Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (48 page)

The FBI communication would have landed on the desk of Eddie King, in charge of the Taylor investigation for the DA’s office. But Detective Sergeant King apparently gave it little heed; in none of his later writings about the case would he mention any federal inquiry. While it was true that gaps in Taylor’s assets might have suggested blackmail, there was no connection that King, or anyone else, could see between the late director and a two-bit con artist like Osborn. The two men came from very separate worlds. Just because the press called Osborn a “movie director” didn’t mean he moved in Taylor’s circles. Osborn had never been employed by any of the studios where Taylor worked, and they seemed to know no one in common. There was simply no evidence that their paths had ever crossed. King apparently dismissed the inquiry from the FBI as irrelevant.

He wasn’t about to waste his time tracking down some crazy lead from the Feds when, under a new district attorney, he might soon be able to arrest Charlotte Shelby.

In the summer of 1923, giant letters were being hoisted up the steep sides of the Hollywood Hills with enormous cables. People gathered below to stare, to point, to wonder what was going on. One by one the letters came together, rambling across the rugged terrain. Finally they spelled out
HOLLYWOODLAND
, the name of a new housing development at the head of Beachwood Drive being financed by Harry Chandler, the owner of the
Los Angeles Times
. Each letter stood thirty feet wide by fifty feet tall and was studded with electric lightbulbs. To the great surprise of those who lived in the hills, one night the sign began to flash on and off in segments: first
HOLLY
, then
WOOD
, then
LAND
, before lighting up entirely.

Living so close, Gibby would have had to pull her blinds down to prevent the flashing lights from disturbing her at night. With the arrests of Don Osborn and Rose Putnam in Ohio, she may have preferred to hide out for a while anyway.

But others were done hiding.

That summer, Mabel was back in town. She’d kept her distance for several months after Wally Reid’s death, unnerved by the prospect of new tabloid attention. But now, finishing her latest film for Mack Sennett, the comedienne seemed gay and cavalier—
“as happy as Easter morning,” Sennett thought.

Could it be true? Was Mabel finally back to her old self?

“Every day in every way,” she assured Sennett, “I’m getting sassier and sassier.”

Sennett could hear the to-hell-with-you back in her voice, and he was glad. For the first time in a very long while, the ex-lovers were getting along. They seemed to have gone back in time to those carefree days before the drugs, the betrayals, and the scandals. They laughed together, socialized together.
Mabel even attended a birthday party for her old pal Mae Busch, the same woman she’d found in Sennett’s bed all those years ago, igniting the infamous fistfight and spurring the onset of Mabel’s depression. But the past was past. Mabel had moved on.

Sennett had a hard time accepting that, however. He wanted to get back with Mabel romantically as well as professionally. He hoped for just one glance, one flutter of her long black eyelashes. But none of that was forthcoming. Instead, Mabel offered him a business deal.

She’d star in his new picture for $3,000 a week.

“Good Lord, Mabel,” Sennett responded.

“And twenty-five percent of the net profits,” she added.

For all the hard bargaining, Sennett was delighted. “She was swinging the rope and I was doing the jumping,” he said. “It felt good. Like old times.”

The picture they made was called
The Extra Girl
. And what a picture it was. A year and a half after Billy’s death, Mabel felt free enough to laugh a little at what she’d been through. This was the old Mabel, the one who spit jokes from the corner of her mouth like tobacco juice. While the most memorable scene would be Mabel leading a lion around the lot on a rope (she gamely filmed the stunt while director Richard Jones held a pitchfork just off camera), it was in the film’s many subtle in-jokes where Mabel’s state of mind came through. Playing the leading man in the madcap movie-within-the-movie was an actor named William Desmond—named onscreen in a title card, just to make sure the audience got the reference. In another scene, Mabel wields a gun, holding off the villain. This, too, was likely no coincidence. For more than a year the public had been imagining Mabel holding a gun. Now here she was for all to see, brandishing the weapon as she saves her family and triumphs over evil.

The subliminal message, Mabel trusted, would not be lost on the public when the film was released later that year.

But there would always be scolds eager to judge her for living as zestfully as she did, for enjoying her cocktails more than a “respectable” woman should. Mabel found such criticism tiring, and patently unfair, because it wasn’t applied equally to men. No one could deny that Mabel liked her gin, but her companion, Mrs. Burns, insisted she drank only enough at parties to be considered a “good sport.” When a man was a “good sport” in that way, he was hailed as a bon vivant, a hail-fellow-well-met. Mabel was called a libertine or a drunk.

It infuriated her. She wasn’t missing work. She wasn’t back on the cocaine. Wasn’t it better to be out having fun than to be holed up in her room as she had been, afraid to venture outside, living in constant fear of the next morning’s paper or the blue lights of a police car?

If people were going to talk about her, Mabel decided, she was through sitting back and taking it. From now on, she was fighting back.

So when she picked up the newspaper and saw that Mary Miles Minter was jabbering on about Taylor again—and bringing up Mabel’s name in the process—she saw red. Mary was quoted as asking Mabel what she knew about the murder. That little nitwit! What did she think she was doing, bringing all that back up again? Mabel immediately issued a statement, saying she couldn’t understand why Mary was regurgitating all this unhappiness.
“It is too bad,” Mabel said, “that my name should be dragged into this on account of the family squabbles between Miss Minter and her mother.”

Any sympathy and compassion she’d once felt for poor little misguided Mary likely evaporated that day.

Mary’s garrulousness that summer took many people by surprise. The former movie star just wouldn’t shut up.

She wanted back in the public eye. Not because she missed the fame and the slog of making movies, but because she was trying to make it on her own, and—jobless, penniless, motherless—was having a hard time paying her bills. Her reconciliation with her mother had been brief; they’d started squabbling again, their planned trip to Asia scuttled before it began. Now twenty-one years old, Mary was threatening to sue Shelby for some of the millions she’d made while still a minor. That was her money, Mary insisted, not Shelby’s. But until she could reach a settlement with her mother—and Mary knew how stubborn Shelby could be when it came to money—Mary was living in Pasadena with friends. And she needed a job.

A comeback wasn’t going to be easy, however, when no one wanted to hire her.

So Mary got creative.
With the help of her friend, the screenwriter Jeanie McPherson, who knew a thing or two about dramatic plot twists, she devised a plan. Living in Mary’s former home on Argyle was the Swedish actress Sigrid Holmquist, whose career had stalled and who probably didn’t mind a little publicity herself. On August 12 McPherson approached members of the press with a sensational story.

Someone had tried to murder Mary!

Murder had kept Mary’s name in the headlines before, so why not again?
McPherson’s story went like this: While Holmquist and some friends were dining on an outdoor terrace, a shot had rung out, barely missing the actress and superficially wounding a guest in the wrist. Mary, of course, was the gunman’s real target; in the half-light of dusk, Holmquist might easily have been mistaken for her. There could be only one explanation: someone was trying to keep Mary from telling what she knew about Taylor’s death.

But after a flurry of news reports, the story was dropped.
“Police do not take the matter seriously,”
Variety
reported, “preferring to look upon it as a ‘plant’ for publicity purposes.”

Thwarted, Mary found other ways to keep her name in the papers. Reporters had always wanted her to talk about Taylor, so now she obliged them, gushing over their great love and handing over her “scarlet, silken-covered” diary to the
Los Angeles Record
. She even wrote a piece herself for the
Los Angeles Times
, disclosing her great, secret love affair with Taylor.

Disputing earlier public comments that Taylor had considered her a “mere child,” Mary now declared that the only reason they had never wed was because Shelby had forced them to hide and pretend—
“as if our love were some unclean thing that could not be avowed publicly.”

And why was Shelby so intent on foiling her daughter’s great love?

Mary surprised many with her answer.
“Mother liked William Desmond Taylor very much,” she declared. “It was not until Mother discovered that Mr. Taylor cared more for me than he did for her that she became bitter towards him.”

Mrs. Shelby, sweet on Taylor? This was the first anyone had heard of such a thing. A whole new round of gossip exploded, and Charlotte Shelby was given one more motivation to commit murder: jealousy.

What was going on with Mary that summer? So many people—her friends, her former employers, reporters who’d been covering her for years—found her statements wild and erratic. In fact, Mary’s words may have not been entirely rational. When she finally left her temporary haven in Pasadena, she left behind some rather curious mementos of her stay. Moving some books on a shelf, her hosts discovered several
“vials of dope” that they “certainly hadn’t put there” themselves.

Mary had apparently been using heroin.

Free at last of her mother’s control, partying late into the night with her friends, Mary had picked up some bad habits. She said things that summer about Taylor, herself, and her mother that she might never have thought of, let alone spoken, in another frame of mind.

Shelby was horrified by the reports, waving off reporters who came to her door.
“Please leave me alone in my sorrow and grief,” she wailed.

And, she might have added, her terror.

When one reporter told Mary that her claims cast increased suspicion of her mother’s culpability in Taylor’s death, the actress professed bewilderment.
The thought had never occurred to her, Mary said.

Few believed her. Least of all Detective Sergeant King, who took Mary’s loquacious few weeks in August as a kind of indirect confession. As soon as District Attorney Keyes gave the word, King was prepared to arrest Charlotte Shelby for the murder of William Desmond Taylor.

Seagulls swooped over the crashing Pacific as a young man made his way across the Venice Beach boardwalk toward the columned portico of St. Mark’s Hotel. His name was
Larry Outlaw—appropriately enough, as he’d been in and out of prison for burglary a number of times in his thirty years. At the moment, however, he was going by the more respectable-sounding Lawrence MacLean, and he was on an errand that might bring him the kind of dough none of his petty burglaries had ever scored.

He’d been hired by a goon named John Ryan, who’d been involved in the shakedown of an Ohio millionaire and was now on the lam. MacLean was to meet another mug by the name of Blackie Madsen at the St. Mark’s and pick up a batch of letters from him—letters that the millionaire would supposedly pay $30,000 to get back. MacLean was told he could keep a third of that.

The young man rapped on the door. Madsen opened it a crack, asked for a code word, then handed over the letters. Before the door closed again, MacLean got a glimpse of the squalor inside the hotel room, and the crazy, hopped-up eyes of May Ryan.

Madsen clung to the belief that Bushnell would pay anything for the remainder of his letters to Rose. In the press, the banker was insisting on his complete innocence. If the letters were published, they’d prove him to be a liar and destroy his marriage and his reputation. Madsen was convinced Bushnell would pay whatever they demanded.

And when the blackmailer got his cash, he had very specific plans for it, plans that didn’t include paying Ryan or young MacLean. The bulk of the thirty grand would be used as bail for Osborn and Rose, allowing them to get out of jail and escape with Madsen to Mexico.

Either Madsen was the most loyal friend ever, or Osborn had something on him.

Blackie Madsen was not a sentimental man. The only reason he was planning to spring Osborn with Bushnell’s money was that if he didn’t, Osborn would sing. Osborn clearly had something on Madsen, and he was vindictive; no way would he go to prison without ratting out disloyal partners. He’d probably insisted on an agreement even before the first shakedown: if one of them got caught, the other would engineer an escape. Or else the one in prison would reveal everything he knew about the other. It was the only way to explain why Madsen stuck around and didn’t flee himself.

Whatever secret the two blackmailers shared, it must have been a doozy—one so serious that the Feds would have pursued them even over international borders.

In his jail cell in the tiny town of Troy, Ohio, Osborn was confident that Madsen would soon have him back walking the streets. After pleading not guilty, he was cocky, cracking jokes with the guards and flirting with the lady reporters who came to see him. Osborn seemed completely
“undaunted by the fact that a possible long residence behind barred doors and windows awaited him.” That was because Osborn believed he’d never stand trial. He was absolutely certain that Madsen would orchestrate another shakedown, and soon they’d have the money they needed for bail. Smarter than his adversaries as always, Osborn planned to have the last laugh.

On Beachwood Drive, FBI agent Connelley and his Los Angeles counterpart Owen Meehan were knocking on the locusts’ doors. Everyone claimed to be shocked and horrified when they learned of the actions of Don and Rose.
“You can imagine the position Osborn has put us in,” Leonard Clapham bemoaned, “in the community and with the neighbors.” It was “most embarrassing” for him and his wife, Clapham said, as well as Leo Maloney and his wife, to have been associated with such low-lifers. If the federal agents tracked down Osborn, Clapham said, they should “tell him that it [would] not be wise for him or Rose Putnam to show their faces in this neighborhood or Los Angeles again!”