A Cast of Killers (21 page)

Just as blackmail now seemed an unlikely factor in the story, so did the notion, as purported by Gloria Swanson and others, that Taylor might have sensed that he was in imminent danger. His activities during the final days of his life, meticulously documented by police investigators, were in no way inconsistent with the way he acted at any other time.

On the morning of what would be his final day, Taylor rose early and swam his regular laps at the Los Angeles Athletic Club pool. After a normal day’s work he stopped at the B. H. Dyas Sporting Store and bought a dozen golf balls, a dozen rubber tees, and a pair of fingerless putting gloves. As he did every week, he sent arrangements of flowers to various friends and associates, including two dozen roses to Mabel Normand and three “fireflames” with three bunches of Scotch heather to Mary Miles Minter. He had also just taken delivery on a newly purchased overcoat and blue-serge suit. On the morning Taylor was found dead, Henry Peavey had stopped at a local pharmacy on Taylor’s behalf and picked up for him a bottle of milk of magnesia, bought a box of mints, and had Taylor’s razors sharpened.

Neither the police nor Vidor believed these to be the actions of a man who even remotely suspected he might be in danger.

The single event that the police seemed to have thought most likely connected with Taylor’s murder was the July 15, 1921 robbery of Taylor’s bungalow by Edward Sands. As Vidor had already learned, Taylor had returned from a trip to Europe to find that Sands had stolen about $2,400 in petty cash and had also forged checks, along with borrowing and then abandoning Taylor’s sports car. Taylor had then fired his chauffeur, Earl Tiffany, and hired a new one, Howard Fellows, whom he sent to the police to secure a warrant charging Sands with grand larceny.

The volume and detail of the file entries on this robbery betrayed its importance to the police, and yet the one man who logic said might have been able to shed some light on exactly what happened the day of the robbery—Edward Knoblock, Taylor’s house guest at the time—was never questioned for the official record.

The next mention of Sands had him identified as the man who had pawned some of Taylor’s stolen jewelry at the Capitol Jewelry and Loan Company in Fresno, California, on December 12, 1921, signing the name W. D. Tanner to the tickets. Twelve days later, more jewelry was pawned for ten dollars at Zemansky’s Loan and Jewelry Company in Sacramento. Again, the man signed his name W. D. Tanner, and again was identified as Edward Sands. But by this time, Taylor had decided against continuing the fruitless search for his former employee; Sands had disappeared for good.

Vidor paused in his note taking. He had wanted to set aside any mention he encountered of two specific evenings that he wanted to study very closely: the Saturday night before the murder and the night of the murder itself. But by now it was quite obvious that the police files were going to be of very little help with the former. They did contain a summary report telling of Taylor having attended the party at the Ambassador Hotel, but that was apparently the extent of police interest in the affair. Even though interviews with Claire Windsor, Mabel Normand, and Mary Miles Minter all indicated that Taylor had had more than a passing contact with Marshall Neilan, and Antonio Moreno, among others, that night, none of these men was questioned about the party or anything else.

Concerning Taylor’s last night, the files were of little more help. They confirmed in detail the visit to Taylor’s bungalow of Mabel Normand, the last person other than the murderer to see him alive. She arrived at 7:00 P.M., driven by her chauffeur, Bill Davis. At 7: 15, Henry Peavey left for the night, speaking briefly with Davis on the street on his way out. About this time, Douglas and Faith MacLean’s maid, Christina Jewett, heard someone walking along the path behind the MacLeans’ bungalow. At 7:40, Taylor walked Normand out to her car, then returned to his bungalow alone.

At 7:45, residents of the bungalow court heard the “shot” or “explosion.” Faith MacLean hurried to her front window and saw a stranger close Taylor’s front door, then walk off toward the rear of the building complex.

At eight o’clock Howard Fellows rang Taylor’s doorbell to ask him when he would be wanting the car the next morning. Though lights were on inside the bungalow, no one came to the door. Fellows rang again, then left.

There was nothing in this account that was new to Vidor. However, the police investigators had found out something that had happened a bit earlier in the evening that Vidor found quite interesting. Taylor had talked on the telephone to his tax accountant, Marjorie Berger. They discussed more than just Taylor’s taxes and the problems Taylor had had with Sands forging his checks. Berger reported that Charlotte Shelby was looking for her daughter, Mary Miles Minter.

“No,” Berger was quoted as telling Shelby. “I haven’t seen her.”

No one, including police investigators, apparently gave a second thought to the seemingly innocuous call.

But Vidor was intrigued that Charlotte Shelby had been making phone calls looking for Mary at a time when Mary, according to her own testimony to the police—testimony completely corroborated by her sister and mother—had been right at home, sitting by the fireplace reading a book aloud to her family.

27

Vidor had trouble sleeping that night. He lay on his bed, a single sheet covering him from the steady breeze rustling the trees outside his windows, as pages from the police file transcripts flashed over and over in his dreams like flipping calendar pages marking the progression of time on a movie screen.

He finally sat up, put on his terry-cloth robe and leather slippers, and walked into the den. The house was quiet except for the breeze and an occasional muffled crackle from the last ash-buried embers still glowing in the fireplace. Empty wine bottles sat on magazine coasters on the hardwood floor along with the Monopoly board still lined with the hotels, houses, and cash that Colleen had amassed while taking the others to the Parker Brothers bank. Vidor added fresh wood to the fire and took one of his guitars from its case. He sat directly in front of the fire, holding the guitar but not playing it. Nippy walked in without making a sound and curled up at Vidor’s feet.

In a couple of hours, the others would be up, preparing for the picnic they planned to have on Moonstone Beach while Vidor finished his examination of the police files. Vidor thought of Colleen, of the decision he knew he had to make. He and Colleen could not continue to see each other, to speak of any kind of future together, until he did something about Betty. Likewise, the future of Vid-Mor Productions—perhaps, Vidor was beginning to feel, his only promising connection to Hollywood—seemed to depend on his decision about his marriage. He didn’t know if he could continue a professional partnership with Colleen if he couldn’t make a commitment to a personal one. And he desperately wanted Vid-Mor to succeed, to show the powers that were running the motion picture industry that two old veterans could still pack a powerful creative punch.

But, over four months into his research, Vidor had yet to write one page of his William Desmond Taylor script.

Vidor decided not even to try to sleep again. He set his guitar down and went to the kitchen, where he brewed a pot of coffee. Then he returned to the living room, shut the door quietly behind him, and settled in for another day’s work reading the reports of each successive district attorney, this time paying particular attention to every mention of Mary Miles Minter and her mother.

Once again, he was surprised at what he found. During the entire first year after Taylor was murdered, Minter, known nationwide as the girl with the pink nightgown, was questioned officially only once, while her mother was never questioned at all. Five years later, Minter and Shelby became the prime suspects, with police gathering such circumstantial evidence against them as the items that now so bothered Vidor. But once again, just as logic seemed to dictate that an indictment would be brought against them, no arrests were made. Vidor knew that circumstantial evidence—personal items at the scene of the crime, blown alibis—wasn’t necessarily enough to produce a conviction. But he also knew that these leads ought to be more than enough to inspire further investigation. Yet the focus of the investigation was away from them.

Vidor wanted to know why. He combed the transcripts chronologically, rereading even those pages he had read so many times that he could recite them by heart. During the first two months of the original investigation, police had already discovered more about Minter’s relationship with Taylor than even the most muckraking of journalists had suspected. They had no doubt that Minter was in love with Taylor. Mary admitted as much during her interrogation. She wrote Taylor love letters and poems, sent him small gifts through the mail, even though, she said, Taylor didn’t exactly return her love. In trying to paint a complete picture of the absolute gentleman she was in love with, Minter even said that on many occasions Taylor rejected physical advances from her. He would not make love to her.

Though Mary shyly refused details of these rejections, other friends and associates of Taylor told of Minter’s chasing him around the studio, begging for affection while Taylor merely treated her like a “little girl.” Arthur Hoyt, a friend from the Athletic Club, told of Minter arriving unannounced at Taylor’s bungalow and “threatening to make a scene” if Taylor did not respond to her overtures. Another Athletic Club member said Taylor himself told of Mary’s once bursting into his bungalow, undressing, and begging to be made love to. Taylor again turned her down.

Early in their investigation, police had learned of the meeting Minter had had with Marshall Neilan the Friday night after the murder, the same meeting Gloria Swanson had told Vidor about. According to Swanson, Neilan had attended a meeting at the studio, then rushed to Minter’s to discuss matters of utmost importance to both Minter and the studio. Minter told the police that Neilan had informed her that the studio had in its possession the letters she had written to Taylor, and that executives were in the process of feeding them to the
Examiner.
Neilan told Minter he wanted to help protect her from bad publicity but, in order to do so, he needed her to tell him everything she knew about Taylor’s personal life. He said he and others, including Antonio Moreno, had heard “ghastly things about Bill” and needed to know that they were not true. Minter told Neilan she didn’t know what he could be talking about, and the matter was dropped.

Vidor wrote the phrase “ghastly things about Bill” in his notebook, along with the one-word question, “homosexual?”

Despite these early findings, District Attorney Thomas Woolwine apparently saw little reason to press Minter for more details about her relationship with Taylor or about her meeting with Neilan. (Neilan himself was never questioned, nor was Antonio Moreno.) Similarly, Minter was not asked to explain how, if as she claimed she’d never had a physical relationship with Taylor, her nightgown came to be found in his bedroom, or how hair from her head had found its way to Taylor’s jacket collar. Apparently, Woolwine bought her statement that she hadn’t seen Taylor since the previous December and that on the night of the murder she had been reading the
Cruise of the Kawa
to her family. Minter was dismissed from official attention until three years later when Asa Keyes, who replaced Woolwine as Los Angeles district attorney, reopened the investigation.

The wealth of the new information discovered under Asa Keyes made Vidor question further D. A. Woolwine’s investigation. Further circumstantial evidence tying Minter and Shelby to the murder appeared in Keyes’s files, evidence even more damning than that which Woolwine had seen fit to dismiss. Almost immediately, investigators uncovered the fact that Charlotte Shelby owned a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson breaktop revolver, the exact type of gun that police ballistics experts believed shot Taylor. They were unable to produce the weapon, but had a sworn affidavit from a Nick Harris Security patrolman that he had given the pistol to Shelby in the summer of 1920, and statements from several witnesses who saw the gun in Shelby’s possession around the time of the murder. Two of the witnesses also claimed knowledge that both Shelby and Minter knew how to use the weapon.

Shelby’s personal secretary, Charlotte Whitney, providing testimony during the Asa Keyes investigation, said that one night in the summer of 1920 Minter came home late from a date, whereupon Shelby accused her of having been sexually intimate with Taylor. Mary denied the sexual charge and, after being physically struck by Shelby, ran upstairs and locked herself in her mother’s bedroom. Shelby’s chauffeur, Chauncey Eaton, heard the commotion and ran inside. While he, Whitney, and Shelby all stood outside the locked bedroom door, they heard three gunshots from inside. Eaton broke the bedroom door down, and the three rushed in to find Mary holding the pistol. She said she’d held the gun to her head to kill herself, but the gun wouldn’t fire. Then it had fired as she pointed it around the room trying to get the safety off.

Asked why this incident was never mentioned during the original Taylor investigation directed by Woolwine, Whitney said she imagined it was because neither she nor Chauncey Eaton had been questioned.

Whitney also told of Shelby’s having spent time practicing firing the pistol during the months prior to Taylor’s murder, and of Shelby’s actually threatening Taylor and others with it. Among the others threatened was actor Monte Blue, whose name, Vidor noted, had come up on several previous occasions. Whitney said that Shelby was extremely jealous of any man who paid attention to Minter, especially William Desmond Taylor, with whom Shelby had many verbal altercations. One particular argument, witnessed by several Paramount employees questioned, ended with Shelby’s screaming, “If I ever catch you hanging around Mary again, I will blow your god damned brains out!”

One witness said that Shelby was “livid with rage, and shook her fist in [Taylor’s] face and swore dozens of times.”