Mary Miles Minter and her director William Desmond Taylor. After Taylor was found shot dead, Minter became one of the suspects. She’d been infatuated with him and a pink satin nightgown monogrammed with the letters ‘MMM’ was discovered at his home.
So, who shot William Desmond Taylor? Was it his friend actress Mabel Normand – a frequent co-star of Roscoe Arbuckle’s – who’d visited him the night he died? Or was he murdered by teenage star Mary Miles Minter, who was in love with him? Or by Minter’s controlling mother Charlotte Shelby? Or by Sands, his valet, who’d fled two weeks earlier, having stolen from Taylor? (But who might also have been Taylor’s brother who’d disappeared a decade earlier.) With that cast of suspects, perhaps soap operas don’t have such outlandish plots after all.
Although Mabel Normand was ruled out as a suspect in William Desmond Taylor’s death, because she had visited him the evening before he died and was the last person to admit seeing him alive, her career was damaged by association.
When the police arrived, Mabel Normand was searching for her love letters to the director and Paramount executives were busy burning documents.
Word spread quickly around Hollywood about the 49-year-old director’s death. By the time the police arrived, quite a crowd of Hollywood insiders was already at the scene. As Minter was screaming out her love for Taylor, a package of her love letters was being found in the toe of one of Taylor’s riding boots and a pink satin nightgown monogramed with ‘MMM’ in his wardrobe, Mabel Normand was searching for her old love letters to the director, and Paramount executives were busy burning documents. The alleged pornographic photos in which Taylor appeared with well-known actresses were never found.
But who was William Desmond Taylor? Not, it seemed, William Desmond Taylor. He was, in fact, William Cunningham Deane-Tanner from Ireland, married with a daughter and working as an antique dealer in New York when, in 1908, following an affair with a married woman, he’d disappeared. A brother, Denis Deane-Tanner, had followed Taylor to New York but was continually borrowing money from him. Four years after Taylor disappeared, Denis did, too.
Mary Miles Minter in 1937 when her sister, Margaret Fillmore, sued their mother Charlotte Shelby over a family financial dispute. In the court hearings, the William Desmond Taylor case came up again, with Fillmore saying her mother: ‘would kill anybody for $1000.’
As Taylor’s missing years were pieced together, it was learnt that he’d been to Alaska prospecting for gold, had worked as a bookkeeper in a mine and as a stockbroker in Chicago, among many other jobs, before winding up in Hollywood as an actor in 1912. There he moved from acting to becoming a successful director. Hollywood – always a great place for reinvention.
And what of the suspects? After fleeing, Taylor’s valet Sands had sent Taylor a pawn stub bearing the name ‘William Deane-Tanner’, indicating that he knew Taylor’s true identity. Had he reappeared to blackmail Taylor and in the altercation shot him? Sands was never found. If he wasn’t Taylor’s brother, that makes two people from the director’s life who disappeared.
Could the murder have been related to drugs? Eighteen months earlier, Taylor had appealed to an assistant US attorney for help in breaking up the traffic in drugs, mentioning that a well-known actress friend was being extorted by peddlers for $2000 a month. The actress was Mabel Normand; the drug was cocaine. Some suggest that a hit was put on Taylor because he was trying to expose the cocaine dealers.
DRUG ADDICTS
FOR AS LONG as the Hollywood film industry has existed, there have always been drug casualties. When action hero Wallace Reid was injured in a stunt in 1919, he was prescribed morphine to numb the pain so that he could carry on filming. However, he became addicted to them and he eventually had to be sent to a sanatorium. It was already too late and, in 1923, at the age of 31, he died locked in a padded cell. After his death, his widow, actress and director Dorothy Davenport, called for greater awareness of drug addiction.
Barbara La Marr (pictured below with Douglas Fairbanks in The Three Musketeers – 1921) was a burlesque dancer, a sometime call girl, a successful screenwriter and an actress. When, in 1924, she was found unconscious, her studio, MGM, had her committed to a sanatorium. However, the following year she was arrested carrying 40 cubes of morphine. She was too weak to stand trial for her offence and died in January 1926. The coroner was persuaded by MGM to attribute her death to tuberculosis, but she’d actually died of a cocaine overdose.
Married briefly to studio executive Dr Daniel Carson Goodman, actress Alma Rubens’s drug was morphine, after it was prescribed when she was suffering from a ‘minor ailment’. Quickly becoming addicted, she later admitted she began to take morphine for every real and imagined illness. In 1926 and then again in 1929, she was too ill to continue working.
Ruben’s addiction was kept from the public until 1929, when she attempted to stab a physician who was taking her to a sanatorium. Although being held under guard, she later managed to escape hospital, clean up and went back to work, before being arrested on a drugs charge in San Diego in 1931. She claimed that it was a frame-up and physicians backed her up: she wasn’t taking drugs. Shortly after her release, though, she contracted pneumonia and died quickly, aged 33.
Or could the killer have been Mary Miles Minter’s jealous mother, Charlotte Shelby? Actress Colleen Moore, a contemporary of Minter’s, described Shelby as ‘one of those well-born Southern women who never let anyone, including the fan-magazines, forget it’. Shelby had managed a lucrative Hollywood deal for her child star daughter, with herself as guardian. But Minter was 18 now. ‘The thought of losing this gold-mine daughter to a husband filled Mama with such terror she became almost insanely jealous,’ wrote Moore. Neighbour Faith MacLean testified at a preliminary hearing that she’d heard a gunshot the previous evening at the house and she had seen someone who looked like a woman dressed as a man leave the property. Could it have been Charlotte Shelby, who didn’t want a relationship between Minter and Taylor to cut her out of a Hollywood fortune? If that was her thinking, it seems misjudged, because Minter’s love for Taylor was unrequited – although he had kept her love letters. He’d told Minter that she was too young for him, besides which he was in love with Mabel Normand.
LOUISE BROOKS
LOUISE BROOKS, ONE of the most distinctive faces of the silent era, didn’t want to play the Hollywood game, and at the height of her fame in the late 1920s she left Hollywood to work, admittedly also very successfully, in Germany. When she returned, sound had come in and she’d lost her footing, and when offered the female lead in The Public Enemy(1931), she turned it down to pursue a love affair in New York.
Seeming to lack the ruthless ambition necessary to maintain star status, her career faded during the 1930s and she briefly headed back to her hometown of Wichita. ‘But that turned out to be another kind of hell,’ she would later admit. ‘The citizens of Wichita either resented me having been a success or despised me for being a failure.’
Some time later she even worked for a few years as a salesgirl in Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City and admitted to having been a courtesan to a few clients in the early 1940s: ‘I found that the only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful actress of thirty-six, was that of a call girl … and [I] began to flirt with the fancies related to little bottles filled with yellow sleeping pills.’
A heavy drinker from childhood, she was sexually liberated and had many lovers, including a one-night stand with Greta Garbo. However, of women she said: ‘Out of curiosity, I had two affairs with girls – they did nothing for me.’
He’d told Minter that she was too young for him, besides which he was in love with Mabel Normand.
Ultimately, no one was ever charged with Taylor’s murder. It remains a fascinating whodunit with no conclusion. The case, however, still had its casualties. Minter’s letters to Taylor, which had actually been written three years earlier, found their way into the newspapers, and, combined with the story that there might hav
e been some relationship between the teenager and the middle-aged man, did a great deal to tarnish her demure image. Her films were withdrawn from distribution and the following year Paramount passed on the opportunity to renew her contract. She turned down other offers and, at the age of 21, retired from acting. Two years later she sued her mother for the money she had received during Minter’s career. They settled out of court. For her part, Mabel Normand’s career continued, but her tuberculosis reoccurred the following year and she died in 1930, at the age of 37.
The murder of William Desmond Taylor has all the makings of a Hollywood movie, but it might have to be a comedy to be taken seriously.
Louise Brooks was free-spirited both on and off screen. ‘We were all marvellously degenerate and happy,’ she said of Hollywood in the 1920s. ‘We were a world of our own and outsiders didn’t intrude.’
The Power of the Press
In November 1924, one single morning edition of The Los Angeles Times ran the headline: ‘Movie Producer Shot on Hearst Yacht!’ ‘Hearst’ was William Randolph Hearst, the immensely powerful newspaper and film baron, and the ‘movie producer’ was Thomas Ince, who’d been working in Hollywood for 20 years and owned his own studio. Given such a story, it was surprising it didn’t reappear or develop in the evening edition or any subsequent editions of that paper or other newspapers. But it didn’t. Nor was the story corrected as might be expected if the shooting report had been an error. Later reports of Ince’s death simply stated that after suffering from stomach ulcers, he’d had a fatal heart attack at home. No mention of a shooting was made, and, two days later, his body was cremated.
Ince’s death simply stated that after suffering from stomach ulcers, he’d had a fatal heart attack at home. No mention of a shooting was made, and, two days later, his body was cremated.
According to other Hearst newspapers, Ince had first fallen ill while visiting the Hearst California ranch, San Simeon, and had been rushed home by ambulance, where he’d died surrounded by his family. But it was the shooting headline that captured the popular imagination. There are various versions of the story; all point the finger at Hearst. As D.W. Griffith said: ‘All you have to do to make Hearst turn white as a ghost is mention Ince’s name. There’s plenty wrong there, but Hearst is too big.’
The story goes that Hearst suspected that his long-time lover Marion Davies was having an affair with Charlie Chaplin. To find out if this was true, Hearst invited Chaplin to join them at a party on his yacht Oneida off the Californian coast. Among others present were journalist Louella Parsons, author Elinor Glyn and Dr Daniel Carson Goodman, a non-practising physician who worked as a studio executive and was married to star Alma Rubens, who wasn’t on board. One night, Hearst found Chaplin and Davies talking, and, enraged by jealousy, pulled out a gun. Davies’s screams alerted Ince, who came running, and, in the scuffle over Hearst’s gun, was shot. Another version had Hearst seeing Ince talking to Davies in the darkness, and, mistaking him for Chaplin, shot him. Or was Ince caught by a ricocheting bullet? Or perhaps Ince was in bed with Davies.
The rumours about Ince’s death were strong enough for the San Diego District Attorney to open an investigation. Dr Goodman testified that Ince had fallen ill and that he’d brought him ashore. While taking the train back to Los Angeles, Ince’s condition was so bad that they left the train early and were seen by a physician. Finally making it home, Ince died just over two days after the party.
Until then, Louella Parsons had been a film columnist for Hearst’s newspaper The New York American. But after Ince’s death, Hearst gave her a lifetime contract and moved her to The Los Angeles Examiner, putting her at the heart of Hollywood and syndicating her columns widely. She became one of Hollywood’s leading gossip columnists. Had Hearst simply recognized a good talent or was he buying her silence on the Ince matter?
And what of the anomalies? Why the ‘Movie Producer Shot on Hearst Yacht!’ headline if there was no substance to it? Someone must have put the newspaper on to the scent of the story, even if it was wrong. Why did a Hearst newspaper later print that Ince had been taken ill at a party at the Hearst ranch, not on the yacht? Although both Chaplin and Louella Parsons claimed that they’d not even been on the yacht and Parsons had said she’d been in New York at the time, others said that they’d seen her in Hollywood with Davies just before leaving to board the Oneida. If the case was considered important enough for the San Diego DA to investigate, why did he then call on only one witness, Dr Goodman, to testify? Also, Chaplin’s driver Toraichi Kono claimed that he had seen Ince reach the shore and it looked as if his head was ‘bleeding from a bullet wound’. Like the death of William Desmond Taylor, Thomas Ince’s has prompted a great deal of speculation that will never now be solved.
Gossip columnist Louella Parsons (centre) leaving Hearst offices. Despite rumours, she denied being on Hearst’s yacht the weekend that Thomas Ince fell ill. But soon after Ince’s death she was promoted by Hearst, leading to suggestions that Hearst had bought her silence.
Hays banned Arbuckle from working in Hollywood and had Mary Miles Minter’s films pulled from distribution.
The Hays Office
After the Chaplin weddings and public divorces, and the Arbuckle and Taylor scandals, the film industry needed to clean up shop. So William H. Hays, a former postmaster-general in President Harding’s administration, was hired as the first president of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA).
The MPPDA, which represented the studio heads and became better known as the Hays Office, introduced morality clauses into stars’ contracts, enabling the studios to fire or fine them if they were involved in a scandal. It was Hays who banned Arbuckle from working in Hollywood, and Hays who had Mary Miles Minter’s films pulled from circulation after the Taylor murder. The Hays Office would go on to have immense influence in vetting scripts on matters of decency and censoring films.
The Coming of Sound
By the end of the 1920s, the stars were playing the studios off against each other and increasing their fees. In an effort to claw back some control and reduce the competition, some studios, such as First National and Paramount, merged to give themselves more clout.
Gloria Swanson and Walter Byron in Queen Kelly. One of the biggest stars of the silent era, Swanson is now actually best known for her role in 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, in which she played a former silent movie star.
But star status was also about to be challenged by the coming of sound. When the idea of producing talking pictures was first proposed, Harry Warner said: ‘Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?’ For him, the bonus of sound was in watching and hearing orchestras play. Nevertheless, his studio went ahead and produced The Jazz Singer (1927), the first talkie. After the first screening, the audience of movie insiders filed out of the auditorium in silence. ‘They were terrified,’ said Frances Goldwyn, Sam Goldwyn’s second wife, while Mary Pickford’s acid comment was that ‘adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo’. Pickford did make some sound films, but her career faded with the talkies, perhaps also because in the cruelty of Hollywood cinema, there were, and still are, fewer roles for women over the age of 35. She retired from acting in 1933, at the age of 41, but remained a producer. Not all actors had the voices or the style that would transfer to talking pictures, however. The careers of Buddy Rogers, Colleen Moore and Norma Talmadge all waned with the era of sound.
JOSEPH P. KENNEDY SNR
JOSEPH KENNEDY, PRESIDENT John F. Kennedy’s father, was a hugely successful businessman and stockbroker in the 1920s. In 1923 he expanded into buying cinemas and was interested, like the moguls, in making the move into producing films as well. Contrary to rumours, there is no evidence that he was a bootlegger, but womanizing and sharp practice weren’t beyond him. In 1926, with his wife Rose (pictured with Kennedy) at home in Massachusetts with their first seven children, Kennedy moved to Hollywood.
There he began an affair with Gloria
Swanson, the biggest star of the time. She was married to French aristocrat Henri, Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye, but Kennedy gave the Marquis a job at Pathé (USA), which required him to represent the company in Paris for ten months of the year. Conveniently, the Marquis was now out of the way. Kennedy and Swanson’s relationship was an open secret in Hollywood and he also became her business partner, organizing the financing for her next few films and producing her movie Queen Kelly (1929). When, though, after three years, the affair with Kennedy ended, Swanson found herself worse off than before. ‘Joe Kennedy operated just like Joe Stalin,’ she wrote years later. ‘Their system was to write a letter to the files and then order the exact reverse on the phone.’ She was left a million and a half dollars in debt.
The Jazz Singer (1927) was the first talkie. ‘The coming of sound,’ said Louise Brooks, ‘meant the end of Hollywood’s all-night parties. You had to rush back from the studios and start learning your lines, ready for the next day’s shooting.’
Will Hays (standing second from right at the door), President of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), showing how his film censorship office worked.
Mary Pickford’s acid comment was that ‘adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo’.
THE OSCARS
THE OSCARS MIGHT seem to have been created to celebrate Hollywood’s best work, but were, in fact, a by-product of an effort to pre-empt the growing interest in organized labour in Tinseltown. By setting up, in 1927, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Louis B. Mayer was really attempting to keep Hollywood players on side. ‘Who needs a union, when you have the fellowship of the Academy?’ went the reasoning.
Dark History of Hollywood: A Century of Greed, Corruption and Scandal behind the Movies (Dark Histories) Page 4