By Leo Banks
(This is the first part of a two-part article.)
Prescott's most notorious prostitute had a small problem with the men in her life. They kept winding up dead, usually after drinking rat poison. But she had her bad points, too.
The story of Gabriell Dollie Wiley lends itself to such dark thinking. She was, after all, one of Arizona's great noir characters, a real-life crime-novel dame who did whatever it took to survive in early Prescott, brooking no interference from such trifles as the law or common morality.
Gabe, as she was known, came to town about 1909 to work as a Whiskey Row prostitute, and she was a darn good one. Her local renown went national in 1915 when her man, Leonard Topp, left Gabe for another woman, stealing her fortune in diamonds.
She tracked him to a Los Angeles liquor store. Clad in silk and furs, and with a pistol stuffed in a muff, Gabe walked up behind Topp. "Hello, Leonard," she hissed.
He spun around. Without removing the gun from the muff, Gabe fired into Topp's chest. The bullet nicked his heart, giving him a few seconds to live. He used them to knock her down and repeatedly smash her head against the floor.
When she passed out, Leonard staggered to his feet and said, "Well, I guess I'm about through for good," then fell over dead.
Topp's death and Gabe's subsequent trial caused such a sensation in Southern California that on some days it knocked World War I off the front pages. Some called it an American folk murder trial, a real-life version of the popular ditty, Frankie and Johnny.
She killed her man because he done her wrong.
"I killed him because I loved him," cried Gabe from the lockup.
She presented herself to the jury as a woman adrift in a cruel world. Her mother, she said, vanished in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, leaving Gabe alone at 15. She survived by making the rounds of Nevada's gold camps, working in hash houses in Reno and Rawhide during the day, and turning tricks for miners at night.
Whether any of that was true is unknown. Lying was Gabe's special gift. What is certain is that she was born around 1890 in France, and came to this country to work as a maid for an Italian couple.
But the trial's most effective testimony came from a friend of Gabe's from Prescott, who said Topp beat her several times a week. Pearl Valley, described in news accounts as a "substantial blond," said one of Leonard's favorite pastimes was to "scuff the toes of his boots against her."
The all-male jury, outraged at Topp's behavior, acquitted her in eight minutes. The best line of the case came from newspaper reporter Adela Rogers-St. Johns, who wrote that the jury understood that with men like Leonard, "homicide was not only justifiable, but obligatory."
By 1920, Gabe had returned to Prescott and was back turning tricks, only now she'd moved into management. She became a madam, operating out of several downtown hotels, including the Mason across from the Courthouse on Whiskey Row.
In February of 1928, Gabe went to see a silent picture called The Red Kimona playing at the Elks Theater on Gurley. Boys handing out promotional flyers approached her on the sidewalk outside. "A startling expose of the white slave trade, fearlessly told!" screamed the handbills. Propped on a lobby chair was the wax figure of a woman dressed in a kimono and bathed in red lights.
When Gabe took a seat in the packed theater, she had no inkling it was her story playing on the screen. Not only did the movie mirror the details of her life, with a few embellishments, but it used her real name.
Kimona was a mostly female production, a Hollywood first. The screenplay was adapted from a 1924 short story by St. Johns and the producer was Dorothy Davenport Reid, widow of Wallace Reid, Paramount's most popular leading man before talking pictures.
Rather than accept the movie's sympathetic portrait, Gabe followed the handbook for crime-novel women and tried to make a big score. She sued Reid, claiming the film's use of her past exposed her "as a woman of lewd characteristics, a prostitute and a murderess" - all true of course. She demanded $50,000.
The suit was unprecedented, even drawing coverage in the New York Times. Never before had the young movie industry been called to answer for using the facts of someone's life in a production. The case bounced through California's courts for five years before Reid settled for damages, losing everything, including her West Hollywood mansion.
Most remarkable, though, was the boldness of this Prescott prostitute in waging a five-year legal war against Hollywood bigshots, based on the lie that she'd shed her sordid ways - and winning again.
Whatever Gabe pocketed from the settlement, it didn't change her life. She continued in the business to which she was born, although now she'd become a figure of great curiosity. She was rarely seen on Prescott's streets in daylight, but when she was, her diamonds set lips flapping.
"You'd see her walking downtown wearing the nicest clothes you ever saw, and shiny diamonds," says Paul Toci, a longtime Prescott resident. "She was a beautiful woman. Unless you knew she was from the whorehouse, you'd never guess it."
Gabe's profile rose considerably past midnight. After closing up shop on the second floor of the Rex Arms Hotel - now the Bank One building on Gurley - where she ran her business for much of the 1930s, she escorted her girls around the corner for a nightcap at the Palace. They were decked out in feathers, boas and stage makeup, but the madam was never so flamboyant.
"She wasn't a floozy," said the late Mary Swartz, whose husband, Bob, managed the Palace then. "She was plump, pretty and usually dressed in suits. Very businesslike. But she had a different shade of red hair every time. Those dye jobs didn't cut it in those days."
Swartz says Gabe cared for her girls, even putting several through a local business college. "One of them was a friend of mine. She did a lot around here and everybody thought she was great, except the Sunday school people. They didn't like her much."
The men in her life thought she was great, too. Until she turned on them.
Next week Dollie marries again and ends up in Salome, Arizona.
(Leo W. Banks, a Tucson-based writer, is a frequent contributor to Arizona Highways magazine. He also has written several books of history for Arizona Highways' book division. These include Never Stand Between a Cowboy and his Spittoon [2001] and Rattlesnake Blues [2000].)
Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number: (bub8130pa). Reuse only by permission.
Dollie Wiley was a little surprise in 1928 when she visited the Elks Theatre and saw that The Red Kimona was about her life growing up into prostitution. Then again, it should not have been too unexpected since some much of her life seem to play out like a dime novel.