Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (28 page)

Sometime after midday, newsboys started hawking the afternoon newspapers. “Murder shocks film colony!” they sang out in their prepubescent voices up and down city blocks. The giant black headlines, still wet with ink, showed what a daunting task the studio faced.

For the first time in weeks, another story had shoved Arbuckle out of the top spot. But even more shocks were waiting in a secure room at the Famous Players studio.

Eyton began going through Taylor’s purloined papers. Page after page he lifted from the wire wastebasket, his eyes scanning each and every item gathered by his team of accomplices. Eyton’s face grew serious. He summoned Jesse Lasky in to take a look.

Soon after that, Lasky placed a long-distance call to Adolph Zukor in New York.

Back at Alvarado Court, a car came screeching to a stop. It was just about noon.

Mary jumped out and ran across the courtyard. She was followed by her grandmother and a veritable army of newspapermen shouting questions at her.

Mary ignored them as she started up the steps of Taylor’s front porch. But a policeman stood at the door, refusing to let her enter.

“It isn’t true, is it?” the little actress asked dramatically.

The policeman confirmed that Taylor was dead.

With great flair, Mary flung her hand to her forehead and turned to the gathered newsmen. Growing up on the stage and in the movies, Mary always expressed emotion theatrically, with big, grand gestures. In front of the reporters she flailed her arms hysterically, uttering terrible cries. Mrs. Miles had to steady her to keep her from collapsing.

“Oh, my God, I can’t believe it!” Mary wailed.

The newsmen pressed in around her. What could she tell them about Taylor?

“Why, he was a wonderful man,” Mary said, “and everyone that knew him loved him.” She didn’t mention that her mother had been a notable exception to that rule.

The reporters had more questions for her, but Mary couldn’t tarry any longer. She had to go to him. Pushing her way through the mob, Mary and her grandmother made it back to the car. As they sped off down the road, a caravan of newshounds followed, eager to see where the young star was headed.

Elsewhere in the courtyard, Henry Peavey was sobbing as he carried a bundle of bloody white cloths through the courtyard.

“His blood!” the valet cried to reporters. He’d been scrubbing the dark purple stain on the carpet, the last service he could perform for his beloved employer. With a flourish, Peavey dumped the cloths into the court incinerator.

“I wish I could get the man that did it,” the valet said, flashing his angry, bloodshot eyes. “I’d go to jail for the rest of my life if I could get him.”

At the corner of Tenth and South Hill Streets, Mary slammed on her brakes and pulled her car up in front of the Ivy H. Overholtzer mortuary, a grand three-story Victorian house with a large portico and a tower. Leaving their cars at odd angles in the street, reporters scrambled to follow, magnesium cubes popping, as the distraught young actress made her way toward the funeral home. Mary leaned on the arm of her grandmother for support as she climbed the steep steps. To Mary, there seemed to be
“a thousand of them.”

Once they got to the top, the two women hurried inside and closed the door on the snapping newshounds behind them.

“I’m coming to give blood,” Mary shouted deliriously as Ivy Overholtzer, a dignified man of forty-five, approached her. “Is he here? Is it true he was shot? He must be losing blood.”

Overholtzer tried to reason with her, to explain that Taylor was dead, but Mary was having none of it. Either she was really delirious, or she was giving one of her finest performances. “I can lie down on the table,” she insisted, “and you can pump the blood out of me into him.”

“I can’t do that,” Overholtzer told her.

“You don’t understand! This is my mate! I have the right! I claim this man!”

Overholtzer repeated that Taylor was dead.

Mary was becoming hysterical. “Many times you think people are dead, but if you just take the right action, they’ll come back. Just stop arguing, Mr. Overholtzer! Take me to him!”

But the undertaker could not let anyone see the remains of the victim. At that moment, in a private room of the mortuary, the coroner, Frank Nance, was preparing for the postmortem examination. Overholtzer promised that if Mary came back the next day, he’d give her some time alone with the body. After much cajoling, she finally agreed to leave.

Pushing through the crush of reporters back to her car, Mary couldn’t go home. Not yet. There was one more place she needed to go.

At her apartment on Seventh Street, Mabel was worn down by the policemen’s incessant questions. For the third or fourth or maybe fifth time, Mabel recounted her movements of the night before. She’d been out running errands. She’d bought some peanuts. She’d swung by Billy’s to pick up the books.

At first she’d been unsure of the exact time—who paid attention to clocks?—but eventually she’d narrowed it down. She’d left Billy’s around 7:45, she told the police. He’d been standing there, in the courtyard, blowing kisses to her as she drove away.

It was the last image she would have of him.

Mabel sobbed.

How could she get through all this without Billy to support her?

Suddenly there was a commotion outside. A crowd had been growing all morning around Mabel’s apartment, and now police were trying to prevent someone from reaching her front door.

“I want to see Miss Normand,” a girlish voice was crying above the din.

Mabel made her way to the top of the steps. “Who is it?” she called down to the police.

“It’s Mary Miles Minter,” shouted the little figure, nearly obscured by a phalanx of blue-uniformed officers.

Mabel told her to come upstairs.

The police stepped back, letting Mary march determinedly past them to the second floor.

Mabel beckoned Mary to follow her into the bathroom.

“We’ll run the water,” Mabel said, shutting the door behind them. “If they’ve got anything going, they can’t hear our conversation.”

Mabel knew the long, tortured history that festered between Mary and Billy. She wasn’t about to let anyone hear what Mary might say about their so-called romance.

The two women weren’t exactly friends. There was nearly a ten-year age difference between them, they’d never worked at the same studio, and their temperaments were as different as chalk and cheese. But Mabel had made efforts to be kind to Mary, perhaps because she felt sorry for her, living with such heartbreak over Billy. The previous summer, she had sent the younger woman flowers before her trip to Europe. And while Mary might have been envious of Mabel’s closer relationship with Taylor, she couldn’t deny that the comedienne had been one of the few people in Hollywood who had been genuinely decent to her. So she had felt safe, at this terrible time, coming to Mabel.

She also seemed determined to find out just what Mabel knew. As the water splashed into the sink, Mary asked if she and Taylor had been lovers.

“We were good friends,” Mabel told her. “But we were never lovers.”

Mary breathed a sigh of relief. But what had Mr. Taylor ever said about her?

Mabel was shrewd, and once again kind. She told the young woman exactly what she wanted to hear. “Mary,” Mabel said, “Billy worshiped the ground you walked on. But you were so young that he feared you would love him all the days of his life. He didn’t want to hurt you.”

Such carefully chosen words reassured Mary that her deeply held beliefs were real. Mr. Taylor had loved her. He had truly, truly loved her.

The two women turned off the water and emerged from the bathroom. The officers did not attempt to question Mary as she descended the steps of Mabel’s apartment. But they did take note of the young actress’s distress. Every last detail would be reported back to their superiors.

The police wondered why was Miss Minter so upset. Why she was so desperate to speak to Mabel Normand. Just what sort of relationship did Mary Miles Minter have with Taylor?

And what might she know about the events of the night before?

As night fell, Charlotte Shelby withdrew to her mansion on South New Hampshire Avenue, where in the coming days she would keep a low profile. Unlike her daughter, the very private Mrs. Shelby did not draw attention to herself with frantic rides all over town. Instead, she continued overseeing the renovations of her house, stepping carefully through the sawdust and the plaster, doing her best to carry on even as the furor outside intensified. By minding her own business, Mrs. Shelby ensured that no policemen came knocking at her door.

Very early on February 3, 1922, barely twenty-four hours after Henry Peavey found the cold body of William Desmond Taylor sprawled out on his living room floor, Edgar C. King, forty-six, an eighteen-year veteran of the police force, made his way through the congested streets of downtown Los Angeles. Another frosty day was dawning over Southern California. Many of the ficus trees had browned overnight, and the palms seemed to tremble in the arctic air.

Detective Sergeant King’s destination this morning was the white-marble Hall of Records on West Temple Street. The twelve-story structure, with its several peaked attics, soared over all the other buildings in the surrounding neighborhood. Even the majestic clock tower of the adjacent red-stone courthouse didn’t reach as high into the sky as the imposing Hall of Records.

Sergeant King rode the elevator almost to the top.

There, on the eleventh floor, higher than nearly everything else in the City of Angels, were the offices of the famous flamboyant “fightin’ prosecutor,” Thomas Lee Woolwine, who had summoned King into his presence.

District Attorney Woolwine’s sobriquet came not only from the fierce battles he waged in courtrooms. A year earlier, he’d also
hauled off and punched a defense lawyer, leading to a fine for contempt of court and the disruption of several trials. A few months later a county grand jury investigated Woolwine’s office, calling it a
“carnival of extravagance, waste and corruption,” but most agreed the move was politically motivated (Woolwine was the rare Democrat in Republican Los Angeles) and the investigation went nowhere.

Even with his penchant for grabbing the headlines, Woolwine retained a homespun air. His modest home in Echo Park was the best evidence against his enemies’ charges that he was accepting kickbacks. Although he was undeniably ambitious—he’d had his eye on the governor’s mansion for some time now and hoped to launch his campaign in the spring—his personal aspirations were tempered by an authentic commitment to justice. Catching Taylor’s killer would certainly boost his campaign for the state’s top job, but that didn’t make Woolwine’s passion for catching crooks any less genuine.

Flush with excitement, King took a seat in front of the colorful DA.
“The ‘bumping off’ of a famous person like William Desmond Taylor,” King would later write, “is the sort of oyster that any detective delights to open.” So he was elated when Woolwine, in his rich, melodious Tennessee accent, asked him to represent the district attorney’s office in the murder investigation. Woolwine wanted an ironclad case when the killer was brought to trial.

What drove Eddie King wasn’t the prospect of glory, but the thrill of the hunt. Around the department, King was heralded as having
“solved more major crime mysteries than any other police officer in Southern California.” Most famously, he’d helped catch the kidnappers of wealthy young Mrs. Gladys Wetherell a year earlier, by using new technology at the central telephone station to trace the kidnappers’ ransom calls. He’d also played a key role in the arrest of Louise Peete, a notorious murderess currently serving a life sentence.

King brought Woolwine up to date on the Taylor case. The autopsy performed at the Overholtzer mortuary had located the .38-caliber soft-nosed bullet. The little blue slug had
entered the victim’s left side, six and half inches below his armpit, before traveling upward through the seventh interspace of his ribs, penetrating his left lung, passing out of his chest and finally lodging in his neck. Such an unusual trajectory made a queer sort of sense: the holes on Taylor’s jacket and vest did not line up. The dead man’s arms had apparently been raised in the air when he was shot.

Given the position of the body on the floor, police were speculating that Taylor had been seated at his desk at the time of the attack. The killer had likely snuck up behind him, either startling him enough that he threw his arms in the air, or ordering him to “stick ’em up.”

That was all interesting. But what really got the detectives’ attention was what they’d found in Taylor’s papers. Not that there were many of them; King told Woolwine that several Famous Players employees had made off with armfuls of documents before Officer Zeigler had declared the apartment a crime scene. But the few scraps left behind by the studio people were provocative enough.

The murdered director, it turned out, had led a whole other life before coming to Hollywood. His real name was William Deane-Tanner, and some years earlier he had walked out on his wife and daughter in New York. This past summer, however, according to letters found in the apartment,
Taylor had met with his daughter, Ethel Daisy, on his way back from Europe. It was the first time she had seen her father in more than a decade.

Was this girl the “secret sadness” Taylor had told friends about? Attempts were being made to reach the wife and daughter, who, according to the letters, were living in Mamaroneck, New York. Evidently in his last months Taylor had been trying to reconcile some of the secrets of his past. But, as King explained, the abandoned family was only one of many mysteries in Taylor’s life.

Considerable trouble had existed between the dead man and his former valet, Edward Sands. King gave Woolwine a full report of the stolen jewelry, the pawn tickets, and the warrant for Sands’s arrest. Friends and associates also told police about a series of harassing phone calls Taylor had received over the last few months. A conversation with Neil Harrington, one of the Alvarado Court neighbors who’d found the body, also revealed the fact that two men had tried to gain access to Taylor’s bungalow just a few days before the murder, and another person had been prowling around the place months earlier. For many detectives, this all pointed to Sands. Solving the Taylor murder, they believed, could be simply a matter of finding his former valet.