A Dime-Store Anastasia : Court Will Rule on Her Claim to Silent-Screen Star Mary Miles Minter’s $3-Million Estate

Call it the case of the dime-store Anastasia.

Like the North Carolina woman who went to her grave insisting she was the sole surviving heir of the last Russian czar, Nicholas II, Margaret Kozma of Santa Monica claims she is the illegitimate daughter of Mary Miles Minter, one of the golden girls of the silent screen, entitled to inherit her $3.3-million estate.

Hers is an intrigue, with all the elements of a suspenseful film, involving one of the most celebrated murders in Tinseltown, a movie star whose career was ruined by scandal, a baby born in secret who grew up in a traveling Hungarian circus, a beauty queen on a global quest to find her mother.

It is also a story of a woman who appears to have written this kind of script before, a script that may be fiction.

The denouement is due in a few weeks in a trial to determine who will get Minter’s estate. It will be the last chapter in legal proceedings that began almost four years ago and which has already resulted in one trial and many hearings.

Like Margaret (or Margit) Kozma, Mary Miles Minter used many names.

According to government and Catholic church records unearthed by writer and small-time actor Ken Du Main, who owns the dramatic rights to Kozma’s life story, Minter was born April 25, 1902, in Shreveport, La., and christened Mary M. Reilly. The actress, however, had often told people she was an April Fool’s baby.

In 1911, the girl with the golden curls starred in “The Littlest Rebel,” a long-running Broadway play, under the name Juliet Shelby. When the play was to open in Chicago, where a local ordinance barred children younger than 16 from the stage, the show dropped the underage Juliet Shelby in favor of a new actress named Mary Miles Minter.

Du Main has turned up documents that show Juliet Shelby and Mary Miles Minter were the same person. It was, he said, a change of identities achieved by Minter’s domineering stage mother, Charlotte Shelby, through the birth certificate of a cousin who had died.

Soon Minter was in Hollywood, where she trailed only Mary Pickford and Clara Bow in popularity. She starred in more than 50 films, only two of which are known to exist today.

Body in a Bungalow

Then on the morning of Feb. 2, 1922, director William Desmond Taylor was found face up on the floor of his South Alvarado Street bungalow, his body concealing the small pool of blood from the .38-caliber slug in his back.

Along with Fatty Arbuckle’s trial for a rape and murder that occurred five months earlier, the Taylor murder scandal dominated Hollywood reporting by the Roaring ‘20s press.

Banner headlines declared Minter a suspect in Taylor’s murder. Adela Rogers St. John, the Hearst gossip columnist, reported that pink lingerie with the initials “MMM” were found in Taylor’s apartment, which was quickly described as a “love nest.”

Minter’s career was ruined and she apparently fled to Europe. But, according to “A Cast of Killers,” a best-selling 1986 book by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, her love for Taylor had actually gone unrequited. The book, a case study of the murder, further argues that Minter’s mother, Charlotte Shelby, shot Taylor to keep control of her daughter’s career and her millions, and that at least two Los Angeles County district attorneys took bribes from Shelby, who sought to avoid prosecution.

By 1926, Minter was living in Paris, still under the influence of her mother. Photoplay magazine found her living in a hotel off the Champs Elysees under the name “Miss Shelby” in 1928.

In 1929, on Feb. 1 or May 1, Kozma claims, Minter secretly gave birth in Paris; the baby girl was delivered by a doctor named Etienne Bernard. By the end of that year, Minter was back in the United States, for a time at a Santa Barbara fat farm, where medical records give her complete medical history and show no mention of a birth.

Kozma’s story, drawn from her testimony, statements she made to Du Main and an interview, boils down to this:

Charlotte Shelby, apparently ashamed that her unmarried daughter had become pregnant, took her 3-month-old grandchild to Hungary and persuaded distant relatives, brick mason Josef Sajban and his wife, Gizella Mohacsi Sajban, to adopt the girl in return for payment of $1,000.

Turned over with her, Kozma said, were several items including a gold bracelet bearing this inscription: “To my daughter Margaret Reilly Shelby Sajban, born in France, from Juliet Mary Reilly, who was born April 25, 1902, in Shreveport, La.”

Kozma, who gave a deposition regarding her claim to Minter’s fortune, has testified that “my stepfather told me that my real mother was in America, but I never heard anything about my father.”

By the time Margaret Sajban was 4, she has testified, the Sajbans became ill, gave her away to a circus and soon died. In the traveling circus--which was owned by a “very nice man” whose name she cannot recall--a couple who were acrobats and whose names she couldn’t recall in testimony, took her into their act. She testified that she grew up on the high wire and that one day in 1941, when she was no more than 12, the Nazis took away her acrobat step-parents, who were Jewish.

Then she got herself a room at the Europa Hotel in Budapest and quickly found an agent who got her more than 50 roles in the movies--so many that “I can’t tell you the number.”

She acted under the name “Anita Hellman,” but testified that she could not recall any of the film titles, the names of any fellow actors or the names of any directors. “I wasn’t interested in the movies,” she said. “I was interested in the money I was getting.”

After the war she danced once, in an opera and met her first husband, Pal Fejer, who worked at an opera house in Budapest. They had two daughters and later she and a common-law husband had a son.

Then in 1954, a woman she knew only as “Karolan” or Caroline appeared, bringing coffee, cocoa and $200 on behalf of an American relative. Kozma said she never asked who the relative was. “Karolan” appeared again, briefly in 1956. And then again in Paris in 1966. The last time, she left a Santa Monica telephone number.

Kozma, who says she was Miss Hungary three times but cannot remember just which years, said she arrived in Los Angeles from Paris 19 years ago to search for her mother. Her only clue was a telephone number given her three years earlier.

A “Mrs. Kay” answered her call, she said, took her home to rest and then drove her to a dilapidated Santa Monica Canyon manse, where she met an eccentric old woman named Mary O’Hildebrandt.

“She said she was my relative,” Kozma said. They met several times over the next 15 years, but Kozma claimed that the old woman “wouldn’t say how we were related.”

Then on Aug. 4, 1984, O’Hildebrandt died. A week later, news reports revealed that the 82-year-old woman was Mary Miles Minter. (For five decades, after her return to the United States, Minter had lived quietly, marrying late in life and buying real estate.)

Under oath, Kozma has said that only then did she learn that Minter was her mother, a fact she learned from Fred F. Willmot, an elderly Santa Monica man who she had never spoken to and only saw at Minter’s house.

They Never Spoke

Willmot, who is almost 90, has testified that he met Minter four or five times over 14 years and spoke to her by telephone a few times and that he saw Kozma only once, in 1975, and never exchanged a word with her.

Willmot also testified that only eight weeks before Minter died, she phoned him asking him to come to her home to witness her will. Joining him were Kozma’s son, Continental Airlines pilot Sanford Scheleffer of Daytona Beach, Fla., and Gizela Lohati, a Venice real estate agent.

The will gave everything to Kozma.

Willmot further testified that after the other two witnesses left, Minter then confided in him the greatest secret of her life: that she secretly gave birth to Kozma in Paris in 1929.

Minter then gave him an unsealed envelope with documents attesting to the relationship. “I was not to give the envelope to Margaret Kozma until after Mary O’Hildebrandt died,” Willmot testified. “Those were the instructions.”

To support her story, Kozma, a tall, blonde housewife who at 59 still retains a strong trace of her native language and has worked as a companion for old women, has produced a small stack of letters, most of them undated and without return addresses, each containing specific statements in support of her claim that she is Minter’s daughter.

Kozma has also produced several documents to buttress her claim, including what she says is an official hand-made copy of a 1929 Paris church baptismal registry.

Along with the baptismal document is an undated letter from a woman named “Mado,” who identifies herself as the daughter of Dr. Etienne Bernard.

Baptismal Certificate

In the letter, Mado, who writes that she has no permanent address and cannot be contacted because she is constantly moving about Europe, declares:

“I have been to Paris to the old church where you were baptized, the little old priest is now dead. We have found the young priest who assisted at the baptism, the record of which I send you a copy. . . .”

Attached was a color photocopy of what appears to be a hand-written copy, complete with official seal, from the baptismal registry of St. Joseph Parish. It declares that the 141st baptism recorded for 1929 was “Juliette, Margaret Reilly-Shelby” daughter of “Rene” and “Juliette Reily Shelby.”

But the 141st baptism registered at the Parisian church in 1929 shows none of these names, according to Sarah C. White of The Times Paris bureau, who visited the parish. In addition, White contacted officials at the 11th arrondissement City Hall in Paris, where births of children baptized at that Catholic church are recorded. No record of a child with the name Shelby or Reilly was found.

“So what,” Kozma said, when a reporter asked about this lack of support for the document she produced. Her attorney, Patrick Maginnis of Century City, said he was unaware that the records did not match.

Preferably No Record

But her friend, Alice Anderson, a real estate agent who also knew Minter and who has accompanied Kozma to many court hearings in the case, offered this explanation:

“Charlotte Shelby was very manipulative and didn’t want any record of her daughter’s child” and so persuaded the priest referred to in Mado’s letter, to enter a false name.

Among other documents in Kozma’s possession is a 1929 letter addressed to Bernard, thanking him for delivering a baby girl named Margaret. It is signed “Mary Miles Minter.”

Anderson said the physician already knew his patient’s true identity, so writing a letter signed Mary Miles Minter made sense. Kozma said she agreed.

In another letter, undated and with no return address, signed “Dr. Etienne Bernard” and addressed to “Margaret Shelby” at Kozma’s Santa Monica home, reports that he delivered a baby in Paris on Feb. 1, 1929. “I was obliged to keep in secret the determination of the citizenship of the baby because her mother was an American citizen. . . . I have learned that your ravishing mother, Mrs. May (sic) Miles Minter who was my favorite star in my youth, just died,” the letter states.

Kozma agreed in an interview that that would date the letter after Minter’s death in August, 1984. But Bernard’s death certificate, obtained by one of the lawyers representing another claimant to Minter’s estate, shows that he died more than five years before Minter.

“That’s a discrepancy,” Anderson said, then added that the letter must have been fabricated by Mado.

Kozma said later in the interview that Mado did fabricate the letter, but since Mado is Bernard’s daughter, it was appropriate for her to write a letter and sign her father’s name.

However, Kozma said Mado cannot verify any of this today because Mado also is dead.

There are two other documents which Kozma has shown in court which would prove her claim. One is a Hungarian birth certificate, which reportedly shows she was born in France and adopted by the Sajbans; the other the gold bracelet that bears Minter’s true birth date.

Two years ago, Kozma was under court order to submit the bracelet to Donald Hromodka, the attorney for Minter’s estate, for examination by metallurgists to ascertain its authenticity. Hromodka said he grew suspicious when he handled the bracelet during a deposition and felt the lettering to be rough.

But the day before Kozma was to submit the bracelet, she said in the interview, she telephoned her attorney to say that the bracelet had been stolen, along with her birth certificate, by unknown people who she believed wanted to deprive her of establishing that she was Minter’s daughter.

Maginnis said when Kozma told him the items had been stolen, he urged her to file a report with the Santa Monica police. Kozma, however, did not.

Willmot, in an interview, said he is certain Kozma is Minter’s daughter not just because Minter told him her secret, but because he was told the same story by his former sister-in-law, Gertrude K. Hawkins, who died in 1977. Hawkins, he confirmed, was the “Mrs. Kay” whom Kozma contacted when she reached Los Angeles in 1969.

Willmot testified in the Minter case that he barely knows Kozma. But Los Angeles County probate court records show this is the second time he has testified that an old woman asked him to witness a will leaving money to Kozma. The first time involved Ella Laubisch, a Beverly Hills woman who employed Kozma as a $1.50-an-hour companion before she died in 1981.

Willmot testified in a deposition in the Laubisch estate case that he met the old woman only twice. The first time was about 1973 when a physician friend asked him for a ride to the woman’s home, which was next door to where Minter lived at the time. Willmot testified that he exchanged hellos with Mrs. Laubisch and then drove off.

Eight years later, just before she died in 1981, Laubisch telephoned Willmot and asked him to witness her new will, he testified. The will left her money to Kozma, but since he was the only witness, the will was not considered legal in California.

Kozma, who testified in the Laubisch case that she was indeed a paid companion, acknowledged in the interview that she had accepted a $25,000 settlement to drop her claim to the Laubisch money. She said her lawyer got $17,000 and she gave the rest away.

Payoff Was Cheaper

Bea Armstrong, a North Hollywood attorney who represented a beneficiary of the Laubisch will that was admitted to probate, said she recommended her client pay Kozma because it was cheaper than fighting what she thought was a groundless claim.

While Willmot testified in the Minter and Laubisch cases that he barely knew Kozma, records show that he signed Kozma’s 1978 petition to become a U.S. citizen, in which he swore that he had personally known her for more than five years.

Asked about this, Willmot said he had, in fact, not known Kozma for five years, but had signed the citizenship papers as a favor to Minter.

In the Minter case, Willmot is one of three witnesses to a will that left the actress’s money to Kozma. The will was one of four submitted for probate. In a March, 1987 probate hearing, retired Judge Arthur K. Marshall chose a will dated June 8, 1984, prepared by Santa Monica estate lawyer Hromodka, at the request of Minter’s long-time bookkeeper, Helen Edmunds. In this will, Minter declared she had never had any children and had no living relatives and directed that her estate be handled as if she died without a will.

Marshall was required only to choose a will for probate, but he went further. He also included in the records, his finding that the purported will leaving Minter’s estate to Kozma was in fact, not signed by Mary O’Hildebrandt, the actress’s legal name when she died.

The rejected will bears a graceful “Mary O’Hildebrandt” signature, but numerous notes the old woman wrote in the last year of her life all show jagged block printing.

In an interview, Willmot was told that the will that he witnessed was declared fraudulent. “Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s too bad,” he replied.

Kozma said she was undaunted by the finding, insisting “I don’t care for money,” and she said she only wants to prove her blood relationship to Minter.

And she continues to press her claim to the estate, a claim that lawyers for all sides say can only be resolved in court. Therefore, Probate Judge Leonard Wolf has ordered a trial, expected this summer, to determine who are Minter’s lawful heirs: Kozma or Joseph Reilly, a 65-year-old San Antonio stock brokerage executive, who is Minter’s half-brother, or the 22 nieces and nephews of Minter’s only husband, the late Santa Monica businessman Brandon O’Hildebrandt?

Meanwhile, Kozma’s search for believers continues.

Recently she invited a reporter, a lawyer in the Minter estate case and several friends to her home where Du Main and a friend, film historian David Bradley, videotaped an interview with a woman who said she was Kozma’s older stepsister.

The woman, who identified herself as Gisele Sajban Jancso, said she distinctly remembered the infant Kozma being delivered to her family in 1929 by a woman she identified from a photograph in “A Cast of Killers” as Charlotte Shelby.

But Jancso she said she could not recall many details about her life, including what years her parents died. She said she was positive that her mother lived until at least 1943 and her father was alive long after World War II.

In earlier discussions, Kozma had recalled that the Sajbans had died in 1933, shortly after they gave her to the circus.

Du Main said the meeting with Jancso only strengthened their belief in Kozma’s story. They acknowledged numerous inconsistencies in both women’s stories, but said they did not regard them as crucial.

As for Kozma, she continues to insist that she is Minter’s daughter.

And what if she is not, she was asked.

“Who I am then?” she replied.