Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (55 page)

Gibby might not have killed Taylor with her own hand. But if she was the one who set into motion the events that led to Taylor’s death, she might have held herself just as responsible.

And this seems to be what happened.

Don Osborn was looking for new blackmail targets.

Gibby suggested William Desmond Taylor.

And when Osborn started blackmailing Taylor, it ended in murder.

Gibby knew Billy Taylor. She may have known any number of his secrets, from the reason for his termination at Vitagraph to his relationship with George Hopkins. She may also have known about his compromising situation with Mary, or Mabel’s drug problems, or the fact that Taylor had abandoned his wife and child.

What we know for certain is that sometime in 1921, Gibby started collaborating with Don Osborn in various blackmail plots. During that same period, Taylor’s last few months alive, evidence suggests that he was being blackmailed. Gibby could have provided Osborn with information to use in blackmailing Taylor.

But Don Osborn didn’t kill Taylor. Just as Faith MacLean would have noticed if the person leaving the director’s bungalow was unusually short, she would also have noticed if the person had been very tall. Osborn was six feet three.

We do know, however, that a noticeably tall man
was
spotted at Taylor’s bungalow on the Monday before the murder. Taylor’s neighbor Neil Harrington saw two men come to Taylor’s front door; when no one answered, the men tried to peer through the director’s windows. Harrington said that one of the men was “much smaller than the other.” A medium-height person standing beside someone who was six three would indeed look “much smaller.” And Osborn’s partner in blackmail, Blackie Madsen, stood about five-seven or five-eight.

It seems likely that it was Osborn and Madsen who Harrington saw at Taylor’s apartment, come to pressure him into coughing up some hush money—much as they would approach John Bushnell ten months later.

The two blackmailers returned to Alvarado Court on the night of February 1.

As always, Madsen had his gun. The old .38-caliber he’d carried since the Spanish-American War. And if he’d kept the gun that long, possibly he had old ammunition for it.

Madsen would have had no trouble finding Alvarado Court; his mother lived right around the block from Taylor, on West Sixth Street. But Osborn, stepping off the streetcar, seems not to have remembered the exact address; Floyd Hartley, the gas station owner, told the police he gave directions to a man he described as in his twenties and dark. Learning the address, Osborn headed toward Taylor’s to meet Madsen.

A short while later, en route from his mother’s house, Madsen was spotted by Mrs. Marie Stone, who was on her way to babysit for her granddaughter. Mrs. Stone would notice Blackie’s ruddy skin, which is specifically described in the FBI reports, as well as his thick earlobes, evident in FBI photos. For a moment, Mrs. Stone had thought he might have been Edward Sands. Why? Because both Sands and Madsen were bowlegged.

Hiding in the shadows, Osborn and Madsen realized they couldn’t approach Taylor right away. His valet was still home, and Mabel Normand had come to visit. The two blackmailers waited separately; Christina Jewett, the MacLeans’ maid, would hear only one man loitering in the alley. And of course Faith MacLean saw only one man come out of Taylor’s house.

Madsen recognized his opportunity when Taylor walked Mabel to her car. He slipped into the bungalow alone. Either he and Osborn had planned it that way, or there simply wasn’t enough time to summon Osborn. Perhaps they’d agreed that Madsen should play the role of some kind of backup agent, as he would do some months later with Bushnell.

Whatever happened next was brief. When Taylor reentered the apartment, Madsen was waiting for him. Perhaps he’d hidden in the telephone nook under the stairs, surprising Taylor when he came through the door. Perhaps, seeing Madsen emerge from under the stairs, Taylor reacted instinctively—aggressively—making the same sort of impulsive move Writ Berkey had made two decades earlier. And just as he had done on the streets of Independence, Missouri, Madsen had responded just as instinctively by pulling out his gun.

And what had Taylor done to cause such a reaction? A careful consideration of the crime scene provides the answer.

Coming in through the front door and spotting Madsen, the angry director had reached for whatever was closest to him: the chair that he kept against the wall. He grabbed the chair and lifted it into the air, intending to strike Madsen with it. His arms were raised over his head.

Madsen, his gun drawn, fired impulsively, just as he had done in Independence.

Taylor fell, the chair with him.

As Eddie King would prove, the powder burns on Taylor’s clothing indicated he’d been shot up close, no more than two inches away from his killer. So when Taylor fell, bringing the chair with him, he fell on top of Madsen.

The only way for Madsen to regain his feet was to shove Taylor and the chair off him. In the process, he stood the chair athwart Taylor’s left foot. As the director’s face turned blue and he struggled to take his last breaths, Madsen turned him flat on his back so that he could pat him down for valuables. That would account for the neat condition in which the corpse would be found, instead of the crumpled appearance expected in someone felled by a gunshot.

Madsen took the roll of money but left everything else, since he knew the shot must have been heard by neighbors. He had to get out fast. Someone would likely be there soon. He didn’t have time to pry rings off fingers.

Still, Madsen was a cool enough operator to know he couldn’t just run out of the house. He left Taylor’s apartment casually, closing the door carefully behind him. He even looked over at Faith MacLean, who’d come to her door, and gave her a smile.

Madsen fit perfectly the description MacLean would give of the man leaving Taylor’s apartment. He was the right height. He had a prominent nose. He was “not fat but stocky.” He definitely had a “rough” sort of appearance. As his FBI mug shots would prove, he looked so much like “a motion-picture burglar” that he might have been sent over by Central Casting. When MacLean was shown the photograph of Carl Stockdale, she said it looked like the man she had seen. With their craggy faces and prominent noses, Stockdale and Madsen definitely resembled each other.

According to FBI reports, Madsen sometimes wore a mustache, sometimes not. When John Bushnell encountered him ten months after Taylor was killed, Madsen was sporting a gray mustache. Of course he was. He’d grown it to help disguise himself, as Faith MacLean’s account in all the newspapers had described a clean-shaven man.

The fact that Madsen hung around after Osborn was arrested, instead of escaping to Mexico when he had the chance, suggests that Osborn had something on him. Osborn could well have turned state’s evidence and ratted out Madsen as Taylor’s killer if Madsen had left him to take the rap by himself. Only when Madsen’s plot to get him sprung failed did Osborn accept his three-year sentence; it was a lot better than hanging.

Murder bound Osborn and Madsen together. When Osborn told Bushnell that he would kill him if he didn’t come up with the money, it was no idle threat. He and Madsen had killed before. Rose Putnam said that Osborn was feeling “very confident” that fall when he and Madsen set out to blackmail Bushnell. And why wouldn’t he feel confident?

He’d gotten away with murder.

But what of Gibby? She was the spark to light the match, but what about after the deed was done? Was she involved after the fact? Did she know for certain that Osborn and Madsen were responsible for Taylor’s death?

Did she, upon learning that Taylor was dead, take off in her car, overcome with the same sense of guilt she would display at the end of her life? Did she drive frantically up the coastal highway to Ventura? The driver of that car was never identified by police.

No doubt Madsen and Osborn did their best to keep the secret to themselves, but the locusts must have suspected something. Word traveled quickly in underground circles, and soon even Honore Connette, likely through James Bryson, had heard the rumors. It was easy to dismiss Connette as a crank, but when I discovered his connection to Bryson, his wagging tongue in the weeks after the murder suddenly seemed more relevant, and further convinced me of the role played by the Osborn gang.

Yet even if Osborn never admitted the killing directly to Gibby, she was smart enough to figure things out. And that knowledge would have given her extraordinary power with Taylor’s studio, Famous Players–Lasky, in those desperate months of early 1922.

The only way to understand the repeated favors Jesse Lasky did for Gibby is either some kind of blackmail on her part or a deal worked out between her and the studio. Something in Taylor’s papers, kept in the Famous Players safe and no doubt eventually destroyed, must have implicated Gibby. Here’s my speculation: Called into the studio after her name was discovered in Taylor’s papers, Gibby revealed what she knew. With the ongoing Arbuckle scandal, the last thing Lasky and Zukor wanted was publicity linking an ex-prostitute to the blackmailers of their esteemed director. It really would have made things a hundred times worse: the arrests of Gibby and Osborn would have exposed the seamy underbelly of Tinseltown and confirmed the worst fears of the reformers and church ladies. So Gibby was given a contract to ensure her silence.

Lasky and Zukor already had the blueprint for such an arrangement. Four years before the murder, DeMille had directed a hugely successful Famous Players film called
Old Wives for New
, in which a murder was covered up by powerful corporate executives. The woman who actually committed the crime was protected by these influential men, who concocted and encouraged rumors to throw suspicion on others. For the executives, allowing a killer to escape justice was preferable to the “Hydra head of scandal,” as one title card put it.

Hollywood knew how to manipulate a crime. Their scenarists had been doing it for years.

So Gibby was given a job. As was Leonard Clapham, one of the other gang members who’d been particularly close to Osborn and apparently knew a great deal. Their proximity to Taylor’s murder and their willingness to keep mum significantly advanced their careers, lifting them out of low-budget independent films and securing them positions at Famous Players.

Gibby, however, was reckless. When she herself was finally implicated during the final attempted shakedown of John Bushnell, she turned once again to Lasky for help. Lasky had the power and the money to hire Frank Dominguez to represent her. Without Lasky’s intercession, Gibby might have turned state’s evidence to avoid prosecution and revealed what she knew about Taylor’s murder. And if she had done so, the scandal that would have enveloped Hollywood at that particular moment would have been Hydra-headed indeed.

So Will Hays was summoned and, through his political influence, the charges against Gibby were dropped.

Gibby had called in her last chip with the studio, however. For the next decade, she would struggle, making appearances in a few pictures when casting agents took pity on her. But even in her late thirties she still had charm for men, and
Elbert E. Lewis, a short, slender, divorced accountant for Standard-Vacuum Oil, fell head over heels in love with her. For a brief moment, Gibby finally got the nice things she’d always wanted, courtesy of Lewis. She called him “Daddy,” even though he was three years her junior.

When Standard-Vacuum transferred Lewis to Asia, Gibby found it prudent to follow him. There were rumblings that district attorney Buron Fitts was planning to reopen the Taylor case, which he did a little over a year later, when he convened the grand jury. Gibby seemed ready to live out her life in Asia,
marrying Elbert Lewis at the American consulate in Singapore in 1935. But two years later, in Shanghai, she developed a bladder infection. Adequate medical treatment wasn’t available in the war-torn city, so, five months before the Japanese invaded, Gibby—now known as Pat Lewis—
sailed back to the United States. Elbert followed, but he returned to Asia not long thereafter. In April 1942, while staying at the Taj Mahal in Bombay, Gibby’s steadfast husband died of a heart attack in his sleep.

There was another husband named Arce after that, but he was soon gone, and Gibby bought her little house at 6135 Glen Oak, not far from the place on Beachwood where she and Osborn had partied and cooked up their schemes. But her life now was very different.

For all her great dreams, for all her plans and intrigues, this was where Margaret Gibson ended up, in a little frame house with a few sticks of furniture. She lived near the poverty line, hiding out from the world with her cat, venturing only rarely outside. Alone and paranoid, the once ambitious movie actress was terrified every time someone knocked on her door. Year by year, her conscience ate away at her. Nice things no longer seemed all that important.

In the end, Gibby would have settled for peace of mind.

Don Osborn served out his sentence and returned to California, where one of the locusts, Leo Maloney, had started his own studio in the San Bernardino Mountains. Maloney hired Osborn as a production manager for a couple of low-budget pictures in 1927—including a film called
Yellow Contraband
about a heroin smuggler named Blackie. Leonard Clapham, now known as Tom London, was featured in both of Osborn’s films. So much for Clapham and Maloney telling the FBI they never wanted to see Osborn again. In 1930 Osborn was working as a labor union organizer, and in the 1940s, as a traveling salesman. He died in 1950, at fifty-four, of throat cancer.

Rose Putnam moved back in with her parents, who had relocated to Long Beach, California. In her mid-forties she married Sylvester Wilcox, a solicitor for a freight company, and they resided in Glendale. Rose died in 1961, in Riverside, at the age of seventy-two.

Blackie Madsen got out of the clink and reclaimed his real name, Ross Sheridan. He roamed around the Northwest for a while, living in Oregon and marrying a woman in Vancouver, Washington, in 1928. Heading back to El Paso, he worked as a cattleman and made frequent trips over the Mexican border. He continued to woo the ladies, marrying twenty-one-year-old Maria Saucedo in Juarez in 1935, when he was sixty-two. At some point, Sheridan was stabbed or maybe shot. The attack didn’t kill him—at least not right away. One lung was perforated and never fully healed, leaving his breathing impaired. Eventually the condition sent him staggering and wheezing back to Los Angeles, where he died at Los Angeles County General Hospital in 1938, at the age of sixty-four. Blackie’s ashes were interred beside his mother and his brother in Hollywood Memorial Cemetery.