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

by William J. Mann

  Like Mrs. Ida Garrow.

  She was a middle-aged dressmaker—she preferred the term modiste—who lived at the Rose of Sharon Apartments on South Coronado Street, on the other side of Westlake Park from Taylor. On the night of the murder, Mrs. Garrow was walking to a class, cutting across Ocean View Avenue. Near the corner of Grand View Street, she spotted a “short and heavyset” man ahead of her, whose “suspicious bearing and movements attracted her attention.” As Mrs. Garrow watched, the man looked back at her, then hurried across the street and “disappeared into the shadows.” The time was just after eight o’clock. Faith MacLean had seen the man leaving Taylor’s home just before eight, so the two stories jibed. If the killer had cut up through the alley parallel to Alvarado Street—which was likely if he wanted to avoid detection—then eventually he would’ve emerged onto Ocean View, which in 1922 crossed Alvarado. Therefore, he would have passed Grand View at a time consistent with Mrs. Garrow’s report of seeing a similar-looking man.

  It was an intriguing clew, and King made a note of it.

  But then again, there were hundreds of leads like that. King didn’t have time to waste on all of them. Especially when he was convinced the answers he needed could be found in one, no-holds-barred interview with Mary Miles Minter.

  CHAPTER 41

  EVIDENCE FOUND

  If Eddie King had known what was taking place at Alvarado Court, he would have turned his motorcycle around and burned rubber on his way there.

  Unbeknownst to the DA’s office, the police had decided to hold a little powwow with Charles Eyton and his chief lieutenant, Frank Garbutt. Apparently Captain Adams thought he could solve the mystery on his own and deny the department’s rivals any credit.

  The dead man’s dining table, so recently the site of gin-and-orange cocktails with Mabel, was now “piled high with papers and letters.” Detectives had gathered everything they could find in the apartment, and Eyton had agreed to bring back what he had taken. Accordingly, he’d dumped a stack of papers on the table for detectives to dig through.

  Captain Adams believed Eyton when the studio executive insisted he’d brought back everything. Eddie King wouldn’t have been so trusting.

  Many times King, and other detectives, had wanted to dig through Taylor’s personal papers, the ones that had been removed from the apartment. Among the “letters and personal belongings” that Eyton had made off with King was certain there was “much documentary evidence in this murder mystery.”

  Mabel Normand’s personal letters to Taylor, for example, were missing. Mabel knew that Taylor had kept them, so where were they? The search for those missing letters had turned into its own separate investigation, though it was all a farce: everyone knew that Eyton had them, even if he denied it to police. Taking studio-related material was one thing. Removing personal letters that might prove pertinent to the investigation was another. No doubt Eyton had received word from his bosses that Famous Players could not appear to be obstructing the investigation, and that was why he made a show of cooperating with Adams on this occasion.

  But when he’d dumped Taylor’s papers onto the dining room table, he’d held a few items back. As the cops dove hungrily into the pile, none of them seemed to notice when Eyton slipped quietly away.

  He had business upstairs in the dead man’s bedroom.

  Eyton moved stealthily, hoping a creaky floorboard wouldn’t give him away. If he was gone too long, someone downstairs would surely notice. Glancing around Taylor’s bedroom, he tried to decide what to do with Mabel’s letters. He couldn’t just hand them over to the police; that would be admitting wrongdoing. It had to look as if he’d never had them. In a flash, Eyton had an idea. He stuffed the letters down into one of the director’s boots.

  When Eyton returned downstairs, he found the officers expressing disappointment that they’d found nothing in the pile of documents to illuminate their investigation. Of course they hadn’t. Mabel’s letters hadn’t been the only papers Eyton had held back. All the important stuff was still back at the studio, safely locked away in Lasky’s safe.

  No way would the police ever see what they needed to see.

  CHAPTER 42

  DAMES EVEN MORE DESPERATE

  Boys hung from lampposts. Grown men sat in trees. The windows of nearby buildings were filled with curious spectators. Mobs packed Olive Street between Fifth and Sixth and spilled over into Pershing Square, where vendors sold roasted chestnuts for a nickel a bag. More than ten thousand people had turned out for the funeral of William Desmond Taylor at St. Paul’s Pro-Cathedral. They’d been gathering for the last three hours, hoping to catch a glimpse of the many celebrities whose names had been linked to the case. As the crowd swelled, police on horseback did their best to keep the situation under control. Some pickpocketing had already occurred, and a number of women had fainted.

  There would be more of that before the day was done.

  “Never before in the history of Los Angeles,” one reporter would observe, “has there been such a crowd at the funeral of a private citizen.”

  Before his death, only a select group of industry insiders, censorship agitators, and diehard movie fans had known Taylor’s name. Now it was a household word. An entire nation was riveted to the ongoing whodunit being played out every morning in their daily newspapers.

  Dignitaries started arriving about a half hour before the two o’clock service, escorted through the throng by blue-uniformed police officers. Charles Eyton showed up with a delegation from Famous Players. Among them was George Hopkins, taking his seat beside Julia Crawford-Ivers and Jimmy Van Trees, remembering the man he had loved, unable to share what made his grief so personal.

  Outside, it could have been a movie premiere. Constance Talmadge arrived to squeals from the crowd. Arthur Hoyt. Antonio Moreno. Neva Gerber, who the papers revealed had once been engaged to Taylor. But the biggest cheers came when Mabel Normand was spotted stepping out of her car, escorted on either side by female companions, “hatted and furred so that her features were entirely obscured.”

  Mabel was shaking terribly. Led into the church, she spied the open casket holding Billy’s body and draped with the British flag. On top of the casket rested the army cap he’d worn during the Great War. An honor guard of British soldiers in full uniform stood at each corner of the casket, their hands holding the butts of their rifles, the barrels resting on the marble floor.

  Mabel did not approach the corpse as some of the others did. Instead she took her seat in the second pew. Ahead of her, Henry Peavey keened like a banshee.

  The chancel was filled with flowers. Biggest of all, front and center, was Mabel’s wreath of roses. Billy had sent her flowers three times a week. Now she was returning the favor.

  A smaller arrangement near the bottom, a modest shower of lilies, bore a card that read simply ETHEL DAISY.

  Billy’s daughter.

  Like everyone else, Mabel had been stunned to learn of Billy’s other life. She’d thought she’d known her friend, her champion, her mentor, so well. But in fact Billy had been a blank screen, onto which Mabel, and so many others, had projected their own hopes and needs.

  As the dean of the cathedral made his way up the center aisle, swinging his thurible, the spicy fragrance of incense filled the air. Mabel fought back tears. Her life had changed so much in just under a week. Seven days ago, everything had seemed on track. Molly O’ was a hit. Suzanna was progressing well. Except for being sick a little too often, Mabel was on the top of her game. She was working. She was solvent. She was sober.

  But the fears she’d harbored after Roscoe’s arrest were coming true.

  The press had her in their crosshairs. Every morning when she awoke, Mabel found a new assault waiting for her in the papers. In virtually every account of Taylor’s death, her name appeared. Sennett’s publicists had sent out dispatches to exhibitors proclaiming Mabel’s absolute innocence and beseeching them to “correct any false impressions” that appeared in their loca
l papers. But the fact that Mabel’s letters to Taylor had gone missing only added to the public’s conviction that she was somehow involved.

  The moralists were demanding blood—hers.

  And it wasn’t just Brother Crafts and Mrs. O’Grady who were targeting the movie industry anymore. Now self-appointed moral guardians in the press were doing the church ladies’ work for them. The shrillest critics were Edward Doherty of the New York Daily News and Wallace Smith of the Chicago American, whose articles were syndicated to papers all across the country. Both Doherty and Smith were convinced that Mabel was implicated in some way in Taylor’s death. They wouldn’t let the idea go, grabbing onto it and swinging it around like a couple of dogs tearing apart a rag doll with their teeth. Mabel’s days of cocaine and carousing were well known to Doherty and Smith, and the two yellow journalists refused to accept that those days were over.

  In his most recent article, Doherty had written that Mabel was still attending “the ‘hop’ feasts.” The writer used no names, but everyone knew whom he meant.

  To Examiner reporter Estelle Lawton Lindsey, Mabel had made a direct appeal for fairness. “Get it straight, please,” she’d begged. She hadn’t been in love with Billy. They hadn’t been planning on getting married. No one killed him out of jealousy over her. “And, please,” Mabel added, “say that I never heard of that pink nightgown.”

  But what about the dope parties Taylor was suspected of hosting?

  The question must have been like a dagger in Mabel’s heart. Billy—who had worked so hard to get her off the stuff—accused of hosting drug parties! “Never, in God’s world, never,” Mabel averred. “Billy was one of the cleanest and most temperate men in all his habits. He loved clean, simple pleasures, and he was a kind and thoughtful friend.”

  How terribly Mabel missed him.

  But as she sat there in the cathedral, Billy’s cold, dead body laid out in front of the altar, she had to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Doherty and Smith were onto something.

  Could Billy have been killed by one of her drug contacts? It wasn’t so far-fetched an idea. Certainly Mabel remembered the pusher Billy had chased from her door.

  The tears she shed at St. Paul’s Pro-Cathedral that day weren’t just wrung from grief. They had just as much to do with worry, fear, and guilt.

  Suddenly, from the back of the church, came a terrible commotion. The guests all turned around in their pews.

  The cops standing outside the front doors were shouting at the crowd to get back. Just as the service was getting under way, the mob had broken through the police barriers. People were sweeping up the front steps of the cathedral. Officers reacted quickly, “compelled to handle some of the foremost and most aggressive men and women with force to prevent them from taking the edifice by storm.” In the crush, a number of women fainted. Screams and shouts penetrated the hushed nave of the cathedral.

  For the remainder of the service, the doors were locked.

  Back into the street the crowd was pushed. At the corner of Olive and Sixth, cars had to be redirected because of the sheer number of people blocking the way.

  Among those standing in the unruly mob, observing the ruckus that had taken over the neighborhood, was, quite possibly, Margaret “Gibby” Gibson. The Melrose Hotel was just a couple of blocks down the street from St. Paul’s Pro-Cathedral. Very possibly, when she learned what all the fuss was about, Gibby had joined her neighbors to get a glimpse of the mourners. Maybe she spent a few moments reflecting on the life and death of Billy Taylor. Everybody else seemed to be doing so that day.

  Certainly Gibby had heard the reports that Taylor might have been the victim of a blackmailer. Now, police had a lead. The notorious con man “Dapper” Don Collins, called “the blackmailer of the century” and wanted for shooting a New York financier, had been in Los Angeles recently, reported to be scoping out marks in the film industry. Had Collins been blackmailing Taylor? And had he shot him when he refused to pay up?

  Reading the papers, Gibby would have learned how different Dapper Don was from that other blackmailing Don, her tenant Osborn. “The blackmailer of the century” wore bespoke suits, dined in the finest restaurants, and traveled in the most expensive staterooms on ocean liners. Gibby and the rest of the locusts just managed to get by.

  Some blackmailers, it seemed, had all the luck.

  Back inside the cathedral, the service complete, the long, high notes of Scottish bagpipers followed the casket as it was wheeled down the aisle to the vestibule. One thousand mourners walked past in a single file. When it was Mabel’s turn, she took one look at Billy’s waxy body, his thin lips sewn tightly together, and fainted. Her friends had to help her out to her car.

  At that point, the front doors were opened and the casket was carried down the church steps. The crowd surged once more as Taylor’s body was loaded into the hearse, but police managed to hold them back. As the funeral procession wound its way to Hollywood Memorial Cemetery, men standing on the side of the street doffed their hats. Construction workers on ladders at the corner of Olive and Eighth Streets stopped what they were doing and stood facing the procession, their helmets held over their hearts. At the cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard, a mob spilled in through the gates and had to be forcefully held back. Finally, a bugler sounded taps, and Taylor’s body was slid into a crypt.

  The name on the plaque would read WILLIAM DEANE-TANNER.

  Those craning their necks looking for movie stars had counted several. But there was one surprising omission, they realized. There had been no Mary Miles Minter.

  Mary had other business that day.

  Across town, at the little Spanish casita located at 2039 North Hobart Boulevard, burly men with scowling faces stood at the end of the driveway, their arms crossed over their chests. Their hard eyes dared reporters and curious spectators to try to get past them.

  Mrs. Shelby had hired these private security guards to defend her daughter’s residence that morning after the Examiner splashed Mary’s love note to Taylor across its front page. “Dearest, I love you—I love you—I love you!”—followed by all those damning x’s.

  The newspaper, Mrs. Shelby learned, had received Mary’s note—as well as others written in an easily decipherable code—from Charles Eyton. Shelby, like many others, was stunned that a studio official would willingly bring such scandal upon one of his stars.

  But there was a method to Eyton’s madness. Now that Realart was defunct and Mary was a full-fledged Paramount star, Mrs. Shelby had been agitating for a raise for her daughter. To Mary’s bosses—chief among them Adolph Zukor, who made the final money decisions—the receipts from Mary’s pictures did not justify her million-dollar salary. “If [Mary’s contract is] renewed,” an industry watcher wrote in Film Daily, weeks before the Taylor scandal, “them big figgers [figures] may be missing.” Mary was popular, but she was never going to be a superstar like Mary Pickford, as her early publicity had predicted.

  That hadn’t stopped Shelby from asking for a raise anyway. Zukor was infuriated. Here they were, still in a cost-cutting mode, trying to climb their way out of the red, and that appalling woman had the audacity to demand more money.

  And so releasing Mary’s love letters to Hearst’s minions made a brutal kind of sense. The negative publicity made Mary damaged goods; why would they pay more for her now? Mrs. Shelby knew exactly what was going on. “The studio was using the situation,” she said, “to gain a further reduction” in Mary’s contract.

  For Famous Players, there was another benefit in releasing Mary’s letters. Taylor’s visits to the city’s “queer places,” combined with Henry Peavey’s screaming effeminacy, had left the clear suspicion—encouraged by Edward Doherty and other writers—that Taylor was homosexual. If their martyred director was going to be slandered in the press, Zukor and Lasky much preferred that he be portrayed as a womanizer than a degenerate.

  Yet by indulging in such shenanigans, the studio chiefs were literally playing with Mary�
�s life.

  The revelation of her love letters, following so closely upon the reports of the pink silk nightgown, made her a prime suspect in the murder, and had finally persuaded District Attorney Woolwine, much to Eddie King’s satisfaction, to call her in for an interview.

  It was an indignity Woolwine had hoped to spare her. The DA was a friend of Mrs. Shelby’s. In fact, there were some, even in his own family, who believed Woolwine and Shelby had had an affair. Not many people in Tinseltown liked Charlotte Shelby, but Woolwine found her charming. Ruthless she could be, but Mary’s mother was also witty and flirtatious, especially when she thought she could get more flies with honey than she could with vinegar. Besides, at forty-four, she was still very attractive, and Woolwine appreciated beautiful women.

  But he could no longer ignore the daily headlines. In the descriptions of unscrupulous reporters, the boxy garment found in Taylor’s apartment, which Detective Cline had thought only “resembled a nightgown,” had been transformed into something pink and feminine; in some accounts, it had suddenly sprouted lace. The Hearst papers called the garment something “unknown in a man’s wardrobe.” Every insinuation was made to convince the public that the nightgown belonged to Mary. That was the way to sell newspapers. Edward Sands or some unknown blackmailer would never be as interesting as sexy little Mary Miles Minter. A glamorous movie star on the stand would sell thousands more copies than even Mrs. Peete or Mrs. Obenchain ever had.

  Under such public pressure, Woolwine could not avoid deposing Mary, no matter how fond he was of her mother. And so, shortly before five on the afternoon of Taylor’s funeral, the door to Mary’s house opened. Surrounded by lawyers and private guards, the small blond figure was hustled down the driveway and into a car. Reporters shouted her name, but Mary did not look up. The guards kept the crowds back so that the car could pull into the street. Reporters followed Mary to the Hall of Records downtown.