Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (69 page)

In the weeks after Taylor’s murder, the newspapers were filled with accounts of his many aliases.
COURTESY BRUCE LONG

Beautiful, defiant, subversive Mabel Normand was Taylor’s best friend.

Famous Players–Lasky, the most powerful movie studio of the 1920s, the progenitor of Paramount, with its founders: Jesse Lasky, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn, and Cecil B. DeMille.
PHOTOFEST

Marcus Loew was Adolph Zukor’s greatest rival—except the rivalry seemed to go only one way.

Almost single-handedly, Zukor created the system by which American movies are made, sold, and shown.
PHOTOFEST

Olive Thomas’s accidental drug-related death in 1920 launched half a decade of scandals that forever changed the way Hollywood did business.

Among the other scandals were the drug addiction and death of popular actor Wallace Reid . . .
PHOTOFEST

. . . and the rape-and-manslaughter trials of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Zukor did his best to manage the fallout from the Arbuckle case, just as he did with the Taylor murder.

Mabel was devastated by Arbuckle’s troubles, remembering happier days when they made comedies for Mack Sennett, such as the famous
Fatty and Mabel Adrift
(1916).
PHOTOFEST

When the irreverent Mabel spoke, “toads came out of her mouth,” said Blanche Sweet—nobody minded. Everybody loved Mabel.

COURTESY RAY LONG