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

by William J. Mann

  Could Normand really be hiding the gun that had killed Taylor? Had she pulled the trigger? Even if her story checked out that she’d left Taylor and gone home to bed, she still could have come back and plugged him. More than one detective had noted that if the gun had been fired while Taylor was embracing his killer, and if the killer had been short—about Mabel’s size, in fact—then the unusual angle of the bullet through the body might have made sense. Had Mabel been in Taylor’s arms when she shot him in the ribs?

  Or maybe one of her drug contacts had offed him. Might Mabel have been in cahoots with her chauffeur, William Davis? The police were trying to determine if Davis “handled any hop.” Wallace Reid, it was said, received his drug deliveries through his chauffeur. Maybe Mabel did as well.

  King and Winn pulled up in front of the actress’s apartment.

  On edge, distraught, red-eyed from crying, Mabel did not try to stop the two detectives from searching the place. She stood back, morose and trembling, as King and Winn carefully scoured the place. “From cellar to attic we went,” King said, “devoting a great length of time to turning over everything where it would be possible to hide a gun.” Finally, in a dresser drawer in Mabel’s bedroom, the two cops found something. Not just one gun. But two.

  King inspected them closely. Both were .25-caliber revolvers, “neither of which could have had any connection to the murder,” he realized.

  King turned to Mabel and apologized for disturbing her. He and Winn left her alone without any further questioning.

  This “beautiful, impulsive, unfortunate” woman, King firmly believed, had no involvement in Taylor’s death. Mabel was a victim herself, of timing and circumstance. “I do not hesitate to say,” King informed Woolwine, “that all suspicion cast upon her was unjust.”

  He wasn’t so sure he could say the same about that other woman in Taylor’s life, however.

  And so King made plans to interview Mary Miles Minter.

  CHAPTER 38

  THE MORAL FAILURES OF ONE CONCERN

  At about the same time that Eddie King was searching Mabel Normand’s basement in Los Angeles, Adolph Zukor was being driven downtown to Pier 54 in New York. The studio chief traveled in the utmost secrecy. He didn’t want any reporters on the pier to spot him.

  He was hurrying to meet Cecil B. DeMille, arriving from Europe onboard the Aquitania. Night had fallen. A brackish mist rose from the Hudson River, allowing Creepy to move easily among the shadows. He knew the press dearly wanted a statement from him about the death of Taylor, and he just as dearly did not want to accommodate them.

  Zukor had cabled DeMille to apprise him of the Taylor tragedy. The message had reached the director somewhere in the North Atlantic. No doubt at Zukor’s urging, DeMille then sent his own ship-to-shore cable, explaining that he would not be able to take questions from the press when he disembarked. He explained he was suffering from an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, which, while not serious, was still “exceedingly painful,” forcing him to be carried off the ship on a stretcher. Zukor hoped DeMille’s little stunt would keep the hounds at bay.

  But even as the mogul scurried down the pier, shrouded in fog, one of those infernal muckrakers had already made his way on board the ship and cornered DeMille in his stateroom, compelling him into making a statement.

  “I have just heard of the terrible tragedy,” DeMille said. “You may look all the world over and you could not find a cleaner man than Taylor.” When the reporter suggested that a woman might be behind the killing, DeMille instinctively guessed the studio’s position and discouraged such talk. “Mr. Taylor was not that kind of a man,” he insisted. Thankfully, the stretcher arrived at that point, and DeMille demurred from any further comment.

  On the dock, Zukor facilitated the transfer of his top director from ship to ambulance. From there they zigzagged their way uptown to the Hotel Ambassador at Fifty-First Street and Park Avenue. Finally behind closed doors, Zukor filled DeMille in on all the horrific events of the past two days. The Taylor murder was only one part of it. Fatty Arbuckle’s trial had just ended in a second hung jury. Not only were they faced with many months of the Taylor investigation, but they’d also have to endure the gruesome details of Fatty’s pajama party for a third time.

  The papers were absolutely giddy with scandal. Given the boost in sales they’d gotten from the Arbuckle calamities, editors were covering Taylor’s murder with comparable headlines and sensation. “The murder of any screen director would have brought enough bad publicity,” Zukor said. But “Taylor’s strange career,” he realized, “compounded the trouble.”

  As it turned out, Zukor’s esteemed defender of the faith hadn’t been quite as virtuous as he, and everyone else, had thought. Not only had Taylor abandoned a wife and daughter, for whom the press and police were still searching, but he’d also been supporting a sister-in-law, Mrs. Ada Deane-Tanner, and her two daughters in Monrovia, California, because his brother had also deserted his family. Had the two brothers run off together on some nefarious scheme? Some were speculating that Denis Deane-Tanner had actually been the man others knew as Edward Sands, and that he may have killed his brother to avoid exposure.

  Zukor was appalled by all the lurid speculation. And yet what a coarse, meandering life the supposedly upstanding Taylor had led before settling down in Hollywood. Sometimes he’d been known as Tanner, sometimes as Cunningham Deane. He’d worked on the railroad down South and prospected for gold in the frozen Yukon. Day by day, reporters were locating more people who had known Taylor in his various other lives. Hollywood had known that the director was a man of mystery. But no one had suspected he’d taken $600 from the antique store he’d managed in New York and then disappeared—making him as much a petty criminal as his valet Sands. Why had he been so desperate, gossips wondered, to run away from his wife?

  The Hearst papers suggested an answer.

  “Find the woman!” their headlines screamed. How dearly the Hearst editors wanted the murderer to be a woman. In the past year, two high-profile female killers, Louise Peete and Madalynne Obenchain, had kept their broadsheets selling like hotcakes. Fervently hoping for another glamorous murderess, Hearst’s reporters were bending over backward to promote the theory. “It is police experience,” the Los Angeles Examiner wrote, “that down below the surface of many such a crime may be found a woman.”

  Yet even as Famous Players tried to dismiss the “woman theory,” calling it “Hearst hyperbole,” the newspaper did have some basis for its stories. Detective Sergeant Eddie King, Woolwine’s man on the case, had admitted to reporters that despite the fact that Mrs. MacLean, the chief eyewitness, was very clear that she had seen a man leaving Taylor’s apartment, it was possible a woman had been the reason the killer had pulled the trigger.

  Under this theory, Thomas Dixon, who’d been courting Mary Miles Minter, was being hunted for questioning. To Zukor’s great distress, another Famous Players name, this time their innocent little blond star, was being dragged into the scandal.

  For the studio, this was as bad as it got. But if Zukor thought it couldn’t get any worse, all he had to do was wait a day.

  The headline practically shouted up at him from the newspaper on his desk.

  DEAD DIRECTOR VISITED QUEER PLACES!

  With a sinking heart, Zukor read on. Taylor’s patronage of Los Angeles’ red-light district was described in sensational detail—complete with the implication that the director had frequented all-male houses of pleasure. While some unnamed friends suggested Taylor had merely been seeking “color” for a picture, the damage was done. His “queer habits” would henceforth be recurring themes in the syndicated dispatches of yellow journalists Edward Doherty and Wallace Smith. The reputation of Hollywood’s noble champion lay in tatters.

  By association, Zukor feared the same for Famous Players.

  His foes were already pointing fingers. “It is a shame,” Sydney Cohen said accusingly, “that some seem to permit such license. The ent
ire motion-picture industry should not be blamed for the moral failures of one concern.”

  For the first three days of the story, the studio had failed utterly in the message wars. Trying to contain the “woman theory,” Zukor’s deputy, Charley Eyton, had only made things worse. “The police theory that a woman is at the bottom of the Taylor murder mystery was scouted at the Lasky studio today,” the Los Angeles Record dutifully reported. “I know positively that Bill Taylor was not intimate with any woman,” Eyton was quoted as saying. But the next day, when stories of Taylor visiting the “queer places” broke, he surely regretted his choice of words.

  Lasky did what he could to contain the damage, telling the press that the studio was pledging “resources of time and money” to assist police in “the detection of the murderer.” But that, of course, was a lie. Lasky had no intention of helping the police.

  At least not until he and Zukor figured out how to deal with the information they’d discovered in Taylor’s papers.

  At home that night, Zukor told his valet to start packing his bags. It was time for the film chief to take a rare trip out to the land of palm trees and swimming pools.

  The murder of Taylor—the man who’d once argued for the decency and integrity of Tinseltown—ratcheted the campaign of the reformers up to new levels. “Only a while ago,” one editorial chided, “it was Miss Thomas going the primrose path to perdition in the hell-holes of Paris. Then [it was] the divorce scandal involving the Fairbankses, then the nasty mess in San Francisco. Now [it is] the murder of the director Taylor.” The cumulative effect of these scandals and moral lapses, Hollywood’s critics charged, would be to destroy the morals of those millions of children who attended the movies faithfully every week—children who would now, in the wake of Taylor’s death, be subjected to stories of drugs, love affairs, and abandoned families. “This fearsome scandal [would] have the effect of cleansing a profession which has recently shown alarming signs of moral decay,” predicted another editorial.

  No wonder Zukor was heading to the coast to take charge.

  Even as the film chief bought his ticket, moralists were thundering that the Taylor murder had exposed the “mad pursuit of twentieth-century happiness”—which, in their definition, meant “loose morals, bachelor apartments, gay parties, drug sessions, new sensations and new experiences.” Such depravity, they charged, was the fault of Hollywood’s overpaid libertines. “The thing to get excited about, to our way of thinking, is not the fact that Hollywood stages some wild parties,” wrote one paper in the nation’s heartland. “They can be found on every Main Street. But the fact that a chit of a girl with a pretty face and an intellect that aspires no higher than The Police Gazette [an allusion to Mabel, obviously] can earn more in a year than we pay the President of the United States. Surely our standards of values are all wrong. Maybe we ought to pass a law about it, or have a congressional investigation, or something.”

  Pass a law. Congressional investigation. Such words struck cold terror into Zukor’s heart. Inking his fingers with as many newspapers as he could read, the film chief recognized the stakes at hand. “The motion picture industry in this country,” wrote the McKean (PA) Democrat, “as the result of another scandal, this time a murder, is on trial for its continued existence.”

  To Zukor, such reports were not hyperbole.

  If he had been able to foresee Taylor’s murder, the movie chief might have written February instead of March onto Will Hays’s contract. How helpful it would have been if Hays had already been on the job, giving interviews, offering reassurances, defending the movies in the wake of the Taylor scandal—the way Taylor himself once had done.

  But at the moment the postmaster general was on holiday at the Flamingo Hotel in Miami Beach. On the day Taylor’s body was found, Hays was taking a joy ride on an eleven-passenger aerial cruiser across the Florida Straits to Havana. He told reporters he had “absolutely no plans to go to California.” He was taking a rest, he insisted, “the first real one I’ve had in a long time,” and nothing, not even a bullet in William Desmond Taylor’s neck, would take him away from it. Hays knew the pressures he would be facing as soon as he stepped into the center ring. So, for the moment, he was having fun.

  Zukor, not so much.

  The spring of 1922 was supposed to have been the time when Famous Players rebounded from its troubles of the past twelve months. Zukor had decided to move all production to Hollywood, strengthening the studio’s financial situation. He had proposed an ambitious schedule, “a production program that eclipses those of the past few years,” Variety reported. The national economy was on an upswing. Unemployment was down, and weekly earnings were on the rise. Despite the ongoing Arbuckle calamities, his optimism had not been unfounded.

  But that was before Taylor had been discovered on his living room floor.

  On the day before Zukor was set to leave for Los Angeles, Famous Players’ stocks were still down. Common stock had declined nearly 3 percent in the past year, preferred stock nearly 5, and there were no signs of a rebound. Even worse, the company’s net income had plunged nearly $1 million during the same period.

  Once again, at the moment Zukor glimpsed a light at the end of the tunnel, something happened to snuff it out.

  How could he turn things around now, with the press peeling away Taylor’s secrets—and Minter’s, and Mabel Normand’s—like some pungently ripe onion, layer by layer, until everyone was left slobbering all over themselves?

  There was a way out, however, if Zukor chose to take it.

  He could have cut his losses right then and there, and stopped the Taylor investigation in its tracks. All he needed to do was call Lasky and tell him to go to the police with what he knew.

  At the Famous Players plant in Hollywood, Taylor’s papers were still safely guarded under lock and key. The collection was substantial. Eyton, Fellows, Maigne, Hopkins, Ivers, and Van Trees had carried off quite a bit of material from the director’s bungalow that morning. Many of the documents were undoubtably innocuous, the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. But as later events would make apparent, amid all the electric bills and car repair estimates, Eyton had discovered other, more pertinent information. Perhaps there was an accounting of Taylor’s missing assets. Perhaps an explanation for why the director had been so distraught during his final months. Perhaps threatening notes, or diary entries, or blackmail demands.

  Whatever was in there, Eyton and Lasky had read it, and they had communicated at least its significance, if not yet its details, to Zukor.

  As would eventually become clear, somewhere in that mass of paper, secreted within those piles of onionskin and cardboard, production notes and calendars, red-striped air mail envelopes and Western Union telegrams, was evidence of Taylor’s killer.

  If he had chosen to, Zukor could have ended the investigation at any time by telling Lasky to go to the police, or by going himself.

  But he didn’t.

  Which could only mean that revealing what he knew about William Desmond Taylor’s killer would be worse—much worse—than the agonizing bloodletting his company was taking with each new edition of a newspaper.

  CHAPTER 39

  “DO YOU THINK THAT I KILLED MR. TAYLOR?”

  Mary stepped gingerly into the funeral parlor like a newborn fawn still unsteady on its legs. In her arms she carried a bouquet of fragrant ‘Black Prince’ roses. As Mr. Overholtzer had promised, she was being given some time alone with Mr. Taylor’s body.

  By now the coroner had finished his grisly business, cutting open the victim’s chest and sewing it back together. Mr. Overholtzer had dressed the corpse in clean clothes, combed its hair, and powdered its face. The body was now ready for viewing.

  Mary stepped into the room alone. Mr. Taylor lay flat on his back on a table ahead of her, his hands folded over his chest. The room was bitterly cold.

  Mary approached timidly.

  She could barely reach the man she loved. The table was high, and she wa
s so small. “I wanted to kiss him on the lips,” Mary said. But she couldn’t lean over far enough.

  Mary despaired. She would have to be content just touching his hand.

  But the moment she did so, she immediately shrank back.

  “That deadly cold,” Mary said, “convinced me as nothing else could have done. No life could return to this man.”

  Mary let out a howl. “God, take me, too,” she cried, the sound echoing through the quiet mortuary.

  Overholtzer hurried in. With tenderness he tried to guide Mary away from the corpse, but she wouldn’t let go of Taylor’s rigid arm. Only with great effort was the undertaker able to pry the little actress away, hustling her into his office, where he gave her a glass of water.

  But Mary was inconsolable.

  “Who could have done this to him?” she cried. “They crucified Jesus! Now they’ve crucified my mate!”

  A short time later, in her mother’s presence, however, Mary’s tears had dried.

  Mrs. Shelby had temporarily emerged from her seclusion, having decreed that both she and Mary should meet the press. Something clearly needed to be done about all the insinuations in the newspapers. Mary’s name could not continue to be dragged into this mess.

  Because, Shelby knew, if they kept talking about Mary, eventually they’d get around to talking about her.

  And so she invited a select group of reporters to North Hobart Boulevard. The newspapermen and women filed into the little house, notebooks in hand, cameras slung over their shoulders. No doubt Shelby had coached Mary on exactly what to say in order to squelch this trouble of theirs as soon as possible.

  Mary daintily took a seat in front of her inquisitors. The first thing she was asked was whether Taylor had ever proposed marriage to her. No, she dutifully replied, he had not. Mr. Taylor was just a good friend to her, who looked on her “as a mere child.”