Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (50 page)

Interrogated by Connelley and by US Attorney Joe Burke, Gibby was alternately humorous and sarcastic, but always very careful. While she clearly knew more than she was admitting, there was little hard evidence linking her directly to Osborn’s schemes. Yet Jim Dallas, the Tijuana club proprietor, had corroborated Lasher’s story of the attempted extortion. That much of the Feds’ case against Gibby seemed solid.

But just as things looked bleak, word came that someone had posted her bail. To her great surprise and relief, Gibby was released.

The identity of her guardian angel was a mystery. But whoever had sprung her from jail had apparently also paid for a new, high-powered attorney to defend her. In swooped white-pompadoured Frank Dominguez, the same lawyer who’d represented Gibby after Little Tokyo—and who had defended Roscoe Arbuckle some years later. As always, Dominguez entered the room strutting and bellowing, demanding that all charges against his client be dismissed. He was a rich man’s lawyer and a friend of the film industry. Unlike Cooney, Dominguez was also a Republican—a potentially significant detail when the federal attorneys prosecuting the case were Republicans, too.

One of them, in fact, was Mark L. Herron, the Will Hays appointee who’d helped the film czar halt distribution of
The Sins of Hollywood
about a year before. Now Herron was in charge of prosecuting Patricia Palmer, aka Margaret Gibson, a featured player in the forthcoming Paramount release
To the Ladies
.
“She gained the limelight several years ago,” one exposé revealed, “when, under the name of Margaret Gibson, she was arrested in a raid on a Japanese rooming-house. She was charged with vagrancy, but was acquitted of the charge in Police Court.” While Gibby had appeared in some important pictures, another paper noted, she had
“never attained stardom in the films.”

Talk about rubbing it in.

Despite Dominguez’s bluff and swagger, the case seemed stacked against Gibby. This time she was going down. But then something else surprising happened.

On November 5, three days after Gibby’s arrest, Agent Connelley was called into Attorney Burke’s office. When Gibby was first taken into custody, Burke had been “of the opinion that there was sufficient evidence” of her guilt. Now, however, the prosecutor’s opinion had changed. And the reason for that change, apparently, was the man sitting next to him: his chief deputy, Mark L. Herron.

Herron told Connelley that he had examined his reports very carefully, “and from the evidence set forth and the statement made by Margaret Gibson, he did not deem it advisable to proceed with this case, in view of the fact that there was
insufficient evidence.”

Connelley was flummoxed. The evidence was far from insufficient. He’d gotten Gibby to admit enough about Tijuana that an indictment would be easy to obtain. Plus, he had Jim Dallas’s statement. Even if they couldn’t prove her direct involvement in Osborn’s various schemes, they could still nail her with Tijuana.

But Herron wanted her released. The government, he argued, “would find itself in the position of attempting to prosecute a woman upon the uncorroborated testimony of a man [Lasher] who had admittedly . . .
violated the Mann Act.” Once again, Herron seemed to be willfully disregarding the corroborating testimony of Jim Dallas, and he showed no interest in rounding up Edward Rucker, Gibby’s musician accomplice, who could have further confirmed Lasher’s account. Herron seemed anxious to end the matter as quickly as possible and let Gibby off the hook.

For three days Connelley stewed. He made no move to dismiss the charges. But finally, unable to countermand a US attorney, he agreed to Herron’s recommendation.

On November 5 Commissioner Long dismissed the case against Margaret Gibson.

In the courtroom, the actress burst into tears of joy upon learning the news. Dominguez thundered,
“This poor girl has lost her job, her mother is seriously ill in bed, and now we are politely informed that it was all a mistake.”

Gaveling the case closed, Commissioner Long said he regretted that the unfortunate business had proceeded as far as it had.

“Good public policy” was the reason Mark Herron gave to drop Gibby’s prosecution.

But was it public policy or public relations he was concerned about?

On the day after Herron delivered his decision to drop the charges, Jesse Lasky boarded a train for New York. He told reporters he would be meeting with Adolph Zukor “on a whole variety of subjects.”

Some suspected that Lasky had been Gibby’s benefactor, posting her bail and hiring Dominguez to defend her. After all, until a few weeks earlier, she’d been a Lasky employee. If the producer had indeed provided for her, then he was being extremely generous to someone who was, after all, merely a former supporting player. But Lasky’s generosity to Gibby had been demonstrated before.

Still, even Jesse Lasky didn’t have the clout to sway the opinion of a US attorney, to get a federal case dismissed against a defendant who was clearly guilty.

But someone else did.

Will Hays.

Mark Herron wasn’t the only one in the federal courthouse beholden to Hays. So, too, was Chief US Attorney Joseph Burke, who’d been commissioned by President Harding in 1921. Both Burke and Herron had been active members of what opponents had criticized as
“the federal brigade”—Republican federal appointees who had worked closely with the party machine to reelect senator Hiram Johnson in 1922. And that party machine, of course, had been led by national chairman Will Hays.

So if Hays had determined that Margaret Gibson should be exonerated, for the good of the industry, he had two party loyalists in place who could have made that happen.

But why would Lasky—or Zukor himself, if his summons of Hays just days before had anything to do with it—have asked the film czar to intervene in the case of a minor actress who was no longer even one of their employees?

Certainly a new scandal involving a blackmailer and former prostitute appearing in an upcoming Paramount release would not have been good for the movie industry. But such drastic action on Hays’s part—pressuring federal attorneys to dismiss a case—could only have been considered in a true emergency. What was it about Margaret Gibson that compelled the heads of Famous Players–Lasky to move heaven and earth to keep her safe—and, presumably, silent?

The only explanation for Gibby walking out of the courtroom a free woman on November 8, 1923, was that someone had pulled strings for her.

Hays had compromised his integrity before for the good of the industry. With a heavy heart, he had apparently done so again—but only under the direst of circumstances, and most likely, only under direct pressure from Zukor.

How it must have rankled him.

More than ever, Hays longed to be free of Creepy’s control.

On the eleventh floor of the Hall of Records in downtown Los Angeles, Eddie King sat uncomfortably in one of the regular weekly meetings held by District Attorney Asa Keyes. This was an opportunity for the deputies to update the department on cases they were investigating. When Detective King’s turn came, he flipped through his files, reporting on his work on the unsolved murder of wealthy industrialist Fred Oesterreich, which had occupied his time of late.

It was early February 1924. Even as King spoke, he regretted having nothing new to report on the Taylor case. It had been two full years since the director was found dead on his living room floor. King’s wife said that Taylor’s murder obsessed the detective “night and day.” And for all of King’s hopes that Keyes would be more aggressive than Woolwine in pursuing the case, the new DA had declared that there was nothing new to investigate.

To King, of course, that was absurd. He had presented to Keyes all the evidence he’d accumulated against Charlotte Shelby: the gun, her weak alibi, the testimony of acquaintances, the suspicious behavior of her daughter and her attorneys. But still the new DA, like his predecessor, had not moved forward on the investigation.

King was extremely frustrated. Why was Keyes so timid about acting against this woman? Could the rumors that Shelby was paying off Keyes be true? Was yet a second DA in the pocket of Mary Miles Minter’s abominable mother?

But in his report that day in February, King didn’t raise any of his doubts or suspicions. He simply hoped that the moment Shelby made a wrong move—which was inevitable, King believed—he’d be able to make an arrest.

Finishing his review of his work, King sat back to listen as the rest of the detectives gave their reports.

Charles Reimer was head of the bunco squad. Some interesting things had been happening under his watch.

Reimer informed his colleagues that he’d been approached by Owen Meehan of the FBI for assistance in finding two fugitives, Blackie Madsen and John Ryan, whose names might have rung bells for King if he remembered the report, some six months earlier, about the John L. Bushnell blackmail case. For a brief moment, the Feds had wondered about a possible connection to the Taylor murder, but King had apparently disregarded that lead.

Now it seemed the FBI had its sights on Madsen, and the bureau was asking Keyes to place a former con artist on his payroll to help smoke the offender out of his hole. Keyes agreed, and the stool pigeon was put to work under Reimer’s direct supervision. Reimer promised to report back to his colleagues any progress on the case.

Madsen wasn’t in Los Angeles, however. He’d fled weeks earlier, and was hiding out in Juarez, Mexico. But, as FBI agents in Texas discovered, he also kept a post office box across the border in El Paso for unknown reasons. Inquiring at the post office, the agents learned that a package had recently arrived for Madsen from 2514 West Sixth Street, Los Angeles, the home of a Mrs. Harriett Sheridan. Who was Harriett Sheridan, the Feds wanted to know, and what was her connection to Madsen?

The phone on Charles Reimer’s desk rang. The FBI was calling with another request for help. A female agent was needed to visit Mrs. Sheridan’s house and make some inquiries. Since the bureau had only three female agents, and none were in Los Angeles, the Feds hoped Asa Keyes would assign one of his women to the case. The DA agreed.

Eddie King would have learned of these developments during the department’s weekly meetings, but apparently the case had no interest for him. Why should it? Why should King care about the search for some two-bit goon?

On demure, jacaranda-shaded West Sixth Street, the female agent from the DA’s office climbed the steps of Mrs. Harriett Sheridan’s house, a clipboard under her arm. She knocked on the door. From a discreet distance, FBI agent L. C. Wheeler kept an eye on the proceedings.

A small, stout woman with a prominent nose opened the door.

The DA’s investigator went into her act. She was taking a school census, and she needed the name of everyone who lived in the neighborhood and the ages of their children. Mrs. Sheridan replied that she had no children of school age. Be that as it may, the female detective insisted she still needed the name of everyone, just to be complete. Finally Mrs. Sheridan relented, and gave her son’s name as Ross. But, as the detective would note in her report, “she was very cautious in touching upon anything relating to his present whereabouts.”

Still, they’d learned something. Comparing Mrs. Sheridan with a photograph of Blackie Madsen, the detectives concluded she was, without a doubt, Madsen’s mother. “The resemblance is certainly very strong,” Wheeler wrote in his report.

An order was placed at the Westlake post office to make tracings of all mail received by Mrs. Sheridan. The tracings would be compared to samples of Madsen’s writing in the FBI files. As soon as a positive identification could be made, the agents planned to arrest Madsen the next time he appeared in El Paso. Why he risked crossing the border to send and receive mail from his mother, the agents weren’t sure, but they were certainly glad he did.

As it turned out, they didn’t need to go all the way to El Paso to get him.

Blackie Madsen had always had a soft spot for his mother. She suffered from chronic nephritis, enduring frequent pain and swelling in her extremities. She was all alone now, too. Worried about her, Madsen snuck back into Los Angeles at the end of February.

He was spotted by the stool pigeon on the district attorney’s payroll. Immediately a manhunt fanned out across Los Angeles to bring Madsen in.

They got him at his mother’s house. At 4:30 in the afternoon on March 1, 1924, Madsen was spotted walking up Sixth Street, wearing a heavy pair of dark tortoiseshell glasses. When he entered the house, Charles Reimer called in a police backup, and the house was quickly surrounded. With FBI agent Owen Meehan covering the front, Reimer snuck around back, kicking in the door and surprising Madsen in the kitchen. As Mrs. Sheridan screamed, Meehan burst through the front door. Grabbing Madsen by the arm, he took a look at his wrist.

A blue star tattoo.

He had his man.

Madsen was forced to turn over his gun, that old .38 that dated back to the Spanish War.

A week or so later, Reimer reported to the department about his successful partnership with the FBI. Through hard work and cooperation, they’d gotten their man. District Attorney Keyes expressed his approval and said he hoped they’d have many more fruitful associations with the Feds in the future.

Eddie King didn’t have as much to say in his report as Reimer. The Oesterreich case dragged on, he said, and as usual there was nothing new to report about Taylor. But he quietly resolved to keep working on the case.

In federal custody, Blackie Madsen rode the rails back to Ohio for arraignment. At first he kept quiet, refusing to admit to anything. After all, he had a long record. The Feds had arrested him for blackmailing Bushnell, but who knew what else they might have on him? So for several days, Madsen didn’t utter a word.

Three days after his arrest, however, he’d figured out the situation. He told agents that he was now “ready to talk.” Waiving his hearing in Los Angeles, Madsen agreed to be removed to Ohio to stand trial in federal court there. He knew if the Feds allowed him to waive his hearing and head straight for Ohio, the Bushnell shakedowns were all he would be charged with.