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

gunmen” were threatening those witnesses who’d testified against him. Gibby could have nothing more to do with that sort of world. Patricia Palmer needed to be sweet and innocent. Patricia Palmer had never known Joe Pepa, and had never set foot anywhere near Little Tokyo in her entire life.
    Despite her determination to start over, however, Gibby made little headway with her “high-class” contacts. Every day she checked, but no one from the big studios ever left messages for her at the Melrose Hotel.
    She was running out of ideas. She knewthere were whispers that Margaret Gibson and Patricia Palmer were one and the same, and the whispers may have been loud enough to keep her contacts from helping her. Billy Taylor, for instance. If he had helped her in the past, he seemed to have washed his hands of her now. When they’d worked at Vitagraph, both of them just starting out, Gibby had shared her dreams for the future with Billy. But now that he’d made it big, he offered no help whatsoever. And it wasn’t as if Gibby hadn’t asked.
    From the Christie plant, she could look over at the sprawling backlot of Famous Players. No doubt Gibby had watched, many times, as the company’s biggest stars—Gloria Swanson, Billie Burke, Alice Brady, Mary Miles Minter—were driven up to the front gates by uniformed chauffeurs in their shiny town cars. Now that was class.
    If Billy had wanted to help Gibby, he had the power to do so.
    He might have been high and mighty now, but Billy hadn’t always been so irreproachable. What most everyone in the industry seemed to have forgotten was that, long before he was so well known, Taylor had beenrather ingloriously fired by Vitagraph. No reason for his dismissal had ever been made public, but Gibby was there when it happened and likely knew why. Indeed, she likely knew a number of the secrets Taylor kept so deeply hidden from Hollywood.
    And if Joe Pepa had taught Gibby anything, it was that you used any means at your disposal to get the nice things you wanted.

CHAPTER 8
MARY
    She knew her mother was likely to blow her top like a geyser in Yosemite National Park, but Mary had stopped giving a damn one way or another.
    Mary Miles Minter steered hereight-cylinder Cadillac roadster down Wilshire Boulevard. The car had been built just for her, with a driver’s seat specially designed to fit her diminutive frame: Mary stood just five-two and weighed barely a hundred pounds. She’d ordered the car in her favorite color, robin’s-egg blue, and loved seeing how fast she could get it to go. Forty, fifty, sometimes sixty miles an hour. Next, she told the studio, she wanted to take flying lessons. The life insurance companies warned her that if she ever took to the air, they’d declare her policies just“scraps of paper.”
    Mary laughed. She’d only been joking. Well, half joking, anyway.
    She was out past her curfew. Whether she cared about her mother’s rules or not, it was always better to avoid a scene than to cause one. “Mrs. Shelby,” Mary called her; sometimes, out of earshot, she dropped the “Mrs.” It was a made-up name, anyway, an attempt to claim descent from Isaac Shelby, the first governor of Kentucky. Their real name was Reilly. There were lots of ruses like that in their lives, and Mary was expected to keep them all straight.
    How tired Mary had become of her mother’s rules. Lately she’d been testing Mrs. Shelby’s patience more and more. Mary was getting braver, or maybe just more foolhardy. But after all, she was now eighteen years of age. That gave her certain rights.
    At least, Mary liked to think so. Shelby thought otherwise.
    They’d just returned from a vacation in Yosemite. They’d stayed at Lake Tahoe—she and Mrs. Shelby and Mary’s older sister Margaret, as well as Mary’s grandmother, the only one in the family Mary felt any affection for. It was her grandmother whom she called “Mama,” even as Mrs. Shelby treated her own sixty-seven-year-old