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

labor laws caught up with them, Mrs. Shelby sent back to Louisiana for the birth certificate of a deceased cousin, Mary Minter, and slammed it down on producers’ desks, claiming it revealed Juliet’s real age and name. From that point on, the little girl became Mary Miles Minter.
    She also became sixteen when she was only ten. Slathered with lipstick and mascara, she was dressed in high heels and long skirts.“These things have an effect upon a child that all the training and coaching in the world cannot eliminate,” Mary would say. Shelby wanted her daughter all grown up fast. One day she snatched Mary’s favorite doll from her hands and burned it in the oven in front of her. The bereft child cried for weeks.“They never would let me be a girl,” Mary said, “to have a girl’s pleasures, to do the things that other girls would do.”
    Only one thing mattered in life, Mrs. Shelby taught her daughter. “From morning till night,” Mary said, “I had money, money, money talked and preached to me.”
    Money, of course, was something Mrs. Shelby was very good at getting. Although Mary made movies for producers in New York and Santa Barbara, California, Mrs. Shelby always had her eye on a bigger prize. She was determined to get her daughter the most lucrative contract in the film business, even if that meant going toe-to-toe with the biggest man in the industry, Adolph Zukor.
    When she finally got an offer from Zukor, Shelby had the nerve to play it against one from Lewis J. Selznick of Select Pictures, watching smugly as the two moguls fought for Mary’s services. Zukor won—Zukor never lost—to the tune of $1.3 million, making Mary“the little girl with the biggest motion-picture contract in the world.” Zukor used the teenager as the linchpin in his newly formed Realart Picture Corporation, which had its own studio out on Occidental Boulevard near Wilshire.
    Mary was an instant hit with audiences, her innocent smile and curvy little body especially popular with men. She had, in her own words,“matured very quickly in this glorious sunshine and gorgeous setting of California.” The men who flocked around her made her feel very grown up, but they made Mrs. Shelby very uneasy. Mary believed her mother was simply afraid some man would steal away her golden goose. But Shelby had other reasons to worry, even if Mary didn’t like to remember them.
    She’d been barely fifteen, a budding rose of adolescent charm and sexuality. James Kirkwood had been her charismatic forty-two-year-old director.
    Predictably, Mary had fallen in love.
    Standing with Kirkwood in a field of wildflowers overlooking the Santa Barbara coast, Mary took her director’s hands in her own. He’d wanted her for so long, Kirkwood told her. But since Mary was still a virgin, he would never think of debasing her honor. So here, under the brilliant blue sky, Kirkwood proclaimed he would marry her, before God.
    With strong hands, the director lifted Mary and placed her on a rock. She stood above him like a goddess, her ringlets blowing in the wind. Kirkwood dropped to one knee. With the sun and the sky their only witnesses, they pledged themselves to each other. Mary was enraptured.
    Then Kirkwood took her down from the rock, yanked off her dress, and had sex with her in the grass.
    Soon afterward, Mary was pregnant. She was deliriously happy, certain that Kirkwood would take her away from her unhappy home; together they’d raise their baby and have many more. But soon Kirkwood was gone, off to New York. Mary wrote him passionate letters, begging him to come back. One of the letters was intercepted by Mrs. Shelby.
    Shaking with rage, Shelby dragged the terrified girl to a doctor who provided clandestine services for women who could afford it. Mary was strapped to a table, her legs pulled apart and secured. Given only the mildest anesthesia, she shuddered as a long, cold, sharp tool was inserted inside of her. The doctor dilated Mary’s cervix and