Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (5 page)

Impetuous and spoiled, romantic and impressionable, Mary was most of all just very young. She’d been on the stage since she was a toddler, and she’d been forced to play the adult on the screen since her early teens. She’d never had a childhood, and so she lived in her daydreams. Unlike Gibby, Mary didn’t care about fame or being a star. What she wanted instead was to be the pampered, protected wife of some strong man who could take her away from her mother. Unlike Mabel, Mary’s only addiction was love.

That exasperated Mrs. Shelby. At home, the young actress
“made no secret” of her feelings for Mr. Taylor. Remembering what had happened with that other older man, Mrs. Shelby shadowed Mary around the lot, frequently giving Taylor hell if he came too close to her daughter.
“They fought all the time,” Mrs. Shelby’s secretary observed. “Always on the set when he was directing.”

So it was with great relief that Mrs. Shelby learned, about six months ago, that the studio was separating Mary and Taylor.
The director was being promoted to the main headquarters on Sunset Boulevard, while Mary would remain making pictures at Famous Players’ subsidiary, Realart. Mrs. Shelby was overjoyed. But Mary was devastated.

Finishing her breakfast and trooping out to the car with her mother to begin another day of playacting in front of the cameras, Mary was focused on one goal: to find a way to insinuate herself back into Mr. Taylor’s life.

Mabel, Margaret, and Mary were three very different women, with different dreams and different dilemmas. But it was the same man, William Desmond Taylor, who would unspool the common thread among them.

On the afternoon of Sunday, September 26, 1920, the sun filtered through the fronds of the eucalyptus trees along Melrose Avenue, etching a lacy pattern of shadows across the partly dirt road. Steering an open cabriolet automobile around the potholes was a young man by the name of Harry Fellows—blond hair, brown eyes, medium build, professional demeanor. Behind him, perusing some notes, sat his employer, William Desmond Taylor.

Fellows pulled into a parking lot beside a long concrete building. Taylor stepped out of the car, the afternoon sun casting shadows across the chiseled architecture of his face. Forty-eight years old, clean-shaven, with iron-gray hair, the Irish-born movie director possessed the
“bony look of a stone bishop on a medieval tomb,” as one writer would describe him. Striding through the parking lot of the Brunton Studios, Taylor carried himself with the studied grace of an experienced stage actor. As always, he was dressed in monochrome grays and tans. There was never
“even a bit of jewelry or a striking cravat to relieve the dullness of his costuming,” one studio artist observed.

Although well regarded in the film colony, Taylor was a bit of a cipher. His prominent participation in the Motion Picture Directors Association notwithstanding, he kept mostly to himself. No one knew much about his past, or what he’d done before he came to Hollywood, besides acting some years on the stage. A confirmed bachelor, Taylor would offer condolences when acquaintances got married. Yet he wasn’t like Tinseltown’s other bachelors, cutting up the rug at the Alexandria Hotel with starlets on weekends. In fact, his neighbors in genteel Alvarado Court observed that Taylor was home from the studio most nights by seven, and usually spent his evenings alone, reading at his desk until late at night.

The only clew to his past that Taylor ever offered was to say that he had known
“great sadness” in his life. That, perhaps, explained why his face seemed perpetually somber and grave. Rarely did a smile curl Taylor’s thin lips, and when it did, it was anger, perversely, that summoned it, not pleasure. In those instances, Taylor’s cool blue eyes hinted at things he preferred to keep hidden from the prying gazes and wagging tongues of the young, impetuous movie colony. A colleague described him as “quiet, like a camouflaged man.”

Yet while Taylor’s reserved demeanor served as a kind of armor, it also commanded respect. His boss, Mr. Zukor, regarded Taylor highly because he did not let emotion rule his actions—a rare attribute in a town of temperamental artists. For that reason, Taylor had been asked to preside over this afternoon’s gathering of film folk at the Brunton Studios. The movie chiefs hoped the event might serve as an antidote to the recent run of damaging headlines and generate a cycle of more sympathetic press coverage for Hollywood.

In the last few months, Taylor had become the movies’ most ardent defender against the increasing calls for censorship. In his deep, commanding voice, he argued in interviews and public speeches that audiences wanted pictures that reflected life as it was, not life as the moralists wanted it to be.
“Give the public real human pictures with hearts in them, and life and love and passion,” Taylor told one reporter, “and the public will rise up and call you blessed.”

He’d been especially busy these last few weeks as criticisms of the film industry mounted following Olive Thomas’s drug-related death in Paris. Few were as articulate as Taylor as spokesman for an industry in dire need of some major public-relations varnishing.

That, ultimately, was what this assemblage at the Brunton Studios was about, though it was also what it was billed as: a tribute, a place for people to come together and grieve. The film colony was a small town. If it weren’t for the palm trees that stood in for maples and oaks, Hollywood could almost have been mistaken for a New England factory town, with movies replacing brass pipes or rubber tires as the local manufacture. Everyone knew each other, no matter what studio they worked for. They belonged to the same clubs; they ate at the same restaurants; they shopped at the same stores and attended the same dinner dances. Very few lived more than half an hour’s drive from anyone else—and how easy it was to zip around in this auto-centered city! Downtown sometimes got congested at rush hour, with Pierce-Arrow runabouts and Oldsmobile touring cars puffing exhaust. But the movie people had settled, for the most part, at the ends of the long streets that radiated outward from the city center, past the citrus groves and date farms and oil wells. Driving to the studios in the morning in their open-air automobiles, the film folk waved to each other as they passed on the street, and again as they headed home in the evening.

So when someone died, it was a loss for the entire community. And when many died at once—and in violent and tragic circumstances, as had happened these last few months—it was an issue for everyone, not just the particular studio where the deceased had been employed.

They came together this afternoon to memorialize their dead. Ormer Locklear and Milton Elliott, aviators who’d been killed in a movie stunt gone wrong. Pretty starlet Clarine Seymour, whose mysterious death had stunned everyone. Bobby Harron, he of the “accidental” revolver discharge. And of course Olive Thomas, whose tragedy was still being played out in the daily headlines.
R
UMORS OF
D
RUG AND
W
INE
P
ARTIES
.
G
AY
R
EVELS IN
U
NDERWORLD OF
P
ARIS
. Even staid papers like the
Los Angeles Times
reported the
“sinister rumors of cocaine orgies” that had swirled around pretty little Ollie.

All around the country, editorials were lambasting the morals of the movie people. It was Taylor’s task, as industry point man, to mollify such critics. In his eulogy at the Brunton Studios, his goal was to put forward a respectable, decent face of the film colony.

On the Longacre stage, the largest of the studio’s film sets, eight hundred mourners—
“stars and stagehands, producers and supers”—were filing solemnly into the pews that had been hastily arranged by Brunton property men.

With all eyes on him, Taylor stepped up to the podium to speak.

Sitting in the audience that day were some of the most important people in the film colony. Adolph Zukor’s partner, Jesse Lasky. Zukor’s rival Thomas Ince. Zukor’s chief director, Cecil B. DeMille. Such top stars as Betty Compson, Harold Lloyd, Mae Marsh, Richard Dix, Thomas Meighan, Lila Lee, Charles Ray, Will Rogers, Bebe Daniels. And the biggest names of all, sitting front row and center, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, whose marriage, after Mary’s quickie Nevada divorce from Owen Moore, had caused its own scandal headlines.

The whole world was watching them. Everyone in that audience was well aware of that fact. They were all depending on Taylor to say what needed to be said.

He’d won their confidence over the past few months. In his most recent film,
The Soul of Youth
, Taylor had very wisely given a small part to Judge Ben Lindsey, a nationally recognized child advocate. It proved a masterstroke of publicity. After the experience of being in a movie, Lindsey became an enthusiastic supporter of Hollywood, offering a powerful counter to those who called movies too permissive and too dismissive of traditional values and religion.
“The motion picture is doing great work,” he declared. The effect of movies on children, Lindsey insisted, was “overwhelmingly good.” Taylor’s sagacity in co-opting Lindsey to the movies’ cause had won him fans among the industry chieftains.

What they faced was the old eternal battle between traditionalists and modernists, brought into stark relief by the end of the war. A new generation of moviegoers, finding, in Fitzgerald’s famous phrase, “all gods dead [and] all faiths in man shaken,” were flocking to pictures that reveled in a new sexual freedom, such as DeMille’s
Old Wives for New
and
Male and Female
.
“Film subject matter was changing to fit the times,” Adolph Zukor acknowledged, and he believed their job as filmmakers was to “stay abreast” of the times.

For every
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
, there were many other films that celebrated a new kind of woman—free, unapologetically sexual—and new kinds of relationships that men and women could enjoy. Other films exposed the seamier side of modern life, with prostitutes, pimps, alcoholics, and gangsters all striding across the celluloid for everyone, including children, to see. Even if good (usually) triumphed in the end, the very depiction of such things was enough to give the church ladies palpitations.

And so out had come the censor’s shears. In Pennsylvania, state-appointed moral guardians had even snipped out scenes of
“a woman making baby clothes, on the ground that children believe that babies are brought by the stork.” What was next? asked the
New York Times
. “Will it be a crime to show a picture of a man giving his wife a Christmas present on the ground that it tends to destroy faith in Santa Claus?”

Zukor and the other film chiefs loudly bemoaned this loss of artistic freedom. But the real pain they felt, of course, came from decreased profits. That was why Taylor had been dispatched to the Brunton Studios memorial to say some kind words about the industry and try to slow the march toward censorship in other states.

In his deep, resonant voice, Taylor intoned the names of the dead:
“Sweet little Clarine Seymour, radiant with youth.” He paused for effect. “Gallant, fearless Ormer Locklear.” Another pause. “True-hearted Bobby Harron.” And finally, with a tremble of emotion, “Generous, great-hearted Ollie Thomas.”

The melancholy strains of Chopin’s famous Funeral March filled the Longacre stage. The Reverend Neal Dodd, pastor of St. Mary of the Angels Episcopal Church, known as the motion picture people’s church, gave a reading from scripture. The Metropolitan Quartet followed with the popular piece “The Rosary,” by Ethelbert Nevin. No matter that most of the studio chiefs were Jewish, or that, except for Harron, none of those being memorialized had been especially religious. This little show at the Brunton Studios had a wider audience than just those present. The good Christian ladies in Newark, and Birmingham, and Des Moines—the ones who could either mobilize for censorship or stop such a campaign in its tracks—were the ones the movie bosses really wanted to impress.

At last it was time for Taylor’s eulogy. Standing tall and erect like the military commander he had been—during the war he’d attained the rank of captain in the British Army—Taylor orated in a rich, resounding voice that rang through the studio. He spoke in glowing terms of those who had been lost. No scandal was mentioned. Instead, Taylor spoke of honor, and devotion to duty, and friendship, and family. Many in attendance were moved to tears.

“William Taylor’s beautiful tribute to the memories of the recently departed stars tried even the stoutest hearts,” the reporter from the
Los Angeles Examiner
observed, “and will never be forgotten by the motion picture folk who made the unique pilgrimage of sorrow to the studio.”

“His sympathy,” declared another attendee, “was a thing of beauty. In it, with the utmost delicacy, he touched the tragic notes in the violent passings of youths who had all life and accomplishments before them, while from his stock of supreme tenderness he pointed his moral, revealing with the philosophy of a thoughtful and clear-visioned soul, the light in all things.”

Standing there before the high and the mighty of Hollywood, Taylor was their man, their voice. They saluted his oration with rousing applause. Pickford, Fairbanks, Ince—all of them commended Taylor for his advocacy. He seemed an impeccable propagandist to defend their industry, their livelihoods, their world. Difficult days still lay ahead; no one believed they’d put an end to the censorship movement overnight. But William Desmond Taylor had the strength, the authority, and the character to meet the challenges head-on.

But looking out at his audience, Taylor knew something they did not.

For all his noble bearing and dignity, he harbored some dark secrets of his own.

Of course, everyone had secrets in Tinseltown. Mabel, Gibby, and Mary had trunkloads of them. Even the mighty Adolph Zukor had Brownie Kennedy in his past. The film colony was a bubbling cauldron of hidden lives.

But the secrets of the man charged with its championship, William Desmond Taylor, would make the rest seem tame indeed.