Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (34 page)

And that included Jesse Lasky and their loose-cannon general manager, Charley Eyton.

Zukor and Lasky were regularly at odds over many details of running Famous Players, so it wasn’t surprising that they would have different views on how to handle the Taylor scandal. Certainly Zukor wasn’t pleased to see how frequently Eyton’s name popped up in reports of the murder investigation. Removing Taylor’s papers from the bungalow had been prudent on the general manager’s part; admitting the fact to police had not been. As a result, Eyton had been directly threatened by authorities; according to
Variety
, he’d only
“narrowly escaped trouble for himself” by finally returning Mabel’s letters. With the Federal Trade Commission breathing down his back, Zukor did not want his studio suspected of obstruction.

On the afternoon of February 12, Zukor’s train chugged into La Grande Station. A delegation of studio officials waited on the platform, including Lasky and Sid Grauman, representing Zukor’s loyal Paramount exhibitors. Given the circumstances, his reception was modest; a few days earlier,
Cecil B. DeMille had scrapped plans for his own lavish welcome-home party, figuring the time wasn’t quite right for tubas and trombones.

Whisked off in a studio car toward Hollywood, Zukor could look out the window at a slate-blue sky silhouetted with palm trees and ringed with majestic mountains. Although he was a New Yorker through and through, the movie chief liked this land of sunshine and make-believe. Hollywood had been very good to him. And now, in the film colony’s hour of need, Zukor intended to return the favor.

The moralists were crying for Hollywood’s destruction. A delegation of women’s groups had met with President Harding, requesting that the film industry be relocated to Washington, DC, where Congress could act as babysitter.
Mrs. Evelyn F. Snow, Ohio film censor and a Republican committeewoman with the ear of the president, suggested her state as the film capital instead, since Ohio sat at the geographical center of the country. Rumors abounded that Will Hays was set to order the industry east as soon as he took charge, and that Zukor was planning to close down the Hollywood plant and reopen the studio on Long Island. The only remedy to the scandals, apparently, was to destroy America’s Sodom.

Zukor had had enough of such talk.
“There’s no more immorality in the Hollywood colony than in the New York stock exchange,” he had told reporters shortly before setting out on his trip. Arriving at the studio on Sunset Boulevard, he was equally as vociferous in his defense of the industry.
“We all deplore the recent unfortunate occurrences,” the movie boss told the waiting reporters, “but . . . I am sure that the percentage of wholesome God-fearing men and women must be as large [in the studios] as among those following any other line of endeavor.”

Then the diminutive figure in the expensive overcoat and fedora hat, flanked and shielded by the much taller Jesse Lasky and Sid Grauman, pushed his way through the mob and barricaded himself inside the studio.
Not for several days would Zukor be heard from again.

Safe from the eyes and ears of the press, Zukor’s lieutenants were debriefed about everything they had done.

His underlings held nothing back from their boss. To do so would have been career suicide. Creepy inspired fear among everyone in the company, even Lasky, who was known on business trips to hide his late-night revelry from his disapproving partner. If Zukor discovered that someone had kept certain details from him—especially about something as important as the Taylor case—he would have had the offender fired, even blackballed from the industry. Hiram Abrams was proof of that.

So Lasky and Eyton laid everything on the table for Zukor.

With his own eyes the movie chief beheld the evidence of Taylor’s killer.

Once again he had a chance to stanch the hemorrhaging Famous Players was suffering by going to the police. But once again he did nothing. The truth remained worse than the ongoing scandal.

Zukor blamed Lasky for letting both the Arbuckle and Taylor scandals break
“all publicity records.” After all, both incidents had occurred on Lasky’s watch as head of production at the Hollywood studio. But though the two partners had frequently disagreed over how to handle the Arbuckle affair, here they saw eye to eye.

The steps Zukor and Lasky took in response to Taylor’s death would be completely erased from history. If anything was written down, it was subsequently destroyed. They left no trail. Decades later, when Zukor’s papers were prepared for posterity, there would be one notable gap in his correspondence. Every month for the year 1922 would be packed full of letters, telegrams, and memos—except for February, for which not one scrap would remain.

They didn’t call him Creepy for nothing.

Yet despite the lack of documentation of his activities, Zukor was very busy that month.
Ten thousand circulars, paid for and authorized by the film chief, went out to police departments all around the country, describing Edwards Sands and asking for his capture. The studio was throwing its weight behind the Sands theory—the least damaging to Taylor’s (and the film industry’s) reputation. Next, Zukor approved a set of talking points intended to reframe the public discussion of the crime. If the talk about drugs couldn’t be quelled, then why not make Taylor an antidrug crusader? After all, he’d briefly assisted US Attorney Tom Green. Now
that
was a storyline, Zukor realized, that could work to Tinseltown’s benefit.

And so, a few days after Zukor’s arrival, a very different narrative began appearing in the daily newspapers. Captain Edward A. Salisbury, well-known explorer and a friend of the dead man, called a press conference at the Waldorf in New York and told reporters,
“Billy Taylor threatened to make an example of the drug peddlers in Hollywood, but they evidently ‘got him’ first.” That Salisbury came forward exactly when he did was no coincidence. He’d just returned from the South Seas with a documentary film, and Paramount had just agreed to distribute it, at least in part. Where Adolph Zukor was involved, there were no coincidences, but plenty of quid pro quos.

Zukor also asked for help from a more surprising ally: Marcus Loew. Under similar circumstances, Zukor might not have been as generous. But Zukor’s daughter’s father-in-law stood up before a gathering of exhibitors and paid tribute to William Desmond Taylor as
“one of the hardest fighters in the movement against the drug traffic.” Taylor, Loew said, had been “instrumental in ridding Los Angeles of scores of these traffickers.” Taylor had suddenly become a superhero, single-handedly cleansing the city of vermin. Reporters picked up Loew’s story and ran with it, and Zukor was grudgingly grateful to his old rival, who’d once again come to his aid.

Yet for all that, investigators still suspected that Famous Players was hiding something. The district attorney’s office was convinced the studio was sheltering
“a number of persons who could, if they would, give information which would put the police on the right trail.” One source told the
Examiner
that “highly placed people in the motion picture industry” were “pursuing their policy of silence in order to protect” someone. And no one thought they’d really go to all that trouble to protect a nobody like Edward Sands.

Who, then, was the studio shielding?

Detective Sergeant Eddie King suspected the answer was Mary Miles Minter. But Charles Eyton had given Mary’s love letters to the
Examiner
. That wasn’t protection. That was implication.

Once again Zukor had apparently decided, for the good of the industry, to toss one of his own to the wolves.

Mary was at the mercy of the reformers. Mrs. Caroline W. Engler of Lynn, Massachusetts, led the charge. Mrs. Engler, who
“took an absorbing interest in all civic and welfare matters,” had convinced her town’s censor board to ban the just-released Minter film,
Tillie
.
“Because of the Taylor murder and the naming of Mary Miles Minter as one of Taylor’s admirers,” the censor board wrote in its decision, “it would not be good policy . . . to allow Mary Miles Minter films to be shown.”

Lynn, Massachusetts, was the first locality to ban Minter films. It would not be the last.

Zukor was no doubt unhappy about losing revenue from Mary’s pictures. But he took no steps to defend the frightened young woman. Like Arbuckle, when the big picture was considered, Mary was expendable. Abandoning Mary was still preferable to Zukor than revealing what he had found in Taylor’s papers.

This was not the man Adolph Zukor had once been—the young dreamer who had come to America believing in a land of opportunity and fairness for all. But it was the man he was now. He had started with a vision, a desire to achieve greatness for motion pictures. But now that vision had become conflated with his own personal ambition, and while the vision was still there, it was becoming harder to distinguish between the two. An attack on the movies was an attack on Adolph Zukor. The scandals, the exhibitors, the FTC investigation, Tufts: these had all left him feeling surrounded and persecuted. It wasn’t just Famous Players that was under siege; it was Zukor himself.

If sacrificing Fatty Arbuckle or Mary Miles Minter would ensure his own survival, so be it. Zukor would never again be that vulnerable child, on his own, unsure of his future. He would never again be powerless or penniless.

Even if that meant letting the real killer of William Desmond Taylor go free.

At last, after more than a week in seclusion, Zukor emerged from the studio. Striding out to the waiting reporters, he announced that he had developed new guidelines for the industry. A
“vigilance committee” would safeguard “the good name of its members,” Zukor said. Everyone would be obliged to sign a pledge of good behavior. “I am here to see,” he declared, “that those few who violate the edicts of good conduct and bring discredit and embarrassment to the many are ruled not only against but out of the ranks.”

This, then, was how he justified his own actions. Arbuckle had brought discredit to the many, so he needed to be “ruled out of the ranks.” It didn’t matter whether he was innocent or guilty of the crime at hand. The same with Mary: if her career plummeted now, Zukor reasoned, it was her fault, not his. She deserved whatever she got for being so indiscreet. And what if Mabel Normand were the culprit? As fond of her as Zukor had always been, if she’d been one of his employees, he would have sacrificed her the same way. After all, those tales of drugs had brought embarrassment upon the industry—and they were her doing, not his.

But sometimes, Zukor understood, exceptions did have to be made.

After spending about a week and a half in the film colony, Zukor departed for San Francisco with Sid Grauman to make plans for a gala tenth-anniversary celebration of the release of
Queen Elizabeth
. But he left Lasky with some final instructions. If they were to ensure that the truth about Taylor’s death never leaked, there was one more thing they would have to do.

Henry Peavey just wanted to go home. The spotlight in Los Angeles, enjoyable at first, had become too glaring, and he longed to return to the winding, hilly streets of San Francisco. The press had turned him into a laughingstock. The press called Peavey a “queer person,” describing him as
“a wonder at concocting rice pudding and a marvel with the crochet needles.” Racist writers inserted hackneyed phrases like “yes’um” and “I’se very lonesome without Mr. Taylor” into his speech when in fact he was quite well spoken, with an accent that reflected Northern California, not North Carolina. And so, fed up,
the former valet requested permission from District Attorney Woolwine to step out of the limelight and head back home.

But Woolwine ordered him to stay put. He might be needed again, and the DA didn’t want to have to go looking for him.

Peavey was peeved. But he had no recourse. Woolwine had been influential in getting the vagrancy charges against him dropped, and he could just as easily reinstate them.

So Peavey was in no mood when, shortly before noon on Sunday, February 19, he heard a rapping at the door of his lodging house on East Third Street. Peering out the window, he spied a couple of white guys in boater hats. Probably journalists.

Opening the door a crack, Peavey snarled,
“I am not doing any talking to newspaper reporters.”

“Newspaper reporters?” The men laughed. “We’re not newspaper reporters. We’re officers from New York and we have authority to come down here and get you and have you go over your statements.” They wanted him to go with them to the
Examiner
office and answer just one question.

Peavey was suspicious. Why would police officers take him to a newspaper office? And what question did they want to ask him there that they couldn’t ask him here?

The so-called officers pleaded ignorance when Peavey tried to argue with them. They simply added, “There’s a thousand dollars in it for you.”

A grand was a lot of cash. Peavey had recently been hired back by his friend Vivien Cabanne, but $1,000 could completely change his life. So he put aside his suspicions and agreed to their request.

The “officers” exchanged covert smiles. Their scheme was proceeding as planned.

Meanwhile, over at the
Examiner
,
a fireplug of a man named Frank Carson was gleefully awaiting Peavey’s arrival.

Forty years old, balding, with beady little eyes that darted back and forth behind his round spectacles, Carson had recently arrived from the offices of Hearst’s
Chicago Examiner
, determined to succeed where his West Coast counterparts had failed: he would find the killer of William Desmond Taylor. For a good story, Carson didn’t let anything get in the way. In his desk he kept blank search warrants, writs, and summonses, as well as phony badges for police, coroners, and federal agents. When a story broke, Carson simply faked the appropriate document and impersonated an official, allowing him to get his scoop. “Muscle journalism,” he called it.

Henry Peavey fascinated Carson. He believed the former valet knew more than he was saying. “Carson became convinced,” said Florabel Muir, a reporter for the
Los Angeles Examiner
who had a front-row seat on her colleague’s shenanigans, “that the secret of who fired the fatal shot could be forced out of [Peavey] under pressure.” So Carson laid a trap for him, and Peavey walked right into it.