Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (24 page)

Washington had been a fiercely cutthroat working environment. But the private lives and peccadillos of politicians were generally ignored by the press. Not so in Tinseltown.

Before he decided to step into that morass, Will Hays would have to think long and hard.

Sashaying through Mr. Taylor’s house, Henry Peavey dusted end tables and straightened his employer’s desk. The valet was enjoying his new job very much. He found Mr. Taylor to be an exceedingly fine man.

As the holidays approached, though, one thing concerned Peavey: Mr. Taylor’s mood had considerably darkened. He was no longer quite as courtly or gracious when Peavey arrived in the morning. He seemed constantly anxious, jumping at the slightest noise.

Strangest of all, the house telephone kept ringing—and when Peavey answered, there was no response at the other end of the line. Mr. Taylor was extremely bothered by these calls.

Peavey wasn’t the only one who noticed the director’s sudden agitation. At the studio, screenwriter Julia Ivers also noticed the furrows in Taylor’s brow. When Ivers asked what was troubling him, Taylor confided in her about the phone calls, which sometimes came in the middle of the night. He had
“not the slightest idea” who was calling him “or what the purpose was,” he said. To Ivers, Taylor seemed “annoyed and mystified.”

At least part of his unease could be easily explained. On the night of December 4, Taylor had come home to find his house burglarized yet again. This time, the thief had taken some jewelry and his entire stock of expensive, imported, gold-tipped cigarettes. Everyone suspected Sands, since he’d robbed the place before. But no one could be absolutely sure.

One morning, as Peavey bent down to retrieve the newspaper and the bottle of milk from the front steps, he noticed something else: a butt from one of those gold-tipped cigarettes. It hadn’t been there the night before.

When Peavey showed his employer what he had found, Taylor confirmed that the cigarette was one of his. But he hadn’t replenished his stock since the burglary.

The realization was chilling: whoever had burglarized his apartment two weeks earlier had returned—and stood right there, smoking a cigarette on the front steps, as Taylor slept upstairs.

There was more trouble afoot.

On Friday, December 23, Mary Miles Minter drove her little blue runabout downtown to do some Christmas shopping. At Hamburger’s department store, she bought several gifts, including one for Mr. Taylor. He’d been on her mind even more than usual lately. She’d seen him at the Screen Writers Guild ball a few weeks earlier. Not to speak to, of course. He’d forbidden that. But Mary had watched him carefully all night, her pretty blue eyes riveted on him as he laughed and joked with Mabel Normand, who sat beside him at his table.

Mary sulked. Why did Mabel get to spend so much time with Mr. Taylor when she couldn’t? What did Mabel have that Mary didn’t?

Other men wanted her. Why didn’t Mr. Taylor?

Thomas Dixon, reported to be the heir to the Dixon Ticonderoga lead pencil fortune, had asked her to marry him.
“In a freak of despondency,” Mary had agreed, though she didn’t really consider them to be engaged and had more or less stopped seeing him soon afterward. And Marshall Neilan, one of the biggest directors in Hollywood, had popped the question, too, though he was certainly jesting. At least Mary thought he was.

But the point was: other men saw her as a woman. They weren’t afraid to smile at her, flirt with her. If only Mary could get Mr. Taylor to put aside his concerns about age. And while he was at it, put aside George Hopkins and Mabel Normand as well.

That day in Hamburger’s, however, she came to the realization that
“it was over” between her and Mr. Taylor. Her dreams would never come true. It was a cruel fact, but Mary decided to do her best to accept it. She was nineteen now. She had to move on with her life.

And then,
just as the thought was crossing her mind, she looked up and saw him, standing across the aisle from her in the store.

Taylor had come downtown to buy a flask at Feagan’s jewelry store. Given how keyed up he’d been the last few weeks, running into Mary in Hamburger’s was probably the last thing he wanted. But he was gracious when she spotted him. “He smiled so sweetly,” Mary said, “bowed, and was gone.”

At the same time, a clerk came up to her. It might easily have been Rose Putnam. But Mary, dazed by the sight of Mr. Taylor, could barely respond as the clerk displayed various samples. “I told her to wrap it up,” Mary said, hardly even aware of what she was buying, and hurried out of the store.

For the rest of the day, Mary had only one thing on her mind. If things were really ending between her and Mr. Taylor, the end would come on her terms, not his.

She had to see him one last time.

That night, after everyone else had gone to bed, Mary tiptoed into her grandmother’s room. She told the old woman she was going to see Mr. Taylor. If Mrs. Shelby had been home, Mary might not have risked leaving the house so late. But she thought her grandmother would be more understanding. At first Mrs. Miles tried to dissuade her, but when she saw how determined Mary was, she offered to come along.

Mary shook her head.
“This is something I must do alone.”

In her dramatic style, she walked through the house, gathering up everything Mr. Taylor had ever given her. His photographs. A little mesh bag. Then she sat down at her desk to write him one last note. “Dear William Desmond Taylor,” she inscribed in her flowery script. “This is good-bye. I want you to know that I will always love you.”

She sealed the note in an envelope, then motored across town to Alvarado Court.

A light was shining from the first-floor windows. Despite the hour—about five minutes to midnight—Mr. Taylor was apparently still awake. Mary rang the bell.

When he opened the door, he seemed distracted, and certainly not happy to see her.
“It is rather late, isn’t it, Mary?” Mr. Taylor asked.

It was, she admitted. But she pushed past him into the room.

Given the events of the past few weeks, the move must have rattled Taylor. He wasn’t in the best frame of mind to deal with a hysterical teenage girl in the middle of the night. Perspiration beaded on his brow; he clenched his fists so tightly that his nails drew blood as they dug into his skin. Mary took his distress to mean that his heart was just as broken as hers.

But she took no pity on him. They could have been together—if he had only taken her away from her mother! All her long-suppressed rage boiled over, and Mary let Taylor have it. Perhaps he’d believed that stringing her along would only hurt her more—“but it wouldn’t have hurt one-millionth as much,” Mary cried, tears flying, “if you had just explained to me and not left me in the dark!”

Taylor was at a loss. “I can’t explain to you,” he said simply.

Of course he couldn’t. He had tried, many times. But Mary heard only what she wanted to hear.

She tried embracing him, but he held her at arm’s length. So she thrust her farewell note at him. Taylor read it, then escorted her out to her car. Slipping behind the wheel, Mary reached up and plucked his handkerchief from his jacket pocket, replacing it with her own.

One last romantic gesture from a very sentimental young woman.

Then she sped off, overcome with emotion.

Taylor shut the door against the night and all its dangers.

Mary’s midnight visit deeply disturbed him. The way she had tried to embrace him had made him very uncomfortable, as friends would later report. It appeared to frighten him.

But then again, for the past three weeks, Taylor had been frightened of many things.

Four days later, on December 27, there was more.

Taylor glanced down at the mail Peavey had brought in for him. He recognized the handwriting on one large envelope, postmarked Stockton. Tearing open the package, he shook out two pawn tickets for the jewelry that had been stolen from his house. The items had fetched $30, far less than their value.

The envelope also contained a note.
“So sorry to inconvenience you even temporarily,” it read. “Also observe the lesson of the forced sale of assets. A Merry Xmas and a happy and prosperous New Year.” The note was signed “Alias Jimmy V”—a reference to the popular play and film
Alias Jimmy Valentine
, about a safecracker who was always eluding the police.

The handwriting in the note confirmed to Taylor who lurked behind the alias.

It was Edward Sands.

But far more blood-curdling was the name Sands had signed on the pawn tickets.

William Deane-Tanner.

It was Sands’s way of telling his former employer that he hadn’t forgotten his secrets.

On Christmas Day, Will Hays was home with his family in Sullivan, Indiana—a rare moment when he and Helen were in the same room at the same time. Turkey was roasting in the oven; a fire popped in the parlor. Aunts and cousins buzzed through the house, as well as Hays’s brother Hinkle, his wife, and their two little boys. When the turkey was ready, Hays, as always, intoned the prayer before the meal.

After dinner, he took his place in his easy chair in front of the fire. The children were running through the house, and the adults had gathered around the Christmas tree, but Hays sat off by himself, deep in thought. He had an important decision to make, and he was still unsure what to do. Should he take the job the movie chiefs were offering him? Even with the pressures that came with it? Even with the power struggle he’d face with Adolph Zukor?

The sounds of his young son and nephews playing distracted him.

“I want to be William S. Hart!” his son Billy cried.

“No, I’m going to be him!” shouted one of his cousins.

“No, I am!” insisted the other. “You can be Doug, and Billy can be the bad guy.”

Hays was struck. The boys were imagining themselves to be William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks. Not the heroes of history or folklore that Hays had once pretended to be—not Daniel Boone or Paul Bunyan or Buffalo Bill, the idols of little boys for generations, but not anymore.

In that moment, Hays’s decision became clear.

“To these little boys and to thousands of others throughout our land,” Hays realized, “William S. Hart and Mary and Doug were real and important personages and, at least in their screen characters, models of character and behavior. I realized on that Christmas day that motion pictures had become as strong an influence on our children and on countless adults, too, as the daily press.”

Hays would forever credit those three little boys with making up his mind for him, of convincing him that he should take on “a work so important” as this.

“Come on, let’s go!” he said, his favorite phrase, feeling suddenly galvanized as he headed back to Washington. Soon after the New Year, he informed the president that he would be leaving the administration. On the same day, he wired New York that he was accepting the offer.

The film chiefs were jubilant.
“We know we have secured the right man and the best man in Mr. Hays,” they declared in a statement. “The President, in releasing Mr. Hays that he might undertake his new, nationwide task, has expressed his appreciation of that task’s importance. We, the undersigned, are also mindful of the responsibility that weighs upon us, and we welcome, gratefully, in our work, the cooperation, advice and association of Mr. Hays.”

Almost immediately the movie men insured Hays’s life for $2 million. A considerable sum—until it was remembered that Zukor had insured his own life for $5 million.

In the early-morning hours of January 1, 1922, Mabel Normand sat pouting in the backseat of Taylor’s newly refurbished McFarlan. She hadn’t wanted to leave the New Year’s Eve party that was still going strong at the Cocoanut Grove. She’d been having a smashing time, partying with her pals Renée Adorée and Tom Moore—and Wesley Ruggles and Pat Murphy and God only knew who else. But Billy had insisted they leave. “Somebody got awfully drunk,” Mabel would later admit. That somebody was probably her.

Now she sat angrily in the backseat beside Billy, giving him the silent treatment. He could be such a bore sometimes. Mabel loved Billy—she’d always be grateful to him—but sometimes he was just too protective. At the party he’d resented her flitting around the place, talking to everyone, leaving him standing by himself. Was it Mabel’s fault that she was outgoing and he was so reserved? She’d given up cocaine and the other drugs; if she wanted to let loose on New Year’s Eve with a little more champagne than usual, what was so wrong with that? She’d had enough with Billy’s nagging, and she told him so.

“For God’s sake,” Mabel had snarled. “Why do you stand around with that trick dignity of yours? You make me sick!”

Taylor said he wasn’t trying to be dignified, but that after all he’d done for her, he wished Mabel wouldn’t be so dismissive of him.

“Good God, don’t be melodramatic,” Mabel replied.

Later she’d regret her tone. “I got a little nasty,” she’d admit.

But the truth was Billy
had
been irritable lately. Everything seemed to set him off. Mabel had no idea what was eating him up, and at that particular moment, sitting in the backseat of his car, she felt no sympathy for him. Her fury at Billy for ruining her night muted any compassion she might have felt for him. When Billy tried to speak to her, Mabel told him to be quiet.

Up front, the eighteen-year-old chauffeur, Howard Fellows, found it all very unusual. Usually Mr. Taylor and Miss Normand were “very affectionate” with each other, but tonight they were both
“very much excited”—and not in a good way. When they arrived at Mabel’s home on West Seventh Street, she stormed out of the car, slamming the door behind her.

The argument left Taylor visibly upset. When they got home, he “broke down and wept” in front of his chauffeur—highly uncharacteristic for the private, self-controlled director.

Something wasn’t right.

Two days later, the director had Fellows drive him to Feagan’s jewelry store, where
he laid out $1,250 for a jade ornament. Then he asked to be driven over to Mabel’s, where he presented the forlorn actress with the gift.