Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann Page B

for. Soon they were “intimately associated and involved,” as she put it.
    But their passion wasn’t so much for each other as it was for what they might accomplish. It was greed, not sex, that aroused them. Their Cupid was cupidity. Osborn was married; Gibby knew and didn’t care. Pepa had been married, too. What mattered was what they could do for each other. Nathanael West wrote of the relationship between two of his fictional locusts: “She wasn’t sentimental and had no use for tenderness, even if he were capable of it.” He might have been describing Margaret Gibson and Don Osborn.
    If Gibby believed Don Osborn’s schemes were aboveboard, she’d soon find out how mistaken she was.
    When he was nineteen, Osborn had masterminded a profitable forgery business out of his downtown apartment at 312 South Flower Street. Knowing the cops were squeamish about arresting women, Osborn had used his new bride, the former Florence Vennum, to sign the checks. Their “worthless paper,” according to newspaper reports, was “scattered throughout Southern California.” When police finally closed in, Osborn blamed it all on Florence; the police took pity on her and let her go. Just as her husband had counted on.
    Not surprisingly, Florence left Osborn soon after this, taking their infant son, Earl, with her andsuing for child support, though Osborn rarely gave her a cent. Moving back in with his mother, Osborn found day jobs at the movie studios. In the last five years, he’d walked though the backgrounds of dozens, maybe hundreds, of pictures from a variety of studios. When heregistered for the draft during World War I, he was working for the Triangle Motion Picture Company in Culver City. But Osborn’sname would not be found on the Triangle payroll: he probably never held a job on the lot for more than a few days at a time.
    Osborn firmly believed that the rules were stacked against people like him. If he was going to succeed, he’d need to go around the rules. He’d also need money. That was the basis for his friendship with George Weh, a middle-aged bachelor and the moderately successful owner of a sheet-metal company. One night, as they luxuriated in the saltwater plunge at the Sultan Baths on South Hill Street, across from Pershing Square, Osborn struck up a conversation with Weh. Osborn told Weh about his dream—to make an independent picture that could crash through the gates erected by the big producers and distributors. All he needed was financing. Weh was intrigued by the younger man. Soon he was frequenting Osborn’s“drinking parties” with their bootleg booze and attractive girls, most of them would-be movie actresses, the kind casting agents used as dress extras and called “soft goods.”
    Among the loveliest was Osborn’s second wife, the teenage Rae Potter, who’d won a Chicago newspaper contest naming her“the prettiest working girl in the city.” Armed with such clippings, Rae had set out for Hollywood. But the only person in Tinseltown who showed much interest was Don Osborn. They married on her eighteenth birthday.
    So much in love was Rae that she didn’t mind supporting her husband, dancing in two shows a night at Pelton’s Theatre in Burbank so the couple could pay their bills. Rae would later describe Don as not“the kind of man who liked to work.” Not that she was judging: Rae sympathized with Osborn’s plight. Don Osborn could be a great film director, Rae believed, if only someone would hire him. But the men in power were jealous of Osborn’s artistry. “You haven’t a friend in the world,” Rae would say, commiserating when her husband came home, depressed after making the studio rounds.
    Yet for some reason her tenderness enraged Osborn. Rae was “too good” to be married to him, he snapped, and he began staying away from home. Rae sank into deep despair. One afternoon the nineteen-year-old swallowed some bichloride of mercury tablets, the same poison Olive Thomas would