Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (27 page)

Douglas MacLean wasn’t convinced. What about the shot he had heard, and the fact that Taylor lay there so neatly, as if someone had straightened him out after he fell? No one, MacLean insisted, could look like a department store dummy after collapsing from a stomach hemorrhage.

The doctor seemed uninterested in MacLean’s arguments, but they did trouble the others gathered in the room, who now included another friend of the dead man, the actor Arthur Hoyt, who’d probably been alerted by Charles Maigne. By now Taylor’s small living room was nearly overrun with people.
Maigne noticed that the stack of canceled checks, so neatly ordered on Taylor’s desk when he’d arrived, had been disturbed, brushed by someone’s coattail as they’d maneuvered around the corpse. Several checks were drifting down to the floor like autumn leaves, coming to rest beside the dead man who had written them.

Into this roomful of buzzing suspicions and compromised evidence now stepped a middle-aged man wearing a pair of pince-nez. His hair was carefully combed, sitting high on his prominent forehead. Charles Eyton, general manager of Famous Players–Lasky, had received a call from Harry Fellows, telling him of Taylor’s death. He’d zoomed down from his home on Vine Street at the base of the Hollywood Hills to Alvarado Court, and from the moment he arrived, it was clear that he was in charge.

Well acquainted with the studio executive, Zeigler offered no protest. Over the last decade the veteran police detective had learned to give studio chiefs considerable leeway. He’d witnessed the spectacular rise to power of the motion picture industry—and in particular, of Famous Players, the most powerful of all. Zeigler had come to accept that when a studio official was present, he sometimes had to take a step back.

Known for his clipped New Zealand accent, the pugnacious Eyton, a former prizefight referee, surveyed the scene as Fellows, MacLean, and Maigne deferentially stepped aside. The manager walked around the body. Taylor was still wearing the same tan gabardine suit he’d worn the day before at the studio. Seeming satisfied that the director had died of natural causes, Eyton did not press for any further investigation. The doctor departed the bungalow as swiftly, and as anonymously, as he had arrived.

MacLean, however, pressed his claim, repeating his story that he had heard a shot. Eyton countered with a question: If Taylor had been shot, then where was the bullet hole? The corpse seemed too pristine to have been killed with a gun.

Perhaps Taylor had been shot in the back, MacLean suggested. But no one wanted to touch the body until the coroner got there.

Eyton recognized that he had precious little time to act. People were gathering in the courtyard. More cops had arrived. All of this was sure to attract the press. And more press at that particular moment, with Fatty Arbuckle sweating out his second trial in San Francisco, was precisely what Eyton’s bosses, Mr. Lasky and Mr. Zukor, did not want. In his days as a ref, Eyton had frequently scuffled with newspapermen—and with the law as well. He knew that a successful resolution to a crisis depended on taking control right from the start. Whether Taylor had been murdered or just dropped dead, Eyton knew the kind of headlines that might arise. So the unsmiling man with the Kiwi accent knew what he had to do.

Ivers, Van Trees, Hopkins, Fellows, Maigne, and Hoyt all worked for Famous Players. Eyton knew they’d obey orders.
Pulling them aside, he instructed them to slip upstairs and search Taylor’s bedroom. Anything written, no matter how seemingly innocuous, was to be collected and taken away before any reporters or more aggressive cops showed up.

Without Zeigler attempting to stop them—there was no evidence of a crime, after all, and these were all friends of the deceased—the studio employees got busy. They opened cabinets; ransacked drawers; dumped boxes of letters, production logs, and files into sacks.
“We got all the literature and things like that that we could get and put them in a package,” Fellows said. He handed off a package of papers to Van Trees, who hurried out of the house with them.
Hopkins accepted another batch from Eyton himself, piled high in a wire wastebasket. The young designer was instructed to take the papers back to the studio and lock them in a safe.

As Hopkins went scrambling out through the courtyard, he passed Ivers, who was busy prying a letter from Taylor’s locked mailbox with her hatpin.

Meanwhile, Douglas MacLean was growing frantic.
“Charley,” he pleaded, turning to Eyton. “Don’t let them take his body away without turning it over.”

The studio chief said nothing.

It was now past nine o’clock, an hour and a half since Henry Peavey had discovered the body. As Eyton had predicted, at least one reporter, Frank Bartholomew of the United Press, had already started nosing around, just as
the deputy coroner, William MacDonald, finally arrived with his stethoscope and medical bag. Eyton insisted to MacDonald that the cause of death had been a stomach hemorrhage. But MacDonald, trained as a nurse, knew a closer examination was needed before they could be sure.

He also knew that he could not ask the general manager of the most important film company in Los Angeles to step aside as he examined the body. So MacDonald permitted Eyton to bend down with him, shoulder to shoulder, as he reached his hand under Taylor’s coat. When MacDonald withdrew his hand, his fingers were sticky with blood.

“I should say it was a stomach hemorrhage,” the deputy coroner said sarcastically.

Now Eyton took over entirely. Reaching across the corpse, he started unbuttoning Taylor’s vest. Pulling back the left side, he found that the dead man’s shirt was stained a deep red. Looking back at MacDonald, Eyton declared that was “evidence enough” to turn the body over, and the deputy coroner offered no argument. Calling for a pillow to be brought to him, Eyton cushioned Taylor’s head and took hold of one side of the body—“stone cold and very stiff and rigid,” he’d describe it—while McDonald gripped the other. Together the two men flipped the corpse onto its right side. “We pulled his shirt and his vest up,” Eyton said, “and we found the bullet wound.”

Murder it was.

In that moment, everything changed.

Zeigler declared the apartment a crime scene. He and the other cops shooed everyone out, especially the reporters. Yet
murder
was a word not easily contained. It leaped like a gazelle through the courtyard, sending people running to their phones. Already onlookers were speculating about who could have done it. Edward Sands, whose arrest Taylor had sought? Or maybe a bootleg gangster? After all, a cabinet in the dead man’s living room had revealed a large quantity of expensive bonded liquors—apparently legal, but who could be sure with that many bottles?

Late that morning, Taylor’s body was carried out on a stretcher through the courtyard. By then Alvarado Court was overrun with newspaper people. They trampled the grass and crushed Emile Jesserun’s calla lilies underfoot. Eleanor Barnes of the
Los Angeles Record
managed to slip inside the bungalow, noting the martini glasses on Taylor’s tray before police ordered her out. Undeterred, other reporters tried to sneak through the back door and snap photographs through windows. Others bolted off into the neighborhood, giving any residents who wanted their names in the papers the chance to tell what they had seen or heard, or what they’d imagined they’d seen or heard.

The madness had just begun.

Uniformed police officers trampled across Mabel Normand’s expensive rugs in their dirty leather boots. Watching as they strode into her Seventh Avenue apartment, Mabel was hardly able to think, let alone form actual words. Standing in front of her, Officers Jesse Winn and Wiley Murphy confirmed what Edna Purviance had called early that morning to tell her. Mabel hadn’t believed Edna. She’d asked her neighbor, Charles Maigne, to hurry over to Alvarado Court to investigate. Now, even before Maigne could report back to her, the presence of those grim policemen in Mabel’s living room was evidence that the unthinkable had happened.

Billy was dead.

Murdered.

The cops were asking Mabel what she knew, where she had been, whom she had seen.

As best she could, Mabel recounted for Winn and Murphy the details of the night before. She had stopped by Billy’s place for the books. They’d had a cocktail. She’d played the piano. They’d laughed and talked, and then Billy had walked her to her car. No, he hadn’t phoned her at nine o’clock as he’d promised. No, she hadn’t thought it was odd that he didn’t. She’d fallen asleep before then, and her maid never woke her for phone calls.

Winn leveled his eyes on hers. Mabel’s testimony was going to be important, he told her, because she was the last person to see Taylor alive.

But surely the last person to see Taylor alive had been his killer.

The officers glared at her, suspicion in their eyes.

Mabel was suddenly terrified.

By ten o’clock that morning, news of Taylor’s death had spread throughout Tinseltown. Phones rang off their hooks. Telegram offices buzzed.

At the studios, directors called “Cut!” and light crews hopped down from the rafters as news of the murder passed from set to set. Actors and actresses, one paper reported,
“their pallor showing through the greasepaint of their makeups, gathered in knots to discuss the tragedy and speculate on what prompted the crime.”

At the Christie plant on Sunset Boulevard, directly across the street from Famous Players–Lasky, word arrived quicker than most. Many of those on the lot had frequently seen Taylor riding regally along Sunset in the back of his expensive car.
Among the actors at the studio that morning may well have been Margaret “Gibby” Gibson. Was she distraught by the news? She and Taylor had been good friends once. Or did she say very little to those around her, choosing not to share her memories of her aristocratic costar, or the fact that Taylor had failed to help her when she’d asked?

Two miles to the east, on North Hobart Boulevard, Mary Miles Minter heard the news through the least desirable channel: her mother.

At eleven o’clock, Mary was just waking up. She rose from her bed, sleepy-eyed, still exhausted from the strenuous wrap of her last picture,
The Heart Specialist
, in which she’d been
“thrown into a deep well, containing real, wet cold water.” Days later, Mary was still recovering.

She dragged herself out of bed and over to her vanity, where she sat in her slip at her mirror, fixing her hair. All at once Mrs. Shelby started banging on her door.

“Let me in!” the older woman shouted.

Mary was surprised to hear her mother’s voice. Mary, her sister, and her grandmother had all temporarily moved into a little house on North Hobart while their mansion on South New Hampshire was being renovated. Shelby, however, had remained behind to oversee the construction. Why was she here, banging on Mary’s door?

“Mary, let me in!”

Mary told her she wasn’t yet dressed. Her mother snarled that if she didn’t open the door, she’d smash her way in.

Mary opened the door.

“Taylor has been murdered,” Shelby announced. Her voice sounded almost triumphant.

How she knew, she didn’t say. Nor did Mary ask. The stunned actress was unable to speak.

“Where were you last night?” Shelby asked.

Mary didn’t answer. She might have asked her mother the same thing. Because, in fact, Mary had been right here with Margaret and her grandmother, reading out loud from the book
The Cruise of the Kawa
, a satire of South Seas travelogues by Walter Traprock,
“laughing all the evening.” But Mrs. Shelby had not come by to see them all night.

The two women just stood there for several moments, studying each other.

Finally, in a daze, Mary finished dressing and grabbed the keys to her car. She needed to get over to Alvarado Court. Pushing past her mother, she made her way to the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Shelby shouted.

“To him, of course,” Mary replied.

“I shall not let you,” Shelby declared, overtaking her daughter and positioning herself between her and the door downstairs. Mary glared at her.

Memories of the past likely flashed through Mary’s mind: Shelby screaming at Taylor in front of the crew. The abortionist’s bloody table. Her doll’s face melting inside the oven. Something inside Mary cracked. She felt like an animal, she’d say later. All instinct. Fixating on her mother’s neck, Mary was filled with the urge to tear out Shelby’s jugular vein with her teeth.

“I am going to him,” she seethed, “even if I have to throttle you to get past.”

Stunned into silence, Shelby stepped aside.

Never before had Mary spoken to her mother in such a way.

Hopping into her speedy little car, she tore out of the driveway. Her seventy-year-old grandmother, worried about what might happen, ran after her,
leaping up onto the running board to go along for the ride.

In San Francisco, Roscoe Arbuckle, waiting on tenterhooks for the jury’s verdict, read the wire report passed to him by an enterprising reporter.
“Mr. Taylor’s death comes as a great shock to me,” Arbuckle said, as newsmen gathered around to scribble down his words. “We were good friends and never a whisper of scandal arose about him. He was one of the finest fellows on the lot.”

Back in Los Angeles, a testimonial from the likes of Fatty Arbuckle was the last thing Taylor’s bosses at Famous Players–Lasky wanted.

The studio had been turned into a control room to manage the press. The banging of hundreds of typewriter keys echoed off the walls as publicists compiled glowing accounts of Taylor’s career at Famous Players. The sordidness of his murder needed to be counteracted by the man’s sterling reputation. If the studio could help it, Taylor would never be painted as a degenerate the way Arbuckle had been.

“Through a cowardly assassin’s bullet,” the statement from Charles Eyton read, “I have lost the best friend I ever had. I have known Billy Taylor for nine years, and we have worked side by side for the entire period without an argument or unfriendly word. In all the nine years, I have yet to find a man, woman or child who was not his friend.”