A Cast of Killers (3 page)

Silent Star,
the autobiography on which she was putting the finishing touches, would be complete within the month. She assured Vidor that he was included, but that he wouldn’t have to worry about what she said. Greta Garbo, Erich Von Stroheim, and Louis B. Mayer were the ones who had to worry. Also, a letter had just arrived from her publishers suggesting she follow the book with a second,
How Women Can Make Money in the Stock Market.
Vidor wasn’t surprised. Moore’s investments for him over the last two years had made it possible to add a wing to his ranch in Paso Robles, a few hours outside of San Francisco. The Taylor film, she suggested, was the perfect interim project between books.

Moore continued, talking cross-collateralization, end money, joint ventures, and negative pickups. Vidor understood the language, but when he spoke, he used terms like dolly shots, crossfades, and character motivation. Both kinds of talk were part of filmmaking. Colleen Moore was as important to getting the Taylor project launched as Vidor was.

They both realized a key problem: they had a “rug show” on their hands, the kind of film with too many interiors. It would be up to Vidor to develop a script that didn’t all take place inside the Taylor bungalow and smoke-filled police interrogation rooms. They needed action. Moore suggested a car chase: Mabel Normand drove her lavender limousine like a maniac, and Mary Miles Minter knew how to fly. They could show Henry Peavey casing Westlake Park for young boys, or Taylor might be seen taking a cable car up Echo Mountain to his favorite speakeasy, or perhaps buying drugs in Chinatown.

Casting would come naturally, once they had a killer, Moore said. Michael Caine looked just like Taylor, and he had the right kind of English accent and debonair appeal. Sandy Dennis would make a good Mabel Normand, and she had been great in the recent
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Kim Novak might be good for Mary Miles Minter, if she could still pass for a teenager. Bette Davis might be good for Minter’s mother, Charlotte Shelby. If Moore asked her, Gloria Swanson might even come in as a dialogue coach, and she had been closer to Taylor than either Vidor or Moore herself.

Flashbacks would be a must. Vidor might even have to bring in Taylor’s bizarre past in New York. Undoubtedly, there were still those around who knew what Taylor had been up to. His daughter, Daisy Deane Tanner, might still be alive. Moore said she knew a woman from the Midwest whose father had known both Taylor and his brother. She would write her immediately. Other friends she had might be able to get hold of Taylor’s diaries, a hot property that had circulated in Hollywood during the thirties and been auctioned off with the Clara Bow sex letters and Valentino candid photo library.

Locations would also be important. Vidor suggested San Francisco. It still had a lot of buildings from the twenties that could be used for exteriors. And in San Pedro, the deep-water seaport of Los Angeles, there was a police station that hadn’t changed at all. The bungalow complex could be built on the MGM backlot. Vidor had the doorknob, didn’t he?

They were going to have to be careful. It would be easy to step on the wrong toes: They wanted to make a film, not put anyone in jail. Both Moore and Vidor were close friends with Claire Windsor, an actress who had dated Taylor on the Thursday night before the murder. One of Moore’s favorite directors was Marshall Neilan, a man who had hinted to both of them that he knew a great deal more about the murder than had ever been leaked to the press. If possible, his reputation had to be protected. Vidor had done a film with Minter in the early teens; Moore had gone on double dates with her. Everywhere, they would have to tread carefully.

Moore gave Vidor the green light. They were talking millions. The director would be in on the cut. The producer would carry development when Vidor had the story nailed down. The first title card would read “Colleen Moore Presents,” followed by “A King Vidor Production.” But no announcements would be made until they had the screenplay. Arrangements would be kept top secret until Vidor had time to circulate and collect what information he could from Taylor’s friends and associates. The killer might still be at large-and all they wanted was a screenplay, not another murder.

“It’s going to be a pleasure working together again, King-zzy,” Moore said, signing off.

Vidor swiveled his chair back around to face Thelma Carr. She had been listening in, and though she pretended not to, she suspected that Vidor was getting romantically involved again, only this time it wasn’t with the script girl, production secretary, or star of the picture. That was for younger directors. He was becoming involved with his producer. As for Vidor, he was so flushed with excitement at that prospect that if Carr’s desk were any nearer his own, he might have tried for a closer look at that smile of hers. He hadn’t looked forward to a project with this much enthusiasm since he had locked horns with Cecil B. deMille back in the fifties. And Colleen Moore was much better looking than C.B.

As she handed him the morning mail, Carr told him she couldn’t find the Taylor files, and she didn’t want to look a second time. They were obviously lost in his filing system, not her own. She suggested he try the basement, and take Nippy, his dog, with him.

Vidor didn’t like that idea. The basement was the repository for everything that didn’t fit upstairs: a set of golf clubs he hadn’t touched for ten years, the stationary bicycle his doctor had made him buy, columns of books that literary agents sent him, clothes, photographs, toys, car parts, and more file cabinets. And on top of that, Vidor hadn’t called Western Exterminators as Carr had suggested nearly two weeks before. Even Nippy wouldn’t step inside that rodent-infested storage room.

3

Nippy sniffed curiously at the stack of old papers on the bedroom floor. Betty, in the bedroom across the hall, still had her light on, but the hallway door was closed. Vidor sat in his own bed, wrapped in the comforter his daughter had given him, poring over the details of the Taylor story, and taking notes on a yellow legal pad. He had found the black binder containing the Taylor file under his baseball mitt and binoculars after a two-hour search through the contents of the basement. Now he reviewed the story he had put together so far.

Taylor’s story began at the turn of the century, in New York. The future Hollywood director had been an actor named William Cunningham Deane Tanner, about whom very little was known. He had told some acquaintances that he had come from a very wealthy Irish family and had graduated from Oxford. He had told others that his father, an officer in the British Army, had sent him to receive a practical education at Runnymeade, a ranch near Harper, Kansas, a claim substantiated by residents of Harper.

In 1901, Tanner married actress Ethel May Harrison. Soon afterward, both gave up the stage, Tanner becoming vice-president of the English Antique Shop on Fifth Avenue, at the impressive salary of $29,000 a year. The Tanners moved to Larchmont, where Tanner was remembered as a highly respected citizen and member of the prestigious Larchmont Country Club.

Then, apparently, Tanner began drinking heavily and seeing other women. On October 23, 1908, he left the antique shop to attend the Vanderbilt Cup Race, an annual automobile rally held on Long Island. He was not seen for several days, though later reports placed him drinking at the Continental Hotel during that period. Then, from a public phone at Broadway and Nineteenth Street, he called his office, asking for five hundred dollars in cash. The money was delivered, and Tanner disappeared for good.

Four years later, Tanner’s younger brother, Denis, also disappeared, leaving behind a wife and two children, Alice and Muriel, and another successful antique business. Denis’s wife, Ada, depleted the family savings looking for him, then moved to California to live with relatives.

Meanwhile, according to various articles Vidor had collected, William Tanner was working as a hotel manager in Telluride, Colorado; as a timekeeper for a Yukon mining operation; even as a prospector in the Klondike. One report placed Tanner in San Francisco, back on the stage, where fellow actors described him as a “shell of a man.”

Whatever happened during the five-year interim between the disappearance of William Deane Tanner from New York and the arrival of William Desmond Taylor in California, Taylor’s meteoric rise to the top of Hollywood’s royalty was well documented. He worked first as a film actor, then as a director, reaching his stride with Paramount’s production of
Huckleberry Finn.
He also directed Mary Pickford in
Johanna Enlists
and
Captain Kidd Jr.,
and after a short stint in World War I directed Mary Miles Minter in such pictures as
Judy of Rogues Harbor
and
Jenny Be Good
.

As Taylor became increasingly successful in the industry, he began enjoying more and more the lifestyle it afforded him, joining the exclusive Los Angeles Athletic Club, taking expensive vacations, acquiring a staff. He hired as his personal secretary a man named Edward F. Sands, who later, in 1921, disappeared with Taylor’s money, jewelry, and an expensive automobile while Taylor was in Europe. This was the man, some reports would later claim, who might have in fact been Denis Deane Tanner. Vidor made a note to investigate this possibility further.

Around this time, Denis Tanner’s wife, Ada, having heard from a friend that Denis was in Hollywood with her brother-in-law, burst into Taylor’s office, demanding that he tell her what had happened to Denis. She said she needed him to help pay for the education of their two children, Alice and Muriel. Taylor reportedly claimed absolute ignorance of everything she was talking about, though he began secretly sending her fifty dollars every month.

Coincidentally, three thousand miles away, in the fall of 1919, Taylor’s own wife, Ethel May Harrison, had been watching a reissue of one of 1914’s biggest hits,
Captain Alvarez,
when a familiar face appeared on the screen. She watched Taylor with disbelief. She’d obtained a divorce after his sudden disappearance, claiming he had carried on an affair in the Catskills and that she had not seen or heard of him since. Ethel May had no idea what had become of Tanner, but she never dreamed he would be a Hollywood celebrity. As Taylor walked across the screen, she gripped the hand of her daughter, Daisy, and said, “That’s your father.”

Little Daisy wrote Taylor a letter, expressing a desire to see him, and Taylor, in another rare and perhaps imprudent admission of his former identity, wrote back, promising to meet with her whenever he could get away from his busy work schedule.

They finally got together in July of 1921. Though no details were made public, friends of Daisy’s family said the reunion had been a happy one, that by the end of their meeting Daisy had been calling Taylor “Father.” In the months that followed, Daisy and Taylor exchanged many letters, promising they would see each other again soon. It never happened.

By this time, 1921, Vidor had met Taylor on any number of occasions. The meeting he remembered most clearly took place when his own studio, Vidor Village, was having a hard time making ends meet. He had made the rounds of all the other studios in hopes of taking on a free-lance project, when he happened to be walking through Echo Park, a beautiful tree-shaded lake area that was often filled with the Keystone Kops and other slapstick comedians from the nearby Mack Sennett Studio. Though a light rain was falling, Vidor saw a group of Boy Scouts standing on a grassy clearing listening to a man on a raised platform. As his black servant held an umbrella over his head, the man addressed them on the importance of making clean films, doing one’s duty, and living upstanding, Christian lives. The man was William Desmond Taylor; the servant, Henry Peavey.

On the evening of February 1, 1922, at 6:45 P.M., Taylor had a visitor. Mabel Normand, the actress, stopped by to pick up a book Taylor had bought for her. As she approached the bungalow, Taylor either answered his ringing telephone or was already engaged in a conversation—Vidor’s clippings presented both possibilities. Either way, Normand waited until Taylor finished his conversation, then enjoyed a forty-five-minute visit. Afterward, Taylor walked her to her chauffeured limousine and said he would call her at nine to see how she was enjoying the book.

Vidor found no explanation in Normand’s recollections for why Taylor was going to call her an hour later about a book he had just given her.

Only a little later that evening, Taylor’s neighbor Faith Cole MacLean saw someone else casually leaving Taylor’s bungalow, someone who appeared to be a man, but according to at least one press account, had “an effeminate walk” and seemed to be wearing what looked like heavy movie makeup. Hazel Gillon, the second neighbor, could neither confirm nor deny MacLean’s account.

The next morning, at 7:30, Henry Peavey arrived for work. He saw a light burning in the living-room window and decided to enter through the front door. The door was locked, either pulled closed from the outside or pushed closed from the inside. A key was unnecessary to lock the door, only to open it.

Peavey opened the door with his house key and saw his employer lying on the floor beside the desk. The houseman panicked, ran through the bungalow court screaming for help. According to some accounts it was an hour before the police arrived, an hour in which any number of individuals hurriedly tampered with what would be discovered to have been the scene of a cold-blooded murder. Mabel Normand, studio head Charles Eyton, actress Edna Purviance, the MacLeans, E. C. Jessurun, wealthy oilman Verne Dumas, and others—they all had reasons for beating the police into Taylor’s bungalow.

Vidor’s list of unanswered questions covered his legal pad as he reached up and turned the bedroom light off. By this time Nippy had lost all interest in the dusty documents at the foot of the bed, and Betty’s room was dark. Vidor had to find out what the police had eventually learned about such puzzles as the identities of Denis Deane Tanner and Edward Sands; what became of the mysterious “doctor” who first examined the body; and the missing monogrammed handkerchief. He wanted to know why Faith MacLean may have given different descriptions of the person she saw leaving the bungalow, why the police had been so long in arriving in the morning, and many other details that would help him map out the events and the motives that had led to Taylor’s murder. But he wasn’t simply looking for a dramatic
theory
of what happened that night; that was not the way King Vidor approached a film story. He wanted to make the definitive statement on the life and death of William Desmond Taylor. It would not only be dramatic, moving, and revelatory—it would be true.