Murder in Hollywood: Solving a Silent Screen Mystery

6. Mirrors of Deceit

6 Mirrors of Deceit The reason Thomas Lee Woolwine protected Mary Miles Minter from a charge of murder was not only that he had strong connections to Famous Players–Lasky through Charles F. Eyton and Frank A. Garbutt . It was not only that he was a close friend of Charlotte Shelby and may even (George Hopkins said) have been her lover. It was not only that, as he told Garbutt, he might not have been able to secure a conviction against Minter; women would be serving on the jury, women who worshiped Minter on the screen. In order to understand why this remarkable man, among the half-dozen most powerful figures in Los Angeles, risked his political future in protecting a killer, his career has to be seen and understood—the atmosphere of a city run by mobsters and ravaged by violence has to be resurrected from the oubliette of history. Los Angeles was a violent, corrupt, and dangerous township from the 1849 gold rush on. Opium became a major trade, brothels flourished, bandits raided bars, lynch mobs seized suspects and hanged them from trees. In 1871 city marshals joined in enthusiastically when a mob killed twenty Chinese T’ong suspects. Between 1877 and 1889, sixteen police chiefs were appointed and resigned, unable to keep their posts in the face of criminal activities on the one hand and charges by morals committees , in most cases well-founded, on the other. After an interregnum of decency, by 1904 prostitution and gambling flourished again, led by 114 Madame Rose Weir, so-called Queen of the Red Lights, from her bordello at 312 North Alameda Street. The city became a battleground between Republican progressives, fierce watchdogs of morality, and the crime bosses. By 1920, with Prohibition in force, the city was more crime-ridden and violent than it had been since the nineteenth century. Detective Captain George K. Home became chief of police, rehiring ex-policemen who were outright criminals, guilty of burglary, break-in, and assault. Chain gangs were run with severe brutality on the city’s outskirts. In 1920 Home’s chief adviser, the criminal Herbert Kittle, threatened with exposure and ruin by the muckraking Record newspaper, fired gunshots through his office floor and, later, shot himself. It was into this atmosphere of bought police, angry progressives, mayors acting to protect the gang leaders and the film studios, that Thomas Lee Woolwine rose to power. He knew from the first he must bend the knee to the outrageously handsome and flashy Kent Kane Parrot, the amazingly-named lawyer who was crime boss of the city and head of a political machine that almost literally ran everything. The dark, rangy, Lincoln-like Thomas Lee Woolwine was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on Halloween, October 31, 1874. A graduate of Columbian (later, George Washington) University, he married Alma Foy, daughter of a well-established Los Angeles family, in 1900. They had no children but adopted a son, Thomas Junior; after a career in private law practice, starting as deputy city and then district attorney, he had become chief prosecuting attorney of Los Angeles by 1908. A year later, he published a novel, In the Valley of the Shadows, with a murder as its theme. Its central protagonist was named Taylor. In 1913 Woolwine’s blistering nature emerged in an altercation outside his mansion on Kensington Road. He was walking his fox terrier round the block when a bulldog owned by his neighbor Fielding J. Stilson attacked the animal and dragged it down the block. Woolwine seized Stilson and threatened to kill him. The chief county prosecutor had to be by the police. In June, 1916, Woolwine was charged, in a Superior Court suit filed by the progressive Law Enforcement League, of trading in illegal goods and improperly dismissing gambling charges against the wealthy restaurant Mirrors of Deceit 115 • owner Baron Long. During the subsequent trial, Woolwine had his lawyer, Joseph Ford, strike prosecuting attorney Randall J. Hood twice on the chin. Through the usual methods of bribery and coercion, he won the case. He was accused by the Morals Efficiency Board of not enforcing Prohibition law; the Board of Supervisors found him guilty of account padding in the Los Angeles Daily Times bombing case; he gave immunity to criminals when they revealed they had made bribes to his rival officials , including Mayor Woodman, whom he hated. He met with...