A Cast of Killers (2 page)

Two Hartley Service Station attendants remembered seeing someone shortly before 6:00 P.M. the night of the murder who fit Mrs. MacLean’s description. They said it had definitely been a man, and that he had asked them directions to Taylor’s house.

The Third Street Red Car line conductor said a man fitting the description had boarded his train that night at Maryland Street, near Taylor’s bungalow, at either 7:45 or 8:27 P.M.; he couldn’t remember which.

Taylor’s body was delivered to the coroner. Seventy-eight dollars had been found in his pocket, a diamond ring on his finger, and a two-thousand-dollar platinum watch on his wrist. Apparently, robbery hadn’t been the motive.

The coroner’s report stated that Taylor had been shot at close range with a .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver. The bullet was of an obsolete design, not commonly used at the time. The bullet hole in his coat was considerably lower than the one in his vest. Only by lifting Taylor’s left elbow could the holes be aligned. Taylor had had his arms raised when he was shot.

Cigarette butts found behind Taylor’s bungalow suggested that someone had lurked in the darkness, entered through the kitchen, then shot Taylor in the back and left by the front door.

But who was the mysterious “police physician”? And what was the significance of the missing handkerchief? And why were Taylor’s friends and associates so concerned about their “personal items” at the scene of the crime?

The press had a field day with the case. People were eager to read about scandal in the sordid world of Hollywood. And the film community, already becoming the most influential force in Los Angeles, was eager to avoid any investigations that might give the press further ammunition against it. The L.A.P.D., caught in the middle, wanted to solve the murder as quickly and undramatically as possible.

According to the more sensational reports, a thorough search of Taylor’s two-story bungalow turned up just the sort of ammunition the press hungered for. Pornographic pictures were reportedly found of the director with a number of easily recognizable actresses. Published accounts also claimed that police had discovered a secret, locked closet containing a large collection of women’s lingerie, each item tagged with initials and a date, presumably souvenirs of encounters the director wished to remember, or, as police began to suspect, evidence for possible blackmail. Most interesting was a pale silk nightgown embroidered with the letters M.M.M., the initials of Paramount’s dainty and demure young starlet, Mary Miles Minter. Love letters were also reported found in the toe of Taylor’s riding boot, suggesting that Minter had been having a torrid affair with the director.

In
the study, police found an open checkbook and a partially completed tax return for the previous year, 1921. Further investigation would reveal that Taylor had visited his accountant, Marjorie Berger, shortly before his murder, and that Berger also handled Mary Miles Minter’s and Mabel Normand’s finances. Though Taylor drew a considerable salary, only a small fraction of the money he was supposed to possess was allegedly found. His bank reported that, a few days before he was killed, Taylor had withdrawn a substantial sum from his account, and then redeposited this same amount the day of the murder. Perhaps, the press quickly suggested, Taylor was not a blackmailer, but was in fact being blackmailed himself.

Police were also said to have found an assortment of keys, but no locks that they fit.

In
time-honored tradition, the police compiled a list of suspects. Henry Peavey was an obvious candidate. He had been the first to discover Taylor’s body. When the investigators arrived at the bungalow, he had been calmly washing dishes—or was he destroying evidence? Less than a week before the murder, Peavey, a homosexual, had been arrested in a public park on a morals charge. On the very morning that Taylor’s body was found at the bungalow, Taylor had been scheduled to appear in court at Peavey’s hearing—an appointment Peavey’s employer never kept.

Mabel Normand also made the list. She was alleged in some reports to have been at the bungalow when the investigators arrived, and the letters she claimed to be searching for, in light of the other letters subsequently found, suggested that she, like Mary Miles Minter, had been having an affair with the director.

As for Minter, though she was still underage, stories abounded of alleged affairs with directors she had worked with, including Taylor. These affairs were ended by Minter’s mother, Charlotte Shelby, who was said to have gone as far as threatening directors with her own .38-caliber pistol, which, of course, made Shelby herself a possible suspect.

The list continued to grow every day as tabloids told and retold the story and Hollywood gossip fueled further speculation. A federal narcotics officer claimed Taylor had been helping a famous actress friend kick her drug addiction. He said Taylor had had a fight with the actress’s supplier, a studio employee suspected of supplying many important stars. Another man reportedly had asked Paramount Studios where Taylor lived two days before the murder. Another had asked at a downtown movie theater, and yet another at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, where Taylor was a member. At least a dozen studio associates came forward with strange stories that the director had been plagued by unidentified telephone callers and burglars.

The police amassed so many suspects that even questioning them all would take weeks, maybe months. And with each addition to the list, the case grew more and more mysterious.

On the first day of the police investigation, police discovered that Taylor had been sending monthly checks to a southern California woman who claimed to be the abandoned wife of Taylor’s brother. Taylor had never mentioned to anyone in Los Angeles that he had a brother, though the description his alleged sister-in-law gave of her missing husband—according to more than one press account—did fit uncannily that of Edward Sands, Taylor’s personal secretary, who had fled Los Angeles a few months before the murder after stealing jewelry from the bungalow and forging Taylor’s signature on checks. And this wasn’t the only theft from Taylor’s bungalow. Two weeks or so before the murder someone had smashed in the rear kitchen door and ransacked the home. But nothing except jewelry and a stock of distinctive cigarettes was reportedly taken. Shortly afterwards, Taylor received a mysterious letter, presumably written by Sands, along with pawn-tickets for two suits, silver plate, jewels and household goods.

Apparently there was a lot about the director that he had wanted no one to find out. Investigators in New York, running down leads provided by Taylor’s alleged sister-in-law, made the astounding discovery that William Desmond Taylor’s name had not even been William Desmond Taylor. It had been William Deane Tanner, the name of a man who had vanished from Manhattan in 1908, leaving behind a thriving business and, like Taylor’s alleged brother, a wife and child. The police in Los Angeles were absolutely baffled, as they realized, days into their investigation, that they didn’t even know the true identity of the victim of the murder they were investigating.

Vidor finished his coffee and poked through the rubble. At least one thing had become painfully clear: not all that had been written about the Taylor murder over the past four-and-a-half decades was true. There was no chimney in the Taylor bungalow. Paramount executives may indeed have been destroying evidence, but they hadn’t been burning papers in the fireplace.

The tattooed man, also still kicking through the debris, attempted small talk. He and Vidor both claimed innocent curiosity at what was going to be built in place of the old bungalow court. Vidor wondered if the man, like himself, was lying, if perhaps he too had secret reasons for wanting to dig back into a forty-five-year-old mystery that the greatest investigative minds in Los Angeles had never been able to solve. The man didn’t look like a detective, but then Vidor knew he himself didn’t either. At seventy-one, he looked more like a grandfather than a sleuth. But he knew he possessed something no one ever involved in the Taylor case had possessed: insight into the victim’s private world. Vidor had been a contemporary of Taylor’s, and had had a long, distinguished career, making fifty-four feature films-all successful-including such classics as
Our Daily Bread, Northwest Passage, Stella Dallas, Ruby Gentry, The Fountainhead, Duel in the Sun,
and
War and Peace.
He had directed such stars as Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Gish, Marion Davies, Douglas Fairbanks, Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, Clark Gable, Audrey Hepburn, and Henry Fonda. Who better to probe the life of one central figure in early Hollywood than another? And now, with the motion picture industry in the hands of young executives who had less need each year for the creative contributions from members of his generation, Vidor had the time and money to do just that. He didn’t plan on retiring: he would turn the story of William Desmond Taylor into the most spectacular screenplay and film of his career. No one before him had ever attempted such a task, because no one before him had ever been qualified to find the one crucial element missing from the story: Taylor’s killer.

Vidor found a doorknob in the rubble. He picked it up, dusted it off. He looked at it and turned to see the tattooed man watching him. He stuffed the doorknob into his pocket for a souvenir paperweight, and waved goodbye to the man. Then he walked back to his car.

2

At his Beverly Hills office several days later, Vidor studied his face in the bathroom mirror, manually supporting the tired muscles under his crystal-blue eyes and pinching his cheeks to give them color. Through his wire-rimmed glasses he saw the brown spots around his temples. His wife, Betty, called it cancer, but he didn’t believe her.

The director turned quickly from the mirror when he heard his secretary, Thelma Carr, fumbling with her keys at the front door. He didn’t want her to see him at the mirror again. She thought he was vain enough as it was, and had told him so after one of the Christian Science therapy sessions they attended once a week.

Vidor dashed to his desk and greeted Carr as she walked in with an armful of papers she had typed over the weekend. She was a pretty brunette in her late thirties, with an electric smile Vidor always wanted to take a closer look at. Her smile soured as she looked for a place to set the stack of papers. Vidor hadn’t spent the weekend straightening up the office as he had promised, but running around town in his T-Bird.

Vidor didn’t fault himself for the office’s condition. It hadn’t been designed as an office, but as a three-room guest house, a hundred yards from his own home. He had built it in the late fifties with strong clean lines, spacious rooms, and the large sliding glass windows that he wanted. Like his home up the driveway, it was quiet and functional, a far cry from the opulence of the homes of his neighbors, two of the wealthiest, most important families in Beverly Hills. But since he’d lost his office on the MGM lot, he’d filled the guest house with film cans, clippings, awards, file cabinets, a pair of Spanish guitars, and film gear. His golden retriever, Nippy, sat beneath the ten-foot-high poster of
The Fountainhead
that was precariously balanced over a baby grand piano.

As Carr settled into her cubicle in the far corner of the room, Vidor swept aside the mass of correspondence neatly stacked in front of him and told her to pull the Taylor papers. He didn’t remember exactly where they were, but he remembered a black binder. He suggested she look in his files under directors. If not there, under murder, or whodunits. When he asked a second time, she reluctantly put down the morning mail and headed toward the broom closet where the file cabinets were kept. Vidor picked up the telephone, swiveled his armchair away from her, and put in a person-to-person call to Chicago, to Colleen Moore, financial analyst, silent-film star, and half owner of Vid-Mor Productions.

“Madame Zaza,” Vidor said, smiling and playfully rolling his antique doorknob across his desk blotter.

“Professor La Tour,” Moore answered immediately, pleased with his call. “What have you got in your hands this time?”

Vidor enjoyed the Madame Zaza gambit. It was part of a mind-reading act they had played at cocktail parties years before, often to the applause of mutual friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Vidor was Professor La Tour, Moore was Madame Zaza. While she was blindfolded, Vidor passed among party guests, picking up curious objects such as coins, jewelry, and silverware. Madame Zaza then identified each object without seeing it. Vidor would say, “Madame Zaza, what is it that I am holding in my hand?” She would reply, “A fountain pen,” or “A wedding ring,” whatever their prerehearsed code called for. When an object came up for which there was no code, she would hold her hand to her head and say, “The object is not clear. Dark vibrations are swirling through my mind.”

This morning, Vidor told her exactly what he had in his hand, the doorknob from the Taylor bungalow that he had swiped last weekend, before wrecking crews could shovel it into a dumpster. He was off and running, he said, on the Taylor screenplay. But, he added, he still needed a killer.

Several years earlier, in a Paris hotel, Vidor and Moore had sat down and talked about the Taylor murder for two hours. Turning it into a film had been her suggestion-Vidor desperately needed another film property. The last four Vid-Mor development projects had been shelved. Their latest, with co-producer Sam Goldwyn, Jr., was on hold until a suitable script could be drafted.

Moore was the ideal producer for the Taylor project. She not only knew, like Vidor, the Hollywood of the twenties, but could put financing together faster than any of the young incompetents at the studio. She hadn’t become a partner in Merrill Lynch by her good looks. She worked at breakneck speeds, taking only an occasional day or two each month for a Hong Kong shopping spree with friends like Clare Boothe Luce, or a retreat to a Scottish castle, where British royalty kept a suite of rooms reserved for her visits.

Moore was restless. It was a nasty day in Chicago, and she was sitting with her secretary in front of her Smith-Corona churning out pages of her autobiography and waiting for a snowstorm to clear the air. On the phone she told Vidor that if he were with her, they could bundle up and run across the street for champagne and pancakes, or to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry to view the permanent exhibit of her million-dollar doll house.