A Cast of Killers (5 page)

Another potential suspect turned himself in, claiming to be a friend of a certain motion picture actress he did not wish to name. He said he had passed by the Taylor bungalow the night of the murder and seen the director and the actress in a heated argument. Entering the apartment, he saw that Taylor had a pistol, and in a struggle to pull the weapon away, had shot Taylor in the back.

Another confession came from a Folsom Prison convict, Otis Heffner, who claimed he had tried to rob the Taylor bungalow on the night of the murder. Taylor’s unexpected arrival forced the burglar to hide behind the piano, where he reportedly witnessed a fight between Taylor and a woman who was dressed like a man. The woman was Mabel Normand, and the fight ended in murder.

In Cleveland, police were said to be closing in on other murder suspects, based on “hot tips.” In Flagstaff, Arizona, deputies located a man who looked identical to Sands, who had arrived in that area only two days after the murder. In Carlin, Nevada, police had a man barricaded in a hotel room. Police in St. Louis, New York, London, and Paris had suspects as well. But none of them had a killer.

As Vidor was quickly discovering, he had quite a task before him. The later reports chronicling developments in the Taylor murder stated that Faith Cole MacLean, the closest the police department had to an eyewitness, had died in the 1950s. D.A. Thomas Woolwine had also died, as had his successor, Asa Keyes; Marjorie Berger; Mabel Normand; Henry Peavey; Charles Eyton; and Charlotte Shelby. Mary Miles Minter had just dropped from sight.

Peavey, lying on his deathbed in the Napa State Hospital, had screamed “the master’s killer” was after him.

Mabel Normand, dying of tuberculosis, had reportedly asked, “I wonder who killed poor Bill Taylor?”

Vidor had read all he wanted to read. He snapped the bound volume shut and dismissed Carr. The Los Angeles
Times
hadn’t wanted this murder solved. Nor had the New York
Times,
the
Herald-American,
or the
Times-Courier.
The longer the investigation ran, and the more sordid the details, the more papers they would sell: “Hollywood Babylon” at three cents a pop.

Outside, he pulled the T-Bird out of the lot, asking for a receipt for the dollar and a quarter. He knew he needed a lot more than the old newspapers had given him. He needed flesh and blood, living people, who remembered what had really happened.

5

On Saturday, January 21, 1967, Vidor took American Airlines Flight Six to New York. He hated the expense of flying first class, but he didn’t want to risk anyone from Hollywood, especially one of the young studio executives, seeing him in economy. Straight bourbon helped mollify his lifelong fear of heights, and he made a point of directing his gaze away from the window, to his desk diary in front of him. Doing so, he thought of Colleen Moore, the woman who had helped him overcome his fear of flying and the woman he planned to meet when he arrived.

Few knew the story of his relationship with Moore. To all but the most trusted friends, they were simply business partners. But in fact, as Vidor had been lately writing in his diaries at night, they were much more than two motion picture veterans teaming up to keep their creative spirits alive. Theirs was a romance born nearly half a century earlier, when Hollywood itself had only just come into being.

When Vidor and Moore first met, the Hollywood community was trying to rise above its reputation. Largely founded by fugitive filmmakers from New York trying to escape paying the patent rights on motion picture equipment, the town was still popularly thought of as a haven for the wanton and the wicked, filled with back-alley dealings, narcotics, prostitution, and general amorality (a view nurtured by such early fan rags as
Motion Picture Magazine
).
To an extent, these stories were true. The towering sums of money that movies brought their creators and players—most of whom, coming from vaudeville, carnival, burlesque, and circus backgrounds, were unaccustomed to wealth of any kind—created a climate wherein excess and extravagance could flourish.

But there were also talented workers whose primary concern was their new art form, the motion picture, and who believed that their dedication and tenacity could raise the world’s opinion of Hollywood, show that it could outgrow its problems, which were really no different from those common to any boomtown. Among these dedicated people were King Vidor and his first wife, Florence.

Vidor had come from Galveston, Texas, in 1915, with ambitions to direct. Florence had dreams of becoming an actress. By 1921, Vidor had his own studio, Vidor Village, next door to the brand-new Mary Pickford Studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. The family-run studio—his parents, sister, and wife all worked there—quietly produced movies while scandal raged around them, the most virulent being Fatty Arbuckle’s. Involving rape and murder at a show-folk orgy, the scandal inspired over a hundred legislative bills calling for film censorship, a ban on all movies by one town in Massachusetts, and a foundation for the anti-Hollywood sentiment around the country. But Vidor, though his fortune and future were hardly secure, had found something to keep his mind off the doomsayers’ predictions that Hollywood was heading for a rightful fall: Colleen Moore.

Colleen Moore was the most beautiful and charming girl he had ever met. Her short black hair was a refreshing change from the blonde Mary Pickford curls popular among actresses, and her eyes—one blue, one brown—were unlike any he had ever seen. She was seventeen years old, King was twenty-six.

Vidor planned his most ambitious production for her,
The
Sky
Pilot,
about a young girl in a small Canadian town coming to grips with life and religion. During shooting on location, while Vidor’s wife, Florence, was off at Paramount, Vidor and Moore fell in love. Keeping their flirtation secret from everyone around them, they concocted symbols of their affection: a circle on a dressing-room door signified eternal love; three vertical lines meant “I love you”; the initials LND stood for Love Never Dies. They gave each other nicknames: Madame Zaza and Professor La Tour. The picture failed in its initial release—with the producers demanding a new ending, and creditors threatening to close Vidor Village—but Vidor and Moore were living a true-life fairy tale romance.

On February 1, 1922, the new ending finally completed, a blizzard hit their northern California mountain location, completely burying the steep roads back to Hollywood. As the cast and crew all settled into a nearby mountain lodge to wait out the storm, Vidor and Moore found their first real time alone together, each completely in love but neither knowing what would happen when they got back to Hollywood, and reality.

When the blizzard finally let up, the company left their cars and some of their equipment behind and made the eight-mile trek down the mountain to Truckee on foot. When they arrived, they all went into a speakeasy behind the hotel to thaw out with hot coffee and brandy. Vidor’s father was waiting for them. While everyone told spirited tales of their ordeal, Charles Vidor didn’t seem to be listening. Finally, he slid onto the bar stool next to King’s and announced that William Desmond Taylor had been murdered the night before. A hush fell over the room.

In the days and weeks that followed, Taylor’s story was retold many times, for it seemed, together with the Arbuckle scandal, to mark the imminent end of Hollywood. The Vidor company returned to Los Angeles, not knowing when they might have to pack up and leave, returning to the carnivals and theaters they had come from. Colleen Moore, a good Catholic girl, knew that her dating a married man would not sit well with a public bent on censorship and enforced morality. So they bid each other farewell on a Manhattan street corner, vowing never to see each other again.

For forty years Vidor and Moore kept that vow. And yet, for forty years, each continued sending the other messages in their lovers’ code, always hidden in an innocent motion picture scene. Moore would tell her leading man that “love never dies,” and Vidor would decorate his sets with violets, which he had always given Moore during their short time together.

Then in 1964, Vidor was in Paris, walking along the Champs-Elysees and contemplating his stalled career, when he recognized a woman in front of him. He tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Madame Zaza, what is it I am holding in my hand?”

Without turning around, Colleen Moore replied, “A dime, Professor La Tour.”

They walked back to Vidor’s hotel, and the years that had elapsed disappeared. They talked of the early days in Hollywood, and the opportunities they had in the new, youth-oriented film industry of the 1960s. Vidor had some scripts, and ideas for others he felt would make good, personal motion pictures. And Moore had the abilities to oversee the business side of filmmaking. Vid-Mor Productions was born.

And now, three years later, Vidor was on his way to New York to see Moore and to work on the script that would for the first time present those early, explosive days of Hollywood as they actually were. He’d arranged meetings with a dozen old friends, and others who might have knowledge of William Desmond Taylor that would answer some of the questions surrounding his life and death. Moore had done her work as well, contacting friends she had in the Midwest who had known Taylor and helping make appointments. It should be a fruitful trip—and not all of it would be business.

6

Taylor certainly wasn’t an Oxford man,” Robert Giroux, the New York book publisher and Hollywood historian, told Vidor. “That’s what he may have told his friends, but the official record doesn’t bear him out. “

As Giroux spoke, he spread his private collection of original Taylor documents out on the table in front of Vidor like a museum exhibit. The sight was nothing out of the ordinary at the Players Club, where they met on January 27, 1967. Publishers like Giroux often conducted business upstairs in the formal dining room. Downstairs, by the pool table and bar where Vidor and Giroux sat, those deals were sealed with a cigar and brandy.

“It’s the disappearing acts that bother me,” Vidor confided as he nursed a glass of French wine. “A lot of people arrived in Hollywood pretending to be people they weren’t. Taylor just did it exceptionally well. What I’d like to know is what he was running from.”

Giroux had no easy answer, nor did Vidor expect one. If he had, Giroux would have published the monumental amount of research he had accumulated on the life of Taylor. The fact was, he had only half the story, just enough to keep Vidor on the edge of his chair.

Irish genealogical records Giroux had collected showed the Tanner family living in Carlow, Weatherford County, not Mallow, Cork County, as the official studio biography publicized—the same biography that failed to mention his first marriage, or the fact that he had ever worked as an antiques dealer. This was a small but important distinction, Giroux pointed out, for Carlow was a great deal more rustic and provincial than Mallow, and Taylor’s origins far more humble than he led one to believe.

The birth certificate of William Cunningham Deane Tanner read April 26, 1872, not 1877, as reported in dozens of newspapers. And the family wasn’t from a long and important line of Irish families, as Taylor had told many of his Hollywood friends, but from a simple, hard-working, and upright Catholic family that placed a high premium on firm discipline, good education, and Irish nationalism.

The information Giroux had collected presented William Tanner as a handsome, friendly, and hard-working young boy. He enjoyed traveling, even if it was only to the next town where he attended school. He had two sisters and two brothers, including Denis Deane Tanner. He didn’t get along very well with his father, known as a hot-tempered major in the British Army who had severely punished his son on occasion. Nothing was known about William’s mother.

Giroux, like Vidor, was particularly interested in the details of an early, unsuccessful marriage arrangement between William and a young neighbor and companion. That friend, Eva Shannon, like William, was only fifteen. From what Giroux had been able to cull from published records, William’s interests didn’t lie in her charms as a lady, but in her abilities to catch salmon in a nearby river, where William often went to be alone. Giroux had little more to go on. All he could say for sure was that wedding plans had suddenly soured, and William had left, destination unknown.

Giroux’s guess was that Tanner had left with an actor, Charles Hawtrey, then managing a repertory company touring that part of Ireland. He based his guess upon the fact that two years later, William was playing roles in Hawtrey’s company. The young boy might have begun building sets or running errands, Vidor suggested. Whatever happened, according to studio publicity, William was waiting for his cue to go on stage in London when a family friend spotted him and wrote his father.

Within days, Major William Tanner had reportedly snatched his son from the stage and sent him to Clifton College, then to Heidelberg, Germany, to study engineering, and prepare to follow his father’s footsteps to the military academy at Sandhurst. The exact details of what followed were unimportant, but it was clear that William spent very little time at school, and may not even have attended Clifton College at all, resulting in bitter arguments with his father over the acting profession—considered by the head of the family to be the lowest form of gypsy existence.

Disgraced, Tanner’s father turned to friends he had in the military and, at their suggestion, sent him to Runnymeade, a ranching settlement in Kansas run by Ned Turnley. In the American West, where Turnley promised a disciplined environment and strenuous physical activity, William’s father believed his son would develop more in his own image.

Vidor helped fill in the rest of that story. Turnley’s daughter was still alive. While Vidor and Carr had been doing research at the Los Angeles Public Library, Colleen Moore had made contact with the daughter. In a letter from Kansas to Moore she recounted what she remembered.