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

by William J. Mann

  How it must have killed her to say such things, but not in this setting, not with her mother looming behind her, could Mary refer to Mr. Taylor as her mate.

  Her face darkened, however, when a reporter told her that Taylor had been married, with a daughter about her age.

  “Married?” The little actress was horrified, flabbergasted. “I’m sure he wasn’t,” Mary managed to say, “or surely he would have told me.” She paused. “We were such good friends.”

  That evening, unable to sleep, Mary took advantage of her mother’s absence—Shelby was still spending her nights at the New Hampshire house—to phone George Scarborough, who’d written the play on which her film Moonlight and Honeysuckle had been based. Would Scarborough like to go for a spin? Urbane, cultured, and a mature forty-two, the playwright was exactly the sort of man who could raise Mary’s spirits a bit. Despite the hour, Scarborough was glad to meet the nubile young actress.

  And so they careened around town in Mary’s blue runabout, stopping at one night spot after another. But Mary was a fickle little fawn. At one of their stops she got word that her occasional beau, director Mickey Neilan, was looking for her, so she made a beeline for the Los Angeles–Salt Lake Railroad station, where Neilan was shooting some night location scenes. Scarborough hadn’t expected to spend his evening with Mary watching Neilan and his cast work into the wee hours of the morning. But that was where Mary wanted to be.

  After calling “Cut” for the last time, Neilan invited everyone back to his house for a little impromptu party. Despite the melodrama from earlier in the day, Mary was game. Gloria Swanson, with whom Neilan was having an affair, also stopped by. So did Jack Pickford. Mary tried frying some eggs for everyone, but she’d never done much cooking for herself, and she ruined them. That made everyone laugh. Mary’s tears of the morning seemed forgotten.

  But as the party was breaking up, Neilan turned serious.

  “I’ve got something very important to say to you, Mary,” he told her. He suggested they take a drive, just the two of them. Scarborough, suddenly superfluous, was taken home in Mary’s car by Neilan’s chauffeur. Mary climbed into the director’s vehicle, and the pair zoomed off down Santa Monica Boulevard, nearly deserted that time of night.

  They ended up at Neilan’s studio. The lot was dark, with only the night watchman there to greet them. Another bitterly cold night held the city in an icy grip. Mary’s teeth were chattering as they settled down in Neilan’s office. The director switched on a light, aiming it at the young actress as if he were about to interrogate her.

  In fact, he was.

  The director lit a cigarette. He told Mary that she had no idea how terrible the Taylor investigation was going to become for her. The murder was shaping up to be the most sensational scandal Los Angeles had ever seen. What they needed to do, Neilan insisted, was get her letters to Taylor before the police got hold of them.

  Mary was surprised that Neilan even knew she’d sent Taylor letters.

  Of course he did. Charley Eyton had them, Neilan told her.

  This surprised Mary. But she insisted there was “nothing in the letters that the world can’t read.” Part of her seemed willing, even eager, to get the letters out there. If published, her letters would set things straight about the love she and Mr. Taylor had shared and expose the lies she’d been forced to tell at her mother’s hastily arranged press conference.

  Neilan glared at her. “You loved Bill, didn’t you?” he asked.

  Mary admitted that she had.

  Neilan was clearly concerned about this. He revealed that Taylor had told him about Mary’s histrionic visit to him right before Christmas. The news stung: Mary felt it hadn’t been very gentlemanly of Mr. Taylor to disclose the incident. But what worried Neilan was that if the police found out about Mary’s visit, they might start to suspect her. “For God’s sake,” Neilan said, “if you know anything about the murder of Bill, tell me now!”

  Mary was aghast. “Do you think that I killed Mr. Taylor?”

  “I’m just trying to find something out about this,” Neilan replied. “This is going to be an awful affair.”

  “I did not kill William Desmond Taylor,” Mary said indignantly, “and don’t know who did!”

  Neilan lit another cigarette. He asked Mary to rack her brain and think of someone who had a motive to kill Taylor. Did she know anyone who had any conflict with Taylor? Had she ever heard anyone threaten him?

  Mary paused. Neilan waited to hear who she might accuse.

  But then she told him she couldn’t think of anyone.

  Neilan gave up. “You mustn’t make any move without your attorneys,” he advised, as he switched off the lights and prepared to bring her home. “This involves picture people, and you know how Hearst hates picture people.” He reiterated the need to get Mary’s letters.

  The sun was coming up when he drove her home.

  CHAPTER 40

  POWDER BURNS

  In the shooting gallery of the central police station downtown, Detective Sergeant King took aim at a piece of gabardine pinned to a dummy across the room and pulled the trigger of his gun. The .38-caliber revolver fired. Taking a few steps closer to the cloth, King fired again. He repeated the process several more times.

  Finally he compared the powder burns on the cloth with those on the gabardine jacket Taylor had been wearing when he was shot. The evidence was clear. The killer had been standing not more than two inches from the victim when the fatal shot was fired.

  It was Sunday morning, February 5. Outside the police station, church bells were ringing. The numerous bakeries of First Street and Broadway were fragrant with baked bread and pastries. Well-dressed citizens strolled the lane, carrying the bulky Sunday newspapers, smudgy with scandal, under their arms. At the bakeries, on the street corners, they gathered to share the latest in the Taylor mystery. Was the killer the crooked valet? Or some man who’d been in love with Mabel Normand or Mary Miles Minter? That Taylor sure had lots of secrets.

  Overhead, the sun shone bright. Temperatures were finally warming up around Southern California. But so were the tempers of the police, the sheriff’s department, and District Attorney Woolwine. Everyone had his own pet theory of who committed the crime and why. Police Captain David Adams still insisted Sands was their culprit, especially now that the former valet’s criminal past had been uncovered. A navy veteran had recognized Sands in a newspaper photograph and come forward to reveal the facts. Then Earl Tiffany, Taylor’s dismissed chauffeur, had claimed that his wife had spotted Sands on the day before the murder while riding the streetcar at Sixteenth and Flower Streets. Sands had lost some weight, Mrs. Tiffany thought, which might have explained why Faith MacLean hadn’t recognized him as the man coming out of Taylor’s door. Adams thought this sighting of Sands meant they had an open-and-shut case.

  But Eddie King wasn’t buying it. Why would Sands risk coming back to Los Angeles? Why would he stop at a gas station to ask directions to Taylor’s house?

  King believed Adams was simply not a very good detective; he’d been wrong in other ways as well. The police captain was also arguing that Taylor had been shot from behind, from some distance away. That was why King had performed his little experiment with the gun and the powder burns. Taylor had been attacked up close, and he’d probably struggled with his attacker right before he was shot. Perhaps, in an effort to defend himself, the director had reached for the chair that had stood against the wall. Lifting the chair over his head might account for the peculiar path the bullet had taken through Taylor’s body, especially if the killer had pulled back instinctively in self-defense.

  Just how the chair ended up straddling the victim’s left foot remained unanswered. Though the newspapers were reporting that the chair had been found overturned, King knew it had actually been standing upright. Someone had placed the chair over Taylor’s leg after he was shot.

  King wasn’t the only one to disagree with Captain Adams. Some frustrated detectives, con
vinced Sands was not their man, asked for reassignments, “rather than continue investigating the murder with asserted misunderstandings existing.” Some of the cops were pushing a theory that Taylor had been killed by a soldier with whom he’d served in the war, come back to exact retribution of some kind. But the notion gaining the most traction among investigators was the “woman theory,” still being flogged endlessly in the Hearst papers. Sheriff William Traeger now believed that a “woman supplied the incentive and a man did the slaying.”

  Of course, none of the various theories were helped by the inconclusive report given to police by the inquest jury the day before. What a day that had been.

  Crowds had started gathering around the Overholtzer mortuary several hours before the inquest was set to begin. A blue line of police officers separated the crowd from those arriving to testify. “Hey, mac!” one fellow shouted over at an officer. “Is Mary Pickford droppin’ by? How ’bout Doug?” The cop just shrugged.

  By now the Taylor scandal had its own stars. Police cleared a path for the arrival of Henry Peavey, decked out in a well-tailored checked coat. Peavey smiled and waved at the crowd, seeming to enjoy the attention. An outsider all his life, anonymous and unsung, Peavey was finally basking in the camera’s flash.

  By contrast, when Faith and Douglas MacLean stepped out of a car, they shielded their faces, hurrying past the battery of photographers. The big question was when Mabel Normand would arrive. Everyone was looking for Mabel. But Mabel fooled them. Even as the crowd craned their necks to watch each person scurry up the mortuary steps, Mabel was slipping in through the back door.

  What she found in the hushed rooms was a coroner’s jury made up of six Los Angeles businessmen seated in a semicircle. Henry Peavey sat in front of them, no longer smiling, sobbing as he gave his account. Officer Zeigler described his arrival as the first policeman on the scene. Charles Eyton related how he had turned the body over and found the wound, though he neglected to mention his order to remove papers from the premises.

  Then Mabel’s name was read. A police officer led her through the room. Wearing a round hat and a fur-trimmed coat, “Miss Normand stepped briskly to the witness chair, the cynosure of all eyes,” one report would detail. “She had steeled herself for the ordeal of questioning which, heretofore, had been only from the lips of detectives and comparatively easy. She had an air of forced composure, for the shadow of death lay heavy in the room, and beyond the wall lay the body of one of her best and dearest friends—‘Billy’ Taylor, she called him.”

  Nothing Mabel said—nothing anyone said—had thrown any new light on the mystery. The conclusion was that an unidentified person had murdered Taylor. When he got the report of the jury, King grumbled he could have told them that and spared the county the expense.

  After the inquest was over, Mabel had bolted out the back door, but this time the shutterbugs were lying in wait. Flanked by Sennett publicity men, Mabel made a mad dash for the gate behind the mortuary. “Click, click, click went camera shutters,” one newspaper reported. “There was a race down the alley, with Mabel in the lead. Miss Normand managed to get inside the car. There she remained until the last of her guard piled in and down the alley sped the $7,000 automobile.”

  But Eddie King wasn’t interested in chasing Mabel. He was much more curious about another young lady, equally lovely and nearly as famous, who hadn’t been called to testify.

  As King emerged from the station, the usual gang of reporters pounced, asking for any new developments in the case. King joked that he ought to be asking the same of them. The detective was impressed by the amount of legwork the boys in the press had done. Journalists from the Times and the Examiner had dug up plenty of witnesses. The love triangle idea, for example, had first emerged from reporters’ inquiries, and King found this a far more compelling possibility than Sands. It was likely King who reporters were sourcing when they cited unnamed detectives “who adhered to the belief” that Taylor might have been slain for revenge in a love triangle. Sergeant King was not averse to occasionally bantering ideas around with reporters he liked. And his favorites were the intrepid Hearst hounds, even if their journalistic standards were the loosest in the business. Nevertheless, King admired their moxie and trusted their instincts. That was why he shared with them a bit of evidence he’d found particularly interesting.

  The newshounds gathered to hear what King had to say.

  Something very interesting had been found in Taylor’s bedroom, the detective revealed. A filmy, pinkish silk garment that Detective Herman Cline thought “resembled a nightgown.” Whose garment it was, no one was sure. There wasn’t even a laundry mark on it.

  The newspaper reporters pressed King about who owned this pink silk nightgown—which they didn’t see, only heard described. King admitted that he believed it was a woman’s garment, but as to just which woman owned it, he was careful not to say. But after learning from Earl Tiffany how Edward Sands had monitored its use, the detective was absolutely convinced that this boxy piece of silk was an important clew to solving the mystery.

  And anyone who’d been paying attention knew whose nightgown it was. Which young woman had been so smitten with Taylor that she had disappointed not one but two swains, Thomas Dixon and Marshall Neilan, in their pursuit of her? And could their disappointment have been enough for either of them to shoot Taylor down in cold blood?

  King was extremely anxious to get Mary Miles Minter on the record.

  His conviction that Minter was pivotal in solving the mystery was only strengthened after he interviewed Arthur Hoyt, a distinguished actor who’d appeared in several of Taylor’s films, and who’d also been present at the bungalow on the day the body was found. Hoyt had told King a very interesting tale about Taylor’s last days.

  He hadn’t told it willingly. Hoyt had wanted to respect what Taylor had shared with him in confidence. But Jesse Winn had grilled the actor hard. Finally Hoyt broke down and wept. “If it would help unravel the mystery surrounding the murder,” he said he’d talk.

  Hoyt then described an evening he’d spent with Taylor a short time before the tragedy. As many others had noted, the director had been anxious and depressed in those final weeks. When Hoyt asked what was bothering him, Taylor had said that “the dearest, sweetest little girl in the world” was in love with him, and described Mary’s midnight visit. He had tried to send her home, Taylor told Hoyt, but Mary had threatened to cause a scene. “It was really becoming serious,” Hoyt understood, and Taylor “didn’t know what to do about it.”

  King had to wonder if Taylor’s wretchedness in those last couple of months, described by so many people, had been the result of Mary’s infatuation.

  So far, however, he’d been unable to secure an interview with Minter herself. Her mother was rather powerful, he’d heard, and had managed to keep her away from the police. But the teenage actress couldn’t remain untouchable for much longer, not with these stories of pink silk nightgowns and unrequited love.

  Marshall Neilan’s fears for Mary were about to come true.

  Tipping his cap to his friends in the press, King hopped onto his motorcycle and revved the engine. Back in 1904, he’d been the city’s first “speed cop,” chasing down speed demons who roared down the vast uninhabited stretch of South Main Street. Small like a jockey, King handled his motorcycle as if it were a Thoroughbred. He tore off across town.

  His mind was racing just as fast. The Taylor case obsessed him. So many clews. Which ones were important? Which were irrelevant? What about the luxurious touring car several witnesses reported being parked near Taylor’s courtyard shortly before the murder? Ventura police reported that a woman had been spotted driving a similar car recklessly up the coastal highway early the next morning. Might there be a connection?

  And what about Theodore Kosloff’s story of a man jumping out at Taylor from some bushes in Pasadena? Was that the same person who’d been making the harassing phone calls? Or a blackmailer, which might explain th
ose missing assets of Taylor’s?

  Or could Taylor’s killer have been a drug dealer looking for revenge? Given Taylor’s friendship with Mabel Normand, Detectives Theodore Mailheau and Lloyd Yarrow of the narcotics squad thought there was every reason to believe that the dead man “may have had knowledge of drug peddlers.” That was definitely an angle to track down.

  Finally, there was Taylor’s murky past to consider. Hollywood was still in shock over the dual life their supposedly upstanding champion had hidden for so long. The newspapers, of course, loved the added sensation of an abandoned wife and daughter and missing brother. East Coast detectives had tracked down Taylor’s former wife, Ethel May Robins, in the town of Mamaroneck on New York’s Long Island Sound. In one of those crazy coincidences, she was now married to the proprietor of Delmonico’s restaurant, where Adolph Zukor conducted so much of his business. With some reluctance, Ethel May told of the day Taylor—Deane-Tanner to her—had disappeared. She also described the day she had recognized the man on the movie screen as the father of her child.

  Ethel May had been deeply hurt by Taylor’s desertion. When she married her second husband, she’d torn up every photo she could find of her first. But when her daughter had expressed the desire to write to her father, Ethel May had given her consent, and had been pleased when Taylor had agreed to meet the girl on his way back from Europe the previous summer.

  But now the elegant Mrs. Robins, highly regarded in New York café society, took great offense at this intrusion from her past. Her long-ago marriage, she insisted, could throw no light on the murder. Her husband, Edward L. C. Robins, huffed, “I can’t see why the newspapers are paying so much attention to Mamaroneck. It seems to me they ought to be trying to solve this mystery out in Los Angeles, where it happened.”

  Eddie King agreed. The killer walked among them, the detective believed. But making an arrest wouldn’t be easy with so many false leads and dead ends. The phones at Central Station were ringing off their hooks. Lunatics wandered into headquarters and confessed to the crime. The cops were overrun with so-called witnesses.