A Cast of Killers (32 page)

“This is my favorite,” she said, again. “This is the same stationery I wrote my letters to my boyfriends on.”

“What boyfriends?” Vidor said, tense, wishing he were gone. When once again she failed to respond to his questions, he said, “Is this the paper you wrote to Mr. Taylor on?”

Minter nodded, almost imperceptibly at first, but stronger as her sobbing grew more intense.

“My mother killed everything I ever loved,” she said, and looked across the dark room at Vidor, tears streaking her bulbous face.

Vidor didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t look at her. He looked out the dirty window, then into the hallway where the foot of the stairs brought back the possibility that Charlotte Shelby was still alive, sitting above them at this very moment. Is that what Minter had been doing when he rang her bell, tending to her mother?

Vidor stood up and, without saying anything or even looking back into the room, let himself out.

He drove to the Santa Monica beach, walked to the pier. Coeds from Pepperdine peered in through windows at a decaying merry-go-round. A refurbished wood-paneled 1930s station wagon rattled by. But Vidor barely noticed. His mind was elsewhere.

The mystery was solved. He had no doubt about that. And its solution was more sensational than he ever could have imagined it would be, involving scandals and blackmail, sex and conspiracies, elements that would promise a sensational screenplay.

And yet he knew he hadn’t gotten from Minter what Sanderson and Brown were hoping for. A vague, ambiguous statement from a crazy woman would not retire this case from active police files. Nor would affidavits from Vidor’s friends and associates be any match for an ex-D.A. with a reputation to defend, and a penchant for taking matters to court.

Now, breathing deeply the ocean air as though sucking life back into his lungs after his visit to Mary Miles Minter’s living tomb, Vidor wondered if all he had learned was worth the trouble. Hadn’t there been enough misery?

Vidor was reminded of the question Antonio Moreno had posed, days before he had died: why did Vidor want to tell this story that would inevitably taint the remaining years, however few, of those involved? First he thought of Buron Fitts, polishing off his third martini over lunch at the Bel Air Country Club, looking nervously beyond Vidor as Vidor spelled out his suspicions, methodically chipping away the foundations of Fitts’s career. And he thought of George Hopkins and the forty-five-year-old portrait of Taylor that Hopkins kept atop his brightly polished piano. Had Hopkins and Taylor just been close friends, or was it more? Then Vidor thought of Mary Miles Minter, once the sweetheart of the entire world, sitting in her dungeon of a house, surrounded by reminders of a world and time that no longer existed, a world and time she had once been a vivacious, vital part of, crying about a mother who “killed everything I ever loved.”

Did Vidor want to tell this story now, and inevitably taint the lives of these people? Just to make his fifty-fifth film? Or should he wait, perhaps only a few years hence, for a better time?

He drove home. Nippy greeted him cheerily.

Vidor put the message on his desk. He changed out of his suit into a pair of jeans. He cleared anything related to the Taylor case from his desk and carried it down into the basement. He turned on the light.

Beneath his worktable he opened the metal strongbox in which he’d been keeping the notes and clippings from his investigation. Then he put everything he had accumulated—magazines, newspapers, police-file transcripts, interview notes, script pages—into the strongbox. He took his notebook from his pocket and started to remove the used pages, but decided instead to drop the notebook into the box intact.

He stood up, looked around the workroom for anything he might have missed, then closed the strongbox lid.

He clamped the padlock shut and shoved the strongbox well under the table, out of sight. He didn’t even want to see it for a while. Maybe one day, he told himself, he would open it and tell the story it contained, but for now he would just let it rest. He had spent the last six months, both professionally and personally, chasing down the past, and he had had enough. Six months wasn’t long—film directors often spent longer pursuing projects that never came about—but he felt it was time for something new. The past was a fascinating place to journey, but as he had seen in the sad eyes of Mary Miles Minter, it was a dangerous place to settle down.

He picked up one of the boxes from the Ranch Market, filled with clothes and personal belongings, and carried it outside. Then, with Nippy barking at his feet, he headed up the driveway to talk to Betty.

AFTERWARD

BURON FITTS, former California lieutenant-governor and Los Angeles district attorney, raised a .38-caliber pistol to his temple on March 29, 1973, and took his own life. He was seventy-eight years old. Police reports indicate that the pistol used in his suicide was a vintage Smith and Wesson blue breaktop revolver, similar to the one used in the Taylor murder fifty-one years before.

CHARLOTTE SHELBY, mother and manager of Mary Miles Minter, officially died on March 13, 1957, at her daughter’s home in Santa Monica. Acquaintances and former employees of Shelby, however, have provided eyewitness accounts of seeing her as late as June 1960. In an unpublished autobiography, made available to this author, she refers to William Desmond Taylor as the “kindest,” “warmest,” “most gentle,” and “loving” director she had known, and posed the question: “Why would anyone wish to shoot such a man?”

MARY MILES MINTER, silent-film actress, died in obscurity on August 5, 1984, at her home on Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica. Shortly after King Vidor’s visit, she unsuccessfully sued CBS and producer Rod Serling for invasion of privacy in his portrayal of her as one of three prime suspects in the killing of William Desmond Taylor. Until her death, she continued various forms of legal action and was known to have been robbed on at least three different occasions. After one such robbery, in 1981, she was gagged, beaten, and left for dead on the floor of her kitchen. A subsequent investigation revealed that one of her ex-servants had participated in this brutal act. Minter’s diaries, which were sold at auction after her death, detailed Charlotte Shelby’s pathological behavior before, during, and after the Taylor murder. “My mother killed everything I ever loved,” Minter wrote.

MARGARET SHELBY FILLMORE, elder daughter of Charlotte Shelby and sister of Mary Miles Minter, died on December 21, 1939, at her home on Valentine Street in Los Angeles. Her death certificate lists cause of death as alcoholic congestions, acute cardiac dilatation, and postal cirrhosis.

EMMETT J. FLYNN, film director, former husband of Margaret Shelby and Nita Flynn, died suddenly in Los Angeles on June 4, 1937, at the age of forty-four. Rumors that circulated about his death were the result of an autopsy performed on June 5, 1937, but never made public. The final diagnosis revealed that he had died from a brain hemorrhage due to chronic alcoholism, and not from a blow to the head.

HENRY PEAVEY, valet to William Desmond Taylor, moved to a ghetto in Sacramento, California, after his employer’s death, where he reportedly lived in poverty, until his own death at the Napa State Hospital in 1931. Among the many statements he made to the press were in January 1930 when he reportedly said that a famous actress killed Taylor and that he had been silenced by the authorities and told to “get out of town.”

GEORGE HOPKINS, Academy Award-winning art director and set designer, died in his Hollywood home on February 11, 1985, days before his eighty-eighth birthday. He had just completed his memoirs, a striking tale chronicling his life among such luminaries as William Desmond Taylor and James Dean.

ALLAN DWAN, film director, died on December 21, 1981, at the age of ninety-six at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, California. He was long considered the last great Hollywood pioneer, credited with over three hundred feature-length films and five hundred shorts.

ADELA ROGERS ST. JOHNS, journalist, novelist, and film historian, died on August 11, 1989, at age ninety-five, after moving from Los Angeles to live with her daughter in northern California. For many years, her autobiography,
The Honeycomb,
contained the only no-holds-barred account of the Taylor slaying in book form.

MINTA DURFEE, silent-film comedienne and ex-wife of Fatty Arbuckle, died on September 10, 1975, at the age of eighty-five at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills. She remained active in her later years, playing small roles in such films as
The Singing Nun, The Odd Couple,
and
Willard.

CLAIRE WINDSOR, silent-film star and artist, died at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles on October 24, 1972. She was seventy-four years old. After King Vidor’s visit with her, she continued painting; her work was displayed in galleries and homes throughout Los Angeles. Because of her great civic contributions, the Alexandria Hotel in Los Angeles named a suite of rooms in her honor.

GLORIA SWANSON, one of Hollywood’s most important film actresses, died in New York on April 4, 1983. No one knew for sure how old she was. Some said eighty-four, others ninety. Regardless, her movie classic,
Sunset Boulevard,
lives on in the memories of millions.

BILL CAHILL, former chief of police of Arcadia, California, and twenty-two-year veteran of the L.A.P.D., died on February 10, 1988, at age ninety-four at a Catholic nursing home in El Monte, California. During his distinguished career he was awarded over seventeen commendations for bravery in the line of duty, and medals for marksmanship.

RAYMOND CATO, former chief and active creator of the California Highway Patrol, a position he held for twenty-three years after leaving the L.A.P.D., died at the age of ninety-five on June 6, 1984, in Sacramento, California. He was remembered for his civic contributions to such organizations as the Shrine Temple, Royal Order of Jesters, and as chairman of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

THAD BROWN, former chief of police of the City of Los Angeles, and seventeen-year chief of detectives, died on October 10, 1970, in Glendale, California. He was sixty-seven years old. Upon his death, Mayor Sam Yorty hailed him “as one of the great police officers of the world,” and ordered that all of the flags on city buildings be lowered to half-staff.

LEROY SANDERSON, former detective lieutenant of the Los Angeles Police Department and retired chief of security for Republic Studios in Hollywood, died of heart failure on July 25, 1981, at the age of eighty-six. He was remembered by many as L.A.P.D.’s “top gun,” and the man police departments all over the country turned to when they needed help on particularly difficult cases.

THELMA CARR, former secretary to King Vidor, became a championship golf professional. Before her death on April 21, 1992, at age sixty-nine, she resided in a lovely motor home overlooking the countryside on the outskirts of Hemet, California.

DICK MARCHMAN, former insurance executive and King Vidor’s associate, continued to remain close to Mr. Vidor and his family throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He died on September 6, 1984, at his home in Park LaBrea, in Los Angeles, one week after his regular game of poker.

BETTY VIDOR, King Vidor’s third wife, died of heart failure, brought on by anorexia nervosa, on August 21, 1978. She was seventy-seven years old. Except on rare occasions, she never permitted her husband back into the family home, and in her will left strict orders that this policy be continued. The house and all its furnishings were left to her German shepherd, Toby, who outlived Mr. Vidor by two years.

KING VIDOR, film director, writer, and private eye, died of heart failure at Willow Creek Ranch on November 1, 1982, at the age of eighty-seven. After putting aside his research on the life and death of William Desmond Taylor, he completely abandoned large-scale feature filmmaking and returned to the kind of smaller-scale documentary filmmaking he had known and practiced as a youth. He completed two successful feature documentaries:
Metaphor,
which he made with friend and admirer Andrew Wyeth; and
Truth and Illusion,
a film about metaphysics, art, science, magic, and life. He not only directed, produced, and acted in these films, but he did a fair portion of the camera work and editing. In 1979 he was presented with an Honorary Academy Award for Life Achievement.

COLLEEN MOORE, silent-film star, author, and former partner in Merrill Lynch, died at age 87 in 1988 at her ranch in Templeton, California, just down the road from King Vidor’s Willow Creek Ranch in Paso Robles. In December 1983 she married Paul Maginot, a highly respected California contractor, and went on a whirlwind honeymoon in Switzerland. Other adventures she took in the 1980s included trips to Japan, China, Europe, Russia, Africa, and the North Pole. Until nearly the end, she was as young, vibrant, ambitious, and loving as she was when she took Hollywood by storm at the age of seventeen.

NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS