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

mother“as a glorified servant girl at her beck and call.” But that was how they’d all lived these past fifteen years: in service to Mrs. Shelby.
    Driving through the elegant columned gateway of Fremont Place, Mary couldn’t deny that her mother, for all her tyranny, had accomplished a great deal for her family, shepherding them from a rather dreary “there” to a very fashionable “here.” When they moved to Los Angeles, Mrs. Shelby had insisted that they“find a suitable millionaire’s home to rent.” Their home was an ornate two-story neoclassical mansion on spacious grounds, with a garage, a tennis court, swimming pools, and stables. The house had been Mary Pickford’s for a couple of years—undoubtedly the reason Mrs. Shelby had thought it perfect for her Mary, whom everyone was calling Pickford’s heir.
    That was Mrs. Shelby’s goal: to see her daughter become one of the biggest stars in moving pictures. Mary heard that refrain every day, and she was getting tired of it. Mabel had achieved that status, and now wanted something else; Gibby yearned for it, and would have killed for a stage mother as determined as Shelby; but Mary simply didn’t care. True, she enjoyed the life her stardom gave her. Her fancy little roadster and the fabulous parties would be hard to give up. But if it meant escaping from Mrs. Shelby, Mary would have chucked it all in an instant.
    How she ached to be free to live her own life. She despised being told“when to go to bed, when to get up, whom to meet and whom not to meet.” There had to be a way out of her mother’s clutches.
    Mary turned the knob of the front door and stepped inside.
    Charlotte Shelby was only a couple of inches taller than her daughter, but somehow even the biggest, most brutish studio guards always stepped aside to let her through. Her kewpie-doll face was invariably pinched, her clenched smile signaling either pleasure or anger. Shelby was feared and loathed by nearly everyone who knew her, including her own family.
    But even her detractors couldn’t contest her brilliance or her ability. To succeed in a world run by men without resorting to sex or trickery was virtually impossible for a woman in Tinseltown. But Mrs. Shelby had managed to do just that. Fifteen years ago she’d left the stink of her husband’s linotype shop and found a new world for her daughters and herself, propelled only by her dreams and her belief in herself.
    Charlotte Shelby had been bornLilla Pearl Miles, the bloom of a faded aristocracy, her speech still edged with the flowery Louisiana lilt of her youth. Mary later described the “gentility” of her mother’s family, part of an old South“where Negroes knelt to pull on the gloves of the plantation owners.” Lilla Pearl grew up determined to reclaim her birthright. When she married her struggling husband, some predicted she wouldn’t last long as a newspaper printer’s wife. They were right. As soon as her two daughters were school age, Lilla Pearl packed them up and took them to New York, without telling her husband when they’d be back.
    “When I was a baby, just four years old,” Mary lamented, “[Shelby] took me away from my home and my daddy.” To Mary’s mother’s way of thinking, there was no life for them in the bayous. Their names were changed so her husband couldn’t find them.
    In Manhattan, the newly christened Mrs. Shelby advertised herself as an acting coach, despite never having acted a day in her life—unless playing the part of a working-class Shreveport wife and mother counted. She taught her pupils the Delsarte method of applied aesthetics, while her widowed mother, Julia Miles, served as babysitter and cook.
    Within a short time Shelby had pushed both her daughters out onto the stage. But it was little Juliet—Mary’s birth name—who became the star. Before she was ten, Juliet was signed by theater impresario Charles Frohman and packed his houses with her sexy nymphet act. When child