Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (40 page)

If the people in these organizations believed they had a say in how the industry operated, Hays reasoned, they’d be less inclined to criticize it. It was a strategy of diversion and co-option:
“If we can preserve and increase their sympathy, and I believe we can,” Hays wrote to Zukor, “the results can be incalculable.”

Hays was sincere in believing that such a system would benefit everyone: the film industry itself, as well as those who wished to reform it. If his means were a bit Machiavellian, he believed his ends were good and honorable.

But best of all, Hays hoped, the Public Relations Committee would make him strong enough to take on Adolph Zukor.

Stepping off the stage of the Hollywood Bowl, Hays had every reason to feel confident about the work he was doing.

If only the shadow of Roscoe Arbuckle didn’t loom over everything.

Hays’s entire success so far—the trust he’d achieved, the strength of his position—had all been accomplished on the back of that one poor, unhappy man. If Hays hadn’t banned Arbuckle from the screen, the movies’ much-heralded savior would have been through before he started.

There was no way a man like Will Hays didn’t feel guilt over that.

He’d timed his visit to the film colony well. Arbuckle had just left for a vaudeville tour of Europe, where his films had never been banned and continued to do great business. The
former comedian had written to Hays, asking if such work was the best he could hope for from now on. The movie czar had struggled over his response, scratching out phrases and rewording passages. He’d been inclined to use the salutation “My dear Mr. Arbuckle,” but then thought better of it and nixed the “my.” Clearly Hays felt great compassion for Arbuckle, but he could not say or imply anything that countered what Zukor or the rest of the MPPDA had decided.

The final letter was a masterpiece of political discretion, penned by a master politician.

“In this whole matter,” Hays wrote, “those who are giving it thought will try very earnestly to take that action which will square exactly with their duty to the industry, their duty to you, their duty to themselves and their duty to the public, whose servant the industry is, and in doing this, I assure you all phases of the matter will be given the most careful and charitable consideration.”

In the most roundabout way possible, Hays was telling Arbuckle that yes, for now, a vaudeville tour of Europe was the best he could do, but that he should not give up all hope.

Hays was in a bind. He wanted to help Arbuckle, but how could he hope to do anything when he was still receiving letters like the one from W. D. McGuire, head of the National Board of Review, describing the outraged reaction when the Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs found a theater in Dalton exhibiting an Arbuckle picture?
“What is the matter with Will Hays?” the club’s president had written to McGuire, who made sure to forward the remark to Hays himself. The picture in question was an old one, not one of Arbuckle’s recent unreleased titles, and McGuire urged the film czar to expand his ban to every picture the comedian had ever made, lest he be “discredited in a way that would seriously affect” his performance.

Hays wrote back saying he would not ban old Arbuckle pictures. Enough was enough.

He knew the public wanted their Fatty back. If those unreleased pictures were freed from their vaults, American theaters would be just as packed as their European counterparts. Hays had been receiving
“a vast load” of mail on the subject, and “four out of five” wanted Arbuckle reinstated. But if the idea of lifting the ban crossed his mind from time to time, all he had to do was look to the
recent brouhaha in Seattle to see what would happen. One theater owner had tried screening an old Arbuckle film, only to have a delegation of local church ladies occupy the theater, threatening to yank it from the projector. The local censor board had backed them up—citing Hays’s own ban.

However charitable Hays felt toward Arbuckle, his hands were tied.

For his vaguely optimistic letter, Arbuckle’s wife, Minta, wrote to thank Hays. Her husband was
“very grateful” for Hays’s “personal belief in him,” she wrote, and had “benefited greatly by that knowledge.”

With kind words she was killing Hays.

Traveling back to New York, he tried to put his guilt out of his mind and focus. He had a cause to champion, a mission to lead. He needed to rally a headstrong band of opposing forces behind him in unity. It was the only way the film industry could survive in its present form.

And if he wanted to survive, he had to find a way to become independent of Zukor.

Meanwhile, in New York, Zukor was winning his own war.

Striding through the ancient, crumbling Putnam Building with his team of architects—the firm of Rapp & Rapp from Chicago, the leading designers of theaters in the country—Zukor explained exactly what he wanted for his new palace. He wanted big. He wanted grand. But mostly, he wanted tall. He turned to his architects and told them the new building should have twenty stories.

Four higher, that was, than Marcus Loew’s building.

As the summer of 1922 turned to fall, Zukor was feeling cocky. He’d survived a year of hell. Shaky finances. Tufts. Arbuckle. Taylor. In each crisis, Zukor had taken extraordinary measures to contain the fallout, but the measures had worked. He was safe.

Even some volatile changes on his board and among his stockholders hadn’t lessened Zukor’s powers. “Through all these changes and shifts,”
Variety
wrote, “the leadership of Zukor has persisted.” That seemed to be the one given in the film industry these days.

Best of all, the FTC complaint seemed to have evaporated into thin air. Moving forward with his Broadway palace might have been seen by some as an act of hubris on Zukor’s part; he was flaunting his power and control even as the government continued to investigate him. But clearly his lawyers had stymied the Feds. There had been no follow-up, no amended complaint, to the defense they had presented on Zukor’s behalf.

So the time was right to start building his monument to himself.

The economy was on an upswing.
The gross national product was back to where it had been before the recession. Unemployment was way down, and in a sign Zukor took as a huge indicator of better times, so was union membership, plummeting 5 percent between 1921 and 1922. If workers would only trust corporate leaders like himself, and not those union rabble-rousers, things would be so much better, Zukor firmly believed.

And Famous Players–Lasky was stronger than ever.
“A beehive is a slow and halting concern compared to the Lasky studio these days,” Grace Kingsley observed in Los Angeles. More companies were at work on the lot than had been in years.
Although earnings were actually slightly down, a lingering effect of the recession—Zukor went so far as to call it a depression—Famous Players was back in the black, due to its significant reduction in liabilities.
“We believe the depth of the depression has long since been passed,” Zukor announced confidently.

With his architects at his side,
Zukor’s customary whisper grew louder and faster as he described what he wanted in his new headquarters. He would outdo Loew in every way. The new Paramount Theater would dwarf the State, seating four thousand to Loew’s thirty-six hundred.
That would make the Paramount larger than the Metropolitan Opera House or Carnegie Hall, and equal to the world’s largest movie theater, the independent Capitol on Fifty-First Street. The project would cost $10 million, making Loew’s State look distinctly second-rate.

Construction could start in a matter of months—as soon as the lease with Shanley’s restaurant, which now occupied the first floor of the Putnam Building, expired. In leaner days, back before he’d made his movie fortune, Zukor and his fellow movie dreamers, Marcus Loew among them, used to gather at Shanley’s near midnight and
“sit up to all hours building castles in the air.”

Now he was building that castle in the air for real, and on the very same spot.

As the weeks wore on, Zukor’s mood only got better.

For all his doubts about Will Hays, he was grateful to his hand-picked czar. By the fall of 1922 it was clear that Hays’s Public Relations Committee was a masterstroke. Bringing the Chamber of Commerce, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the American Legion, and especially the Federation of Women’s Clubs onboard had worked just as Hays had envisioned, allowing them all to make suggestions and feel their voices were being heard. Hays set up a regular meeting schedule for them, and hired Colonel Jason S. Joy of the American Red Cross to head up the committee. But what really appeased the committee members, as Zukor well knew, were the free movies they got to show at their conventions and the chance to meet Wally Reid or Gloria Swanson when their leaders came to Hollywood.

Even more deviously, Hays had made sure to win over key members of the various organizations, so that when they held their membership meetings, his loyalists could take the floor and speak in defense of the film industry. That way, when their remarks were recorded, Hays could circulate them
“to create the perception of a group divided” and argue that not everyone on the PTA or the Girl Scouts, for example, was hostile to the movies.

How cunning Hays was. A man after Zukor’s own heart.

Most impressive, Hays had launched a charm offensive with exhibitors, delighting Zukor with the civil war it triggered. Hays had won over Jimmy Walker, exacerbating an existing fault line between the flamboyant senator and Sydney Cohen. With Walker now cooperating with the producers on the long-simmering issue of contracts, an infuriated Cohen had led a mutiny that tore the exhibitors’ organization in half. In just six months on the job, Hays had caused Zukor’s opponents to self-destruct.

For Zukor, it was a wonderful spectacle to observe.

But while Zukor was grateful to Hays, he saw no reason to be unctuous about it. When Carl Laemmle from Universal wrote to Zukor, suggesting they underwrite the high income taxes Hays was burdened with, the Famous Players chief responded with a firm no.
“Your attitude in this matter is appreciated,” he wrote to Laemmle, but “the consensus of opinion is that the present time is not opportune to carry out your suggestion.”

The consensus of opinion, of course, was his own.

Sitting on the veranda of his country estate, Zukor puffed his cigar contentedly. After all his worries, everything seemed to be going his way. Even Marcus Loew, sitting beside him, no longer seemed quite such a threat, even if Zukor still felt the need to boast that the turnips and squash in his garden were much bigger than his neighbor’s. Loew just laughed.

The two moguls sat in their rocking chairs as the sun set over the trees of the Hudson River Valley. Their veranda conversations usually steered far away from movies. It was safer that way. These days they smoked their cigars and chomped raw green beans while their wives sat indoors, talking excitedly about the baby Mickey was going to have.

Zukor and Loew were about to become grandparents.

Since joining forces to bring Hays on board, the two men had found increasing common ground. As head of Metro, Loew was now a producer as much as he was an exhibitor—and, with his chain of theaters growing every day, he was just as vulnerable to an antitrust ruling by the FTC as Zukor was. How much better it was to work together than compete. And the announcement of Mickey’s pregnancy had only further softened the rivalry.

But not completely.

When he’d gotten the news, Loew had sent Zukor a box of cigars. Not to be outdone, Zukor sent Loew two boxes. Loew responded with three. And so it went.

“Always insisting on the last word,” Loew said, describing Zukor with an affectionate laugh.

Zukor never seemed to notice that, for all of Loew’s competition with him, he never seemed to take it quite as seriously as Zukor did. Loew found Zukor’s need to have the last word amusing, even endearing. What was the harm if he needed to believe he grew the biggest turnips? If Zukor ever gave it a thought, he might have realized that all these years, their rivalry had been pretty one-sided.

But even if it did occur to him, Zukor wasn’t going to stop trying to come out on top.

As he proved on the night of October 26, 1922, when word came that Mickey’s baby was born. Both grandfathers were in Chicago at the time, and immediately took an overnight train back to New York. Pulling into the station early the next morning, the two men
“laid a bet on who would be first to reach the hospital.” Zukor knew that Loew, dandy that he was, would take the time to go home first and shave. “I didn’t,” he boasted, “and I beat him.”

Of course he did.

Looking down at the infant, Jane Constance Loew, cooing in his arms, Zukor no doubt hoped she’d take after her mother’s side.

Eddie King steered his motorcycle across Los Angeles to Central Station. Everyone else seemed to have forgotten about the dead man sprawled out on his living room floor with a bullet in his neck, but not King. Exasperated that the Taylor investigation had fizzled out, King was on a mission. He was now convinced that he knew the killer’s identity. He just had to find enough evidence to make an arrest.

He still faced opposition from Woolwine. But the DA had finally announced that he was running for governor, and these days he was often out on the campaign trail. That gave King a freer hand to do what he pleased.

At the police station, he took Jesse Winn aside to make a plan. King’s partner shared his conclusion about the solution to the crime. Their epiphany had come gradually, growing out of their belief that Mary Miles Minter was somehow involved. But it was Woolwine’s behavior that really sealed the deal for the detectives.

From the start, it was clear that Woolwine was protecting Mary. But, as King thought about it, he suspected Woolwine’s real concern wasn’t protecting Mary as much as it was protecting her mother, the woman many whispered he’d had an affair with.

But what was he protecting her from?