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

by William J. Mann

Zukor read all the accolades for his old friend. Many of them singled Loew out as exceptional in a world of cutthroats and sharks. Several thousand of Loew’s employees signed an enormous card expressing their belief that they had “worked with him, not for him.”

  Zukor knew his employees would never say the same.

  At Loew’s house, trying to console the dead man’s family, Zukor was useless. “I can’t find words to express my feelings,” he said helplessly. Of course that was something he’d never been good at, whether he was asking forgiveness from Lottie or answering letters from a distraught Roscoe Arbuckle. Zukor’s strategy had always been emotional avoidance at all costs.

  But there he stood, at Loew’s funeral on September 9, one of a couple dozen pallbearers, listening to Rabbi Aaron Eiseman speak about the man they’d come to bury. “A man of humanity, modesty and meekness,” the rabbi called Loew. “With all his power, wealth, success, and aggrandizement, he remained the simple, unostentatious, humble and democratic character.” Zukor might have nitpicked about unostentatious, remembering Loew’s bold ties and fancy cloaks, but the rabbi wasn’t talking about clothes. He was referring to Loew’s generosity of spirit, his concern for others, his lack of self-importance. “He never forgot the days of poverty and want,” Eiseman continued. “He never withheld the helping hand to others.”

  Adolph Zukor had spent the past two decades competing with Marcus Loew. But Loew had never been competing with him, at least not in the same way. Marcus was just “the other fellow doing his business.” He’d made it to the pinnacle. He’d achieved all the same wealth and power that Zukor had. And when it was all over, he was hailed by hundreds of people who had loved him.

  That was one accomplishment Zukor could never match.

  CHAPTER 71

  “WE ARE MAKING REAL PROGRESS”

  Eddie King could not have been happier. Not only had District Attorney Keyes promoted him to lieutenant, but in the fall of 1925 he’d finally agreed to formally reopen the Taylor investigation. The evidence King had compiled against Charlotte Shelby was compelling enough, Keyes said, to warrant another look.

  Hopping on his motorcycle, an exuberant King zipped around town, pressing each witness to remember as much as he or she could about the events of three and four years earlier. Over the next several months, statements were taken from, among others, Charles Eyton, Shelby’s former secretary Charlotte Whitney, and Taylor’s accountant, Marjorie Berger. Once again, King was struck by the specificity of Shelby’s threats against Taylor.

  But it was Berger who provided the clew that excited investigators the most.

  Sitting in her cluttered office, the prim accountant bristled when told that Shelby had claimed to have learned of Taylor’s death through her. “My God, the next thing they will say I murdered him,” Berger complained. “I was the first to give [the news] to her? Absolutely not.” In fact, Berger insisted, it was Shelby who told her about the murder, during a telephone conversation around seven thirty on the morning of the murder.

  Seven thirty. King and the other detectives looked at each other. If that was true, Shelby had known about Taylor’s death even before Henry Peavey discovered the body!

  King couldn’t resist letting his pals in the press know that a new investigation was under way. And so in March 1926 the murder of William Desmond Taylor was back in the headlines: TAYLOR MYSTERY NOT A MYSTERY IN HOLLYWOOD. The gist of most of the stories was plain: the killer was known to police, and she was a woman. “We are making real progress,” Keyes told reporters. An arrest was expected at any time.

  The DA insisted that they finally get an official statement from Shelby. She could no longer find ways of wiggling out of it. Drawing herself up indignantly, Shelby complied with Keyes’s order. She answered every question the detectives asked her, although her account of events differed radically from what everyone else was saying.

  “Mr. Taylor was the most perfectly poised man, such a proper man,” Shelby said, extolling the dead man’s virtues. When a detective asked her about Mary’s relationship with the director, Shelby denied ever noticing “any awakening of a friendship or love” between them. In fact, when the two were out together, she always felt that Mary was “under a good influence.” Confronted with the report that she’d brought a gun to Taylor’s house, Shelby called it absurd. She had never had any quarrel with the man. They were the best of friends!

  How smoothly she lied.

  Only when detectives asked about her gun’s whereabouts was Shelby forced to admit the truth. Her mother had thrown it away—though she didn’t say where or how.

  Certainly Mrs. Shelby seemed to be hiding something. Rumors quickly spread that a “prominent Los Angeles society woman” was close to being indicted.

  In the midst of all this, Keyes’s briefcase was stolen, and reporters learned about the blond hairs that had been found on Taylor’s coat, a fact that had never been revealed to the public. Those hairs—coupled with stories of that pink nightgown, which had disappeared during Woolwine’s tenure—seemed to cinch it for many people. The solution to the mystery was plain: Charlotte Shelby had killed Taylor after discovering that Mary was having an affair with him. Her motives ranged from fear of losing her meal ticket to jealousy because of her own love for the director. Murder aficionados, a considerable audience by 1926, could take their pick.

  Of course, Mary had to be interviewed again as well. When detectives found her, they encountered a very different young woman from the one they had interviewed four years earlier.

  Still fighting her mother for the fortune she felt was rightfully hers, Mary was now twenty-four, living in New York by herself. She had fed her loneliness and resentment with food. The tiny blond southern sexpot had plumped like a boudin sausage on a Cajun grill, the inevitable consequence of sitting around all day with nothing to do, popping chocolates and pastries into her mouth. All her bodices had to be let out. Her puffy fingers refused to surrender her rings. A second chin had dropped below the first.

  Mary had entertained a series of beaux, all of them older than she was, as she’d moved from place to place. None of her beaux lasted. Sometimes she returned to Los Angeles, as she did when her grandmother died, but she was no longer seeking any work on the screen. Having failed in her bid to retake the New York stage, Mary contented herself with giving parties and launching into flowery accounts of her love affair with Mr. Taylor at every opportunity. “I know that he loved me,” she told the detectives who interviewed her in the spring of 1926. Mr. Taylor wanted to marry her, Mary said, if only her monstrous mother hadn’t gotten in the way.

  The detectives asked if Shelby would have killed Taylor to keep him away from her. Mary thought about the question. “She may have said, ‘I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!’” she replied. “Mrs. Shelby was like that, always going to kill somebody.”

  King and the other detectives believed that was just what Mrs. Shelby had done.

  Yet no arrest was made. The problem, as Keyes knew, was that for all the circumstantial evidence against Shelby, they could never bring an indictment without explaining the one major, looming inconsistency in their case against her. Charlotte Shelby simply did not match in any way the description given by any of the eyewitnesses. And without the gun, the detectives had no physical evidence linking her to the crime.

  King stewed, furious that Shelby had slipped from his grasp once again.

  Indeed, when an indictment came down in the fall of 1928, it wasn’t against Shelby, but against Keyes himself, who was charged with “willful and corrupt” misconduct in the office of district attorney. The following February, Keyes was found guilty of accepting bribes and sentenced to jail. The files of the Taylor case were once again locked away in the vault.

  Frustrated, Eddie King wrote a piece called “I Know Who Killed William Desmond Taylor” for a magazine called True Detective Mysteries. In the piece, published in late 1930, he all but named Charlotte Shelby as the murderer.

  Fate went
on conspiring against the nefarious lady.

  Seven years later, when almost everyone had forgotten about the case, King got another chance to make an arrest. Like Mary, Shelby’s older daughter Margaret had also turned against her mother. Fighting Shelby for money, Margaret was now singing a very different song than the one she’d crooned to detectives in the past. In earlier interviews, Margaret had always insisted her mother had nothing to do with the murder. But now she told investigators she had lied. She had reason to believe her mother killed Taylor.

  Although offering no hard evidence, Margaret did reveal how afraid Shelby had been of Asa Keyes after Thomas Woolwine resigned. Margaret also declared that in the hours before Taylor’s murder, Shelby had locked Mary in her room, which disputed Mary’s own account of reading downstairs with the family. Margaret said Mary had snuck out later that night, and hadn’t returned home until eight thirty. King was galvanized by this latest information. Margaret’s story fit precisely the scenario he had long imagined—that Mary had gone to Taylor’s on the night of the murder, and Shelby had found her there. Margaret also revealed that her grandmother had tossed Shelby’s gun into a Louisiana bayou. The accusations were enough to reopen the case once more.

  The new DA, Buron Fitts, took a series of statements. Interviewed again, secretary Charlotte Whitney corroborated Margaret’s contention that Mary had been locked in her room, adding that Mary had told her that she’d been about to elope with Taylor when her mother discovered the plan and put her under lock and key.

  Even more damning evidence was forthcoming. Chauncey Eaton, Shelby’s chauffeur, revealed that although his employer’s gun might be corroding at the bottom of a swamp, the bullets might still exist. Soon after Taylor’s death, Shelby had asked Eaton to remove the ammunition from the gun, afraid that in her grief Mary might attempt suicide, this time for real. So Eaton had placed the shells on a beam in the basement of Casa Margarita. As far as he knew, they were still there.

  Instantly three cars filled with detectives were squealing through the streets toward Shelby’s former home. Fifteen years was a long time for anything to sit undisturbed, but District Attorney Fitts sent his men out to the house regardless. The current owners let them in, and miraculously, when a detective ran his fingers along the beam, the bullets were there.

  And they were of the same old-style ammunition that had killed Taylor!

  Charlotte Shelby, King figured, was finally done for.

  In the spring of 1937 a grand jury was convened to reopen the investigation. The jurors heard testimony from Mary, Margaret, and their mother. Mary came waddling in, now close to two hundred pounds, her once pretty face bloated and creased. Although she had no love for her mother, Mary told the grand jury that any accusation against Shelby in this case was completely absurd. Her sister Margaret was a raging alcoholic, Mary explained, embroiled in civil litigation against her mother, and willing to say anything to make Shelby look bad in the eyes of the law. She had not been locked in her room, Mary insisted, on the night of Taylor’s murder. The story she told at the time was the true one. As for Charlotte Whitney, she was a disgruntled former employee, repeating hearsay and gossip from fifteen years ago.

  The last witness was Mrs. Shelby herself. At last the tenacious lady, her copper hair now shot through with gray, brought with her an alibi for the night of Taylor’s murder. The actor Carl Stockdale swore that he had been with Shelby at her home on the night of February 1 between 7:00 and 9:00 P.M. With icy disdain, Shelby answered every one of the panel’s questions, repeatedly asserting her innocence. Afterward, the jury disbanded. They handed down no indictments, but neither did they offer any exonerations.

  Shelby had had enough. “I demand a complete exoneration in this case or an indictment for the murder of William Desmond Taylor,” she declared. She’d welcome such a move, Shelby said, as it would finally give her an opportunity to end the ceaseless speculation about her. “I did not kill William Desmond Taylor,” she told the press. “I do not know the person who did kill him. I do not know any person who would have the slightest reason or motive to kill him.” Her eyes were hard as she faced the reporters. “One of the worst tortures for any person, particularly a woman, is to go through life with a cloud of malicious innuendo constantly hovering over her like a spectre. Why must William Desmond Taylor’s murder follow me through the years? I want to live the rest of my life in happiness and peace, if I may be permitted to do so.”

  Her words seemed to have the desired effect. Despite Eddie King’s objections, on September 29, 1938, District Attorney Fitts closed the case on the murder of William Desmond Taylor. It would never be opened again.

  When Mabel Normand had died of tuberculosis on February 23, 1930, far too young at thirty-seven, she’d reportedly looked up at her companion, Julia Brew, and said, “I do hate to go without knowing what happened to poor Billy Taylor.”

  EPILOGUE

  A CONFESSION

  OCTOBER 24, 1964

  The late-afternoon sun suffused the hills, turning picture windows pink and brightening the crumbling HOLLYWOOD sign. Still standing after forty-one years, the sign’s lightbulbs were long gone, as was as its final syllable, LAND. The third O had fallen down. The city below reflected the same deterioration. A permanent umbrella of brown smog hung over massive intersecting freeways that had obliterated entire neighborhoods. Most of the orange groves were long gone. Genteel Alvarado Court now moldered in disrepair. In a few years it would be torn down to make way for a shopping plaza.

  On Hollywood Boulevard, the locusts now ruled. Movie premieres had been replaced with drug deals. And across the backlots of the once-thrumming movie studios, a terrible silence prevailed. The system Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew had worked so diligently to create was in its final days.

  Up in the Hollywood Hills, another death was about to take place.

  At a little past four in the afternoon, Ray Long, thirty-one, arrived at his parents’ house on Glen Oak Street. But before he could reach the front door, his attention was drawn to some commotion down the road, at a little house covered with ivy and bougainvillea. Neighbors were rushing toward the place, so Ray wandered that way as well.

  He knew the house. The reclusive old lady who lived there, a Mrs. Lewis, had been his parents’ neighbor for the past fifteen years. Ray knew very little about Mrs. Lewis, except that she was a widow living off a pension from her late husband, who’d worked for an oil company. Rarely did Mrs. Lewis venture off her property. She had no car. Her groceries were delivered to her. Sometimes Ray had seen her poking her head out of the door to pay the delivery boy. No one else ever came to visit Mrs. Lewis. Her only companion was her cat, Rajah.

  Ray’s mother, Mary, had taken Mrs. Lewis under her wing, the same way she cared for the neighborhood stray cats and dogs. Occasionally Mrs. Lewis would come to their house to watch television. The old woman didn’t have much to say to the Long children, but she always seemed pleasant and levelheaded.

  Ray walked up the steps to Mrs. Lewis’s back door.

  He was taken aback by what he found inside. The tiny old woman was writhing on the kitchen floor, “obviously in a great deal of pain.” She was talking rapidly, muttering words Ray didn’t understand. His mother was there as well, and she explained that Mrs. Lewis had suffered a heart attack. An ambulance was on its way.

  Ray knelt beside the old woman. Her eyes were frantic, her hands clawing the air.

  “A priest!” she rasped. “I need a priest!”

  Ray knew that Mrs. Lewis was a Catholic convert. She told him she needed to “confess her sins.”

  Sins? What possible sins could this demure old lady have committed?

  “I killed William Desmond Taylor,” Mrs. Lewis said, in a clear, terrified voice, her eyes latching onto Ray’s.

  The name meant nothing to the young man. Forty-two years later, the murder that had gripped the world’s imagination was unknown to a younger generation.

  Ray tried to comfort Mrs. L
ewis, but she was inconsolable.

  “A priest,” she begged him. “I killed William Desmond Taylor!”

  Finally the ambulance arrived, and Mrs. Lewis was lifted onto a stretcher and carried down the back stairs. She was brought to the Sunset Boulevard Hospital, where she died at 5:20 in the afternoon.

  When Ray asked his mother what Mrs. Lewis had been ranting about, she claimed she didn’t know and refused to discuss it further. It was best, she said, to just forget that sad day.

  But Ray didn’t forget.

  Mrs. Lewis had named Mrs. Long as her executor. The old woman had left $500 to her veterinarian to take care of Rajah, as well as a few other small bequests. But when her estate was probated, it was discovered there was no cash left. So Mrs. Long and her husband generously borrowed the money to honor their neighbor’s last wishes. In exchange, they received Mrs. Lewis’s little home and its contents.

  As he went through the late woman’s belongings, Ray found little of value. “She obviously lived at, or below, the poverty line,” he came to realize. The house was no more than a thousand square feet, filled with cheap furniture. However, a small trunk in the corner caught Ray’s eye. He pried open the lid.

  Inside, he discovered several old letters, most written by Mrs. Lewis’s deceased husband, bearing postmarks from Singapore and Ceylon. Underneath the letters, however, were far more interesting items: a stash of black-and-white glossy stills from a series of old movies. Silent movies, from the looks of them. There were also headshots of a beautiful woman.

  Across one was written the name “Patricia Palmer.”

  Ray showed the photos to his mother. Who, he demanded to know, was their neighbor?

  Mrs. Long looked at the photographs. She explained that Mrs. Lewis had been an actress in the movies. She didn’t know a lot about her career. But she had worked under the name Patricia Palmer.