Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (16 page)

Next time one of them came around, Sands would have to keep an eye on that pink nightshirt and see if it had been used.

Of the three ladies Sands suspected, only Mabel had been spending any time with Taylor of late. But Mabel’s evenings with Billy always ended with a brotherly kiss—exactly why she found spending time with him so wonderful and refreshing. Liberated from the kind of sexual tension that had poisoned her relationships with Sennett and Goldwyn, Mabel could relax when she was out with Taylor and have a good time.

In the last few weeks, they’d frequently been spotted twirling around the dance floor in the grill room at the Ambassador Hotel.
Columnist Hazel Shelly called the Ambassador the new “Mecca” for the filmfolk; the grill room
would soon be christened “the Cocoanut Grove.” Green monkeys with lighted eyes, perched in towering potted palms, watched as Ruth Roland “tripped the light fantastic” in a pink chiffon dress, and Gloria Swanson dazzled in a flame-colored sequined gown. Back at their tables, deposited there by attendants and carefully cloaked by the tablecloths, were suitcases filled with
“the precious cargo of expensive booze.”

How easy it would have been for Mabel to indulge if she wanted. But not with Taylor. He made sure his “Blessed Baby” stayed clean. An occasional cocktail was fine, but nothing more. They sat discreetly, never drawing much attention to themselves. One night their dinner companions were the distinguished actor Mahlon Hamilton and his wife. Hamilton had just finished shooting
Greater Than Love
at the Ince studios. Perhaps he shared stories of working with Patricia Palmer, whom Taylor knew better as Margaret “Gibby” Gibson.

For all their discretion, Mabel and Taylor were still watched by the columnists. Grace Kingsley had fun with a blind item:
“Mabel Normand has caught a distinguished looking one with gray hair this time!” But the pair never gave the press anything to gossip about. Taylor, as always, was tight-lipped and mysterious. And Mabel, for the first time, seemed calm and content.

That didn’t stop people from drawing their own conclusions.

People like Edward Sands.

Sands had a way of finding out things, but he knew how to get away with things too. Like his employer, he had lived many different lives. His name wasn’t Sands, but rather Snyder, and despite his accent, he wasn’t English at all, having been
born in Ohio twenty-seven years earlier. As a teenager, he had fled his strict father’s belt by enlisting in the US Navy. Told he was too young, he’d lied about his age. It was the first lie of many.

While on board the USS
Paducah
, Snyder was arrested for fraud and embezzlement after overcharging for supplies in the mess room and pocketing the difference. Court-martialed, he was found guilty and sentenced to twelve months of hard labor. The experience turned Snyder bitter. A year in the brig seemed excessive punishment for making a few extra pennies on Lifebuoy soap, Colgate toothpaste, and peanut butter. For the rest of his life Snyder would try to stay one step ahead of everyone, even his benefactors, whom he felt he could never really trust. After serving his time, he was dishonorably discharged from the navy.

He found his way back, however, enlisting in the coast guard and later the US Navy Reserve, neither time disclosing his court-martial. During the war he was promoted to commissary steward. At last things were going well for Snyder, but he was simply too self-destructive to thrive for very long. One night he stole a car and smashed it into a telegraph pole. Ordered to pay for the damages, he deserted instead.

But military life was all Snyder knew. Once again he enlisted, this time under the name Edward Strathmore, this time in the army, where one of his duties was drawing up government checks. On October 4, 1919, temptation proved impossible to resist. He made out a check payable to himself for $481.53, forged the signature of the finance officer, and deserted.

Now he had several branches of the US military looking for him.

Snyder ended up in Los Angeles, that place of last resort for so many fugitives. He found the perfect cover working for Taylor as Edward Sands.

His years in the military had taught him how to keep a shipshape house. Every morning, Sands made Taylor’s bed crisply and prepared his food precisely to order. Taylor was pleased with his valet’s work, and Sands seemed happy as well, at one point telling his employer he’d be glad to be his
“servant for life.” Julia Crawford-Ivers, Taylor’s most frequent screenwriter, thought
“there never was a more devoted man serving another.” George Hopkins liked Sands as well, though he felt a little sorry for him. To Hopkins, Sands seemed to carry around the sadness and humility of a
“defrocked priest.”

There were reasons a priest was defrocked. Perversions. Wickedness.

A villainous smile pushed against Jazz’s pudgy cheeks.

Telling Earl Tiffany he had other things to show him, Sands led the chauffeur into Taylor’s living room.
“In every way possible,” Tiffany came to realize, Sands had been prying into Taylor’s life. And the most sensational discovery he’d made wasn’t in the bedroom, but in the rolltop desk in the living room. Flinging it open, Sands exposed bundles of letters and stacks of checks. He’d been through them all. And he told Tiffany what he’d discovered:

Their esteemed employer’s name wasn’t William Desmond Taylor.

It was William Deane-Tanner.

And once a month he wrote a check to a woman named Ada Deane-Tanner, who lived with two young daughters in Monrovia, a little more than twenty miles from Los Angeles.

Sands felt such knowledge gave him the upper hand with Taylor. “If the old man ever gets hard with me,” he told Tiffany, “I will let him know where I get off at, and where he gets off.”

Why Sands felt he needed an upper hand, Tiffany wasn’t sure. Taylor had always been fair and generous to his valet. But never in Sands’s restless life had he let much time go by before succumbing to his fetish for self-destruction.

For Tiffany, what made the valet’s attitude all the more troubling was
the .45-caliber Colt revolver he carried around. Sands’s time in the military had taught him a lot about guns. One time, when Taylor was trying to fit the shoulder piece onto the German Luger he owned, Sands quickly stepped in to help.
“Without a word, Sands took up the two, and by one motion fitted them together,” an observer would recall. Taylor was astonished. “Is there anything Sands does not know?” he asked.

But Earl Tiffany found the valet’s proficiency with guns unnerving.

Stepping out of Taylor’s car one day, Tiffany saw Sands waiting for him. In his chubby hand he held the Colt revolver, and he stuck it alongside the McFarlan’s door. When Tiffany asked what the idea was, Sands just laughed and walked away.

For all their shared love of mischief, Sands made Tiffany uneasy. When he was asked to describe the valet, the chauffeur used one word.

Ungodly.

Mary was writing letters again.

Dipping her pen into the inkwell, she composed her thoughts. In front of her lay a page of her blue butterfly stationery. Filled with emotion, Mary began to write, her pen making a frantic scratching sound as it crossed the paper.

Mr. Taylor might have been trying to keep his distance from her, but Mary would not be ignored.

“I wrote letters,” she’d admit. “Passionate, impulsive letters. I did everything I could to make him break his resolve and marry at once. I loved him, oh, so sincerely—and he loved me.” That much she’d never doubt. Mr. Taylor had told her so, Mary insisted, “many, many times.”

She folded the letter, squirted it with perfume, and slipped it inside an envelope. Then, in her flowery little girl’s script, she addressed it to the man she wished to serve as she “would have served the Lord.”

Jazz Sands sniffed the letter, laughed, and passed it to Earl Tiffany.

Dearest—

I love you—I love you—I love you—

This was followed by nine small x’s and one enormous X that took up most of the page. The letter was signed, “Yours always—Mary.”

Taylor’s two servants got a good kick out of that.

Living with her mother was hell. Terrible memories sometimes overwhelmed her. The sickening odor as her beloved doll burned in the oven. The cold metal and the rough fingers as the abortionist violated her body.

As soon as Mrs. Shelby wasn’t looking, Mary bolted.

Hopping into her little blue runabout, she sped over to the Famous Players studio on Sunset Boulevard. Through the front gates she ran, her blond curls bouncing on her shoulders. As a top star, Mary could go where she liked. No guard was going to bar her from a set. She made a beeline for the company shooting Taylor’s new picture,
The Lifted Veil
.

From across the set, Taylor’s screenwriter, Julia Crawford-Ivers, a sharp, sturdy lady of fifty-two, caught sight of Mary’s approach. It wasn’t the first time the petite actress had barged onto one of Taylor’s sets, and Ivers wasn’t happy to see her.
“Oh, there is little Mary again,” the older woman said in exasperation. “What can she be wanting this time?”

When Mary reached her, Ivers tweaked her chin as if she were a child.

Mary resented Ivers’s condescension. Behind the screenwriter’s back, she called her a “very fat, large woman.” Ivers had the power to rile Mary like few others. She was always hanging around, refusing to budge from Mr. Taylor’s side. Would Mary never get the chance to see her great love alone again?

Not if Ivers could help it. The screenwriter knew how harassed the director felt, and she felt duty-bound to protect him. So she made sure to position her considerable bulk in front of Taylor whenever Mary came around making a pest of herself. Furious, Mary finally turned on her heel and stomped out.

But she had no intention of giving up.

In the little nook under the director’s stairs, the telephone was ringing.

Earl Tiffany, passing by, answered. It was Mary Miles Minter, asking to speak to Mr. Taylor. As both he and Sands had been instructed, Tiffany replied that the director was out.

Mary didn’t believe him. Hopping back into her little blue car, she zipped across town to Alvarado Court. When she came trudging through the courtyard and saw that Mr. Taylor
was
at home, she looked to Tiffany
“as if she were about to cry her eyes out.” Faced with the delicate task of calming the distraught young woman, Taylor sent his chauffeur home, telling him he wouldn’t be needed anymore that day. The cynical Tiffany assumed that meant Taylor was getting ready to take the diminutive teenage star to bed.

Not quite. As kindly as he could, Taylor told Mary that she shouldn’t contact him again, that if he wanted to see her, he would telephone. Eventually Mary agreed to return to her car and drive back to her mother’s new rented mansion on Seventh and South New Hampshire Avenues.

It was only another strategic retreat.

George Hopkins sat at his desk at the studio, catercorner to Taylor’s, dreaming the impossible. He knew that his relationship with the director would always need to be discreet, that he could never hope for more than what they already had—an association that, while intimate, was also irregular and indefinite. But that didn’t stop Hopkins from wishing for more, imagining what it might be like to be with Taylor
“all of the time, to live with him, and for the whole world to know” of their love.

It was a fanciful pipe dream.

Then his phone rang. On the other end was the actress Vivian Martin, whom Hopkins planned to escort to the opening of Verdi’s
Otello
at the Philharmonic Auditorium the next night. But Martin was calling to say she had the flu. Hopkins said he hoped she’d feel better soon, then hung up the phone thoughtfully. A crazy thought was taking shape in his head.

Leaning across Taylor’s desk, Hopkins impulsively asked the director to be his date instead.

Taylor looked over at the young man with those bracing blue eyes of his. To Hopkins’s great surprise, he accepted his invitation.

It was a daring move. Two men never accompanied each other to the theater alone, without female escorts, let alone to such a prestigious event. The arrival of the famed soprano Mary Garden’s Chicago opera company had been anticipated all season.
“Everyone has been telling everyone else for months that it would be the gala climax of the year,”
Los Angeles Times
cultural critic Edwin Schallert reported.

Perhaps Taylor was feeling brave. Perhaps he wanted to reward Hopkins for all his support, personal and professional, these past several months. Whatever the reason, he tossed his usual caution aside and made the young designer very happy.

On the night of April 4, 1921, Hopkins drove his plain black Ford from his mother’s house in Pasadena to a parking lot on Olive Street in downtown Los Angeles. Perfectly turned out in white tie and tails, he pulled his little car alongside Taylor’s shiny McFarlan. Earl Tiffany sat at the wheel, smoking a cigarette. “The boss has gone inside to wait for you,” the chauffeur told him.

Hopkins might have wished he and Taylor had walked into the event together, facing the snapping photographers shoulder to shoulder. But he was content to meet Taylor in the lobby. Even that was more than he’d ever expected.

The young man’s eyes grew wide at the glamorous crowd milling all around him, “one of the most distinguished gatherings ever seen,” according to a newspaper reporter. The movie folk were there—the DeMilles, the Laskys, the writer Rupert Hughes—but it was the minks and diamonds of “Southland society” that really elevated the evening beyond the ordinary. Mr. and Mrs. Richard Jewett Schweppes, Mr. and Mrs. J. Benton Van Nuys, Mr. and Mrs. Mattison Boyd Jones, and hundreds of others.

Through their mother-of-pearl opera glasses, these Los Angeles socialites watched Taylor and Hopkins make their way to the front orchestra.

As the two men took their seats, the two women seated directly in front of them turned to stare. To his horror, Hopkins realized who they were: Charlotte Shelby, in emerald green, and Mary Miles Minter, in orchid chiffon. Mary had an ermine wrap draped across her slim white shoulders and a silver bandeau wrapped around her blond curls. When she saw the two men, Mary’s eyes almost popped from their sockets.