Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood Read Online Free Page B

strange, foreign looks that would cross people’s faces when they’d see her drop a dollar into a hobo’s hat or hand over a pair of shoes to an extra. Mabel’s generosity was well known. Her boss, Sam Goldwyn, struggling to make his payroll one week, was thunderstruck when his star actress presented him with an envelope containing $50,000 worth of Liberty Bonds.“If they will tide you over,” Mabel told him, “you may have them.” Such things just weren’t done in Tinseltown.
    Except by Mabel Normand.
    She was always giving, and by the late summer of 1920, she seemed to have given everything away.
    As her train steamed through the California desert, the reflection glancing back at Mabel from the window looked nothing like her. Her friend, the fan magazine writer Adela Rogers St. Johns, had been horrified when she’d seen her last. Mabel had looked“harassed,” St. Johns thought, “eaten up inside by something that was bitter to her spiritual digestion.”
    For all its promise of high spirits, cocaine wasn’t very flattering to one’s face.
    Neither was booze. They might be living under Prohibition, but that didn’t stop people like Mabel, who had money and connections, from getting what they wanted. Bootleggers were as easy to find in Los Angeles as fresh avocados. As a result, Mabel had one of the“six best cellars” in town, according to the Los Angeles Herald . Two of the other five belonged to Mabel’s friends Roscoe Arbuckle and William Desmond Taylor, whom Mabel called Billy.
    Billy Taylor worried about her. He had no problem mixing Mabel drinks, but he was opposed to her use of drugs, seeing what they’d done to her. Billy promised to do whatever he could to help her break the habit. But first, he said, Mabel had to really want to quit.
    Did she? Mabel wasn’t sure. How could she survive without cocaine in a place like Tinseltown? Could she really “get off the dope,” as the saying went?
    The answer came soon after Mabel’s train chugged into the imposing pink granite structure of New York’s Pennsylvania Station. As taxicabs bleated and smokestacks pumped black soot into the air, Mabel wandered happily along the crowded city sidewalks, exulting in being back home, cherishing the realness, the grittiness, the anonymity.
    Then, all at once, everything changed. Handing a newsboy a penny, Mabel stared down at the headline marching across the front page in three-inch black type. Her good friend Olive Thomas had just died in Paris after drinking a solution of mercury bichloride, apparently by accident. Mabel hurried back to her hotel room at the Ritz, where, for the next week, she hid out.
    Mabel was devastated by Thomas’s death. The two good-time girls had partied together many times, so it was easy for Mabel to imagine her friend’s tragic last night. Strung out on cocaine and booze, Ollie had shaken some tablets into a glass, thinking them to be sleeping pills. But in fact they had come from a medicine bottle, prescribed by a French physician to treat husband Jack Pickford’s syphilis. Intended to cauterize Jack’s sores topically, the mercury had instead burned its way down Ollie’s throat, before embarking on the slow, agonizing process of eating through her stomach and other internal organs. The poor woman’s death had dragged out painfully for several days.
    The sheer horror of it all destroyed Mabel. Her happy homecoming was ruined. The next “accidental death,” she realized, might be her own.
    Back in Hollywood, in the once quiet but now rapidly urbanizing Bunker Hill neighborhood, in the architecturally incongruous Melrose Hotel, the second desperate woman, twenty-five-year-old Margaret Gibson, did not share Mabel’s desire to get out of town. In fact Margaret, whose friends called her Gibby, had overcome great odds in her effort to stay right where she was.
    She might not have been as successful as Mabel, or lived in as swanky an apartment—the Melrose was a faded dowager of