Hollywood in the 1930s wore sequins on its sleeve and brass knuckles in its pocket. The Great Depression was ravaging America, but the dream factory on the Los Angeles hills churned out shimmer and fable: comedies sharp as broken glass, gangster pictures reeking of cordite and malevolent intent, and platinum-blonde starlets whose screen smiles glowed brighter to conceal fresh bruises underneath. On the outside, it was all champagne sparkle. Underneath, quicksand and velvet ropes. Lawrence, Massachusetts. This was the place that shaped Thelma Todd—a city with its teeth bared, choked with mill smoke, rivers thick with the runoff of exhausted ambition. Thelma was Lawrence’s daughter, the air there heavy as yesterday’s grief, streets pressed flat by relentless poverty and the clatter of textile machines. By the late 1910s, Lawrence was a faded headline: strike city, strike again, bread riots, one grim winter bleeding into the next. Nobody smiled in Lawrence without a good reason and an eye...