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Wild Blue Press published my book on 10/05/21. Available online from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Much thanks to everyone who has helped me along the way. We're giving away 20 e-books on Goodreads. 
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Hollywood in the silent era was a bigger deal than it is now. For one thing, the movies exercised more influence on the American culture then. By the early 1920s, half of all Americans attended the movies every week, a figure that would grow to 90% by 1930. It was still a new thing and there weren’t many entertainment alternatives—television was far in the future and radio was in its bare infancy. Today’s A-listers pale in comparison to the silent stars. They come nowhere near the popularity, glamor, or influence of a Mary Pickford or a Charlie Chaplin, a Gloria Swanson or a Rudolph Valentino. Studios wielded more influence as well. Los Angeles politicians and police deferred to studio heads like Adolph Zukor of Famous Players-Lasky, the number one studio, and went out of their way to protect the industry because it was so vital to the economy. And studios put out way more films then. Famous Players cranked out hits like Valentino’s The Sheik, a film so popular that it added a word to the popular lexicon, inspired an eponymous brand of condoms, inspired the most famous song of the Jazz Age, The Sheik of Araby, and spawned a film sub-genre about Arab men (portrayed by white actors) who seduced or raped adventurous white women in desert tents. Tinseltown scandals were bigger then, too. A major scandal rocked the film colony every year between 1920 through 1924. Yellow journalism had a lot to do with inflaming the situation, especially in the newspapers of its inventor and most enthusiastic practitioner, William Randolph Hearst. The first highly-publicized Hollywood scandal, the September 1920 drug overdose death of archetypal movie flapper Olive Thomas—she had starred in The Flapper earlier that year—had excited the yellow press and shocked the public, but it was nothing compared to what came next: The Arbuckle Affair. A year after Olive Thomas’ death, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, the rotund king of farce comedy, was charged with manslaughter in the death of a struggling actress named Virginia Rappe. Arbuckle’s popularity rivaled that of Charlie Chaplain. He’d recently signed the most lucrative movie contract ever with Famous Players-Lasky. At trial, the prosecution contended that during a raucous Labor Day weekend party at the posh St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, Arbuckle had raped Virginia, causing her death by peritonitis. What actually happened depends upon which variation of the story a person believes. As invariably happens with celebrity deaths, there are plenty of theories to choose from. The full truth is lost to history in boozy memories, political ambitions, sensationalized newspaper fiction, self-serving lies and half-truths, false statements made under duress, and facts twisted to fit pre-conceived notions. Two of Hearst’s papers, the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Examiner, led the media frenzy with an avalanche of front-page articles under screaming headlines. The incendiary coverage, generally reflecting the prosecution’s portrayal of Arbuckle as a sexual predator, convinced a large swath of middle America of the actor’s guilt before any facts had come out. Overnight he went from a lovable clown to the public face of Hollywood debauchery and a film colony pariah. The media circus dragged on for seven months and three manslaughter trials between November 1921 and April 1922 with two hung juries and finally an acquittal. But it was too late. Even if he hadn’t raped and killed Virginia, some reasoned, Arbuckle had committed lewd conduct and violated the Volstead Act. Many people thought he got what he deserved. “Maybe three trials couldn’t prove that Arbuckle was guilty,” said Gloria Swanson, “but nobody in town ever thought he was all that innocent.” At any rate, he lost his mansion, his cars, his livelihood, and most of his fortune to the lawyers. He died in his sleep in 1933. Time has only partially clarified the affair. If anyone recognizes Arbuckle’s name today it’s as the man who raped and killed a woman with a bottle, a lie invented by a contemporary reporter and revived decades later in Kenneth Anger’s entertaining, best-selling, and comically inaccurate book, Hollywood Babylon. Contemporary papers had generally portrayed Virginia Rappe as naïve and innocent, but Arbuckle’s counsel smeared her character with exaggerations. Authors in recent decades seeking to exonerate Arbuckle have treated her with even less respect, portraying her as an alcoholic, opportunistic slut and Hollywood parasite. More recent biographers have sought to rehabilitate Virginia’s reputation, depicting her as an independent modern woman, pointing out her previously unsung accomplishments in the nascent fashion industry of the 1910s. Authors have suggested that she actually died of complications from a botched abortion or a chronic cystitis condition, perhaps exacerbated by alcohol and multiple abortions. Who knows. The only sure thing about the Arbuckle affair is that it devastated everyone involved except the lawyers, the reporters, and William Randolph Hearst. The scandal, Hearst boasted, "sold more newspapers than any event since the sinking of the Lusitania.” It seemed impossible that Hearst could top the rumpus he created around Arbuckle, but he did. At the height of the Arbuckle affair, news broke on what would become an even bigger scandal and the most notorious Hollywood mystery of all, the baffling and still unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor, a noted director for Famous Players-Lasky. Taylor's valet arrived at his employer’s stylish bungalow one morning in February 1922 to find the director dead on the floor from a gunshot wound to the back. The valet ran shouting into the courtyard outside. Taylor’s neighbors, most also in the motion picture business, soon filled the bungalow and trampled on the evidence. Agnes Ayres, Valentino’s co-star in The Sheik, was one; another was Edna Purviance, Chaplain’s long-time leading lady. Someone telephoned Charles Eyton, general manager of Famous Players. Hoping to prevent a replay of the Arbuckle fiasco, he rushed to the scene with some underlings and tried to sanitize the place of embarrassing materials. The first detective at the scene deferred to the studio bigshot and didn’t interfere. Eyton and company removed some bootleg liquor and correspondence, but missed a few important items, chief among them a scented love letter and filmy nightgown belonging to screen ingénue Mary Miles Minter, another Famous Player. Police determined that Taylor had been shot the night before after walking his friend, Mabel Normand, famed comedy queen and frequent Arbuckle collaborator, to her car; someone apparently ambushed him when he returned to his bungalow. A neighbor saw a man calmly emerging from Taylor’s door after hearing what she thought was a gunshot. The story instantly blew up. The cops had no shortage of motives or suspects. The juiciest theory, the one most promoted by the yellow papers, involved a purported love triangle between Minter, Taylor, and Normand. In reality, other than Minter’s unrequited crush on the director (thirty years her senior), the love triangle didn’t exist. Taylor, most likely gay or bi, apparently loved Mabel as a friend, as she claimed. But the papers manufactured a sex scandal and ruined the careers of both actresses—Mary because her love letters to Taylor shattered her virginal screen image, Mabel because her struggles with cocaine came to light. The Taylor scandal generated even more outrageous hype and fake news than Arbuckle’s. Wallace Smith of Hearst’s Chicago American reported that a gay, opium-smoking Hollywood sex cult had murdered Taylor, ostensibly their leader, for violating some sacred oath. Other reporters took it upon themselves to solve the mystery. Three weeks after the murder, a Hearst reporter and some cohorts—Chicago mob thugs--kidnapped Taylor’s valet, a gay black man named Henry Peavey. Convinced Peavey knew more about the murder than he was telling, they held him at the offices of the Los Angeles Examiner for twelve hours. That night they took Peavey to the Hollywood Forever cemetery and tried to frighten him into confessing. A thug covered in a white sheet emerged from behind Taylor’s tomb. Peavey laughed. Among other oversights, the perpetrators had neglected to give Taylor’s apparition the pronounced British accent the man had in life. The NAACP filed a complaint over the incident but Hearst’s people got away with it. The police quickly cleared Minter, Normand and Peavey, but they had a plethora of other suspects. The list is long to this day. Some detectives and film colony insiders—and many current case aficionados—consider Minter’s mother, Charlotte Shelby, the prime suspect. Determined to protect Mary’s image, Shelby, a quintessential stage mother who got rich from and lived vicariously through her famous daughter, was known to threaten men who got too close to Mary, including Taylor, with a .38 revolver. This happened to be the same type of gun as the murder weapon. Another leading suspect then and now is Taylor’s former valet, Edward Sands, a man with a long record who had previously stolen money from Taylor, burglarized his bungalow, and wrecked the director’s car. Despite an intense nation-wide manhunt, the cops never located Sands. The police never suspected Margaret Gibson, a Famous Player-Lasky actress who had once worked with Taylor, but she allegedly confessed to the crime on her deathbed in the 1960s. Margaret, out of work at the time, may have helped set up Taylor in a blackmail scheme, leading to the director’s death at the hands of a con man. Another widespread theory is that drug dealers murdered Taylor in retaliation for his efforts to keep Mabel off of drugs. There are plenty of other theories to choose from. One of these has ties to the Fritzie Mann case through one of her dance mentors, Theodore Kosloff, a Russian ballet dancer, silent film star, and choreographer for Cecile B. Demille at Famous Players. The story involves the drug angle, the Black Hand, the KKK, and a series of articles in a popular movie fan magazine. It represents a missed opportunity for yellow journalists to drum up another Hollywood scandal, but that’s a story for another post. Just as the Taylor scandal finally began to subside, the ordeal of another A-list Famous Player rocked Tinseltown and unleashed a fresh firestorm of publicity. Wallace Reid epitomized the All-American image the studios sought to project, the antithesis of an Arbuckle, an image shattered when the public learned of the actor's morphine habit. The studio tried to keep Reid's struggles out of the papers, but then Reid’s wife checked him into a sanitarium and went public. He died on January 18, 1923 from complications of his addiction. News of Reid’s death appeared on front pages alongside that of Fritzie Mann. Fritzie’s case, with its multiple Hollywood connections, offered the hint of a new film colony scandal and some of the papers used this angle to play it up. The fifth and final major Hollywood scandal of the early 1920s occurred in November 1924 when William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, the Oneida, dropped anchor in San Diego Bay filled to the gunwales with Tinseltown luminaries. There is no reliable record of the passenger list but it’s thought to include Hearst, Marion Davies (Hearst’s mistress), Charlie Chaplain, writer Elinor Glyn, columnist Louella Parsons, actresses Aileen Pringle, Julanne Johnston, Jacqueline Logan and Seena Owen, actor-dancer Theodore Kosloff, and producer-director Thomas Ince. The Oneida entered port after Ince become gravely ill. A water taxi delivered him and a doctor ashore. The pair boarded a train for L.A., but Ince’s condition deteriorated to the point that they were forced to stop at the Hotel Del Mar. Ince died a few days later at home in L.A. Although the official cause of death was heart failure, the Los Angeles Times, the main rival of Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, proposed a different theory: “Movie Producer Shot Aboard Hearst Yacht!” The story goes that Hearst had mistakenly shot Ince while aiming at Chaplin, who he suspected of having an affair with Davies. Hearst managed to squelch the initial reports, but rumors persist to this day. San Diego DA Chester Kempley conducted a cursory investigation of Ince’s death. He spoke to a La Jolla doctor and a nurse who had attended to Ince during his stay at the Hotel Del Mar. Ince had blamed his condition on the copious amounts of bad alcohol he’d consumed aboard the yacht, not a gunshot wound to the head. As with the Taylor and Arbuckle scandals, there are plenty of theories about what happened onboard the Oneida. The play The Cat’s Meow and a 2001 film of the same name starring Kirsten Dunst as Davies portrays Ince’s death as an accident during Hearst's attempted murder of Chaplain. Whatever happened aboard the Oneida, the episode caused Hearst considerable angst, a small measure of poetic justice, perhaps, for the lives his papers had ruined. The scandals made Hollywood the epicenter of a brewing culture war. Traditionalists reacted badly to Jazz Age frivolity and liberalism and blamed film colony denizens for a lot of it. Emboldened by the negative press, moral reform groups went looking for evidence of Tinseltown depravity and either found it or invented it. During the Arbuckle affair, Capt. J.H. Pelletier of the Los Angeles Morals Efficiency Association, for instance, claimed he’d discovered a group of Hollywood luminaries known as the “Live One Hundred,” also known as “Arbuckle’s crowd.” The group held drug- and alcohol-fueled Bacchanalian parties, he claimed, rituals akin to black masses, and orgies “without equal in the history of America” at their palatial mansions. Such bizarre reports rarely included names, nor did they produce witnesses or evidence or lead to indictments, but confirmed the worst pre-conceived notions about the film colony. The publicity surrounding the scandals prompted Congress into action. Following the Taylor scandal, Democratic Senator Henry Myers of Montana denounced Hollywood in fiery speeches on the Senate floor and introduced legislation proposing to investigate the industry and censor their films. Movies were the only form of amusement within the means of millions, Myers argued, and bestowed upon young people much of their education. The studios wielded this power irresponsibly for profit without regard for the impact on youthful minds, he said. The film colony was a place “where debauchery, drunkenness, ribaldry, dissipation and free love seem to be conspicuous,” Myers declared, and its stars low-lifes who didn’t know what to do with their new-found wealth. There were also proposals to disband the film colony altogether or at least forcibly move it to the east coast so lawmakers could keep a better eye on it. Ironically, a movie had driven the resurgence of one of the most strident critics of Hollywood, the Ku Klux Klan. D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, reinforced racist stereotypes about African Americans, glorified the Klan as patriotic heroes, and inspired the preacher who became the organization’s imperial wizard. The focus of the new iteration of the KKK shifted somewhat to meet the needs of the moment; the Klan of the 1920s held as much enmity for Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and Jazz Age liberalism as it did blacks, though its focus varied by region. The southern California Klan, for instance, often singled-out Mexicans for persecution. The new KKK fancied itself the arbiter of patriotism, morality and the law, seeking to impose its views through intimidation, occasionally meting out vigilante justice. It would grow to over four million members by its peak in the mid-1920s. Hollywood, as a town largely founded and run by immigrant Jews, employing stars who, in the Klan’s view, flouted decency on screen and in their private lives, embodied everything the group despised. The Klan particularly loathed one of the more conspicuous symbols of the changing times depicted on the silver screen, the modern woman.
 San Diego Union A key prosecution witness in the Fritzie Mann murder case of 1923 in San Diego was a woman named Wilma Minor, who five years later became the most famous person involved in the case due to her involvement in a bizarre hoax. Nobody in San Diego would’ve predicted this any more than they would’ve believed that Wilma had been involved in a very different but even more bizarre episode ten years before. Judging by the news coverage of the case, she didn’t seem like a person capable of such things.
In the news coverage of the case, Wilma came across as decidedly normal, an ordinary person selected by fate to play a role in the most sensational crime story in the city’s history. Her only noteworthy traits seemed to be a striking beauty, stylish attire, and an actress’ flair for the dramatic—when Wilma made an entrance, everybody noticed. This was no accident. Few people in San Diego would’ve known it, but before settling there in 1922 she’d traveled around the country for years as an actress in vaudeville musical comedies. Her mother, Cora, ran the vaudeville troupe, which also included her husband, Frank. Thirty-seven in 1923, Wilma gave the impression of being younger and if asked her age would’ve answered with something closer to twenty-eight or nine. She lied about her age throughout her life, including in official documents. With each ten-year census, Wilma’s rate of aging appeared to slow. She’s listed as twenty-one in 1910 when she was actually twenty-four; twenty-seven in 1920 when actually thirty-four; and thirty-one in 1930 when actually forty-four. Her official age never caught up to reality. It’s unlikely that any of the men in her life, including the four men she married, knew her real age. Wilma had inherited some of her traits from her mother, most notably the hypnotic effect she had on men, her multiple marriages, and her exaggerated sensitivity to the passage of time. But whereas Wilma was charming and sensitive, her mother, Mrs. Cora Mickle-Hoffer, was domineering, eccentric, and something of a grifter. Cora billed herself at various times as an actor, a singer, an author, a playwright, a poet, a medium, a lecturer, a Reverend, the publisher of a magazine called The Thinker’s World, and founder of a secret society based in Chicago called the Society of Natural Science. The existence of the society came to light in 1913 when a row between Cora and one of her acolytes turned into a legal brouhaha that shocked the public. “Doctor” Herbert Ross Bumpass, a “recalcitrant prophet” of the Society of Natural Science, defended himself against a charge of disorderly conduct by revealing the peculiar goings on within the organization. A self-described philosopher and soldier of fortune, Bumpass testified that Cora had hired him to write about his war adventures in the Boxer Rebellion and Spanish-American War for her magazine, then refused to pay him. She suggested instead that he come live at her house rent-free as compensation. Bumpass agreed. At Cora’s house, which doubled as the Society’s headquarters, Wilma mesmerized him. “I discovered that Mrs. Minor was my affinity,” Bumpass said. “I thought I deserved an affinity as well as my room and board for my work on the magazine.” His affinity no doubt had much to do with Wilma’s curvaceous figure, gray-green bedroom eyes, and flirtatious charm. Cora, more liberal than average in sexual matters, agreed that Bumpass deserved an affinity with her daughter. So did Wilma’s husband, Frank, who said he and Wilma were married in name only. Bumpass promptly moved into Wilma’s room. You see, Bumpass said in court, the Society of Natural Science was not a spiritual society as Cora claimed, but a free-love cult. And Cora’s house was not the headquarters of a legitimate organization but a “love temple.” Then, out of the blue, Frank, whom Bumpass referred to derisively as a “ham actor,” objected to the arrangement, as if he’d just discovered another man sleeping with his wife under the same roof. He forcibly ejected the prophet from Cora’s house. Cora later accused Bumpass of conspiring with his brother to burn down a printing company and Cora’s house. Bumpass defended himself against the arson charge by trashing the reputations of his former guru and her daughter. Mrs. Mickle-Hoffer’s so-called “natural science,” he said, condoned and even encouraged free love. He dwelt at length on his sexual affair with Wilma, going into such explicit detail that the judge had to repeatedly warn him to moderate his language. On the stand, Wilma wept and denied all of Bumpass’ sleazy accusations. Cora, referred to in the papers as the “High Priestess of an Alleged Love Utopia,” was not so easily cowed. She dismissed Bumpass’ allegations and hurled invective of her own, calling him a crazy man. Bumpass was ultimately acquitted. The bizarre episode caused quite a stir in Chicago—this was 1913, after all, long before the carefree Jazz Age loosened up the Victorian moral code. Free-love cults were definitely not a thing and certainly not talked about in public. By 1920 Cora and Wilma had given up the vaudeville lifestyle. Wilma was living with Frank in Long Beach, Ca, Cora with her latest husband in Chula Vista, a small suburb near the south end of San Diego Bay. Wilma moved to San Diego in early 1922. That year she ran a short-lived dress design company called My Lady’s Dressmakers out of her house. She divorced Frank around this time and began a career as an associate editor and writer for Southwest Magazine, a now-defunct San Diego monthly. She wrote features on light human-interest subjects such as Snooky, who Wilma described as an “almost-human” chimp at the zoo. Sometime after her involvement in the Fritzie Mann case, Wilma became a part-time writer for the San Diego Union. She wrote a human-interest column called “Sidelights on Life” for a few years. Known for her distinctive purple prose, Wilma once described a book as “so full of fresh air and high zest of living that it plays on jaded senses pleasantly like the muted strings of a violin.” By late 1928 Wilma was in her second marriage. Using her writing skills and making maximum use of her hypnotic effect on men, with encouragement from her allegedly clairvoyant and conniving mother, she became a nation-wide celebrity overnight as the protagonist of one of the most audacious literary hoaxes of all time. She submitted an article called “Lincoln the Lover” to Atlantic Monthly magazine. Her submission included letters that Abraham Lincoln had reputedly exchanged with a woman named Ann Rutledge. Back up evidence included a bible Rutledge had supposedly gifted to the future president and her friend’s diary. Rutledge, some historians believed, was Abe’s first love. Some Lincoln scholars theorized that her death in 1835 accounted for the depression that plagued him the rest of his life. Wilma’s letters seemed to confirm the theory. Lincoln biographers Ida Tarbell and Carl Sandburg excitedly authenticated the letters. This was enough to convince well-regarded Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick. Swiftly, he edited out Wilma’s purple prose and serialized her piece in three parts. The magazine paid her $1500 for the articles and another $1,000 as an advance towards a book, considerable sums in those days. Wilma gave talks and basked in the attention. Soon, Lincoln experts spotted the letters for what they were—crude forgeries. The handwriting in the letters bore no resemblance to Lincoln’s. Nor was the composer of the Gettysburg Address known to write sentences such as, “Night, like a black sinewy panther, crawled cautiously through the unbending straight directness of the saplings on the river bank.” Embarrassed, Sandburg and Tarbell recanted their previous statements, leaving Sedgwick to twist in the wind. After months of adamant denials, Wilma admitted writing the letters and the fake diary but insisted that it was no fraud. A spirit guide, she claimed, had dictated the contents of the documents to her mother, now known as Cora Deboyer. Because the spirit guide was in direct contact with Abe and Ann, now together in the afterlife, the materials were authentic. Needless to say, nobody bought this. Cora, of course, was the real mastermind behind the hoax. The editor of the Atlantic Monthly Press, Edward Weeks, described her as “…tall and beady-eyed, with hair suspiciously black for her age.” Her general look “reminded him somehow of a fortune-teller.” An L.A. private eye the Atlantic Monthly hired to investigate the hoax described Cora as “…the hard nut of the two…a hard boiled old hen, who does not know what the word truth means.” Wilma, on the other hand, was “very badly disrupted and plainly showed the ordeal she had been through. At one point Wilma seemed like she was ready to pass out.” The weird episode stamped a permanent black mark on Ellery Sedgwick’s otherwise distinguished career. Along with another man involved in the scandal, he’d been duped in no small part by his electric attraction to the comely Wilma. Wilma’s celebrity-notoriety flamed out as quickly as it had ignited, and she drifted back into obscurity. She married two more times, continued writing, became an artist and a scrap booker and lived a quiet life in the San Diego area until her death in 1965. Her obituary, which does not mention the Lincoln letters, lists her age as sixty-seven. She was actually seventy-nine.  1. Colleen Moore, Clara Bow, and Louise Brooks became famous for portraying flappers in silent films, but the first was Olive Thomas in the 1920 film “The Flapper.” Thomas died later that year in Paris after ingesting husband Jack Pickford’s syphilis medicine (mercury bichloride) in what was officially ruled an accident, though some believe it was suicide or murder. 2. Olive Thomas’s death was the first of five notorious Hollywood scandals during the first half of the 1920s. The others: Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s manslaughter trials for the death of actress Virginia Rappe in 1921; director William Desmond Taylor’s mysterious murder in 1922; movie star Wallace Reid’s drug-related death in 1923; and director Thomas Ince’s death after a cruise on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht in 1924. 3. William Randolph Hearst pioneered the sensationalized, fact-challenged form of reporting called “yellow” journalism. His newspapers were largely responsible for shattering the careers of three major silver screen players—slapstick king Roscoe Arbuckle, slapstick queen Mabel Normand, and screen ingenue Mary Miles Minter—with lurid, often false innuendo, exaggeration, and outright fabrication. 4. The stereotypical flapper image, promoted by Hollywood, included a waif-thin, androgynous look, bobbed hair, a shapeless party dress with fringes, beads or sequins, rolled stockings, modish cloche hat or feathered headband, and a cigarette in a long holder. 5. Along with Hollywood, tobacco companies helped create and capitalized on the flapper image by advertising smoking as a weight loss method and a mark of sophistication for women. 6. Smoking is one of the flapper behaviors, often depicted on the big screen, that outraged traditionalists. Others included driving, visiting bars, dating, close dancing, and public displays of affection. 7. Jazz Age frivolity and progressive attitudes prompted a backlash from conservatives. The culture wars of the 1920s bore a close resemblance to those one hundred years later. Other than the more recent addition of LGBTQ rights, the flash points were the same: Gender, race, abortion, immigration. 8. The Ku Klux Klan, which had been in decline since the Civil War, had undergone a resurgence following D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, which reinforced racist stereotypes and glorified the Klan as patriotic heroes. The revitalized Klan of the 1920s held enmity for Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and Jazz Age liberalism as well as African Americans. The organization also viewed itself as the arbiter of morality. By its peak in the mid-1920s, the KKK had grown to over four million members—approximately fifteen percent of the eligible U.S. population of native-born white Protestants. 9. Before the Jazz Age, the idea of two young people going on a date wasn’t a thing. Previously, suitors “called on” young women at their home, where their parents could keep an eye on them. Now the man picked the woman up in his “machine,” as automobiles were commonly called, and took her to a dance, a restaurant, or a movie. But with the more casual interaction between the sexes, parents worried that they might end up a speakeasy or a hotel. With birth control and abortion illegal, the danger of an unwanted pregnancy was ever-present. 10. An unwritten Victorian moral code in the patriarchal society placed a disproportionate burden on women to prevent pre-marital sex. Until married, a woman could not allow a man to touch her and the only birth control needed was to keep her legs closed. That shouldn’t be hard, it was thought, since women were not considered sexual beings anyway. The man was supposed to “do the right thing,” but when he didn’t the woman had no good options. Like so many others, I got hooked on crime nonfiction back in the mid-70s when Helter Skelter came out. The best-selling true crime book of all time begins with a warning: “This book will scare the hell out of you”—the best introductory teaser for a book I’ve seen and absolutely true. Over the years I developed a fondness for narrative nonfiction books in the tradition of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, particularly those about vintage crimes such as The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson or Midnight in Peking by Paul French. I’ve wanted to write about true crimes almost as long as I’ve been reading about them.
I finally got around to it thirty-five years after reading Helter Skelter. After retiring from active duty in the Navy and settling in San Diego, I went back to school, earning a BA in English from National University followed by an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside. The UCR course is a top-rated low-residency program where the majority of the work is done online, with intense ten-day residency periods twice a year. In 2012, while preparing to start the MFA program, I began searching for a thesis subject. I wanted to write a narrative nonfiction book—using the literary techniques of fiction but sticking to the facts—about an old crime, preferably obscure, unsolved, and untold. If possible, I wanted it set near my home in San Diego because I knew extensive research would be required. As I started the search, I came across a number of crimes that met these criteria, but none stood out and most of them aren’t well-documented. Access to source material became an additional criterion. As I asked around, several people mentioned the Fritzie Mann case. Local historian and author Richard Crawford had recently rescued the story from obscurity by publishing an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune called “1923 Death of Butterfly Dancer Becomes Shocking Mystery.” As I began looking into it, I noticed that the story seemed to have attained something of a cult status around town as an unsolved mystery, no doubt largely due to Richard’s article. A young woman who worked at the San Diego History Center in Balboa Park referred to it as the city’s “Black Dahlia case.” She steered me to an old scrapbook packed with newspaper clippings, mostly from the 1920s, the majority of which covered the Fritzie Mann case. The case, which met all of my criteria, drew me in at once. It had the added bonus of being set in the Jazz Age, to me one of the most fascinating periods in U.S. history. Over the next several years, during what proved to be a daunting research project, I learned that the story of Fritzie’s tragic death was much more than an intriguing Jazz Age murder mystery, although it was certainly that; in many ways it seemed to define the era, an era of change and societal conflict with striking parallels to today. Telling the story, however, proved to be more challenging than I’d anticipated. In some cases, I found hard-to-fill gaps in the historical record that made it difficult to reconstruct scenes with the detail and characterization I wanted. In other cases, such as contemporary newspaper articles, I found an abundance of information but of questionable veracity. I learned some hard lessons about writing a narrative nonfiction book, at least a book about an obscure hundred-year-old murder mystery. The most important lesson: Real-world events don’t always cooperate with your story-telling desires and those pesky facts can get in the way of a good true story. I found that the best—and probably only—way to solve this problem was to get creative with how I told the story without getting creative with the facts. My book is about the tragic unsolved death of Fritzie Mann, a beautiful interpretive dancer from an immigrant Jewish family. She left her San Diego home one evening in January 1923 to meet a mysterious man, telling her mother only that it was a “man from L.A.” who was taking her to a “house party in Del Mar.” The next morning Fritzie turned up dead on Torrey Pines beach, then a lonely spot. The scene, with her body in an odd posture and her belongings scattered around the beach, mystified the police. Was it an accident, a suicide, or a homicide? They couldn’t tell for sure and neither could the inquest but ultimately the coroner ruled it a homicide. Two intriguing suspects emerged right away, a playboy actor and a debonair doctor, both sophisticated men from the east. Each of these men had a motive, a shaky alibi, and circumstantial evidence against him and in the early stages of the case both looked guilty. The doctor walked unbidden into the police chief’s office with his lawyer in tow. The cops couldn’t locate the actor for three days; when they finally did, it was in L.A. and it looked like he was about to flee out of state. The investigation uncovered Fritzie’s connections to Hollywood, her clandestine meeting on the night of her death at a beach cottage in La Jolla with a man called the “mysterious Mr. Johnston,” and secrets she’d been keeping that had threatened to ruin her killer. Newspapers in San Diego and Los Angeles covered the case from the beginning. With each revelation the hype grew and the story spread to front pages across the nation. The more the papers sensationalized the story in this era of “yellow” journalism, the more the coverage shaped and distorted it. Later, an ambitious District Attorney battled a high-profile L.A. attorney in the most sensational trial in San Diego’s history amid allegations of corruption and legal dirty tricks on both sides. But at the end, big questions remained. In my research I found information unavailable to the jury and newspapers at the time that sheds new light on this true Jazz Age murder mystery. Set against a backdrop of yellow journalism, notorious Hollywood scandals, Prohibition corruption and a lively culture war, this is the tragic story of a spirited young woman who practiced a now-forgotten art and loved the wrong man at a time women had few options. In upcoming blog posts I plan to cover topics related to Fritzie’s story and the time and place: Ten things you didn’t know about the Jazz Age; San Diego’s unique law enforcement situation and corruption during Prohibition; the string of notorious Hollywood scandals in the early 1920s (e.g. Fatty Arbuckle, William Desmond Taylor); the fact-challenged, sensationalized style of reporting called “yellow” journalism; and the history of the lost art of interpretive dance and Fritzie's experiences in the dance world. I also plan to cover side stories about some of the characters such as a prosecution witness who later became notorious for perpetrating one of the most audacious literary hoaxes in U.S. history involving fake letters from Abraham Lincoln and a colorful brothel madame who followed a successful system to stay one step ahead of the law—until her luck finally ran out. |
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