Among the loveliest was Osborn’s second wife, the teenage Rae Potter, who’d won a Chicago newspaper contest naming her “the prettiest working girl in the city.” Armed with such clippings, Rae had set out for Hollywood. But the only person in Tinseltown who showed much interest was Don Osborn. They married on her eighteenth birthday.
So much in love was Rae that she didn’t mind supporting her husband, dancing in two shows a night at Pelton’s Theatre in Burbank so the couple could pay their bills. Rae would later describe Don as not “the kind of man who liked to work.” Not that she was judging: Rae sympathized with Osborn’s plight. Don Osborn could be a great film director, Rae believed, if only someone would hire him. But the men in power were jealous of Osborn’s artistry. “You haven’t a friend in the world,” Rae would say, commiserating when her husband came home, depressed after making the studio rounds.
Yet for some reason her tenderness enraged Osborn. Rae was “too good” to be married to him, he snapped, and he began staying away from home. Rae sank into deep despair. One afternoon the nineteen-year-old swallowed some bichloride of mercury tablets, the same poison Olive Thomas would consume a year later. In a suicide note she said she “longed for the love of her husband.”
But the dosage she took wasn’t as high as Olive’s, and Rae made a full recovery. She also made the papers. STAGE BEAUTY WILL LIVE, the headlines cried. Like a moth to the spotlight, Osborn came fluttering back to Rae’s side, making a great show of contrition.
But within a few months they had separated again—leaving the door open for Gibby.
Margaret Gibson was like no girl Don Osborn had ever encountered before. She wasn’t a docile accomplice like Florence, or a besotted acolyte like Rae. Gibby had her own dreams, her own ambitions. And they were at least equal to Osborn’s own.
What they both wanted was to get inside the gates. They were tired of being on the outside, watching the lives of their betters with their noses pressed up against the glass.
On the night of December 1, both Gibby and Osborn could have glanced outside their windows to see the searchlights crosshatching the dark sky, heralding the opening of the Mission Theatre. All they would have had to do was walk a few blocks from their respective hotels to witness the fuss and glamour of Hollywood’s A list. The Mission’s first show was the premiere of Douglas Fairbanks’s The Mark of Zorro, and the elites had turned out in force. Gibby and Osborn might well have stood among the crowd of screaming fans watching as Doug and Mary arrived in their Rolls-Royce, turning to the crowd to wave before heading up the velvet carpet to the theater. Following close behind was the mayor of Los Angeles, and Cecil B. DeMille, and Gloria Swanson, and Tom Ince, and William Desmond Taylor, and Mary Miles Minter. The women dripped with diamonds, the men dazzled in top hats and tuxedos. Cameras flashed; searchlights swung across the theater; fans shouted their favorites’ names.
This was the world Gibby and Osborn aspired to join. This was the world they believed was walled shut against them. And this was the world they intended to conquer.
CHAPTER 12
THE MADDEST WOMAN
It hadn’t been easy seeing Mr. Taylor at the Mission Theatre premiere. Mary was doing her best to forget him, but every time she got a little distance, there he was again, looking so handsome, so debonair, his square shoulders and noble bearing giving him the appearance of a cavalier at some European court. All that was missing was a sword at his side and a plumed hat. In those moments, Mary’s feelings came rushing back at her like a runaway train.
Their mansion on Fremont Place had been sold, and Shelby hadn’t yet found them another rich man’s house to call home, so Mary and her mother were packing to spend Christmas back East. Mary’s heart ached for the love she was leaving behind. She studied the photograph Mr. Taylor had given her. He had signed it, “Yours now and forever.”
Now and forever.
Shelby was no doubt pleased at the chance to get her daughter away from Hollywood and Taylor for a while. They had a great deal to accomplish while they were in New York. They would need to see Mr. Zukor, their imperious employer, while they were in town, so Shelby ordered Mary to write to him. Mary got out pen and paper and did as she was told.
“I am very, very happy in my work,” Mary wrote to Zukor in her girlish script. “I know that behind it all is you.” She closed her letter with a paean that must have pleased both her mother and her boss very much: “Don’t forget that there’s a little girl three thousand miles away whose main ambition is to make you proud of her.”
That was malarkey, and even Mary, as oblivious as she could sometimes be, must have known it. Her main ambition wasn’t to please Adolph Zukor. It was to make Mr. Taylor notice her again.
Nothing Mary had done to forget him had worked. As a distraction, she had even tried getting close to Monte Blue, one of her costars. Monte was a little younger than Mary’s usual crushes—thirty-three—but he was part Cherokee, handsome in a dark, exotic kind of way, and Mary was powerfully attracted to him.
Shelby, of course, had put a stop to that.
So all Mary was left with were the memories of Mr. Taylor, for whom she was determined to wait like Dickens’s Miss Havisham—“until the end of my life,” she insisted.
Mary decided another letter was in order.
“I want to go away with you,” she wrote to Mr. Taylor on a sheaf of her perfume-scented, butterfly-engraved stationery, using an easily decipherable children’s code. “Wouldn’t it be glorious to sit in a big comfy couch by a cozy warm fire with the wind whistling outside, trying to harmonize with the faint sweet strains of music coming from our Victrola? I’d . . . tie fresh ribbons on the snowy white curtains and feed the birds and fix the flowers and, oh yes, set the table and then in my spare time, I’d darn your socks. I’d put on something soft and flowing [and] lie on the couch and wait for you. I might fall asleep for a fire always makes me drowsy—then I’d wake to find two strong arms pressed around and two dear lips pressed on mine in a long sweet kiss.”
There was more. Several pages more of gushing, romantic, sexualized innuendo.
Mary slipped the letter into an envelope and sent it off to Mr. Taylor.
Heartbroken, miserable, bullied by her mother, Mary drifted into a world of delusion. Her innocent outings with Mr. Taylor the year before had taken on great consequence in her memory. The life she imagined for them in her letter could be theirs, Mary believed, if only Shelby didn’t force her to keep making movies, to keep genuflecting at Mr. Zukor’s altar. If Mary were free of her mother, Mr. Taylor could admit that he loved her as much as she loved him. Then they could live a life every bit as wonderful as she dreamed, with cozy fires and fresh ribbons and two lips pressed against hers.
If only Mary could find some way to escape her mother.
As they packed up the house, Charlotte Shelby kept a sharp eye on her daughter.
She recognized Mary’s moods. She knew when her daydreams took over. It was precisely at times like these that Mary needed to be watched like a hawk. After the episode with the gun, Shelby would have been derelict in her duty if she hadn’t watched her closely.
She knew the world was full of men—like James Kirkwood—who would take advantage of her daughter. But Shelby was stronger than any of those filthy, despicable men. Never in her entire life had she depended on a man. She’d made a successful life for her family all on her own. If only Mary could learn that men could not be trusted. But the girl was a romantic fool.
Not long before, Shelby had found Mary with “that halfbreed Indian” Monte Blue. “I was about the maddest woman that could ever be,” Shelby admitted later. As Blue tried to flee the scene, Shelby had grabbed the terrified actor by the shirttail and ordered him to stay away from Mary. He obeyed.
And Mary fumed.
Shelby didn’t care. If Mary had forgotten that day at the abortionist’s, Shelby hadn’t.
But then, one night shortly before they were to leave for New York, she glanced aro
und the house and realized Mary had managed to slip past her eagle eye. The girl had taken off into the fog in that “big, fast roadster” of hers.
Pulling on a long overcoat, Shelby ordered her chauffeur, Chauncey Eaton, to drive her across town. Secretary Charlotte Whitney went along for the ride. Barking directions from the backseat, Shelby directed them through the foggy streets. “Turn right here,” she commanded. “Turn left here.” Only she knew where they were heading.
At last Shelby told Eaton to park at the corner of Fourth Street. Her destination was still a few blocks south, but the determined woman didn’t want to give herself away. She told Eaton and Whitney to wait for her, then headed off toward Alvarado Street on foot.
Within a few minutes she was banging on William Desmond Taylor’s door.
The house was dark. Taylor didn’t respond. Shelby continued to knock.
“Who is there?” the director finally called out, raising his upstairs window and peering down into the foggy courtyard.
“This is Mrs. Shelby.”
Taylor knew the voice from the set, where she had harangued him relentlessly. He told her he’d be right down.
When he opened the door, he was wrapped in his robe. He asked Shelby inside.
Once in the house, Shelby scanned the small living room and adjoining dining area for her daughter. The only sign of Mary was the photograph Taylor kept on the room’s wainscoting, along with portraits of his other leading ladies, including Mary Pickford and Winifred Kingston.
Shelby looked directly into Taylor’s eyes. She told him Mary hadn’t come home that evening. Now it was midnight, and the fog was getting worse. Did he know where Mary was?
Taylor replied that he did not.
Shelby said she’d telephoned everyone she could think of, and no one had seen her errant daughter. That left Taylor.
But Taylor insisted Mary wasn’t there.
Shelby held his gaze. She didn’t seem to believe him.
In his most courtly, respectful voice, the director offered to make a few calls for her. Stepping into the little telephone nook under the stairs, Taylor rang one of the assistant directors at the studio, then several other people. But none of them knew where Mary was.
Finally Shelby gave up. She bid Taylor a terse good night.
“Be sure to call me and let me know if anything has happened,” Taylor said as Shelby made her way back out into the fog.
Returning to the waiting car, Shelby reported that Mary was not at Taylor’s. It was at that moment that Charlotte Whitney noticed that her employer was holding her blue steel .38 revolver—the same gun Mary had fired in her mock suicide attempt. The revolver had been given to Shelby by a private detective on the advice of district attorney Thomas Lee Woolwine, after Shelby had expressed fears of intruders and Mary’s overzealous fans. Whitney realized the entire time Shelby had been talking with Taylor, she’d been holding that gun in her sleeve.
And if Shelby had found her daughter at Taylor’s house, Whitney believed, she would not have hesitated to pull the trigger.
CHAPTER 13
IMPUDENT THINGS
All along Broadway the electric signs of Los Angeles’s movie theaters—the largest concentration of picture palaces in the country—flashed on and off, lighting up the night in intermittent glows of pink, gold, and green. Straight-backed and efficient, Harry Fellows drove his employer, William Desmond Taylor, past Sid Grauman’s elaborate Million Dollar Theatre, the pink-stucco Rialto, the French Renaissance–inspired Palace, and the New Theatre of Alexander Pantages—all but the Palace under the sway of Mr. Taylor’s boss, Adolph Zukor.
The car Fellows drove was a brand-new McFarlan, the luxury auto of the season, specially ordered by and custom-built for Taylor. The chrome still shone; the leather of the seats was still fragrant. The screen’s most popular leading man, Wallace Reid, also drove a McFarlan, racing them in a number of his pictures. Strikingly beautiful in design, McFarlan interiors included pillows, hassocks, and armrests, with optional bar sets and golf-bag compartments. According to the Los Angeles Express, Taylor had ordered his car “with all the trimmin’s.”
Pulling up in front of Clune’s Broadway Theatre, Fellows waited as his employer stepped out onto the sidewalk. The marquee above announced WILLIAM D. TAYLOR’S PRODUCTION OF THE SOUL OF YOUTH. The picture had continued to serve as the industry’s best answer to its critics. While racy on the surface, with scenes set in a whorehouse, The Soul of Youth was redeemed by its message, and this was what Taylor had come to preach at the theater this night.
Meeting with reporters before the screening, Taylor insisted the picture was about uplift. “The Soul of Youth is the story of a street gamin,” he explained. “It shows what kindness, sympathy and education will accomplish in developing character in the boy of the streets.” In other words, the end justified all that preceded it. How could redemption be shown, Taylor argued, without dramatizing the temptations that came before? It was a brilliant argument, allowing the producers to appear to agree with their critics while still making money off the public’s desire to witness sensation and vice.
With spokesmen like Taylor, the industry was learning how to fight back against the church ladies. When the American Humane Society called for a national censorship board, Taylor stepped forth as first responder. “The heads of the motion picture industry,” he argued forcefully, “have been to every effort to make films which entertain and yet instruct and are of moral value.” Pointing again to The Soul of Youth, he averred that the film offered “sufficient refutation of the charge that the public is being led from the sweet, simple human drama to plays which exploit individuals of doubtful reputations.”
And certainly no one in the film colony, Taylor implied, had a doubtful reputation.
The Hollywood press knew better.
A few days after the screening at Clune’s Broadway, Taylor was stopped by a reporter on the Famous Players lot. Notebook in hand, the inquiring scribe asked Taylor to spill “the biggest secret” in Tinseltown.
Lightheartedly, Taylor suggested that the biggest secret was “how a star owes more to her cameraman than to her modiste and hairdresser . . . how double chins are removed with a spotlight . . . how skillful backlighting is more precious than a gallon of peroxide.” He expected the reporter to laugh, then step aside.
But the newspaperman was digging for dirt. “Anybody been murdered in the movies lately?” he asked. “Got killed?”
Taylor fixed him with an icy stare. With all the bodies stacked up in Hollywood’s morgue this past year, some things weren’t joking matters. He scolded the reporter for encouraging the public’s interest in “morbid, silly, prying, impudent things.”
William Desmond Taylor understood the importance of maintaining secrets. His goal was keeping Tinseltown safe.
After all, he owed a great deal to the movies. The industry was his anchorage. He had now lived longer in Los Angeles than he’d lived anywhere else since leaving his childhood home in County Carlow, Ireland, at the age of eighteen. Where he’d been and what he’d done in the interim, no one knew, except for the few years he admitted to spending on the stage. But the truth was he’d lived many different lives and been known by many different names in his half century of existence. And those were just some of William Desmond Taylor’s secrets.
At his home in Alvarado Court, there were others.
Greeting him was his valet, a chubby young man named Edward F. Sands. Or at least, that was the name he’d provided when Taylor hired him a year earlier. The director hadn’t pried too closely into Sands’s background; after all, everyone was entitled to keep his history to himself. All Taylor cared about was Sands’s experience as a cook at the Famous Players commissary. Given his frequent heartburn, the director needed a houseman who could whip up meals that were tasty but bland. At this, Sands proved extremely capable.
The valet quickly gained his employer’s confidence. Occupying the upstairs bedroom at the back of the house, he s
oon became a familiar sight around Alvarado Court. When Mary first met the portly, apple-cheeked young man, she’d thought him “very round,” that if “you knocked him over, he’d bounce back up again.” Sands spoke with a pronounced Cockney accent that Mary called “very, very Limey.” Some questioned whether the accent was real.
But Taylor never appeared to doubt him for an instant.
That was unfortunate, because whenever he had the chance, Sands snooped through Taylor’s closets and drawers to satisfy a voyeuristic compulsion.
With small eyes shifting under heavy eyebrows that nearly met over his nose, the crafty valet paid close attention to the select few who visited Taylor at his home. Usually the director spent his evenings alone, but on occasion the living room rang with the hearty laughter and four-letter oaths of Mabel Normand or the congenial conversation of Neva Gerber, leading lady of westerns and serials. But of late, the most frequent guest to 404B Alvarado Court had been George James Hopkins, a soft-spoken, easily startled, bespectacled young man of twenty-four.
Hopkins’s visits weren’t just social. As Taylor’s production manager, he helped devise extraordinary visual effects for the director’s films. Both men were quite pleased with their latest achievement, The Furnace, which had opened in theaters the third week of November. The film contained lots of audience-pleasing special effects: for one scene, Taylor had dynamited a hill near Griffith Park. The picture had gone way over budget, topping out at $700,000, but Taylor figured it would be worth it. Audiences liked spectacle. And in one fantasy sequence, there was even a glimpse into the depths of hell.
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