But the talks proceeded surprisingly smoothly. Upon arrival Crafts was given a copy of Lasky’s fourteen points, and he read and approved them. His object was “to cleanse the ‘substance’ of the modern movie,” Crafts declared; how it happened was “a matter of minor consideration.” Since the industry had pledged to follow Lasky’s code, Crafts agreed to call off all agitation for a federal censorship law.
A few blocks away and eight stories up, Adolph Zukor was smiling.
It didn’t matter that, a short time later, Crafts was back to his old ways, calling for a federal commission to compel producers to abide by the fourteen points. All that mattered was that the reformers’ momentum had been slowed. Now the film industry appeared to be the reasonable, rational side: they had come up with a code of rules, and if they failed to live up to that, public opinion, not government censors, would be the final arbiter.
A few months later, The Affairs of Anatol was released. Nothing had been cut. Not the extramarital affairs. Not Satan Synne. Not Gloria Swanson’s legs. The closing title read: “All of which goes to prove that there is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it ill behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us.” It was a final raspberry to the reformers, courtesy of Cecil B. DeMille and Adolph Zukor.
And of course it was a gigantic hit. Just as Zukor knew it would be.
W. D. McGuire, head of the National Board of Review, was furious. “If [a producer] cannot apply the fourteen points to his own product,” he wrote to Zukor, “then he is incapable of enforcing them on his competitor’s product.”
Precisely.
Self-censorship was a ruse, a marketing ploy. Lasky might have intended to apply his fourteen points, but Zukor had merely used them to disarm Crafts, to force the agitators to disperse. It was a temporary solution—the moralists were already regrouping—and Zukor knew it. But he believed they were fighting a losing battle.
What Zukor was counting on was the fundamental American belief in free speech. The previous year, D. W. Griffith had argued against a censorship bill in Virginia, calling it “un-American, dangerous, misguided, senseless, unjust, artless, unlawful, needless, intolerant.” Virginia legislators had promptly voted the bill down. That, Zukor believed, was the American way. The America he loved, the land of the free that had called to him when he was a poor clerk in Hungary, was not a place that stifled free expression or inhibited free enterprise. That was what made America great, and that was what Zukor was counting on now.
Let the bluenoses make noise about government regulation, Zukor thought. They’d win a few battles. But not the war.
It was a gamble. But Zukor had been gambling his entire life.
On the night of May 1, a twenty-nine-year-old bootlegger and ex-con named Edward Coates snuck through the woods with a companion toward Adolph Zukor’s country house. They’d heard about the treasures inside—especially the alcohol in the basement. Coates was wearing an army pistol and a belt sagging with extra cartridges. Prying open the lock on the front door, he stepped inside—and Zukor’s trap gun fired on cue, hitting him in the stomach.
The two thieves ran. Alerted by the sound of gunfire, Patrick Murphy, the caretaker, took off in pursuit. Coates was losing a lot of blood. His companion got away, but Coates dropped facedown into the dirt. Murphy found him dead a short time later.
Zukor wasn’t home. In fact, he had left some weeks earlier on board the SS Aquitania, bound for England. He and Lottie traveled first class, mingling with such luminaries as New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, Mr. and Mrs. Jacques Cartier of the jewelry family, and General Cornelius Vanderbilt. It was a long way from steerage.
Convinced his American empire was safe for the moment, Zukor was sailing to conquer new worlds: England, France, Belgium, Germany.
But in Boston, a different sort of foe had emerged, an unexpected adversary who had discovered Zukor’s darkest secret. And no chicanery or trap guns could stop this aggressor in his tracks.
CHAPTER 17
PRYING EYES
“Let’s go up,” said Edward Sands, “and see who slept with the old man last night.”
William Desmond Taylor’s plump, red-cheeked valet was speaking to Manley Tiffany, the director’s new chauffeur, whom everyone called “Earl.” The two of them made an odd-looking pair. Sands was short, stout, and fair. Tiffany was tall, slender, and dark. But they shared a penchant for mischief. Tiffany’s predecessor, Harry Fellows, had been straight-up and trustworthy—so much so that Mr. Taylor had hired him to be his assistant at the studio. Sands wasn’t unhappy that Fellows was gone and Earl Tiffany had taken his place. He told the new chauffeur to call him “Jazz.” All his friends did.
Up the short flight of stairs Jazz and Earl crept toward Taylor’s bedroom. Sands was distinctly bowlegged, so his walk was a little comical.
For months, whenever the director wasn’t home, Sands had been snooping around the Alvarado Court apartment. Now he showed Tiffany the interesting things he’d uncovered:
A douche bag.
Some suppositories.
And a pink silk nightshirt of some kind.
It was a big, boxy thing, not very feminine in appearance, but Sands assumed it must have belonged to a woman. It was pink, after all. Others would call the garment “flesh-colored,” but to Sands it was pink. And what man would wear a pink nightshirt? It had to be a woman, the valet believed.
To find out which woman, Sands had an idea. By folding the garment “in a trick manner,” he told Tiffany they’d be able to discern if it had been worn the next time they looked.
Not long afterward, Sands and Tiffany snuck up to Taylor’s room again. And eureka! The trick had worked. The garment was folded differently from how they had left it. “The old man” was clearly having sex with some woman! Or at least some woman was spending the night, snuck in after Sands had gone to bed.
But who? Sands “paid particular attention to the visitors to the Taylor home . . . and drew his own conclusion,” according to a later report. The valet told Tiffany he suspected one of three women: Neva Gerber, Mabel Normand, or Mary Miles Minter.
Next time one of them came around, Sands would have to keep an eye on that pink nightshirt and see if it had been used.
Of the three ladies Sands suspected, only Mabel had been spending any time with Taylor of late. But Mabel’s evenings with Billy always ended with a brotherly kiss—exactly why she found spending time with him so wonderful and refreshing. Liberated from the kind of sexual tension that had poisoned her relationships with Sennett and Goldwyn, Mabel could relax when she was out with Taylor and have a good time.
In the last few weeks, they’d frequently been spotted twirling around the dance floor in the grill room at the Ambassador Hotel. Columnist Hazel Shelly called the Ambassador the new “Mecca” for the filmfolk; the grill room would soon be christened “the Cocoanut Grove.” Green monkeys with lighted eyes, perched in towering potted palms, watched as Ruth Roland “tripped the light fantastic” in a pink chiffon dress, and Gloria Swanson dazzled in a flame-colored sequined gown. Back at their tables, deposited there by attendants and carefully cloaked by the tablecloths, were suitcases filled with “the precious cargo of expensive booze.”
How easy it would have been for Mabel to indulge if she wanted. But not with Taylor. He made sure his “Blessed Baby” stayed clean. An occasional cocktail was fine, but nothing more. They sat discreetly, never drawing much attention to themselves. One night their dinner companions were the distinguished actor Mahlon Hamilton and his wife. Hamilton had just finished shooting Greater Than Love at the Ince studios. Perhaps he shared stories of working with Patricia Palmer, whom Taylor knew better as Margaret “Gibby” Gibson.
For all their discretion, Mabel and Taylor were still watched by the columnists. Grace Kingsley had fun with a blind item: “Mabel Normand has caught a distinguished looking one with gray hair this time!” But the pair never gave the press anything to gossip about. Taylor,
as always, was tight-lipped and mysterious. And Mabel, for the first time, seemed calm and content.
That didn’t stop people from drawing their own conclusions.
People like Edward Sands.
Sands had a way of finding out things, but he knew how to get away with things too. Like his employer, he had lived many different lives. His name wasn’t Sands, but rather Snyder, and despite his accent, he wasn’t English at all, having been born in Ohio twenty-seven years earlier. As a teenager, he had fled his strict father’s belt by enlisting in the US Navy. Told he was too young, he’d lied about his age. It was the first lie of many.
While on board the USS Paducah, Snyder was arrested for fraud and embezzlement after overcharging for supplies in the mess room and pocketing the difference. Court-martialed, he was found guilty and sentenced to twelve months of hard labor. The experience turned Snyder bitter. A year in the brig seemed excessive punishment for making a few extra pennies on Lifebuoy soap, Colgate toothpaste, and peanut butter. For the rest of his life Snyder would try to stay one step ahead of everyone, even his benefactors, whom he felt he could never really trust. After serving his time, he was dishonorably discharged from the navy.
He found his way back, however, enlisting in the coast guard and later the US Navy Reserve, neither time disclosing his court-martial. During the war he was promoted to commissary steward. At last things were going well for Snyder, but he was simply too self-destructive to thrive for very long. One night he stole a car and smashed it into a telegraph pole. Ordered to pay for the damages, he deserted instead.
But military life was all Snyder knew. Once again he enlisted, this time under the name Edward Strathmore, this time in the army, where one of his duties was drawing up government checks. On October 4, 1919, temptation proved impossible to resist. He made out a check payable to himself for $481.53, forged the signature of the finance officer, and deserted.
Now he had several branches of the US military looking for him.
Snyder ended up in Los Angeles, that place of last resort for so many fugitives. He found the perfect cover working for Taylor as Edward Sands.
His years in the military had taught him how to keep a shipshape house. Every morning, Sands made Taylor’s bed crisply and prepared his food precisely to order. Taylor was pleased with his valet’s work, and Sands seemed happy as well, at one point telling his employer he’d be glad to be his “servant for life.” Julia Crawford-Ivers, Taylor’s most frequent screenwriter, thought “there never was a more devoted man serving another.” George Hopkins liked Sands as well, though he felt a little sorry for him. To Hopkins, Sands seemed to carry around the sadness and humility of a “defrocked priest.”
There were reasons a priest was defrocked. Perversions. Wickedness.
A villainous smile pushed against Jazz’s pudgy cheeks.
Telling Earl Tiffany he had other things to show him, Sands led the chauffeur into Taylor’s living room. “In every way possible,” Tiffany came to realize, Sands had been prying into Taylor’s life. And the most sensational discovery he’d made wasn’t in the bedroom, but in the rolltop desk in the living room. Flinging it open, Sands exposed bundles of letters and stacks of checks. He’d been through them all. And he told Tiffany what he’d discovered:
Their esteemed employer’s name wasn’t William Desmond Taylor.
It was William Deane-Tanner.
And once a month he wrote a check to a woman named Ada Deane-Tanner, who lived with two young daughters in Monrovia, a little more than twenty miles from Los Angeles.
Sands felt such knowledge gave him the upper hand with Taylor. “If the old man ever gets hard with me,” he told Tiffany, “I will let him know where I get off at, and where he gets off.”
Why Sands felt he needed an upper hand, Tiffany wasn’t sure. Taylor had always been fair and generous to his valet. But never in Sands’s restless life had he let much time go by before succumbing to his fetish for self-destruction.
For Tiffany, what made the valet’s attitude all the more troubling was the .45-caliber Colt revolver he carried around. Sands’s time in the military had taught him a lot about guns. One time, when Taylor was trying to fit the shoulder piece onto the German Luger he owned, Sands quickly stepped in to help. “Without a word, Sands took up the two, and by one motion fitted them together,” an observer would recall. Taylor was astonished. “Is there anything Sands does not know?” he asked.
But Earl Tiffany found the valet’s proficiency with guns unnerving.
Stepping out of Taylor’s car one day, Tiffany saw Sands waiting for him. In his chubby hand he held the Colt revolver, and he stuck it alongside the McFarlan’s door. When Tiffany asked what the idea was, Sands just laughed and walked away.
For all their shared love of mischief, Sands made Tiffany uneasy. When he was asked to describe the valet, the chauffeur used one word.
Ungodly.
CHAPTER 18
SO THIS IS WHAT IS GOING ON
Mary was writing letters again.
Dipping her pen into the inkwell, she composed her thoughts. In front of her lay a page of her blue butterfly stationery. Filled with emotion, Mary began to write, her pen making a frantic scratching sound as it crossed the paper.
Mr. Taylor might have been trying to keep his distance from her, but Mary would not be ignored.
“I wrote letters,” she’d admit. “Passionate, impulsive letters. I did everything I could to make him break his resolve and marry at once. I loved him, oh, so sincerely—and he loved me.” That much she’d never doubt. Mr. Taylor had told her so, Mary insisted, “many, many times.”
She folded the letter, squirted it with perfume, and slipped it inside an envelope. Then, in her flowery little girl’s script, she addressed it to the man she wished to serve as she “would have served the Lord.”
Jazz Sands sniffed the letter, laughed, and passed it to Earl Tiffany.
Dearest—
I love you—I love you—I love you—
This was followed by nine small x’s and one enormous X that took up most of the page. The letter was signed, “Yours always—Mary.”
Taylor’s two servants got a good kick out of that.
Living with her mother was hell. Terrible memories sometimes overwhelmed her. The sickening odor as her beloved doll burned in the oven. The cold metal and the rough fingers as the abortionist violated her body.
As soon as Mrs. Shelby wasn’t looking, Mary bolted.
Hopping into her little blue runabout, she sped over to the Famous Players studio on Sunset Boulevard. Through the front gates she ran, her blond curls bouncing on her shoulders. As a top star, Mary could go where she liked. No guard was going to bar her from a set. She made a beeline for the company shooting Taylor’s new picture, The Lifted Veil.
From across the set, Taylor’s screenwriter, Julia Crawford-Ivers, a sharp, sturdy lady of fifty-two, caught sight of Mary’s approach. It wasn’t the first time the petite actress had barged onto one of Taylor’s sets, and Ivers wasn’t happy to see her. “Oh, there is little Mary again,” the older woman said in exasperation. “What can she be wanting this time?”
When Mary reached her, Ivers tweaked her chin as if she were a child.
Mary resented Ivers’s condescension. Behind the screenwriter’s back, she called her a “very fat, large woman.” Ivers had the power to rile Mary like few others. She was always hanging around, refusing to budge from Mr. Taylor’s side. Would Mary never get the chance to see her great love alone again?
Not if Ivers could help it. The screenwriter knew how harassed the director felt, and she felt duty-bound to protect him. So she made sure to position her considerable bulk in front of Taylor whenever Mary came around making a pest of herself. Furious, Mary finally turned on her heel and stomped out.
But she had no intention of giving up.
In the little nook under the director’s stairs, the telephone was ringing.
Earl Tiffany, passing by, answered. It
was Mary Miles Minter, asking to speak to Mr. Taylor. As both he and Sands had been instructed, Tiffany replied that the director was out.
Mary didn’t believe him. Hopping back into her little blue car, she zipped across town to Alvarado Court. When she came trudging through the courtyard and saw that Mr. Taylor was at home, she looked to Tiffany “as if she were about to cry her eyes out.” Faced with the delicate task of calming the distraught young woman, Taylor sent his chauffeur home, telling him he wouldn’t be needed anymore that day. The cynical Tiffany assumed that meant Taylor was getting ready to take the diminutive teenage star to bed.
Not quite. As kindly as he could, Taylor told Mary that she shouldn’t contact him again, that if he wanted to see her, he would telephone. Eventually Mary agreed to return to her car and drive back to her mother’s new rented mansion on Seventh and South New Hampshire Avenues.
It was only another strategic retreat.
George Hopkins sat at his desk at the studio, catercorner to Taylor’s, dreaming the impossible. He knew that his relationship with the director would always need to be discreet, that he could never hope for more than what they already had—an association that, while intimate, was also irregular and indefinite. But that didn’t stop Hopkins from wishing for more, imagining what it might be like to be with Taylor “all of the time, to live with him, and for the whole world to know” of their love.
It was a fanciful pipe dream.
Then his phone rang. On the other end was the actress Vivian Martin, whom Hopkins planned to escort to the opening of Verdi’s Otello at the Philharmonic Auditorium the next night. But Martin was calling to say she had the flu. Hopkins said he hoped she’d feel better soon, then hung up the phone thoughtfully. A crazy thought was taking shape in his head.
Leaning across Taylor’s desk, Hopkins impulsively asked the director to be his date instead.
Taylor looked over at the young man with those bracing blue eyes of his. To Hopkins’s great surprise, he accepted his invitation.
Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood Page 12