Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (10 page)

But Zukor was keeping his eye on another race that wasn’t quite as comforting. That was the contest in New York’s twelfth senatorial district, where the Democrat, the flamboyant young James J. Walker, was cruising to an easy reelection. A former Tin Pan Alley songwriter, Walker spent more time in the city’s speakeasies than he did the state house in Albany. But working stiffs loved the guy. The ambitious Walker made sport of hounding fat-cat capitalists, and he was counting on riding a populist wave to ever-higher office.

What made Zukor despise Walker most, though, was his role providing legal counsel for the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America. Walker, Sydney Cohen, and Marcus Loew were bosom buddies. Zukor would see them at Shanley’s or Delmonico’s, laughing and carrying on, everyone stopping by their table to say hello.

There had been a time, many years ago, when Zukor had laughed like that in public. Those were the days when he and Loew, flush with the stunning profits from Automatic Vaudeville, had knocked back their share of whiskies and pulled more than a few chorus girls onto their laps. Zukor had been young then, high-spirited. He hadn’t yet become cautious, or cagey, or circumspect. He hadn’t yet become paranoid.

These days, when he spotted Loew across the room, raising a glass of ale spiked with rum at a table with Walker or Cohen, he marveled at how easy it was for his old friend to laugh. People from all walks of life were drawn to Marcus. What was it? What made everyone like Marcus Loew? What must it feel like to be everybody’s friend?

Zukor had no idea.

“There is no question,” the vile Jimmy Walker had told a rally of exhibitors during the campaign, “that what Famous Players is doing with its acquisition of movie theaters should be investigated by the trade commission under federal anti-trust laws.”

Lately it seemed everyone was challenging Zukor’s power. Filmmaker Thomas Ince, who’d previously released his films through Paramount, had suddenly broken ranks, launching his own distribution company, Associated Producers, with partners including Mack Sennett. There was also a challenge from W. W. Hodkinson and Hiram Abrams, two former associates with personal vendettas against Zukor. Hodkinson, the founder of Paramount, had been ousted after Zukor cajoled stockholders into replacing him with Abrams—an underhanded move, perhaps, but a necessary step in his quest to merge production and distribution. A few years later Abrams himself had been unceremoniously dumped, the fall guy for the Mishawum Manor affair. Now both Hodkinson and Abrams were back to bedevil Zukor, Hodkinson distributing the sort of independent productions Zukor felt were drains on the industry and
Abrams working for United Artists in their quest to merge with some or all of the Associated Producers.

Zukor intended to squash them all underfoot like insects.

He’d rather be feared and loathed, and come out on top, than be loved and admired and come in second—which was the fate Zukor believed awaited Loew.

From his comfortable chair at the Ritz, Zukor lifted his eyes to check the latest returns. No way could Cox catch up with Harding now. Zukor was pleased.

Soon after arriving in America, the ambitious immigrant had become a Republican,
“because all the people I knew were Republicans.” He hadn’t gotten where he was by playing the outsider. Shrugging off the old country like a peasant’s shawl, Zukor had enthusiastically embraced everything about America. He took up baseball. He boxed with Italians and Irish, forever proud of his cauliflower ear. He ate lobster with gusto and decorated an enormous fir tree every Christmas. Zukor’s Americanism came first, his Jewishness second. Back in Hungary, his uncle, a devout Talmudist, had urged him to become a rabbi, but there was
“never a danger” of that, Zukor would say. The only part of his religious education that had ever interested the future moviemaker was the Bible itself, because it was a primer in how to tell good stories.

Now Zukor lived in an elegant town house on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, stuffed full of antique Oriental rugs and Chippendale sofas and original artworks by some of the great masters. He owned another house in rural Hudson River Valley and drove an expensive Pierce-Arrow automobile—
“a self-indulgence,” he’d say, “since I enjoy good things.” Zukor believed a man should surround himself with good things, for in doing so “he sets a standard in his own eyes as well as those of others.”

As a young man, sweeping the floors of a dry-goods store in Hungary, the young Adolph had seen “nothing but darkness” in his future if he didn’t somehow get to America. His parents had died when he was very young; Zukor had never known the nurturance of a mother or a father. Wearing the rags issued by the government to orphans, he’d felt as if he’d been “dipped in a sewer.” As one biographer wrote, Zukor’s life was
“the story of a man who had been emptied out in childhood, who had lost or been deprived of love and who then set about to fill himself back up again, even if that meant appropriating everything around him.”

When he stepped off the boat at New York’s Castle Garden, Zukor had only a tenth-grade education and spoke no English. His pockets were filled with nothing but ambition. His fellow movie chiefs all came from similar humble beginnings: William Fox toiled in New York’s garment industry until he invested in a penny arcade in 1903; Universal’s Carl Laemmle was a bookkeeper who opened a Chicago movie theater on a whim in 1906; and Thomas Ince was a struggling vaudevillian before taking a job as a movie actor for $5 a day in 1908. Now they ran three of the most profitable film factories in the world.

But Zukor had moved faster and further than any of them. Even before the turn of the century, the impoverished immigrant had already transformed his start-up furrier business into a profitable enterprise. At nineteen, he was “swimming in money.” Zukor believed he was different from his competitors because he made his first fortune before he went into the movies. That made him more “level-headed” than the others, more comfortable with money—and that confidence enabled him to expand his business empire with the swiftness of a prairie fire.

Now the orphan from Hungary had the ear of the man who would be the president of the United States. Where else could that be possible but in this great land? The only time Zukor would ever show emotion in public was when he expressed
“his gratitude to his adopted country.”

As the rising sun sent its long pink fingers between the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the final presidential returns rolled in. Zukor was tired, but he was smiling. Noisemakers blew, and the room at the Ritz exploded in confetti. Harding won the election with more than 60 percent of the vote, the largest share of the popular vote in a hundred years.

Now Zukor could forge ahead with a free hand, without fear of government intrusion. He was so close to his dream that he could taste victory on his tongue.

Only the church ladies still had the power to keep him awake at night.

Adolph Zukor might have been the most powerful man in the film industry, but in some ways the women who sat on national boards and ran civic clubs and wrote letters to newspapers had more influence than even he did. No matter who was in the White House, the church ladies still had the ability to organize boycotts, pressure lawmakers, and drive public opinion. They could vote now, too. The 1920 election was the first in which women had the right to cast ballots. To underestimate the power of these women would have been foolish. And Adolph Zukor hadn’t gotten where he was by underestimating his foes.

These reform-minded women seemed to be everywhere. The National Board of Review, the organization charged by the industry to ensure that all films released were suitable for the screen, depended on the service of 150 volunteer reviewers, and a good number of them were conservative Christian women.
On the various affiliated Committees for Better Films scattered throughout the country, such women as Mrs. Thomas H. Eggert of Houston, Texas; Mrs. Neil Wallace of Birmingham, Alabama; and Mrs. Eugene Reilley of Charlotte, North Carolina, exerted tremendous authority. One word from one of these matrons could be enough for a local municipality to forbid the showing of a particular film, which often led to the film being banned in surrounding communities.

And then there was Mrs. Ellen O’Grady in Manhattan.

Mrs. O’Grady had made history as
one of the first policewomen in the New York Police Department. Irish-born, a widowed mother of three daughters, Mrs. O’Grady had been charged with the protection of young girls and investigation into prostitution rings. She was known for her bravery, her compassion, her efficiency, and her strict adherence to the rules.

She was also a devout Roman Catholic. In a speech before the National Conference of Catholic Charities in September, Mrs. O’Grady said that “the elimination of sin” guided her work. To the Women’s City Club, she insisted, “Girls should not paint or powder. There should be no improper dress. I know how hard it is when tight skirts are in fashion.”

This was the woman the NYPD placed in charge of the city’s public welfare laws as they related to motion picture theaters. Not surprisingly, Mrs. O’Grady had some pretty strong opinions about the movies. If a picture wasn’t “clean,” she argued, the police
“must have the power to stop the showing.” She added, “Our foreign-born citizens get their ideas of our institutions from the moving pictures. Some kind of censorship is needed.”

On the afternoon of Sunday, November 14, 1920,
a tragedy occurred that brought many of the reformers’ simmering resentments against the movies to the surface. An audience of nearly three hundred people, most of them children, had crowded into the New Catherine Theatre on the city’s Lower East Side for the latest installment of the Vitagraph serial
The Veiled Mystery
, starring Antonio Moreno. When smoke from a faulty furnace began billowing up through the floorboards, someone shouted “Fire!” and panic ensued. In the mad rush for the exits, six children were trampled to death. In the chaos outside, mothers screamed for their babies in half a dozen different languages. Initial reports said one door was locked, which led to the theater owners being charged with manslaughter. But charges were dropped once an investigation determined that the doors were actually open, and the owners had followed all safety regulations.

That, however, did not satisfy Mrs. O’Grady. She used the tragedy of the New Catherine fire to further her goal of getting children out of movies entirely. Rounding up eighty-seven fellow officers in the Police Welfare Bureau, she announced a crackdown on New York’s movie houses. “Some theatre proprietors are unscrupulous and money mad,” she declared. “It is up to you to show no leniency where violations are detected.” Any manager who admitted children without a parent or guardian would be arrested. Officers would patrol the aisles and pluck out any child not accompanied by an adult. And of course, the children’s tickets would be refunded.

That, of course, would have spelled financial disaster for the film industry. The theaters depended on children for a large percentage of their receipts. But now, with the city’s women’s clubs and many religious groups backing Mrs. O’Grady in her campaign, exhibitors had little recourse. People were angry. The present system wasn’t working, the reformers charged, and they were tired of broken promises from the film industry. Censorship was the only solution.

Even President Harding might not be able to stop this groundswell.

But in New York City, the reformers lost the battle. Zukor had little love for Sydney Cohen of the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America, but in this case the two found common cause. In early December the organization, whose members forked over a great deal of taxes to the city, sent Cohen to call on the chief of police. Shortly thereafter, Mrs. O’Grady was stripped of her oversight of the movie houses. The chief called her work there
“too strenuous.” Outraged, Mrs. O’Grady removed her badge and handed it to the chief. “I’m through with the police department,” she said, and walked out.

Zukor could only have been pleased by this takedown of one of the movies’ most vocal opponents. But the film industry hadn’t heard the last from the church ladies.

Least of all Mrs. Ellen O’Grady.

The weeks after Olive Thomas’s funeral were among the worst in Mabel’s life. She dropped out of sight. Few friends knew where she was or how to get in touch with her.

In such situations, confronted by tragedies that could have been their own, some addicts are scared straight. Others, overcome, feeling trapped and helpless, spiral into self-destruction, gorging on drugs and booze. What Mabel’s reaction was, no one knew.

But whatever hell she went through in those terrible weeks after Ollie’s funeral, at the end of it, she had finally reached a turning point.

With trembling fingers, she placed a transcontinental phone call to Billy Taylor.

From Los Angeles, Taylor encouraged her to take the next step. It would be difficult, but it would also be the most courageous decision of Mabel’s life.

In the late fall of 1920 she checked into
the Glen Springs Sanatorium above Seneca Lake in the little town of Watkins Glen in central New York. Mabel immersed herself in the black, briny healing waters of the natural springs. She meandered across the rolling green hills, playing golf and picking autumn vegetables for the supper table. She
“went to bed when the moon came up and arose at the crack of dawn,” she’d recall later.

No doubt the cravings still gnawed at her, threatening at times to overwhelm her. But out in rural Schuyler County there were no dealers to call, and eventually the need ebbed.

From three thousand miles away, Billy Taylor called to cheer her on. Some in the film colony believed that Taylor himself was footing the bill for her stay at Glen Springs. Mabel had been spending her earnings on drugs—
up to $2,000 a month, some whispered—and even if that was exaggerated, it was easy to see where her money had gone, and why she likely needed Taylor’s financial help.

It was a long and painful process. But Mabel wasn’t just purging herself of her addictions at Glen Springs. She had other, even more profound healing to accomplish as well.