Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (51 page)

For that, he was looking at two years probably, tops. Madsen could deal with that.

“Believe he will plead guilty if handled carefully,” Agent Wheeler cabled agents in Cincinnati as the prisoner traveled east in the custody of federal marshals.

If Madsen needed any further prodding to cop a guilty plea, he got it on March 31 when
Rose Putnam was released from jail. A month had been chopped off her sentence for good behavior. Surely Madsen must have wondered if Rose had been let out early so she could testify against him in a trial. After all, she knew an awful lot. Six days later, Madsen pleaded guilty as charged. Facing the judge along with him were Ryan and MacLean, who’d been apprehended separately, the last of Rose’s letters finally being returned to Bushnell.

These “menaces of society,” the prosecutor argued, should be tossed in jail and the judge should
“throw away the key.” Judge Hickenlooper agreed that a severe sentence was in order.
For the first shakedown, Madsen was given two years; for the failed second attempt, he got a year and a day, to be served consecutively.

On the afternoon of April 5, 1924, Blackie Madsen, his hands and wrists shackled, set off on the train for Atlanta, where he would join Don Osborn behind bars. He’d be away longer than he’d expected. But all things considered, three years and one day wasn’t so bad.

The Roaring Twenties might not have reached full thunder by 1924, but the din was definitely getting louder. The economy was expanding. For the third year in a row, the gross national product had risen. Earnings were trending upward, and full employment had been reestablished. The national mood was optimistic, even a bit brash.

Yet while many others in Tinseltown were jumping up onto tabletops and shimmying to the Charleston, the three desperate dames of 1920 were feeling a little less frolicsome, even if they weren’t nearly as desperate as they had been. A better word to describe Mabel might have been determined. Mary, delusional. Gibby, defeated.

Mabel’s determination was evident as she sat in the witness box of a Los Angeles trial in June 1924, dueling with the smarmy defense attorney S. S. Hahn, Joe Pepa’s brother-in-law. She was testifying in the assault trial of her chauffeur, an unhinged character named Horace Greer, who had shot and wounded a friend of hers, wealthy playboy Courtland Dines, on New Year’s Day while Mabel and Edna Purviance were present. The resulting scandal had given the newspapers their biggest boost since Wally Reid died a year earlier.

C
HAUFFEUR
S
HOOTS
M
AN IN
P
RESENCE OF
F
ILM
S
TARS
, trumpeted the headlines, and once again Mabel’s name was in big black ink. The parallels with the Taylor case abounded: Greer, like Edward Sands, had a criminal past, and he’d been using an assumed name. As before, two beautiful actresses were involved. And if the police were right, a love triangle was once again at the center of it all.
“An unvoiced, passionate love for his movie queen employer and jealousy of her host is believed by the police to have caused Horace A. Greer, the driver, to shoot Dines,” wrote Edward Doherty, reprising his role as Mabel’s chief persecutor.

Another newspaper scolded:
“Dear Mabel may be very sweet, but her actions are not such as to make the public believe it. The quicker she is removed from filmdom, the better.”

This time, no one waited for Will Hays to act. Across the country, theaters quickly instituted bans on Mabel’s pictures.
N
ORMAND
C
ASE
U
PROAR
was
Variety
’s headline as the list of embargoes grew. In Memphis, Mabel’s films were banned for all time; the prohibition was quickly copied in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Columbus, Ohio. Within days, theaters were falling like dominoes. Topeka. Sacramento. Hartford, Connecticut.

Yet in the face of it all, Mabel no longer retreated. She held her ground, insisting she should not be held accountable for the actions of a mentally unstable employee. In court, she refused to be bullied by Hahn. At one point, as Hahn deliberately twisted her words,
“the Normand temper slipped its moorings,” one reporter noted, and Mabel lashed out.

“You haven’t any right to cross-examine me like that,” she snapped. “What do you want to be so mean to me for?”

When the prosecution objected that Hahn was badgering the witness, the judge smiled. “This witness seems perfectly able to take care of herself,” he said.

And she was. When Hahn asked Mabel if she’d told Greer to shoot Dines, she exploded. “For heaven’s sake—no! Why should I tell anybody to plug anybody, anyhow?”

Greer was acquitted, Dines recovered, but Mabel, for all her courage, was through in Hollywood. Attempting a goodwill tour on Sennett’s advice, she was invited to speak to a committee of the Federation of Women’s Clubs in Chicago. En route, she received word that higher-ups had rescinded the invitation. Arriving at the station as an unwanted guest, Mabel was besieged on the platform by reporters brandishing a statement from Mrs. George Palmer, the club’s president.
“The majority of Illinois club women wish to see neither the actress in person, nor on the screen,” Mrs. Palmer declared.

Mabel stood on the train platform, choking back the humiliation. “Will you do something for me?” she asked the reporters. “I want you to thank the few lovely women in Chicago who have stood by me.”

A class act, Mabel Normand turned her back on them all, and never again played the Hollywood game.

When, a few months later, an opportunistic woman by the apt name of Mrs. Church sued Mabel for alienation of affection in her divorce case, Mabel struck back hard.
“There is a limit to all human endurance and I have reached mine,” she said, and slapped a libel suit against the woman. Too often, Mabel told reporters, she and others—she was thinking of Roscoe—had let charges against them go unanswered. No longer. “I’ve made up my mind to quit being good natured about all this dirt being dished out about me. They’ve just got to quit kickin’ my name around.”

Though the court dismissed Mabel’s suit on a technicality, her action did force Mrs. Church to withdraw her own suit and resubmit a new one against her husband, this time without any mention of Mabel. The move generated headlines of a very different sort.
M
ABEL
I
S
C
LEARED
. M
ABEL
I
S
E
XONERATED
.

Five years, she’d been waiting to read those words.

She might have been finished as a movie star, but Mabel adjusted. She took classes, learned French. She bought a house with a garden. She moved back to New York for good—back to the real world, away from all the tinsel. She went on the stage.

It took courage to try something new, to start over without a playbook. It took guts to walk out in front of an audience instead of a camera, and to speak lines out loud instead of pantomiming them. In the past, if Mabel had blown a scene, she could have counted on her director to call, “Cut.” Now she was walking a tightrope in front of a theater full of people, and she’d been given only the briefest theatrical training. Within weeks of her arrival, Mabel was thrust out onto the stage, starring in producer A. H. Woods’s farce
The Little Mouse
.

The show opened in Stamford, Connecticut, and played in Washington, DC, and Asbury Park, New Jersey, before closing in Providence, Rhode Island, in September 1925, never making it to Broadway. A myth would arise that
The Little Mouse
was an abject failure, and that the disaster could be laid at Mabel’s doorstep, since her health and vitality had been destroyed by drugs and scandal. In fact, the
play wasn’t as bad as all that, or at least Mabel wasn’t. She was greeted with an ovation every time she walked onstage—and the applause returned at each curtain call. The main criticism of her was that she didn’t speak loudly enough, perhaps inevitable for a silent-picture star. In a slow theatrical season,
The Little Mouse
did better than most tryouts. Mabel’s name proved to be
“magic at the box offices of the road,” the
New York Times
reported.

Yet from this point on, myths and distortions would obscure the reality of Mabel’s life. She must have been a flop in
The Little Mouse
, people concluded. She must have been terribly unhappy, a failure, a tragic alcoholic. For some reason, people seemed to need to believe the worst about Mabel; her story had to be a tragedy. Even decades later,
her otherwise sympathetic biographer would paint her last years as those of a sad, pathetic drunk.

But on what evidence? True, Mabel was a regular at Texas Guinan’s soirees at the 300 Club at 151 West Fifty-Fourth Street, where fan dancers and bootleg liquor abounded. But so were such giants of the New York theater and literary scene as George Gershwin, Al Jolson, Jeanne Eagels, and Edmund Wilson. If Mabel knocked back her share of sidecars and bee’s knees in the cafés and salons of New York—and sometimes more than her share—that hardly made her a drunk. It certainly didn’t make her tragic.

What it made her, at last, was happy. Julia Brew had come back to live with her, and take care of her, and Mabel thrived in her beloved New York. Remaining under contract to Woods, Mabel no longer had to worry about money. She brought in $1,550 a week, and while some of that surely went to her bootlegger—some of everybody’s salary did—a good deal more went to books and theater tickets. She entertained the writer Carl Van Vechten, the painter Miguel Covarrubias, the journalist Heywood Broun, and the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

How proud Billy Taylor would have been of his protégée. For that matter, how proud her father would have been. Mabel had made a place for herself, finally, in the big wide world.

In October 1925
fashion columnist Betsy Schuyler spotted the former star at the premiere of the Maxwell Anderson play
The Buccaneer
, drawing all eyes to her as she glittered in a white chiffon gown, white cape, and rhinestones. And at a party for the actress Irene Rich around the same time, a reporter from
Photoplay
noticed Mabel in an ermine wrap,
“looking well and happy.”

She didn’t stay well forever. In 1927 Mabel was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Clearly she’d been suffering with the disease for years—the reason she was sick so often, and why people thought she was still using drugs when she wasn’t. Yet even as her health declined, Mabel persevered. She made some well-received comedy shorts for Hal Roach and survived a brief, impulsive marriage to fellow merrymaker Lew Cody. Mostly she kept up her rounds of salons and sophisticated speakeasies, writing poetry and exchanging letters about art with the illustrator James Montgomery Flagg.

Mabel had escaped the confines of Tinseltown. She had fought back, spoken her truth, and reclaimed her life from those who thought they could buy it, sell it, judge it, consume it.

The same could not be said for Gibby and Mary.

“Don’t get too big,” the director Allan Dwan was known to warn his friends. “Let the other fellow get the kudos if he wants it. You can last forever at the bottom—or in the middle—but you get to the top and you’re doomed.”

Gibby should have counted her blessings that she’d never made it to the top. Her fall would have been that much more steep and injurious. As it was, she simply slipped into obscurity, going back to work for Al Christie on the Corner of Last Hope, playing bits and uncredited walk-ons. Now and then she secured a minor character part in a minor independent film. But any plans to produce her own pictures were abandoned.

Her marriage to Arthur McGinness didn’t last, now that she no longer needed to fear his testifying against her. The parties that had once lit up the night along Beachwood Drive became echoes of the past. With Osborn and Madsen in jail, the locusts scattered like vermin after a spray of pesticide. Leonard Clapham still lived nearby, starting a new life as Tom London. Gibby might have warned him not to invest too much hope in a simple name change, but the two were likely keeping their distance by now.

And yet, every couple of years, she still paid for new headshots, emblazoned with the name “Patricia Palmer” across the bottom, even as her face filled out and she developed a double chin. Gibby hadn’t given up, not altogether.

Hope, after all, dies hard. But in fact her mother would pass away without ever getting the nice things Gibby had promised her on that rocky mountain road so long ago.

And Mary? Like Mabel, she left Hollywood for New York, hoping to carve out a new career for herself on the stage. After all, she’d been a great star of the New York theater when she was a little girl. People still remembered her, Mary insisted. Lots of them!

At the train station, a reporter asked her when she would be coming back to Hollywood.

“I hope never,” Mary replied.

Yet one thing was certain. No matter where she fled, Detective Sergeant King would keep her in his sights.

Out at the windswept corner of Forty-Third and Broadway, Adolph Zukor, now fifty-two years old, gestured dramatically at the foremen and pointed up toward the clouds. Throughout the fall and winter of 1925, the Paramount Building grew taller every day behind giant scaffolding. Muffs on his ears during the colder months, Zukor stopped by often to check on the progress and hurry the workers along. The skyscraper was now slated to have thirty-five floors, dwarfing Loew’s sixteen. That included a six-story tower boasting the largest office clock in New York. Every hour a set of chimes, cast in Europe, would sound over Times Square. Zukor’s magnificent monument would complete the ring of skyscrapers around the square, fringed until recently by one- and two-story frame buildings.

The film chief was feeling emboldened. It had become clear to everyone that he would survive the Federal Trade Commission assault against him. After two years of hearings, the government still hadn’t proven any illegality on the part of Famous Players. Shrewdly, Zukor had made a major concession by ending his policy of block booking, eliminating one of the FTC’s major complaints against him. Besides, with so many other producers now expanding into exhibition, and exhibitor chains like First National financing new films, it was increasingly difficult to single Famous Players out. Observers predicted it would be years before the commission could win a judgment against the company, and maybe not even then.