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

morning, as the sun reflected off the shiny chrome and mirrored stages of Tinseltown, three beautiful, desperate young women tottered on the brink.
    The first of these was Mabel Normand. She was twenty-seven years old, but her friends told her she’d never live to see twenty-eight if she didn’t break off a love affair that was destroying her by inches. The affair had started as a lark, full of fun and laughs, but it had ended up wrecking Mabel’s health and depleting her bank account—the way romances with cocaine usually ended.
    With the city around her waking up, mockingbirds jeering from jacaranda trees, and trolley cars jangling their bells, Mabel knew the only answer was to get out of town. She needed to go home, back to the East, away from all this sunshine and make-believe.
    Mabel had been very successful here on the coast. After almost a decade on the screen, her face was one of the most familiar in the world. She was the “Queen of Comedy,” sometimes called the female Chaplin. Her latest picture, The Slim Princess , had just opened in June. But what Mabel needed more than anything else was a long, deep breath of New York air. It might be grimy, it might be smelly, but it was real—unlike the air out here, perpetually perfumed with coyote mint, as if she were living in some absurd fairy kingdom. Packing the last of her things and locking the door of her apartment at 3089 West Seventh Street, Mabel instructed her chauffeur to take her to La Grande Station, at the corner of Second Street and Santa Fe Avenue.She had a train to catch.
    Once, a long time ago, Mabel had liked Hollywood very much. Back then it had been all about laughter and friendship and romance and late-night skinny-dipping in the Pacific Ocean. Now it was only about money and grosses and boardrooms and deceit. How Mabel hated the film colony’s artificiality and hucksterism. She could play “the baloney card,” as she called it, when she needed to, like the way she knocked three years off her age in her official biographies (the public thought Mabel was twenty-four), or the way she told some interviewers she’d been born in Boston and others Atlanta. But Mabel never played the baloney card for money or power. When she regaled the fan magazines with stories of growing up wealthy and being educated at private schools—or sometimes the opposite, growing up as a destitute orphan scrubbing floors—she was indulging a creative imagination that stretched all the way back to her childhood. Rich or poor, it didn’t matter to Mabel. All she had ever cared about was that she never be considered ordinary.
    When Mabel was a little girl—on Staten Island, which she rarely admitted—her father, a carpenter, would take her out on a boat and point at Manhattan. Those glittery lights, he’d tell Mabel, were part of a great big world he hoped she’d see one day. Claude Normand had once wished the same for himself. Instead, he lived vicariously through the local theater company for whom he occasionally built sets, imagining the places they saw on tour—Cleveland, Columbus, Chicago, St. Louis—places he might have seen himself if he hadn’t been a husband and father stuck on Staten Island.
    Mabel’s father was a dreamer, and he imparted his dreams to his little girl. But he also taught her more fundamental lessons, such as the difference between right and wrong, and what was worth giving up and what was not. Out into the world, Mabel had carried the twin gifts of her father’s imagination and his integrity, and sometimes found it hard to square the two. In the movie colony, there were lots of people with the former but only a few with the latter. Mabel was fine with exploiting herself for her own goals—what was the harm in subtracting a few years from your age or pretending you were born in Boston?—but she drew the line at taking advantage of someone else. That set Mabel apart in Tinseltown, where such behavior was common.
    She’d noticed the