A Cast of Killers (20 page)

26

The next day, Vidor and Colleen finished their breakfast coffee on the back porch. Watching the sunrise over his own rolling pasture, Vidor wondered why he had allowed so much time to pass since his last visit. Everything at the ranch was calm and quiet and rooted to the earth with a permanence and a patience Vidor had never seen in Hollywood or Beverly Hills.

Dick and Cassie had driven to town for supplies, saying when they left that they might take a drive around San Simeon, William Randolph Hearst’s celebrated kingdom, an hour’s drive away, before coming back. Vidor decided this would be the best time to fill Colleen in on all that had happened during her African trip.

“Goldwyn passed on the project,” he said. “He wants to do the other script of it.”

Colleen set her coffee on the porch railing and took Vidor’s hand. “I kind of thought something like that might have happened, when you didn’t even mention the project all the way up here. Didn’t he even offer you the directing job?”

Vidor evaded the question. “They turned down
Cer
vantes,
too.”

Colleen knew what a blow to his ego these snubs were. She had once been an important part of the industry herself and knew what it felt like to be a victim of its selective, ever-shortening memory. But she had married, moved away from it, and established a more successful and more rewarding career for herself. Still, she understood perfectly what Vidor was feeling as he quietly told her of the latest series of setbacks his career had taken.

“It could work out for the better,” she said. “You won’t have to put aside the Taylor story, which, I must say, is getting more fascinating all the time. I don’t see how Goldwyn or anybody for that matter could turn this one down.”

The night before, he had told everyone over dinner about his day’s work.

“Do you think Mary Miles Minter was the murderer?” everyone had asked.

“I don’t know” was Vidor’s answer. “But I do know that the story I’ve been pursuing these last few months and the story presented in those police records are two quite different and distinct stories.”

“Why do you think that is?” Dick Marchman had asked.

“Well, obviously, the press all latched onto their version of things, which you have to admit contains some pretty juicy stuff, and that’s the version that everyone has accepted as truth. And it may be the truth. But whether it is or not, it had to have originally come from somewhere, and it apparently didn’t come from the police. They never found a closet full of underwear.”

“Then where did it come from?” Cassie had asked. “Herb Dalmas says the studios made it all up to get rid of Mary Minter and Mabel Normand.”

“I wouldn’t put it past them” had been Colleen’s response to that. Hollywood’s heartlessness no longer surprised her. She reached up and brushed a strand of white hair from King’s forehead.

Vidor hesitantly agreed, and as he sat on the back steps with a towel across his shoulders and Colleen snipping away, he felt closer to Colleen than ever before.

Vidor liked what he was feeling, and imagined once again what might have happened if he’d been able to whisk Colleen away to this place forty-five years earlier. As she spoke of future excursions she was planning around the world, of investments she felt could make Vidor financially secure for the rest of his life, Vidor pictured the dapper director and the vibrant actress, whose passion had once burned through a mountain blizzard, spending the decades that had passed since that fateful winter living together in contented rural bliss at Willow Creek Ranch.

Then Colleen put her scissors down. She rubbed her fingers against Vidor’s temples. Vidor could feel her breath on his face as she looked at him closely.

“These brown spots look like skin cancer,” she said. “You should really get that taken care of. Do you want me to call a doctor when we get back to L.A.?”

Vidor was reminded of Betty, who had finally stopped asking him when he was going to call a doctor about the spots; who had, in fact, stopped saying much of anything at all to him. He shook his head.

“I’ll call someone,” he said.

Later that afternoon, he returned to the police files.

Having chronicled their version of what happened the day Taylor’s body was found, he wanted to see what they had to say about Taylor’s life up to the time of the murder. Concerning Taylor’s early life, as William Deane Tanner, Vidor was surprised to find that he had, with the help of Bob Giroux, Allan Dwan, Gloria Swanson, and Laurence Stallings, already gathered more information than the police files contained. Still, he discovered discrepancies between his and the “official” version.

Taylor’s father, Sergeant Major Kearus Deane Tanner, had apparently not died during the First World War, as Vidor had come to believe. According to L.A.P.D. findings, he died in 1901, shortly before Taylor decided to abandon his life as a traveling actor and settle down to marriage and a career in antiques. His death also closely coincided with Taylor’s renewed contact with and financial support of his family back in Ireland.

Taylor’s mother, however, Jane Deane Tanner, did die during the war, during a London air raid a month before Taylor enlisted in the army.

That either of these facts would shed any light on Taylor’s death Vidor doubted, but they did deepen his conviction that some strange power had been at play in 1922 and thereafter that saw to it that different investigators discovered different sets of facts.

Other discrepancies concerned Taylor’s brother. Vidor had read press accounts of how Denis Deane Tanner worked in the antiques store across town from his brother. The press accounts Vidor had read failed to convey the fact that Taylor had once employed Denis, providing him with his start in the antiques business. Taylor and Denis were also members of the same athletic club and were known to have dined together on a regular basis. They were both close to their sisters in London, and gave no one who talked with the L.A.P.D. any reason to believe that they had in any way abandoned their British roots.

Taylor wasn’t, however, close to Denis’s wife, Ada Tanner. According to various entries in the police files, Taylor had only met Ada on three occasions in his life, twice in New York (as best man at her wedding and at her bedside when she gave birth to Denis’s first child) and once years later in Hollywood, when she stormed his office at Paramount demanding financial aid.

Vidor found records of a police interview with Ada Tanner, but they implied that she was questioned only about how she had located Taylor in Hollywood. Her explanation of her final meeting with him was simply that a friend had told her where Taylor was, and that she had then gone to him for help. The questions of who the friend was and how the friend knew Taylor’s true identity were not raised. (Vidor himself still preferred his theory that she had seen the film
Captain Alvarez.)

The most surprising revelation in the files concerning Denis Deane Tanner was that the police had known from the beginning that he and Edward Sands were not the same person. That entire theory had been launched by an anonymous letter mailed to the police. Research eventually proved it to be a complete lie. Police had also found a snapshot in Taylor’s bungalow that proved that Tanner and Sands didn’t resemble each other in the least. Why, Vidor wondered, had police even bothered to waste their time running the lead down? And why had police allowed the theory to be bandied about in the press when all along they knew it was nonsense? Did they think they might have something to gain by swaying public thinking decidedly off the right path? And if so—why?

Vidor found no mention of Taylor’s ex-wife or daughter having been questioned concerning the murder. Apparently police saw no tie-in between the crime and Taylor’s disappearance from New York. Further evidence supporting such a conclusion was found in a series of letters the police obtained that Taylor and his daughter, Daisy, had written to each other. Though he had left them abruptly in New York by 1908, he was on good, open terms with her, writing regularly, sending Christmas and birthday gifts, as well as a sum of money amounting to over $7,000 to be used for Daisy’s education and future dowry. These were not exactly the actions of a man hiding from an unsavory past.

Vidor found no mention of homosexuality in relation to Taylor. The subject appeared only in the file entries concerning Henry Peavey’s arrest in Westlake Park on a morals charge. Howard Fellows had apparently bailed Peavey out, and Taylor was scheduled to appear in court on Peavey’s behalf on the morning he was found dead. But no one questioned Peavey or Fellows about Taylor’s reaction to the incident, though both were questioned at length about any number of other matters; hence the police records shed no light whatsoever even on Taylor’s feelings about homosexuality. Though Vidor could read into certain moments described throughout the record, the majority of testimony suggested quite strongly that Taylor was actively and openly heterosexual.

Perhaps the most glaring discrepancy between the public and official reports of Taylor’s life—most glaring because they should have been the most easily documented by any worthy reporter or investigator—was the detailed evidence found in the police files that Taylor was anything but penniless, as the press had consistently made him out to be, when he died. Dwindling bank accounts—one in New York containing only $18.20--had led to journalistic conclusions that Taylor was being bled by blackmailers.

Taylor had over $6,000 in his account at the First National Bank of Los Angeles. In a safety deposit box he had eight Liberty Bonds totaling $4,500 and over 18,000 shares of stock in petroleum and mining companies, stocks whose purchase value when they were bought was estimated at $20,000. These figures, coupled with Taylor’s material possessions—a McFarlan Touring Car, a Chandler sports car, diamond and gold jewelry, furniture, hunting gear, piano, etc.—showed clearly that Taylor had died a wealthy man. (Adjusting the figures to the standards and inflation rates of 1967, Vidor estimated that Taylor’s financial worth had been the 1922 equivalent of at least $1,000,000.)

The subject of blackmail, another favorite among both Hollywood and crime reporters, was also little supported by police findings. Taylor’s financial records, both those he kept personally and those maintained by Marjorie Berger, were thorough and revealed nothing out of the ordinary. His monthly expenses were considerable, including regular checks to his daughter and sister-in-law, salaries and expenses of his personal employees, even the rental of a room nearby for Henry Peavey to sleep in when he worked too late to catch the trolley home. But Taylor still lent money willingly to friends and associates who needed it, displaying no evidence at all of any financial strain. The New York bank account containing only $18.20 was shown to be an account Taylor kept for his daughter, who had recently made a considerable withdrawal to pay tuition at her boarding school in Westchester County, New York. And Taylor’s withdrawal of $2,500 from the First National Bank of Los Angeles the day before the murder and redeposit of a sum nearly as large the day he was killed—actions that reporters everywhere pointed to as evidence of blackmail—were in fact just as innocent. Taylor had taken the money from the bank to buy an expensive gift for Mabel Normand. He shopped at Robinson’s department store, where a jeweler he had dealt with many times would help him choose the appropriate gift item. Unable to find exactly what he wanted, Taylor put the money back in the bank for a later time.

The police pieced together this sequence of events very early in their investigation, yet like so many other things that would have altered the very flavor of the mystery as reported in the press, it never found its way to the public.