Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann
Authors: William J. Mann
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through with Sam Goldwyn.
How persistent he’d been in his advances. Eventually Mabel had given in. After all, Sam was her boss. As much as Mabel loathed it, sleeping with Sam Goldwyn was job security.
Goldwyn was nearsighted, squat, bald, and selfish. Cocaine was the only thing that helped Mabel tolerate sex with him.Once, on a train, she’d excused herself from his sweaty clutches and hurried into her compartment to snort a couple of lines. When she returned she was glassy-eyed and frenzied, the better to deal with Goldwyn’s pawing hands and sloppy kisses.
But what was even worse was his Napoleonic presumption of power. Goldwyn wanted to change Mabel, to refine her. That was perhaps the worst thing of all. With each new etiquette lesson he arranged for her, Mabel’s resentment toward him grew.
Sitting in the shadows of a movie set with Frances Marion, she nursed her discontent like a gin and tonic.“Look at him,” Mabel seethed under her breath, pointing her finger at Goldwyn as he waddled through the studio, hunched over and beady-eyed. “That stuck-up bastard! That—” And she proceeded to “let fly a string of cuss words that no longshoreman could improve on,” Marion recalled. At last, out of breath, Mabel said, “Excuse me, Frances, for pointing.”
When it came to Sam Goldwyn, Mabel’s anger ran deep. But it wasn’t just because of the unwanted sexual passes and hectoring about etiquette.
Julia Brew, her companion-nurse, knew just how deeply Mabel despised Goldwyn. Julia had come to work for Mabel fresh from the nursing school at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Assigned her first case—“a movie star at Seventh and Vermont”—Julia was told the job was top-secret. So the bespectacled young woman took the trolley five miles to Mabel’s apartment without telling a soul.
On Mabel’s door hung a brass knocker shaped like the Mask of Thalia, the smiling muse of comedy. Julia took hold and rapped hard. A maid let her inside. The apartment was deathly still. Julia was told her patient was upstairs.
In the second-floor hallway the nurse spotted “a young balding man with wire-rimmed glasses” looking “pale and quite nervous.”
It was Sam Goldwyn.
Opening the door to Mabel’s room, Julia found the actress in pigtails and a flannel nightgown, rocking on the bed in terrible pain. She was in labor, Julia realized, and losing a great deal of blood.
Immediately Julia went to work delivering the baby. Mabel’s “large eyes closed with pain and then opened again.” The five-month-old male fetus was born dead.
When Mabel had learned she was pregnant, she hadn’t demanded Goldwyn marry her, as many other young women in her position might have done. She didn’t love Goldwyn, so she wasn’t going to marry him. Neither had she undergone an abortion. A network of doctors and midwives stood ready to provide the illegal procedure; Mary Miles Minter knew that firsthand. But not Mabel. What she’d been planning to do when the baby came, she told no one. She might have dropped out of sight for several months and then given the child up for adoption—or adopted the boy herself, from a sympathetic orphanage, some months later.
But in the end she was spared any of those decisions.
Mabel looked down at her dead baby. “Miss Normand was in a terrible state,” Julia would remember.
Goldwyn came into the room and kissed Mabel on the forehead. “I’m so terribly sorry,” he said. Mabel didn’t answer. She didn’t want to see him. This was what happened when she gave in, when she let a man run her life.
From now on, she was on her own.
Mabel spent about a month at Glen Springs. Then, suddenly, she resurfaced.
“Mabel Normand has a pair of callused hands to prove she has been rusticating in Staten Island,” columnist Louella Parsons reported. A few nights earlier, Parsons had spied Mabel at the Times Square Theater at a performance of The Mirage . Mabel regaled the columnist with stories of “her
How persistent he’d been in his advances. Eventually Mabel had given in. After all, Sam was her boss. As much as Mabel loathed it, sleeping with Sam Goldwyn was job security.
Goldwyn was nearsighted, squat, bald, and selfish. Cocaine was the only thing that helped Mabel tolerate sex with him.Once, on a train, she’d excused herself from his sweaty clutches and hurried into her compartment to snort a couple of lines. When she returned she was glassy-eyed and frenzied, the better to deal with Goldwyn’s pawing hands and sloppy kisses.
But what was even worse was his Napoleonic presumption of power. Goldwyn wanted to change Mabel, to refine her. That was perhaps the worst thing of all. With each new etiquette lesson he arranged for her, Mabel’s resentment toward him grew.
Sitting in the shadows of a movie set with Frances Marion, she nursed her discontent like a gin and tonic.“Look at him,” Mabel seethed under her breath, pointing her finger at Goldwyn as he waddled through the studio, hunched over and beady-eyed. “That stuck-up bastard! That—” And she proceeded to “let fly a string of cuss words that no longshoreman could improve on,” Marion recalled. At last, out of breath, Mabel said, “Excuse me, Frances, for pointing.”
When it came to Sam Goldwyn, Mabel’s anger ran deep. But it wasn’t just because of the unwanted sexual passes and hectoring about etiquette.
Julia Brew, her companion-nurse, knew just how deeply Mabel despised Goldwyn. Julia had come to work for Mabel fresh from the nursing school at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Assigned her first case—“a movie star at Seventh and Vermont”—Julia was told the job was top-secret. So the bespectacled young woman took the trolley five miles to Mabel’s apartment without telling a soul.
On Mabel’s door hung a brass knocker shaped like the Mask of Thalia, the smiling muse of comedy. Julia took hold and rapped hard. A maid let her inside. The apartment was deathly still. Julia was told her patient was upstairs.
In the second-floor hallway the nurse spotted “a young balding man with wire-rimmed glasses” looking “pale and quite nervous.”
It was Sam Goldwyn.
Opening the door to Mabel’s room, Julia found the actress in pigtails and a flannel nightgown, rocking on the bed in terrible pain. She was in labor, Julia realized, and losing a great deal of blood.
Immediately Julia went to work delivering the baby. Mabel’s “large eyes closed with pain and then opened again.” The five-month-old male fetus was born dead.
When Mabel had learned she was pregnant, she hadn’t demanded Goldwyn marry her, as many other young women in her position might have done. She didn’t love Goldwyn, so she wasn’t going to marry him. Neither had she undergone an abortion. A network of doctors and midwives stood ready to provide the illegal procedure; Mary Miles Minter knew that firsthand. But not Mabel. What she’d been planning to do when the baby came, she told no one. She might have dropped out of sight for several months and then given the child up for adoption—or adopted the boy herself, from a sympathetic orphanage, some months later.
But in the end she was spared any of those decisions.
Mabel looked down at her dead baby. “Miss Normand was in a terrible state,” Julia would remember.
Goldwyn came into the room and kissed Mabel on the forehead. “I’m so terribly sorry,” he said. Mabel didn’t answer. She didn’t want to see him. This was what happened when she gave in, when she let a man run her life.
From now on, she was on her own.
Mabel spent about a month at Glen Springs. Then, suddenly, she resurfaced.
“Mabel Normand has a pair of callused hands to prove she has been rusticating in Staten Island,” columnist Louella Parsons reported. A few nights earlier, Parsons had spied Mabel at the Times Square Theater at a performance of The Mirage . Mabel regaled the columnist with stories of “her
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