Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (70 page)

Margaret Gibson was poised to become a huge star in 1916. Then she was caught in a kimono during the raid of a brothel in Little Tokyo.
COURTESY RAY LONG

A little thing like being arrested didn’t derail Gibby’s ambition. She’d promised her mother to find a way out of the dire poverty they lived in, just as she often did on the screen.
COURTESY RAY LONG

Mary arriving in New York with her sister Margaret and mother.
PHOTOFEST

Eighteen-year-old Mary Miles Minter lived in a world of fantasy and illusion, one in which she was free of her controlling mother, Charlotte Shelby, and united in love with her “soul mate,” William Desmond Taylor.

Mary
(left)
with her mother and her beloved grandmother, Julia Miles. During the summer of 1922, the aged Mrs. Miles traveled back to her home state of Louisiana and threw a gun into a bayou.

Gibby starred with Taylor in
The Riders of Petersham
(1914).

Mary and Gibby attended a 1916 exhibitors’ convention together in Indianapolis.
COURTESY BRUCE LONG

Mary and Taylor pose for the publicity cameras after completing a picture together.

A rare shot of Taylor, Charlotte Shelby, and Mary together. The look Shelby seems to be giving Taylor pretty well sums up her feelings for the director. From the
Los Angeles Express
, October 14, 1919.
COURTESY OF BRUCE LONG

George James Hopkins was Taylor’s set designer and his lover. He’d go on to win Oscars for
A Streetcar Named Desire, My Fair Lady, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, and
Hello Dolly!.
ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES

Henry Peavey discovered Taylor’s body. He was later kidnapped by journalists trying to scare a confession out of him, an act resulting in charges by the NAACP.
CORBIS

The murder made front-page headlines for weeks, especially in the Hearst papers.
COURTESY BRUCE LONG