Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

by William J. Mann

  Mabel grinned and guessed correctly: a translation of Nietzsche and Rosa Mundi by Ethel M. Dell, the popular English romance novelist. No doubt she’d been hinting to Billy she wanted them, and she was delighted. Billy had introduced her to so many great writers. Her current favorite was Stephen Leacock, the Canadian humorist who reminded some of Mark Twain. She also “surprisingly, tenderly understood” the deeply psychological novels of Knut Hamsun, who’d just won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  How transformative Billy had been for her. As she leafed through his latest gifts, Mabel was happy and grateful. What would she ever do without him?

  Outside on Alvarado Street, the night was getting darker.

  Mrs. Marie Stone, age fifty, was walking up the block from South Carondelet Street to babysit for her nine-year-old granddaughter, who lived with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Wachter, at 412A Alvarado Court, on the other side of the complex from Taylor. As Mrs. Stone paused at the corner of Sixth, she noticed a man apparently waiting for the streetcar. But the streetcar came and went, and the man did not board. Instead, he walked “aimlessly” up Alvarado, Mrs. Stone observed.

  For some reason, the man made Mrs. Stone nervous. She kept a safe distance behind him. Under the glow of the streetlamps, she could discern only a few details about the man. He wore an ill-fitting dark suit that bulged at the collar, tan oxford shoes, and a cap that was either plaid or checked. Mrs. Stone couldn’t tell the man’s age, but she could see that he was of medium height, with a ruddy complexion, and that his neck and earlobes were thick.

  For a moment she thought the man might have been Edward Sands, Mr. Taylor’s former valet, whom Mrs. Stone had seen many times in Alvarado Court while visiting her daughter. Sands was bowlegged, so his walk was recognizable. But she couldn’t be sure.

  At some point the man abruptly stopped walking. As Mrs. Stone watched, he “transferred something from his left hip pocket to the right-hand pocket of his coat.” Then he turned right on Maryland Street and disappeared from view. Mrs. Stone, heading up the steps to her daughter’s home in Alvarado Court, thought no more about the stranger.

  Maryland Street ran directly behind Taylor’s apartment.

  As Mabel and Billy talked, Peavey wheeled in a silver-and-cut-glass tray bearing a martini shaker and a couple of large stemmed glasses.

  “How do you do, Miss Normand?” the valet asked, bowing. “I trust all is well with you.”

  Mabel couldn’t help but laugh. She found Peavey comical. He dressed so colorfully and spoke so effeminately. “All’s well, Henry, thanks,” she managed to say. She didn’t notice how the smile shriveled on Peavey’s face. She had no clew that Peavey resented the way she laughed at him.

  The valet informed Taylor that he had washed the supper dishes, turned back the covers of his bed, and placed some ice water on the bedside table. Would there be anything else? Taylor told him that was all and bid him a good night. “And don’t worry,” he called after Peavey. “I think I can fix up everything downtown tomorrow.”

  After the valet had left, Mabel asked Taylor what he’d meant.

  He proceeded to fill her in about Henry’s troubles “at some length,” Mabel recalled, detailing the valet’s arrest and his visit to see the judge about the charge. Taylor told Mabel he’d put up a bond of $200 to secure Peavey’s release.

  Then he suggested they move over to the William and Mary dining table, where they clinked glasses and sipped Henry’s orange-infused martinis. Mabel lit up a cigarette. They talked about whether Sands would ever be caught, and about Mabel’s work on Suzanna, and about the upcoming cameramen’s ball, which they both planned to attend. The gin slid down easily, and soon they were both just a little bit happier than they had been moments before.

  For Taylor, after weeks of anxiety, a few moments of respite with Mabel must have felt like heaven.

  Catercorner from his apartment, Taylor’s neighbors in 406B were sitting down to dinner. Douglas MacLean was an actor who’d worked for the director in a couple of pictures, though at the moment he was under contract to Thomas Ince. His wife, Faith, was an East Coast debutante, the daughter of a former speaker of the New York Assembly. Their Danish-born maid, Christina Jewett, was carrying the various courses in and out of the dining room.

  On one of her passes through the kitchen, Jewett paused. From outside the window, she could hear footsteps “come from the corner and go down in the alley” that ran behind the house. At that moment, Mrs. MacLean rang the bell, so Jewett had to hustle the next course out to her employers. But when she came back into the kitchen, she could still hear the footsteps. Jewett thought the man was now walking out toward the garage.

  The garage sat between the MacLeans’ apartment and Taylor’s.

  Mabel was playing the piano for Taylor, making him laugh by hitting a lot of deliberately bad chords. Finally, around 7:35, she announced that she was tired, and Billy admitted that he had a lot of checks to write, as it was getting near tax time. But he might call her later to see if she’d had the chance to dive into Nietzsche. Mabel told him not to call until nine o’clock.

  Taylor helped her into her coat and walked her out to her car.

  As usual, he left his front door open.

  At the end of the sidewalk, Mabel’s chauffeur, Davis, stood amid a litter of peanut shells. Glancing inside the car, Taylor laughed out loud. There lay a copy of Freud, which Mabel was in the midst of reading, as well as the latest issue of the Police Gazette, the celebrated tabloid of true crime, sports, and burlesque.

  “Good Lord, Mabel,” Taylor said. “You certainly are going for heavy reading this winter.” But that was what he loved about her. He kissed her good-bye. She pulled his earlobe. “Toodle-oo, Billy,” Mabel said, slipping into her car. He told her he’d call around nine o’clock to see how she liked her new books.

  “As my car turned around,” Mabel would remember, “I waved at him. He was partly up a little stairs there. I looked back and we wafted kisses on our hands to each other for as long as I could see him standing there.”

  It was approximately 7:45.

  Taylor stood on the curb waving to Mabel until her car passed out of sight.

  Then he turned and headed back up through the courtyard to his apartment.

  CHAPTER 34

  A SHOT

  After dinner, Faith MacLean was feeling chilly. Temperatures outside had slipped precariously close to freezing. Sending Douglas upstairs to fetch a small electric heater, she settled onto the davenport to do some knitting.

  Faith was a pretty woman. Thirty years old, she had been married to Douglas for eight years. They had no children, and despite her husband’s increasing popularity in the movies, Faith wasn’t exactly enamored of Hollywood.

  The events of this evening would do nothing to change her mind.

  At about 7:50, Faith heard “a shattering report,” as she called it. It was a muffled sound, but still it seemed to penetrate every corner of the room.

  “Wasn’t that a shot?” Christina Jewett asked, leaning in from the kitchen.

  Faith couldn’t be sure. Living so close to Alvarado Street, they often heard the backfire of automobiles. Standing, she walked across the room and opened the front door. “There were several lights in the living room, back of me,” Faith would recall. “They reflected from the screen door.” So she pressed forward against the screen to see better, peering out into the dark.

  She spotted a man.

  “He stood on a corner of Mr. Taylor’s porch,” Faith would later reveal. The man’s back was to her, and Taylor’s door was open. Amber light spilled out into the darkness.

  As Faith watched, the man turned to look at her. “He did not seem surprised or startled,” she said, “surely not alarmed.”

  Although the darkness made it impossible to see much, Faith felt certain of one thing. As the man looked at her, he suddenly smiled.

  “I could see the corners of his mouth curl in the shadow of his cap,” she said.
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  He looked stocky, Faith thought, of medium height. He might have had a prominent nose, though that could have been merely the shadows playing tricks. The man seemed to be wearing a muffler around his neck; it was certainly cold enough for that. And his cap, Faith thought, might have been plaid.

  Then, as though Mr. Taylor had called from the inside the house, “the man turned away,” Faith would report, “walked to the door and almost disappeared inside. It seemed he was bidding his host good-bye. It was all done in a moment.”

  Then he closed the door. He didn’t slam it or shut it with any particular heed. He just closed the door as anyone might—anyone without a care in the world.

  As Faith watched, the man walked down the porch steps and turned back toward her. He crossed in front of Taylor’s house and headed “into the walk between the houses.” In seconds he had disappeared into the dark.

  Faith thought “absolutely nothing” of what she had seen.

  She closed the front door.

  Douglas came down with the electric heater. They set up a table and played dominoes for a while. Then they went to bed and slept soundly, until Henry Peavey’s screams woke them the next morning.

  PART TWO

  HUNTING, HUSTLING, AND HIDING

  CHAPTER 35

  THE DEAD MAN ON THE FLOOR

  The MacLeans weren’t the only ones who heard Peavey crying that Taylor was dead.

  In 408A, Verne Dumas was shaving at his bathroom sink when the valet’s voice suddenly shattered the peaceful morning. Pulling on a bathrobe, Dumas hustled out into the courtyard, along with his roommate, Neil Harrington. Two doors down, at 406A, Emile Jesserun, the proprietor of Alvarado Court, also hurried down his front steps into the chilly air.

  But upstairs in 402A, Edna Purviance, Chaplin’s beautiful leading lady, wasn’t going anywhere. Awakened by all the commotion, she peered down into the courtyard, watching Peavey run around in circles and several men in bathrobes scurry across the grass. The angle of Purviance’s apartment prevented her from seeing Taylor’s residence, but the night before, when she’d returned home around midnight, she’d noticed that all of the director’s lights had still been blazing. Now Edna was terrified. Pulling herself away from the chaotic scene outside, she picked up the telephone. If Taylor was indeed dead, she knew someone for whom that news would be very important.

  Jesserun, the landlord, reached Taylor’s apartment first, with Harrington and Dumas close on his heels. Peavey followed, fluttering in terror. Jesserun had been sick in bed these last few days; traipsing in to look at a corpse was hardly how he wanted to be spending his morning. But the Jamaican-born Jesserun wasn’t just the proprietor of Alvarado Court; he’d also designed and built these apartments. This was his territory. He might have been ailing, but he knew it was his responsibility to see what had happened in 404B.

  The four men crowded into Taylor’s small living room.

  The corpse lay at their feet, head toward the west, arms at its sides. Dumas reached down and touched the dead man. He found Taylor’s arm “absolutely stiff.” They could all clearly see the puddle of congealed blood behind his head, staining the expensive purple Axminster carpet.

  A few minutes later Douglas MacLean appeared at the door. His boyish movie-star good looks lit up with alarm. “Mr. Taylor is dead,” Jesserun told him.

  How had this happened? MacLean asked. No one was sure. Except for the blood under his head, the dead man looked immaculate. His clothes were smooth and undisturbed. He lay flat on his back, not twisted in any way, as if he had calmly and carefully laid himself down to die. Taylor’s coat was arranged “perfectly along his body,” MacLean observed, not “thrown back or anything.” Looking down at the corpse, the actor was struck by the uncanny look of the body. “He looked just like a dummy in a department store,” MacLean said.

  Peavey finally collected himself enough to take a look around the place. Nothing seemed out of order. The place was exactly as he’d left it the night before. The serving tray still held the cocktail shaker Taylor had used to pour drinks for himself and Miss Normand. Two stemmed glasses stood in mute testimony to the evening’s conviviality. The water of the melted ice cubes was flecked with orange pulp. Nearby an ashtray held the stub of a cigarette.

  A quick check of the rest of the house also revealed nothing amiss. On top of the piano, several delicate ivory figures stood undisturbed. On a nearby table, a hand-painted ribbon dangled from a book, Moon-Calf by Floyd Dell, marking the place where Taylor had left off reading. The director’s rolltop desk was covered with neat stacks of canceled checks, along with a ledger. From the looks of it, Taylor had been preparing his tax returns when he died. His checkbook was open, his pen still filled with ink. Above the desk hung a photograph of Mabel Normand.

  Peavey checked the back door. It was locked, just as he had left it. The front door had also been locked when he arrived, but that locked automatically when it was closed.

  The only elements in the entire place that seemed out of whack—other than the dead man on the floor, of course—were the rug, one corner of which, near Taylor’s feet, “was a little bit kicked up,” Peavey observed, and a chair, usually kept against the wall right inside the front door, which now stood athwart Taylor’s left foot.

  Yet it was the position of the body—so neat, so composed—that perplexed observers the most. At last Harrington expressed what everyone seemed to be thinking: “I don’t believe the man fell in that position.”

  Suddenly Taylor’s fellow director and friend Charles Maigne came rushing through the door. Maigne lived about a mile away; how he had known about Taylor’s death so soon, no one knew at first. But he too was “stumped” to understand how a man could die so neatly. Maigne kept “wondering how on earth Bill could have fallen the way he did.”

  But maybe, Douglas MacLean suggested, he hadn’t simply fallen.

  They all turned to look at him.

  MacLean volunteered that both he and his wife had heard something the night before. They both thought it might have been a gunshot. Jesserun admitted he’d heard the sound, too, though at the time he’d shrugged it off as the backfire of a car. But like the others, he’d taken note of the fact that the lights in Taylor’s house had been burning all night long.

  The suggestion of foul play weighed heavily in the frosty morning air. As Harrington and Dumas, still in their nightclothes, traipsed back across the courtyard to their apartment, a curious woman opened her window to ask MacLean what had happened. The actor replied with a single word: “Murder.”

  A little before eight o’clock, the apartment began to fill up with new arrivals. Howard Fellows, alerted by Peavey, arrived with his brother Harry. Not long afterward came three more of Taylor’s colleagues: Julia Crawford-Ivers; her son, cameraman Jimmy Van Trees; and George Hopkins, his face ashen with grief and shock at the sight of his lover’s corpse.

  A few minutes later Detective Thompson Zeigler, who’d been telephoned by Jesserun, came ambling through the court. A heavyset man in his sixties, Zeigler was nearing the end of a thirty-year tenure with the Los Angeles Police Department. And from what the experienced detective could see, there was no murder here.

  The doors had all been locked, he determined, and all the pins were still in the downstairs windows. No one had gone in or out. And on the body, Zeigler could see no signs of violence. Besides, Taylor wore a wristwatch, and a large gold band with a diamond on one finger. If he’d been killed by a burglar, Zeigler pointed out, surely those items would have been taken. The policeman did note that one hand of the corpse was outstretched, bent at the wrist, almost as if—in his final moments of life—Taylor had made an attempt to clutch at something.

  Upon getting Jesserun’s call, Zeigler had telephoned a doctor, who soon arrived, carrying his medicine bag. Walking around the corpse, the doctor made no attempt to move the body. After a few moments he confirmed Zeigler’s instinct and announced that Taylor had died of natural causes. A stomach hemorrhage, he
speculated, which would explain the blood behind the head, which had presumably drained from the mouth. It was not an official ruling, of course. The coroner was on his way, and it would be left to him to determine the precise cause of death down at the morgue. But that was this doctor’s conclusion.

  Douglas MacLean wasn’t convinced. What about the shot he had heard, and the fact that Taylor lay there so neatly, as if someone had straightened him out after he fell? No one, MacLean insisted, could look like a department store dummy after collapsing from a stomach hemorrhage.

  The doctor seemed uninterested in MacLean’s arguments, but they did trouble the others gathered in the room, who now included another friend of the dead man, the actor Arthur Hoyt, who’d probably been alerted by Charles Maigne. By now Taylor’s small living room was nearly overrun with people. Maigne noticed that the stack of canceled checks, so neatly ordered on Taylor’s desk when he’d arrived, had been disturbed, brushed by someone’s coattail as they’d maneuvered around the corpse. Several checks were drifting down to the floor like autumn leaves, coming to rest beside the dead man who had written them.

  Into this roomful of buzzing suspicions and compromised evidence now stepped a middle-aged man wearing a pair of pince-nez. His hair was carefully combed, sitting high on his prominent forehead. Charles Eyton, general manager of Famous Players–Lasky, had received a call from Harry Fellows, telling him of Taylor’s death. He’d zoomed down from his home on Vine Street at the base of the Hollywood Hills to Alvarado Court, and from the moment he arrived, it was clear that he was in charge.

  Well acquainted with the studio executive, Zeigler offered no protest. Over the last decade the veteran police detective had learned to give studio chiefs considerable leeway. He’d witnessed the spectacular rise to power of the motion picture industry—and in particular, of Famous Players, the most powerful of all. Zeigler had come to accept that when a studio official was present, he sometimes had to take a step back.