The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (64 page)

It seems to me, therefore, that some person wanted, and quite probably obtained, a written statement from Taylor. Once that statement had been properly written out and signed, the person had no further use for Taylor and probably through a desire for vengeance, or else with the idea of sealing his lips, pulled the trigger of a gun which had been surreptitiously placed against the side of the director’s body.

It is interesting to speculate whether some woman may not have been concealed in the upstairs portion of the house at the time the shot was fired. The presence of a pink silk nightgown indicates that at some time previously women, or at any rate a woman, had been there.

Notice the manner in which the body had been “laid out.”

If the person in an upstairs bedroom had heard voices below, followed by the sound of a shot, and then the noise made by a body falling to the floor, then the opening and closing of a door . . . Perhaps, after ten or fifteen minutes of agonized waiting this person tiptoed down the stairs and found the body of the director sprawled on the floor. It is quite possible that this woman, before slipping out into the concealment of the night, would have bent over the lifeless body, wept a few tears, and arranged the clothing as neatly as possible.

The most interesting lead of all was offered by Mabel Normand in her comments about the telephone conversation. Quite obviously she was trying to impress upon the police that in her opinion this telephone conversation had some probable bearing upon the death of the director. It is almost certain that this was no mere casual conversation and that Taylor discussed it with her while they were talking together. How else could Mabel Normand have know that the person had called Taylor, not vice versa? How did she know that the person at the other end of the wire was very interested in what Taylor was saying? And why was her subsequent recollection of the telephone conversation so widely at variance with her original statements to the press?

Is it possible the police failed to appreciate the significance of Miss Normand’s statement, or did Miss Normand, after thinking things over, decide that she had gone too far and that it would be better to forget all she might have been told about that telephone conversation?

It is to be borne in mind that the police were undoubtedly subjected to great pressure at the time. They were also confused by confessions which were arriving at the rate of ten a day for a period of thirty days. That’s an average of better than one an hour for each hour of the working day.

One thing is certain, no dyed-in-the-wool mystery fan would have let Miss Normand’s significant statement about the telephone conversation pass unnoticed. And I think most really intelligent mystery readers would have given an interpretation other than the stick-up hypothesis to the fact that the course of the bullet indicated the left shoulder had been raised at the time of death.

As time passes, it becomes less possible that the case will ever be solved by the police. Yet there is an interesting field for speculation in the fact that police have the fingerprints of Edward Sands. It is becoming more and more common nowadays for all classes of people to be fingerprinted and the prints passed on to the FBI. Imagine what a furor there will be if some day the FBI, making a routine check of some fingerprint, comes upon that of the missing secretary of the murdered motion-picture director. That is a very distinct possibility, one which may once more bring the case into the limelight. So one can hardly write the murder of William Desmond Taylor off the books—not yet.

The murder of William Desmond Taylor remains unsolved. Many years after Erle Stanley Gardner’s ruminations, two books appeared presenting different theories on the Taylor murder.
A Cast of Killers,
published in 1986, was written by director King Vidor’s biographer, Sidney Kirkpatrick, and based on notes that King Vidor had made while researching and trying to solve the murder. The Kirkpatrick-Vidor theory is that Mary Minter’s mother, Charlotte Shelby committed the murder and used much of Mary’s money to pay off various Los Angeles District Attorneys. In 1990, Robert Giroux’s book,
A Deed of Death,
put forward a theory that Taylor was killed by a hit man, hired by a drug kingpin. At the time of his death, Taylor was trying to drive the drug dealers out of Hollywood. His friend Mabel Normand had been having a problem with drug addiction, and Taylor’s actions against the drug dealers sprang from his desire to help Mabel conquer her drug problem.

(Marilyn Monroe, 1962)

Kirk Wilson

In August 1962, the world’s most glamorous film star Marilyn Monroe was found dead in bed at her home in Los Angeles. At first her death was said to have been caused by a drugs overdose; later, however, several people claimed that Monroe was given a lethal injection or otherwise murdered, claims that have been bitterly disputed over the years. The favourite conspiracy theory surrounding her death is that she had affairs with both President John F. Kennedy and his brother, US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and that Monroe was murdered because she knew too many state secrets. In 1973 the American writer Norman Mailer published a biography
Marilyn
in which he argued that, although Monroe had been deeply depressed at the time of her death, she had not committed suicide. Mailer attacked Marilyn’s last husband, playwright Arthur Miller, and reported that while making her last film
The Misfits
she had resumed an affair with Clark Gable. “Who is the first to be certain that it was of no interest to the CIA, or to the FBI, or to the Mafia, and half of the secret police of the world, that the brother of the President was reputed to be having an affair with a movie star who had once been married to a playwright denied a passport for supporting Communist movements”, Mailer wrote.

In the world she moved through, nobody who mattered used their real names. The names they used were made up for them, like magical incantations. But she was never sure of her real name, so even by the standards of this world of make-believe, she was an insubstantial creature. The actress the world knows as Marilyn Monroe created herself anew each day. What she created was a dream, a myth, the closest thing our times have summoned to a love goddess in the flesh. The death that came to her had all the scope of emotive possibilities she had brought to every day in life. From one perspective, it was squalid, pointless, and pitiable. From another, it was of itself a myth, an epic role in a drama involving the most potent names and players of her age.

Sometime in the night of 4 August 1962, Marilyn Monroe slipped away into the ultimate unreality, riding a massive dose of Nembutal and chloral hydrate. The Chief Medical Examiner of Los Angeles County made a hedging call on the cause of death—“
probable
suicide”. Other investigators, with considerable evidence but no hard proof, are still calling it murder.

Murder, accident, or suicide, Marilyn’s death is a mystery today not because of differing interpretations of the facts, but because this mistress of make-believe had been playing in a real and dangerous world, and the monarchs of that world were powerful enough to rewrite the script of her last hours.

In life and death, Marilyn embodied a supremely surreal and ambiguous version of the all-American success story. Raised in orphanages and foster homes, she became the Queen of Hollywood, using her talent and her body in equal measure to ascend from one imagined tier to the next. By the end she had achieved everything any starry-eyed bit player could dream of, and along the way she had bedded a president, married a sports legend and a literary giant, and captured the adulation of the world more completely than any actress of any time. She could be in turns a bitch and a baby, cunning and helpless, the goddess of sexual promise and the ghost of oblivion. She was a woman who could move, in the same afternoon, from a trembling mess of insecurity and self-doubt into an absolute master of her art. No one before or since has put more electricity and magic onto a piece of film.

The baby girl born at Los Angeles General Hospital at nine-thirty a.m. on 1 June 1926, was named Norma Jean Baker. The first name was inspired by the actress Norma Talmadge. The last was a convenience, borrowed from her mother’s departed second husband. Though the matter has been endlessly researched, the identity of Marilyn’s real father has never been firmly established. There are several candidates, the leading one a man named Gifford, who worked with her mother. The search for a father would become one of the themes of Norma Jean’s strange life. A number of surrogates—in fantasy, Clark Gable was a favorite—would fill and abandon the role.

The child who would be Marilyn had little more in the way of a mother. At the time of her daughter’s birth, Gladys Pearl Baker Mortenson was a delicately beautiful woman in her mid-twenties, working as a negative cutter at Consolidated Film Industries. She had two other children—a boy and a girl—who were living in the custody of her first husband’s family.

Norma Jean spent her first eight years with foster families while her mother worked, visiting the child on weekends. In 1934, mother and daughter lived in the same household for a few months—the longest period they would spend together during Norma Jean’s childhood—until Gladys suffered the first of many mental collapses and entered the same state hospital in which her own mother had died. The mother of Marilyn Monroe would spend most of the rest of her days in institutions, diagnosed—like her parents and brother before her—as a paranoid schizophrenic.

At nine, Norma Jean entered an orphanage and slept by a window overlooking the RKO studies. Beginning at eleven, she migrated from foster homes to guardians. Biographers have charted a total of twelve different households, not including the orphanage, inhabited by young Norma Jean before her marriage at sixteen. This upbringing did little to build a stable personality. After her transformation into movie stardom, Marilyn would milk the poor-orphan story for all it was worth with writers and studio publicists. Her accounts included an attempted smothering by her grandmother and no fewer than ten episodes of rape or molestation, beginning at age six. Even allowing for her exaggerations and self-contradictions, there is no doubt that Marilyn’s childhood was a perfect breeding ground for insecurity and loneliness.

Norma Jean’s first marriage, to a twenty-one-year-old former high school hero named Jim Dougherty, was more or less arranged by her guardian of the moment, who was moving out of state and preferred not to take the teenage girl along. In later years, Jim would remember the marriage more fondly than Marilyn. However happily it may have begun, the marriage was doomed when Jim shipped out with the merchant marine and the head of his luscious young bride was turned toward a career in modeling. With every stunning photograph, with every line of agent’s hype and every leer from ad executives and movie producers, Norma Jean moved closer to rebirth as Marilyn.

The official incarnation happened while Norma Jean was working as a contract player for 20th Century-Fox in 1946. Ben Lyon, the Fox casting director, borrowed the name Marilyn from an actress he admired named Marilyn Miller, Marilyn herself contributed Monroe—it was the maiden name of her grandmother.

Her first screen appearance came the following year, at the age of twenty-one. Marilyn briefly rowed a canoe in an insipid movie starring a team of mules and titled
Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!
The infamously jiggling-Monroe walk had its debut in a bit part in a Marx Brothers movie called
Love Happy
(1949), causing Groucho to evaluate the young starlet as “Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo Peep all rolled into one.” The importance of these early cameos was that Marilyn’s uncanny ability to make love to a camera lens was being noticed by the men who owned the cameras. She was not, by Hollywood standards, an exceptionally beautiful woman. She was an exceptionally photogenic woman, and that was all that mattered. Remembering his first session with Marilyn in an early screen test, veteran cinematographer Leon Shamroy says, “I got a cold chill. This girl had something I hadn’t seen since silent pictures. She had a kind of fantastic beauty . . . she got sex on a piece of film.”

She also knew how to use sex on a casting couch, and her talents in this line contributed as much to her early successes as her undeniable screen presence. One advantageous relationship was with the seventy-year-old Joseph Schenck, the head of production at Fox and one of the founders of the company. Another was with a powerful agent named Johnny Hyde. Marilyn minced no words in describing her attitude at this stage of her career. “I spent a lot of time on my knees.” There were genuine love affairs to go with the affairs of business, and a good deal of near-pathological abandon. By the end of her life, Marilyn may have undergone as many as fourteen abortions.