Sin City Meets Tinseltown
by
Bruce Cook, a.k.a. Brant Randall
I have been part of the motion picture industry for almost forty years and have taught Cinema for much of that span. I love movies as much as I love books. I guess you won’t be too surprised to find that my third crime novel is set in Hollywood…but not the Hollywood of 2009. I wanted to write about Tinseltown when it was really full of drugs and adultery, corruption and cover ups, gays being outed by the yellow press, murders committed by stars, actors dying of drug overdoses, and calls from religious groups for censorship of a lewd and lascivious industry.
That’s right…I wanted to write about Hollywood in 1932. The book is called Tommy Gun Tango and is due out in October from Capital Crime Press.
I’m a native of Los Angeles, born at 4th and Crenshaw in South Central, an area that once was mostly white, then black, and now is predominantly Latino. I teach college in what is called the “poverty core” of Los Angeles, since there is no inner city in this sprawling web of freeways, bus lines, and light railways. It is a city of infinite variety, cultural diversity to the point of near insanity, utopian experiments, upstart religions, fabulous weather, pernicious traffic, beaches, mountains…and movies.
Because so many Angelenos are newcomers to the city, our history is mostly unknown to its inhabitants. First let’s scope out 1932 and see if any of this sounds familiar.
The Great Depression is in its third year:
Nearly one third of all farms and homes were in foreclosure.
Unemployment stood at 23.6%.
The Gross National Product had fallen 31% since Black Tuesday.
To keep the rich from escaping taxation, the top income tax rate was raised to 63%, up from the previous 25%.
Three million homeless rode the rails and walked the roads looking for work.
A quarter of a million teenagers were among them.
And in Los Angeles:
They also served as houses of prostitution, night clubs, and speak easies.
The mayor between 1929 and 1933 had been the head of the KKK on the west coast.
He ran for office on the policy that Los Angeles would be the last bastion of native-born, white Protestantism.
He was also a strict Prohibitionist and he abhorred the hedonistic motion picture industry.
The Los Angeles Police Department was widely known for its corruption, second perhaps only to Chicago. It worked hand in glove with the motion picture industry to hide the peccadilloes of the actors and studio executives who provided a major source of employment and revenue for the city.
In the 1920s Hollywood had been rocked by a series of scandals:
It was discovered that Mabel Normand, Mack Sennett’s former mistress, was at Taylor’s home the night of his murder. She was cleared but the investigation revealed her $2000 a month cocaine habit.
Famed producer Thomas Ince was murdered aboard the yacht Oneida owned by William Randolph Hearst (the model for Citizen Kane), possibly by Charlie Chaplin. Actress Barbara LaMarr died of complications from her heroin addiction. Leading man Wallace Reed died of morphine addiction. Other addicts who succumbed included Jack Pickford, brother of Mary Pickford; and Oscar-nominee Jeanne Eagles, the original Roxie Hart in the 1926 stage play Chicago. Sadly the list goes on.
For this novel, I have invented a gossip sheet, The Hollywood Daily Tattler. It closely resembles a number of sensationalist tabloids published about the movie industry in the 1920s, breathlessly reporting the scandals of the stars. Although I created the paper, the stories I have placed in it are all factual (or at least as factual as the stories themselves were), written in the style of the day. During my research I found contemporary newspaper accounts and court records to be invaluable in recreating the atmosphere of Hollywood during the Roaring Twenties.
All this is the backdrop to a sensational true-life mystery. Did Jean Harlow’s husband commit suicide or was he murdered? And if MGM producer Paul Bern was murdered, by whom?
What made the case sensational?
Investigators found that Bern had a secret common-law wife who had been in an asylum in New York for years. She had been released from care and arrived in Los Angeles that same week to reclaim her husband. She was reported missing the day after Bern’s death and found dead a week later—an apparent suicide by leaping off a San Francisco ferry.
An unidentified woman had left her wet bathing suit, a small amount of blood, and a broken glass next to Bern’s pool that night.
Jean Harlow had stayed the night at her mother’s home. When notified of his death she was so distraught that she was “unable” to speak to police, and thus avoided direct questioning.
Bern’s body was found completely naked on the tile floor of Jean’s bathroom, drenched in her perfume, the pistol that had killed him lying nearby.
Louis B Mayer, Irving Thalberg (head of production at MGM), and Whitey Hendry (chief of security for the studio), were called to the death scene by Bern’s butler, where they cooked the evidence for several hours before calling the LAPD.
A very peculiar “suicide” note was found near Bern’s body, but it appeared to have been torn from a guest book. The note was not in Bern’s handwriting, according to some witnesses.
At a meeting the next day Mayer announced that to save the career of MGM’s rising star, Jean Harlow, they would have to let the public know that Bern committed “suicide because of impotence.”
The same District Attorney, Buron Fitts, investigated most of the deaths listed above. He was widely reputed to be on the take from the studios.
I sifted the evidence anew. I read late life memoirs by those who had been involved at the time. I came to some new conclusions which I have woven into this Hollywood Noir murder mystery.
My mother’s family immigrated to Los Angeles in 1932, having left their bankrupt business in Pennsylvania. My father was born in Long Beach, a suburb of Los Angeles. I used stories from both my parents, as well as from my grandmother (who lived to be 96) to help recreate the feel of everyday life in the City of the Angels some fifteen years before I was born. I was aided by family photos and diaries kept by my mother as a young woman.
I’m hoping that you will be as captivated reading this slice of life from an earlier time as I was in writing it.
Bruce/Brant
Originally a laser physicist on the Apollo Project, Bruce has written, produced, and/or directed eleven movies. He teaches Cinema in Los Angeles and among his 5,000 former students are 7 Academy Award and 12 Emmy winners. He worked in the Philippines and researched his mystery novel Philippine Fever. His second novel, Blood Harvest, was written under the pen name Brant Randall.
brucecook@earthlink.net