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

age—twenty-five—when if she didn’t grab the brass ring soon, it would soon be forever out of her reach.
    So Gibby rode the trolley to every studio and office where she had a connection. Patricia Palmer’s head shots and résumés landed on dozens of desks.
    Among her more important connections was William Desmond Taylor, the prestigious Famous Players–Lasky director. Gibby had known Taylor when he’d been an actor at the Vitagraph company. Six years earlier, they’d starred in a quartet of pictures together, Taylor playing the noble hero to Gibby’s demure leading lady. They’d been “great pals,” one fan magazine reported. Gibby was one of the few who called the aristocratic Taylor “Billy.” Now Billy exerted considerable clout at the biggest, most successful studio in Hollywood, and Gibby hoped her old pal would help her out.
    Head shots in hand, she headed into the Famous Players plant. It couldn’t hurt to ask.
    And finally, in one of the city’s poshest neighborhoods, Fremont Place off Wilshire Boulevard, where the nouveau riche built sprawling Beaux Arts mansions to trumpet their arrival into society, the third desperate woman sat sulking over her breakfast.
    Pretty little Mary Miles Minter, eighteen, was dreading another day at the studio. Despite the servants who curled her hair and laid out her clothes, Mary felt overworked and unloved. To her imperious mother, whose lyrical, Louisiana-laced voice sent tremors of fear through everyone in the house, Mary was little more than a cash cow. At Famous Players, she was being groomed as the new Mary Pickford, but all this Mary wanted was to run away.
    Convinced she wasn’t strong enough to escape her mother on her own, Mary longed for a knight in shining armor to ride in and rescue her, as the gallant heroes did in her films. For a young girl who’d never known her father, every older man became a potential savior, and Mary lost her heart to a number of them. In fact, she had lost more than that to one particularly conniving old lech. That was why Mrs. Shelby, Mary’s mother, watched over her daughter like a guard at the gates of Buckingham Palace.
    Yet of all the older men Mary had fallen in love with, none had mattered more to her than the courtly William Desmond Taylor, who’d been her director. Mr. Taylor, Mary declared, was the love of her life. If not for Mrs. Shelby, Mary was convinced, they would have been married a year ago.
    Impetuous and spoiled, romantic and impressionable, Mary was most of all just very young. She’d been on the stage since she was a toddler, and she’d been forced to play the adult on the screen since her early teens. She’d never had a childhood, and so she lived in her daydreams. Unlike Gibby, Mary didn’t care about fame or being a star. What she wanted instead was to be the pampered, protected wife of some strong man who could take her away from her mother. Unlike Mabel, Mary’s only addiction was love.
    That exasperated Mrs. Shelby. At home, the young actress“made no secret” of her feelings for Mr. Taylor. Remembering what had happened with that other older man, Mrs. Shelby shadowed Mary around the lot, frequently giving Taylor hell if he came too close to her daughter.“They fought all the time,” Mrs. Shelby’s secretary observed. “Always on the set when he was directing.”
    So it was with great relief that Mrs. Shelby learned, about six months ago, that the studio was separating Mary and Taylor.The director was being promoted to the main headquarters on Sunset Boulevard, while Mary would remain making pictures at Famous Players’ subsidiary, Realart. Mrs. Shelby was overjoyed. But Mary was devastated.
    Finishing her breakfast and trooping out to the car with her mother to begin another day of playacting in front of the cameras, Mary was focused on one goal: to find a way to insinuate herself back into Mr. Taylor’s life.
    Mabel, Margaret, and Mary were three very different women, with different