Madsen took the roll of money but left everything else, since he knew the shot must have been heard by neighbors. He had to get out fast. Someone would likely be there soon. He didn’t have time to pry rings off fingers.
Still, Madsen was a cool enough operator to know he couldn’t just run out of the house. He left Taylor’s apartment casually, closing the door carefully behind him. He even looked over at Faith MacLean, who’d come to her door, and gave her a smile.
Madsen fit perfectly the description MacLean would give of the man leaving Taylor’s apartment. He was the right height. He had a prominent nose. He was “not fat but stocky.” He definitely had a “rough” sort of appearance. As his FBI mug shots would prove, he looked so much like “a motion-picture burglar” that he might have been sent over by Central Casting. When MacLean was shown the photograph of Carl Stockdale, she said it looked like the man she had seen. With their craggy faces and prominent noses, Stockdale and Madsen definitely resembled each other.
According to FBI reports, Madsen sometimes wore a mustache, sometimes not. When John Bushnell encountered him ten months after Taylor was killed, Madsen was sporting a gray mustache. Of course he was. He’d grown it to help disguise himself, as Faith MacLean’s account in all the newspapers had described a clean-shaven man.
The fact that Madsen hung around after Osborn was arrested, instead of escaping to Mexico when he had the chance, suggests that Osborn had something on him. Osborn could well have turned state’s evidence and ratted out Madsen as Taylor’s killer if Madsen had left him to take the rap by himself. Only when Madsen’s plot to get him sprung failed did Osborn accept his three-year sentence; it was a lot better than hanging.
Murder bound Osborn and Madsen together. When Osborn told Bushnell that he would kill him if he didn’t come up with the money, it was no idle threat. He and Madsen had killed before. Rose Putnam said that Osborn was feeling “very confident” that fall when he and Madsen set out to blackmail Bushnell. And why wouldn’t he feel confident?
He’d gotten away with murder.
But what of Gibby? She was the spark to light the match, but what about after the deed was done? Was she involved after the fact? Did she know for certain that Osborn and Madsen were responsible for Taylor’s death?
Did she, upon learning that Taylor was dead, take off in her car, overcome with the same sense of guilt she would display at the end of her life? Did she drive frantically up the coastal highway to Ventura? The driver of that car was never identified by police.
No doubt Madsen and Osborn did their best to keep the secret to themselves, but the locusts must have suspected something. Word traveled quickly in underground circles, and soon even Honore Connette, likely through James Bryson, had heard the rumors. It was easy to dismiss Connette as a crank, but when I discovered his connection to Bryson, his wagging tongue in the weeks after the murder suddenly seemed more relevant, and further convinced me of the role played by the Osborn gang.
Yet even if Osborn never admitted the killing directly to Gibby, she was smart enough to figure things out. And that knowledge would have given her extraordinary power with Taylor’s studio, Famous Players–Lasky, in those desperate months of early 1922.
The only way to understand the repeated favors Jesse Lasky did for Gibby is either some kind of blackmail on her part or a deal worked out between her and the studio. Something in Taylor’s papers, kept in the Famous Players safe and no doubt eventually destroyed, must have implicated Gibby. Here’s my speculation: Called into the studio after her name was discovered in Taylor’s papers, Gibby revealed what she knew. With the ongoing Arbuckle scandal, the last thing Lasky and Zukor wanted was publicity linking an ex-prostitute to the blackmailers of their esteemed director. It really would have made things a hundred times worse: the arrests of Gibby and Osborn would have exposed the seamy underbelly of Tinseltown and confirmed the worst fears of the reformers and church ladies. So Gibby was given a contract to ensure her silence.
Lasky and Zukor already had the blueprint for such an arrangement. Four years before the murder, DeMille had directed a hugely successful Famous Players film called Old Wives for New, in which a murder was covered up by powerful corporate executives. The woman who actually committed the crime was protected by these influential men, who concocted and encouraged rumors to throw suspicion on others. For the executives, allowing a killer to escape justice was preferable to the “Hydra head of scandal,” as one title card put it.
Hollywood knew how to manipulate a crime. Their scenarists had been doing it for years.
So Gibby was given a job. As was Leonard Clapham, one of the other gang members who’d been particularly close to Osborn and apparently knew a great deal. Their proximity to Taylor’s murder and their willingness to keep mum significantly advanced their careers, lifting them out of low-budget independent films and securing them positions at Famous Players.
Gibby, however, was reckless. When she herself was finally implicated during the final attempted shakedown of John Bushnell, she turned once again to Lasky for help. Lasky had the power and the money to hire Frank Dominguez to represent her. Without Lasky’s intercession, Gibby might have turned state’s evidence to avoid prosecution and revealed what she knew about Taylor’s murder. And if she had done so, the scandal that would have enveloped Hollywood at that particular moment would have been Hydra-headed indeed.
So Will Hays was summoned and, through his political influence, the charges against Gibby were dropped.
Gibby had called in her last chip with the studio, however. For the next decade, she would struggle, making appearances in a few pictures when casting agents took pity on her. But even in her late thirties she still had charm for men, and Elbert E. Lewis, a short, slender, divorced accountant for Standard-Vacuum Oil, fell head over heels in love with her. For a brief moment, Gibby finally got the nice things she’d always wanted, courtesy of Lewis. She called him “Daddy,” even though he was three years her junior.
When Standard-Vacuum transferred Lewis to Asia, Gibby found it prudent to follow him. There were rumblings that district attorney Buron Fitts was planning to reopen the Taylor case, which he did a little over a year later, when he convened the grand jury. Gibby seemed ready to live out her life in Asia, marrying Elbert Lewis at the American consulate in Singapore in 1935. But two years later, in Shanghai, she developed a bladder infection. Adequate medical treatment wasn’t available in the war-torn city, so, five months before the Japanese invaded, Gibby—now known as Pat Lewis—sailed back to the United States. Elbert followed, but he returned to Asia not long thereafter. In April 1942, while staying at the Taj Mahal in Bombay, Gibby’s steadfast husband died of a heart attack in his sleep.
There was another husband named Arce after that, but he was soon gone, and Gibby bought her little house at 6135 Glen Oak, not far from the place on Beachwood where she and Osborn had partied and cooked up their schemes. But her life now was very different.
For all her great dreams, for all her plans and intrigues, this was where Margaret Gibson ended up, in a little frame house with a few sticks of furniture. She lived near the poverty line, hiding out from the world with her cat, venturing only rarely outside. Alone and paranoid, the once ambitious movie actress was terrified every time someone knocked on her door. Year by year, her conscience ate away at her. Nice things no longer seemed all that important.
In the end, Gibby would have settled for peace of mind.
WHAT HAPPENED TO EVERYONE ELSE
Don Osborn served out his sentence and returned to California, where one of the locusts, Leo Maloney, had started his own studio in the San Bernardino Mountains. Maloney hired Osborn as a production manager for a couple of low-budget pictures in 1927—including a film called Yellow Contraband about a heroin smuggler named Blackie. Leonard Clapham, now known as Tom London, was featured in both of Osborn’s films. So much for Clapham and Maloney telling the FBI they never wanted to see Osborn again. In 1930 Osborn was working as a la
bor union organizer, and in the 1940s, as a traveling salesman. He died in 1950, at fifty-four, of throat cancer.
Rose Putnam moved back in with her parents, who had relocated to Long Beach, California. In her mid-forties she married Sylvester Wilcox, a solicitor for a freight company, and they resided in Glendale. Rose died in 1961, in Riverside, at the age of seventy-two.
Blackie Madsen got out of the clink and reclaimed his real name, Ross Sheridan. He roamed around the Northwest for a while, living in Oregon and marrying a woman in Vancouver, Washington, in 1928. Heading back to El Paso, he worked as a cattleman and made frequent trips over the Mexican border. He continued to woo the ladies, marrying twenty-one-year-old Maria Saucedo in Juarez in 1935, when he was sixty-two. At some point, Sheridan was stabbed or maybe shot. The attack didn’t kill him—at least not right away. One lung was perforated and never fully healed, leaving his breathing impaired. Eventually the condition sent him staggering and wheezing back to Los Angeles, where he died at Los Angeles County General Hospital in 1938, at the age of sixty-four. Blackie’s ashes were interred beside his mother and his brother in Hollywood Memorial Cemetery.
Just a short distance away from the grave of the man he killed, William Desmond Taylor.
George Hopkins, Taylor’s lover, went on to a remarkable career as one of Hollywood’s most celebrated set decorators. Some of the great American movies were styled by Hopkins: Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, Life with Father, Strangers on a Train, A Streetcar Named Desire, A Star Is Born, East of Eden, Auntie Mame, My Fair Lady, Inside Daisy Clover, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Hello, Dolly!, and The Day of the Locust. He died in 1985, at the age of eighty-eight.
Henry Peavey finally got his wish to move back to San Francisco, but his health rapidly declined. By 1930 he was living at the Napa State Hospital. He died of syphilis there the next year, at the age of forty-nine.
No trace of Edward Sands was ever found.
Detective Lieutenant Edgar King officially retired from the Los Angeles Police Department and became a permanent investigator for the district attorney’s office. He apprehended Kid McCoy, the prizefighter turned murderer, and helped track down and capture Otto Sanhuber, the “ghost in the attic” who killed Fred Oesterreich. Although he always regretted not capturing Taylor’s killer, spending his life convinced of Charlotte Shelby’s guilt, King got a great deal right in his investigation. He nailed the distance of the killer to the victim; he correctly described how Taylor grabbed the chair to defend himself, which resulted in his arms being raised over his head when he was shot; he figured out that Taylor had collapsed on top of his killer. Had Charles Eyton not stolen Taylor’s papers after the murder, I believe King would have solved this crime long ago. Eddie King died in 1965, aged eighty-eight.
Charlotte Shelby finally shared Mary’s fortune with her. In fact, she had invested her daughter’s earnings quite well, enough that they both lived very comfortably for the rest of their lives. Despite all their squabbles and legal battles, the two eventually reconciled, and Shelby spent her last days living in Mary’s house, a reversal of their original roles. Elegant and formidable even into old age, Shelby remained bitter about all the years of accusations and slander. In 1942 she hired a ghostwriter to pen a roman à clef, which she titled Twisted by Knaves. The unpublished manuscript tells the story of Taylor’s murder, but makes it clear that Shelby had no idea who did it. She died in 1957 at the age of seventy-nine, in the home of her daughter.
Mary Miles Minter never made another movie. In the age of the talkies, she came to represent a mawkish, overly sentimental era, though the 1920s had been anything but. People remembered Mary and her lacy, pipe-curled companions as saccharine and simplistic, hardly doing justice to the vibrant, passionate personalities of the era. But with so few silent films surviving, Mary—and Mabel and Gibby, too—would exist for most people only as memories framed in heart-shaped iris shots.
Mary had wanted the freedom to live her life as she pleased. She got that chance, for a while, dwelling among the fashionable set in New York. But people found her slightly off, living in a world of funhouse mirrors. Between Mary’s bizarre upbringing and the indignities of the Taylor investigation, that really wasn’t too surprising. People laughed at her behind her back and whispered about the scandal. Never having learned how to be an adult, Mary trusted people she shouldn’t have, including a broker who defrauded her out of $200,000.
Moving back to California, the former star lived in Beverly Hills, growing fatter and more eccentric. Mary dabbled in interior decoration, but mostly she and her mother lived off trusts. At the age of fifty-five, just a few weeks after her mother’s funeral, Mary finally wed. Her husband was Brandon O’Hildebrandt, a wealthy real estate developer. O’Hildebrandt made sure Mary stayed comfortable, even if they rarely saw each other. Their neighbors across the street on Adelaide Drive, high above the beach in Santa Monica, were the playwright and author Christopher Isherwood and his life partner, the artist Don Bachardy. Never once did Bachardy see Mary’s husband or have any sense of him.
Mary, on the other hand, was impossible to miss. “She was enormous,” Bachardy remembered. She would scold him for driving too fast down their street, apparently forgetting the days when she zipped around Los Angeles in her little blue runabout, a car she no longer could have fit into. Once, inviting Bachardy and Isherwood inside, she hinted that the playwright might want to pen her biography. “So many erroneous things have been written,” she said. Isherwood demurred.
After her husband died in 1965, Mary became even more reclusive, never leaving the house. Only a few visitors, such as the film historian Kevin Brownlow, were allowed inside. On the walls hung portraits of herself in her younger days. Still wearing the curls and lacy dresses of her early years, Mary talked endlessly to visitors in long, meandering, sentimental streams of consciousness. She had become Norma Desmond, or Baby Jane Hudson.
But mention the Taylor case, and the fire would return to her eyes. Why must this be the first thing people remembered about her? Why was that the only thing anyone ever wanted to talk to her about?
And yet she’d wax poetic about the late director, calling him her only love despite her eight-year marriage to O’Hildebrandt. If anyone suggested she knew something about Taylor’s murder, she’d turn red and angry. Like her mother, Mary had had enough of such talk. In 1970 she sued CBS and the producer Rod Serling, after Serling suggested on television that Mary had been involved in the murder.
The years passed. Mary suffered increasingly from diabetes.
Late one night in January 1981, she was awakened by a masked intruder. The terrified seventy-eight-year-old woman was gagged and bound, breaking her wrist in the struggle. The thief took $300,000 worth of antique china, silver, and jewelry. Eventually police arrested Mary’s caretaker, a thirty-nine-year-old woman, for masterminding the crime. After all this time, Mary still hadn’t learned whom she could trust and whom she couldn’t.
She died on August 4, 1984, at the age of eighty-two. The very first line of Mary’s obituary mentioned her connection to the sixty-two-year-old Taylor murder.
Of course it did.
Will Hays survived his own mini-scandal in June 1929, when his divorce was finally granted and became public knowledge. A short time later, it was rumored that he was involved with a divorcée, Mrs. Virginia Lake. But Hays had learned how to let criticism roll off him, especially from the Anvil Chorus. He ended the scuttlebutt in 1930 when he married the eminently respectable Jessie Stutesman, widow of the former ambassador to Bolivia and daughter of a prominent Indiana family.
As a new push for censorship arose in the early sound era, led this time by Catholic priests and laymen instead of Protestant clergymen and church ladies, Hays was compelled to establish the Production Code Administration. The code was a draconian self-censorship protocol that went far beyond his original Formula, sterilizing American films for the next thirty-plus years. It is ironic that “the Hays Office” would become sy
nonymous with a puritanical, moralistic worldview, when the man himself was progressive and pragmatic.
Will Hays should be remembered not as Hollywood’s censor but as one of its greatest practitioners of public relations. As the power of Adolph Zukor waned, Hays became “an apostle of progress, an optimistic advocate of new media, and a skilled user of publicity,” in the opinion of Indiana historian Stephen Vaughn. With his successful Public Relations Committee and various other creative outreaches to the public, Hays saved the film industry from federal regulation and secured its place as the foremost means of communication in the twentieth century. He remained at the helm of the MPPDA until 1945. Hays died in his hometown of Sullivan, Indiana, in 1954, aged seventy-four.
Adolph Zukor seemed to let out a long, deep breath once he made it to the top of his skyscraper. The days of his greatest power were past. But he had achieved his monument, which still stands today. The giant clock on the side of the building is still ticking, and Paramount still has offices inside, though Zukor’s theater was shut down in 1964 and demolished in 1967.
The addition of Balaban & Katz to the company and the expenses of its theater chain eventually saddled Paramount with a crushing debt—so much so that, by the early sound era, the company Zukor had once kept so lean and tight was bankrupt. Paramount would bounce back, and magnificently, but it wasn’t Zukor who led the revival. The board of directors appointed Barney Balaban to take over as head of the company, and Zukor agreed to “step upstairs into an advisory role.” There he spent the next forty years, dispensing words of wisdom from on high.
In his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald would write that Hollywood could only be understood “dimly and in flashes.” Fewer than half a dozen people, he said, had “ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.” Zukor was one of those few. He created a system that worked brilliantly for nearly three decades, and then proved adaptable enough to accommodate the technological changes that challenged it. The vertically integrated model Zukor established “would change only in the means of presentation,” one studio historian observed. In 1953, when the movie studios were worried about the rise of television, Zukor saw no need for panic. “Rather than lose the public because television is here,” he argued, “wouldn’t it be smart to adopt television as our instrument?” So Paramount did, opening television studios that offset the losses in its movie divisions.
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