The Badge by Jack Webb

Author:Jack Webb [Webb, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Corruption, Crime, Mystery & Detective, Non-Fiction, True Crime
ISBN: 9780099499732
Google: 2Qv_NFLb8zAC
Amazon: 0099499738
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2006-06-14T23:00:00+00:00

The rambunctious tradition was planted at the dawn of the century when the crude flicker industry arrived in town. Colonel William N. Selig’s cinema cowboys fired their blanks up and down Hollywood boulevard, the shooting crews caused traffic jams and confusion, and the good people hung out signs, No Dogs or Actors Allowed.

From the beginning, the police couldn’t quite cope with the eccentricities and excesses of Hollywood. As the movies became the major industry, the situation only worsened. Wild Hollywood parties, wild drinking, wild dope orgies became commonplace, and the police couldn’t have stopped them if they had tried.

But they didn’t particularly try, so they were marked by the public as either stupid, Keystone or grafting cops.

When to most of America dope was a remotely awful thing, the California State Board of Pharmacy listed five hundred movie people as addicts. In the crazy Twenties, dope was smart in Hollywood. Before a party in his mansion, one film luminary emptied the big sugar bowl and refilled it with cocaine as a practical joke. Another needled his ace leading man into the morphine habit when his natural stamina ebbed.

Occasionally, there was a scandal and a temporary cover-up. For three years the idol who had made fifty-two box office hits in seven years, suffered from morphine addiction and simultaneous blackmail. Courageously, he went “cold turkey” for two months and then one day collapsed on the lot in the middle of shooting a scene.

“One moment he had been the smiling and upright hero on the set,” an eyewitness later reported. “Then, in the bat of an eye, he began to drool and stagger.”

He was taken to a remote mountain cabin while his studio announced he was suffering from “Klieg-eyes.” A month later, he died and the scandal could not be suppressed. In the United States Senate, a debate on the League of Nations was interrupted as Senators warned Hollywood to clean up or face federal action. For a while discretion ruled, but not for long.

During a two-year period, a director and a director’s mistress died violently, the idol succumbed to his brave withdrawal attempt, and a one-time Ziegfeld beauty now a cocaine addict, killed herself in Paris. On Broadway, they put out all the lights for the night between 46th Street and Columbus Circle in her memory, and again Hollywood sobered momentarily.

But the reform was transitory. Hollywood remained the place where you ordered sex, dope, and Prohibition whisky By telephone, where bookies were protected on the movie lots (so that shooting schedules would not be interrupted by frequent phone calls to the horse parlors). Unlike many other sections of the country, Los Angeles had no long-standing social traditions of its own. Thus, for thirty years, what the stars did was accepted as the local mores.

And the police stood by.

Occasionally an honest cop revolted. During the 1930’s, Captain Carey M. Buxton, then a rookie, was ordered to check on a complaint in the tenderloin district. The place was a house rather than a home, and the madam brusquely told the young officer to get out.

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