Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (49 page)

From between her closed blinds, Gibby may well have watched the agents walk up and down North Beachwood Drive. No doubt she breathed a sigh of relief when they failed to knock on her door.

Once again, she was in a terrible bind. On June 6,
A Pair of Hellions
had been given a gala premiere at the Franklin Theatre in Oakland, with a glittering personal appearance by Patricia Palmer, who identified herself as
“a former Paramount star.” They might not have had the funds to make it in 3D as they’d hoped, but
Hellions
was still a big feature; Gibby had ridden her horse expertly and showed off some lovely gowns in the bargain.

But Max O. Miller Productions had no cash for a follow-up picture, and so far
Hellions
hadn’t exactly set the state’s rights market on fire. Once again, Gibby was broke.

Then, all at once, things got even worse.

Out driving with a new friend, Arthur McGinness, Gibby was startled when a man leaped up onto her running board and tried to seize control of the steering wheel.

It was George Lasher.

He forced her to pull over. Lasher insisted that Gibby meet him at his office. When she complied, she was told, in the presence of Lasher’s wife, that unless she forked over $1,000 by September 4, the police would learn all about the racket she and Osborn had going.

Who was blackmailing who now?

Unbeknownst to Gibby, Lasher had written to John Bushnell after reading about him in the newspapers, spilling the beans about Osborn’s connection to Patricia Palmer, movie star.
“I intend to expose the gang anyway,” he told the banker, “but I am trying to get my money back first.” Lasher was being as dishonest with Gibby as she had been with him; he seemed to take great pleasure in the turnabout. Even if Gibby got him the grand, Lasher still intended to turn her in.

She might not have known everything that was afoot, but Gibby recognized the danger she was in. She had no money to pay Lasher. After all her schemes, this, finally, could be the end of the road.

There was only one thing she could do. Only one way she could get some money to pay him and keep him quiet.

Gibby went back to Jesse Lasky and asked for another job.

And for a third time, defying all logic, Lasky said yes.

Accompanied by John Ryan,
Lawrence MacLean took the letters to Ohio. Also in on the scheme was one Herbert I. Ross, a notorious check forger. The trio made arrangements to meet Bushnell at a hotel and exchange the letters for the thirty grand. Their mood was confident. The banker seemed eager to comply and put an end to all of this.

But just as the blackmailers were about to make the exchange, federal agents came swarming out of every door and elevator. They grabbed Ross and slapped handcuffs on him. Ryan and MacLean managed to slip out a back door and hightailed it to safety, Rose’s letters still stashed down inside MacLean’s coat.

When word reached him of the fiasco in Ohio, Blackie Madsen knew it was over.

He packed a bag and ran. He’d find some place deep down in Mexico to hide out. Now that the plan had backfired, he feared Osborn might start singing at any time.

In his temporary office in the Hall of Records, provided to him courtesy of District Attorney Keyes, Agent Connelley read the report that was coming across the wire. Clicking and clacking with every letter, the teletype machine spelled out the note that Bushnell had received from George Lasher—the one that had just foiled a third attempted shakedown of the millionaire in Ohio. Connelley read each line with growing interest. It seemed this guy Lasher had been the victim of a similar swindle by one of Osborn’s associates, an actress named Patricia Palmer.

Connelley had seen that name before.

He pulled out his reports and began leafing back through them.

Patricia Palmer was Osborn’s landlady. She lived down the street from him on Beachwood Drive.

Apparently Connelley would need to visit her after all.

On October 15, just as Agent Connelley was making plans to investigate Patricia Palmer in Los Angeles, the great ship
Leviathan
was steaming into New York Harbor, gliding past the Statue of Liberty and rounding the tip of Manhattan as it completed its transatlantic voyage from Southampton. Onboard was Will H. Hays, rested and relaxed after three weeks abroad.

Hays’s trip had been largely a holiday, a much-needed break. Since taking the reins of the MPPDA a year and a half earlier, he’d spent nearly all of his time putting out fires, one after another. It had been an extremely difficult year—and not just professionally. Not long before his trip,
Hays had decided on a legal separation from his wife. He was no longer able to continue the charade of their marriage. Helen, thankfully, wasn’t planning on contesting it; in their eventual divorce, she would even agree to give Hays custody of their son. But their separation needed to be conducted with extreme discretion. Under no circumstances could the church ladies discover that the movies’ moral guardian had left his wife.

By necessity, Hays lived a rather solitary existence. Back in Washington, he’d occasionally been able to assuage his loneliness with the company of a lady friend. That was no longer an option—not with Canon Chase and the church ladies watching Hays’s every move.

So after eighteen months without a vacation, he had jumped at the chance to get away,
sailing off for England at the invitation of George Brinton McClellan Harvey, ambassador to the Court of St. James and a longtime political ally. The two old friends had gone on shooting expeditions in the north of England, smoking many cigars and consuming copious amounts of brandy, which was refreshingly legal in the mother country.

Of course, if Hays had wanted a complete holiday, he could have gone back to Florida, where his only distractions would have been a beach lounge and a pair of snorkeling fins. But as the head of the MPPDA, even if he shunned public appointments, he was obliged to be
“wined and dined” by British film industry leaders in private. Hays’s American clients expected him to come home with a deal to make the importation of American films into Britain easier; his British hosts hoped he might facilitate the exhibition of more of their features on American screens.

As always, Hays spent his days in a constant attempt to please all sides.

Some observers wondered if it was all a ruse—if after the contentious past eighteen months Hays was unhappy with his movie job and wanted out. Was he meeting with Harvey to discuss taking over the ambassadorship? Or was he
contemplating a return to politics? On August 2 President Harding had died in office, and many of his more hardline conservative supporters weren’t sure of his successor, Calvin Coolidge. A fight for the nomination might well break out at the presidential convention the following year, and some party operatives were publicly calling for Hays’s return. The presence of several Republican lawmakers onboard the
Leviathan
with Hays—Senator Edwin Ladd of North Dakota and Representative James A. Frear of Wisconsin, among others—only fueled the talk.

But Hays had no intentions of going anywhere. As he sailed back into New York, he was ready to recommit himself to his job. His work was finally beginning to pay off. At last he could envision a time when Adolph Zukor no longer controlled his every move.

After the debacle of trying to lift the Arbuckle ban, Hays had moved swiftly to consolidate his power on the Public Relations Committee once again. The members who had opposed him most stridently had since resigned; many of the vacancies were filled with people with whom he had personal connections. Hays had also worked hard at developing even closer relationships with such producers as Joseph Schenck, Sam Goldwyn, and Marcus Loew, who were, at least nominally, as important to the MPPDA as Zukor. At the moment, Hays was going to bat for Goldwyn in resolving some exhibitor problems; in London, he’d been a particular advocate for Loew’s Metro Pictures.

By the later part of 1923 Hays had clearly rebounded from his darkest hour. Though he’d been vilified after the Arbuckle episode, now he was walking tall—quite a thrill for a man who barely cleared five feet—as the hero who’d saved the film industry from censorship. That season, the
Film Daily
observed,
“Motion picture people have no great fear of what the various state legislatures will do so far as censorship is concerned. The Hays victory in Massachusetts has had its effect.” A year on, no censorship campaign had succeeded at the state or federal level; few had even been attempted. The fact that the trades were calling the win in Massachusetts “the Hays victory” spoke volumes.

As the film czar stepped off the
Leviathan
onto the pier, he was planning his next moves to consolidate his power.

He and Joseph Schenck were
discussing a “readjustment” of the industry—a necessary move, they argued, for long-term economic growth and prosperity. Exorbitant star salaries needed to be lassoed and brought under control, but Hays made it known that he had other extravagances in his sights. Such talk could only have put Adolph Zukor on edge. He was not the sort to be lectured about how he spent his money.

Schenck boldly told the press that “the Will Hays organization will play an important part in this readjustment.” In fact, Schenck said, “this new era” would return “the Will Hays organization to the place it originally was destined to hold in the industry.” An
independent
place, in other words, free of Zukor’s control.

It was perhaps no surprise, then, that Hays received a summons from Zukor shortly after he returned from England.

Encountering reporters on Fifth Avenue, Hays presumed Zukor wanted
“to discuss his recent trip abroad.”

He was, most likely, surprised by what was really on Zukor’s mind.

On the afternoon of October 27, 1923, the same day Will Hays was summoned to Adolph Zukor’s office in New York, Gibby Gibson stood in the little courthouse that overlooked the gracious green in Santa Ana, California, and signed her name to the certificate in front of her. She was now
officially a married woman.

Her new husband scribbled his signature as well. He was Arthur McGinness, a North Dakota native two years Gibby’s senior, and a plasterer at the shipyards. Gibby hadn’t known him very long. But McGinness had been there the day George Lasher had jumped on her running board and started making threats against her. McGinness had heard quite a bit that day, and subsequently he’d learned quite a few of Gibby’s secrets.

So she’d married him. Courts couldn’t order a husband to testify against his wife.

Gibby had just finished shooting
To the Ladies
, the third big-budget picture Jesse Lasky had assigned her. This was another prestige production for Gibby, adapted from a George S. Kaufman Broadway play and directed by James Cruze, who’d helmed one of the year’s most successful films,
The Covered Wagon
. Though Gibby had only a small part, she hoped the money would hold off Lasher for a while.

Yet Lasher was no longer her biggest problem. Almost immediately after she shot her last scene for
To the Ladies
, Gibby got word, probably through George Weh, that FBI agents were asking questions about her.

Agents Connelley and Meehan were now convinced that Patricia Palmer was a key player in Osborn’s
“blackmail ring which had mulcted prominent and wealthy men of more than $3,000,000 during the past few years.” Gibby figured it was only a matter of time before she was arrested, so she needed to act fast. Grabbing Arthur McGinness, she’d sped down to Santa Ana and married him. Then she returned home to wait.

She didn’t have to wait long.

On the afternoon of November 2, several police cars pulled up in front of Gibby’s house. From the window, she watched as the officers, accompanied by federal agents, strode up to her front door. She accepted the warrant for her arrest without any argument. The officers thought the calm she displayed was “almost startling.”

“Mother,” Gibby called over her shoulder,
“these gentlemen are officers. I’ll have to go with them.”

“Are you going to jail?” Celia Gibson asked her daughter.

“I suppose so,” Gibby replied.

She was led away in handcuffs.

Two thousand miles away, in the federal courthouse in Cincinnati, Ohio, Don Osborn and Rose Putnam were preparing for prison. Osborn’s smirk had faded from his face pretty quickly after investigators started questioning him about Patricia Palmer. Realizing that Gibby’s arrest was imminent and fearing the details she might reveal, Osborn told prosecutors that both he and Rose would change their pleas from not guilty to guilty.

On the morning of October 30, Judge Smith Hickenlooper sentenced Osborn to twenty-one months in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Rose got just six months and was permitted to serve it back in her familiar cell in Troy.

Now that it was all over and he was heading to prison, Osborn had regained some of his old swagger. To the marshal accompanying him on the train to Atlanta, the erstwhile con artist announced he planned to write a movie scenario based on his experiences. On the train south, he pulled out a pen and
“became very busy, reeling off about twenty pages,” the marshal observed. Not only would Osborn “write a number of scenarios while locked up,” but he also said he “intended to make a lot of money by so doing.”

Don Osborn always had a plan to make a lot of money. Just because he was going to jail was no reason to change that.

Meanwhile, in a Los Angeles cell, Gibby waited for news of her own fate.

She was charged with violating Section 145 of the Federal Criminal Code—extortion. Her bail was set at $2,500, which she was unable to make. Her lawyer was Patrick J. Cooney, a Calexico lawyer who often took on hard-luck border-town cases like hers.

“It’s just
a put-up job,” Gibby said, weeping angry, bitter tears as she was arraigned before federal commissioner Stephen G. Long. “This is simply a matter of personal spite, and they haven’t got anything on me at all.” It was like a replay of six years earlier after she was pinched in Little Tokyo.