Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (9 page)

But even her detractors couldn’t contest her brilliance or her ability. To succeed in a world run by men without resorting to sex or trickery was virtually impossible for a woman in Tinseltown. But Mrs. Shelby had managed to do just that. Fifteen years ago she’d left the stink of her husband’s linotype shop and found a new world for her daughters and herself, propelled only by her dreams and her belief in herself.

Charlotte Shelby had been born
Lilla Pearl Miles, the bloom of a faded aristocracy, her speech still edged with the flowery Louisiana lilt of her youth. Mary later described the “gentility” of her mother’s family, part of an old South
“where Negroes knelt to pull on the gloves of the plantation owners.” Lilla Pearl grew up determined to reclaim her birthright. When she married her struggling husband, some predicted she wouldn’t last long as a newspaper printer’s wife. They were right. As soon as her two daughters were school age, Lilla Pearl packed them up and took them to New York, without telling her husband when they’d be back.

“When I was a baby, just four years old,” Mary lamented, “[Shelby] took me away from my home and my daddy.” To Mary’s mother’s way of thinking, there was no life for them in the bayous. Their names were changed so her husband couldn’t find them.

In Manhattan, the newly christened Mrs. Shelby advertised herself as an acting coach, despite never having acted a day in her life—unless playing the part of a working-class Shreveport wife and mother counted. She taught her pupils the Delsarte method of applied aesthetics, while her widowed mother, Julia Miles, served as babysitter and cook.

Within a short time Shelby had pushed both her daughters out onto the stage. But it was little Juliet—Mary’s birth name—who became the star. Before she was ten, Juliet was signed by theater impresario Charles Frohman and packed his houses with her sexy nymphet act. When child labor laws caught up with them, Mrs. Shelby sent back to Louisiana for the birth certificate of a deceased cousin, Mary Minter, and slammed it down on producers’ desks, claiming it revealed Juliet’s real age and name. From that point on, the little girl became Mary Miles Minter.

She also became sixteen when she was only ten. Slathered with lipstick and mascara, she was dressed in high heels and long skirts.
“These things have an effect upon a child that all the training and coaching in the world cannot eliminate,” Mary would say. Shelby wanted her daughter all grown up fast. One day she snatched Mary’s favorite doll from her hands and burned it in the oven in front of her. The bereft child cried for weeks.
“They never would let me be a girl,” Mary said, “to have a girl’s pleasures, to do the things that other girls would do.”

Only one thing mattered in life, Mrs. Shelby taught her daughter. “From morning till night,” Mary said, “I had money, money, money talked and preached to me.”

Money, of course, was something Mrs. Shelby was very good at getting. Although Mary made movies for producers in New York and Santa Barbara, California, Mrs. Shelby always had her eye on a bigger prize. She was determined to get her daughter the most lucrative contract in the film business, even if that meant going toe-to-toe with the biggest man in the industry, Adolph Zukor.

When she finally got an offer from Zukor, Shelby had the nerve to play it against one from Lewis J. Selznick of Select Pictures, watching smugly as the two moguls fought for Mary’s services. Zukor won—Zukor never lost—to the tune of $1.3 million, making Mary
“the little girl with the biggest motion-picture contract in the world.” Zukor used the teenager as the linchpin in his newly formed Realart Picture Corporation, which had its own studio out on Occidental Boulevard near Wilshire.

Mary was an instant hit with audiences, her innocent smile and curvy little body especially popular with men. She had, in her own words,
“matured very quickly in this glorious sunshine and gorgeous setting of California.” The men who flocked around her made her feel very grown up, but they made Mrs. Shelby very uneasy. Mary believed her mother was simply afraid some man would steal away her golden goose. But Shelby had other reasons to worry, even if Mary didn’t like to remember them.

She’d been barely fifteen, a budding rose of adolescent charm and sexuality. James Kirkwood had been her charismatic forty-two-year-old director.

Predictably, Mary had fallen in love.

Standing with Kirkwood in a field of wildflowers overlooking the Santa Barbara coast, Mary took her director’s hands in her own. He’d wanted her for so long, Kirkwood told her. But since Mary was still a virgin, he would never think of debasing her honor. So here, under the brilliant blue sky, Kirkwood proclaimed he would marry her, before God.

With strong hands, the director lifted Mary and placed her on a rock. She stood above him like a goddess, her ringlets blowing in the wind. Kirkwood dropped to one knee. With the sun and the sky their only witnesses, they pledged themselves to each other. Mary was enraptured.

Then Kirkwood took her down from the rock, yanked off her dress, and had sex with her in the grass.

Soon afterward, Mary was pregnant. She was deliriously happy, certain that Kirkwood would take her away from her unhappy home; together they’d raise their baby and have many more. But soon Kirkwood was gone, off to New York. Mary wrote him passionate letters, begging him to come back. One of the letters was intercepted by Mrs. Shelby.

Shaking with rage, Shelby dragged the terrified girl to a doctor who provided clandestine services for women who could afford it. Mary was strapped to a table, her legs pulled apart and secured. Given only the mildest anesthesia, she shuddered as a long, cold, sharp tool was inserted inside of her. The doctor dilated Mary’s cervix and carefully, painfully, scraped out her uterus with a curette.

After the procedure, it was common to try to reassemble the pieces of the fetus to make sure nothing was left inside the woman’s womb.

Mary had many reasons to hate her mother. But surely this topped the list.

The Kirkwood affair had been devastating, but it hadn’t ended Mary’s interest in men, nor theirs in her. Before long, she had fallen in love again. But her latest love was very different from James Kirkwood. True, William Desmond Taylor was another older man, another authority figure. But the new director assigned to Mary was polite, deferential, distant, and reserved, with none of Kirkwood’s prurience, which only made Taylor more appealing.

On their first day working together, on an adaptation of the novel
Anne of Green Gables
, Taylor addressed his leading lady as “Miss Minter.” That won her over. Usually her directors called her “Mary,” as they might talk to a child. But Taylor was different: he saw her, Mary believed, as a woman.
“Heart hungry as I was,” she would remember, “I loved him the first time I saw him.” She looked into his face and thought, “This is God.”

Taylor was tall, distinguished, and austerely handsome. He was also even older than James Kirkwood, forty-seven to Mary’s seventeen. Mary watched his every move with puppy-dog eyes.

Mr. Taylor decided to shoot
Anne of Green Gables
outside Boston, where it would be easier to evoke the story’s Prince Edward Island location than in Southern California. Cast and crew packed their bags. Mrs. Shelby and Mary’s grandmother went along as chaperones.

In the little town of Dedham, Massachusetts, Mary lay awake in their guesthouse, listening for Mr. Taylor’s footsteps.
“I recognized them as they went up the stairway and into his room,” she said. More and more, Mr. Taylor filled her every waking thought.

On a trip into Boston, the director took a seat in the chauffeur-driven automobile between Mary and her grandmother. “The road was rough and bumpy,” Mary recalled, “and his arms were spread across the rear of the backseat. One bump threw grandmother against him and he said, ‘I guess I will have to hold you.’ But his arm did not embrace me.” Desperate, Mary thought, “Dare I? Dare I?” She did indeed. She “reached up and tugged at his coat sleeve” until Taylor dropped his arm about her waist. “The thrill of that innocent act thrilled me for days and days,” Mary said.

Despite what had happened with Kirkwood, she remained an innocent. One day she and Mr. Taylor were walking when it started to rain. Wrapping his coat around her, Taylor hurried Mary back to the guesthouse, only to run into Mrs. Shelby, who was “fairly raging.” As Mary would remember, “She accused Mr. Taylor before the entire company of taking me out, humiliating him most shamefully.” Later, when Mary apologized to him for her mother’s outburst, Taylor replied, “Your mother is right, Mary. You must always obey her.”

Mary didn’t. Back in Hollywood, she went riding with her beloved and wrote poetry to him. He was always “Mr. Taylor” to her. Unlike Mabel or Gibby, she never called him Billy.
“The man was too wonderful for that,” she said.

Finally Mary confessed her feelings to him. Mr. Taylor was gallant and tender, and probably flattered. But he thought of her only as
“a nice little girl,” his chauffeur Harry Fellows understood. Taylor told her, as gently as he could, that
she was May and he was December, and it was best they not see each other socially anymore.
“I can’t give you what a boy your age could give you,” he told her kindly.

And he thought that would be that.

But Taylor’s very remoteness only made him more attractive to his admirer. To her mind, Mr. Taylor wasn’t rebuffing her.
“He reciprocated my love,” Mary fervently believed. He was only trying to protect her honor. “He never by look, by word, or by deed gave me any reason to doubt any of my ideals that were placed in him absolutely,” she said. He just wanted to wait until she was old enough to be free of her mother before they could be together. The only obstacle to their happiness, Mary believed, was Mrs. Shelby.

When Mr. Taylor was promoted to the main Famous Players studio on Sunset Boulevard, his absence only made Mary’s heart grow fonder. On one occasion, when her true love visited the set where she was working, Mary maneuvered a seat very close to him. At that moment her mother walked in. Charging up to Taylor, Mrs. Shelby thundered,
“If I ever catch you hanging around Mary again, I will blow your goddamned brains out!”

Shelby’s secretary, Charlotte Whitney, witnessed the episode. “She was livid with rage,” Whitney said, “and shook her fist in his face and swore dozens of times.”

This was the woman Mary now faced from across the room.

“Have you been out with Taylor?” Mrs. Shelby demanded.

Mary resented the question. How dare her mother even ask such a thing? After all, it was Shelby herself who’d driven Mr. Taylor away from her.

The two women stood glaring at each other. There was a time when Mary had wanted her mother’s love. When she was younger, she had tried cuddling up to her,
“to kiss and fondle her,” but she’d been pushed away and told not to be silly. Now there was no love left.

Shelby accused Mary of being intimate with Taylor.

“Do you really mean that?” Mary asked, full of indignation.

“I certainly do,” Shelby told her.

Mary screamed in rage. To cool her down, Shelby tossed a glass of water in her face.

The young woman’s eyes popped. Her wet hair dripping down in front of her eyes, Mary cried, “I’m going to end it all!” and ran up the stairs.

Mrs. Shelby, her mother, and her secretary followed, only to hear Mary lock herself in Mrs. Shelby’s room. They pounded on the door but got no reply.

Suddenly there was a shot from inside the room. Then another one.

Shelby screamed down the stairs to Frank Brown, her security guard, and Chauncey Eaton, her chauffeur. The two men came running. Shelby told them to break into the room.

Eaton and Brown rammed their shoulders against the door. It fell inward.

“And there,” Shelby would tell investigators later, “lay Mary on my bedroom floor.” Her mother’s gun was beside her.

With extreme tenderness, Eaton picked the young woman up in his arms.

“Why, Mrs. Shelby,” the chauffeur said, “there’s no blood on her.”

It was Mary’s grandmother who had the presence of mind to inspect the limp figure in Eaton’s arms. “Why, no,” Mrs. Miles concluded, “she is not shot.” The old woman took a step back. “Stand her up, Chauncey.”

Eaton put Mary down on her feet. The pretty little movie actress opened her eyes and looked around defiantly at everyone staring at her.

“I thought I would give you all a jolt,” she said.

As Mary stalked off to her room to sulk, Mrs. Shelby told Eaton to search the room for the spent bullets. He found one lodged in the closet, the other in the ceiling.

Later, when she told the story to police, Shelby would insist she was “afraid of pistols.” But when her statement was repeated to Charlotte Whitney, the secretary laughed. “Mrs. Shelby,” she insisted, “is not afraid of anything.”

A steady rain beat down across Manhattan on the night of November 2, but that didn’t deter thousands from gathering outside City Hall
to watch the presidential election returns. In the age of motion pictures, waiting for the next day’s papers to learn who’d won was very nineteenth century. Tonight the results were being projected onto giant screens set up outside the offices of the
New York Tribune
. In between returns, newsreels of the candidates were shown. When images of the Republican candidate, Warren G. Harding, flashed on the screen, the crowd of ten thousand, cold and drenched, “with only their high spirits to protect them,” erupted with cheers. Pictures of the Democratic candidate, James Cox, elicited mostly boos.

Uptown at the Ritz, cigar and brandy in hand, Adolph Zukor was cheering Harding too. During the campaign Zukor had met several times with Harding’s manager, a tenacious little bird of a man named Will H. Hays. Hays assured the mogul that Harding would do nothing to hinder any attempts to consolidate business holdings. Under a pro-business Harding administration, Zukor would have nothing to fear.

In return for such promises, Zukor—indeed, all of Hollywood—had gone all out to put Harding in the White House. Newsreels suddenly became ubiquitous—except that audiences saw virtually none of Cox. Instead they soaked up images of Harding on his front porch in Marion, Ohio, receiving distinguished visitors, many of them from the film colony. Pickford and Fairbanks were the ones moviegoers were most excited to see. Poll watchers believed the newsreels had had an effect. Who could vote against a guy endorsed by Mary and Doug?