Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (23 page)

Osborn exploded. He was through helping the both of them, he declared; they’d better get their belongings out of his mother’s house immediately, or he’d destroy everything.

Rose and Bryson made haste for Pasadena.

Osborn, suddenly calm, headed in the other direction.

His car pulled in at the central police station downtown. With detailed precision, he told the cops where they could find a certain man who’d defrauded the Yule Café with a bad check.

A short time later in Pasadena, Mrs. Osborn peered out of her window. Police cars were surrounding her house. Officers came banging on the door, and Jim Bryson was arrested.

His San Diego wedding would have to wait.

Not long afterward, a contrite Rose Putnam showed up at Osborn’s door. She had finally realized she could never live without him. Could he ever forgive her?

Still obsessed with the dark, beautiful woman standing before him, Osborn wrapped his arms around her and took her back.

Rose was beautiful, no question. But the sheer wickedness of their relationship was probably what really entranced Osborn. He was a man who thrived on breaking rules. He was aroused by deviance. Rose’s dark eyes—eyes passed down from his sister—electrified him.

From now on, Osborn vowed, he’d make no secret of his love for his niece, however taboo the rest of the world might think it was. They would live together as man and wife.

And he knew just the person who could provide the roof over their heads.

Osborn paid a call on Gibby. He inquired about the properties she owned on Beachwood Drive, explaining that he and Rose needed a place to live. He also admitted the truth of their relationship. Would Gibby be able to countenance them as tenants?

It wasn’t even a question. Gibby was broke again. For a steady $30 a month, she could countenance anything.

In the nation’s capital, Will H. Hays was dictating a letter to Adolph Zukor regarding a matter of
“magnitude and importance.” His hands moved as he spoke, fluttering like scrawny birds. He told his secretary to type “Confidential” across the top of the letter and then underline it.

It was Monday, December 12, 1921. Late the previous week, Postmaster General Hays had received a joint letter from the various film chiefs, asking him to head up a reorganization of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry. And Hays, much to their delight, was interested.

The letter from the ten film executives—Adolph Zukor first on the list, of course—had been written on December 2, the day Roscoe Arbuckle’s case had gone to the jury. Forty-eight hours later, the jury had returned deadlocked, ten to two for acquittal. Two stubborn holdouts had kept the nightmare alive. Arbuckle would have to endure a second trial.

So would the film industry. More than ever, its chiefs needed help. And so they had turned to Will Hays.

“We realize that in order to insure that we will have proper contact with the general public and to retain its confidence,” the studio bosses had written, “it will be necessary to obtain the service of one who has already, by his outstanding achievements, won the confidence of the people of this country.” That person, they said, was Hays.

Though Lewis Selznick had hand-delivered the letter, Hays knew where the real power in the industry rested, and he addressed his response directly to Zukor. The two men had been in touch frequently over the past year, and Hays recalled
“the pleasant talks” they’d had “on the whole subject matter of the industry.” Whether he accepted the job depended, in large part, on whether Hays felt he could work with Zukor.

Both were small men who had achieved big things. At barely one hundred pounds, Hays was even smaller than Zukor—a slender reed of a man who might be knocked over by the slightest breeze.
“You could put him in the pocket of Bill Brady’s greatcoat,” the
Film Daily
quipped, referencing the man they hoped he would replace—William Brady, the bombastic impresario who headed up the NAMPI.

In visual terms, Hays was a rather comic figure. Sitting behind his desk, the postmaster general looked a bit like a hand puppet, with slightly uneven jug ears and a mouthful of crooked teeth. And yet he was always smiling. Unlike Zukor, there was nothing creepy about Will Hays. He was forthright and plainspoken, a rarity in Washington.

Much of what he had accomplished in his year as postmaster general, Hays would admit,
“added up to public relations.” He’d spent his time in office crisscrossing the country, appearing at trade conventions, professional gatherings, and women’s club meetings, shaking hands and giving speeches. He was a politician, after all, and he’d just run one of the most effective political campaigns in American history, getting Warren Harding elected to the White House. Hays’s success at the post office was due in large part to how forcefully he had sold that success to those around him. He’d brought people in, made them feel a part of the process, and convinced them that they had a say in his decisions—even if it wasn’t always true.

That was precisely why the movie men wanted him.

And they were proposing to pay him $100,000 a year.

The idea appealed to Hays—
“as it must appeal to any man who realizes the ever increasingly important place which the screen will occupy in our advancing civilization,” he wrote to Zukor. Or at least to any man who realized how comfortably he could live on a hundred grand a year. Hays promised Zukor that he would give the matter his full consideration and “let you know as soon as possible.”

In a postscript, he added that he knew “how thorough” Zukor’s cooperation would be if he took the job. But Hays was savvy enough to know that what the mogul was offering him was less likely to be cooperation than a struggle for control.

Zukor read Hays’s letter with great interest.

“I want carefully to consider how much good I can do, how much service I can be to you and to the others,” Hays wrote.
And to the others.
No doubt that phrase made Zukor wary.

The postmaster general was not his man. That sneaky independent Lewis Selznick had proposed inviting him. But the Arbuckle situation demanded an immediate solution, so Zukor had little choice but to go along with the letter to Hays. He had nothing personally against him; they’d worked together in the past. But Zukor might have preferred a candidate of his own choosing. Herbert Hoover, for instance, who as secretary of commerce had been an enthusiastic booster of Zukor’s interests overseas. Yet Zukor’s Wall Street angels had nixed the secretary as too independent. They preferred Senator Hiram Johnson of California, but the public wasn’t likely to trust someone whose constituents were the dissolute citizens of Hollywood.

So Hays it would have to be. If he said yes, that was that.

Zukor agreed that they needed to replace the NAMPI with a new organization. The association had lost much of its clout when it had failed to stop censorship from passing in New York. Besides, the trade association was irrevocably linked to Brady, its longtime president and an avid Democrat. With the new administration in Washington, what they needed was an influential Republican. In that sense, Hays was ideal.

And setting up its own supervisory body might be the only way the industry could forestall outside jurisdiction. The time had passed when smoke and mirrors could stave off regulation. No longer could Zukor get away with the kind of stunt he’d pulled on Wilbur Crafts with Lasky’s fourteen points. As the Arbuckle crisis worsened, the obvious parallel was with major-league baseball, which had responded to the Chicago Black Sox gambling scandal in 1919 by hiring the esteemed judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as the sport’s first commissioner. Likewise, the movie industry needed someone equally unimpeachable as a figurehead—someone the church ladies would trust.

Once again, Will Hays fit the bill. Not only was he a respected cabinet member and adviser to the president but also an esteemed elder in the Presbyterian church. His family stretched back generations in this country, all the way back to the ships that had brought them over from England and Scotland in the eighteenth century.

In other words, Hays wasn’t Jewish.

That mattered to the increasingly emboldened reformers.
“Word comes from Los Angeles of the almost complete submergence of moviedom into the hands of Jews,” read the diatribe of automaker (and notorious anti-Semite) Henry Ford in his widely circulated newspaper, the
Dearborn Independent
. Ford placed the Arbuckle scandal firmly at the feet of the Jews. Joseph Schenck and Marcus Loew, he said, were “two Jewish gentlemen who naively assert that the comedian must be innocent because he means a lot of money to them.” But the worst Jews in Ford’s opinion were those “in charge of the destinies of the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation, which is accused of being a motion picture trust.” Zukor and Lasky had promised reform, Ford wrote, but they hadn’t delivered; now, “lacking the courage to write off their losses and publicly proclaim that they have no further use for men of Arbuckle’s caliber,” they were trying to hedge their bets, leaving themselves the option of rehiring their former star if he was acquitted in a second trial.

Zukor knew that bringing on Hays wouldn’t completely silence bigots like Ford, but it would deprive them of one of their most potent, and loathsome, rallying cries. The leader of the movies would no longer be a Jewish infidel, but a Christian elder.

At least, Zukor would let them think as much.

He was confident that the postmaster general shared his view on the issue of censorship. Hays had spoken about the subject in the past.
“I have always believed that the principle of self-regulation, in contrast with regulation from without, will take firm root if given a chance,” Hays declared. “Self-regulation educates and strengthens those who practice it.” What surely gave Zukor some comfort was the knowledge that Hays was as much of a believer in the market as he was.
“Box office receipts,” Hays argued, “are the surest way of interpreting the mind of the public.”

Just where Hays stood on other sorts of regulation, however, was not entirely clear. What was his opinion of the Federal Trade Commission? After all, Hays had gotten his start with the trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt and considered himself a progressive Republican, not shy about his support for organized labor. While Zukor, too, had once been gung-ho on Roosevelt, a decade had passed since then, and now he was casting his lot with Harding’s more hard-line Republicans—the “standpats,” as they were called. What would Hays consider “unfair trade”? Would he side with Zukor, or with his smaller competitors?

That one phrase in Hays’s letter—
and to the others
—surely left Zukor wondering.

Looking out his train window across the snow-covered farmland of New Jersey, Will Hays was happy to be getting away from Washington. He was heading to a friend’s home in Yonkers, New York, to retreat from the world and think over his prospects.

Certainly the salary the movie chiefs had offered him was astounding—
four or five times greater than what he was getting from Uncle Sam. How could he turn that down? He had no personal family fortune. But he did have a five-year-old son and a wife who was in and out of hospitals. At the moment, Helen Hays was in the St. Luke’s sanitarium in Chicago. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with her. No doctors ever did.

Still, Hays was humble enough to care about what people might say.
“I knew that if I accepted the offer I would be criticized for yielding to a mercenary object and renouncing, as it were, dignity for gain,” he wrote, “as if being Postmaster General were something priestly, consecrated by vows which a man might not forsake with self-respect.”

Even if he took the job, would the pressures he’d face as movie czar be worth the money?

He’d already gotten a glimpse of what his life might be like. When news of the film industry’s offer leaked, a savvy reporter from the
New York World
got Zukor to admit that a plan was afoot to reorganize the national association. Although the film chief would neither confirm nor deny Hays’s involvement—
“We have decided nothing definite as yet”—his words were still enough to fire up presses all across the country.

Hays was overwhelmed by the attention. When he got to his friend’s house, he went directly to bed. For the next several days, he remained holed up in a darkened room, not even looking at the newspapers.

On December 18, he got out of bed and issued a statement. To quiet all the speculation, he said he still had not made up his mind. He worried that what he didn’t know about motion pictures
“would fill the
Encyclopedia Britannica
.”

But what worried him even more were the church ladies.

Hays was a deeply religious man. A faithful attendee at the little Presbyterian church in his hometown of Sullivan, Indiana, he often led the congregation in prayers and hymns. But he was not a reformer.
“And precisely because I was not a reformer,” he would recall, “I dreaded the blunders the reformers would make in dealing with this new and vital force” of the movies. Hays was thinking of Prohibition, “which had by no means produced the era of national sobriety its proponents had contemplated.” He knew if he took the position that he’d been offered, he’d find himself head-to-head with the reformers—God-fearing Protestants like himself—who would surely call him a traitor to Christ.

Was he prepared for that? He wasn’t at all sure.

Because, like everyone else, Will Hays had secrets.

The man who was being called to uphold the morals of Hollywood—the savior who would instill “the highest possible standards” in the industry—spent as little time with his sickly wife as possible. Not in many years had they lived together as a married couple. Indeed, Hays was sometimes spotted with other ladies in the nation’s capital, some of them divorcées. Although it was highly unlikely that anything improper went on between Hays and these lady friends, the moralists would not be pleased by such goings-on. They would expect Mr. Hays and his wife to be together, side by side.