Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (14 page)

The director of Gibby’s film was Fred Niblo, who’d just helmed
The Mark of Zorro
for Douglas Fairbanks. Quite a change for a young woman used to working with C-listers. The film’s producer, J. Parker Read, was in the process of building his own company, and Gibby had a proposal for him. A proposal that would take her and Don Osborn out of their seedy hotels and turn them into power players in Tinseltown.

The thirty-five-year-old Read had recently joined Associated Producers—Tom Ince’s “Big Six,” established to counter Adolph Zukor’s growing control of the industry. Alongside heavyweights like Ince and Sennett, Read was eager to prove himself. His biggest success so far had been
Sex
, also starring Louise Glaum, which had raked in the cash while sending the moralists over the edge. Read hoped to make a name for himself with sex pictures.

Gibby, of course, knew a few things about selling sex. She and Read seemed like a perfect fit.

At her meeting with the producer, she shared the idea that she and Don Osborn were cooking up. It was to be a
“very modern and daring” picture. Gibby would star and Osborn would direct. Read seemed interested—but he wouldn’t give her a definite answer until their current project wrapped. Gibby left the meeting encouraged. Perhaps she was finally about to make good on that promise to her mother all those years ago.

Out on the sprawling Ince lot, Gibby got down to work on the current film, which was called
Greater Than Love
. She was playing a prostitute. Her past hadn’t hurt her this time; it might have even helped. Louise Glaum certainly knew the truth behind the Patricia Palmer alias, so maybe Read did too, and maybe that was the real reason he’d cast Gibby as Elsie Brown, the little hooker with a heart of gold.

Certainly Gibby had leaped at the chance to play her.
Although Elsie dies early in the picture, it’s her death around which the whole movie turns. When Elsie’s bereaved mother arrives at the brothel, the other girls, led by Glaum, pretend it’s just an innocent boardinghouse to protect the memory of Elsie, a conceit that unravels dramatically at the picture’s conclusion. Gibby might have been billed third, but hers was the part that audiences would remember.

Every day at the Ince studio, she poured her emotions, her history, and her ambitions into her portrayal of Elsie Brown. How right she’d been to put the likes of Joe Pepa behind her; for once, Gibby was going after her dreams honestly and aboveboard. How refreshing that she didn’t need to lie or cheat or sell herself to get what she wanted. At night, she’d hurry back downtown on the trolley to encourage Osborn to finish the script that would take them to the top. The payoff, Gibby believed, was finally at hand.

But Osborn was feeling discouraged. Bank after bank had turned him down when he’d tried to get financing for his independent production. The bankers would pull out maps showing all the theaters controlled by Adolph Zukor and the other big chains nationwide. The number of independent theaters was dwindling. Even if Osborn could raise the money needed to make a picture, the bankers told him, his options for where to show it would be extremely limited. Why should they invest in a nobody like him?

Osborn was ready to give up, but Gibby tried to rouse him. This was their moment, their chance, she argued. She tried to get Osborn to approach J. Parker Read. But it was difficult to get Osborn to do anything now that his niece Rose had come to town.

Don Osborn’s intense blue eyes were trained on the young woman across the room. His wife was not pleased.

Osborn’s wife, Rae, had come back to him yet again, still desperately in love and willing to forgive him everything. They were living with Don’s mother in Highland Park. Also in the house was Don’s niece Rose Putnam, recently arrived from Vermont, licking her wounds after a difficult divorce. At the moment Rose was working as a salesclerk at Hamburger’s department store on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles.

Rose was a very pretty woman, dark and petite, and seven years older than her twenty-five-year-old uncle. The anomaly was explained by the wide difference in age between Don and his eldest sister, Rose’s mother. But even at thirty-two, Rose was still a looker, pretty enough to stir up feelings of envy and unease in Don’s wife Rae, who had just turned twenty-one.

Rae didn’t understand her husband’s fascination with his niece, nor could she have articulated the reasons it bothered her. Since coming to Los Angeles, Rose and Don had become “thick as thieves,” Rae observed. She would walk into a room and find her husband and Rose whispering together, only to fall silent when they caught sight of her. What on earth was going on?

Gibby wondered the same thing. Osborn no longer had time to see her. He brushed her aside when she came to visit. Gibby was likely only momentarily bothered by the loss of their personal relationship; it was the disruption of their professional plans that truly unsettled her. When she demanded to see the script Osborn had written, he made excuses, claiming it wasn’t ready. Gibby realized he’d produced nothing of substance since Rose had arrived.

She was furious. Here she was, working for Associated Producers, one of the few organizations that could go up against the Zukor machine, and Osborn had failed to put together a proposal she could take to Read. Osborn argued they didn’t need Associated Producers. He’d start his own production-distribution company with George Weh’s money. Why be beholden to J. Parker Read and Tom Ince? Gibby was flabbergasted.

Osborn might be willing to let the opportunity pass, but Gibby wouldn’t be that foolish. As soon as
Greater Than Love
wrapped, she strode into the Ince studio armed with scenarios and broadsheets. She
“made inquiries about setting up a production company of her own, possibly to produce Westerns,” as she’d tell one reporter—modern, daring, sexy westerns, no doubt.

To Read, she projected confidence and professionalism. But the producer barely looked at her proposals. He thanked her but declined. He didn’t even offer her a contract for a second picture with Glaum.

The industry, it seemed, really was stacked against people like her.

All of Gibby’s noble ideas about doing things honestly—of insisting on high-class—shattered at her feet.

Don Osborn’s little house at 1533 South Bronson Avenue was becoming a gathering place for the down-on-their-luck. In April he and Rae moved into their own home, a cheap stucco cube with a postage-stamp backyard. There were always people hanging around the place, smoking cigarettes on the front steps or crashing in the second bedroom. George Weh came around, still hoping Osborn could help him make good. Fred Moore and other struggling actors drank and bitched and moaned. And Gibby was there, too, once she got over her pique at Osborn for botching their chance with J. Parker Read.

Those who packed Osborn’s place, swilling rotgut booze and snorting cut-rate hop, had never enjoyed much success in an industry that had made a rarefied few rich and famous. They burned with envy and resentment against people like Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter and William Desmond Taylor—and Adolph Zukor himself—who had made much of themselves while starting with less. Was it merely a matter of luck and connections, as those griping at Osborn’s house insisted? Or was it greater determination, discipline, and talent?

In some ways, the reasons didn’t matter. For the scowling mob congregating at Osborn’s house, it was simply unfair. Their resentment was left to bake inside those cramped, stuffy rooms, pulsing off the stucco walls like heat from an oven on a sultry afternoon.

On Adolph Zukor’s sprawling country estate in the wooded hills of Nyack, New York, his caretaker, Patrick Murphy, loaded a trap gun full of buckshot and hung it opposite the front door. Tying a string to the trigger and threading it through a pulley on the ceiling, Murphy secured the other end to the knob on the door. If anyone broke into the house when the Zukors weren’t there, the gun would discharge, pumping the intruder full of buckshot.

Adolph Zukor trusted no one.

There were people out there, he believed, waiting to snatch everything he’d achieved.
At his five-hundred-acre estate on the banks of the Hudson River—Zukor called the place “his farm”—the studio chief kept many valuable antiques and paintings. Even more precious was the large stock of bonded (legal) liquor stored in his basement. To patrol the place, Zukor had hired an armed watchman, but the trap gun would give him added peace of mind.

If only it were so easy to protect the rest of his empire.

The latest marauders at the gate were a particularly militant band of zealots called the Lord’s Day Alliance. They were led by seventy-one-year-old Brother Wilbur F. Crafts, a self-proclaimed “Christian lobbyist” and a speaker of such fire and brimstone that Jonathan Edwards would have been impressed. Crafts was a tall, thin scarecrow with a short beard of gray straw. Beneath heavily drooping lids, his eyes burned with all the passion of the true believer. Crafts’s International Reform Bureau had been instrumental in bringing about Prohibition. Now the skeletal spiritual soldier turned his eyes toward other causes, like cigarettes, close dancing, “joy rides” in automobiles, and—most especially—the movies.

As its name implied, the Lord’s Day Alliance had initially focused on banning all amusements on Sundays. But that wouldn’t be enough to cleanse the nation of the sins Hollywood had perpetrated. The film industry, Crafts charged, was in the hands of
“the devil and 500 non-Christian Jews” (as if there were any other kind). Federal censorship, he declared, was the only way to halt the corruption of American youth by the movies.
“I do not ask autocratic exclusion of films,” Crafts said, trying to seem less fanatical in the press, “but only such supervision as the Government gives to all other great financial interests.”

In his eighth-floor office, Zukor brooded.

Only such supervision as the government gives to all other great financial interests
.

President Harding had pledged to protect the studios from regulation. But for how long?

If industries like railroads and banking were regulated, the reformers were arguing, movies should be too. Conservative lawmakers, who controlled both houses of Congress, tended to dislike regulation, but many were also sympathetic (and accountable) to the country’s strong religious constituencies, who were the ones calling for federal censorship.

Only a few months after Harding’s election, Zukor was starting to worry again.

In Washington, DC, Brother Crafts was marching his flock, mostly somber-faced women in long gray dresses, to the steps of City Hall, his long black coattails flapping in the breeze. Turning to the gathered newspapermen, he dramatically lifted a file of papers over his head, like Moses wielding a stone tablet. The “flickering filums,” he announced to the newsmen, were endangering the public’s morals. He had just spent two months hunkered down in the dark, watching every film shown in the theaters of the nation’s capital, and he could say without a doubt that
“the sex thrill was the great objective” of the vast majority of motion pictures. Crafts had taken pains to compile every kiss, every flash of a woman’s leg, in the study he now held in his hands. “The sex thrill,” Crafts charged, was taking the place of “the alcoholic thrill” of the saloon. His flock responded with a cacophony of
amen
s, and with that Crafts turned and entered City Hall, ready to make his case to the district commissioners.

Editorial cartoons across the country satirized and ridiculed Brother Crafts, but Zukor viewed him with deadly seriousness. Crafts was part of a movement that, despite all the industry’s best efforts, seemed unstoppable. Another censorship bill awaited
the California legislature. Pro-censorship governors had been elected in Massachusetts and New York, two of the biggest markets for moving pictures. Still struggling to climb out of its pool of red ink, the industry remained extremely vulnerable to this kind of assault. Zukor knew that until the ever-looming threat of censorship was vanquished once and for all, he could not fully push forward with his dream of industry domination.

With all that on his mind, he picked up his phone and placed several key calls. It was time to put his distrust aside and meet with his rivals, including Marcus Loew. It was time to make common cause.

The building that housed Delmonico’s restaurant, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Fourth Street, was a six-story confection crowned with spires. The venerable New York eatery was known for creating lobster Newburg, Baked Alaska, French-fried potatoes, and the Delmonico steak. On a cold night in February 1921, in a private dining room above the main hall, a gathering of some of the most important men in the movie business was taking place.

Zukor, of course, presided from the head of the table. His partner, Jesse Lasky, sat as usual on his right. The rest of the gathering included William Fox, Sam Goldwyn, D. W. Griffith, Carl Laemmle, Lewis Selznick, Joseph Schenck, and William A. Brady, president of the national association. Loew arrived late, glad-handing around the table, laughing and joking with the others, until Zukor’s steely eyes stopped him cold. It was time to get serious.

Something had to be done, Zukor declared. If they didn’t act to protect themselves, they would be controlled by state, and possibly federal, regulations. He’d gathered everyone together because he had a plan. With that, he turned the discussion over to Lasky.

Zukor’s partner was the good cop to his bad, as easygoing as Zukor was hardline. A former vaudevillian, Lasky had never fit comfortably around a corporate table. He was far from a prude, but he’d come to the conclusion that the reformers had outmaneuvered them, and that the film industry was fighting a losing battle. It was either federal censorship imposed on them from the outside, Lasky told the film execs, or self-regulation managed from within.

He snapped open his briefcase, withdrew a stack of carbons—a “code of rules,” he said—and passed them around the table. All Famous Players directors would be directed to follow these guidelines, Lasky announced, and he urged his fellow producers to do the same with theirs. Fourteen specific recommendations were outlined. The first was perhaps the broadest:
“No picture showing sex attraction in a suggestive or improper manner will be presented.” Movies should only depict “wholesome love and avoid sensuality.”