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

the 1890s, home to traveling salesmen and small-time movie players—but Gibby wasn’t forfeiting her place in this land of dreams, no matter how precarious. Not long before she’d endured a terrible, humiliating night in Little Tokyo, one that had nearly ended her aspirations right then and there. But Gibby had cooked up a scheme in response to that disaster that she hoped would still allow her to make it to the top.
    On a late summer day, as the heat rose in shimmering sheets from the sidewalk and the papers in her hands dampened and began to curl, Gibby set out on a round of the studios. On South Grand Avenue she hopped onto one of the Big Reds, the lumbering, noisy streetcars of the Pacific Electric Railway. Mabel had a chauffeur; Gibby had to ride the trolley. But she was determined to meet with “everyone she knew in the business who might give her a job.”
    The résumé she carried did not bear the name Margaret Gibson. Instead, the girl with the golden brown hair in the head shots was identified as Patricia Palmer. How easy it had been for Gibby to rewrite her past in this land of make-believe. By replacing Margaret with Patricia, she’d expunged that night in Little Tokyo and reset her clock by six years—from twenty-five to nineteen—giving herself plenty of time to become a top star.
    True, there might have been some in the audience who recognized Patricia as Margaret, but they had no way of proving it. The films of Margaret Gibson had largely vanished. Once a movie had finished its run, it was dumped into a vault, where its nitrate base soon crumbled into dust. Only the most exceptional films were ever seen again. So if the newspapers and fan magazines declared that Patricia Palmer was a garden-fresh nineteen-year-old new to pictures, then she was. In Tinseltown the truth was unverifiable, so it could be anything Gibby wanted it to be.
    She had come to Hollywood when both were still very young, when movies were made on the cheap and didn’t last longer than ten or fifteen minutes. The Vitagraph company had put out a flyer looking for girls for cowboy pictures. Gibby, who’d grown up in the mountains of Colorado, figured she’d be perfect.“Before Western girls are sent to school,” she explained, “they are taught to ride a horse. By the time they are graduated, they can ride anything that has four feet and wears hair.” No surprise, she got the job.
    But there wasn’t much of a future in westerns, Gibby soon realized, at least not for women. Playing second fiddle to both the hero and his horse meant she’d never make the big bucks, and the whole reason Gibby had gotten into movies was to get rich. She’d seen the salaries top stars like Mary Pickford were making—unheard-of wealth!—and determined she’d snatch some of that for herself.
    Gibby had grown up dirt-poor. Her father had abandoned the family when she was just twelve, after which she and her mother had lived out of the back of a wagon pulled over mountain roads by a tired old horse. They’d made a living singing and dancing in flea-ridden theaters between Colorado and Kansas. One day Gibby had looked over at her mother and declared, “We are going to have nice things.” She had never forgotten that vow.
    For a while, Gibby had seemed on course to get what she wanted. She’d played leading lady to Charles Ray in The Coward , a smash hit five years ago. But then had come the debacle in Little Tokyo, and most everyone in Hollywood had turned their backs on Gibby after that. Only comedy producer Al Christie had stuck by her, keeping Gibby busy in short comedies, which at least paid the rent at the Melrose Hotel. But a life on the receiving end of custard pies was hardly Gibby’s objective. She still wanted to be a star—if not as big as Pickford, then at least of the standing of Mabel Normand or Mary Miles Minter. And why not? Gibby was as pretty as either of them, and had ten times their ambition. Yet she was at that dangerous