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

by William J. Mann

  Woolwine had decided to have his own deputy, William Doran, conduct the interview, instead of the more independent Eddie King. Knowing the detective was deeply suspicious of Mary, the DA apparently chose to shield her from more aggressive questioning.

  Mary entered the conference room calmly, with none of the histrionics she’d displayed at Overholtzer’s mortuary. An uncharacteristic air of dignity followed her. Her mother had undoubtedly been coaching her again.

  With her lawyer at her side, Mary answered questions for several hours. She admitted that she’d been in love with Taylor, but insisted they had not been intimate. She rejected as absurd the idea that either Dixon or Neilan had ever been serious enough about her to go after Taylor with a gun. Her childishly romantic testimony seemed straightforward and sincere.

  In short, Mary convinced Doran, and through him Woolwine, of her innocence.

  Immediately afterward, the district attorney’s office announced that they would be issuing a complaint charging Edward Sands with the murder of William Desmond Taylor.

  Delivering the statement to the press was Eddie King. Woolwine had no doubt asked him to do so as a way of bringing him in line. Yet despite his public words, King was not convinced.

  That was because, as a member of the police department and not as an investigator for the DA, he’d conducted his own interview with Mary the night before. And King hadn’t been quite as captivated by his subject as Doran had been.

  To his friends in the press corps, King described his questioning of Mary as “long and grueling.” Just what he learned, he didn’t say. But he’d apparently gleaned enough that he wasn’t as ready as Woolwine to exonerate Mary of all involvement in the case.

  The next day, King’s suspicions seemed vindicated.

  Searching through Taylor’s bungalow one more time, police found a lacy handkerchief with the initials MMM.

  The handkerchief was almost certainly the same one Mary had switched with Taylor’s, stuffing it down into his jacket pocket during her late-night visit the previous December. Just where the lacy little thing had been the past week was anyone’s guess. Police had scoured the apartment several times but found it only now, on the same day they made another important discovery in the bungalow: Mabel’s letters, packed down into one of Taylor’s boots.

  Once again, Charles Eyton’s fingerprints were all over the evidence—metaphorically speaking, anyway. It was painfully obvious that Eyton had snatched the handkerchief on the morning of February 2, hoping to keep his star out of the scandal. Now, when protecting Mary was no longer his goal, he’d returned it, perhaps at the same time as Mabel’s letters, for police to find.

  And so the studio continued its cavalier game with Mary’s life.

  That little handkerchief convinced Eddie King that the diminutive blond actress was, somehow or another, implicated in Taylor’s murder. If Mary was arrested now, it would largely be because of Eyton’s reckless acts, sanctioned by Lasky and Zukor.

  In seclusion back at her mansion, Charlotte Shelby watched the developments with mounting horror. The threat was not just against her daughter.

  Sooner or later, Shelby herself would be in danger.

  CHAPTER 43

  THE NEED FOR VIGILANCE

  Zukor loved trains. One of his first ventures in the movie business had been dressing up little storefront nickelodeons to look like the interiors of railroad cars and then setting their floors on rockers. A man out back would shake the room while images of passing terrains were projected onto the screen. Working-class audiences who could barely afford trolley fare were given the illusion of traveling across the country on a passenger train. Glamour for the masses, courtesy of Adolph Zukor—still his stock in trade.

  But as the flat desert landscape flashed past his window on the Twentieth Century Limited, much as it had done during his little “Hales’s Tours,” Zukor wasn’t in the mood for sightseeing. Steaming mad, he puffed his cigars one after another, producing nearly as much smoke and ash as the locomotive’s engine.

  The Taylor murder had sent him into a fury. Variety reported that the film chief was “at the end of his rope.” He told the trade weekly it was “cleanup time” in Hollywood.

  Zukor’s first-class cabin was scattered with newspapers. One of the last tabloids he’d picked up before leaving was the New York Daily News, a relatively young paper with a rapidly growing circulation, due to its emphasis on photographs. For days the News had been splashing Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter all over its pages. But the most grievous aspect of the tabloid’s coverage were the regular dispatches of Edward Doherty, which millions read. And Doherty didn’t have much good to say about Hollywood.

  “The murder of William Desmond Taylor has had a fearsome effect upon the movies,” Doherty wrote on February 8. “It is exposing the debaucheries, the looseness, the rottenness of Hollywood.” A religious conservative, Doherty knew how to press the hot buttons that incited outrage. “The volcano has erupted,” he wrote. “The lava is spreading. But the debauchees keep up their mad, capricious dance, drugged, drunk, senseless, dancing into oblivion.” Doherty wasn’t all that different from Brother Wilbur Crafts, except that his goal was selling newspapers, not saving souls.

  When all was said and done, Doherty wrote, the scandal would mean the loss of “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to the movie industry. Of course, that was the reason Zukor was steaming west. Doherty might have been a cynical extremist, but he was right about the money. Preachers were calling for boycotts from their pulpits. Zukor intended to crack his whip, and he didn’t care who felt its sting.

  And that included Jesse Lasky and their loose-cannon general manager, Charley Eyton.

  Zukor and Lasky were regularly at odds over many details of running Famous Players, so it wasn’t surprising that they would have different views on how to handle the Taylor scandal. Certainly Zukor wasn’t pleased to see how frequently Eyton’s name popped up in reports of the murder investigation. Removing Taylor’s papers from the bungalow had been prudent on the general manager’s part; admitting the fact to police had not been. As a result, Eyton had been directly threatened by authorities; according to Variety, he’d only “narrowly escaped trouble for himself” by finally returning Mabel’s letters. With the Federal Trade Commission breathing down his back, Zukor did not want his studio suspected of obstruction.

  On the afternoon of February 12, Zukor’s train chugged into La Grande Station. A delegation of studio officials waited on the platform, including Lasky and Sid Grauman, representing Zukor’s loyal Paramount exhibitors. Given the circumstances, his reception was modest; a few days earlier, Cecil B. DeMille had scrapped plans for his own lavish welcome-home party, figuring the time wasn’t quite right for tubas and trombones.

  Whisked off in a studio car toward Hollywood, Zukor could look out the window at a slate-blue sky silhouetted with palm trees and ringed with majestic mountains. Although he was a New Yorker through and through, the movie chief liked this land of sunshine and make-believe. Hollywood had been very good to him. And now, in the film colony’s hour of need, Zukor intended to return the favor.

  The moralists were crying for Hollywood’s destruction. A delegation of women’s groups had met with President Harding, requesting that the film industry be relocated to Washington, DC, where Congress could act as babysitter. Mrs. Evelyn F. Snow, Ohio film censor and a Republican committeewoman with the ear of the president, suggested her state as the film capital instead, since Ohio sat at the geographical center of the country. Rumors abounded that Will Hays was set to order the industry east as soon as he took charge, and that Zukor was planning to close down the Hollywood plant and reopen the studio on Long Island. The only remedy to the scandals, apparently, was to destroy America’s Sodom.

  Zukor had had enough of such talk. “There’s no more immorality in the Hollywood colony than in the New York stock exchange,” he had told reporters shortly before setting out on his trip. Arriving at the studio on Sun
set Boulevard, he was equally as vociferous in his defense of the industry. “We all deplore the recent unfortunate occurrences,” the movie boss told the waiting reporters, “but . . . I am sure that the percentage of wholesome God-fearing men and women must be as large [in the studios] as among those following any other line of endeavor.”

  Then the diminutive figure in the expensive overcoat and fedora hat, flanked and shielded by the much taller Jesse Lasky and Sid Grauman, pushed his way through the mob and barricaded himself inside the studio. Not for several days would Zukor be heard from again.

  Safe from the eyes and ears of the press, Zukor’s lieutenants were debriefed about everything they had done.

  His underlings held nothing back from their boss. To do so would have been career suicide. Creepy inspired fear among everyone in the company, even Lasky, who was known on business trips to hide his late-night revelry from his disapproving partner. If Zukor discovered that someone had kept certain details from him—especially about something as important as the Taylor case—he would have had the offender fired, even blackballed from the industry. Hiram Abrams was proof of that.

  So Lasky and Eyton laid everything on the table for Zukor.

  With his own eyes the movie chief beheld the evidence of Taylor’s killer.

  Once again he had a chance to stanch the hemorrhaging Famous Players was suffering by going to the police. But once again he did nothing. The truth remained worse than the ongoing scandal.

  Zukor blamed Lasky for letting both the Arbuckle and Taylor scandals break “all publicity records.” After all, both incidents had occurred on Lasky’s watch as head of production at the Hollywood studio. But though the two partners had frequently disagreed over how to handle the Arbuckle affair, here they saw eye to eye.

  The steps Zukor and Lasky took in response to Taylor’s death would be completely erased from history. If anything was written down, it was subsequently destroyed. They left no trail. Decades later, when Zukor’s papers were prepared for posterity, there would be one notable gap in his correspondence. Every month for the year 1922 would be packed full of letters, telegrams, and memos—except for February, for which not one scrap would remain.

  They didn’t call him Creepy for nothing.

  Yet despite the lack of documentation of his activities, Zukor was very busy that month. Ten thousand circulars, paid for and authorized by the film chief, went out to police departments all around the country, describing Edwards Sands and asking for his capture. The studio was throwing its weight behind the Sands theory—the least damaging to Taylor’s (and the film industry’s) reputation. Next, Zukor approved a set of talking points intended to reframe the public discussion of the crime. If the talk about drugs couldn’t be quelled, then why not make Taylor an antidrug crusader? After all, he’d briefly assisted US Attorney Tom Green. Now that was a storyline, Zukor realized, that could work to Tinseltown’s benefit.

  And so, a few days after Zukor’s arrival, a very different narrative began appearing in the daily newspapers. Captain Edward A. Salisbury, well-known explorer and a friend of the dead man, called a press conference at the Waldorf in New York and told reporters, “Billy Taylor threatened to make an example of the drug peddlers in Hollywood, but they evidently ‘got him’ first.” That Salisbury came forward exactly when he did was no coincidence. He’d just returned from the South Seas with a documentary film, and Paramount had just agreed to distribute it, at least in part. Where Adolph Zukor was involved, there were no coincidences, but plenty of quid pro quos.

  Zukor also asked for help from a more surprising ally: Marcus Loew. Under similar circumstances, Zukor might not have been as generous. But Zukor’s daughter’s father-in-law stood up before a gathering of exhibitors and paid tribute to William Desmond Taylor as “one of the hardest fighters in the movement against the drug traffic.” Taylor, Loew said, had been “instrumental in ridding Los Angeles of scores of these traffickers.” Taylor had suddenly become a superhero, single-handedly cleansing the city of vermin. Reporters picked up Loew’s story and ran with it, and Zukor was grudgingly grateful to his old rival, who’d once again come to his aid.

  Yet for all that, investigators still suspected that Famous Players was hiding something. The district attorney’s office was convinced the studio was sheltering “a number of persons who could, if they would, give information which would put the police on the right trail.” One source told the Examiner that “highly placed people in the motion picture industry” were “pursuing their policy of silence in order to protect” someone. And no one thought they’d really go to all that trouble to protect a nobody like Edward Sands.

  Who, then, was the studio shielding?

  Detective Sergeant Eddie King suspected the answer was Mary Miles Minter. But Charles Eyton had given Mary’s love letters to the Examiner. That wasn’t protection. That was implication.

  Once again Zukor had apparently decided, for the good of the industry, to toss one of his own to the wolves.

  Mary was at the mercy of the reformers. Mrs. Caroline W. Engler of Lynn, Massachusetts, led the charge. Mrs. Engler, who “took an absorbing interest in all civic and welfare matters,” had convinced her town’s censor board to ban the just-released Minter film, Tillie. “Because of the Taylor murder and the naming of Mary Miles Minter as one of Taylor’s admirers,” the censor board wrote in its decision, “it would not be good policy . . . to allow Mary Miles Minter films to be shown.”

  Lynn, Massachusetts, was the first locality to ban Minter films. It would not be the last.

  Zukor was no doubt unhappy about losing revenue from Mary’s pictures. But he took no steps to defend the frightened young woman. Like Arbuckle, when the big picture was considered, Mary was expendable. Abandoning Mary was still preferable to Zukor than revealing what he had found in Taylor’s papers.

  This was not the man Adolph Zukor had once been—the young dreamer who had come to America believing in a land of opportunity and fairness for all. But it was the man he was now. He had started with a vision, a desire to achieve greatness for motion pictures. But now that vision had become conflated with his own personal ambition, and while the vision was still there, it was becoming harder to distinguish between the two. An attack on the movies was an attack on Adolph Zukor. The scandals, the exhibitors, the FTC investigation, Tufts: these had all left him feeling surrounded and persecuted. It wasn’t just Famous Players that was under siege; it was Zukor himself.

  If sacrificing Fatty Arbuckle or Mary Miles Minter would ensure his own survival, so be it. Zukor would never again be that vulnerable child, on his own, unsure of his future. He would never again be powerless or penniless.

  Even if that meant letting the real killer of William Desmond Taylor go free.

  At last, after more than a week in seclusion, Zukor emerged from the studio. Striding out to the waiting reporters, he announced that he had developed new guidelines for the industry. A “vigilance committee” would safeguard “the good name of its members,” Zukor said. Everyone would be obliged to sign a pledge of good behavior. “I am here to see,” he declared, “that those few who violate the edicts of good conduct and bring discredit and embarrassment to the many are ruled not only against but out of the ranks.”

  This, then, was how he justified his own actions. Arbuckle had brought discredit to the many, so he needed to be “ruled out of the ranks.” It didn’t matter whether he was innocent or guilty of the crime at hand. The same with Mary: if her career plummeted now, Zukor reasoned, it was her fault, not his. She deserved whatever she got for being so indiscreet. And what if Mabel Normand were the culprit? As fond of her as Zukor had always been, if she’d been one of his employees, he would have sacrificed her the same way. After all, those tales of drugs had brought embarrassment upon the industry—and they were her doing, not his.

  But sometimes, Zukor understood, exceptions did have to be made.

  After spending about a week and a half in the film colony, Zukor departed fo
r San Francisco with Sid Grauman to make plans for a gala tenth-anniversary celebration of the release of Queen Elizabeth. But he left Lasky with some final instructions. If they were to ensure that the truth about Taylor’s death never leaked, there was one more thing they would have to do.

  CHAPTER 44

  TAKING HIM FOR A FOOL

  Henry Peavey just wanted to go home. The spotlight in Los Angeles, enjoyable at first, had become too glaring, and he longed to return to the winding, hilly streets of San Francisco. The press had turned him into a laughingstock. The press called Peavey a “queer person,” describing him as “a wonder at concocting rice pudding and a marvel with the crochet needles.” Racist writers inserted hackneyed phrases like “yes’um” and “I’se very lonesome without Mr. Taylor” into his speech when in fact he was quite well spoken, with an accent that reflected Northern California, not North Carolina. And so, fed up, the former valet requested permission from District Attorney Woolwine to step out of the limelight and head back home.

  But Woolwine ordered him to stay put. He might be needed again, and the DA didn’t want to have to go looking for him.

  Peavey was peeved. But he had no recourse. Woolwine had been influential in getting the vagrancy charges against him dropped, and he could just as easily reinstate them.

  So Peavey was in no mood when, shortly before noon on Sunday, February 19, he heard a rapping at the door of his lodging house on East Third Street. Peering out the window, he spied a couple of white guys in boater hats. Probably journalists.

  Opening the door a crack, Peavey snarled, “I am not doing any talking to newspaper reporters.”