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

by William J. Mann

But what had her dying words meant? Ray had not forgotten them, and he suspected his mother knew more than she had previously admitted. What had Mrs. Lewis meant by saying that she’d killed William Desmond Taylor, whoever he was?

  Mrs. Long explained that Taylor had been a movie director, and that his murder had been quite the sensation in 1922. The case remained unsolved. And, Mrs. Long admitted, once before their neighbor had made a similar claim.

  A few months before her death, Pat Lewis had come to the Longs’ house to watch Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, a program on KNXT, Channel 2. With a dry wit, Story hosted reports about the city’s history, the more offbeat and unusual the better. And this night he was revisiting the murder of William Desmond Taylor.

  At the mention of the dead man’s name, Mrs. Lewis had become unhinged.

  “I was the one who killed him!” she told Mrs. Long. “I killed Taylor! I thought it was all forgotten!” She rushed around the house, crying.

  Mrs. Long hadn’t known what to make of their neighbor’s hysterics. Her husband, Edward Long, had been a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department until he retired; he’d joined the force in November 1924, two and a half years after Taylor’s death and a year after Patricia Palmer’s arrest for extortion. He knew the media circus that had followed the case in the 1920s, and knew they might see something like that again if new information was reported. Not wanting to draw attention to themselves or their neighbor, and not knowing whether her statements had any veracity, the Longs decided the best thing was to say nothing about Mrs. Lewis’s wild claim.

  But their son couldn’t forget what he had heard.

  In the years that followed, Ray Long dug up facts on the case. More than a decade passed before he learned very much. By then a small cottage industry had grown up around the Taylor murder. Fans of classic film as well as amateur detectives wrote articles in film journals, trying to sift through all the clews. Reading as much as he could find, Ray discovered that while Taylor’s murder remained officially unsolved, a general consensus had developed that he’d been shot by Charlotte Shelby, the mother of Mary Miles Minter, another former silent screen star, but that Shelby had gotten away with the crime.

  This was certainly the conclusion drawn by the director King Vidor, who had known Taylor and many of the principals in the case, and who spent some time in the late 1960s and early 1970s researching the case for a possible movie. Eventually Vidor’s research was novelized in A Cast of Killers, a best-selling book by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick that was published in 1986. In 1990 Robert Giroux countered Kirkpatrick’s conclusions in A Deed of Death, arguing that Taylor’s killer was actually the hired assassin of a drug gang, angry at him for disrupting their lucrative trade. Fourteen years later Charles Higham’s Murder in Hollywood postulated that it wasn’t Shelby but Mary herself who had pulled the trigger in a fatal embrace.

  No one ever mentioned Pat Lewis—or Patricia Palmer—or Margaret “Gibby” Gibson, which, as Ray Long soon discovered, was his neighbor’s real name.

  Finally Ray took his story to the one person who might make sense of it. In 1985 Bruce Long (no relation), a longtime aficionado of the Taylor mystery, had started publishing Taylorology, an intermittent fanzine dedicated to the case. In 1993 the fanzine went online, and would eventually run some one hundred issues. Under one banner the website gathered virtually every article ever written about the murder, as well as offering expert analysis and the kind of common-sense detective work even many of the original gumshoes had missed. If anyone could determine if and how Margaret Gibson had been involved in the murder of William Desmond Taylor, it was Bruce Long.

  Within just a few months of publishing Ray Long’s account, Bruce Long and his shrewd band of Taylorologists had uncovered accounts of Gibby’s various arrests. Speculation ensued.

  That was where I came in, snared by the mystery and hoping to rectify the errors I’d made when I briefly referenced the case in my book Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood. I started researching in old court records, as well as in the archives of the FBI.

  At long last, the suggestion made by FBI agent Leon Bone—that Los Angeles detectives consider the possibility that Don Osborn’s gang was involved in Taylor’s death—was being followed up. When Bone first made the recommendation, it was brushed aside. Nearly eighty years later, I thought it might prove the answer to Hollywood’s most notorious unsolved murder.

  Eddie King had first suspected that Charlotte Shelby was the killer for one reason: because district attorney Thomas Woolwine refused to investigate her. Detective Lieutenant King thought the DA was covering up a friend’s guilt. In fact, it appears that Woolwine did want to protect Shelby, but not for the reasons King assumed. Woolwine recognized the vultures circling above Mary and Shelby. The newspapers, especially the Hearst publications, desperately wanted a woman to be the culprit, certain that would make for higher sales. So Woolwine did his best to protect his friends—not because Shelby was guilty, but because it was obvious that neither she nor Mary had anything to do with the crime.

  Woolwine saw the evidence against Shelby for what it was: purely circumstantial. But the sheer abundance of it was enough to blindside King and dozens of seasoned detectives. The motive seemed to be there; Shelby had threatened to kill Taylor in the past; she had no strong alibi for her whereabouts on the night of the murder; and the weapon appeared to match. Finally, the blond hairs on Taylor’s lapel provided Shelby with a reason for her final desperate act.

  Certainly Shelby was aware of all this circumstantial evidence, and that was why she tried, sometimes awkwardly, to keep detectives at arm’s length. “She was frightened by the Taylor murder case,” her daughter Margaret told investigators in 1937. “She told me they were pinning it pretty close to her. She was awfully worried.”

  She had reason to be. Shelby knew she made a very popular suspect in Tinseltown, where nearly everyone hated her. She also knew the newspapers were clamoring for a woman to splash across their front pages. No wonder she sent her mother to Louisiana to toss the gun into the swamp. No wonder she tried to lie low and stonewall the detectives. No wonder she got ill whenever Mary started talking and drawing attention to herself.

  Charlotte Shelby was tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. By 1925, the prevailing wisdom was that she had killed Taylor while disguised as a man. “The image was too cinematic to resist and Hollywood embraced it,” wrote Betty Harper Fussell, biographer of Mabel Normand, some decades later. Yet for all its dramatic potential, the suggestion was completely illogical. People who insisted Shelby was the killer seemed to willfully disregard Faith MacLean’s eyewitness testimony of seeing the killer leave Taylor’s house. “To conform to Mrs. MacLean’s description,” Fussell went on, “Mother Shelby would have had to strap on elevator shoes six to eight inches high and strap sixty to seventy pounds of padding to her body.” But what was logic when “pitted against the power of a double-barreled image—the seduced virgin and the vengeful virago?”

  It would have made one heck of a King Vidor movie, though.

  Other facts debunk the theory as well. Margaret was a hopeless alcoholic when she made the claims against her mother, who she was suing for money and trying to discredit. Not long after her testimony, Margaret was institutionalized. Meanwhile, Mary herself, whose love for Taylor endured, never believed her mother was guilty, even when she was angriest at her. If she’d believed her mother had killed her great love, wouldn’t she have lashed out at her? Plus Shelby actually welcomed and encouraged the 1937 grand jury inquiry, hardly the typical reaction of a guilty person. Allegations that she knew of Taylor’s death before it was public knowledge are convincingly countered by contemporary newspaper accounts, which record that Mary and her mother did not learn of the murder until much later in the morning.

  As for the hairs on Taylor’s jacket? If the expert was correct, and they did indeed come from Mary’s head, that much is easily explained by her midnight visit to Taylor in D
ecember—the same in which she gave him her handkerchief, which the press made so much of—when by her own testimony she rested her head against his chest. Henry Peavey claimed he cleaned and brushed Taylor’s jackets frequently, which is why many theorized that Mary must have been back to visit Taylor shortly before his death; surely by the time of Taylor’s death, a month later, Peavey’s brush would have cleared away any hair Mary had left behind in December. But is it really so difficult to believe that Peavey may simply have missed two hairs on a piece of gabardine?

  Finally, Charlotte Shelby’s own character exonerates her. Certainly she was cruel and hotheaded. Without a doubt, she had threatened Taylor. But as passionate as she was, she was also shrewd. One didn’t achieve the kind of success she had secured for herself and her daughter by being rash. Shelby knew how to play the game. Would she have risked everything by dressing as a man and confronting Taylor with a gun? Wouldn’t she have gone to Jesse Lasky or Charles Eyton and asked them to handle it? Sneaking into Taylor’s apartment while he was outside bidding Mabel good night, and then drawing a gun on him when he returned, would have been an extremely reckless move on Shelby’s part. And if there was one thing Charlotte Shelby was not, it was reckless.

  As for that pink nightgown, it was the press that declared it was a woman’s garment. No one seemed to consider that Taylor, with his appreciation for fine clothes, might choose to sleep in a silk nightshirt himself.

  The only truly compelling bit of evidence against Charlotte Shelby wasn’t, as Eddie King insisted, motivation, but rather ammunition. The bullets of Shelby’s gun matched the type that killed Taylor. Experts speculated there might not be “one pistol in thousands” anywhere in the city that used the same “ancient brand of ammunition” that had lodged itself in Taylor’s neck.

  In fact, there may have been one other pistol with such old bullets—as the introduction of Margaret Gibson as a suspect in the case would reveal.

  Only one other person was ever considered seriously as a suspect, and that was Edward Sands. Yet while some detectives clung for many years, even decades, to their belief that Sands committed the crime, others dismissed the theory quickly. As Eddie King argued, it made little sense for Sands to return to Los Angeles and risk arrest. Even if it could be argued—as it was—that Sands had come back to get some money from Taylor, then shot him in the heat of an argument, the fact remained that Faith Mac-Lean would have recognized him. And she was certain the man she saw wasn’t Sands. King said that “in his gut” he never believed it was Sands.

  To his credit, King was also troubled by the fact that Charlotte Shelby didn’t match MacLean’s description. He was a good enough detective not to simply disregard evidence when it didn’t fit his preferred theory. That was why he had a photograph of Carl Stockdale shown to MacLean. The evidence of the gun and the matching bullets had convinced King of Shelby’s culpability, but it remained possible that she had sent someone else to do the dirty work. Could she have used Stockdale, who belatedly came forward as her alibi for the night of the crime?

  MacLean studied the photograph of Stockdale. After some contemplation, she said Stockdale did look like the man she had seen so briefly that night. King was encouraged.

  But of course, not only was Stockdale Shelby’s alibi, but she was his.

  It’s well to remember Thomas Woolwine’s opinion of the case, as stated by a family member later: “Whoever killed Taylor had probably been hired to do it and had no emotional connection” to him. The murder, in Woolwine’s view, was not a crime of passion.

  A chance burglar, perhaps. Or someone who was operating completely under the radar of the police.

  King believed that if detectives had been able to get back all of Taylor’s papers from the Famous Players studio after Charles Eyton had absconded with them, they might have found evidence of another suspect.

  Gibby’s dying confession, as it turned out, was the next best thing to Adolph Zukor handing over Taylor’s papers to the police.

  At the end, as she breathed her last on the floor of her little house, Gibby’s guilty conscience pleaded for some kind of absolution after more than four tortured decades. In her loneliness and her poverty, her Catholic faith had come to sustain her; she would leave money to Blessed Sacrament Church on Sunset Boulevard for a requiem Mass to be said for her soul. So in those last few minutes of her life, what she feared was eternal damnation for having killed William Desmond Taylor.

  But, as with Shelby, the notion that Gibby herself pulled the trigger stretches the imagination. At five feet one, Gibby was even shorter than Shelby; her size would have been apparent to Faith MacLean, whether the killer was dressed as a man or not.

  A tortured conscience, however, could come from other things.

  Gibby might not have killed Taylor with her own hand. But if she was the one who set into motion the events that led to Taylor’s death, she might have held herself just as responsible.

  And this seems to be what happened.

  Don Osborn was looking for new blackmail targets.

  Gibby suggested William Desmond Taylor.

  And when Osborn started blackmailing Taylor, it ended in murder.

  Gibby knew Billy Taylor. She may have known any number of his secrets, from the reason for his termination at Vitagraph to his relationship with George Hopkins. She may also have known about his compromising situation with Mary, or Mabel’s drug problems, or the fact that Taylor had abandoned his wife and child.

  What we know for certain is that sometime in 1921, Gibby started collaborating with Don Osborn in various blackmail plots. During that same period, Taylor’s last few months alive, evidence suggests that he was being blackmailed. Gibby could have provided Osborn with information to use in blackmailing Taylor.

  But Don Osborn didn’t kill Taylor. Just as Faith MacLean would have noticed if the person leaving the director’s bungalow was unusually short, she would also have noticed if the person had been very tall. Osborn was six feet three.

  We do know, however, that a noticeably tall man was spotted at Taylor’s bungalow on the Monday before the murder. Taylor’s neighbor Neil Harrington saw two men come to Taylor’s front door; when no one answered, the men tried to peer through the director’s windows. Harrington said that one of the men was “much smaller than the other.” A medium-height person standing beside someone who was six three would indeed look “much smaller.” And Osborn’s partner in blackmail, Blackie Madsen, stood about five-seven or five-eight.

  It seems likely that it was Osborn and Madsen who Harrington saw at Taylor’s apartment, come to pressure him into coughing up some hush money—much as they would approach John Bushnell ten months later.

  The two blackmailers returned to Alvarado Court on the night of February 1.

  As always, Madsen had his gun. The old .38-caliber he’d carried since the Spanish-American War. And if he’d kept the gun that long, possibly he had old ammunition for it.

  Madsen would have had no trouble finding Alvarado Court; his mother lived right around the block from Taylor, on West Sixth Street. But Osborn, stepping off the streetcar, seems not to have remembered the exact address; Floyd Hartley, the gas station owner, told the police he gave directions to a man he described as in his twenties and dark. Learning the address, Osborn headed toward Taylor’s to meet Madsen.

  A short while later, en route from his mother’s house, Madsen was spotted by Mrs. Marie Stone, who was on her way to babysit for her granddaughter. Mrs. Stone would notice Blackie’s ruddy skin, which is specifically described in the FBI reports, as well as his thick earlobes, evident in FBI photos. For a moment, Mrs. Stone had thought he might have been Edward Sands. Why? Because both Sands and Madsen were bowlegged.

  Hiding in the shadows, Osborn and Madsen realized they couldn’t approach Taylor right away. His valet was still home, and Mabel Normand had come to visit. The two blackmailers waited separately; Christina Jewett, the MacLeans’ maid, would hear only one man loitering in the alley
. And of course Faith MacLean saw only one man come out of Taylor’s house.

  Madsen recognized his opportunity when Taylor walked Mabel to her car. He slipped into the bungalow alone. Either he and Osborn had planned it that way, or there simply wasn’t enough time to summon Osborn. Perhaps they’d agreed that Madsen should play the role of some kind of backup agent, as he would do some months later with Bushnell.

  Whatever happened next was brief. When Taylor reentered the apartment, Madsen was waiting for him. Perhaps he’d hidden in the telephone nook under the stairs, surprising Taylor when he came through the door. Perhaps, seeing Madsen emerge from under the stairs, Taylor reacted instinctively—aggressively—making the same sort of impulsive move Writ Berkey had made two decades earlier. And just as he had done on the streets of Independence, Missouri, Madsen had responded just as instinctively by pulling out his gun.

  And what had Taylor done to cause such a reaction? A careful consideration of the crime scene provides the answer.

  Coming in through the front door and spotting Madsen, the angry director had reached for whatever was closest to him: the chair that he kept against the wall. He grabbed the chair and lifted it into the air, intending to strike Madsen with it. His arms were raised over his head.

  Madsen, his gun drawn, fired impulsively, just as he had done in Independence.

  Taylor fell, the chair with him.

  As Eddie King would prove, the powder burns on Taylor’s clothing indicated he’d been shot up close, no more than two inches away from his killer. So when Taylor fell, bringing the chair with him, he fell on top of Madsen.

  The only way for Madsen to regain his feet was to shove Taylor and the chair off him. In the process, he stood the chair athwart Taylor’s left foot. As the director’s face turned blue and he struggled to take his last breaths, Madsen turned him flat on his back so that he could pat him down for valuables. That would account for the neat condition in which the corpse would be found, instead of the crumpled appearance expected in someone felled by a gunshot.