Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (52 page)

And so Zukor had resumed what he’d been busy doing before the government stuck its nose into his business: acquiring more theaters. In November 1923, Famous Players took full control of Sid Grauman’s theaters on the West Coast; many more theaters followed in the succeeding months and years. The government had been Zukor’s biggest worry. Now, feeling safe, he was giving the raspberry to the relentless federal prosecutors.

Yet for all his bluster, his autocratic reign over the movies had ended.

And the one who had ended it was Marcus Loew.

In April 1924, Zukor’s longtime rival had formed a giant combine that would
“surpass in capitalization, influence and physical scope any other film organization in the world.” Loew’s Metro Pictures had merged with a host of others—with Goldwyn, with Louis B. Mayer’s eponymous company, and with William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures—creating a company worth an astonishing $65 million in combined authorized capital stock. Not only had the new MGM, as the industry was calling it, immediately become a financial powerhouse, but its formation gave Marcus Loew control of more theaters nationwide than Zukor. And MGM produced and distributed about as many films a year as Famous Players–Lasky.

In one fell swoop, Loew had become Zukor’s equal.

F
ILM
W
AR
L
OOMS AS
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EW
C
OMBINE
S
EEKS
S
UPREMACY
, read one headline. “A war to wrest supremacy in the film world from Famous Players–Lasky is freely predicted now that Metro, Goldwyn, Mayer and Cosmopolitan have united under Marcus Loew, making him a powerful figure rivaled only by Adolph Zukor,” the syndicated article declared.

In some ways, Loew was more than Zukor’s equal; he was his superior. In March 1924 came a new
Variety
headline: R
ADIO
I
S
B
OX
O
FFICE
D
ANGER
. Increasing numbers of people were choosing to stay at home and listen to concerts and prizefights on the newfangled squawk box instead of going out to the movies. Loew had anticipated radio’s power in a way Zukor hadn’t. He’d purchased radio station WHN and relocated its transmitting station to high above his State Theatre on Broadway, where he regularly broadcast his movie premieres as well as the sounds of Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor.

For once, someone other than Zukor was ahead of the curve.

Yet when he was finally corralled into testifying at the FTC hearings, Loew had said nothing to damage his rival. In fact, he had steadfastly defended Zukor against charges of industry control. What a peculiar man! What motivated him? Zukor couldn’t figure Loew out.

A few years earlier, sitting with his rival on his country estate veranda, Zukor had mused about the nature of competition, about the need for dogs to eat dogs lest
“they get eaten first.” Loew didn’t necessarily disagree in most cases. But he surprised Zukor with a rather different perspective. Sometimes, Loew said, what Zukor thought was competition was really “just the other fellow doing his business.”

Zukor had no idea what he was talking about.

Those veranda chats were in the past now. The Hudson River Valley was no longer good enough for Marcus Loew. Now that he was the head of MGM, he’d purchased Pembroke, a sprawling multimillion-dollar estate in Glen Cove, Long Island, with twelve master bedrooms, twelve baths, a mosaic tile swimming pool seventy feet in circumference, and a garage that accommodated twenty cars. Set on forty-six acres, much of it on the water, the mansion was called by some in real estate
“the most beautiful home in the world.” Loew had the residence of a king, making Zukor look like a country squire in comparison.

But Zukor would show him. The Paramount Building was almost done.

With the coming of MGM, the push to finish Zukor’s signature headquarters took on a new urgency.
“Zukor is about the wisest manipulator in pictures,”
Variety
noted. “It is pride in being the biggest man in the picture industry and Zukor is going to keep that status as long as possible.” His skyscraper would tell the world that no one would ever be bigger than he.

At the last minute, he made sure the plans included a radio station.

On May 19, 1926, the cornerstone was laid, using a gold trowel wielded by the mayor of New York—none other than Jimmy Walker, Zukor’s old nemesis and now fast friend. Will Hays was there too, smiling his crooked smile from ear to floppy ear.

Hays seemed content to indulge Zukor’s illusions of grandeur. Let him have the highest skyscraper. Let him maintain the pretense that he was still the most powerful man in the industry. But Hays had helped ensure that was no longer true.

When Hays had signed the renewal of his contract on April 1, 1924, he’d known that Marcus Loew’s merger was in the works, and that Zukor’s reign was about to end. Hays had encouraged Loew in the move, staying in the loop through J. Robert Rudin, Loew’s attorney and an adviser to the MPPDA. He was cheered by MGM’s quick success: by its second year, Loew’s studio was the biggest moneymaker in the industry, with profits over $6 million. Never again would Zukor hold the kind of power he had enjoyed from 1920 to 1924. And that diminution ensured Hays’s elevation.

The little film czar now stood apart, dependent upon the studios for funding but increasingly independent of them in most other matters. Hays had succeeded splendidly in his primary objective, forestalling outside regulation by disarming the opposition through his brilliant public relations campaign. To tamp down any lingering calls for censorship, he’d developed what he called “the Formula,” a loose set of guidelines based on Lasky’s fourteen points, whereby producers were asked—not required—to submit questionable scripts to Hays’s office for review. Although the Formula had no teeth for enforcement, it did disarm critics like Canon Chase. No wonder the board of the MPPDA had renewed Hays’s contract. The original agreement had run until 1925. But the new contract that the film czar signed so enthusiastically in April 1924 extended his tenure through 1928.

Despite all the rumors, Will Hays wasn’t going away.

Neither was Zukor, though he’d have to get used to sharing power.

And not just with Hays and Loew. In August 1925, to offset the FTC’s repeated assertions that Famous Players
“conspired to seize control of and monopolize the motion picture industry,” Zukor had found it prudent to take on some partners. Transferring management of his theaters to the theatrical company Balaban & Katz of Chicago was a shrewd move, once again muddying the FTC’s argument against him.
Neither a merger nor a sale, the arrangement merely gave Balaban & Katz managerial control over Paramount theaters, with money continuing to flow vertically into Zukor’s coffers. But he had also gained collaborators in Barney Balaban and Sam Katz who were far more independent and influential than his nominal partner, Jesse Lasky, ever was.

Zukor had relished his rule as an absolute monarch. But that was in the past. Being part of an oligarchy would take some getting used to.

At least he’d sit higher than any of them in the sky.

On August 2, 1926, the Paramount Building reached its peak when its highest girder, 450 feet above street level, was swung into place. Extra police had to be called out to control the crowds that gathered in the square to witness the milestone. At noon exactly, whistles blew and two marines walked out onto the beams of the thirty-fifth floor and hoisted the Stars and Stripes on the flagpole. Far below, a US Navy band played the national anthem. Zukor blinked back tears.

The building opened in October, but the real gala came on November 19, with the
theater’s official premiere. Guests flowed into the marble lobby under an enormous dome of solid gold. Socialites, Wall Street money men, and Broadway impresarios stared up in awe at a magnificent chandelier of bronze and crystal. During the day a gargantuan ornamental window flooded the lobby with sunlight that reflected majestically off all the gold and crystal. At night, the hall sparkled with thousands of colored electric lights.

The theater itself was grander than anything New York had seen before—grander than even Loew’s State, which had so impressed everybody back in the day. The French Renaissance auditorium was draped in red and gold satin damask. The great Wurlitzer organ, one of the largest in the world, occupied four chambers on both sides of the elaborate proscenium arch, overlaid and intertwined with crystal. Thomas Edison was there for the opening, looking a bit dazed to see his little novelty housed in such sumptuous surroundings.

The crowd featured a pantheon of New York’s elite: Florenz Ziegfeld. Conde Nast. Frank Crowninshield. Arthur Hammerstein. Irving Berlin. Otto Kahn. Charles M. Schwab. Senator-elect Robert Wagner. Mayor Walker. Four thousand guests in all, the maximum number of seats allowed by law—matching the Capitol, which was now in Loew’s control after his acquisition of Goldwyn’s chain. The stalemate couldn’t have been lost on Zukor. If only he could have crammed in four thousand and one.

Still, in its first day of official operation, the Paramount admitted fifteen thousand paying customers from morning until night, collecting first-day receipts of an astonishing $8,000.

He might not be the sole emperor of Tinseltown anymore, but Adolph Zukor had the biggest, grandest palace of them all.

Some of the joy in that, however, was diminished by an unexpected factor: Marcus Loew’s health was failing. Suffering from heart trouble, Zukor’s granddaughter’s other grandfather missed the opening of the Paramount. Instead he sent the man to whom he’d handed over MGM, Nicholas Schenck, who’d been with Zukor and Hays the infamous day they’d banned Fatty Arbuckle from the screen. But those days were long gone. The scandals had all been forgotten. There were new stars and new directors and new pictures. In a few years, it was said, movies might even talk and sing. A technological revolution was in the air.

Marcus Loew wouldn’t live to see it.

On September 4, 1927, Zukor paid his old adversary a visit at his magnificent Long Island estate. He knew that Loew was failing, and he sat at his bedside for some time. A nurse was in constant attendance. Finally Zukor told the frail man in the shiny satin robe—dandy to the end!—that he would see him again soon, and made his farewells.

At six o’clock the next morning, Loew died in his sleep from a heart seizure.

Zukor received the news a short time later. He was overcome.
“All I can say now,” he told a reporter who called, “is that I feel his loss more than that of any man in the world.”

Loew had been there from the start with Zukor. No one else but Lottie went back as far with him. But as they’d both climbed the ladder to success, Loew had been loved by those around him, while Zukor had been feared. The
Film Daily
eulogized the MGM chief as leaving
“a heritage of reputation, of honesty, of kindliness, and of charity.”
Photoplay
thought that Loew’s honesty often seemed
“like a beacon in a dark world.” The humorist Will Rogers quipped that that Loew “would have been a credit even to a respectable business.”

Will Hays was deeply moved by Loew’s death.
“A man is great or small,” he said, “as he rises above or sinks below his generation. Marcus Loew had characteristics of real greatness.”

Zukor read all the accolades for his old friend. Many of them singled Loew out as exceptional in a world of cutthroats and sharks. Several thousand of Loew’s employees signed an enormous card expressing their belief that they had “worked
with
him, not for him.”

Zukor knew his employees would never say the same.

At Loew’s house, trying to console the dead man’s family, Zukor was useless.
“I can’t find words to express my feelings,” he said helplessly. Of course that was something he’d never been good at, whether he was asking forgiveness from Lottie or answering letters from a distraught Roscoe Arbuckle. Zukor’s strategy had always been emotional avoidance at all costs.

But there he stood, at Loew’s funeral on September 9, one of a couple dozen pallbearers, listening to Rabbi Aaron Eiseman speak about the man they’d come to bury. “A man of humanity, modesty and meekness,” the rabbi called Loew. “With all his power, wealth, success, and aggrandizement, he remained the simple, unostentatious, humble and democratic character.” Zukor might have nitpicked about
unostentatious
, remembering Loew’s bold ties and fancy cloaks, but the rabbi wasn’t talking about clothes. He was referring to Loew’s generosity of spirit, his concern for others, his lack of self-importance. “He never forgot the days of poverty and want,” Eiseman continued. “He never withheld the helping hand to others.”

Adolph Zukor had spent the past two decades competing with Marcus Loew. But Loew had never been competing with him, at least not in the same way. Marcus was just “the other fellow doing his business.” He’d made it to the pinnacle. He’d achieved all the same wealth and power that Zukor had. And when it was all over, he was hailed by hundreds of people who had loved him.

That was one accomplishment Zukor could never match.

Eddie King could not have been happier. Not only had District Attorney Keyes promoted him to lieutenant, but in the fall of 1925 he’d finally agreed to formally reopen the Taylor investigation. The evidence King had compiled against Charlotte Shelby was compelling enough, Keyes said, to warrant another look.

Hopping on his motorcycle, an exuberant King zipped around town, pressing each witness to remember as much as he or she could about the events of three and four years earlier. Over the next several months, statements were taken from, among others, Charles Eyton, Shelby’s former secretary Charlotte Whitney, and Taylor’s accountant, Marjorie Berger. Once again, King was struck by the specificity of Shelby’s threats against Taylor.

But it was Berger who provided the clew that excited investigators the most.

Sitting in her cluttered office, the prim accountant bristled when told that Shelby had claimed to have learned of Taylor’s death through her.
“My God, the next thing they will say I murdered him,” Berger complained. “
I
was the first to give [the news] to her? Absolutely not.” In fact, Berger insisted, it was Shelby who told
her
about the murder, during a telephone conversation around seven thirty on the morning of the murder.