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The Cat‘s Meow
25 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M discuss the conspiracy of silence around the fate of Thomas H. Ince!
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction to the Murder Mystery Theme
00:00:00
Speaker
This week's episode is a classic Agatha Christie-style whodunit, so I'm expecting Em's legendary David Suchet Poirot impression to be in full swing. These little greasels, Hastings, they are percolating. It's like the legend it is David Suchet is in the room with me now.
00:00:15
Speaker
A most intriguing proposition Hastings. Could someone impersonate Mons such that a simpleton like yourself did steady on our men? Hastings, you are the classic moron. Always asking of Parro, how did the chap die? And why was the horse he's not winnowing in the night? Always Parro tells you, use the little grey cells Hastings.
00:00:35
Speaker
Yes, but you keep saying, in fact, secret from me Poirot, how can I think the problem through if you refuse to give me access to the evidence? Ah, by Hastings you are just, ah, what do you English call it, ah, an audience surrogate. And if the audience knows all the clues, then they might guess the identity of the murderer before Poirot, and we cannot have the reader think they are smarter than a Belgian.
00:00:54
Speaker
Listening to this exchange from behind the curtains in the room, I began to reflect on my relationship with the great detective Lord Morrissey Morrissey and the way he treated me. Was I also some kind of audience surrogate? And what of our next caper? Hadn't our last adventure ended on something of a cliffhanger? Who is this speaking alert from behind the curtains? There was no time to lose. I say, Poirot, who was that chap who just defenestrated out of the windows? Hastings! You zee little gray cells! Must Poirot tell you everything?
00:01:25
Speaker
No, no, the other one!
Hosts Introduce Themselves and Discuss Topics
00:01:45
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. My name is Josh Addison, still locked down in Auckland, New Zealand, but free as a bird, presumably in Zhuhai, China. It is Dr. M. Denteth. I am indeed free as the bird. I want to fly away. A-A-A-A. Mm, Natalie Imbruglia, classic. Do we have much in the way of a, of a, of an introductory pre-ambly thing this week? I don't, I don't have anything myself.
00:02:13
Speaker
Well, they claimed to have identified the Zodiac Killer. Oh, the Zodiac Killer. Yeah, I just read that before. And that's one of those things I thought maybe we could mention it in this week's episode, but I actually think given it's kind of breaking news and I suspect the next week is going to be a case of, oh, we already suspected this guy or there is good reason to think he wasn't the Zodiac Killer whatsoever. Maybe it's really next week's news.
00:02:39
Speaker
Yes, so watch this space. Or not. It may turn out to be a completely nonsense story and we never met again. By this time next week? Who knows. This week though, on a similar vein, we have a bit of a murder mystery for you. And if there isn't anything else to say, maybe we should not keep people in suspense and just jump straight into it. What do you say?
00:03:04
Speaker
I say murder she wrote. Is this okay from like a copyright legalistic standpoint? No, not at all. Let's play the jam. Play our actual sting.
00:03:38
Speaker
Ah, that's that's much less copyright infringing. I like it. So this week, it's not a it's not a masterpiece theater week. It's not a what the conspiracy week. It's just a good old fashioned conspiracy topic
Who was Thomas H. Ince?
00:03:50
Speaker
week. And this week's topic is the cat's meow.
00:03:54
Speaker
Sort of. The thing The Cat's Meow was based on. We're going to be talking about the death of Hollywood producer Thomas H. Inch. Thomas H. Inch? Who was Thomas H. Inch? Which is a question that will be on the lips of almost every single listener, because even if you know The Cat's Meow...
00:04:12
Speaker
and you know the principal characters of the Cats meow, which is, of course, your Charlie Chaplin and your Randolph Hearst. And every time I say Randolph Hearst, I want to put in Randolph Scott from Blazing Saddles. The actual presumed murder victim, we'll get into that, Thomas H. basically is a non-entity now, even though his death was actually really, really big news at the time.
00:04:42
Speaker
Yes, now almost a hundred years after the fact, all Mr. Ince has really remembered for as being the guy who may or may not have been murdered. But he did definitely die. He is dead. He's not the immortal Thomas Agent.
00:05:01
Speaker
No, he would be 140 something years old right now. But he was a big name in the silent film era of the 1920s and I guess 1910s. He's known as the father of the Western. I assume he
00:05:17
Speaker
did a lot of, like, somehow 800 films, I think he was responsible for, but westerns were prominent among them. He built what you would call the first ever studio, what was it called, Inceville, or something? A little bit cringy. I think, so his second film studio was in Culver City. The first one was slightly further outside of LA at the time. The first film studio burnt down,
00:05:44
Speaker
because basically it was a whole bunch of wooden sets on dry land, so a new, more bespoke, more permanent film studio was built in Culver City, where of course the Paramount lot is now located, not literally on the site of Inches Film Studio, but Culver City kind of came the big place where films were made because of what Thomas did.
Ince's Impact on Hollywood
00:06:08
Speaker
And yeah, he was he was a really, really, really big name. He essentially created the role of the film producer. Yeah. And it was his decision. He he he was a director and an actor and I think a screenwriter. He started directing and also self-cating most of his own films.
00:06:28
Speaker
Well, he did seem like the kind of guy. And then eventually he sort of stepped back from the directing. He sort of, he invented this new way of doing things, basically, where he would hand over the directing duties to someone else and just sort of step back a bit and manage it a bit more, sort of be a bit more of an overall manager and the guy
00:06:50
Speaker
with the money behind everything, which is what these days we would call a producer, but he basically was the first to do it. He liked making long films, which in the 1910s was one hour. Americans wouldn't stand for films that long.
00:07:07
Speaker
In the 1910s and 1920s, they had other things to do, fight in a world war, I guess. Except the people who lost them on top of a flagpole. The long films were popular in Europe, and that was where the World War was actually occurring.
00:07:25
Speaker
I mean, what's actually quite fascinating about this was they used to measure films with respect not to time, but to how many reels a film had. So Americans seem to like films that were at max around about two reels. So anywhere between 10 to 15 minutes in length. Europeans, they loved a five-reeler. They liked an hour-long film. They wanted narrative. They wanted character. Americans, they just wanted action, action, action.
00:07:53
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, he basically, by the 1920s, he was an old hand at this, knew very much what he was doing and realised that he could basically
00:08:04
Speaker
panned over the reins to another director and just rely on the fact that his films were tightly scripted and the director would stick to the script. And then, you know, he was also the one overseeing the editing of the film as well. So he could be assured that the film would turn out the way he wanted it to, even though someone else may have been directing.
Ince's Invitation from Hearst
00:08:25
Speaker
Towards the, in the early 1920s,
00:08:28
Speaker
His power was starting to wane a bit apparently as the studio system in Hollywood came up and it was making harder for him to get actors and directors because that'll be signed to different studios and they have non-compete clauses and anything. He was technically an independent producer so he existed outside of the studio system which initially went really well for him because he was basically a work for hire man.
00:08:52
Speaker
But as the studio system locked down contracts for directors and actors, suddenly it turned out that he couldn't contract anyone to work with him. So he tried to create a production company, and that kind of fell apart. Randolph Hearst found out that he was in a bit of financial trouble, and invited him on a weekend cruise
00:09:17
Speaker
story of which is what we're going to get into.
Official Cause of Death: Heart Failure
00:09:21
Speaker
Yes, so this is not the podcaster's guide to 1920s film producers, it's the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and the conspiracy in this case is that.
00:09:30
Speaker
Vince died just after his 44th birthday, I think. Wikipedia gives his birth year as 1880, and since he died in 1924, after his birthday, it would have been his 44th, although I've read some articles that say it was his 43rd, and some articles that say it was his 42nd. Who the heck knows? Well, actually, the explanation here is that birth dates prior to the 20th century are...
00:09:55
Speaker
pretty hard to put down because in some respects people's birth certificates were only issued after a person was born sometimes they were only issued after a person was baptized sometimes they were issued later in life because i need to kind of prove i exist could i have a document when were you born like
00:10:15
Speaker
I think I was born. Yeah, let me ask my mother. So it was the year of the big winter or whatever. Yeah, so it turns out these things are vague for the sheer fact that actually the idea of having a locked down birth date is actually a relatively modern invention in Western society. But the point is, he was in his early to mid 40s, younger than the pair of us,
00:10:37
Speaker
And on the 19th of November 1924 he died. That was a Wednesday on the weekend just before he had been on a cruise. He'd been to a party on the yacht of William Randolph Hearst, the USS Oneida.
00:10:52
Speaker
off the coast of San Diego. The official version is that he suffered a medical event on the ship and died of heart failure, but rumors spread that he had in fact been shot by Randolph Hearst himself, and Orland of Yacht was sworn to secrecy, an actual honest-to-goodness, good old-fashioned conspiracy of silence. Now why are we calling it the cat's meow, though?
00:11:19
Speaker
Because there's a film called The Cat's Meow, which stars Idi Azad as Charlie Chaplin, and a whole bunch of other people playing a variety of roles, but of course our favourite, Kerry Yules, playing the murder victim himself.
00:11:35
Speaker
Thomas Ince himself, yes. Apparently, there was originally a play by Stephen Perros, which was then adapted into the movie in 2001 by Peter Bogdanovich. Interesting, there's also another piece of fiction based on these rumored events. William Randolph Hearst's niece, Patricia Hearst, wrote a novel in 1996 called Murder at San Simeon, which is basically also another fictionalized account of the rumored death
00:12:05
Speaker
the rumored circumstances around the death of Thomas Innes. So I guess we should start with the official version before we start getting into the rumors and the conspiracies. So here is the timeline as it is
00:12:19
Speaker
it was reported in the official records. So as you see it, Ince had been doing a deal with Hearst. I think Hearst's production company was going to do a deal paying to use Ince's studio. They were talking about it on Saturday, the 15th of November. And because Sunday, the 16th was Ince's birthday, Hearst basically said, hey, come let's throw a party on my yacht. It'll be grand. Throw a big birthday party for you.
00:12:46
Speaker
And so they did. So this party was going and couldn't make it straight away. I think he had to catch a train down to San Diego. So by the time he got there, the party was in full swing and guests included such names as Charlie Chaplin, who was I mean, would it be fair to say he was the biggest name of the silent film era? I mean, you had Buster Keaton, you had
00:13:05
Speaker
Harold Lloyd, you heard Charlie Chaplin. I mean, he was incredibly famous at that time. It's not the biggest, one of the biggest, yeah. And it's probably the silent film star who, A, has survived the most in popular culture, and B, was the Sakhalin film star who successfully transitioned to talkies as well. Most of the other silent film stars did not, in part because Chaplin was
00:13:29
Speaker
very very good at vocal work and it turned out that being a silent screen star didn't really require you to have a particularly good acting voice, strangely enough. Weirdly yes. So as well as Chaplin there was Marion Davies, a silent film actress and also Hearst's mistress at the time.
00:13:46
Speaker
There's a writer by the name of Marion Davies, played by Kirsten Dunst in the film, Eleanor Glynn, who I think was Joanna Lumley, and another actress by the name of Sina Owen. Those are the only people who I think have been confirmed as having been on the yacht apart from Inse and Hearst himself.
00:14:06
Speaker
The full guest list was never actually made public, and for reasons we'll see no one else has ever actually admitted to being there. There's a woman by the name of Luella Parsons, who was a sort of a columnist and a screenwriter, who will figure prominently shortly. She may or may not have been there, but will neither confirm nor deny. Actually, no, I think she does deny, but there's... Well, I think she did deny. I believe she's quite dead. Well, yes, yes.
00:14:37
Speaker
On the Sunday night, the guest celebrated Ince's birthday with a big birthday meal. After this, Ince suffered an acute bout of indigestion. Apparently he had peptic ulcers.
00:14:51
Speaker
and was under doctor's instructions to stay away from food that might inflame it. But it was his birthday and he's a big Hollywood man who probably isn't going to let no one tell him what to do. So yes, things such as the salted almonds and champagne that were apparently available would have would have reacted badly with his ulcers. So he had had quite a bad reaction, apparently.
00:15:15
Speaker
Now, I've never understood this kind of weird exceptionalism people have around food, which is the, I know I'm not meant to eat this thing, but it's my birthday. But just this one. No, if you can't eat the thing, you don't eat the thing. Biology doesn't go, oh, of course it's your birthday, so we won't have an adverse reaction this time.
00:15:38
Speaker
But so feeling very unwell, Ince had to leave the party, went ashore and took a train back to, well, he intended to take a train back to his home in Los Angeles, but his condition worsened on the train and he ended up having to get off at Del Mar in California.
00:15:58
Speaker
I let him interject here because this gets to an issue about the guest list. So one of the accounts I read said that he went ashore accompanied by one Dr. Goodman, a licensed though non-practicing physician, that somewhat suggests if he went ashore with Dr. Goodman, Dr. Goodman was presumably one of the guests at
00:16:20
Speaker
the party although I suppose it is possible he was summoned to the boat and then went actually no this guy needs to be on shore immediately and then came back with him but it kind of speaks to the fact that because we don't know who was there a whole bunch of names come up in these narratives you end up going where do they appear from where
00:16:39
Speaker
When were they there? Yes, no. Dr. Goodman will be appearing later on in the story. But yes, he was definitely on the train. But as you say, whether he went from the boat to the train or whether he'd been summoned to the air and then got on the train with him, we're not quite sure. But so in Delmar, Ince was taken to a hotel where they summoned a doctor, a nurse, and he was given medical treatment. In this day and age, you'd think to a hospital, but possibly in 1929. Sorry, in 1924.
00:17:09
Speaker
Maybe a private doctor in a hotel room would be a better bet than a public hospital. So at that point, he summoned his own personal physician, a Dr. Ida Glasgow. He summoned his wife and his eldest son, William. And then together, they all traveled back to his home where he unfortunately did not recover and died on the morning of Wednesday the 19th.
00:17:34
Speaker
his physician, Dr Glasgow, signed the death certificate himself, gave the course his heart failure. Apparently his son William would go on to become a doctor himself and would say that he believed his dad's symptoms were closer to a thrombosis. I'm not quite sure what the difference between a thrombosis and a heart failure is, but neither of them are good for you.
00:17:55
Speaker
And that's the official version. Ince fell sick at the party on the boat, went home, died of heart failure. But that's not the version that's been committed to history. Tell me about the rumors then. What's the unofficial version?
Speculation of Jealousy and Mistaken Identity
00:18:12
Speaker
So the unofficial or rumoured version of what happened on the boat was that Randolph Hearst shot Thomas Inch, presumably because he confused Thomas Inch for Charlie Chaplin, who he suspected was having an affair with his mistress Marion Davies.
00:18:33
Speaker
So the story people have sort of put together is that he suspected the Sophia had been going on. He possibly found the two of them together or confronted them for some reason, tried to shoot either or both of them. There was a big commotion. Ince got involved. The gun went off and Ince was killed by accident. There have been other rumors, other versions of the rumors. Some people, Ince himself, made a pass at Davies and was shot in a jealous rage by Hirst.
00:19:03
Speaker
I haven't actually seen The Cat's Meow, but apparently their version, their version of events, there's a scene where Ince and Davies are talking to each other, and Ince is playfully put on Charlie Chaplin's hat, which happened to be lying around, and Davies is talking to him about her relationship with Charlie Chaplin and with Hurst and is talking. It says of Charlie Chaplin, I don't love him anymore, but Hurst coming up behind them sees Ince and the hat thinks
00:19:32
Speaker
thinks Davies is talking to Chaplin, and so that when she says, I don't love him anymore, she's talking about Hurst, and so thinking that his girlfriend is busy talking to his rival, saying that she doesn't love him anymore, he shoots at what he thinks is Charlie Chaplin, only to discover that he's accidentally shot instantly ahead.
00:19:53
Speaker
This is all supposition, basically. I think a lot of it's based on the fact that Charlie Chaplin was a known philanderer, and the idea of him having an affair with another man's woman, if you'd put it that way, is certainly not unthinkable. Hurst was, I believe, known to have kept a gun on the boat, and was also known for being this sort of arsehole who'd fly into a jealous rage over that sort of thing.
00:20:23
Speaker
But however exactly it happened, the idea is that Ince was shot, and then everything was hushed up. The investigation into it was squashed because Hurst was one of the most powerful men in the country at the time, really. And everyone present on the boat was sworn to secrecy. So it's an interesting story, but how did it start?
00:20:45
Speaker
Well, like most of these things, the origin of the story is a little bit hard to piece together. It seems to start with Chaplin's valet. And I'm going to use the British pronunciation here rather than the American one, given that Chaplin was British himself. A man by the name of Tarachi Kono, who claims to have seen it being stretched off the yacht,
00:21:09
Speaker
Instead he was bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head. Now it's also claimed, and claimed here is very very important, claimed that the LA Times ran the headline movie producer shot on Hearst Yacht.
00:21:25
Speaker
Now, no copy of this headline is known to exist. As far as people claim, the headline only occurred in the morning edition of the newspaper. And this is back in the day when newspapers would have several editions throughout the day. Some newspapers would have as many as four editions, early morning, mid-morning, early afternoon, and late afternoon. LA Times had at least two. It is claimed that the headline appears in the morning edition
00:21:53
Speaker
only, but as there are no surviving copies of it, this itself may be a rumor. But if it is a rumor, sorry, if it is, if that story is true, there's at least one source on the boat who shot the story to someone on the mainland, which you might think suggests there might be something to the story, or
00:22:17
Speaker
As many other people claim, this headline may never have been printed. It may be post facto. People go, oh, yeah, I heard something about about Hearst being shot. Maybe there was a newspaper headline. Hmm. I've also one of the articles I read in reading up on this said that Hearst's papers, because obviously, as you probably know, Hearst controlled a bunch of papers as well. He was the inventor of yellow journalism.
00:22:45
Speaker
So one of the articles I read claimed that Hurst's papers initially sort of ran a cover-up story that neglected to mention Hurst's yacht at all. They claimed Ince had fallen ill at Hurst's ranch while visiting him there and then from there being taken back to his home where he died surrounded by his family on Wednesday the morning of Wednesday the 19th.
00:23:09
Speaker
And this line was dropped fairly quickly once numerous people began placing him on his yacht at the time instead.
00:23:19
Speaker
So, but I've only read that once. I'm not quite sure where that one came from either. But yeah, it's this Torichikono Japanese, as the name may have suggested, who is a bit of an interesting history himself from what I read. Being a Japanese person at that time in America, he
00:23:40
Speaker
ended up getting stuck in an internment camp in World War II and all that sort of stuff. But apparently there was, I don't know how things worked back then, but apparently Japanese servants were the thing back then that was the country where you got your home help from. And so there was sort of a network apparently of Japanese
00:24:00
Speaker
house people around the place, and the rumor kind of spread through there. Apparently, you're going to hear the word apparently a lot, I think, as we carry on through this. Apparently, Eleanor Glynn, the writer, played by Jonah Lumley, is meant to have told someone herself that everyone on the yacht had been sworn to secrecy. And why would you be sworn to sea? Oh, didn't say why, but why would you be sworn to secrecy? Just because a guy... We will get into a very plausible rationale as to why that might be the case.
00:24:31
Speaker
And so basically, I mean, Hollywood, as far as I'm aware, is a fairly gossipy town at the best of times. And these rumors started to spread all over the place to the point that the San Diego District Attorney felt compelled to actually open an investigation into
District Attorney's Investigation: Cover-up or Ineptitude?
00:24:47
Speaker
it. And of course, don't forget, Vince was still a big name. His power may have been on the way, but he was a
00:24:52
Speaker
Well, and also his album might have been on the wane, but because he was associated with Hearst, there might have been a feeling his power was about to rebound, because Hearst being basically the richest man in America, if it turns out that Hearst is going to bankroll in a new production company, then his power may have been waning, but it might be about to wax very suddenly.
00:25:17
Speaker
So the DA did conduct an investigation, but not much of an investigation as it turned out. So that Dr. Goodman, who we mentioned before, this man, Dr. Daniel Goodman, he gave a statement to the DA that he had been on the train with Intz on his way to Delmar, that he saw Intz suffering from chest pains.
00:25:40
Speaker
And that apparently Ince had, who had apparently been trying to keep this condition of his a little bit quiet, but supposedly confided in Dr. Goodman that he had been, this wasn't the first time that he had had these sort of attacks before.
00:25:58
Speaker
Apparently, that seemed to settle the case as far as the DA was concerned. A couple of the things I've read mentioned that Goodman actually worked for Hearst was a Hearst employee, which could explain if he had been on the yacht or if Hearst had summoned him onto the scene to accompany it's in the first place.
00:26:22
Speaker
And yeah, that was kind of it. Nobody else was asked to give a statement. Certainly no one else had been on the yacht. And that was it. This DA said, oh, you're a doctor. Your word's good enough for me. You say he was on the train suffering from heart troubles. And then his other doctor said he died of heart failure. Well, that's a case close to me.
00:26:44
Speaker
complicating the investigation but more since his body was cremated soon after his death so there was no chance for any sort of an autopsy apparently he and his wife were theosophists to
00:26:59
Speaker
I wasn't aware that theosophy was so keen on cremation, but then again, it could also just be a particular aspect of theosophy as practiced in the US. I actually don't know much about the burial practices of theosophists.
00:27:14
Speaker
I mean, I know Catholics in that day and age definitely could not be cremated because of the notion of bodily resurrection in the end times. But yeah, theosophy don't actually know. I feel I should, but I don't.
00:27:29
Speaker
No, I just read he and his wife with theosophists who believed in cremation. I don't know. Maybe it's just that not that being a theosophist makes you believe in cremation, but it just means that they weren't Catholic and therefore were allowed to be cremated. But apparently, this wasn't. Apparently that
00:27:47
Speaker
That sinister, they had arranged for him to be cremated well before he died, which is to say they arranged well before he died for him to be cremated. They weren't wanting him to be cremated a long time before he died because that wouldn't really, it would be a short time before you died. It would also change the story quite remarkably. It would, yes. He wasn't just murdered, he was then burnt to death. Burnt to death, yes.
Prohibition and Conspiracy of Silence
00:28:12
Speaker
um but but but here here's the here's the main wrinkle uh it's important to remember this is 1929 we're talking about and what was going on in 1929
00:28:25
Speaker
Prohibition baby! Prohibition. Alcohol was illegal. I do want to also point out, we did actually say he died in the 19th of November 1924. So it can't be 1929. Otherwise we're saying that... So it was the 19th.
00:28:46
Speaker
otherwise we're saying that the train journey he took between San Diego and Del Mar literally took five years which would make him a very very prolonged death if it's if it's peptic ulcers leading to heart failure.
00:29:00
Speaker
getting my 1924s and my 19th of November's mixed up. Yes, no 1924, nevertheless, even in 1929, prohibition was still in effect. Now, I mean, we all kind of know that those sorts of laws don't really apply to society's upper classes, but Hurst himself apparently was not a fan of alcohol and would sort of allow guests at his place to maybe have a drink or two, but if you started hitting the source
00:29:25
Speaker
too hard you'd be you'd be out on your ear. But nevertheless, if there were to be an investigation into this presumably boozy party on Hearst's private yacht, and as you remember, apparently one of the things that set Incis Alsace off was drinking champagne.
00:29:42
Speaker
So there was the potential for some rich and powerful people to get into a bit of trouble if anyone had locked too hard into this investigation. And there's also the potentiality that there are certain people who were claiming to be teetotalers, or claiming to be against the drinking of alcohol, who turned out to be at a party where not only alcohol is being drunk,
00:30:04
Speaker
but where they were drinking said drunk alcohol. So it could, you might want to go look, don't look into this too deeply because there are reputations on the line in a variety of different ways. So basically the point of this is to say that you don't actually need
00:30:25
Speaker
to imagine a murder being covered up to come up with the reason for why this information, why this investigation was squashed post-haste. When you have the reputations of a bunch of society's most powerful people on the line, it's entirely believable that pressure would have been brought to bear to make sure this investigation was concluded as quickly as possible and paying as little attention to what might have gone on on the yacht.
00:30:53
Speaker
Yeah, so this is a case where you might say, look, we can definitely say there was a conspiracy of silence here, but it's not necessarily related to covering up a murder. It's a conspiracy to cover up behavior which was considered to be unbecoming to the citizen of 1924 or indeed 1929.
00:31:14
Speaker
But, on the side of the rumours though, we get into the idea that certain people were paid off to keep their silence. To keep their silence?
00:31:24
Speaker
They're welcome to keep their science, but their silence was what Hearst was most interested in. I mentioned before Luella Parsons, played by Jennifer Tilly, I think, in the Cats meow. Subsequent to the Sophia, Parsons was given a lifetime contract with Hearst's publications, and Hearst expanded her syndication more widely across the country.
00:31:51
Speaker
which is which is a lot of people have have sort of wink wink nudge nudge suggested that this was her payoff this was herst buying her silence by giving her a bunch more money and furthering her writing career now because
00:32:08
Speaker
Even though she claimed she wasn't on the yacht, there were eyewitnesses that said that she was definitely there. Now, this isn't a payoff, presumably, to cover up the fact she was on the yacht. It's presumably a payoff saying, well, if you were on the yacht and you saw certain things that were going on on the yacht,
00:32:27
Speaker
Then if I give you some money and extend your syndication, maybe you won't talk about some of the things you saw. Because once again, you may not be concerned about covering up a murder. You might be concerned about certain things happened on that yacht that, you know, when they happen at sea, they should definitely stay at sea.
00:32:47
Speaker
And yet, on the other side of the argument, some people say that actually her contract, this lifetime contract, had been signed well before the night of the party. It was already a done deal. And Hurst looked on her favourably not because she kept her mouth shut about what happened on board his yacht, but because she had long been a champion of Marion Davies' films and had given them glowing write-ups in her films. Isn't this a plot point in Citizen Kane?
Rumors of Hush Money and Witness Silence
00:33:16
Speaker
Well, we'll be getting to Citizen Kane, but it would not surprise me. It is. It is a plot point in Citizen Kane. It's someone who has watched Citizen Kane probably more than a dozen times. It's very definitely a plot point in Citizen Kane.
00:33:30
Speaker
that he paid off a reporter to keep quiet about stuff. Yes, because in Citizen Kane, the mistress is put forward as being an opera singer. It turns out she can't sing particularly well. But Charles Foster Kane pays columnists to give her rave reviews. Right. And then as well as that, Hurst supposedly paid off the mortgage on Thomas's apartment in Hollywood and gave his wife Nell and a trust fund when she went to Europe at some stage.
00:33:59
Speaker
The thing is, I can see that as being plausible without there being a murder, because you might go... Yes, he was... I mean, your husband attended a birthday party on my yacht, where he ate food he wasn't meant to. I kind of feel as if that might be slightly my fault. I mean, I didn't kill the man. But at the same time, I also allowed him to eat food that led to his death, so...
00:34:27
Speaker
Maybe I'll just be very nice to you in the hope that you aren't going to then bring this up at every single social event you attend. Now, as I say, lots of people would deny you for being there and no one really wanted to talk about it.
00:34:44
Speaker
The people who we definitely know were involved certainly have never been keen to talk about it. Hurst himself, people had said that sort of mentioning Thomas Ince's name around William Randolph Hurst was a good way to sort of make him go white as a sheet that he wouldn't countenance anyone talking about Ince and his presence.
00:35:02
Speaker
Certainly didn't talk about it much at the time. Years after the fact, he supposedly said to a reporter, not only am I innocent of this murder, but so is everybody else, i.e. there was no murder.
00:35:14
Speaker
Either that, or God killed Thomas. No, possibly. No mortal is responsible. No mortal man, yes. But Nell Ince's wife was apparently quite frustrated by these rumours. A friend of hers by the name of Adela Rogers St. John's wrote her autobiography called The Honeycomb, and in that she writes about Mrs. Ince saying, do you think I would have done nothing even if I suspected that my husband had been victim of foul play on anyone's part?
00:35:43
Speaker
So apparently she was very much, you know, look, he was my husband, for goodness sake. He was the man I loved, the father of my children. Are you going to tell me I'd just go quietly and take a payoff if he'd been murdered in cold, well, probably not in cold blood, but murdered by accident, presumably, I don't, you know, child, hearst or no hearst. Yeah, it's the death of her husband. And she was very much, she was apparently kind of indignant at the idea that she would have taken hush money to overlook the fact that her husband had been murdered.
00:36:12
Speaker
Ah, but Hastings! Hastings, use the disgrace hours. You overlook the most obvious implication of... She was merely a yacht who killed him? Precisely, Hastings. She is the killer. No, apparently she wasn't on the yacht, but who knows? We don't know. It could be anything. Well, the guest list. We do not have a complete list. We must return back to the yacht, Hastings, and talk to the person to find out exactly who and who is not on port sea boat.
00:36:37
Speaker
Apparently the yacht was sold for scrap metal in Canada quite a long time ago. We must build a type machine hestings and travel back in time and purchase the yacht ourselves and then destroy it. Could be, could be. Also I am turning into the German. I do not know what is going on. It's German, yeah, it's not particularly Belgian at the end there, but that's okay. Well, you know, Paolo is simply a stereotype of a foreigner. There is nothing particularly Belgian. He's a man of the world, his accent wanders I'm sure.
00:37:07
Speaker
So we've got the investigation. We've got the supposed payoffs. We've got the dials. The only other detail that seems relevant is that apparently, as we said, it's big name. And so his death was a big deal. And so his funeral was a big deal.
00:37:24
Speaker
And apparently, the LA Times, when they wrote about Ince's funeral, one of the things they mentioned was that his body was displayed in an open casket for an hour so that anybody could come in and pay their respects to him. And you would think that if he'd had a bullet wound in his head and was displayed in an open casket, someone might have noticed that and remarked upon it, and yet nobody ever did.
00:37:52
Speaker
Although his scenes, once again, he worked for the film industry. It may be the best makeup artist in the world. All that being said, the problem is we kind of know what makeup artistry looked like back in 1924. And it probably wasn't sufficient to make a head wound just disappear without people going. That looks a bit weird.
00:38:11
Speaker
Yes, especially, let's not forget 1924, we're talking about black and white films and the sort of makeup you wear to look good on black and white film looks quite bizarre in real life from the pictures I've seen. So that's a lot of the evidence, but of course, I said Citizen Kane. We can't talk about Hearst without mentioning Citizen Kane. It's also amazing.
00:38:35
Speaker
Exactly. So you have seen Citizen Kane. Is there a scene in Citizen Kane where Charles Foster Kane shoots someone on a yacht and then pays people to be quiet about it?
00:38:45
Speaker
No, although apparently Orson Welles did write a scene of that type, was just never filmed. So this was a room, so it's well known that Citizen Kane is essentially a story which amalgamates a bunch of different famous rich people at the time. The primary one that Charles Foster Kane is based upon is of course Randolph Hearst.
00:39:09
Speaker
And that's why you get a mistress character like Marion Davies. That's why Charles Foster Kane ends up running a newspaper empire. It's why there's a very coded joke about the fact that Charles Foster Kane basically has set up a war in South America to sell newspapers, given it's well attested to that Randolph Hearst was basically going, you get me the pictures, I'll supply you the war.
00:39:38
Speaker
And so there's one scene that was scripted but never shot, in which it's referent that maybe Charles Foster Kane was responsible for the death of a lover of the Marion Davies analog. But Orson Welles ended up going, this doesn't really fit the characterisation of Charles Foster Kane, because despite the fact
00:40:00
Speaker
that Citizen Kane is kind of a coded story of Randolph Hearst. And despite the fact that Randolph Hearst hated Citizen Kane and essentially ended Orson Welles' directing career because of it, the film's actually quite sympathetic to Charles Foster Kane. And so Orson Welles went, look, I can't make my main character
Citizen Kane's Alleged Reference to the Murder
00:40:19
Speaker
look like a murderer that doesn't fit the story I'm trying to tell. So it was scripted, but never shot.
00:40:29
Speaker
That being said, when Orson Welles was interviewed about this potential scene, Orson Welles said, look, I could have included it in the film, because what was Randolph Hearst ever going to do? I mean, he could never react to a scene of this kind, because then you'd have to confirm or deny being involved in the murder, and of course that was never going to work out for him. He would never have dared to admit it was him.
00:40:58
Speaker
Yeah, so part of the reason why Peter Bogdanovich directed The Cat's Meow is that he had spoken to Orson Welles himself about this rumour. He first heard the rumour when he was interviewing Welles in the late 60s. So Welles apparently had heard the rumour from Marion Davies' nephew, and Peter Bogdanovich then went and talked to the nephew and got him to
00:41:26
Speaker
tell him the story as well. And so there is a line, there's a book of the collected interviews of Peter Bogdanovich interviewing Orson Welles, which features the exchange where Welles says, in the original script, we had a scene based on a notorious thing Hearst had done, which I still cannot repeat for publication. And I cut it out because I thought it hurt the film and wasn't in keeping with Kane's character. If I'd kept it in, I would have had no trouble with Hearst. He wouldn't have dared admit it was him.
00:41:54
Speaker
And Bogdanovich asked, did you shoot the scene? And Wales said, no, I didn't. I decided against it. If I kept it in, I would have bought silence for myself forever. Which reminds me a bit of, you've heard of the small penis defence? Isn't that where you take your small penis and you fend off attackers by gyrating? Actually, I'm doing it physically on camera here. You gyrate in front of them, making your small penis swing side to side.
00:42:21
Speaker
No, there's the idea that if you're wanting to send someone up by creating a fictional character based on them, you should also give that character something particularly undesirable about them, like having a very small penis. And that way, the person who you're sending up won't want to sue you for libel, because then they'll have to say, hey, that person with the tiny penis that you're talking about, that's me. There was one particular case, I forget the exact details, but a guy wrote a play
00:42:50
Speaker
and included as a character a guy that was obviously based on someone he didn't like, but he also made this character a pedophile or a sex abuser or something so that the guy couldn't say, that character is obviously me. Well, that character is a pedophile. Are you a pedophile? Obviously not. Well, then obviously it's based on you. Seems like it's maybe not exactly the sort of thing in that it would be including a thing that the guy was rumored to have done.
00:43:16
Speaker
But in the knowledge that because he denied it, you could happily say it and he couldn't do a thing because to get angry about it would suggest that it was true. Yes, this is the idea of the grotesque caricature. If you give someone some kind of grotesquerie, people are less likely to go, that's me! If that is me, I have to then explain that I don't have feature X, which makes me grotesque. So I'm just not going to say anything at all.
00:43:43
Speaker
So there you go. That's the story of the death of Thomas H. Ince who, I mean, it's a little bit sad, I suppose, that these days he's only really remembered as that guy that Hurst may or may not have shot when in his day he was incredibly influential. And I guess, given that he's the inventor
00:44:06
Speaker
of the concept of a movie producer, his influence is still found to this very day, in terms of the actual plausibility of it. I mean, basically it's all just gossip, like there is no hard evidence anyway. We have official testimony and then we have sort of hushed up gossipy testimony, but I don't really say that you could
00:44:28
Speaker
You could say that the case is even particularly strong in terms of the rumored vision. It just makes for a better story. Nobody's made a movie about Vince dying of indigestion in his own bed at home.
00:44:39
Speaker
No, although what I do think is interesting is that actually no matter what the story is, we can still talk about there being a conspiracy to cover something that happened on that yacht. It doesn't seem particularly plausible that the conspiracy is to cover up a murder, but it does seem quite plausible to think the conspiracy was to cover up behaviour on the yacht that would have got a lot of people into trouble at that time.
00:45:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I assume that the idea would have been that, yes, let's go. Let's let's let's all get wasted and have a big party on the ocean. Then on Monday morning, we'll all go go our separate ways and never speak of it. And that'll be the end of it. And it was just the it was bad luck for them that unfortunately a notable personage ended up dying in connection with it. And people paid attention to what these rich people were up to on their private yacht.
00:45:32
Speaker
would have got away with it all if it hadn't been for those salted almonds and champagne yep the the most bourgeois version of a scooby-doo story of all time and it would have got away if it hadn't been for those salted almonds and flute to champagne
00:45:49
Speaker
So that's the story of the cat's meow. Now, interestingly enough, interestingly enough, and Em doesn't know this, but when I was talking with my wife earlier this week about, I sort of went into her, oh, Em and I are going to be talking about that at the time a famous person got killed on a yacht. And my wife's immediate response was, oh, are you talking about Natalie Wood? And I'm like, who? And she's, wasn't she someone who died on a yacht and Christopher Walken was there or something?
00:46:17
Speaker
And wouldn't you know it, I then, the next day, opened our notes to see that Em, entirely unbeknownst to me, had suggested for the content of this week's bonus episode, why don't we talk about Natalie Wood?
00:46:41
Speaker
Yes, if you're gonna do it, probably. Yes, so our patrons get not one but two mysterious celebrity deaths on a yacht this week. Not the same yacht, on different yachts. It's been greater than it had been the same yacht. The Curse of the Oneida, whatever it's called. In fact, wouldn't it be great if it turned out that Elements of the Oneida turned up on the yacht, the Splendor? I'm sensing a series. Oh yes, it's a prequel to Ghost Ship.
00:47:11
Speaker
But yeah, so our bonus episode this week, we'll be talking about the death of Natalie Wood. And if you'd like to learn more about that, I suppose you could look it up on Wikipedia, but don't do that. Listen into our bonus episode. And if you want to listen into our bonus episode, you're going to have to be a patron. And if you are a patron, then all is right with the world and you're one of God's chosen people.
00:47:34
Speaker
but, or our chosen people, like Rachel, I suppose you self-select to become a patron, don't you? But you know what I mean. And if you'd like to become a patron, you could simply go to Betrayon.com and look for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and sign yourself up. And then you too can see one of us almost certainly doing a Christopher Walken impression as we talk about the mysterious death of Natalie Wood. We need writers who do a Christopher Walken impression. I end up doing a William Shatner impression instead.
00:48:02
Speaker
Now, I mean, the main impression I know of is an impression of Jay Moore doing an impression of Christopher Walken. Although then you can watch the, what's the movie they were in? Suicide Kings, where if you watch the
00:48:15
Speaker
The bonus features behind the scenes stuff. There's an interview with Christopher Walken where he does an impression of Jay Moore doing an impression of Christopher Walken, which is quite, quite marvellous. But anyway, that's the end of things for this main episode where we are going to go off and record the bonus one. But the rest of you are free to go about your day. And I think I will simply call things to a close in the traditional way by saying goodbye. Well, I have things we'll say bonjour, mon ami.
00:48:44
Speaker
Isn't that French? Oh, but that's what Belgian speak, so I guess that's okay. And remember, it's just a step to the left.