Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (38 page)

Hays wanted nothing to do with such a plan. If such a ban was going to be issued, Hays believed, the man to do it was Zukor, on behalf of Paramount.

Zukor could have done it. Technically, in fact, he alone—not Hays—had the power to ban Arbuckle’s films. But then Zukor would have had to face the wrath, and potentially the lawsuits, of those who held the ten thousand Arbuckle contracts. Even worse, a Zukor-imposed ban would have damaged the credibility of the MPPDA. If anyone other than Hays made the decision to ban Arbuckle, Zukor argued, the movie czar would be exposed as a puppet—a charge some had already leveled, and one Hays deeply resented. If he didn’t take the lead on this issue, Zukor told Hays, the moralists were ready to emasculate him. And a castrated leader would have zero power to effect any of the other industry changes they all wanted.

Against such reasoning, Hays had no argument.

The press coverage would say it was
Hays who had “prevailed upon” Zukor and Schenck to ban Arbuckle. How Hays must have cringed to read the stories. Years later, in his memoirs, he’d say that Zukor’s decision to ban Arbuckle had been noble: he had put the good of the entire industry ahead of the potential profits he might make from the comedian’s pictures—and paid the price for it, as stock in Famous Players dropped precipitously the day the ban was announced.

But that was hogwash. One of Zukor’s core beliefs was that the market should decide everything. If audiences nationwide flocked to Arbuckle’s pictures the way they had in Los Angeles, he (and Hays) could have told their critics, “That’s the American way.” Yet faced with threats of boycotts and regulation and the possibility of undermining the power of the MPPDA, Zukor had abandoned one of his most cherished business tenets. Hays did his best to make that decision seem honorable. But he also made clear to posterity that it was not he who made it.

At the time, however, Hays had no choice. On a blank Famous Players–Lasky interoffice memorandum, he scrawled a draft of what Zukor wanted him to say.
“After consultation at length with Mr. Nicholas Schenck, representing Mr. Joseph Schenck, the producers, and Mr. Adolph Zukor and Mr. Jesse Lasky, of the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation, the distributors, I will state that at my request they have canceled all showings and all bookings of the Arbuckle films. They do this that the whole matter may have the consideration that its importance warrants, and the action is taken notwithstanding the fact that they had nearly ten thousand contracts in force for the Arbuckle pictures.”

Hays then made the short walk back to his office, memo in hand. So this was what his job would be: a glorified secretary to Adolph Zukor, rubber-stamping Famous Players policy. The pundits were right: it hadn’t taken Zukor very long to flex his muscles, exposing Hays’s leadership as an industry ruse. Just two months after taking office, Hays had been forced to deny his better nature and obey his overlord’s bidding.

After instructing his assistant to type up the draft and send it out, Hays tried to slip away unseen. But a group of newsmen caught him,
“hat and coat in hand,” and started pummeling him with questions. How did he justify this ban, given Arbuckle’s acquittal and the jury’s statement condemning the injustice against him? What happened to Hays’s insistence that he was no censor?

Turning to face his pursuers, Hays tried quoting the MPPDA’s mission statement, blathering about “moral and artistic standards.” But his words were hollow. His heart wasn’t in them. “Beyond that,” Hays muttered, “I cannot say anything just now.”

He hurried away.

Zukor made no statement. This was Hays’s moment, as he had intended it to be.

The press spun the ban as the “first move in the announced campaign to ‘clean up’ the industry,” just as Zukor had hoped. That would please the moralists. That should convince them—for a while, anyway—that Hays held moral authority over all of them.

In Hollywood, the ban came as a great surprise to everyone, including the man himself. When reporters banged on his door to give him the news, Arbuckle’s face dropped. “Gosh,” he said.
“I thought I was well-started on my comeback.”

So had Will Hays. In his office the next day, the film czar sent off a letter to friends. He was
“very homesick for you all,” he wrote. Heartsick too, no doubt.

The Arbuckle ban was a game-changer. No one was safe.
“The action is regarded by high officials in the industry,” the
New York Times
observed, “to mean that other characters who have figured in so-called Hollywood scandals would be driven out as objectionable to the public.” Who was next, then? Mabel? Mary?

They all now lived in fear of Will Hays.

The man Jesse Winn had just brought in for questioning was handsome, slender, dark, and very nervous. Sitting opposite him in the interrogation room, Eddie King doubted very strongly that this latest suspect in the Taylor case had anything to do with the crime. He was starting to get a sense of who the killer might be, and it was not this man.

Still, as the DA’s lead investigator on the case, King had a job to do, so he went through the motions of interrogating the trembling figure sitting across from him. His name was Honore Connette. Well-dressed and erudite, Connette was thirty-nine years old, unmarried, and a newspaper scribe, working at various times for the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Long Beach Press
. Most recently, however, he’d been writing for the
Hilo Tribune
in Hawaii. While in the island territory, Connette had drawn attention to himself by telling some outrageous stories about William Desmond Taylor. To a fellow reporter, Connette had insisted that Taylor’s murderer was not a woman, as so many papers were implying. When asked how he could be so sure,
Connette had implied that he knew a lot of people in the film colony—and their secrets.

Connette had been an actor before going into journalism. The Indiana native had toured the country in
The Poor Little Rich Girl
, playing the
“first society man.” After the show’s run, he had settled down in Los Angeles, along with one of his castmates, James Bryson, who had played the “second society man.” Bryson went on to become part of Don Osborn’s clique, writing bad checks and carrying on with Rose Putnam—until, of course, Osborn put a stop to that.

Connette had done better for himself than his old friend, landing his newspaper gigs as well as some bit parts in movies. At one point he had worked as an extra for William Desmond Taylor. The two had shared a conversation about books, Connette told King.

Somehow, Connette seemed to have picked up some knowledge of Taylor’s death—and for a while he blabbed about it to anyone who would listen. For the
Hilo Tribune
he wrote articles suggesting that Taylor’s killer was planning to disappear into the Orient. Finally, when his talk raised too much suspicion, Connette’s editors turned him over to the police. Jesse Winn had met his ship in San Francisco, and in searching the traveler’s bags he had found something very interesting.

A .38-caliber revolver, the same kind of gun used to kill Taylor. And one bullet was missing.

King sat staring into the man’s dark eyes. Revolver notwithstanding, he was still convinced that Connette had nothing to do with the case. What possible motive would Honore Connette, a newspaper reporter who’d barely known Taylor, have had to commit murder?

And for King, motive was everything.

Three months after the murder, investigators still had no solid leads.
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charged. But King intended to debunk that headline. He believed he was close to figuring out the case.

His early dismissal of Edward Sands as the culprit was now accepted by most—though not all—of the other investigators. The detectives had
received a police report that a sailor fitting Sands’s description, going by the name of Snyder—Sands’s real name—had signed up for the revenue cutter
Bear
the previous November, which certainly fit the pattern of Sands’s life. The report also said that the same man had been spotted in the municipal woodyard in Oakland, California, on February 1—which, if true, would discredit Earl Tiffany’s wife’s claim that she had seen Sands that same day in Los Angeles. It would also exonerate Sands of Taylor’s murder. As far as King was concerned, the testimony of the Oakland police carried more weight than that of Mrs. Earl Tiffany.

Only one person had the motive to kill Taylor, in the detective’s opinion. It wasn’t Edward Sands. And it sure as heck wasn’t Honore Connette.

Still, King was obliged to investigate Connette as thoroughly as he could. The actor Gareth Hughes, a friend of Connette’s, was called into the DA’s office. Hughes revealed that the newspaperman had been very depressed following the death of his mother the previous January, and had started drinking heavily. He’d also become addicted to Veronal, a barbiturate sleeping aid. Connette’s talk about Taylor could only have been a fever dream, a fantasy, Hughes believed. King chalked him up as just one more crackpot obsessed with the Taylor case.

By this time, Connette was trying frantically to walk back all the tales he’d told about the murder. In
“a moment of levity,” the frightened newspaper reporter now claimed, he’d tried to impress a newspaper rival in Hilo. “I suppose I drank a bit,” he told investigators, “and said things while under the influence of liquor upon which the preposterous situation in which I now find myself could have been built.”

Just to be sure, Connette was hustled into a police car and driven over to Alvarado Court, where he was presented to Faith MacLean. The weary woman took a long look at him and concluded that, no, he was not the man she had seen. And presumably a test of the bullets in Connette’s gun revealed that they did not match the one that had killed Taylor.

The newspaper writer was released. No further tabs were kept on him.

King was tired of such foolishness. It was time, he believed, that they arrest the real killer. But first, he knew, he was going to need proof.

He asked Woolwine to allow him to interview the suspect he had in mind. But his request was turned down. It wasn’t the first time that the DA had stopped King from following his instincts. He’d tried to stop him when he suspected Mary Miles Minter, but King had found a way around that and interviewed her anyway.

And he’d find a way around this obstacle as well. No matter his boss’s opposition, King was determined to crack this oyster. Before the end of the year, the detective vowed, William Desmond Taylor’s murderer would be standing trial.

In the distance, the snow-covered Grand Tetons blued the horizon. Gazing through a pair of binoculars, Charlotte Shelby watched her daughter move across the wide graben valley. She was like a hunter tracking an antelope, waiting for the right moment to shoot to kill.

It was a hot day in July. Shelby had accompanied the cast and crew of Mary’s latest picture,
The Cowboy and the Lady
, on location to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It was Mary’s first time back in front of the cameras since all that nasty publicity about Taylor.

The scandal had changed her daughter, Shelby felt. Mary wasn’t the same girl. She was acting up, misbehaving,
“not cooperating with the studio,” in Shelby’s opinion. And that was dangerous. Shelby no longer worried about what salary Zukor might offer when he renewed Mary’s contract. Now she worried whether he’d renew it all.

Shelby’s eyes followed her daughter. The film was Mary’s first western, and she was required to ride a horse. With utter recklessness, she was galloping across the valley, as if daring the horse to throw her and break her neck. What had gotten into the child? Mary was insisting on doing things her way, no matter the orders of her director, Charles Maigne. This was not like her. Normally, on location, Mary was “a good trouper,” Shelby said. Why this sudden, willful change of character?

Watching her daughter’s every move, Shelby thought she had it figured out.

“By stages so gradual as to be imperceptible,” Shelby would later write, Mary “was aligning herself more and more with the least desirable of the motley crew that made up the company.” Encouraged by their unruly, rebellious ways out there in the Wild West, Mary “grew steadily more resentful and defiant” of her mother. When Shelby spoke, Mary no longer quaked.

The chief instigator of Mary’s rebellion, much to her mother’s dismay, was
her costar, a spitfire by the name of Patricia Palmer.
Mary had known Palmer for years. They’d met when Mary was just thirteen, when both were feted at a ball hosted by the Indianapolis Motion Picture Exhibitors League. Back then, Palmer was still known as Margaret Gibson, and no doubt Mrs. Shelby was well aware of the reasons Gibby had changed her name. Little wonder why she was so displeased to see Mary now falling under the spell of the older actress.

A thousand miles from Hollywood, the company was cut off from civilization in every direction. Back in the days of cattle rustlers, Jackson Hole had been considered an ideal place for outlaws to hide out from law enforcement.

Now the outlaws had returned to Jackson Hole.

Mary liked these risk takers, these plain talkers. She took to eating catsup on toast and staying up late at night, disregarding Shelby’s wishes. She may even have snuck a swig of bootleg rum. How wonderful to be among such exciting people in the presence of the majestic Tetons. Mary thought the mountains
“more beautiful than the Swiss Alps,” which she’d seen on her tour of Europe the previous summer.

At night, after Shelby went to bed, Mary would sit with the rest of the company on the veranda of their dude ranch outside the little town of Jackson. She may well have poured out her heart to her new friends. After all, Gibby had known Mr. Taylor quite well, too. They had been good friends, when they were both just starting out in the business. No doubt Mary wanted to hear all of Gibby’s memories of Mr. Taylor.