Free Speed Kings by Andy Bull Page A

arrest, Mae had already quit New York for Hollywood, lured there by Zukor’s promise that he would arrange a red-carpet reception for her, with a brass band, when she got off the train. When she arrived, she was disappointed to find that Zukor had sent instead a fat man with a bunch of flowers. Mae saw Jay twice before she left the city. The first time was at a party, when he had ignored her as he offered his congratulations to all her co-stars in the Follies. “He never said one word that I might take personally! NOT ONE WORD! I felt the full cruelty of his blow then.” She flounced out. Jay’s somewhat transparent ploy seemed to be working. “His name rushed out and roared and tingled in my ears after every performance . . . and beat there cruelly in my heart when I was alone, disturbing me as I tried to rest.” The final time was when she bumped into him on Fifth Avenue. It was then she told him that she was moving to the West Coast.
    â€œI am a dancer and an actress,” she said. “I want to believe that I am, and with you I can’t believe anything. Not even that you love me.”
    â€œYou seem to think it is what you want that counts,” Jay said. “It’s what you are. You are just a precious baby who belongs to me, not to Broadway, not to Hollywood. Dancing and acting and running away from me and doing the things I don’t want you to do—they don’t count! You’re still my baby. Don’t you understand that by now?”
    And with that, he bundled her into the back of a cab, pressed his lips against hers, and then began to sob into her hair. Mae said, “I was more puzzled than ever about the strange bond between Jay and me”; he “was in torture because of me and I had been unhappy because of him. It did not seem right. His influence on my emotional life had not ended.”
    â€œAll right, all right,” she said, out of pity as much as love. “I will marry you.”
    Jay and Mae agreed that she would go to Hollywood to work on her first picture—
To Have and to Hold
, co-starring “the screen’s most perfect lover” Wallace Reid—and then return to New York for the wedding. They parted the next day, with Jay telling her, “I intend to hold you to your promise, baby, aboutcoming back after one picture and marrying me. Remember, if you don’t come back, I’ll come out and get you.” She did come back to New York, but only so she could break off the engagement. She was working for Cecil B. DeMille now and had fallen in love with her director on
A Mormon Maid
, Bob Leonard. Jay, just as he said he would, went out to Hollywood to persuade her to change her mind.
    Another of Mae’s biographers, Michael Ankerich, says that she changed her story about what happened next almost as often as she did the year of her birth. In her preferred version, Jay promised to leave her to Leonard if she would just come to the train station to say goodbye before he got on the train to New York. When she arrived, she was met by Jay and his friends “Pud” Sickle and his wife.
    â€œJay’s train doesn’t leave for an hour,” Pud said. “We’re going out in my car. We have a little surprise.”
    They drove until they reached a large white house. She assumed it was the Sickles’, but then they had to ring the door to get in. As they sat in the sitting room, Mae asked Jay, “Who lives here?” And he replied, “The judge who is going to marry us.” He put one arm around her and pulled her close, then slipped his other hand into his pocket.
    â€œYou can’t do this, Jay!” she said
    â€œYes, I can. It is all arranged. What do you think I have been doing in town all day?”
    Mae felt the coat pocket press into her side. “And I knew what I felt was a gun.”
    She looked around for Pud and his wife, but they had left the room.
    â€œYou