell the Beachwood properties and move into a glamorous mansion.

But things hadn’t quite worked out that way.

No wonder she had turned to Joe Pepa. Joe had shown her there were other ways to get what she wanted. And for a while, he’d been right. But the cost had been too high: it was because of Joe that Gibby had been arrested for prostitution at
“a house of ill fame” in Little Tokyo on that terrible afternoon of August 25, 1917. Her dreams had nearly died right then and there.

The whole sordid tale began in
a downtown taproom popular among picture players—in the days before Prohibition, of course—where Gibby first met Joe Pepa.

At that moment, Joe was enjoying a dash of notoriety. His right arm was draped in a sling, broken in twenty-two places by police bullets, and he was
suing the department for $15,863 to cover his medical costs. When Gibby came across him, he was holding forth at his table, gesturing dramatically with a glass of whisky in his left hand. Everyone there had read his story in the papers:
Suspecting him of smuggling opium over the Mexican border, the cops had followed him to his little stucco house on Rodgers Street and demanded to search his car. Standing outside the front door, Joe had told the cops to beat it. At that point, according to the official police report, Joe reached for his gun, although Joe insisted he was only raising his hands as ordered. In any event, one of the officers fired. An explosion of gunfire rattled the quiet street. When the smoke cleared, Joe was lying on the ground with a shattered arm.