Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (6 page)

In his eighth-floor office on Fifth Avenue in New York, Adolph Zukor cursed.

Another movie mogul was going to beat him into the sky in Times Square. A skyscraper was going up on the northeast corner of Broadway and Forty-Fifth Street that would include offices and a state-of-the-art theater. Construction was projected to cost nearly $2.5 million, and the building would top out at sixteen stories.

Exactly double the height at which Zukor sat at the moment.

Worst of all, the mogul who would beat him was Marcus Loew.

Zukor and Loew had been friends and rivals for a very long time. In the beginning, they’d been partners, too. They had run a business called Automatic Vaudeville, a penny arcade on Fourteenth Street, in the heart of the city’s tenderloin, surrounded by saloons and dance halls and immigrants looking for a cheap way to pass the time. For a penny, these uneducated laborers could peer into the peep shows and watch sexy girls swivel in serpentine dances. Their first year in business, Zukor and Loew raked in more than $100,000, a pirates’ booty of pennies and nickels. Soon they had a chain of arcades.

But then they had split. Neither man was the type to share power easily. Both wanted to be the boss, so Zukor and Loew went their separate ways to run their own shows. Still, they remained intertwined in each other’s lives. In those early days, the two men lived across the street from each other on 111th Street and Seventh Avenue. Their wives went shopping together, and their sons played on the same baseball teams. Loew found success with a chain of theaters that showed only moving pictures, without any vaudeville—a radical move at the time. And of course, as the most powerful producer of moving pictures in the world, Zukor became one of Loew’s biggest suppliers.

If only they could have maintained such a symbiotic relationship.

But Zukor wanted more. When he started accumulating his own theaters, placing himself in direct competition with Loew, his former partner retaliated by taking over Metro Pictures, a struggling movie studio in Hollywood. That put him in direct competition with Zukor in film production, and Creepy was not pleased. Why was Loew always trying to show him up?

And now he would beat Zukor into the sky, too.

The two men couldn’t have been more different. Zukor dressed conservatively, trying not to look like the parvenu he was. Loew was
“a dandy in a high hat and fur coat,” Zukor said, and Loew didn’t disagree.
“I wear ’em to impress ’em,” he said. Where Zukor was private and deliberate, Loew was loud and impulsive,
“a jolly mixer type, knowing everybody.” Zukor rarely socialized anymore. His days of raucous laughter and high spirits were over. Now he could be found in some dark corner at Delmonico’s restaurant, presiding over late-night, smoke-hung, business-heavy dinners. At another table across the way, Loew continued to party, with friends and acquaintances constantly pulling up chairs. But no one stopped by Zukor’s table unless summoned.

About the only quality the two men shared was ambition. As Loew admitted, “You must want a big success and then beat it into submission. You must be as ravenous to reach it as the wolf who licks his teeth behind a fleeing rabbit.” Zukor would never have been as upfront or loquacious about it, but he would have entirely agreed with the sentiment.

They played out their rivalry on the tennis court. Loew, bigger and stronger, nearly always won. When he suggested they don boxing gloves for a little sparring in the ring, Zukor declined. He was not lacking in courage, and he was certainly not averse to risk. But Zukor’s risks were always calculated. He understood the wisdom of a strategic retreat.

What Loew lacked was Zukor’s foresight. As savvy a businessman as he was, Loew had failed to see the potential of feature-length films. The “flickers,” he argued, would always remain ten to fifteen minutes long. No one would sit still much longer than that. So when Zukor imported the nearly hour-long French film
Queen Elizabeth
, starring Sarah Bernhardt, Loew had placed a sympathetic arm around Lottie Zukor’s shoulders. Her husband, Loew told her,
“had lost his head.” His money was sure to follow.

Queen Elizabeth
turned out to be a huge hit, launching the era of feature-length films. Zukor made sure Loew received a report of the box-office receipts in the mail. Anonymously, of course.

Yet what finally separated the two old acquaintances was something more personal. Loew was loved, while Zukor was feared. Reporters told stories about Loew’s friendship with his elevator boy, whose troubles the film mogul would listen to every day as they rose from floor to floor. Zukor’s elevator boy knew to keep mum when taking the boss up. Loew’s employees feted their employer on every birthday, but Zukor’s staff shrank from the man they called Creepy. Loew was modest and gave credit to others:
“I have had the help all the way along of a great many very capable men.” Zukor only ever spoke of his own efforts. Loew said he’d been lucky in his career. Zukor insisted luck had had nothing to do with his success.

But only bad luck could explain why his beloved daughter Mildred, whom he called Mickey, had fallen in love with Loew’s son Arthur.

Zukor believed Loew had encouraged Arthur’s courtship of Mickey, knowing full well that the romance would get under his skin. But both fathers had been surprised when Mickey had accepted Arthur’s marriage proposal. Grumbling all the way, Zukor had paid for
a lavish wedding with 350 guests in the Crystal Room at the Ritz-Carlton—as much to impress Mickey’s father-in-law as herself. Moving-picture cameras, of course, had recorded the momentous event.

If anyone was hoping that a family alliance might tamp down the rivalry between the two men, they would have been disappointed. The marriage of their children only exacerbated the competition between the fathers-in-law.
“Then you did not let blood ties interfere with business?” an attorney would ask Zukor, years later. “No!” Zukor replied, as if it were the most foolish question ever posed.

Sitting at his desk, Zukor uncurled a map of New York. Circled in red were the theaters that belonged to him. In blue were those that belonged to Loew. That fall, Zukor’s rival had bought six more theaters, bringing his total to forty-one. And word was that he was getting ready to acquire more.

Zukor scanned the rest of the map with his sharp eyes. Dozens of other theaters remained uncircled, just waiting to be snagged by one of them.

Controlling the exhibition of movies was key to all of Zukor’s future success. The numbers told the story.
The combined annual income of all American producers was $90 million—but the combined revenues of all American movie theaters was $800 million. Zukor wanted a piece of that. The most substantial piece, in fact.

A year earlier he’d taken personal affront when some of the biggest first-run theaters in the country had formed First National Pictures. The exhibitors had organized in response to Zukor’s increasing control of the market, but the Famous Players chief saw the move as offensive, not defensive. Ever paranoid, Zukor felt “raided.” His first reaction was to try to buy out First National. When that failed, he decided to hobble it. He’d acquire as many theaters as possible before First National could get to them.

Now Zukor owned close to three hundred theaters throughout the United States, most of them showing only his Paramount pictures. His plan was vertical integration of the industry: he would make the pictures, distribute them, and exhibit them. Zukor wanted what all capitalists ultimately want: to eliminate the competition and create a monopoly for himself.

But acquiring all those theaters hadn’t been easy. In many cases, Zukor had had to coerce or bully the local exhibitors into coming on board with him. In this, he had found a determined opponent in Sydney S. Cohen, the head of the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America (MPTOA). With Cohen around, Zukor was finding it increasingly difficult to get his way.
“Cohen must be destroyed,” the Famous Players chief wrote in a memo to his staff, “and his organization broken down.” The note found its way into the hands of the exhibitors, and open war broke out between Zukor and the MPTOA.

Of course, Marcus Loew had moved right in to take advantage of the situation—or at least, that’s how Zukor perceived it. At the MPTOA’s most recent gathering, Zukor’s daughter’s father-in-law had riled up his fellow exhibitors even further by thundering from the podium that no producer should want to
“drive the exhibitor out of the game”—a clear indictment of Zukor. That, he said, was “killing the goose that lays the golden egg.” When Loew finished speaking, those uncouth theater owners—most of them illiterate immigrants, Zukor sniffed—cheered and stamped their feet. A beaming Loew basked in their applause.

No one ever cheered for Zukor.

It didn’t matter. He was richer and more powerful than any of them. He’d accomplished what no one had ever thought possible: he’d turned the flickers into big business. He’d marched into the offices of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., the biggest investment firm on Wall Street, and made his case for a $10 million loan. Zukor’s colleagues, Loew chief among them, had thought he was crazy. But he’d convinced the firm’s chief, Otto Kahn, that “the screen was becoming the entertainment medium of the great body of the public” and that Famous Players was “the spearhead of this vast new industry.” Kahn had responded with a $10 million stock issue. Famous Players went public, and the movies came of age.

As did Zukor. No longer did he move among showmen and vaudevillians, as Loew still did. Zukor’s associates were the city’s richest men. Kahn. Jacob Schiff, director of the National Bank of New York. Lord Beaverbrook, the powerful Canadian-British newspaper tycoon. So what if Zukor didn’t get the cheers and the backslaps Marcus Loew got?

The little orphan boy from Hungary had done pretty well for himself these past seventeen years. His father—or so he’d been told; Zukor didn’t remember him—had built his dry-goods store in the little village of Ricse with his bare hands. Zukor had done the same with his own business, metaphorically. He’d started with nothing, but film by film, screen by screen, dollar by dollar, he’d created a business like none before, entirely of his own design.

That fall of 1920, 35 percent of all motion picture revenues in America were generated by Paramount films. Famous Players operated twenty-eight branches throughout the country and six in Canada, as well as offices in more than ten countries worldwide. Zukor was more than a king. He was an emperor. And soon, he told himself, the entire industry—production, distribution, exhibition—would be brought under his centralized command. Famous Players would swell to include every aspect and every territory of the movie business, becoming bigger than anything anyone had ever imagined. Too big for any of his competitors to withstand the onslaught. Too big to be contained.

Too big, Zukor believed, to fail.

Providing, of course, these silly scandals didn’t keep stirring up the wrath of the church ladies.

Zukor’s daily newspapers were black and smudgy with scandal. For two solid weeks the press had bannered Olive Thomas’s grisly death in Paris. Investigations were followed by autopsies and funerals. And then had come the censure.

“We are told the wages of sin is death,” one newspaper editorialized, “and judging from the trials of our much advertised movie folks, misery goes hand in hand with those who scoff [at traditional values].” The
Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger
thought the movies
“show altogether too much of the side of American life erroneously called gay. A child educated in the movie theatres might well suppose that he lived in a profligate world.” Another paper declared,
“It may be time, at long last, for the government to investigate the goings-on in Movie Land and perchance take over the running of the various businesses from its libertine leaders.”

This was why Zukor feared the reformers. They could bring the government down on him, and only the government had the power to turn back Zukor’s advance. So far he’d been fortunate. President Wilson’s zeal for trade reforms, like everything else, had dimmed since his stroke. But his vile creation, the Federal Trade Commission, still breathed like an ugly, pulsing leviathan, waiting to strike at everything Zukor had built. Further antitrust regulation could prevent his consolidation of the industry, and federal censorship could snatch control of production right out of his hands. His beloved Uncle Sam, who had given him so much since he’d come to these shores, could willfully roll back all the gains Zukor had made.

Zukor took some comfort in the fact that pro-business Republicans had taken over Congress in the last election, ousting the unionists and the socialists who were determined to destroy everything great about America. A poor orphan could come here and make as much money as he wanted, by working hard and learning how to play the game. Zukor hoped that, come November, Republicans would expand their majorities and take back the White House as well, and maybe then he could breathe a little easier.

But frequent scandals, he knew, increased the odds of a government investigation. And in an industry teeming with secrets, further scandals were perpetually looming, including his own.

That fall, brooding in his office high—but not high enough—above Fifth Avenue, Zukor grew paranoid. He questioned the motives of everyone who came through his door. He distrusted every letter, every phone call. People were out to get him: Marcus Loew, Sydney Cohen, the exhibitors, the reformers, the government. He had worked very hard to get where he was, and not a single dollar would he give up without a fight.

Like all megalomaniacs, Adolph Zukor lived with the fear of losing it all.

On the morning of September 28, 1920, Mabel moved carefully down the steps of St. Thomas Episcopal Church at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Third Street. If she had tried to hurry, she might have tripped, and the mob surging ahead of her might easily have trampled her underfoot. Hordes of hysterical, wailing people in the street were pushing against a barricade of trembling policemen. No one had ever seen anything quite like this.