Popular Crime

by Bill James

  The last person to see Taylor alive was Mabel Normand, another young movie star of the era; she had dropped by Taylor’s apartment to borrow a book. Like Minter she was poorly educated and naive, and she was being exploited for her beauty, although she was well paid for it. Normand had had drug and alcohol issues. Her account of their relationship was that Taylor was one of the few men she knew who didn’t try to take advantage of her. An anti-drug activist, he had paid out of his own pocket to get her cleaned up, and he had encouraged her to read and improve herself. Other people have suggested that the relationship was not so innocent, but … that was what she said.

  Mabel Normand was involved in a period of three years in three separate murder scandals. In none of these does she appear to have done anything wrong. Fatty Arbuckle … well, you probably all know the outlines of the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, and if you don’t I’m not going to get into it, but it wasn’t exactly a murder and Arbuckle was, after all, acquitted, and Mabel Normand wasn’t anywhere near any of those events, but she and Arbuckle had starred together in several movies, and so her name was tarnished by association. Fatty Arbuckle was on trial at the time that Taylor was murdered, and then, two years later, Normand’s chauffeur was so inconsiderate as to shoot somebody with Mabel’s pistol. Normand’s career was swept away by these scandals, and she died of tuberculosis at the age of 37.

  Hundreds of people have been accused over the years of murdering William Taylor, among them Minter and Normand and the drug merchants who were Taylor’s sworn enemies. King Vidor’s conclusion (spoiler alert) was that Taylor was murdered by Charlotte Shelby, who was an actress herself, but more importantly Mary Minter’s mother.

  Vidor’s argument for this conclusion, however—or at least Kirkpatrick’s explanation of it—is so weak that one doesn’t even really understand why he believes this to be true. This appears to be one of the critical passages in his argument against Shelby (p. 185):

  Minter was not asked to explain how, if as she claimed she’d never had a physical relationship with Taylor, her nightgown came to be found in his bedroom, or how hair from her head had found its way to Taylor’s jacket collar.

  OK, two critical facts there: (1) Minter vigorously denied that Taylor had ever given her a monogrammed silk nightie, but such a nightgown was in fact found in his apartment by the police, and (2) two or three hairs identified by police as Minter’s were found on Taylor’s jacket, the jacket he was wearing at the time of his demise.

  But the explanation for the nightie seems stupefyingly obvious to me: Taylor had purchased the nightgown and had it embroidered for Minter, but, as they had not yet consummated their relationship, he had not yet given it to her at the time of his death. And as to the hairs, which “the police had identified” as Minter’s, there was no forensic technique to identify hairs as belonging to a specific individual until many, many, many years after Taylor’s murder. There not only was no such method in 1922, when Taylor was killed, there was no such method in 1967, when Vidor was investigating the case. Even in the 1980s, when Kirkpatrick was writing about Vidor’s research, such evidence was considered speculative. Hair and fiber evidence was introduced in Wayne Williams’ trial in 1981–1982, but it was a fight to get it admitted, and I personally thought that the “hair” portion of it was BS. I believe that the police thought that those were Mary Minter’s hairs, but that’s as far as I would go with that.

  And if they were Mary Minter’s hairs, so what? No one denies that there was some sort of relationship between these two people. It is not unusual that her hair would be clinging to his jacket. Those facts don’t seem to me to contribute anything toward the case against Shelby, which is, in essence, that Shelby murdered Taylor because he had chosen her daughter over her.

  The time frame surrounding the discovery of Taylor’s body is confused and confusing. Peavey apparently discovered the body about 7:30 AM or earlier, did not realize that there had been a homicide, but immediately called the police to report the death. But then, not realizing that Taylor had been murdered, he also called a couple of other people, including Taylor’s studio. Taylor’s studio, hoping to avoid another scandal in the midst of the ruinous Fatty Arbuckle affair, sent people rushing to the bungalow to get anything out of there that might be considered scandalous. By the time the police arrived there were eight to twelve other people already on the scene, carrying out things that might have made Taylor, or Taylor’s bosses, look bad.

  A bookkeeper claimed (three years after the fact) that Charlotte Shelby called her on the morning of the murder, about 7:30, and told her about Taylor’s murder. Shelby claimed that a) it was the bookkeeper who called her, and b) it was more like 9:00.

  The police claimed that they were at the bungalow a half-hour after the call came in. Yeah, right. Some of the people who were at the bungalow by the time the police arrived reported that they had been roused from their beds and told to rush to the bungalow. It is virtually impossible to see how the studio could have responded to a call from Peavey after he had called the police, called their employees at home, and gotten that many people to the bungalow in less than half an hour.

  The newspapers of the time printed substantially varying reports about the time of the discovery of the body and the time the police responded. Vidor tries to make this into evidence against Shelby by insisting that there is only one timeline—the police timeline—and that that means that Shelby called the bookkeeper about the murder before the police even turned over the body and discovered that Taylor had been shot. What seems much, much more likely is that the police timeline is a fiction designed to make it appear that the police responded much more quickly than they actually did.

  Let’s face it: Vidor’s solution to the mystery is not a real solution; it is a Hollywood solution. A movie has to tell a story; I understand that, and I’m not criticizing it. But the fact that Vidor picked this as the story he wanted to tell does not make it true.

  On the morning of the murder, Henry Peavey (who discovered the body) was due to appear in court, on a charge of soliciting teen-aged male prostitutes from a nearby park. Taylor was scheduled to appear and speak for him. Vidor believes that Peavey was soliciting prostitutes on Taylor’s behalf, that Taylor was a secret homosexual with a taste for young boys.

  Vidor has, in my view, no evidence for this whatsoever. He points out that Henry Peavey kept an apartment near Taylor’s house, and that Taylor paid for the apartment. Vidor thinks it was a place to take young boys. He quotes several instances of Taylor’s lack of interest in young actresses. Page 51, from an interview with an aging co-worker:

  I don’t know if Taylor ever slept with [Mabel Normand]. He wasn’t the kiss-and-tell type. He didn’t even stand in line to peep through the secret holes in the walls of the actress’s dressing rooms.

  Vidor wonders whether Taylor did not engage in this adolescent sexual behavior because he was not interested in girls. A more plausible explanation is that he was not an adolescent. He was a grown man who understood the process of earning respect by behaving respectfully. Page 185:

  Another Athletic Club member said Taylor himself told of Mary’s once bursting into his bungalow, undressing, and begging to be made love to. Taylor again turned her down.

  Oh, yeah; that kind of stuff happens all the time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to tell Keira Knightley to put her clothes back on. It reflects poorly on Kirkpatrick’s judgment that he finds space for this anecdote, apparently told to Vidor forty years later by someone who claimed to have known Taylor from his athletic club.

  I wanted to double back to the issue of the hairs. I would bet that many, many people who read Kirkpatrick’s book at the time of its publication in 1986 immediately spotted the problem with Vidor’s claim that hairs found on Taylor’s jacket were identified by police as Mary Minter’s. Anyone who reads crime books would have known that that was impossible, given the forensic science of the time.

  The thing is, Kirkpatrick doesn’t read
crime books. Many people who write crime books quite obviously never read crime books. This is obvious first because they often say things like this, which reveal an underlying ignorance of the general subject, and second because they will often spend pages explaining things that, if they read crime books, they would know that almost all of their readers are already familiar with.

  This is one of the key reasons that I wrote Popular Crime, which I didn’t quite get to explain in the first edition: I wrote it in an effort to attack the general, underlying ignorance of the good writers—like Kirkpatrick—who occasionally will whip out a crime book. Think about it: wouldn’t it be strange if you had people writing books about physics who never read books about physics? Wouldn’t you think it odd if you had people writing books about politics who had quite obviously never read very much about politics?

  But that is the real condition of the crime publishing industry: many of the people who write crime books quite obviously never read them. It has to do with how people think about crime books, as a sub-professional diversion. I was trying to elevate the field, just a little bit, by challenging the writers of future crime books to read up on the subject before they dive in.

  Regarding the death of Bill Taylor, my instinct is that it was not Charlotte Shelby who killed him. Just a small thing; I would never argue that details like this are persuasive, but … just a little thing that bothers me. Taylor was shot in the back while standing with his hands over his head, which we know because the bullet hole in the jacket only lines up with the bullet hole in his body if he had his hands in the air at the time he was shot.

  Vidor’s argument is that Shelby wanted Taylor for himself, and was furious at him because he rejected her and was trying instead to take her daughter away from her. But if you visualize that confrontation, at what point does Shelby say to him, “OK, face the wall and put your hands in the air?” It doesn’t happen that way. If he was shot by an angry, jealous woman, he’d have been shot in the chest in the middle of a sentence. When somebody points a gun at you and orders you to face the wall and put your hands in the air, that’s not an angry woman; that’s an experienced criminal. Just my opinion.

  Some information for my discussion of the Taylor case was taken from the website Taylorology, and in particular from the article “The Humor of a Hollywood Murder,” by Bruce Long.

  Moving forward, now, another 40 years. Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. On February 8, 1963, a heavyset black lady named Hattie Carroll, 52 years old, was working as a serving woman at a party in Baltimore for rich white fops in top hats and tails, the women in finery and lace. It was long past midnight, and many of the rich white fops were as drunk as skunks and acting silly. One of the rich white skunks, twenty-three-year-old William Zantzinger, took offense at something Hattie said, and struck her with his cane, not very hard, and made a vile and racist remark, the transcript of which does not seem to be part of the public record. Overcome with stress and emotion, Hattie became ill almost immediately, and fell into a sickness, which triggered a stroke. She was dead before the morning.

  Zantzinger was arrested and charged initially with murder. He was convicted on a lesser charge, and was sentenced to five months in the county jail. The judge who sentenced Zantzinger expressed the concern that giving him any longer term of imprisonment would require him to serve his time in a state prison, and this might ruin his life.

  This was never a major national news story, but a few people—some on the left, and more on the right—were outraged at the lenient treatment of a young white man who had caused the death of an entirely innocent black woman, the mother of ten children. Bob Dylan, then 22 years old, wrote a song about it, a very lucid and specific song entitled “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” The song mentions Zantzinger by name, repeatedly, and denounces the sentence, referring to “you who philosophize disgrace / and criticize all fears.”

  I revere Bob Dylan, but is that an awful line, or what? Who in the hell philosophizes disgrace? Who does this speak to? Do you think there is anybody in the world who gets up in the morning and says to himself, “I think I’ll go philosophize some disgrace today?” What does that even mean? It’s not that it is vague in the sense that Dylan is so often marvelously vague and evocative. It is more like it is specific but clumsy. It doesn’t sound good, and Dylan must repeat this ghastly phrase 40 times during the song. Yoo-who-phil-osophize-dis-grace … Yoo-who-phil-osophize-dis-grace … You-who-phil-osophize-disgrace, over and over. What makes it worse is repeating the You Who sound (yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo). It’s awful. It is not a particularly good song, although Dylan’s admirers will soberly insist that it is a great song, and I suppose they are entitled to their opinion.

  Anyway, what struck me about this is that Dylan and Johnny Cash were of course good friends, a 40-year friendship that began when Cash, nine years older than Dylan and an established star, wrote a friendly note to the fledgling songwriter on the back of an air sickness bag.

  But Dylan, who rarely adopts any comprehensible position except that the world is a cauldron of injustice and we should all feel bad about it, has, in this case, adopted a position which is diametrically opposed to a central theme of Cash’s career: to wit, that people who commit crimes remain human in spite of their offense, that they remain within the reach of God’s grace, and that, as much as we can, we should treat them with compassion and dignity.

  So who is right, in this case: Dylan, who argued for a more appropriate sentence, or Cash, who would have liked to go to Zantzinger’s cell and sing him a sad song? Of course five months is a ridiculous sentence under the circumstances, but the judge who issued the sentence was forced by the intersections of the law to choose between undue leniency and undue harshness. The case is a liberal dilemma: do you argue for compassion, or do you argue for justice for Hattie Carroll?

  I would argue that, in the big picture, the judge who sentenced Zantzinger did the right thing. What Zantzinger did was despicable—but it was not murder. (The blow with the cane was not hard enough to cause a bruise, let alone hard enough to cause death.) Zantzinger, even drunk, did not intend to cause Hattie Carroll’s death, and he didn’t, really; he was the proximate cause, but not the ultimate cause. It was wiser to give the young fool a chance to rebuild his life than it would have been to give vent to anger in the guise of justice.

  Zantzinger lived until 2009. He went into the real estate business, wound up renting inexpensive housing mostly to black people. A young woman who worked as a housing advocate for the poor, many years later, was astonished to discover that Zantzinger—then facing charges for housing code violations, charges which eventually landed him in jail for longer than the death of Hattie Carroll—was actually a likeable and decent man who was just trying to do what he could to help poor people find housing that they could afford. It is always best, I think, to remember that wickedness is human.

  Acknowledgments

  My first acknowledgment here should be offered to my longtime friend Mike Kopf, who shares my interest in crime stories, who read this book for me as a favor, who, over the long period of this book’s gestation, probably chewed through with me every crime included in here, or nearly every one, and who made numerous other contributions to the book.

  Other people were nice enough to read the book and let me know what they thought. Cal Karlin, my friend since college, read through it for me, as did Keith Scherer, Ben McGrath, Bruce Dickson, Chuck Woodling, Matthew Namee, Eddie Epstein and Allen Barra. I much appreciate the insights of each of you, and each of you saved me from saying something stupid somewhere, or showed me a better way to think about something. Steve Moyer, the same for you; I appreciate your reading the manuscript, and letting me know what you thought. It matters.

  Actually, I hadn’t realized I had asked so many people to read the book; that’s certainly a personal record for me—number of people reading the book before it’s published. I haven’t written about this subject before; I felt like I needed feedback. Or maybe I a
m becoming needy in my old age.

  I have been represented for three decades by Liz Darhansoff and for almost as long by Chuck Verrill; I appreciate your work in helping me get this book to a publisher.

  Brant Rumble edited this, so, of course, any mistakes that appear in the book are his fault. Kidding. I gather that I may have a reputation as, um … not an easy man to edit. I welcome editorial suggestions with the warmth of an alligator greeting a scuba diver. Brant has made it through two or three books with me now without complaining, which I much appreciate.

  We had editorial support, for this effort, from Nan Graham, Scribner’s editor in chief, and also from Susan Moldow, our (spoken reverently) publisher. This book has also had the help and support of Roz Lippel (associate publisher), Anna deVries (associate editor), Laura Wise (production editor), Tom Pitoniak (copyeditor), Rex Bonomelli (cover designer), Carla Jayne Jones (interior designer), Alexandra Truitt (photo researcher), Elisa Rivlin (legal reader) and Lauren Lavelle (publicist). I thank you all for your efforts on behalf of the book.

  Michael MacCambridge, Joe Posnanski, Josh Levin; I appreciate your interest in the book, your support and your insights.

  Dan Okrent helped to launch my writing career, some time in the middle of the last century, and this is still appreciated.

  My good wife, Susan McCarthy, has been with me through many books; her love and support are crucial to every one. My children … Rachel, Isaac, Reuben. Rachel actually read the book, or tried to, Isaac talked with me about it, Reuben is still here at home with us, and so lived through the book.