A Cast of Killers (12 page)

“Oh. They’ve been moved. The studio needed space. So when Legal moved in here, the morgue, what was left of it, was moved to storage.”

“Storage? Is it still available for use?”

“Sure, but as I say, there isn’t a lot left to it. Most of the stuff hadn’t been used in years, so they put the torch to it. It’s a damn shame, if you ask me, but what are you going to do? Progress.”

The guard gave Vidor directions to the morgue’s new location. As he had said, there wasn’t much left of it. Vidor found a file cabinet marked DIRECTORS and opened a drawer to the Ts. He found a folder marked TAYLOR, W. D. Though a typewritten notation on the folder’s tab indicated that it had once been the first of ten folders on Taylor, it was now the only one. Its contents told Vidor nothing he didn’t already know: a filmography, a thin publicity bio, a few posed photographs, and a handful of press clippings. He folded the material and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.

Then he found the files on actors and looked up Mary Miles Minter. Again, nothing of more than the most general biographical interest had been saved. Vidor wondered what his own file at MGM—an entire cabinet nearly bursting with material the last time he’d checked—would look like if that studio too found its own history a small sacrifice to make in the name of space-saving.

Outside, he walked back through the lot, past the Carson City exterior set, where
Bonanza’s
Cartwright family were saddling up to ride to the Ponderosa. In front of the white post-production building, teeming with activity from the Christmas releases, he saw an old friend, an attractive blonde, who worked in the film library. He complimented her miniskirt, then asked if he could take a look at some of William Desmond Taylor’s films. He was particularly interested in the last of Taylor’s films to be released,
The Top of New York.
She went to the office to see what she could do.

Over the years Vidor and Moore had seen many of their own films destroyed. In the early sixties, silent films were thought to have no commercial value. They were difficult to store, dangerous to handle, and a fire hazard. Vidor’s had been destroyed in a Bekins Storage Company fire, and Colleen’s entire collection had burned up in a fire at Warner Brothers.

Vidor’s friend brought him the news of Taylor’s films. What titles had not disintegrated by the fifties were in such bad condition that they were taken out of the vaults, cut into small pieces with a chain saw, then burned, to salvage the silver content of the film stock.

“Well,” Vidor told his friend, his frustration growing with each new dead end he encountered, “thanks anyway. It was good to see you again.”

He walked slowly back to his car, more sensitive than ever before to the changes that had overtaken the lot. Most of the studio production seemed to be for television, location shooting having come into vogue for features.

Vidor sat in his car and flipped through the pilfered Taylor file. One photograph showed Taylor with Hugh Walpole and Somerset Maugham; another, the director with George Hopkins, the art director whom Gloria Swanson had mentioned. A newspaper article mentioned the actress Claire Windsor and Fatty Arbuckle’s wife, Minta Durfee. The journalist and Colleen Moore’s best friend, Adela Rogers St. Johns, had written extensively on the murder and Mary Miles Minter. At least he might salvage a couple of new names to look up, Vidor thought. He locked the file in the glove compartment and left.

Dick Marchman lived near Hollywood in a residential development called Park LaBrea. His poker games were like Boys’ Night Out for Vidor and any of a number of friends, including fellow director Lewis Milestone. Marchman was married to Vidor’s sister Catherine (Cassie) and was a retired insurance executive who had spent many years as a fraud investigator. Vidor always looked forward to the poker games but was especially eager tonight. In light of his failure to turn up any useful information at Paramount, his desire to see the police files on the Taylor case grew stronger. And who would be better to ask for help in his endeavor than an old sleuth like Marchman? With his connections, he ought to be able to get to those files. That is—the thought struck Vidor as a somewhat fitting end to the kind of afternoon he was having—if the files were still around to be gotten to. The murder had been, after all, nearly a half-century ago. Vidor just hoped that in the years since, the Los Angeles Police Department hadn’t, like Paramount Pictures, suffered a deadly shortage of storage space.

16

It had been years since anyone had attempted a full cleaning of the basement beneath the guest house. Thelma Carr refused even to set foot there, claiming the entire room, stacked randomly with dusty, unmarked boxes the contents of which only Vidor knew, was crawling with mice. Vidor had Western Exterminators rout out all subhuman species, but Carr still wanted nothing to do with the place. So Vidor attacked the job himself. His Taylor investigation was on hold for a while, until he heard back from a few people. He had made two lists of the principal characters in the mystery about whom information might be found. One contained the people thought to have played important roles in Taylor’s life before his murder: Henry Peavey, Edward Sands, Howard Fellows, Mabel Normand, and Mary Miles Minter and her mother. The second listed those who played important roles just after the crime: Charles Eyton and his fellow studio executives who arrived at the scene of the crime before the police, and the three district attorneys who were in charge of the investigation—Thomas Lee Woolwine, Asa Keyes, and Buron Fitts. He hoped that the official police files, should Dick Marchman be able to get hold of them, would provide him with good information on the investigators and on just what went on in the bungalow after Taylor’s body was found. For the others on the list, particularly Minter and Normand, he assigned some of his students “special projects”—to gather biographical information for him. Until he heard from them, he had time to attend to other business, like the cleaning of the basement.

He cleared a wooden table for a workbench and set about going through the room. Nearly every box contained something that Vidor took time out to read: old diaries, film treatments, correspondence with half-forgotten former colleagues, pictures of people he no longer recognized, bank statements, and binders stuffed with handwritten notes. The stacks of papers and scripts to be donated to UCLA grew only at the constant remindings from Carr that they were not being destroyed but simply transferred to a new storage place, and that they represented a substantial tax write-off. Vidor did little to lessen the quantity of memorabilia in the basement, but he was determined to compress it into a smaller area, stacking the boxes higher and making more space to move around in the room that he now decided would be the official headquarters of his Taylor investigation. He knew he was safe from intrusion in the room, and that he could spread his work across the table without Thelma Carr’s asking what he was working on. At one end of the table he set an old steel strongbox. Inside he put all his Taylor notes and files to date, along with an old envelope and photograph he’d found pressed between the pages of a biography of Mack Sennett, the film producer. On one side of the envelope was a question, in his own handwriting; on the other, written in another hand, was the reply. When he’d come across the envelope and photograph, he’d sat down at the table and recalled a day he was surprised hadn’t come to him earlier in his Taylor research.

It was February 23, 1930. Vidor had been called to MGM to discuss his film project
Billy the Kid
with production chief Irving Thalberg. Thalberg and Eddie Mannix, the executive in charge of
Billy the Kid
, met Vidor and screenwriter Laurence Stallings in a limousine near the studio gate.

“We don’t have much time,” Thalberg said. “Tell me about your story.”

Used to this treatment from Thalberg (though never in a speeding car), Vidor quickly explained his and Stallings’s plan to make the Kid a sympathetic victim of unfortunate circumstances rather than the cold-blooded killer most people thought of when they heard his name. He hadn’t yet finished the pitch when the limousine stopped in front of a church where a large crowd was gathering.

“It sounds good,” Thalberg said. “We’ll continue after.”

Assuming that Thalberg and Mannix were attending what appeared to be a funeral at the church, Vidor stepped out of the limo to hold the door for them. As they followed him outside, someone touched Vidor’s shoulder from behind. It was Marshall Neilan, Mary Pickford’s director and Gloria Swanson’s intimate friend.

“How are you, King?” Marshall Neilan asked.

Vidor hadn’t seen Neilan in some time. As he said hello, he saw other familiar faces getting out of other limos. Everyone started into the church.

“Aren’t you coming?” Neilan said.

“What’s going on?” Vidor asked. He looked at Stallings, who shrugged his shoulders, just as lost as Vidor was. “I’m not dressed for—“

“You look fine,” Thalberg said. “They’ll be expecting you.”

Vidor shut the limo door and with Stallings followed the others inside.

An organ was playing. A flower-bedecked casket sat at the front of the aisle, just before the altar. In the pews Vidor saw Chaplin, Mack Sennett, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Buster Keaton, Minta Durfee, Fatty Arbuckle. Hollywood’s comedians were crying. Vidor sat beside Thalberg and, as the organ stopped and a minister stepped into his pulpit, took an envelope from his pocket and scribbled “Who is it?”

Mannix was surprised at the question. He wrote “Mabel Normand. Don’t you read the papers?” Vidor and Stallings looked at the name with shock. Ten years earlier she had been one of Hollywood’s brightest stars. Then the Taylor scandal had sent her career into a gradual decline. Now she was dead, and Vidor and Stallings hadn’t even heard the news.

Though Vidor remembered the beautiful brunette hair, brown eyes, and the classic way she always posed for the camera, he had forgotten how small Normand was. She couldn’t have stood over five feet tall, nor weighed over a hundred pounds. In the photo Vidor had taken during her Keystone Kops days, she had been smiling, as she always seemed to be doing, with her small feet pointed inwards, and her small fingers pointed outwards—the pose that made almost everyone who met her want to give her a great big bear hug.

Vidor put a padlock on the strongbox and hid the key in his wallet. He brought in a new comfortable chair for use at the worktable and continued methodically but slowly consolidating his boxes. After a week, he had gathered enough material for his UCLA donation and had just sent it off when the first of his student researchers presented him with her work. Coincidentally, she was the student he had assigned the task of delving into the background of Mabel Normand. So, with Normand’s tragic end fresh in his mind, he sat at his basement table and, through a collection of notes worthy of an A+, put together an outline of her life from the beginning.

Mabel Normand was born on Staten Island, New York. Her father was a failed pianist, her mother a seamstress. She quit school when she was very young to join her mother’s profession, but by the time she was fifteen she had become a successful model.

From modeling she turned to acting. One day on a motion picture set, she met D. W. Griffith’s right-hand man, Mack Sennett. Though her parents opposed her association with the types of people they believed were involved with show business, she signed contracts with Biograph and, later, Vitagraph, the most important New York film studios. She learned her trade from those around her: Mary Pickford, Wallace Reid, Antonio Moreno, and the Talmadge sisters.

When Griffith’s company moved from New York to California for winter shooting, she went along with them. Sennett soon formed his own film company, Keystone, and asked Normand to join. He had been in love with her, he said, from the start. He offered her seventy-five dollars a week, twice the salary of what her parents made combined. Then, interpreting her speechlessness as dissatisfaction with the offer, he upped the ante to $100, and finally to $125. Normand signed with Keystone, where her fellow players for Sennett would eventually include Gloria Swanson, Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, W. C. Fields, and the man who would become her frequent on-screen partner, Durfee’s husband, Fatty Arbuckle.

In 1915, just days before Normand and Sennett were to be wed, Normand discovered Sennett in his long johns and actress Mae Busch completely naked, rehearsing, according to Sennett, for a new picture. Before Normand could even react to Sennett’s ridiculous explanation of their undress, Busch reportedly struck her with a vase. An hour later, she was found by Arbuckle and Durfee, lying on their porch with a bloody head wound. At least this was one of the several versions of the often told story.

Somehow, she and Sennett made amends, though their wedding plans were canceled and their relationship was never the same.

The next year Normand threatened to leave Sennett for good if he didn’t give her a studio of her own. Her request was granted.
Mickey
, one of her first productions of her new company was a problem picture, fraught with delays, cost overruns, and bickering on the set. Normand fired three directors, the last of whom stole a portion of the film negative as insurance that he would be paid the money owed him. By the time the picture wrapped, everyone involved felt sure it was going to be a $150,000 flop. Everyone that is, except Normand.

Normand angrily left the company. She signed a five-year contract with Samuel Goldwyn, with a starting salary of $1,000 a week increasing to $4,000. Then, mid-way into her contract with Goldwyn,
Mickey
was released and became a critical and box-office success. Many people thought it the best film she ever made.

With this unexpected career turn and change of studio came a change of personality. She suddenly became undependable, often showing up late or not at all. She demanded more money from Goldwyn. When he refused, she walked off the set. Fan magazines and newspapers reported that she engaged in lavish spending sprees, dropping $10,000 on a single dress.