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15 Just after the First World War, the word junkie entered into American parlance to describe a population of heroin addicts—a visible and growing population of male derelicts in and around New York City—who supported their drug habit by scouring that city’s junkyards in search of scrap metal, which they then sold to junk dealers. As medical historian David Courtwright has noted, the emergence of the term junkie at the beginning of the 1920s marked an historical transition in the general demographics of narcotic addiction in the United States. No longer was the typical addict a white, middle-aged, middle- or upper-class rural housewife, whose addiction had begun when her physician administered therapeutic doses of morphine to relieve pain. The new addict was more likely to be a young, white male who decidedly belonged to the urban underclass and whose addiction was more likely to have started when he began sniffing heroin with his friends at cheap dance halls. Yet junkie also rather neatly describes the transformation , in both popular and medical understandings of narcotic addiction, from a notion that morphinism was an organic disorder of the individual that resulted from medical treatment, to the view that narcotic addiction was a type of social disease, an unfortunate by-product of a modern industrial society and thus a pressing public health issue. It was within the context of such a transformation that the popular film star Wallace Reid died in January 1923 at the age of thirty-one, due to complications resulting from an attempted withdrawal from narcotic addiction. Reid’s death is generally considered one of the three most significant scandals of early Hollywood , along with the criminal trials of the film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in 1921 and 1922 and the sensationalized murder of director William Desmond 1 The Early Hollywood Scandals and the Death of Wallace Reid 16 Twilight of the idols Taylor in February 1922. Reid was remarkably handsome and had been a very successful matinée idol from the mid-1910s until his death. Like other popular male stars of the period such as Douglas Fairbanks and Thomas Meighan, Reid typified a rugged, all-American virility that was a compelling version of psychological and physical health for young white men. Often reported to stand at 6′ 3″ and to weigh approximately 190 pounds, Reid was usually portrayed in the fan magazines as a happy and playful giant. He was also represented as somewhat of a dilettante with scattered interests in music, painting, chemistry, automobile racing, book collecting, golf, and a host of other pastimes. A man of many accomplishments , Reid was presumably so full of wonder at the world that he could not be bothered to devote a great amount of time or attention to any single activity. Although younger than Fairbanks by almost a decade, Reid was part of the same generation of film stars who, like Fairbanks, emerged in the mid-1910s to become public representatives of the newly formed movie colony in southern California. Unlike the newcomer Fairbanks, however, Reid had been working steadily in the film industry since 1910, making over one hundred films as a featured player for the Vitagraph, Universal, and Majestic film companies. When Jesse Lasky signed Reid with his company in June 1915, Reid was already a wellknown and established performer, though Reid’s popularity rose rapidly after Lasky paired him with Metropolitan Opera star Geraldine Farrar in a couple of prestige pictures directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Reid’s masculinity also differed from the “vim, vigor, and vip” of Fairbanks by departing from the latter’s insistence upon rational self-discipline. While Fairbanks’s healthy manliness resulted from the adoption of a youthful mental attitude which valued carefully planned and regimented physical activities, Reid’s boyish charm rested more on a naturally robust physique and a much more spontaneous athleticism. Although his many film performances and even the scandal with which his name is linked are largely forgotten today, in the early 1920s, when it appeared as if the film industry itself was in danger of imminent collapse, Reid’s drug addiction was a significant moment in the history of the star system and in the consolidation of Hollywood as a mass cultural institution. Reid’s death afforded the film industry its first opportunity to explain how good stars can go wrong. The industry succeeded not only in containing the scandal of Reid’s drug use, but in reinterpreting his death as both...

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