In November 1928, Hollywood was already expert at manufacturing illusion. By day, the studios hummed and the stars smiled for the cameras. By night, the city belonged to shadows, unpaved roads, stalled automobiles, and men who knew where the streetlights ended. It was in that darkness—just as the silent era was gasping its last breath—that Lottie Pickford, younger sister of Mary Pickford and Jack Pickford, became the unlikely name at the center of one of Hollywood’s most disturbing police blotter stories.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
A little after three o'clock in the morning, Lottie Pickford was driving home through Hollywood with her escort, actor Jack Daugherty. They were headed to her home at 6524½ Franklin Avenue, nestled into a hillside above the boulevard. It was late and the street was nearly deserted. The car, still a finicky beast in 1928, sputtered and refused to go on. The couple stopped to try to figure out what was wrong, not realizing they had wandered into a remote area where help was slow to arrive and there were no witnesses to stay and wait around. Four men appeared from the shadows.
What happened next was both quick and violent. Daugherty was hit across the head with a blackjack, beaten senseless, robbed of the small amount of cash he had in his pocket and left half-conscious on the ground. Lottie was grabbed, yanked out of the car, and dragged by force to a more isolated area nearby. There, the gang turned their attentions on her—punching and kicking her, ripping at her clothes, searching through her purse for jewelry and additional money. She struggled, fiercely and with every ounce of strength she could muster, managing to hide and retain an expensive diamond bracelet and several rings as the men ran off with the cash in her purse.
Something unexpected occurred in the gloom that followed. Lottie later reported to the police that she had managed to confront the man she took to be the gang's leader and had spoken to him face to face, trying to appeal to reason where force had not. Whether it was her sangfroid, her words, or just arithmetic, the attack suddenly stopped. The men left her alone and shaken but alive and took to their heels into the night.
Lottie had come back by the time Daugherty came to. The car, once more very much alive, had brought them to Franklin Avenue. The attack was not immediately made public, although its seriousness would have certainly merited it. The police were informed, but the story was not released until late morning. Hollywood likes its scandals on a short leash and its violence hushed up.
When the story broke, the headlines blared her famous surname but lingered on an uncomfortable truth: this was not Mary Pickford’s fairy-tale Hollywood. This was the city’s unlit underside. Detectives fanned out across the East Side, guided by Lottie and Daugherty, attempting to locate the exact stretch of road where the attack had occurred. They failed. The terrain was too indistinct, the darkness too complete, the city too unfinished.
Detectives had what evidence they could. Four sets of fingerprints were dusted from the car, and Bertillon specialists were called to examine them. This was still the early days of fingerprinting and it held a shimmer of the technical and the exotic. Eyewitnesses described the attackers – four men, mulattos and whites, their features already merging in rumor, indistinct in the dimness. No suspects were named. The case went the way of so many of its day, quietly off the front page.
For Lottie Pickford, the assault marked another bruise on a life already lived in the long shadow of Hollywood royalty. Unlike her sister Mary, she had never been protected by the full machinery of the studio system. Her career drifted at the margins, and her personal struggles were well known to those who looked past the marquee lights. The attack did not transform her into a symbol or a cause. It was simply endured, absorbed into the city’s unspoken ledger of damage.
Hollywood moved on. It always did.
But the blotter lives. A stalled car. A lonely road. A famous name bleeding just beyond the klieg lights. In the last years of the silent era, as Hollywood was learning to speak, it had very little to say about the night Lottie Pickford was beaten and robbed—and what that silence told about the city it was becoming.
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