Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (18 page)

From beneath heavily mascaraed lashes,
Gibby watched the man check in at the Melrose Hotel. He was a middle-aged traveling salesman stopping for a few nights in Los Angeles. For the next couple of days, Gibby kept her eyes on the man. She memorized his movements. In the late afternoon she watched as he sat by himself in the lobby, reading a newspaper or smoking a cigar. Slinking over to the hotel desk, Gibby made a phone call.

Not long afterward Don Osborn showed up, accompanied by his niece, Rose Putnam.

From a discreet vantage point at the far end the lobby, Gibby and Osborn watched as Rose went to work.

Strolling nonchalantly over to the man, she took a seat and struck up a conversation. Flirting came naturally to Rose, as it did to Gibby. Within a very short time Osborn’s niece had the traveling salesman laughing. She leaned in as he lit her cigarette. She crossed her legs, showing off her shapely calves, dangling her shoe from her toes.

Eventually Rose and the man stood and made their way upstairs.

It was all going according to plan.

Glancing at his watch, Osborn gave his niece ten minutes.

At the exact scheduled time, Rose burst back into the lobby, her face a mask of horror and outrage. The man followed, his hands pleading. This was where Osborn came in. Hurrying over to Rose, he asked her what was wrong. Amid a torrent of tears, she pointed at the salesman. He’d tried to accost her! She’d had to fight him off! She covered her face and sobbed.

Now it was Osborn’s turn to show off his own acting abilities. Never in his long career as a movie extra had he ever landed such a meaty part. With anger flashing like neon signs in his icy blue eyes, he drew close to the salesman’s face. At six-three, Osborn could be very intimidating. Through clenched teeth, he identified himself as Rose’s husband and snarled that he had no choice but to call the police. The man begged him not to do so. Wasn’t there something he could do to keep the police out of this?

Osborn turned, locking his eyes onto the trembling man. His wife’s honor was worth a great deal, Osborn declared.

The salesman agreed.

In that case, Osborn said, maybe they could work out a deal.

After a bit of haggling over just how much Rose’s honor was worth, the traveling salesman wrote Osborn a check. Then he packed his bags and hightailed it out of the hotel as quickly as he could, scrambling back to wherever it was that he had come from—Iowa, perhaps, or Michigan or Wisconsin or North Carolina.

And Osborn and Rose took the check to the bank.

Gibby, of course, got her cut for setting the jig into motion.

The hapless traveling salesman was their first chump. He was certainly not their last.

People did what they had to do in Tinseltown. No one was getting any work. With the studios struggling to unload their backlog of unreleased pictures,
Variety
reported, actors without long-term contracts—people like Gibby and Osborn—weren’t being hired.

Meanwhile, Gibby’s rent was due. She had to do something.

She’d tried playing by the rules. She’d tried going high-class. But no offers had been forthcoming after
Greater Than Love
. So she’d had to drag herself back, tail between her legs, to Al Christie and his Gayety shorts. The area around Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, where Christie and other low-budget comedy producers had their studios, was called the “Corner of Last Hope” wthin the industry. For Gibby, a return to Christie meant more slapstick. More silly, inconsequential roles for which she was paid pennies. To make matters worse, Christie sent out a humiliating press release marking her return.
“Patricia Palmer is back in comedy, following her desertion, for she found that work in the dramatic field was not all that it was declared to be.” Talk about rubbing salt in her wounds.

It wasn’t fair. Gibby had worked so hard. She’d come up with scenarios, budgets, and production schedules for her proposed picture, but no one was willing to take a chance on her. Nearly a decade she’d spent in front of the camera. She knew as much about making movies as anybody. Why couldn’t she catch a break? Why did everyone else get to have nice things except for her? Mary Miles Minter in her luxurious rented mansions—Minter didn’t even
want
to make movies! Gibby would’ve killed for one of Mary’s rejects. And Mabel Normand! She’d just gotten a million-dollar contract, even though her pictures hadn’t been making real money for years. A million dollars! When Gibby couldn’t even pay her rent!

Why was the world so out of balance?

At Osborn’s house on South Bronson Avenue, the locusts thronged.
Rae would come home late at night after performing at a downtown burlesque theater to find her husband and George Weh, or Fred Moore, or out-of-work director Jack Nelson, completely intoxicated. And there was a new character, too, brought into the group by Weh, who sat drinking his whiskey off to one side, coiled like a snake, seemingly ready to strike at any point.

His name was Blackie Madsen. A long history of barroom brawls and back-alley fights was etched into his coarse features. His face was like a living mug shot, with small, devious black eyes over a prominent nose. Heavyset, in his fifties, Madsen walked slowly and was bowlegged. On his left wrist was tattooed a blue star.

At the moment
Madsen was on the lam from the San Diego police for fleecing a tourist out of $16,000 through a fake stock exchange. Clearly this Blackie character knew how to make money. That was why Weh had brought him to Osborn’s.

But Madsen had no interest in motion pictures. He had other ideas about how they might earn a living.

Madsen told Osborn that the pigeons at the Melrose Hotel were rinky-dink. If he ever hoped to make more than pocket change, he’d need to start casting for bigger fish.

And so they started compiling a list.

The movie colony was a limitless source of easy marks. Ambitious young writers could be swindled with the promise of a producer reading their scripts. Out-of-work actors would pay anything for a chance at landing a part. Thousands of gullible stooges, moping around soda fountains and loitering in pool halls, could be swayed by get-rich-quick stories.

According to a report that would come later, Osborn and Madsen started
“looking around for victims for their bunco schemes.” Rose and “other women” often served as bait.

But Blackie Madsen pointed out that they didn’t need to go to all the trouble of setting someone up. In Tinseltown, after all, most everyone had secrets. How much easier it was to just rattle a few skeletons in various closets than concoct some elaborate racket. A simple blackmail job could bring in a lot of cash, with far less overhead.

Among their first victims during the spring and summer of 1921 were “a film exchange man who was cheating on his wife” and a man who “owed a great deal of money to the government.” By July, Osborn and Madsen were counting out their payola with glee, throwing the bills onto the bed so Rose could roll around on top of them in ecstasy. Their minds raced. Who else could they shake down? Who else had secrets? How easy this blackmail game was!

Over the next few months Osborn and Madsen would put together “a long list of names” of potential victims. And they almost certainly had help in compiling it. Gibby had assisted Osborn before; she could easily have come up with a few ideas again. After all, Gibby knew lots of people who had secrets.

Chief among them William Desmond Taylor.

That spring of 1921, Gibby was feeling no love for her old friend Billy. When she’d made the rounds of studios the previous summer, traipsing across Hollywood on a sweltering day, practically begging for a job, she’d visited
every contact she’d ever had, which surely included Taylor. And here she was, more than half a year later, still unemployed, forced to resort to bunco schemes to make a few dollars.

Thanks for nothing, Billy Taylor.

What different directions they had traveled since starting out together. Eight years earlier,
Illustrated Films Monthly
had carried a serialization of their picture
The Night Riders of Petersham
, along with a photograph of Taylor standing beside his horse, staring lovingly down at Gibby, holding her hand. In
The Kiss
, Gibby had played a discontented shopgirl who sets her eyes on a wealthy man, played by Taylor, believing he can get her the pretty things she wants. An ironic bit of foreshadowing, perhaps.

But in fact Gibby had known Taylor—or known of him—even longer than that.

When he directed Judge Ben Lindsey in
The Soul of Youth
, Taylor had told the magistrate an interesting story, one of the few occasions he ever discussed his past. As he related to Lindsey, around 1910 he’d been mining for gold in the mountain town of Ouray, Colorado. During this period, he would make “frequent visits” to Denver. On one such trip, Taylor told the judge, he’d been arrested. Despite insisting that he was a victim of mistaken identity, Taylor was beaten by the arresting officer and tossed in jail overnight. In the morning, when his identity was proven, Taylor was released with extravagant apologies. He made no complaint and returned to Ouray. At least, that was the version he told Judge Lindsey.

During that same period, Gibby was also in Denver. She was fourteen at the time, singing and dancing in the city’s Pantages Theatre, trying to earn a living for herself and her mother. Gibby might well have been aware of Taylor’s “frequent visits” to the city.
In May of that year, Taylor was on the Denver stage himself, advertised in newspapers as appearing at the Tabor Grand Opera House in
As the Sun Went Down
. So at the very same time Gibby danced and sang at the Pantages, Taylor was appearing at a theater just a block away. Did they meet? Did Gibby know something about Taylor’s night in jail? Did she hear talk that the incident involved more than just a case of mistaken identity?

Maybe Taylor’s arrest was just as he told it to Judge Lindsey. Nonetheless, Gibby had been nearby when it happened—just as she was present for other key moments in Taylor’s life, when she had the chance to witness things he might have preferred to keep private.

When Taylor was fired by Vitagraph, Gibby was there.
Taylor would insist that he had quit, but a notice in the
Moving Picture World
proved otherwise. Just why the company would sack the star of their important upcoming picture
Captain Alvarez
was perplexing. Clearly there’d been some bad blood. When
Captain Alvarez
turned out to be a giant hit, Taylor’s name was sometimes omitted from the credits. Had someone discovered that his name wasn’t actually Taylor? Or was he fired for other reasons? Some kind of transgression, perhaps?

And how much had Gibby observed or overheard?

Even now she still had connections to Taylor.
One of her acquaintances was a twenty-one-year-old Tennessee-born actor and dancer named Starke Patteson, with whom she and Osborn had appeared in
The Tempest
. Patteson, also a friend of George Hopkins, was preparing to play a small role in Taylor’s forthcoming picture
Morals
, scheduled to begin shooting that summer. And a year earlier, Patteson had acted in
Sweet Lavender
with Mary Miles Minter, not long after the young actress’s obsession with Taylor began.

So not only was it possible that Gibby knew, through her connection with Patteson, all about Taylor’s relationship with Hopkins, but she might also have heard a few juicy stories of the director’s troubles with his fanatical admirer.

If Gibby did decide to add Taylor’s name to a list of patsies for Osborn and Madsen, she would have had plenty of goods on him.

Everybody in Tinseltown had secrets. But few had more than William Desmond Taylor.

The ballroom of the West Hotel in downtown Minneapolis stank of smoke, sweat, and testosterone. On the excruciatingly hot afternoon of June 28, 1921, three thousand theater men gathered for their annual convention. Shedding their coats and removing their collars, they argued among themselves about everything from tariffs to censorship. But then, all at once, their squabbling ceased. Silence fell over the great sweltering hall. The only sound was the squeak of the ceiling fans overhead. All eyes turned as a little man in a fedora hat filed into the room.

Adolph Zukor.

For the last few days Zukor’s photograph had dominated the newspapers. He was the central figure in an exploding scandal out of Boston, involving prostitutes and a corrupt district attorney. The exhibitors, many of them union men and fervently anticapitalist, had gotten some good chuckles observing Zukor’s predicament.

B
IG
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OVIE
M
EN
S
AID TO
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AVE
P
AID

T
HOUSANDS TO
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SCAPE
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ROSECUTION

Zukor and Hiram Abrams had been
revealed as two of the men involved in the $100,000 shakedown in Boston. For the past two days in Minneapolis, salacious details of the Mishawum Manor dinner had been passed around the convention hall like bottles of beer in a saloon. The imperious Adolph Zukor, caught with his pants down!

Zukor paid no attention to the smirking faces as he proceeded through the muggy ballroom, his hooded eyes staring straight ahead. He took his seat with several of his Famous Players lieutenants.

He could have stayed away from this gathering of his enemies. But there he was, sitting among three thousand men who wanted his head. Zukor had promised to be there, and so he was. He’d come to Minneapolis to answer the charges the exhibitors had against him. To back out after the scandal broke would have been seen as cowardly. So he braced himself and made the trip.

Besides, as difficult as it was, heading to Minneapolis might have been preferable to staying home and witnessing the hurt on Lottie’s face.

She had seen the headlines about her husband, and yet she had not turned her back on him. What “great strength and understanding” Lottie had, Zukor would say. She endured this trial as she had others: selflessly. When Lottie worried about things, her husband would say, “her concern was never added to mine.” Yet Lottie’s magnanimity likely made Zukor’s guilt only more difficult to bear.