A Cast of Killers (26 page)
Authors: Sidney Kirkpatrick
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Arts & Literature, #Actors & Entertainers, #Artists; Architects & Photographers
“You mean she wanted Taylor for herself?” Vidor asked.
Hopkins finished his second glass of wine. He offered a second glass to Vidor before pouring his third.
“I don’t know if she was actually in love with Bill, or if it was just a matter of wanting him so that Mary couldn’t have him. Most of that stage-mother mentality does seem to stem from basic jealousy. I mean, Charlotte might not have hovered over Mary the way she did if she’d ever been able to become a star herself.”
“Do you think,” Vidor said, asking himself as much as he was asking Hopkins, “Charlotte could have killed Taylor because, not only was he paying attention to Mary, but because he was not paying the sort of attention she wanted him to pay Charlotte?”
Hopkins responded with a tentative nod. “There’s very little you could ever accuse that woman of that I would tend to doubt. I even heard she wasn’t even dead like all the papers said, and, hell, I’d believe it. Vampires don’t kill easily. She could still be sucking blood out of poor little Mary.”
Vidor stared blindly into his wineglass. This was the second time someone had said that Charlotte Shelby might not have died when she was supposed to have. When Adela Rogers St. Johns had said it, Vidor had dismissed it as a joke illustrating Shelby’s character. Now he wondered if such a rumor really existed. He asked Hopkins as much.
Hopkins shook it off. “That’s something I heard. Probably nothing to it. But as I say, I wouldn’t put anything past her.”
Vidor wondered how to turn the conversation toward the true reason he was there. He changed the subject as offhandedly as he could.
“When did you first meet Taylor?”
“My mother introduced us. She was head set decorator at Paramount for ten years. I started working with her when I was sixteen. Her office was right below Bill’s. He and Marshall Neilan, Charlie Eyton, Jimmy Kirkwood, Denis, all of them would come down all the time.”
“Denis?”
“Tanner,” Hopkins said. “Bill’s brother.”
“Denis was at the studio?”
“Until his wife showed up looking for him. Then he disappeared, changed his name, and moved to Riverside. That’s probably why people thought he and Sands were the same person, both of them vanishing like that.”
“Why did he take off?” Vidor asked.
“You tell me.”
But Vidor had no answer. He steered the talk back to Taylor. “So your mother introduced you?”
“That’s right. Then when Lasky decided to give Bill his own company, Realart they called it, she said she was too busy to do all their design as well as the rest of the studio’s, and suggested me for the job.”
Vidor recalled Taylor’s first picture for Paramount with Minter. “You worked with him right from
Anne of Green
Gables
on?”
“Thirteen pictures, one after another, the first bunch all with little Mary.”
“Why did you stop using her?” Vidor asked.
Hopkins finished his third glass of wine. He looked at the bottle, but made no move to reach for it again.
“She wasn’t doing such a good job. She was great at first, a fine little actress, but after a few pictures, she seemed too nervous and so upset all the time she couldn’t concentrate on what she was doing. The studio decided to drop her. Against Bill’s wishes, I might add. He knew what was going on, that it was her mother that was doing it to her, but the studio didn’t care about the reason, only the results, so they let her go. Bill wanted to help her, as he was helping Mabel Normand.”
“Did Taylor ever have words with Shelby?”
“Oh, yes,” Hopkins said, emphatically. He topped off Vidor’s glass, then emptied the bottle into his own.
“How well did you know Taylor?” Vidor asked.
“Very well,” Hopkins said. “Work that closely with someone for that long, you can’t help but get to know them.”
“His death must have come as quite a blow.”
Hopkins nodded, and Vidor hated the course the interview was taking: why couldn’t he just come right out and ask what he wanted to know? Vidor had no animus against homosexuals, yet he couldn’t bring himself to be forthright with a man he knew to be one.
“He was a nice man. And would have gone on to make many great pictures,” Hopkins said. “You know his last one that was released?
The Top of New
York?
Monte Katterjohn, the writer, was so drunk when he was working on it that I ended up writing most of the screenplay myself. Bill didn’t live to see it screened.”
Hopkins set his glass down and stood up. “I’ll get us some more wine,” he said and walked out of the room. Vidor sat, his own glass still half filled, and looked over at the framed photo of Taylor on the piano. Even from across the room it seemed set apart from the other pictures, seemed to occupy a space of reverence.
“Here,” Hopkins said, returning. “Ice cold.” He filled his own glass once again and sat down. “Now, where were we?”
“Taylor’s death,” Vidor said. “It seems like the minute they found his body all the rumors started. And all the stories about the things supposedly found in his bungalow. Nightgowns, handkerchiefs, mysterious keys, pornographic pictures.”
To Vidor’s surprise, Hopkins began to smile for the first time. “They did go a little overboard, didn’t they? But it served their purpose. Until now, at least.”
“What do you mean?”
“You yourself said all those rumors were started by the studio, by all of us at the bungalow that morning.”
“All of us?” Vidor could feel his heart beating. “You were there?”
Hopkins slumped back in his chair, wineglass in hand. “I figured you already knew that.”
Vidor shook his head. “No. You were the unidentified studio employee?”
“I guess so. Charlie Eyton called and said Bill was dead and to get there as fast as I could. I was the first one there from the studio. I didn’t even know Bill’d been murdered until I was already back at the studio. I just ran upstairs into the bedroom and gathered every scrap of paper I could find and got the hell out.”
“What exactly were you looking for?” Vidor asked, the tension at its peak. He knew this was why he was there.
Hopkins looked him in the eye, punctuating his nervousness.
“I figured you already knew that, too,” he said. “Taylor slept with men.”
Vidor let out a deep breath. There it was, confirmation of what he had come looking for. This was what Neilan had tried to explain to Mary, but she hadn’t understood. Taylor loved her, but not in the way Mary could mentally process. Mabel understood, so had Neva Gerber, and Tony Moreno. The studio, had known it too, perhaps all along.
“So Eyton sent you and the others to destroy all the evidence,” Vidor said. “And then planted contrary evidence, like the nightgown, and made up the existence of even more evidence like the pornographic pictures, the closet full of underwear, the mysterious keys—”
“The keys weren’t made up,” Hopkins said.
“There’s no mention of them in the police files,” Vidor challenged.
“That’s because the police never had them,” Hopkins said. “They were eventually turned over to Frank Bryson, who administered Bill’s estate. Eyton passed the story around and said they were keys that fit no locks, just another dead-end clue. And as far as Bryson knew, they didn’t fit any locks. At least none that Bryson would ever find.”
“So what were the keys, then?” Vidor asked. “Why would they be so important to Eyton? Unless it was the locks they actually fit that had to be covered up, unless they opened doors Eyton didn’t want anyone to know Taylor would ever open? Is that it?” Vidor sat forward, excited. “Were they keys to Taylor’s lover’s house? Taylor’s male lover?” He downed his wine and helped himself to another glass.
“You should have been a detective, King,” Hopkins said.
“So who was it? Sands?”
Hopkins laughed. “I spoke too soon. Sands wasn’t homosexual. He did know about Bill, though. Why do you think Bill didn’t press charges after Sands robbed him the second time?”
“Sands was blackmailing him?”
“Sands threatened to expose Bill if he went to the police. That’s why I had to take Sands’s letters out of the bungalow that morning.”
“And that’s why the police had no blackmail evidence against him,” Vidor said, realizing a great irony: if the studio hadn’t taken the letters in their attempt to cover up Taylor’s homosexuality, the letters—along with Sands’s suicide six weeks after the murder—would have been enough for District Attorney Woolwine to have convicted Sands and closed the case before the arrival of whatever secret evidence it was that turned him away from the evidence against Mary Miles Minter and Charlotte Shelby.
“So if it wasn’t Sands,” Vidor said, “then who was it? Peavey? He was homosexual, and he had a room near Taylor’s place. Taylor paid the rent on it!”
Vidor felt he was getting close. Then Hopkins said, “How do you know Peavey was homosexual?”
“Simple,” Vidor said. “Right before the murder, he was arrested in Westlake Park on a morals charge. Soliciting young boys. Taylor was planning to stand up in his behalf.”
“But he didn’t stand up in his behalf,” Hopkins said. “Did he?”
“Of course not. He died.”
“So what happened at Peavey’s trial?”
“I don’t know,” Vidor said. “But what does that matter? What matters is whether Peavey and Taylor were lovers. And Peavey was obviously homosexual, or why would he be in a public park soliciting young boys?”
“I couldn’t imagine why,” Hopkins said. But suddenly Vidor could imagine why.
“Unless,” he said, “he was soliciting them for Taylor.”
Hopkins raised his glass in salute. “I was right in the first place, King. You should have been a detective.”
“And the room Taylor kept for Peavey was really a secret hideaway where Taylor took male lovers Peavey found for him.”
Vidor pulled his notebook from his pocket to record this revelation while it was fresh in his mind, thinking as he did, the personal and professional challenges Taylor must have confronted. No wonder Taylor had had an ulcer.
“That explained why the studio was so interested in the keys,” Vidor said. “To make sure no one found out about that room!”
Vidor quickly jotted notes into the book, mentally checking them against the incomplete theories he had walked into Hopkins’s apartment with. When he looked up from the notebook, Hopkins was watching him over the rim of his wineglass.
“May I ask a question?” Hopkins said.
“Of course.”
“Are you really going to tell this whole story? That Bill was homosexual?”
“When I know the whole story,” Vidor said. “Why?”
“It all happened so long ago, I just wonder why you want to tell it now?”
Vidor put his notebook back into his pocket, preparatory to leaving. “Because it’s a good story. And people love to see good stories. Especially true stories. And this is one of the greatest, most scandalous true stories ever to come out of this town, filled with behind-the-scenes dirt and deep, dark secrets that actual, real people tried so hard to hide. Don’t you think so?”
“Of course I do,” Hopkins said. “That’s exactly why I wonder why you want to tell it.”
33
Vidor left George Hopkins’s apartment feeling he had a new, clear understanding of the Taylor case. What everyone, himself included, had thought for forty-five years to be an unsolvable convolution of mysteries and motives had in fact been a series of insidious fabrications that, while successfully concealing the facts of Taylor’s life from the press and the public, also concealed the facts of his death.
What could have happened to cause Woolwine’s behavior? This was Vidor’s primary concern when he met on May 3 with former district attorney Buron Fitts.
Thad Brown, Bill Cahill, and Ray Cato had all warned Vidor about Fitts. He was a hard, tough-skinned man, a former combat lieutenant and veteran public administrator with a wooden leg and a die-hard dedication to his work. He might not be willing to talk about the Taylor case, Vidor had been told. The case was still open, and could very well be a thorn in Fitts’s side; he had once been about to make an announcement concerning it but, after an assassination attempt against him, had changed his mind. He had remained silent about the case since. But he had at least agreed to meet with Vidor, so Vidor was hopefu1.
Vidor arrived at the Bel Air Country Club a little before noon. He sat at his favorite table, looking out on the seventeenth green and, through the trees beyond the green, toward his own home. Minutes later, the maitre d’ showed Fitts to the table. Vidor stood and shook his hand.
“So you know who killed William Desmond Taylor,” Fitts said as he sat down.
Vidor was slightly taken aback; he hadn’t expected Fitts to get right to the point like that.
“I have an idea,” he said.
“Oh,” said Fitts. “An idea. Well, I hope you don’t take this as an insult, but everybody’s got ideas who killed Taylor. I’ve been hearing ideas for thirty years. What I’d like to hear is some good hard evidence.”
A waiter stepped to the table to take their orders. Vidor ordered trout, Fitts sirloin steak, “blood red.” As the waiter walked away, Fitts continued.
