A Bright and Guilty Place Read online

  She was not authorized to take Miss Bow’s private letters and telegrams and later to use them to extort $125,000 from the generous girl who had befriended her.

  Actually she was stealing from her employer right and left, as the evidence shows.

  Clark’s performance was calm, measured, clear. He stood close by the jury box, not raising his voice, with his hands clasped behind his back. He saw no need for theatrics. He’d judged the progress of the trial and felt confident.

  The case went to jury at 3:25 P.M., Wednesday, January 21, and the jurors spent several hours in argument before they were sequestered for the night in a downtown hotel. They spent the entire next day deadlocked, returning to Judge Doran to receive more instructions before being shut away in the hotel again. Two male jury members, the Examiner reported, had been fistfighting, and one of them said there was no chance of a verdict. DeVoe, who was waiting in court, surrounded by family and friends, visibly brightened. “I’ll sleep better tonight,” she said. She spoke too soon. Next day, after more than forty-eight hours of deliberation, the jury came in, finding DeVoe guilty—but on only one count.

  Now it was DeVoe’s turn to break down. She lost her hitherto remarkable self-control and pitched face forward on the counsel table, her sobs sounding through the otherwise silent court. As a bailiff escorted her to the stairs leading to the county jail, she stumbled. “I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it,” she said, at the point of collapse, hanging in the arms of the bailiff and a newspaperwoman. “If they were going to convict me at all, why didn’t they convict me of everything?”

  That was a good question. Various jurors seized their own moment in the limelight, telling the press that the verdict had been a compromise—a punishment not only of DeVoe’s theft, but of Clara Bow’s celebrity and lifestyle. A submerged but ever-present theme of life in L.A. came to the surface: class warfare.

  Before the sentencing, Buron Fitts received a letter from Clara Bow, pleading for leniency for her former friend. “It is my hope that mercy will be shown,” she wrote. Judge Doran was firm, however, handing DeVoe eighteen months in county jail and telling her flat out that she was an embezzler. “From a position of trust you conducted systematic raids and the jury was generous,” he said. “The evidence was sufficient to convict you on all counts.”

  DeVoe stood rigid before the bench and was led away by a jail matron.

  Clark’s job was done, but the torture of Clara Bow went on. Frederic Girnau, publisher of the Pacific Coast Reporter, another “political weekly,” jumped in with the “facts of the blushless love life of Clara Bow.” “‘IT’ GIRL EXPOSED!” ran the headline. Girnau asserted that Bow had seduced her chauffeur, her cousin, and a pet koala bear. According to him, she’d slept with Duke, one of her dogs, a Great Dane. In Agua Caliente she’d initiated a whorehouse orgy while another of her lovers, a Mexican croupier, watched. The croupier subsequently murdered his wife before turning a gun on himself. Girnau accused Bow of incest and lesbianism. She had venereal disease, drank highballs before breakfast, and was hooked on morphine. “You know, Clara, you’d be better off killing yourself,” he wrote. In time Girnau was prosecuted for criminal libel and sent to prison for eight years for publishing this filth. By then, though, Clara Bow had checked into a mental asylum in Glendale and her Paramount contract was terminated by mutual consent. Her career was over, and she was only twenty-five.

  People v. DeVoe could scarcely have worked out worse for Clara Bow, and it’s hard to escape the suspicion that B. P. Schulberg had engineered her downfall. His son, Budd Schulberg, thought so—but then Budd, the jaded insider, had his own grudge, his father having deserted his mother for Bow’s replacement, Sylvia Sidney. Certainly B. P. Schulberg jumped on the chance to dump a tempestuous star who had become troublesome freight. Buron Fitts was the tool with which B. P. Schulberg achieved a desired end, and Fitts had turned loose Dave Clark, who then did his job.

  Clark had scaled a peak. He’d been the star performer in another of L.A.’s great goldfish bowl trials, where crime and celebrity mingle and swim around together, weirdly magnified. Three days after the sentencing of Daisy DeVoe, Clark quit the D.A.’s office, rejoined Wellborn, Wellborn & Wellborn, and announced that he was running for a judgeship. He set up his campaign in a suite at the Alexandria, then the swankiest downtown hotel, and soon he was standing before the Republican Women’s Study League in Van Nuys, giving a campaign speech in which he spoke darkly of “the head of vice in Los Angeles,” saying that this man was tied into the D.A.’s office and the LAPD. He meant Charlie Crawford.

  A story in the Van Nuys Tribune was headlined: “CRIME-BUSTING ATTORNEY RUNS FOR JUDGE.” The story reported Clark’s speech, in which he attacked “the underworld of Los Angeles, its narcotic, gambling and prostitution branches,” and praised “the dashing and handsome Clark, a beacon of virtue in our community, a foe of the underworld, the man who brought down Albert Marco.” Clark, cashing in the chip that the DeVoe trial gave him, envisioned a future involving more money and prestige, greater power. Was he really interested in virtue? Probably not. After he was elected judge, he planned to move into politics in some substantial way. With his adoring wife Nancy on his arm, the sky was the limit.

  20

  Hard Times in Lotus-Land

  Clara Bow had been Hollywood’s biggest box-office draw of 1930. Charlie Chaplin was still probably the most famous being on the planet, though his future, too, was uncertain. His most recent film, The Gold Rush, had been released way back in 1928, before The Jazz Singer and America’s infatuation with sound. Chaplin—the purist, the perfectionist—defied the trend and spent the next two years making another silent film, City Lights. Actually City Lights wasn’t completely silent: Chaplin included sound effects that mocked the talking fad.

  On January 30, 1931, only days after People v. DeVoe wrapped up, Chaplin’s film premiered at the 2,200-seat Los Angeles Theater, downtown on Broadway. Like City Lights, the Los Angeles Theater had been begun with grand expectations at the height of the boom and finished, barely, at the Depression’s onset. Chaplin himself had to put up the money to complete the building so his premiere could go ahead. In his autobiography, he confessed that he was worried: “Would the public accept a silent picture?” Nobody was sure. City Lights, as history knows, proved a triumph, a critical and box-office smash, regarded by many as the summit of Chaplin’s art.

  In the middle of the film Chaplin’s tramp and his sometimes friend, the millionaire (it’s a running gag that the millionaire, when drunk, recognizes the tramp, only to forget him again when sober), return home in the millionaire’s car after a night-club binge. A studio shot of the car pulling away from a curb cuts into location footage of the same car hurtling through the deserted pre-dawn streets of downtown L.A. The car careens around another car, jumps on the sidewalk, and almost turns over. “Be careful how you’re driving,” reads the tramp’s line on the dialogue card. The millionaire replies: “Am I driving?” The sequence provides, in the background, startling views of what downtown Los Angeles looked like: the freshly-built buildings are spotless, unblemished, and dense tangles of streetcar wires run high over the streets. The streetcar wires are now long gone, and the little dialogue exchange feels like the socialist Chaplin’s comment on America’s economic disaster. Nobody had been driving.

  Chaplin attended the premiere with Albert Einstein and his wife. The new age of celebrity waved its wand at some surprising figures, and Einstein was one of them. The ship bringing him to the West Coast on December 31 had been besieged by dozens of reporters, a comical scene evoked by reporter Gene Coughlin. “Two of our number fell off the Jacob’s ladder of the liner Belgenland and pitched into the ocean,” he wrote. Coughlin usually covered the crime beat and prepared for his interview with the great scientist by consulting with a professor of physics at UCLA and trying to bone up on the subject of relativity. The physics professor told Coughlin he himself couldn’t understand it, so Coughlin came away no
ne the wiser. Instead, notebook in hand on the deck of the Belgenland, he asked Einstein a single question: “Is there a God?” Einstein just smiled, and Coughlin had his story.

  Einstein headed north to Los Angeles, where he at once announced his desire to meet Chaplin. Lunch was arranged, and the two men became friends. Now, dressed in tuxedoes and walking arm-in-arm, they posed for the press photographers and the newsreel cameramen in the high-ceilinged, walnut-paneled, and gold-leaf decorated lobby of the Los Angeles Theater. “They cheer me because they all understand me and they cheer you because nobody understands you,” Chaplin said to his new friend. Chaplin, like Einstein, was no mug.

  Outside the theater searchlights fingered the cool of the night sky while limousines continued to disgorge celebrities and pandemonium reigned. The premiere was one of the biggest in Hollywood’s history. UPI reported that 400 policemen tried to keep in order a crowd of 50,000 that mingled with the downtown bread lines. Soon celebration and curiosity turned into anger and a chaotic rampage. The mob tore up chunks of the sidewalk and smashed store windows. The LAPD responded with tear gas and clubs. More than 100 arrests were made—this was a riot.

  L.A. had been magicked into existence and the Depression in no way fitted with the city’s unswerving onward and upward view of itself, and affronted especially the politicians and businessmen who had worked so hard to pump full the balloon of civic optimism. “The situation is remarkably good and not at all alarming” said Mayor Porter, leading the way in denial, adding, “You have nothing to worry about.” The Times, the bullhorn of the boosters, noted: “The Depression is mostly psychological.” But reality set in, as reality will. Businesses kept failing and jobs kept being lost. A human river of the displaced and the dispossessed poured into the city from all over America. People loaded everything they had into their cars and took their families and their failed lives in the direction of California. In 1931 a total of 876,000 automobiles entered the state.

  The economy had fallen off a cliff and even in California people were starving. Yet crops of citrus and wheat were being destroyed in dumps to keep prices up. Dorothy Comingore, the actress who would star in Citizen Kane, recalled: “I saw heaps of oranges covered with gasoline and set on fire and men who tried to take one orange shot to death.” The situation certainly wasn’t “remarkably good,” and hard times would get harder, conjuring not belief and hope in the limitless future but a desperate mood of fear and bewilderment. The L.A. Chamber of Commerce took out ads in the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s and The New Yorker, the “slicks,” saying that although the city was still a place to visit, people shouldn’t come looking to work. They did more than just warn people away. For a while the authorities tried to seal off the borders against transients bound for the city. The LAPD’s anti-Red squad was becoming a success, much more so than its anti-gang squad, though Leslie White wrote that “most of the so-called ‘Reds’ weren’t communists but unemployed men and women beaten down to the danger line.”

  Wealthy men were targets for extortion plots. Times publisher Harry Chandler received an anonymous letter threatening to blow up his home unless money was paid. Leslie White was put on a twenty-four-hour detail, standing outside the Los Feliz mansion in the rain because Chandler didn’t want “any damn flat-feet” messing up the carpets inside.

  More seriously, White became part of a “gangbusting” unit, assigned to track down Ralph Sheldon, a famed Irish gangster out of Chicago and an associate of Capone’s, who popped up in L.A. in January 1931. Sheldon and his crew kidnapped gambler Ezekiel “Zeke” Caress, one of the owners of the racetrack down in Agua Caliente. While making the snatch, Sheldon shot and nearly killed an LAPD cop. Facing mobsterism on this serious scale, White visited a friend in Ventura and returned to L.A. with a Thompson submachine-gun and tear-gas grenades wrapped in towels on the backseat of his car. He also acquired an “auto-riot gun,” a double-barreled shotgun with a fifteen-inch barrel and a snug pistol grip. “It was called an auto-riot gun because one blast fired into an automobile would kill everyone in the car,” he said, clearly expecting life-threatening thrills and spills. He and other investigators interrogated informers. They raided a house in Glendale without any luck and spent days staking out a lonely cottage in Hermosa Beach, accidentally taking potshots at each other in the dark before learning that the gangsters were being tipped off and had split up. Afterward White laughed, saying how lucky he’d been not to be killed during this little escapade, most likely by one of his own colleagues. Everybody, White included, had been determined that there should be a shoot-out and the fearsome

  “auto-riot” gun brought into play. But the danger passed; one-by-one, and without further gunplay, Sheldon and his gang were brought in. White was selling more stories and meeting other writers. As his horizons began to broaden, he ceased to foster any illusions about the invincibility of justice. He was tired of jaded old detectives telling him, “You’ll learn, kid.” He fretted about the uselessness of his daily work; but, with the Depression tightening its grip, he was happy to be employed. The incident that would provoke his exit from the D.A.’s office began harmlessly enough when Blayney Matthews summoned him in. Matthews opened a drawer in his desk and tossed White a small black book.

  “In that offhand gesture, he started one of the most sensational cases in the court annals of California, a case that cost millions of dollars and changed the pattern of many lives,” White said. On the outside of the little black book was stamped a single word: “MILESTONES.”

  “It’s the five-year diary of a prostitute,” Matthews said. He had the idea this material might be useful for White’s fiction. “Maybe you’ll get a yarn out of it.”

  The diary had been written by a woman named Olive Day, and delivered to the D.A.’s office by the man in whose house she’d left some of her belongings. The man had found the diary strange, but Matthews had barely glanced at it. White took the diary home, started to read it, and found himself stepping into a remarkable story.

  On September 10, 1930, Olive Day had written: “Camilla to lunch. Decided to risk taking her to M’s. There is a good profit if she will get drunk enough.” The entry for September 14 was: “Bill and I started out leaving Rita in charge. We picked up Camilla and drove pleasantly through to San Diego. The house was waiting for us, but I am nervous about Camilla’s actions.” And for September 15: “Camilla got drunk and proved a tip-over, but Mills is satisfied. I’m convinced he is a terrible bull-thrower. We had a weary drive home. The trip cost fourteen dollars, meals and all.”

  White gathered that girls, aged as young as twelve and fourteen, were being sold to wealthy men around Southern California. Having pieced this together, he went back to Blayney Matthews who then sanctioned an investigation. Together with female investigator Marjorie Fairchild, White set out on a search for Olive Day, finally finding her in a cheap hotel on 6th Street.

  Day, who had “oily skin and large clear eyes,” was hostile at first but agreed to make a statement. She’d been a prostitute in Los Angeles, Reno, and San Francisco. Exhausted by the game, she’d gone into business with her partner, William Jobelman, procuring young women for rich clients who didn’t like to think they were being served professional whores but wanted “good girls,” like their sisters and daughters. Day told of one man to whom she’d delivered a virgin every week, a multimillionaire realtor named John P. Mills. White found Jobelman, then he and Fairchild scoured Hollywood for girls involved in the case, some of whom had been taken from orphanages and children’s homes. Before long they had enough evidence to go to Buron Fitts, who summoned the press and ordered the arrest of Mills.

  White had heard that Mills drove a V16 Cadillac, one of the most distinctive and exclusive cars then being made, so he waited in the parking lot outside Mills’s downtown office until the big car rolled up. “Mills paled, but took it standing,” White said, and soon Mills was down at the Hall of Justice and the presses were thundering. “L.A. ‘LOVE MART’ SECRETS BARED I
N DIARY OF GIRL,” said the headline in the News.

  White had never before arrested twenty million dollars, and he was interested to see what would happen. He got his answers quickly. Within the hour Mills was out on bail and his attorneys had hired a private detective to help prepare his defense. White’s heart sank when he heard the news, for the private eye was none other than his old boss, Lucien Wheeler.

  “In Wheeler, I recognized a grim investigative enemy. He was one of the cleverest detectives I had ever met, and I knew I was no match for him in the struggle,” White wrote. “The rigid boundaries of the law clipped my claws, whereas the defense, with their clever detectives and brilliant lawyers, were only bound by their own ethics.” And he no longer had any illusion about those.

  21

  Double Death on Sunset

  Big news,” said Blayney Matthews, late in the afternoon of Wednesday, May 20, 1931, and this had nothing to do with the approaching Love Mart trial. Matthews, usually so calm and genial, was scarcely able to contain himself. “Charlie Crawford’s been shot.”

  White, amazed, stared at Matthews for a moment. “Is he dead?”

  “No.”

  Crawford, badly wounded but still conscious, was in an ambulance on the way to a hospital. A journalist, Herbert Spencer, who had been with Crawford at the time, had been shot too, and was already dead. Spencer was the editor and co-owner of The Critic of Critics, the political weekly that Crawford was backing. All this had happened in Crawford’s office at 6665 Sunset Boulevard, inches from the door through which White had heard Morris Lavine extort Crawford the previous year. The gunman had fled the scene. None of Crawford’s numerous alarms had sounded.

  “I want you to get over there,” Matthews said. White started to gather together his forensics gear.