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

by William J. Mann

  “It’s Mary Miles Minter,” shouted the little figure, nearly obscured by a phalanx of blue-uniformed officers.

  Mabel told her to come upstairs.

  The police stepped back, letting Mary march determinedly past them to the second floor.

  Mabel beckoned Mary to follow her into the bathroom.

  “We’ll run the water,” Mabel said, shutting the door behind them. “If they’ve got anything going, they can’t hear our conversation.”

  Mabel knew the long, tortured history that festered between Mary and Billy. She wasn’t about to let anyone hear what Mary might say about their so-called romance.

  The two women weren’t exactly friends. There was nearly a ten-year age difference between them, they’d never worked at the same studio, and their temperaments were as different as chalk and cheese. But Mabel had made efforts to be kind to Mary, perhaps because she felt sorry for her, living with such heartbreak over Billy. The previous summer, she had sent the younger woman flowers before her trip to Europe. And while Mary might have been envious of Mabel’s closer relationship with Taylor, she couldn’t deny that the comedienne had been one of the few people in Hollywood who had been genuinely decent to her. So she had felt safe, at this terrible time, coming to Mabel.

  She also seemed determined to find out just what Mabel knew. As the water splashed into the sink, Mary asked if she and Taylor had been lovers.

  “We were good friends,” Mabel told her. “But we were never lovers.”

  Mary breathed a sigh of relief. But what had Mr. Taylor ever said about her?

  Mabel was shrewd, and once again kind. She told the young woman exactly what she wanted to hear. “Mary,” Mabel said, “Billy worshiped the ground you walked on. But you were so young that he feared you would love him all the days of his life. He didn’t want to hurt you.”

  Such carefully chosen words reassured Mary that her deeply held beliefs were real. Mr. Taylor had loved her. He had truly, truly loved her.

  The two women turned off the water and emerged from the bathroom. The officers did not attempt to question Mary as she descended the steps of Mabel’s apartment. But they did take note of the young actress’s distress. Every last detail would be reported back to their superiors.

  The police wondered why was Miss Minter so upset. Why she was so desperate to speak to Mabel Normand. Just what sort of relationship did Mary Miles Minter have with Taylor?

  And what might she know about the events of the night before?

  As night fell, Charlotte Shelby withdrew to her mansion on South New Hampshire Avenue, where in the coming days she would keep a low profile. Unlike her daughter, the very private Mrs. Shelby did not draw attention to herself with frantic rides all over town. Instead, she continued overseeing the renovations of her house, stepping carefully through the sawdust and the plaster, doing her best to carry on even as the furor outside intensified. By minding her own business, Mrs. Shelby ensured that no policemen came knocking at her door.

  CHAPTER 37

  KING OF THE COPS

  Very early on February 3, 1922, barely twenty-four hours after Henry Peavey found the cold body of William Desmond Taylor sprawled out on his living room floor, Edgar C. King, forty-six, an eighteen-year veteran of the police force, made his way through the congested streets of downtown Los Angeles. Another frosty day was dawning over Southern California. Many of the ficus trees had browned overnight, and the palms seemed to tremble in the arctic air.

  Detective Sergeant King’s destination this morning was the white-marble Hall of Records on West Temple Street. The twelve-story structure, with its several peaked attics, soared over all the other buildings in the surrounding neighborhood. Even the majestic clock tower of the adjacent red-stone courthouse didn’t reach as high into the sky as the imposing Hall of Records.

  Sergeant King rode the elevator almost to the top.

  There, on the eleventh floor, higher than nearly everything else in the City of Angels, were the offices of the famous flamboyant “fightin’ prosecutor,” Thomas Lee Woolwine, who had summoned King into his presence.

  District Attorney Woolwine’s sobriquet came not only from the fierce battles he waged in courtrooms. A year earlier, he’d also hauled off and punched a defense lawyer, leading to a fine for contempt of court and the disruption of several trials. A few months later a county grand jury investigated Woolwine’s office, calling it a “carnival of extravagance, waste and corruption,” but most agreed the move was politically motivated (Woolwine was the rare Democrat in Republican Los Angeles) and the investigation went nowhere.

  Even with his penchant for grabbing the headlines, Woolwine retained a homespun air. His modest home in Echo Park was the best evidence against his enemies’ charges that he was accepting kickbacks. Although he was undeniably ambitious—he’d had his eye on the governor’s mansion for some time now and hoped to launch his campaign in the spring—his personal aspirations were tempered by an authentic commitment to justice. Catching Taylor’s killer would certainly boost his campaign for the state’s top job, but that didn’t make Woolwine’s passion for catching crooks any less genuine.

  Flush with excitement, King took a seat in front of the colorful DA. “The ‘bumping off’ of a famous person like William Desmond Taylor,” King would later write, “is the sort of oyster that any detective delights to open.” So he was elated when Woolwine, in his rich, melodious Tennessee accent, asked him to represent the district attorney’s office in the murder investigation. Woolwine wanted an ironclad case when the killer was brought to trial.

  What drove Eddie King wasn’t the prospect of glory, but the thrill of the hunt. Around the department, King was heralded as having “solved more major crime mysteries than any other police officer in Southern California.” Most famously, he’d helped catch the kidnappers of wealthy young Mrs. Gladys Wetherell a year earlier, by using new technology at the central telephone station to trace the kidnappers’ ransom calls. He’d also played a key role in the arrest of Louise Peete, a notorious murderess currently serving a life sentence.

  King brought Woolwine up to date on the Taylor case. The autopsy performed at the Overholtzer mortuary had located the .38-caliber soft-nosed bullet. The little blue slug had entered the victim’s left side, six and half inches below his armpit, before traveling upward through the seventh interspace of his ribs, penetrating his left lung, passing out of his chest and finally lodging in his neck. Such an unusual trajectory made a queer sort of sense: the holes on Taylor’s jacket and vest did not line up. The dead man’s arms had apparently been raised in the air when he was shot.

  Given the position of the body on the floor, police were speculating that Taylor had been seated at his desk at the time of the attack. The killer had likely snuck up behind him, either startling him enough that he threw his arms in the air, or ordering him to “stick ’em up.”

  That was all interesting. But what really got the detectives’ attention was what they’d found in Taylor’s papers. Not that there were many of them; King told Woolwine that several Famous Players employees had made off with armfuls of documents before Officer Zeigler had declared the apartment a crime scene. But the few scraps left behind by the studio people were provocative enough.

  The murdered director, it turned out, had led a whole other life before coming to Hollywood. His real name was William Deane-Tanner, and some years earlier he had walked out on his wife and daughter in New York. This past summer, however, according to letters found in the apartment, Taylor had met with his daughter, Ethel Daisy, on his way back from Europe. It was the first time she had seen her father in more than a decade.

  Was this girl the “secret sadness” Taylor had told friends about? Attempts were being made to reach the wife and daughter, who, according to the letters, were living in Mamaroneck, New York. Evidently in his last months Taylor had been trying to reconcile some of the secrets of his past. But, as King explained, the abandoned family was only one of many mysteries in
Taylor’s life.

  Considerable trouble had existed between the dead man and his former valet, Edward Sands. King gave Woolwine a full report of the stolen jewelry, the pawn tickets, and the warrant for Sands’s arrest. Friends and associates also told police about a series of harassing phone calls Taylor had received over the last few months. A conversation with Neil Harrington, one of the Alvarado Court neighbors who’d found the body, also revealed the fact that two men had tried to gain access to Taylor’s bungalow just a few days before the murder, and another person had been prowling around the place months earlier. For many detectives, this all pointed to Sands. Solving the Taylor murder, they believed, could be simply a matter of finding his former valet.

  But King wasn’t so sure, and he made his doubts clear to Woolwine. For one thing, Neil Harrington was absolutely certain that neither of the men he’d seen was Sands. Even more critically, King saw no logic in the theory that Sands would harass Taylor. What purpose would it serve? And why would a man wanted for a felony risk returning to Los Angeles? Why, for that matter, would Sands kill Taylor? Greed was Sands’s motivation. If Sands had been the one to pull the trigger, he would never have left behind the $78 in cash detectives found in Taylor’s jacket pocket, or the two-karat diamond ring or platinum watch he was wearing.

  To King, this case had “crime of passion” written all over it. Just what sort of passion, he wasn’t yet sure. But he knew it was impulsive. Reactive. Maybe it was motivated by revenge. Or jealousy. Maybe it had happened in the midst of an argument.

  Besides, their only eyewitness, Faith MacLean, was also emphatic that the man she’d seen leaving Taylor’s home was not Sands. And she knew the former valet. Even in the darkness, she would have recognized him. He was not as heavy as Sands, she said.

  Beyond that, MacLean hadn’t been able to give the detectives much to work with. All she’d been able to recall was that the man she’d seen had been clean-shaven and wearing a plaid or checkered cap. He was stocky, she thought—“not fat but stocky”—and possibly had a prominent nose. He gave off a “rough” sort of appearance, she said. Pressed for more, MacLean said, “He was dressed like my idea of a motion-picture burglar.” As for his age or his height, the young woman couldn’t say. Only later, after much pressure, did she guess that he might have been about thirty-five and that he stood, possibly, about five foot nine.

  Still, MacLean, along with Mabel Normand, had allowed detectives to establish a timeline of the killing. King told Woolwine there was general consensus that the killer had slipped into the bungalow during the few minutes when Taylor had been walking Normand to her car. He’d apparently been lurking in the shadows, waiting for an opportunity. The cement-paved alley behind the courtyard—the exact place where the MacLeans’ maid had heard someone walking—had been littered with six cigarette butts, some only half smoked, leading detectives to conclude that the man waiting there had been anxious. One cigarette—likely the last one the killer lit before he spotted Taylor walking off with Normand and quickly sneaked into the house—was barely touched.

  King estimated that probably no more than five minutes had passed between the time Taylor returned to his apartment and the time MacLean and others heard the shot. Whatever transpired between Taylor and his killer was brief. Either the man with the gun came and did what he intended to do quickly, or something unexpected happened that caused him to shoot.

  Taylor’s own gun had been found in a drawer upstairs. It had not been discharged.

  The director’s chauffeur, Howard Fellows, had rung Taylor’s doorbell at 8:15. There was no answer, Fellows told police, although the lights were on in the apartment; assuming the director was either asleep or out, Fellows had put the car in the garage and gone home. The chauffeur’s statement fit the detectives’ working timeline: by 8:15, Taylor had already been dead between twenty and twenty-five minutes.

  Eager for a scoop, reporters had been scrambling through the neighborhood since yesterday morning, digging up more witnesses. Only now, King said, were police getting around to interviewing these people themselves. Two guys at a nearby gas station were among the most important witnesses. They told of a stranger asking for Taylor’s address just a couple of hours before the murder. In addition, two streetcar operators reported a man boarding the Big Red at either 7:54 or 8:25—they couldn’t remember precisely which. Given how few passengers ever boarded at the Maryland Avenue stop, though, they took note of the man. All four witnesses described a similar suspect: aged about twenty-six or twenty-seven, with dark hair. Like the man MacLean saw, this man also wore a cap. But he was also described as being well dressed—hardly MacLean’s image of a motion-picture burglar.

  The newspapers, however, disregarded the discrepancies and jumped to the conclusion that the witnesses were describing the same man.

  King was absolutely convinced that the culprit was not Edward Sands. When Floyd Hartley, the gas station owner, was shown a photo of Taylor’s former valet, he was “inclined to think they were different individuals.” Besides, as King pointed out to Woolwine, why would Sands need to ask directions to Taylor’s apartment?

  King told Woolwine that while many on the force were convinced that Sands was the killer, there were other possibilities. Taylor might have been paying off a blackmailer. Police were learning that the director was considered “the easiest ‘touch’ in Hollywood . . . an extremely liberal man to borrow money from.” Taylor’s books, in full view on his rolltop desk, were full of stubs marked “cash.” These were presumed to be loans to individuals, but King wondered if some of them had been blackmail payments. Certainly a man with an abandoned family was susceptible to blackmail. The checks ranged from $200 to $1,500. Moreover, investigators were befuddled by a yawning disparity of some $13,000 between the figures Taylor had been preparing to report on his tax form and a preliminary accounting of his income and expenses.

  Finally, King reported, some were speculating that Taylor might have been killed in a dispute over a woman. This was the theory the newspapers, especially the ones controlled by William Randolph Hearst, were favoring in their headlines:

  JEALOUS MAN HUNTED AS SLAYER OF TAYLOR. POLICE CONVINCED

  EITHER WOMAN KILLED DIRECTOR OR FURNISHED MOTIVE.

  In fact, police were hardly convinced of such a fact. Most were still betting on Sands. But jealousy as a motive did fit King’s hunch that the murder was impulsive, a crime of passion.

  But why had a woman even entered the speculation, given that all of the witnesses insisted they had seen a man?

  King explained that detectives kept hearing about two particular females in Taylor’s life. Both ladies had given them reasons to be suspicious. Mabel Normand was a known addict, with drug dealers and bootleggers as contacts. And Mary Miles Minter had made quite the spectacle of herself when Taylor’s body was found. Exactly what was her relationship to the dead man?

  Woolwine had his own suspicions. Finally he offered King a lead of his own, handing the detective a letter across his desk.

  To his trained eye, the letter struck King as the work of a woman, evidently “a lady of refinement.” The letter informed the police that a search of the basement of Mabel Normand’s apartment at Seventh and Vermont would reveal a .38-caliber pearl-handled revolver. Taylor had been killed with a .38-caliber bullet.

  All sorts of tips like this had been flowing into the district attorney’s office, by phone, letter, and telegram. But this one, Woolwine thought, warranted an investigation as soon as possible. Taking the assignment, King headed out of the Hall of Records to pay a visit to Mabel Normand.

  Back on Alvarado Court, other agents from Woolwine’s office were mapping out Taylor’s bungalow and searching the surrounding neighborhood. Fingerprints were taken, but too many people had elbowed their way into the apartment on the morning the body was found, moving chairs, sitting at tables, and opening drawers, for the police to expect anything very useful to be found.

  The district men, as they were call
ed, wore more expensive suits than the gumshoes on the police force. With solemn, serious faces, they kept largely to themselves. The city cops viewed the district men as inefficient interlopers. But even worse, from their perspective, was a third investigation team, this time from the county sheriff’s office, who the cops viewed as too lenient. Rivalries and tensions were percolating everywhere.

  Stopping off at Alvarado Court on his way to Mabel’s, Eddie King suddenly found himself in the middle. He would have to be a mediator as much as a detective in this mess. But King was up to the task. A native of Indiana like Will Hays, King possessed the same sort of midwestern sangfroid. He was plainspoken, a devoted family man, married for twenty-five years. He and his wife had raised their two children in a modest home on West Forty-Fifth Street in working-class South Los Angeles, a world away from the upscale Westlake district where Taylor had lived. Like Hays, too, King was a short man; “the smallest man in stature on the police force,” one report called him. But that slight frame contained a substantial mind. Six years earlier King had been sent from police headquarters to the East Side substation, where he’d taken the younger plainclothesmen under his wing to train them as top-quality detectives. King’s reputation endured, which was why Woolwine had made him his point man.

  But the DA wanted him to work on his own, “independent of all officers of the police department.” King knew that would cause only further resentment; besides, it wasn’t his style. A lone-wolf approach hindered good detective work; King needed collaboration. So, in defiance of Woolwine’s orders, he approached Sergeant Jesse Winn, another longtime veteran of the force, and asked him to partner with him on the case. Winn agreed.

  The two detectives complemented each other well. Winn was younger than King, just turned forty, and considerably taller than his partner. He was also more aggressive, the bad cop to King’s good. Since Winn had already interviewed Mabel Normand the day before, it made sense that he accompany King now to the actress’s fashionable abode on Seventh Street.