A Cast of Killers (8 page)

“I mean, aside from all the obvious ones that have been tossed around now for ... what? ... forty years? ... you shouldn’t overlook Taylor’s professional colleagues and friends who just happened to make it big only after he was killed. Like George Hopkins and Douglas MacLean?”

While Swanson was completely enjoying herself, facetiously adding to the already laughably long list of suspects, Vidor grew tense. He knew George Hopkins. Hopkins had been the art director on a film Vidor had made for Warner Brothers.

“George Hopkins knew Taylor?”

“Oh, yeah. Taylor gave him his first big-time job in pictures. They were very close friends.”

“Interesting.” Vidor took out his notebook, added Hopkins’s name to it. He thought Hopkins might be able to answer an important question about Taylor. When Vidor had worked with Hopkins, Hopkins was having an affair with a friend of Vidor’s—an important Academy Award winning Hollywood director, a man. Hopkins had also attended dance lessons at the same studio Taylor did, where their instructor, according to Hollywood gossip, was a particularly flagrant dandy named Duncan.

Douglas MacLean, Taylor’s neighbor and friend, had become a big-time Hollywood producer—a producer of a King Vidor film. Paramount had always been good to MacLean. Perhaps too good.

Swanson accepted a kiss on the cheek and returned it. “Yes, you are, King, and a very good one. But you haven’t answered my question.”

9

William Desmond Taylor was a hero in the First World War.

The roles he played in the war were as varied as the newspapers and magazines that reported them. Vidor read printed accounts, interviews, studio publicity releases, even Taylor’s own war journal, which Vidor had acquired from a Hollywood souvenir dealer. All that the various reports had in common were that Taylor had served for Great Britain and that he had served heroically—two facts Vidor had believed from the beginning, having witnessed, along with six thousand other spectators, a full honor guard composed of officers of every army of the British Commonwealth firing a hero’s salute over Taylor’s Union Jack-adorned casket. Some of the reports smacked of pure Hollywood PR. Others, such as those from friends like Mary Miles Minter, might have resulted from self-promotion on Taylor’s part. And still others—who knew? But whatever the truth of Taylor’s wartime experiences might be, Vidor felt it might play a part in Taylor’s postwar life, and death.

There had been stories about Taylor’s testifying in a wartime court-martial, and speculation that the soldier he testified against might have tracked him to Hollywood and taken his revenge. But like every aspect of his life, Taylor’s war years were clouded with contradictions, and Vidor needed to understand what really happened. So he asked his friend Laurence Stallings if he might be able to help. Having directed such a wide variety of movies—pictures set from Coney Island to the Russia of
War and Peace,
and taking place in every era from that of biblical Sheba to the present day—Vidor had had occasion to work with experts in many geographical, historical, and cultural fields. Stallings’s area of expertise was World War I. He had met Vidor, in fact, during the twenties, while writing a script about the war. They were on the same Pullman, heading away from Los Angeles, Stallings’s berth directly above Vidor’s. For several hours they talked, Stallings telling Vidor about the horrors he had seen at Chateau-Thierry and the Metz. As he spoke, the train bounced over a rough length of track, causing Stallings’s wooden leg, hanging on a wall hook, to swing into Vidor’s berth, offering visual proof of just how real the horrors had been. In the forty years since, Stallings had become Vidor’s chief screenwriter as well as confidant, drinking buddy, and yachting partner.

He arrived at Vidor’s room at the Lombardy Hotel armed with street-vendor hot dogs and an oversized briefcase. Vidor had just come back from seeing Swanson. “Hope you know what you’re getting into, King,” his deep gravel voice said as he made his way inside to a large overstuffed chair by the window, the only chair big enough for him. “Isn’t every day I’m asked to dump on a guy’s reputation. Even if the reputation isn’t deserved.”

He sat his hot dogs on an ottoman, offering to share them with Vidor but letting Vidor know with a laugh that if he weren’t hungry not to worry—nothing would go to waste. He opened his briefcase. It was filled with papers from the British Recruiting Commissioner, and Taylor’s war journal, which Vidor had given him to study.

“Taylor’s reputation wasn’t deserved?” Vidor asked.

“Well, not his soldier’s reputation at least. Taylor did serve, there’s no question about that. But he was no hero.”

Stallings told Vidor all he had been able to find out. On July 3, 1918, sixteen months after the United States had declared war, William Desmond Taylor, age forty-one, enlisted as a private in the British Army. He signed up in Los Angeles, which delayed the processing of his papers so long that by the time he actually arrived on the other side of the Atlantic, the Armistice had already been signed. He was stationed in Hounslow, south of London, where he was appointed lieutenant shortly before being discharged. In all, he served approximately nine months in uniform, during which he saw no wartime activity at all.

Vidor wasn’t surprised. It was typical of Hollywood to canonize its celebrities, to take a known fact—such as Taylor’s having worn His Majesty’s uniform—and exaggerate it in the name of glamour. But he still wondered why, especially that late in the war, Taylor had enlisted at all. If the studio had pressured him to participate in the war effort as they had others in the public eye, he could have done so by selling war bonds, as had Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. Or he could have enlisted in the U.S. Army as an officer—a letter from Zukor or Eyton could have arranged it with no problem. But he had enlisted as a buck private for the British.

“It’s not really any great mystery,” Stallings said. “There were British recruitment drives in New York and Los Angeles at the time. The greater question, to my mind, was his motivation. And for that you have to look at his background with the military.”

Stallings, Vidor could see, has shifted into his screenwriter’s mode. He laid out a plausible story line.

“Taylor’s father was a British officer who apparently governed his family the way he governed his troops. When Taylor ran away from the military life, he lost his father’s respect. Maybe he tried to get it back when he was in Kansas. Who knows? But there is a report that his father was later killed defending Taylor’s homeland, so maybe Taylor enlisted as a private to prove his worth to his family and his country. And to himself.”

“But what could he have proved?” Vidor asked. “He didn’t see any action. In fact, from what I got out of his journal, he didn’t see much of anything, except Friday night variety shows.”

Stallings finished off a hot dog and licked mustard from his fingers. “That’s true.” He picked up Taylor’s journal, randomly flipped through it. “Private Gale, magician; Corley, pianist and singer; Hendry, bagpipes. Not like most war journals I’ve read.” He sat the book back down, readied another hot dog.

“Maybe his commanding officers knew who he was and gave him the assignment he was most suited for, directing their shows. I mean, how many men were there named William Desmond Taylor?”

“Yeah,” Vidor said, “and he certainly wouldn’t have enlisted as Tanner and risked that whole ball of wax being found out.”

Vidor picked up the journal, turned to a small entry Taylor had made about the court-martial at which he had testified. The note said he had hidden his evidence behind a barracks window for safekeeping until the trial.

“What about this court-martial?”

“You know as much about it as I do,” Stallings said.

“It would be next to impossible to find out any more now. We don’t even know the name of the soldier on trial, or what he was being tried for. And the name of one witness doesn’t give us much to go on.”

Vidor stood, looked out the window. Across the street, construction workers walked on girders and platforms, raising another high-rise office building, oblivious to the height and the weather.

“I appreciate the help, Larry,” he said. “This Taylor story gets more interesting the deeper I get into it.”

“Well, as I said, I hope you know what you’re getting into. This sounds like the kind of story that, no matter how you end up writing it, you’re always going to know another way that’d be just as good.”

Stallings wadded his lunch wrappings into a ball and stuffed it into his briefcase with the recruiting papers.

“I almost forgot,” he said. “I found this stuck between a couple of pages in Taylor’s journal” He handed Vidor a small, wrinkled photograph. “Looks like our man with a couple of his buddies.”

Vidor inspected the photograph in the light from the window. It showed Taylor in his uniform, standing with three other officers. Two of the officers Vidor didn’t recognize. But the one on the far right looked exactly like Taylor’s brother, Denis Deane Tanner.

10

Herb Dalmas fancied himself another Raymond Chandler. The celebrated hardboiled author was his idol, and, like him, Dalmas had abandoned an early career choice—he had been an associate professor at Rutgers; Chandler, an oil company executive—to try his hand at mystery writing. Like Chandler, who had called the industry “poison to writers” but had been forever attracted to the money it offered, he had moved to Hollywood, hoping to find work in motion pictures. His first novel,
Exit Screaming,
released the year before, seemed to be providing the break he needed. Upon the novel’s publication, Vidor had expressed interest in developing the book as a movie project and, especially impressed with the mystery’s structure, had asked Dalmas for any insight he might have into the Taylor case. Dalmas had jumped at the opportunity to work, if only in a minor advisory capacity, on his first real Hollywood mystery, researching the case throughout the promotional tour for
Exit Screaming.
Now, the tour ended, he stood in the lobby of the Lombardy Hotel, an inscribed copy of the novel under his arm, waiting to share his ideas with Vidor.

Vidor exited an elevator and was taken by Dalmas’s appearance. More than his literary idol, he looked like one of Chandler’s characters, worn and haggard, as if the book tour had been marked by constant travel and no sleep. Vidor shook Dalmas’s hand and was about to suggest they postpone their meeting until after Dalmas had had a good night’s rest, when suddenly Dalmas seemed to come alive.

“I think I’ve come up with something very interesting,” he said as he led Vidor outside into the snow. He flagged down a Checker cab and instructed the driver to take them to the public library.

On the way, Vidor gave Dalmas a vague progress report, referring to his pocket notebook and listing the areas requiring further investigation.

Dalmas listened carefully and agreed that Vidor could never be too thorough in his research.

“The more I read, the more I understand why Chandler once said the only reason the Taylor mystery was a mystery was because no one had ever taken the time to do an adequate investigation. All anyone seemed interested in were the scandals surrounding the murder. The crime itself was almost secondary.”

At the library, Vidor found a pair of empty seats at a long wooden reading table populated mostly by transients driven inside by the snow. He waited nearly twenty minutes, memorizing the graffiti carved into the tabletop, until Dalmas emerged from the next room carrying a stack of bound magazines and a dust-covered blue book. He set them in front of Vidor and opened one of the thick volumes to the cracked cover page of a 1919 issue of a Hollywood trade magazine.

“I think I threw them for a loop in the stacks. No one’s checked these out in years.”

“It’s no wonder,” Vidor said, carefully turning the brittle pages. “You can’t believe a word of this stuff. It’s all just publicity blather.”

“Exactly.” Dalmas commandeered the volume, quickly flipping for specific pages. “The studios used these rags to print whatever they wanted printed. They put these stories in here for reasons, and if you read between the lines, you can pretty well guess what the reasons were.”

He found a six-page photo spread announcing the birth of Realart, a motion picture corporation formed after the First World War by Paramount Studios to feature the combined talents of their top director and newest star, the “priceless” and “profound” William Desmond Taylor and the “dainty, delicious, and delectable” Mary Miles Minter.

“Did you ever wonder,” Dalmas asked, “why this Taylor thing ended the careers of Mary Miles Minter and Mabel Normand, but didn’t affect other people who were close to Taylor at all? I mean, we read a lot about monogrammed panties in Taylor’s bedroom, but M.M.M.’s the only monogram anyone ever singles out. I think there’s a reason for that.

“After the war, Paramount’s biggest star, Mary Pickford, quit, eventually forming United Artists with her husband, Doug Fairbanks; Chaplin; and Griffith. Paramount desperately needed a replacement, and who could have been better than Minter? I mean, she looked just like Pickford, and she was younger. So they started the old publicity ball rolling, giving her her own company and everything, trying to make her seem like the greatest thing that ever happened to movies. But what happened?”