Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (33 page)

How terribly Mabel missed him.

But as she sat there in the cathedral, Billy’s cold, dead body laid out in front of the altar, she had to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Doherty and Smith were onto something.

Could Billy have been killed by one of her drug contacts? It wasn’t so far-fetched an idea. Certainly Mabel remembered the pusher Billy had chased from her door.

The tears she shed at St. Paul’s Pro-Cathedral that day weren’t just wrung from grief. They had just as much to do with worry, fear, and guilt.

Suddenly, from the back of the church, came a terrible commotion. The guests all turned around in their pews.

The cops standing outside the front doors were shouting at the crowd to get back. Just as the service was getting under way, the mob had broken through the police barriers. People were sweeping up the front steps of the cathedral. Officers reacted quickly,
“compelled to handle some of the foremost and most aggressive men and women with force to prevent them from taking the edifice by storm.” In the crush, a number of women fainted. Screams and shouts penetrated the hushed nave of the cathedral.

For the remainder of the service, the doors were locked.

Back into the street the crowd was pushed. At the corner of Olive and Sixth, cars had to be redirected because of the sheer number of people blocking the way.

Among those standing in the unruly mob, observing the ruckus that had taken over the neighborhood, was, quite possibly, Margaret “Gibby” Gibson. The Melrose Hotel was just a couple of blocks down the street from St. Paul’s Pro-Cathedral. Very possibly, when she learned what all the fuss was about, Gibby had joined her neighbors to get a glimpse of the mourners. Maybe she spent a few moments reflecting on the life and death of Billy Taylor. Everybody else seemed to be doing so that day.

Certainly Gibby had heard the reports that Taylor might have been the victim of a blackmailer. Now, police had a lead. The notorious con man “Dapper” Don Collins, called
“the blackmailer of the century” and wanted for shooting a New York financier, had been in Los Angeles recently, reported to be scoping out marks in the film industry. Had Collins been blackmailing Taylor? And had he shot him when he refused to pay up?

Reading the papers, Gibby would have learned how different Dapper Don was from that other blackmailing Don, her tenant Osborn. “The blackmailer of the century” wore bespoke suits, dined in the finest restaurants, and traveled in the most expensive staterooms on ocean liners. Gibby and the rest of the locusts just managed to get by.

Some blackmailers, it seemed, had all the luck.

Back inside the cathedral, the service complete, the long, high notes of Scottish bagpipers followed the casket as it was wheeled down the aisle to the vestibule. One thousand mourners walked past in a single file. When it was Mabel’s turn, she took one look at Billy’s waxy body, his thin lips sewn tightly together, and fainted. Her friends had to help her out to her car.

At that point, the front doors were opened and the casket was carried down the church steps. The crowd surged once more as Taylor’s body was loaded into the hearse, but police managed to hold them back. As the funeral procession wound its way to Hollywood Memorial Cemetery, men standing on the side of the street doffed their hats. Construction workers on ladders at the corner of Olive and Eighth Streets stopped what they were doing and stood facing the procession, their helmets held over their hearts. At the cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard, a mob spilled in through the gates and had to be forcefully held back. Finally, a bugler sounded taps, and Taylor’s body was slid into a crypt.

The name on the plaque would read W
ILLIAM
D
EANE
-T
ANNER
.

Those craning their necks looking for movie stars had counted several. But there was one surprising omission, they realized. There had been no Mary Miles Minter.

Mary had other business that day.

Across town, at the little Spanish casita located at 2039 North Hobart Boulevard, burly men with scowling faces stood at the end of the driveway, their arms crossed over their chests. Their hard eyes dared reporters and curious spectators to try to get past them.

Mrs. Shelby had hired these private security guards to defend her daughter’s residence that morning after the
Examiner
splashed Mary’s love note to Taylor across its front page. “Dearest, I love you—I love you—I love you!”—followed by all those damning
x
’s.

The newspaper, Mrs. Shelby learned, had received Mary’s note—as well as others written in an easily decipherable code—from Charles Eyton. Shelby, like many others, was stunned that a studio official would willingly bring such scandal upon one of his stars.

But there was a method to Eyton’s madness. Now that Realart was defunct and Mary was a full-fledged Paramount star, Mrs. Shelby had been agitating for a raise for her daughter. To Mary’s bosses—chief among them Adolph Zukor, who made the final money decisions—the receipts from Mary’s pictures did not justify her million-dollar salary.
“If [Mary’s contract is] renewed,” an industry watcher wrote in
Film Daily
, weeks before the Taylor scandal, “them big figgers [figures] may be missing.” Mary was popular, but she was never going to be a superstar like Mary Pickford, as her early publicity had predicted.

That hadn’t stopped Shelby from asking for a raise anyway. Zukor was infuriated. Here they were, still in a cost-cutting mode, trying to climb their way out of the red, and that appalling woman had the audacity to demand more money.

And so releasing Mary’s love letters to Hearst’s minions made a brutal kind of sense. The negative publicity made Mary damaged goods; why would they pay more for her now? Mrs. Shelby knew exactly what was going on.
“The studio was using the situation,” she said, “to gain a further reduction” in Mary’s contract.

For Famous Players, there was another benefit in releasing Mary’s letters. Taylor’s visits to the city’s “queer places,” combined with Henry Peavey’s screaming effeminacy, had left the clear suspicion—encouraged by Edward Doherty and other writers—that Taylor was homosexual. If their martyred director was going to be slandered in the press, Zukor and Lasky much preferred that he be portrayed as a womanizer than a degenerate.

Yet by indulging in such shenanigans, the studio chiefs were literally playing with Mary’s life.

The revelation of her love letters, following so closely upon the reports of the pink silk nightgown, made her a prime suspect in the murder, and had finally persuaded District Attorney Woolwine, much to Eddie King’s satisfaction, to call her in for an interview.

It was an indignity Woolwine had hoped to spare her. The DA was a friend of Mrs. Shelby’s. In fact, there were some, even in his own family, who believed Woolwine and Shelby had had an affair. Not many people in Tinseltown liked Charlotte Shelby, but Woolwine found her charming. Ruthless she could be, but Mary’s mother was also witty and flirtatious, especially when she thought she could get more flies with honey than she could with vinegar. Besides, at forty-four, she was still very attractive, and Woolwine appreciated beautiful women.

But he could no longer ignore the daily headlines. In the descriptions of unscrupulous reporters, the boxy garment found in Taylor’s apartment, which Detective Cline had thought only “resembled a nightgown,” had been transformed into something pink and feminine; in some accounts, it had suddenly sprouted lace. The Hearst papers called the garment something
“unknown in a man’s wardrobe.” Every insinuation was made to convince the public that the nightgown belonged to Mary. That was the way to sell newspapers. Edward Sands or some unknown blackmailer would never be as interesting as sexy little Mary Miles Minter. A glamorous movie star on the stand would sell thousands more copies than even Mrs. Peete or Mrs. Obenchain ever had.

Under such public pressure, Woolwine could not avoid deposing Mary, no matter how fond he was of her mother. And so, shortly before five on the afternoon of Taylor’s funeral, the door to Mary’s house opened. Surrounded by lawyers and private guards, the small blond figure was hustled down the driveway and into a car. Reporters shouted her name, but Mary did not look up. The guards kept the crowds back so that the car could pull into the street. Reporters followed Mary to the Hall of Records downtown.

Woolwine had decided to have his own deputy, William Doran, conduct the interview, instead of the more independent Eddie King. Knowing the detective was deeply suspicious of Mary, the DA apparently chose to shield her from more aggressive questioning.

Mary entered the conference room calmly, with none of the histrionics she’d displayed at Overholtzer’s mortuary. An uncharacteristic air of dignity followed her. Her mother had undoubtedly been coaching her again.

With her lawyer at her side, Mary answered questions for several hours. She admitted that she’d been in love with Taylor, but insisted they had not been intimate. She rejected as absurd the idea that either Dixon or Neilan had ever been serious enough about her to go after Taylor with a gun. Her childishly romantic testimony seemed straightforward and sincere.

In short, Mary convinced Doran, and through him Woolwine, of her innocence.

Immediately afterward, the district attorney’s office announced that they would be issuing a complaint charging Edward Sands with the murder of William Desmond Taylor.

Delivering the statement to the press was Eddie King. Woolwine had no doubt asked him to do so as a way of bringing him in line. Yet despite his public words, King was not convinced.

That was because, as a member of the police department and not as an investigator for the DA, he’d conducted his own interview with Mary the night before. And King hadn’t been quite as captivated by his subject as Doran had been.

To his friends in the press corps, King described his questioning of Mary as
“long and grueling.” Just what he learned, he didn’t say. But he’d apparently gleaned enough that he wasn’t as ready as Woolwine to exonerate Mary of all involvement in the case.

The next day, King’s suspicions seemed vindicated.

Searching through Taylor’s bungalow one more time, police found a lacy handkerchief with the initials MMM.

The handkerchief was almost certainly the same one Mary had switched with Taylor’s, stuffing it down into his jacket pocket during her late-night visit the previous December. Just where the lacy little thing had been the past week was anyone’s guess. Police had scoured the apartment several times but found it only now, on the same day they made another important discovery in the bungalow: Mabel’s letters, packed down into one of Taylor’s boots.

Once again, Charles Eyton’s fingerprints were all over the evidence—metaphorically speaking, anyway. It was painfully obvious that Eyton had snatched the handkerchief on the morning of February 2, hoping to keep his star out of the scandal. Now, when protecting Mary was no longer his goal, he’d returned it, perhaps at the same time as Mabel’s letters, for police to find.

And so the studio continued its cavalier game with Mary’s life.

That little handkerchief convinced Eddie King that the diminutive blond actress was, somehow or another, implicated in Taylor’s murder. If Mary was arrested now, it would largely be because of Eyton’s reckless acts, sanctioned by Lasky and Zukor.

In seclusion back at her mansion, Charlotte Shelby watched the developments with mounting horror. The threat was not just against her daughter.

Sooner or later, Shelby herself would be in danger.

Zukor loved trains. One of his first ventures in the movie business had been dressing up little storefront nickelodeons to look like the interiors of railroad cars and then setting their floors on rockers. A man out back would shake the room while images of passing terrains were projected onto the screen. Working-class audiences who could barely afford trolley fare were given the illusion of traveling across the country on a passenger train. Glamour for the masses, courtesy of Adolph Zukor—still his stock in trade.

But as the flat desert landscape flashed past his window on the Twentieth Century Limited, much as it had done during his little “Hales’s Tours,” Zukor wasn’t in the mood for sightseeing. Steaming mad, he puffed his cigars one after another, producing nearly as much smoke and ash as the locomotive’s engine.

The Taylor murder had sent him into a fury.
Variety
reported that the film chief was
“at the end of his rope.” He told the trade weekly it was “cleanup time” in Hollywood.

Zukor’s first-class cabin was scattered with newspapers. One of the last tabloids he’d picked up before leaving was the New York
Daily News
, a relatively young paper with a rapidly growing circulation, due to its emphasis on photographs. For days the
News
had been splashing Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter all over its pages. But the most grievous aspect of the tabloid’s coverage were the regular dispatches of Edward Doherty, which millions read. And Doherty didn’t have much good to say about Hollywood.

“The murder of William Desmond Taylor has had a fearsome effect upon the movies,” Doherty wrote on February 8. “It is exposing the debaucheries, the looseness, the rottenness of Hollywood.” A religious conservative, Doherty knew how to press the hot buttons that incited outrage. “The volcano has erupted,” he wrote. “The lava is spreading. But the debauchees keep up their mad, capricious dance, drugged, drunk, senseless, dancing into oblivion.” Doherty wasn’t all that different from Brother Wilbur Crafts, except that his goal was selling newspapers, not saving souls.

When all was said and done, Doherty wrote, the scandal would mean the loss of “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to the movie industry. Of course, that was the reason Zukor was steaming west. Doherty might have been a cynical extremist, but he was right about the money. Preachers were calling for boycotts from their pulpits. Zukor intended to crack his whip, and he didn’t care who felt its sting.