Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (32 page)

Hoyt then described an evening he’d spent with Taylor a short time before the tragedy. As many others had noted, the director had been anxious and depressed in those final weeks. When Hoyt asked what was bothering him, Taylor had said that “the dearest, sweetest little girl in the world” was in love with him, and described Mary’s midnight visit. He had tried to send her home, Taylor told Hoyt, but Mary had threatened to cause a scene. “It was really becoming serious,” Hoyt understood, and Taylor “didn’t know what to do about it.”

King had to wonder if Taylor’s wretchedness in those last couple of months, described by so many people, had been the result of Mary’s infatuation.

So far, however, he’d been unable to secure an interview with Minter herself. Her mother was rather powerful, he’d heard, and had managed to keep her away from the police. But the teenage actress couldn’t remain untouchable for much longer, not with these stories of pink silk nightgowns and unrequited love.

Marshall Neilan’s fears for Mary were about to come true.

Tipping his cap to his friends in the press, King hopped onto his motorcycle and revved the engine. Back in 1904, he’d been
the city’s first “speed cop,” chasing down speed demons who roared down the vast uninhabited stretch of South Main Street. Small like a jockey, King handled his motorcycle as if it were a Thoroughbred. He tore off across town.

His mind was racing just as fast. The Taylor case obsessed him. So many clews. Which ones were important? Which were irrelevant? What about the
luxurious touring car several witnesses reported being parked near Taylor’s courtyard shortly before the murder? Ventura police reported that a woman had been spotted driving a similar car recklessly up the coastal highway early the next morning. Might there be a connection?

And what about Theodore Kosloff’s story of a man jumping out at Taylor from some bushes in Pasadena? Was that the same person who’d been making the harassing phone calls? Or a blackmailer, which might explain those missing assets of Taylor’s?

Or could Taylor’s killer have been a drug dealer looking for revenge? Given Taylor’s friendship with Mabel Normand, Detectives Theodore Mailheau and Lloyd Yarrow of the narcotics squad thought there was every reason to believe that the dead man
“may have had knowledge of drug peddlers.” That was definitely an angle to track down.

Finally, there was Taylor’s murky past to consider. Hollywood was still in shock over the dual life their supposedly upstanding champion had hidden for so long. The newspapers, of course, loved the added sensation of an abandoned wife and daughter and missing brother. East Coast detectives had tracked down Taylor’s former wife, Ethel May Robins, in the town of Mamaroneck on New York’s Long Island Sound. In one of those crazy coincidences, she was now married to the proprietor of Delmonico’s restaurant, where Adolph Zukor conducted so much of his business. With some reluctance, Ethel May told of the day Taylor—Deane-Tanner to her—had disappeared. She also described the day she had recognized the man on the movie screen as the father of her child.

Ethel May had been deeply hurt by Taylor’s desertion. When she married her second husband, she’d torn up every photo she could find of her first. But when her daughter had expressed the desire to write to her father, Ethel May had given her consent, and had been pleased when Taylor had agreed to meet the girl on his way back from Europe the previous summer.

But now the elegant Mrs. Robins, highly regarded in New York café society, took great offense at this intrusion from her past. Her long-ago marriage, she insisted, could throw no light on the murder. Her husband, Edward L. C. Robins, huffed,
“I can’t see why the newspapers are paying so much attention to Mamaroneck. It seems to me they ought to be trying to solve this mystery out in Los Angeles, where it happened.”

Eddie King agreed. The killer walked among them, the detective believed. But making an arrest wouldn’t be easy with so many false leads and dead ends. The phones at Central Station were ringing off their hooks. Lunatics wandered into headquarters and confessed to the crime. The cops were overrun with so-called witnesses.

Like Mrs. Ida Garrow.

She was a middle-aged dressmaker—she preferred the term
modiste
—who lived at the Rose of Sharon Apartments on South Coronado Street, on the other side of Westlake Park from Taylor. On the night of the murder, Mrs. Garrow was walking to a class, cutting across Ocean View Avenue. Near the corner of Grand View Street, she spotted a
“short and heavyset” man ahead of her, whose “suspicious bearing and movements attracted her attention.” As Mrs. Garrow watched, the man looked back at her, then hurried across the street and “disappeared into the shadows.” The time was just after eight o’clock. Faith MacLean had seen the man leaving Taylor’s home just before eight, so the two stories jibed. If the killer had cut up through the alley parallel to Alvarado Street—which was likely if he wanted to avoid detection—then eventually he would’ve emerged onto Ocean View, which in 1922 crossed Alvarado. Therefore, he would have passed Grand View at a time consistent with Mrs. Garrow’s report of seeing a similar-looking man.

It was an intriguing clew, and King made a note of it.

But then again, there were hundreds of leads like that. King didn’t have time to waste on all of them. Especially when he was convinced the answers he needed could be found in one, no-holds-barred interview with Mary Miles Minter.

If Eddie King had known what was taking place at Alvarado Court, he would have turned his motorcycle around and burned rubber on his way there.

Unbeknownst to the DA’s office, the police had decided to hold a little powwow with Charles Eyton and his chief lieutenant, Frank Garbutt. Apparently Captain Adams thought he could solve the mystery on his own and deny the department’s rivals any credit.

The dead man’s dining table, so recently the site of gin-and-orange cocktails with Mabel, was now
“piled high with papers and letters.” Detectives had gathered everything they could find in the apartment, and Eyton had agreed to bring back what he had taken. Accordingly, he’d dumped a stack of papers on the table for detectives to dig through.

Captain Adams believed Eyton when the studio executive insisted he’d brought back everything. Eddie King wouldn’t have been so trusting.

Many times King, and other detectives, had wanted to dig through Taylor’s personal papers, the ones that had been removed from the apartment. Among the
“letters and personal belongings” that Eyton had made off with King was certain there was “much documentary evidence in this murder mystery.”

Mabel Normand’s personal letters to Taylor, for example, were missing. Mabel knew that Taylor had kept them, so where were they? The search for those missing letters had turned into its own separate investigation, though it was all a farce:
everyone knew that Eyton had them, even if he denied it to police. Taking studio-related material was one thing. Removing personal letters that might prove pertinent to the investigation was another. No doubt Eyton had received word from his bosses that
Famous Players could not appear to be obstructing the investigation, and that was why he made a show of cooperating with Adams on this occasion.

But when he’d dumped Taylor’s papers onto the dining room table, he’d held a few items back. As the cops dove hungrily into the pile, none of them seemed to notice when Eyton slipped quietly away.

He had business upstairs in the dead man’s bedroom.

Eyton moved stealthily, hoping a creaky floorboard wouldn’t give him away. If he was gone too long, someone downstairs would surely notice. Glancing around Taylor’s bedroom, he tried to decide what to do with Mabel’s letters. He couldn’t just hand them over to the police; that would be admitting wrongdoing. It had to look as if he’d never had them. In a flash, Eyton had an idea. He stuffed the letters down into one of the director’s boots.

When Eyton returned downstairs, he found the officers expressing disappointment that they’d found nothing in the pile of documents to illuminate their investigation. Of course they hadn’t. Mabel’s letters hadn’t been the only papers Eyton had held back. All the important stuff was still back at the studio, safely locked away in Lasky’s safe.

No way would the police ever see what they needed to see.

Boys hung from lampposts. Grown men sat in trees. The windows of nearby buildings were filled with curious spectators. Mobs packed Olive Street between Fifth and Sixth and spilled over into Pershing Square, where vendors sold roasted chestnuts for a nickel a bag. More than ten thousand people had turned out for the funeral of William Desmond Taylor at St. Paul’s Pro-Cathedral. They’d been gathering for the last three hours, hoping to catch a glimpse of the many celebrities whose names had been linked to the case. As the crowd swelled, police on horseback did their best to keep the situation under control. Some pickpocketing had already occurred, and a number of women had fainted.

There would be more of that before the day was done.

“Never before in the history of Los Angeles,” one reporter would observe, “has there been such a crowd at the funeral of a private citizen.”

Before his death, only a select group of industry insiders, censorship agitators, and diehard movie fans had known Taylor’s name. Now it was a household word. An entire nation was riveted to the ongoing whodunit being played out every morning in their daily newspapers.

Dignitaries started arriving about a half hour before the two o’clock service, escorted through the throng by blue-uniformed police officers. Charles Eyton showed up with a delegation from Famous Players. Among them was George Hopkins, taking his seat beside Julia Crawford-Ivers and Jimmy Van Trees, remembering the man he had loved, unable to share what made his grief so personal.

Outside, it could have been a movie premiere. Constance Talmadge arrived to squeals from the crowd. Arthur Hoyt. Antonio Moreno. Neva Gerber, who the papers revealed had once been engaged to Taylor. But the biggest cheers came when Mabel Normand was spotted stepping out of her car, escorted on either side by female companions, “hatted and furred so that her features were entirely obscured.”

Mabel was shaking terribly. Led into the church, she spied the open casket holding Billy’s body and draped with the British flag. On top of the casket rested the army cap he’d worn during the Great War. An honor guard of British soldiers in full uniform stood at each corner of the casket, their hands holding the butts of their rifles, the barrels resting on the marble floor.

Mabel did not approach the corpse as some of the others did. Instead she took her seat in the second pew. Ahead of her, Henry Peavey keened like a banshee.

The chancel was filled with flowers. Biggest of all, front and center, was Mabel’s wreath of roses. Billy had sent her flowers three times a week. Now she was returning the favor.

A smaller arrangement near the bottom, a modest shower of lilies, bore a card that read simply E
THEL
D
AISY
.

Billy’s daughter.

Like everyone else, Mabel had been stunned to learn of Billy’s other life. She’d thought she’d known her friend, her champion, her mentor, so well. But in fact Billy had been a blank screen, onto which Mabel, and so many others, had projected their own hopes and needs.

As the dean of the cathedral made his way up the center aisle, swinging his thurible, the spicy fragrance of incense filled the air. Mabel fought back tears. Her life had changed so much in just under a week. Seven days ago, everything had seemed on track.
Molly O’
was a hit.
Suzanna
was progressing well. Except for being sick a little too often, Mabel was on the top of her game. She was working. She was solvent. She was sober.

But the fears she’d harbored after Roscoe’s arrest were coming true.

The press had her in their crosshairs. Every morning when she awoke, Mabel found a new assault waiting for her in the papers. In virtually every account of Taylor’s death, her name appeared. Sennett’s publicists had sent out dispatches to exhibitors proclaiming Mabel’s absolute innocence and beseeching them to
“correct any false impressions” that appeared in their local papers. But the fact that Mabel’s letters to Taylor had gone missing only added to the public’s conviction that she was somehow involved.

The moralists were demanding blood—hers.

And it wasn’t just Brother Crafts and Mrs. O’Grady who were targeting the movie industry anymore. Now self-appointed moral guardians in the press were doing the church ladies’ work for them. The shrillest critics were Edward Doherty of the
New York Daily News
and Wallace Smith of the
Chicago American
, whose articles were syndicated to papers all across the country. Both Doherty and Smith were convinced that Mabel was implicated in some way in Taylor’s death. They wouldn’t let the idea go, grabbing onto it and swinging it around like a couple of dogs tearing apart a rag doll with their teeth. Mabel’s days of cocaine and carousing were well known to Doherty and Smith, and the two yellow journalists refused to accept that those days were over.

In his most recent article, Doherty had written that Mabel was still attending
“the ‘hop’ feasts.” The writer used no names, but everyone knew whom he meant.

To
Examiner
reporter Estelle Lawton Lindsey, Mabel had made a direct appeal for fairness.
“Get it straight, please,” she’d begged. She hadn’t been in love with Billy. They hadn’t been planning on getting married. No one killed him out of jealousy over her. “And, please,” Mabel added, “say that I never heard of that pink nightgown.”

But what about the dope parties Taylor was suspected of hosting?

The question must have been like a dagger in Mabel’s heart. Billy—who had worked so hard to get her off the stuff—accused of hosting drug parties! “Never, in God’s world, never,” Mabel averred. “Billy was one of the cleanest and most temperate men in all his habits. He loved clean, simple pleasures, and he was a kind and thoughtful friend.”