Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (56 page)

Just a short distance away from the grave of the man he killed, William Desmond Taylor.

George Hopkins, Taylor’s lover, went on to a remarkable career as one of Hollywood’s most celebrated set decorators. Some of the great American movies were styled by Hopkins:
Casablanca
,
Mildred Pierce
,
Life with Father
,
Strangers on a Train
,
A Streetcar Named Desire, A Star Is Born
,
East of Eden
,
Auntie Mame
,
My Fair Lady
,
Inside Daisy Clover
,
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
,
Hello, Dolly!
, and
The Day of the Locust
. He died in 1985, at the age of eighty-eight.

Henry Peavey finally got his wish to move back to San Francisco, but his health rapidly declined. By 1930 he was living at the Napa State Hospital. He died of syphilis there the next year, at the age of forty-nine.

No trace of Edward Sands was ever found.

Detective Lieutenant Edgar King officially retired from the Los Angeles Police Department and became a permanent investigator for the district attorney’s office. He apprehended Kid McCoy, the prizefighter turned murderer, and helped track down and capture Otto Sanhuber, the “ghost in the attic” who killed Fred Oesterreich. Although he always regretted not capturing Taylor’s killer, spending his life convinced of Charlotte Shelby’s guilt, King got a great deal right in his investigation. He nailed the distance of the killer to the victim; he correctly described how Taylor grabbed the chair to defend himself, which resulted in his arms being raised over his head when he was shot; he figured out that Taylor had collapsed on top of his killer. Had Charles Eyton not stolen Taylor’s papers after the murder, I believe King would have solved this crime long ago. Eddie King died in 1965, aged eighty-eight.

Charlotte Shelby finally shared Mary’s fortune with her. In fact, she had invested her daughter’s earnings quite well, enough that they both lived very comfortably for the rest of their lives. Despite all their squabbles and legal battles, the two eventually reconciled, and Shelby spent her last days living in Mary’s house, a reversal of their original roles. Elegant and formidable even into old age, Shelby remained bitter about all the years of accusations and slander. In 1942 she hired a ghostwriter to pen a roman à clef, which she titled
Twisted by Knaves
. The unpublished manuscript tells the story of Taylor’s murder, but makes it clear that Shelby had no idea who did it. She died in 1957 at the age of seventy-nine, in the home of her daughter.

Mary Miles
Minter never made another movie. In the age of the talkies, she came to represent a mawkish, overly sentimental era, though the 1920s had been anything but. People remembered Mary and her lacy, pipe-curled companions as saccharine and simplistic, hardly doing justice to the vibrant, passionate personalities of the era. But with so few silent films surviving, Mary—and Mabel and Gibby, too—would exist for most people only as memories framed in heart-shaped iris shots.

Mary had wanted the freedom to live her life as she pleased. She got that chance, for a while, dwelling among the fashionable set in New York. But people found her slightly off, living in a world of funhouse mirrors. Between Mary’s bizarre upbringing and the indignities of the Taylor investigation, that really wasn’t too surprising. People laughed at her behind her back and whispered about the scandal. Never having learned how to be an adult, Mary trusted people she shouldn’t have, including a broker who defrauded her out of $200,000.

Moving back to California, the former star lived in Beverly Hills, growing fatter and more eccentric. Mary dabbled in interior decoration, but mostly she and her mother lived off trusts. At the age of fifty-five, just a few weeks after her mother’s funeral, Mary finally wed. Her husband was Brandon O’Hildebrandt, a wealthy real estate developer. O’Hildebrandt made sure Mary stayed comfortable, even if they rarely saw each other. Their neighbors across the street on Adelaide Drive, high above the beach in Santa Monica, were the playwright and author Christopher Isherwood and his life partner, the artist Don Bachardy. Never once did Bachardy see Mary’s husband or have any sense of him.

Mary, on the other hand, was impossible to miss. “She was enormous,” Bachardy remembered. She would scold him for driving too fast down their street, apparently forgetting the days when she zipped around Los Angeles in her little blue runabout, a car she no longer could have fit into. Once, inviting Bachardy and Isherwood inside, she hinted that the playwright might want to pen her biography. “So many erroneous things have been written,” she said. Isherwood demurred.

After her husband died in 1965, Mary became even more reclusive, never leaving the house. Only a few visitors, such as the film historian Kevin Brownlow, were allowed inside. On the walls hung portraits of herself in her younger days. Still wearing the curls and lacy dresses of her early years, Mary talked endlessly to visitors in long, meandering, sentimental streams of consciousness. She had become Norma Desmond, or Baby Jane Hudson.

But mention the Taylor case, and the fire would return to her eyes. Why must this be the first thing people remembered about her? Why was that the only thing anyone ever wanted to talk to her about?

And yet she’d wax poetic about the late director, calling him her only love despite her eight-year marriage to O’Hildebrandt. If anyone suggested she knew something about Taylor’s murder, she’d turn red and angry. Like her mother, Mary had had enough of such talk. In 1970 she sued CBS and the producer Rod Serling, after Serling suggested on television that Mary had been involved in the murder.

The years passed. Mary suffered increasingly from diabetes.

Late one night in January 1981, she was awakened by a masked intruder. The terrified seventy-eight-year-old woman was gagged and bound, breaking her wrist in the struggle. The thief took $300,000 worth of antique china, silver, and jewelry. Eventually police arrested Mary’s caretaker, a thirty-nine-year-old woman, for masterminding the crime. After all this time, Mary still hadn’t learned whom she could trust and whom she couldn’t.

She died on August 4, 1984, at the age of eighty-two. The very first line of Mary’s obituary mentioned her connection to the sixty-two-year-old Taylor murder.

Of course it did.

Will Hays survived his own mini-scandal in June 1929, when his divorce was finally granted and became public knowledge. A short time later, it was rumored that he was involved with a divorcée, Mrs. Virginia Lake. But Hays had learned how to let criticism roll off him, especially from the Anvil Chorus. He ended the scuttlebutt in 1930 when he married the eminently respectable Jessie Stutesman, widow of the former ambassador to Bolivia and daughter of a prominent Indiana family.

As a new push for censorship arose in the early sound era, led this time by Catholic priests and laymen instead of Protestant clergymen and church ladies, Hays was compelled to establish the Production Code Administration. The code was a draconian self-censorship protocol that went far beyond his original Formula, sterilizing American films for the next thirty-plus years. It is ironic that “the Hays Office” would become synonymous with a puritanical, moralistic worldview, when the man himself was progressive and pragmatic.

Will Hays should be remembered not as Hollywood’s censor but as one of its greatest practitioners of public relations. As the power of Adolph Zukor waned, Hays became
“an apostle of progress, an optimistic advocate of new media, and a skilled user of publicity,” in the opinion of Indiana historian Stephen Vaughn. With his successful Public Relations Committee and various other creative outreaches to the public, Hays saved the film industry from federal regulation and secured its place as the foremost means of communication in the twentieth century. He remained at the helm of the MPPDA until 1945. Hays died in his hometown of Sullivan, Indiana, in 1954, aged seventy-four.

Adolph Zukor seemed to let out a long, deep breath once he made it to the top of his skyscraper. The days of his greatest power were past. But he had achieved his monument, which still stands today. The giant clock on the side of the building is still ticking, and Paramount still has offices inside, though Zukor’s theater was shut down in 1964 and demolished in 1967.

The addition of Balaban & Katz to the company and the expenses of its theater chain eventually saddled Paramount with a crushing debt—so much so that, by the early sound era, the company Zukor had once kept so lean and tight was bankrupt. Paramount would bounce back, and magnificently, but it wasn’t Zukor who led the revival. The board of directors appointed Barney Balaban to take over as head of the company, and Zukor agreed to “step upstairs into an advisory role.” There he spent the next forty years, dispensing words of wisdom from on high.

In his unfinished novel
The Last Tycoon
, F. Scott Fitzgerald would write that Hollywood could only be understood “dimly and in flashes.” Fewer than half a dozen people, he said, had “ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.” Zukor was one of those few. He created a system that worked brilliantly for nearly three decades, and then proved adaptable enough to accommodate the technological changes that challenged it. The vertically integrated model Zukor established
“would change only in the means of presentation,” one studio historian observed. In 1953, when the movie studios were worried about the rise of television, Zukor saw no need for panic.
“Rather than lose the public because television is here,” he argued, “wouldn’t it be smart to adopt television as our instrument?” So Paramount did, opening television studios that offset the losses in its movie divisions.

Even though he did not know what was to come, Zukor’s system survived television, video, DVDs, and even the Internet, accommodating them all as new venues for the presentation of moving pictures. That’s what came of keeping “the whole equation” in his head.

Not until 1948 did the government finally force the movie studios—all of them, not just Paramount—to divest themselves of their theater chains. By then Zukor was happily ensconced as chairman emeritus. In 1953 he published a memoir,
The Public Is Never Wrong
, which he dedicated to his wife Lottie. The book is free of any real introspection, though it shares some good stories of the early days. About the scandals he had done his utmost to contain and control, Zukor said little. Without further comment or a hint of sympathy, he wrote, “To the day of [Arbuckle’s] death in 1933, the storm had not abated sufficiently so that he could make another picture.” He offered no details of his part in that storm. Of the Taylor case, Zukor said it made for “good reading,” and recalled the fodder it gave to “dozens of special correspondents” who painted Hollywood as “a wicked, wicked city.” Of Taylor’s papers, or the actions he’d taken after reading them, Zukor said nothing. He took that secret with him to the grave.

Zukor had never been one for soul-searching; that was Marcus Loew territory. He spent his golden years peacefully, relying on Lottie for company, seemingly free of regret. One day in 1956, when Zukor was eighty-three, Lottie insisted on making him one of her special Hungarian meals all by herself, served on their best china. Zukor would say they
“never had such a time.” The next day Lottie suffered a stroke that eventually killed her. Zukor took her death “very philosophically,” his son Eugene said, “because he remembered their last night together.”

Zukor would live another twenty years, spending his winters in Los Angeles to be near Eugene. Almost every day he was driven to the Paramount lot, slowly ascending the stairs to his office, going over the company’s financial reports with a careful eye.

For his hundredth birthday, Zukor was feted with a gala party. Twelve hundred people filled the ballroom at the Beverly Hilton. Charles Bluhdorn, chairman of Gulf & Western, Paramount’s new owners, declared that Zukor “exemplified the American dream.”

The little man with the unblinking eyes sat in his chair, looking out at all the people who had come to pay their respects. When Marcus Loew died, his funeral had brought out all of his peers, but Zukor’s peers were long dead. Most of the people who had come for his party were too young to have seen a first-run silent picture. They didn’t remember William Desmond Taylor, or Roscoe Arbuckle, or Mabel Normand, or Jesse Lasky, or Will Hays, or Brother Wilbur Crafts. They had little understanding of the changes Zukor had seen and wrought. He had started with a handful of penny arcades, and lived long enough to see the age of the blockbuster.
Jaws
was in the nation’s theaters during the last year of the old man’s life.

“Moses lived to a hundred and twenty,” the rabbi at his birthday party said.

Creepy just smiled.

He died in 1976, at the age of one hundred and three.

I could not have written this book without the extraordinary work of Bruce Long. Three decades ago Bruce started discovering, assembling, analyzing, and making available material on the Taylor murder. This book is one of many that owes him an incalculable debt: every study of American silent film benefits from the material Bruce has compiled in his book
William Desmond Taylor: A Dossier
, and on his remarkable and compulsively readable site, taylorology.com.

Recognition must also go to Sidney D. Kirkpatrick and the late Robert Giroux and Charles Higham, authors of previous books on the Taylor murder. While I believe that my solution to the long-unsolved crime is the correct one—and the only one not contradicted by the available evidence—each of these three previous writers conducted invaluable research that informed my understanding of my subjects and the times they lived in. I am deeply indebted to all of them.

My thanks to the historians, librarians, and archivists who helped me uncover so many artifacts from nearly a century ago. In alphabetical order: Louise Corliss, Vermont State Archives; Simon Elliott, UCLA Library Special Collections; Natalie Fritz, Clark County Historical Society, Springfield, Ohio; Sandra Garcia-Myers, Cinematic Arts Library, University of Southern California; Barbara Hall, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California; David Hardy, Records Management Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation; David W. Jackson, Jackson County Historical Society, Independence, Missouri; Ginny Kilander, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming; Glenn V. Longacre, National Archives, Chicago; Harry Miller, Wisconsin Historical Society; Joann Nichols, Brattleboro Historical Society, Vermont; Albert Palacios, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; Galen Wilson, National Archives, Federal Records Center, Dayton, Ohio; and various archivists from the New York Public Library, main branch as well as the Performing Arts Library in Lincoln Center; the Los Angeles County Archives; and the Boston Public Library.