Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (47 page)

Swaine’s confidence melted. Once again, prosecutor Fuller was smiling.

But there was one celebrity witness who hadn’t been called. At the end of one hearing, a reporter asked Fuller when Marcus Loew might testify.
“The same day we put Zukor on the stand,” the prosecutor responded dryly.

By now, it was clear to the FTC that Zukor and Loew, rivals and antagonists, were also associates and collaborators. In many ways, Loew could have been charged with the same overreach as Zukor. He owned nearly as many theaters and had his own ambitious plans for expansion. The two former partners found themselves colluding more often these days as their interests aligned. Sidney Kent, Paramount general manager, admitted under oath that Loew houses “received certain preferences in the booking of [Paramount] pictures.” So now the government was also trying to prove that Loew “held a sort of corner on Paramount film in New York.” It was clear that if the two fathers-in-law ever officially merged their companies, they would control more than half the motion-picture industry between them.

But any camaraderie Zukor might have been feeling for his old rival quickly evaporated with Sydney Cohen’s testimony.

Cohen was asked about his relations with Loew. A little more than a year earlier, Cohen revealed, Loew had asked the exhibitors’ organization to
“take over Metro,” fearing the studio would “be done for” if Zukor’s ambitions weren’t stopped.

Zukor was furious. He knew that sneaky rat couldn’t be trusted! That dandy had been negotiating with some of his bitterest enemies, those ill-bred theater owners!

Confronted with Cohen’s statement, Loew tried to shrug it off. That was then, he said, and this was now. He wouldn’t make the same request today.

But for Zukor, it was just further evidence that he could trust no one. He was in this for himself and his company only. He had to watch his back at all times.

Every obstacle he’d faced these past three years he had overcome, even the ones he’d feared might sink him. Arbuckle was finally history. And the truth of the Taylor murder, Zukor believed, had been obliterated forever.

But would he survive these infernal government hearings?

When Zukor worried, he walked. Sometimes he walked from midnight to sunrise, all over the city, from his office to downtown and then back again. And when he walked, he plotted. He strategized. He figured out how to win.
“When the Sioux started ghost-dancing, it meant trouble along the Big Horn,” one contemporary of Zukor’s observed. “When Zukor starts walking, it’s time for everybody on the reservation to look out.”

Zukor was not a man who dealt well with fear or ambiguity. As the hearings dragged on, he lost his vision of the future. Would the government strip him of everything? Would he wake up one morning and find his bank accounts empty, his companies shuttered, his access to important people gone? Would he once again be that defenseless orphan with nothing to his name?

The hearings rolled on, indifferent to Zukor’s schedule, leaving him constantly wondering when or if he might be called to the stand. In July the commission reconvened in Philadelphia, to meet with exhibitors and distributors there. Later it moved south to Atlanta, and by late summer up to Boston, with more cities still on the docket. The nightmare promised to drag out endlessly.

At an industry dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, Zukor’s primary Wall Street angel, Otto Kahn, angrily defended Famous Players. Democracy was wrong, Kahn declared, when
“it countenances government commissions giving to endless innuendo and irresponsible gossip the place and the scope that belong to trustworthy testimony.” Democracy was also wrong, he said, when “it tolerates unwarranted assault on the reputation of businessmen with the resulting damage to the good name and fair fame of business both here and in foreign lands.”

For men like Kahn and Zukor, it seemed, there was such a thing as too much democracy.

Zukor had always been paranoid about losing power. But even the paranoid sometimes had real enemies. That summer of 1923, Zukor walked the leather off his shoes.

A block north on Fifth Avenue, though he didn’t know it yet, Zukor had another reason to worry.

Will Hays picked up the telephone and rang Marcus Loew.

He’d heard the Metro chief was having a meeting with Louis B. Mayer, the plucky independent producer who was coming to New York from Hollywood to scope out possibilities for a merger. Mayer knew that his only chance of becoming a power player in the industry was to become big enough to compete with Famous Players. To do that, however, he’d need partners. And so, among others, he was meeting with Loew.

Just what advice Hays gave Loew, neither of them ever recorded. But if Loew let on that he was considering joining forces with Mayer, Hays certainly signaled his blessing.

On the hot, humid morning of Tuesday, July 10, 1923, John L. Bushnell passed beneath his father’s monarchial crest into the Springfield National Bank in Ohio and realized the moment he’d been dreading for the past eight months was now upon him.

Waiting in the lobby were Rose Putnam and her brother. Or rather, as Bushnell now knew from Fred Moore’s letter, her
uncle
, Don Osborn.

Rose looked exquisite in a black dress, her face covered in net. A squirrel fur, incongruous on such a hot day, hung across her shoulders down to her knees.

Bushnell turned and ran.

Osborn followed. “Do you remember me?” he shouted.

The banker stopped in his tracks and looked around. Yes, he remembered him. “But you are not the man you represented yourself to be,” Bushnell said.

Osborn insisted they speak at once.

Reluctantly, Bushnell returned to the bank with Osborn. He brought his two visitors into his private office, instructing his secretary to hold all his calls.

Rose said nothing. She just sat there looking lovely and vulnerable.

“The federal men are back,” Osborn told the banker. It was going to be “necessary to fix things up” with more money. This time, Osborn said, the Feds wanted fifty grand.

Bushnell was appalled.

Osborn warned the banker that if the Feds didn’t get what they wanted, they’d haul him down to New Orleans and charge him with the Mann Act. Pointing over at Rose, who was weeping, he added that they’d drag her along as a witness. Bushnell didn’t want to put Rose through that, did he?

The millionaire had known this second shakedown was coming. The letter from Fred Moore—Earl Frank Dustin to him—was still in his safe. As a result, Osborn’s theatrics had little effect on him.

When Osborn asked him what he going to do, Bushnell replied, “Nothing.”

Osborn became red in the face. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Did Bushnell want to end up in the penitentiary? What about Rose? How could he put her through all this? He called Rose “sweet and pure and all that sort of bunk,” Bushnell later recalled.

But the banker just shrugged his shoulders.

Osborn got angrier. He told Bushnell that the officer who’d accompanied him in November “had been laughed at for the small amount of money he had obtained.” The higher-ups had refused to turn over the balance of the letters. Did Bushnell want them to end up in the hands of his wife?

The banker kept his cool, explaining he was “not in a position to do anything at this time” as he’d recently suffered some financial losses.

Osborn seemed ready to snap. “If you’re not doing anything,” he seethed, “I will do something.” He leveled his eyes with Bushnell’s. “I can kill you.”

This much Bushnell hadn’t expected. He told Osborn to take it slow.

All six feet three inches of Osborn loomed over him. “There is nothing to prevent me from killing you,” the blackmailer said, “if you don’t fix things up.”

Bushnell promised he’d try to figure something out. He told Osborn to return to the bank at 1:30 that afternoon.

Osborn had no other choice. If he wanted the money, he’d have to come back. He and Rose left the bank.

No doubt Bushnell let out a very long breath.

When he was sure they were gone, he placed a telephone call and told the man who answered to get over to the bank right away.

Back at the Shawnee Hotel, Blackie Madsen’s ruddy face creased in suspicion. Just what did Bushnell have up his sleeve? Why did he want Osborn to bring the federal agents back with him to the bank that afternoon? Why couldn’t he just give Osborn the money? After two decades of scams and con jobs, Blackie could always sniff out a trap.

But what else could they do? They couldn’t just leave now. Osborn was desperate to get his hands on more of Bushnell’s money. How fast that ten grand had disappeared! Back in Hollywood, he’d been forced into some honest work as a director’s assistant with the Sanford Production Company, a low-budget independent. He’d just finished a picture called
Shell-Shocked Sammy
, photographed by Gibby’s old partner Elmer Dyer and featuring their buddy Leonard Clapham. But Osborn didn’t like to work. How much easier, and more lucrative, it was to bilk money from pigeons like Bushnell.

Osborn had left Los Angeles with Rose and Madsen on July 2. In Chicago they’d met up with
John A. Ryan, a fellow conspirator who ran a gambling den in Los Angeles, paying police part of the proceeds so they’d leave him alone. Ryan would play the part of the second federal agent, come to put the screws on Bushnell.

But the banker’s insistence on meeting the agents left Madsen uneasy. Why would someone who was afraid of being arrested over the Mann Act want to meet the guys who might actually do the arresting? Madsen told Osborn to go back by himself to the bank. If the sucker still didn’t cough up the cash, he and Ryan would arrive later and rough him up a little bit.

Osborn agreed and made his way back downtown.

But when he was ushered into Bushnell’s office, the banker wasn’t alone. Osborn was introduced to a private eye named Nicholas Fischer. In that moment he knew he’d walked into a trap. Osborn had thought Bushnell was so worried about being exposed that he would never have brought a third party into the situation—especially not a private dick. But of course he had no clew about Fred Moore’s letter.

Fischer started badgering Osborn for the names of the federal agents. If the Feds were so anxious to get Bushnell, Fischer wanted to know, why hadn’t they come to the bank themselves? When Osborn couldn’t come up with a good answer, the detective told him the jig was up and pulled out a pair of handcuffs.

Cornered like an animal, Osborn fought back like one as well. He lunged at Fischer, reaching for his throat. But then the hard nose of the detective’s pistol pressed into his gut. Fischer told Osborn to back off, and to keep his hands in the air as he phoned the police.

Calmly triumphant, Bushnell requested that “handcuffs not be used because of the attention they would attract.” He was sure Osborn would go quietly, wouldn’t he?

Osborn steamed. He was led out through the bank, Fischer’s gun pressed discreetly against the small of his back.

For the trio waiting at the Shawnee Hotel, the afternoon dragged on. The sun dropped lower in the sky. Shadows lengthened across the room.

Blackie Madsen knew something was up.

Itchy and uncomfortable, he told Rose that he and Ryan would go see what was happening. Until she heard from them, she should stay in her room.

Rose agreed. For the next several hours, she waited alone.

At police headquarters, FBI agent Earl J. Connelley, just thirty years old, arrived from Cincinnati, having been summoned by Nicholas Fischer. Connelley’s first job was to interrogate Osborn. The prisoner was alternately indignant, anguished, and bemused. He’d just been following orders, Osborn claimed. A man named Blackie Madsen was the mastermind of the scheme. And if Connelley wanted to catch him, he’d better hurry.

The agent wasn’t fooled; he knew right from the start that Osborn was “the brains of the organization.” But he asked where they could find this Madsen.

The Shawnee, Osborn told them.

Minutes later, police arrived at the hotel.

Neither Madsen nor Ryan were in their rooms. The officers staked out the front of the hotel, watching everyone who came out and everyone who went in.

Sometime around quarter past seven that evening, the phone rang in Rose’s room.

It was Madsen. He told her to meet him on Limestone Street around the corner from the hotel. Rose quickly agreed.

Outside, the shadows of dusk were filling up the block around the hotel. A few feet ahead of her, Rose spotted Madsen lurking, but he gestured for her not to stop as she passed. “Go on,” he whispered harshly as she drew near. Rose kept walking right past him.

Eventually she turned around and headed back the way she had come. Madsen was gone. Anxious, Rose continued to walk up and down the street for forty-five minutes. But Madsen did not return. Finally, when darkness had settled completely, Rose went back inside the hotel.

Connelley had been watching her the whole time.

In the morning Rose was taken into custody. Connelley also seized the contents of Madsen’s and Ryan’s rooms, including a gold-plated badge in the shape of a star inscribed “U.S. Department of Justice Inspector.” But the two conspirators had escaped.

On July 15, and for several days thereafter, newspapers across the country bannered the arrest of Osborn and Putnam and the manhunt for Madsen and Ryan. Meanwhile, the FBI was going through reports from its various provincial offices, considering the possibility that Bushnell’s shakedown was not an isolated case. Moore’s letter had convinced the Feds that Osborn’s gang might have had other victims, some perhaps prominent.

In Los Angeles, special agent Leon Bone took a look at some of the film colony’s unsolved blackmail cases. He learned that
“numerous prominent motion picture people” had been victimized by “an organized group of blackmailers in Los Angeles . . . about the time of the Roscoe Arbuckle scandal, when motion picture people . . . were dodging publicity of all kinds.” One case in particular drew Bone’s attention.

Could Osborn’s gang “have been implicated in the murder of William Desmond Taylor, noted motion picture director who was slain about a year and a half ago?” Bone sent the inquiry over to the district attorney’s office.