Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (19 page)

So he sat among the barbarians, a wounded man. His enemies may have smelled blood, but they were also impressed that he hadn’t backed down. No one could call Zukor chicken.

Across the aisle, Marcus Loew held court like a king, standing out from the crowd in his snazzy suit and brightly colored tie. Loew seemed to be anticipating quite the show now that his rival had arrived. When word got out that Zukor would attend the Minneapolis convention, Loew was asked if he planned to be there, too.
“Try and keep me away,” he’d answered to a chorus of laughter. Fireworks were inevitable, and Loew wanted to see them.

He didn’t have to wait long. As speaker after speaker took the podium, Zukor was excoriated as a greedy oligarch out to destroy them all. His worst sin, the exhibitors declared, was the practice of “block-booking,” wherein theater owners were forced to take second-rate pictures if they wanted top-of-the-line product as well. To keep Fatty Arbuckle or Wallace Reid on their screens, they had to buy dreary low-budget romances or cheap westerns as well—which meant half-empty houses much of the time. The injustice was blamed squarely on Zukor.

The film chief made no response. He just sat there stoically, his tie still knotted at his throat, his collar tight despite the sweltering heat. But surely his blood was boiling as the next speaker strutted up the podium to a chorus of cheers and whistles.

Senator Jimmy Walker.

Locking eyes with Zukor, Walker called a spade a spade. Famous Players’ acquisition of theaters, he said, amounted to a
“trustification” of the industry. Walker spoke of “powerful Wall Street interests” that were “exerting pressure on banks not to advance any loans to independent producers.” Struggling young filmmakers, he charged, fired with the same dreams that had once propelled Zukor forward, were now being denied the same opportunities the Famous Players chief once enjoyed. And even if some young filmmaker could find the financing to make a movie, Walker asked, “Where will this man show his picture—up the alley?”

Don Osborn would have applauded.

Zukor’s corporate greed was hurting real people, Walker declared. Poor Mrs. Pauline Dodge, the mother of a three-year-old son, had watched as her little theater in Morrisville, Vermont, was stolen right out from under her by Famous Players agents. Behind on her mortgage payments, Mrs. Dodge was elbowed aside by one of Zukor’s “henchmen” who cajoled the bank into reverting the theater to its previous owner—who, of course, had a deal to turn it over to Famous Players.

“Don’t forget, Mr. Zukor,” Senator Walker said, speaking directly to the mogul, “that while you had your early struggles, Mrs. Dodge is having hers now.”

The men roared in defense of the little lady from Vermont.

Zukor burned in his seat, but he gave no indication of his ire. These exhibitors were certainly a coarse lot. They’d been waiting a long time for this moment, to confront him face-to-face. Ill-bred boors. And Democrats, which to Zukor was often the same thing. Uneducated, illiterate Irish, Italians, Poles, and Greeks. Worst of all, to Zukor, were the lower-class Jews, the kind to whom he felt no kinship. Some Jews, Zukor believed,
“were not very well liked because their behavior wasn’t such that people could admire.” As the raspberries and catcalls flew all around him, Zukor saw multiple examples of such loathsome behavior.

Still, he’d given his word to be there. He had appeared at the exhibitors’ New York gathering a few weeks earlier to tell them he resented being called
“a liar and a crook.” He’d spent the best years of his life in this business, he said, and “I have my reputation at stake.” So he had agreed to come here to Minneapolis and submit himself to their abuse. No one could ever say Adolph Zukor ducked a fight.

It was about much more than that, however.

The old proverb “It never rains but it pours” was especially true that summer of 1921. Exhibitor agitation, the lingering effects of the recession, and the scandal of Nathan Tufts and Mishawum Manor were all bad enough. But potentially worse than any of that was Zukor’s greatest worry, which seemed at last to be at hand.

The Federal Trade Commission was considering action against Famous Players. The repeated use of the word
trust
by Jimmy Walker and Sydney Cohen had finally reached the ears of Washington.

Zukor, of course, resisted any idea that he was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, that Wilson-era law prohibiting restraint of trade. Famous Players wasn’t restraining anybody’s trade, its chief insisted haughtily. The company was simply a superior competitor. Yet the FTC apparently disagreed, as rumors spread that an investigation was imminent.

Zukor quickly placed a call to Washington.

A short time later
George B. Christian, President Harding’s private secretary, summoned the head of the trade commission, Houston Thompson, to a meeting at the White House. “I understand you have issued a complaint against the Famous Players Corporation,” Christian said. “What do you mean by issuing a complaint without giving these people a hearing?”

Thompson replied that the commission had not yet issued a complaint, but acknowledged that one was under consideration. Without asking him directly to halt the investigation, Christian made sure Thompson understood that the president was not pleased with this situation. “This case will never go through,” Thompson believed Christian was telling him.

Zukor could only hope that pressure from the White House would deter the Federal Trade Commission from pressing on with its complaint. But there were ways he could maybe help bring about that outcome himself. Some very public overtures to the exhibitors would be extremely prudent at this juncture. That, more than anything else, was why Zukor had come to Minneapolis.

And so the little movie chief stood when his name was called and made his way to the podium past all the staring eyes and hardened faces.

He opened with a grand gesture. He would write a check, right there at the convention, to pay poor Mrs. Dodge a fair rate for her theater as well as to cover all her legal expenses. Henceforth, Zukor promised, he would
“protect the exhibitor from the sort of treatment” Mrs. Dodge had endured at the hands of those ruffians.

A smattering of surprised, suspicious applause followed his words.

But then Zukor narrowed his canny eyes and lowered his voice. The exhibitors should not, he cautioned, pit themselves against him. The only way to proceed, Zukor asserted, was through cooperation. He pledged to do his part. Would they do the same?

The room was mostly silent as Creepy returned to his seat.

What did he mean by that? How would Zukor cooperate with them? He hadn’t promised to do away with block-booking. There were so many other issues, from tariffs to unfair acquisitions, that he hadn’t addressed. The exhibitors started to grumble. Zukor wasn’t looking for cooperation, they murmured among themselves. He was hoping for capitulation.

Some of the speakers who took the podium after Zukor said his word wasn’t good with them. There was talk of forming an exhibitors-producers alliance led by Lewis Selznick to oppose Famous Players. Listening to this, the film chief seethed. Why had these oafs insisted he come to their damn convention if they had no intention of working with him? If all they intended to do was continue to oppose him?

Zukor had had enough. Early on the morning of June 29, he walked out. Since he had not been
“accorded convention courtesies,” he instructed a spokesman “to tell President Sydney S. Cohen what he thought about it.” He took the train back to New York.

Marcus Loew sat in his seat on the convention floor, his chin in his hand.

He wasn’t smiling anymore. The laughter and backslapping had ceased, and Loew was stewing over the way Zukor had been treated. Watching his former partner hold his own against that hostile crowd, standing up to those jeering exhibitors, his head barely clearing the podium, Loew had felt a wave of sympathy for Zukor. They’d been through so much together. Zukor might be cutthroat, driven largely by self-interest. But he’d also done more to create this industry than anyone else, and he deserved respect for that at least. Loew, who saw the good in people before he saw anything bad, wasn’t thinking about how Zukor’s appearance in Minneapolis might benefit him in the eyes of the Federal Trade Commission. Instead, he simply saw the fact that the Famous Players chief had had the courage and the decency to meet the exhibitors on their own turf, that he had walked into the lion’s den with his chin held high.

Risking the backlash of the exhibitors whose support he needed to retain, Loew strode up to the podium himself and asked for a chance to speak.

“It took a damned big man to apologize as Zukor has done,” he told the crowd. If Zukor came here asking for cooperation, then they should take him at his word, Loew insisted. They could work with Zukor if they talked to him “in the proper vein.” To provoke him further, Loew cautioned his fellow theater owners, would only make him fight back harder.

Much of the crowd muttered and groaned as Loew tried to defend the man they all loved to hate. A few, however, were won over by his appeal. Jimmy Walker, of all people, admitted he’d felt some grudging admiration watching
“that little man” move through a roomful of irate exhibitors, who shouted “cruelly unkind things” at him as if they were tossing rotten fruit.

When Zukor learned of Loew’s defense of him, he was surprised. In a similar circumstance, it was hard to imagine Zukor rising to plead for Loew. But that was the sort of man Marcus Loew was. He might do his best to beat Zukor in the height of his skyscraper or in the number of theaters he owned. He might buy a house right next door to Zukor’s country estate, just to stay in competition with him. But then he’d turn around and do something like this.

“Business has nothing on me once I go home at night,” Loew told Zukor at one point, lugging over a basket of cucumbers he’d grown himself to Zukor’s country house, sitting with his old rival on the front porch and sharing a cigar.

Zukor looked over at him with a bewildered expression. What did he mean about not bringing business home with you? To Zukor, Loew seemed to be speaking a foreign language he didn’t understand.

Yet Loew was right about one thing. He understood Zukor better than anybody, and he knew just how hard his competitior would fight. Backed into a corner by the triple threats of Nathan Tufts, the FTC, and the exhibitors’ campaign against him, Zukor would come back at them swinging. He had come too far, gained too much, to shy away from the battle now.

But his fight wasn’t just about the money, or even the control, and this Loew understood as well. Yes, Zukor liked being rich, and yes, he intended to get a lot richer. It was true that Zukor was a megalomaniac and had no interest in sharing power with anyone. But the reason he fought went much deeper than that.

Nearly two decades earlier, Zukor had glimpsed the promise of the movies before anyone else.
“There was nothing to the whole industry but terrible products in little doses [and] cheap methods,” William Brady wrote. “No actor of any standing would have anything to do with celluloid. Zukor was about the only living human being who could guess what was going to happen.”

Seeing beyond the five-minute quickie comedies that played on vaudeville bills in those days, Zukor envisioned longer, more complex narratives for films. He took the movies out of their makeshift storefront theaters and enshrined them in grand palaces of entertainment. More magnificent possibilities, he believed, were still to come.

Adolph Zukor loved the movies. They were part of his soul. They were the core of his past, and certainly of his future. Right now movies were silent and black and white, with piano accompaniment and occasional hand-tinted frames. What if someday they could be synchronized with music scores? What if they could be shot in color? What if movies could talk?

Right now, nearly every city and town in America had a movie house, but Zukor dreamed of the day when every city and town around the world would have one too. What if movie theaters became more than just places to screen the latest releases? What if they got bigger and more elaborate? What if, someday, movies were taken as seriously as the legitimate stage, as an art form in their own right? What if movies could be, as some now imagined, brought into the homes, shown on screens or on devices not yet invented? What was the future of moving images? What forms might they take? How prevalent might they become in everyday life?

Zukor was eager to find out. He didn’t think just about today, or even tomorrow. He imagined what things might be like ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years in the future.

That was what set him apart from the others.

To some, Zukor’s long eyes were ferocious and threatening. But the theatrical impresario Robert Grau thought the president of Famous Players had
“the face and eyes of a dreamer.” Both observations were correct.

That was why, in the end, Marcus Loew expected that Zukor would prevail.

Pretty little Rae Osborn had no idea where her husband Don was getting all his money. He hadn’t worked in months. But suddenly Don was wearing new suits and drinking high-grade contraband booze. And his niece Rose Putnam flaunted some very fancy new dresses when she came around, which was practically every day.

Still naive after three years in Hollywood, Rae was terribly confused. Every morning when she left for her job as a stenographer, her husband would still be sound asleep. Rae would type letters all day, then dance all night at the burlesque theater. When she finally staggered home well after midnight, she’d find Don stinking drunk with Rose, or Gibby Gibson, or Blackie Madsen. Often Madsen brought along his much younger common-law wife, the dope fiend May Ryan. Retreating to her bedroom, Rae would cry herself to sleep. If she ventured out to the kitchen, she’d have to hold her breath not to inhale all the opium being passed around by crazy-eyed May.

Rae thought she couldn’t get any unhappier. She was wrong.

Late one sultry evening in the early summer of 1921, she stepped off the trolley and trudged back to the little house on South Bronson Avenue. Even before she reached the door she could smell the cigarette smoke wafting from the windows and hear the honky-tonk music playing on the old Victrola. Rae braced herself and stepped inside. As usual, Don was sitting with some friends, soused. Perched close to Don’s side was Rose—too close, Rae thought.