Free Speed Kings by Andy Bull Page B

can’t do this, Jay,” she insisted. “I’ll tell the judge I don’t want to marry you and that you have got a gun in your pocket.”
    â€œYou can take your choice,” Jay said. “I could kill you but I couldn’t have you then. I could kill your red-headed boyfriend and you couldn’t have him, and you couldn’t have your career either. Know why? The publicity of having a director killed over a movie star would fix everything for you with your public.”
    â€œI couldn’t scream or even try to get away from him any longer. He had thought of everything. Everything. For the first time in my life I knew fear, and that’s why the situation slipped from my control.”
    Pud Sickle and his wife came back into the room with the man who owned the house.
    â€œJudge,” Jay said. “This is the future Mrs. O’Brien.”
    â€œThe gun punched into my ribs,” wrote Mae. “I felt my face stretch into a smile. I heard my voice say ‘Yes, yes.’ I was so frightened I couldn’t think ofanything else to say. Then, with Jay’s arm locked through mine, with his gun still jammed painfully in my side, we went through with the marriage ceremony.”
    In her memoirs, Mae said the couple then headed back to the Alexandria Hotel. During dinner she slipped out the bathroom window and caught a taxi back to the studio, where she was reunited with Bob Leonard. Certainly she and Jay quarreled at their wedding supper. Anita Loos remembered the couple had come to the Hollywood Hotel, rather than the Alexandria. “We all stopped dancing to applaud the glowing bride as she made her way toward the broad staircase on the arm of Hollywood’s first socialite bridegroom. But it is dismal to report that a brief two hours later the bridegroom booted the bride down the same staircase, out into the night. What happened between those honeymooners in the bridal suite is a mystery still.”
    What few facts can we extract from all that? Jay and Mae were certainly married by a justice of the peace on December 18, 1916. The witnesses were, indeed, one “Mr. and Mrs. J. Harrington Sickle.” Both the bride and groom lied about their ages. And they were divorced on August 30, 1918. Mae testified in court that between the wedding night and the court date she had seen Jay only once, when he had “choked her and thrown her across a room.” She left the courthouse in tears.
    We have to leave Mae behind now. If it seems a sudden separation, it is no sharper than the break between the two of them. While they were separated but still married, they were once seen out at the same restaurant, each eating with someone else and refusing even to acknowledge the other. A fortnight after the divorce, Mae and Bob Leonard announced that they were engaged to be married. Her haste made Jay seem almost reserved: he waited almost an entire a year before he got engaged again.
    His second wife was Irene Fenwick, a star like Mae, but brunette rather than blonde, and a real actress rather than a dancer and showgirl. She had dabbled with the movies but was best known for her work in the theater. They were married on June 14, 1919. This time the marriage lasted beyond the wedding night, but not all that much longer. By the summer of 1922 the papers were full of rumors that Fenwick was in love with her costar in
The Claw
, Lionel Barrymore. When Barrymore divorced his wife in the winter of 1922, Irene decided to publicly deny the affair. She and Jay were “happily married.” This was a lie. It was common knowledge that the two of them had drifted apart, but Jay was refusing to grant her the divorce she wanted. Soon enough, the decision was taken out of his hands.
    Irene and Jay had separate charge accounts at the same Fifth Avenue jewelry store, which they had once used to buy each other surprise gifts. The bookkeeper there mistakenly billed her for “a number of