Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (11 page)

For all the heartbreak Mabel had endured with Sennett, it couldn’t compare to the hell she’d gone through with Sam Goldwyn.

How persistent he’d been in his advances. Eventually Mabel had given in. After all, Sam was her boss. As much as Mabel loathed it, sleeping with Sam Goldwyn was job security.

Goldwyn was nearsighted, squat, bald, and selfish. Cocaine was the only thing that helped Mabel tolerate sex with him.
Once, on a train, she’d excused herself from his sweaty clutches and hurried into her compartment to snort a couple of lines. When she returned she was glassy-eyed and frenzied, the better to deal with Goldwyn’s pawing hands and sloppy kisses.

But what was even worse was his Napoleonic presumption of power. Goldwyn wanted to change Mabel, to refine her. That was perhaps the worst thing of all. With each new etiquette lesson he arranged for her, Mabel’s resentment toward him grew.

Sitting in the shadows of a movie set with Frances Marion, she nursed her discontent like a gin and tonic.
“Look at him,” Mabel seethed under her breath, pointing her finger at Goldwyn as he waddled through the studio, hunched over and beady-eyed. “That stuck-up bastard! That—” And she proceeded to “let fly a string of cuss words that no longshoreman could improve on,” Marion recalled. At last, out of breath, Mabel said, “Excuse me, Frances, for pointing.”

When it came to Sam Goldwyn, Mabel’s anger ran deep. But it wasn’t just because of the unwanted sexual passes and hectoring about etiquette.

Julia Brew, her companion-nurse, knew just how deeply Mabel despised Goldwyn. Julia had come to work for Mabel fresh from the nursing school at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Assigned her first case—
“a movie star at Seventh and Vermont”—Julia was told the job was top-secret. So the bespectacled young woman took the trolley five miles to Mabel’s apartment without telling a soul.

On Mabel’s door hung a brass knocker shaped like the Mask of Thalia, the smiling muse of comedy. Julia took hold and rapped hard. A maid let her inside. The apartment was deathly still. Julia was told her patient was upstairs.

In the second-floor hallway the nurse spotted “a young balding man with wire-rimmed glasses” looking “pale and quite nervous.”

It was Sam Goldwyn.

Opening the door to Mabel’s room, Julia found the actress in pigtails and a flannel nightgown, rocking on the bed in terrible pain. She was in labor, Julia realized, and losing a great deal of blood.

Immediately Julia went to work delivering the baby. Mabel’s “large eyes closed with pain and then opened again.” The five-month-old male fetus was born dead.

When Mabel had learned she was pregnant, she hadn’t demanded Goldwyn marry her, as many other young women in her position might have done. She didn’t love Goldwyn, so she wasn’t going to marry him. Neither had she undergone an abortion. A network of doctors and midwives stood ready to provide the illegal procedure; Mary Miles Minter knew that firsthand. But not Mabel. What she’d been planning to do when the baby came, she told no one. She might have dropped out of sight for several months and then given the child up for adoption—or adopted the boy herself, from a sympathetic orphanage, some months later.

But in the end she was spared any of those decisions.

Mabel looked down at her dead baby. “Miss Normand was in a terrible state,” Julia would remember.

Goldwyn came into the room and kissed Mabel on the forehead. “I’m so terribly sorry,” he said. Mabel didn’t answer. She didn’t want to see him. This was what happened when she gave in, when she let a man run her life.

From now on, she was on her own.

Mabel spent about a month at Glen Springs. Then, suddenly, she resurfaced.

“Mabel Normand has a pair of callused hands to prove she has been rusticating in Staten Island,” columnist Louella Parsons reported. A few nights earlier, Parsons had spied Mabel at the Times Square Theater at a performance of
The Mirage
. Mabel regaled the columnist with stories of “her efforts to conquer that fascinating game called golf,” and revealed that she was putting on weight, adding “a pound a week.”

All true—except it wasn’t Staten Island where Mabel had been rusticating.

She had fallen far, but Mabel was determined to prove to her doubters that she was made of tougher stuff than they gave her credit for. She was not Olive Thomas. She had survived not only drugs but betrayal and exploitation, and the loss of a beautiful baby boy.

Mabel returned to Manhattan with a new gleam in her eye.

There would be no orchid-covered casket for her.

“They loitered on the corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed,” Nathanael West would write in
The Day of the Locust
, describing those who lived in the margins, who’d been denied their share of fortune in the land of sunshine and dreams. “When their stare was returned,” West continued, “their eyes filled with hatred.” Little could be discovered about them, West wrote, “except that they had come to California to die.”

Gibby had yet to turn as sour as all that. For now, her dreams still held. But a dull, dead look moldered in the eyes of the lost souls who congregated on the stairs of the Wallace Apartments, a building full of hookers and dealers on Georgia Street downtown. Leaning against cracked stucco walls, they chain-smoked cigarettes and watched as Gibby climbed past.

She’d come here at the invitation of a new friend, Don Osborn, who shared her determination to make it to the top. Osborn, just a month younger than Gibby, had big plans. Like so many of the postwar generation, Osborn thought everyone could be millionaires if they just put their minds to it. Not for long would he be stuck living at the Wallace. Palatial homes awaited him. Fancy automobiles. Big-budget pictures. Just as they awaited Gibby.

They’d gotten to know each other on the set of
The Tempest
, a two-reel film based loosely on the Shakespeare play, starring the veteran actor Tom Santschi. But
The Tempest
was hardly a prestige picture. Made by independent producer Cyrus J. Williams and released by Pathé, the film flickered across only those few screens still uncontrolled by Adolph Zukor or the other big chains. Although
Williams renewed his contract with Pathé for another series of pictures with Santschi, he had not rehired Gibby. Had her past caught up with her yet again?

By now, she’d run out of people to turn to. She had, in her own words, asked “every one” of her contacts for help by now. And none of them had come through.

Enter Don Osborn.

Sitting with her new friend in the courtyard of the Wallace Apartments, the yellow paint peeling off the walls, Gibby listened eagerly as Osborn told her how he planned to rewrite the rules. Osborn might not be high-class—yet—but he had high-class ideas. The big studios might be closed off to people like them, Osborn told her, but the trick was to team with an independent like Williams and make a picture that generated so much publicity that audiences would beg theaters to book it. Even Adolph Zukor would be powerless to stop exhibitors from showing a film if the public demanded it strongly enough. All they needed, Osborn insisted, was a little hype. He had friends who wanted to invest money in pictures. So he was going to direct a fantastic picture and beat Hollywood at its own game.

Gibby was entranced. Don Osborn was Joe Pepa without the criminal record. Shrewd, smart, spontaneous, Osborn had the same fatal charm with women as Pepa.
He was six feet three, lean and muscled at a hundred and sixty-eight pounds. His dark hair was offset by striking blue eyes, and he sported the pencil-thin mustache that was all the rage on the motion-picture screen. Most important, he was ambitious. He’d help Gibby get what she wanted, and he’d do it more cleverly than Pepa had with his inelegant schemes. Don Osborn was just the man Gibby was looking for. Soon they were “intimately associated and involved,” as she put it.

But their passion wasn’t so much for each other as it was for what they might accomplish. It was greed, not sex, that aroused them. Their Cupid was cupidity. Osborn was married; Gibby knew and didn’t care. Pepa had been married, too. What mattered was what they could do for each other. Nathanael West wrote of the relationship between two of his fictional locusts: “She wasn’t sentimental and had no use for tenderness, even if he were capable of it.” He might have been describing Margaret Gibson and Don Osborn.

If Gibby believed Don Osborn’s schemes were aboveboard, she’d soon find out how mistaken she was.

When he was nineteen, Osborn had masterminded a profitable forgery business out of his downtown apartment at 312 South Flower Street. Knowing the cops were squeamish about arresting women, Osborn had used his new bride, the former Florence Vennum, to sign the checks. Their “worthless paper,” according to newspaper reports, was “scattered throughout Southern California.” When police finally closed in, Osborn blamed it all on Florence; the police took pity on her and let her go. Just as her husband had counted on.

Not surprisingly, Florence left Osborn soon after this, taking their infant son, Earl, with her and
suing for child support, though Osborn rarely gave her a cent. Moving back in with his mother, Osborn found day jobs at the movie studios. In the last five years, he’d walked though the backgrounds of dozens, maybe hundreds, of pictures from a variety of studios. When he
registered for the draft during World War I, he was working for the Triangle Motion Picture Company in Culver City. But Osborn’s
name would not be found on the Triangle payroll: he probably never held a job on the lot for more than a few days at a time.

Osborn firmly believed that the rules were stacked against people like him. If he was going to succeed, he’d need to go around the rules. He’d also need money. That was the basis for his friendship with George Weh, a middle-aged bachelor and the moderately successful owner of a sheet-metal company. One night, as they luxuriated in the saltwater plunge at the Sultan Baths on South Hill Street, across from Pershing Square, Osborn struck up a conversation with Weh. Osborn told Weh about his dream—to make an independent picture that could crash through the gates erected by the big producers and distributors. All he needed was financing. Weh was intrigued by the younger man. Soon he was frequenting Osborn’s
“drinking parties” with their bootleg booze and attractive girls, most of them would-be movie actresses, the kind casting agents used as dress extras and called “soft goods.”

Among the loveliest was Osborn’s second wife, the teenage Rae Potter, who’d won a Chicago newspaper contest naming her
“the prettiest working girl in the city.” Armed with such clippings, Rae had set out for Hollywood. But the only person in Tinseltown who showed much interest was Don Osborn. They married on her eighteenth birthday.

So much in love was Rae that she didn’t mind supporting her husband, dancing in two shows a night at Pelton’s Theatre in Burbank so the couple could pay their bills. Rae would later describe Don as not
“the kind of man who liked to work.” Not that she was judging: Rae sympathized with Osborn’s plight. Don Osborn could be a great film director, Rae believed, if only someone would hire him. But the men in power were jealous of Osborn’s artistry. “You haven’t a friend in the world,” Rae would say, commiserating when her husband came home, depressed after making the studio rounds.

Yet for some reason her tenderness enraged Osborn. Rae was “too good” to be married to him, he snapped, and he began staying away from home. Rae sank into deep despair. One afternoon the nineteen-year-old swallowed some bichloride of mercury tablets, the same poison Olive Thomas would consume a year later. In a suicide note she said she
“longed for the love of her husband.”

But the dosage she took wasn’t as high as Olive’s, and Rae made a full recovery. She also made the papers. S
TAGE
B
EAUTY
W
ILL
L
IVE
, the headlines cried. Like a moth to the spotlight, Osborn came fluttering back to Rae’s side, making a great show of contrition.

But within a few months they had separated again—leaving the door open for Gibby.

Margaret Gibson was like no girl Don Osborn had ever encountered before. She wasn’t a docile accomplice like Florence, or a besotted acolyte like Rae. Gibby had her own dreams, her own ambitions. And they were at least equal to Osborn’s own.

What they both wanted was to get inside the gates. They were tired of being on the outside, watching the lives of their betters with their noses pressed up against the glass.

On the night of December 1, both Gibby and Osborn could have glanced outside their windows to see the searchlights crosshatching the dark sky, heralding
the opening of the Mission Theatre. All they would have had to do was walk a few blocks from their respective hotels to witness the fuss and glamour of Hollywood’s A list. The Mission’s first show was the premiere of Douglas Fairbanks’s
The Mark of Zorro
, and the elites had turned out in force. Gibby and Osborn might well have stood among the crowd of screaming fans watching as Doug and Mary arrived in their Rolls-Royce, turning to the crowd to wave before heading up the velvet carpet to the theater. Following close behind was the mayor of Los Angeles, and Cecil B. DeMille, and Gloria Swanson, and Tom Ince, and William Desmond Taylor, and Mary Miles Minter. The women dripped with diamonds, the men dazzled in top hats and tuxedos. Cameras flashed; searchlights swung across the theater; fans shouted their favorites’ names.

This was the world Gibby and Osborn aspired to join. This was the world they believed was walled shut against them. And this was the world they intended to conquer.

It hadn’t been easy seeing Mr. Taylor at the Mission Theatre premiere. Mary was doing her best to forget him, but every time she got a little distance, there he was again, looking so handsome, so debonair, his square shoulders and noble bearing giving him the appearance of a cavalier at some European court. All that was missing was a sword at his side and a plumed hat. In those moments, Mary’s feelings came rushing back at her like a runaway train.