A Last Goodbye
Taylor
On February 1, 1922, William Desmond Taylor was enjoying a rich, full life. In that silent film era, he was one of Hollywood’s most successful and respected directors. He had directed such acting greats as Mary Pickford, Dustin Farnum, Wallace Reid and Mary Miles Minter. His notable films included Davy Crockett, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He had recently directed The Green Temptation starring Bett Compson and Anne of the Green Gables. Both motion pictures had been well received (perhaps green was a lucky color for him) so he could look forward to directing many more movies.
The director resided in a California neighborhood called West Lake Park, at the time a fashionable area. His home was in Alvarado Court, a collection of bungalows grouped in a U-shape around an elaborately landscaped garden. Each house was built in a Spanish style with white stucco and red tiled roofs. The occupants of Alvarado Court tended to be people in the movie business. Another director, Charles Maigne, lived next door to Taylor. Acclaimed screen actors Agnes Ayres, Douglas MacLean and Edna Purviance also lived in Alvarado Court.
Taylor’s life was not entirely charmed. Earlier that year, his valet had defrauded and stole from him. Taylor had been in England when plump Edward Sands, the director’s cook, valet and secretary, wrecked Taylor’s car, forged checks for over $5,000, and stole jewels and clothes from his employer. Sands was not caught. He appeared to have simply vanished before the director returned to America.
Taylor’s replacement valet and cook, Henry Peavey, had gotten into some trouble unconnected with his job. Peavey had been arrested for vagrancy and indecent exposure, charges often made against homosexuals cruising for partners in those days. Taylor had put up bail for his beleaguered servant. The director had also promised the court that he would appear on Peavey’s behalf on February 2.
Taylor was close to the actress Mabel Normand and, for good reason, deeply concerned about her. In some accounts of the case, Taylor and Normand were in love. In others, they were close friends who shared books and laughs. In either case, Normand, like so many people in Hollywood in the post-World War I era, had experimented with mood altering drugs. She became addicted, and Taylor wanted to help her kick the habit.
Normand visited Taylor that day, February 1, to pick up a book on German philosophy. She left Taylor’s home at about 7:45 p.m. The director walked her to her car where he teased her about having a copy of the Police Gazette in the vehicle, a lowbrow magazine considered racy in its day. The philosophy book and the cheap, raunchy magazine certainly made for eclectic reading. Normand blew kisses at Taylor as he waved goodbye.
Shortly after, at about 8 p.m., Taylor was shot in the back inside his home. A single bullet killed him. Many people believe his killer slipped through the door that he had left open while he saw Normand off. The assassin likely waited for the director to return to the house, then ended his life with a single shot.
In the bungalow directly to the east of Taylor’s, Faith MacLean, wife of actor Douglas MacLean who had appeared in films directed by Taylor, was seated at her table and enjoying the last course of her evening meal. Her husband had finished his dinner and was upstairs playing cribbage. Suddenly she was startled by a sudden, explosive noise.
Faith looked outside in the direction of the sound. A stranger, who appeared to be a man in his late 20s, came onto the lighted doorway and their eyes met in the early evening’s darkness.
The man calmly turned around and went back into Taylor’s house. A few minutes later he emerged and strolled out of the courtyard through the area between the MacLean and Taylor homes. Reassured by the stranger’s unhurried manner, MacLean assumed she had heard a car backfire and thought no more of it — until the next morning.
At about 7:30 a.m. on February 2, Henry Peavey arrived at Taylor’s home to fix the director’s breakfast. He was carrying a bottle of milk of magnesia that his employer had requested. The valet bent down to pick up the morning newspaper from the doorstep. He had a key, and when he opened the door, let loose a blood-curdling scream.
The fully clothed body of William Desmond Taylor lay on his living room floor. A chair was astride one of his legs. It was later discovered that his pockets held a wallet with $78 in it, a silver cigarette case, an ivory toothpick, and a Waltham pocket watch. A two-carat diamond ring was on his finger. Above his hand he wore an item that had just come into vogue: a wristwatch.
A crowd gathered, and someone phoned the police. But some people got there before the police did.
The young film industry had suffered more than its share of bad publicity just before Taylor’s death. Two incidents in particular had caused much public outrage.
The first was the infamous affair of Fatty Arbuckle and the sadly named Virginia Rappé. Arbuckle was a film comedian whose talent had delighted audiences for years. Rappé died at a party Arbuckle was giving at his home. The comedian was arrested and charged with raping her in a way that caused her death. The prosecutor theorized rape by the overweight actor had ruptured the young woman’s bladder. A rumor circulated that Arbuckle had raped her with either a Coca-Cola bottle or a champagne bottle although this sensational charge was not made in court.
On the last day of Taylor’s life, he may well have read an article about Arbuckle’s manslaughter trial in his own daily newspaper.
Screaming newspaper headlines like ‘Torture of Virginia Rappé Charged’ and ‘ARBUCKLE DRAGGED RAPPÉ GIRL TO ROOM, WOMAN TESTIFIES’ biased much of the public against Arbuckle.
The president of the Federation of Women’s Clubs, Jennie Partridge, said, “It is a disgrace that any girl should have to suffer from this man’s ruthlessness. Arbuckle should be made to suffer.” Vigilantes attacked theaters showing Arbuckle films.
Arbuckle was tried three times. The first two trials resulted in hung juries. The third jury acquitted him and its foreman read out a special apology to the defendant for “the great injustice that has been done him.”
Most people who have examined the case believe that Arbuckle was innocent. It appears that Rappé had gonorrhea and an infected bladder. The ill effects of an illegal abortion may have also contributed to her tragic demise.
Despite the acquittal and ample evidence to show the case against him was fabricated, Arbuckle’s career was irretrievably shattered. As the New York Times wrote, “Arbuckle has become, through mischance, a symbol of all the vice that has been indulged in by movie people.”
The second major scandal that sent shudders through Hollywood was the drug-related death of popular actor Wallace Reid. Blonde, blue-eyed, handsome, musical and athletic, Reid became a star when he was only 23. The movie that catapulted him to fame was Enoch Arden in which he co-starred with Lillian Gish. His best performance was widely considered to be in Forever, the silent movie version of Peter Ibbetson.
Behind the scenes and unbeknownst to his adoring public, Reid was addicted to morphine. When his dependency began to affect his ability to work, the studio bosses did not immediately fire him. He was too valuable for that. Instead, they brought in doctors to try to break his addiction. They were unable to get him to stop taking narcotics. Eventually he agreed to go to the Banksia Place Sanitarium to be cured of his addiction. Unfortunately, Reid was so powerfully addicted that giving it up made him sick. He came down with pneumonia, then suffered a fatal heart attack.
Motion picture executives could not keep the truth about the cause of Reid’s death out of the newspapers. This was a time when the usual term for an addict was “dope fiend” and having a supposedly wholesome star stuck with this label after death did little to improve the reputation of Hollywood as a “den of iniquity.”
Nervousness over the probability of a fresh scandal explains why some people hurried to the home of the newly dead director for a clean-up operation. They are said to have been desperate to remove anything that could cast aspersions on the dead man and enmesh Hollywood in yet another scandal.
Charles Eyton, general manager of Paramount, the studio for which Taylor was working at the time of his death, is believed to have been behind a hurried attempt to cleanse Taylor’s residence of anything that could prove embarrassing. According to some reports, Eyton told Harold Fellows, Howard’s brother and Taylor’s chauffeur, to accompany Taylor’s colleague Julia Crawford Ivers and her son, camera operator James Van Trees, to Alvarado Court. Other reports say Eyton went there himself.
Mary Miles Minter
Adela Rogers St. Johns claimed in her book, The Honeycomb, that her husband Ike also went to the Taylor house early that morning. She said that the mayor of Hollywood told him to go there because he didn’t want his city deluged by more negative publicity. While in the house, St. Johns says, Ike stole monogrammed pink lingerie with the initials M. M. M., those of actress Mary Miles Minter, written on it.
One of the many mysteries around the Taylor case concerns a man at the scene who said he was a doctor but did not give his name. He told a police officer, Lieutenant Tom Ziegler, that he had examined the body and that Taylor had died of natural causes, probably heart trouble. No one has ever found the supposed doctor or the reason he gave his unsolicited and wrong diagnosis. If he really was a physician, he was extraordinarily careless, since just turning the body over revealed that Taylor had been shot.
When the police car drove up, some accounts claim that Ivers and Van Trees were speeding off. They had taken out Taylor’s bootleg booze and all the letters they could find. Some reports say people were burning some papers just as the police walked in although a critique in Taylorology, a magazine devoted to the case, says those accounts must be fanciful since the home had no fireplace. At any rate, people tampered with that crime scene, and they may have inadvertently aided the murderer of the man they knew as William Desmond Taylor but whose family named him William Cunningham Deane-Tanner.
He was born in Carlow, Ireland. Much about his life and death is in dispute including the year of his birth, which has variously been given as 1866, 1872 and 1877. Sources are more in agreement about the month and day: April 26. He was the second of four children. His father, Kearns Deane-Tanner, was a major in the British Army. The family was affluent. Major Deane-Tanner was a strict disciplinarian with a hot temper and frequently clashed with young William.
William left home in his teens after quarreling with his father. Precisely what sparked the row that led to their estrangement is unclear. Some accounts say that Major Deane-Tanner was upset because of the adolescent’s relationships with women.
Other versions of the story say that the major was so disappointed that his son failed the eye examinations for the Army that he threw the lad out of his home. This is a perplexing story since William did have poor eyesight. However, it is not impossible that the elder Deane-Tanner incorrectly believed that William had faked an eye condition to get out of the service and was outraged at what he perceived as cowardice.
After leaving the family home, William found work on the stage. It was 1890 when he managed to get a bit part in a production of Sir Charles Hawtrey’s “The Private Secretary.”
Word got back to Kearns Deane-Tanner that his son was appearing in plays and he was furious because, like many of the day, he viewed the theater as a low occupation. He decided that his son would no longer besmirch the family name and Major Deane-Tanner enrolled the budding actor in a place called Runnymede, across the ocean in Kansas. Runnymede was dedicated to turning young miscreants into gentlemen farmers.
William remained at Runnymede for a year and a half. There he picked up a strong interest in horses that would continue long after his stay at Runnymede became a distant memory.
Without a clear career goal in mind, William held a variety of jobs. He worked on a railroad, waited tables and did manual labor. For a while, he trudged door-to-door soliciting subscriptions for magazines.
Eventually he found his way to New York City and the theater there. On December 7, 1901, he married the well-to-do Ethel May Harrison, a pretty blonde who acted under the name ‘Effie Hamilton.’
Unable to support his family as an actor, William left the stage to manage an antique store, which was financed by his father-in-law. After Ethel became pregnant, she abandoned paid work for full-time homemaking. William did well in the antique business. He was urbane and sophisticated, and had a reliable knowledge of antiques.
However, as the years went on, he was increasingly bothered by minor health problems and seemed uneasy and bored. He apparently tried to spice up his life with a series of casual affairs. That must not have worked because he began to drink heavily.
It was on September 26, 1908, that William took the coward’s way out of an unhappy marriage. He asked underlings at his antique store to bring him $600 in cash. They did and he put $500 of it in an envelope and told them to give it to his wife.
With the remaining $100 in his pocket, he walked out of his wife and daughter’s lives without an explanation or apology.
William roamed from state to state, once again a traveler working at odd jobs. For a while, he panned for gold in Colorado and Alaska. Eventually, he got to San Francisco where the stage beckoned to him again. Before long, he became involved in the film industry, which was still in its infancy.
Like so many others, he changed his name. Film director Allan Dwan is quoted in Sidney D. Kirkpatrick’s A Cast of Killers as saying, “Taylor’s name choice was brilliant. It sounded like someone from an English novel, the kind Hollywood liked making into films.”
At first, the renamed William Desmond Taylor got small parts in Westerns. Directors and producers saw that the handsome actor could do the job so he was given the starring role of Robert Wainwright, leader of a band of rebels, in Captain Alvarez. His experience with horses at Runnymede must have helped him in making this movie since an article about the film called him “a wonder in the saddle.”
His ex-wife, Ethel May, happened to be in a theater with her daughter Ethel Daisy when his familiar face unexpectedly showed up on the screen. “That’s your daddy,” a startled Ethel May whispered to the younger Ethel.
Happily remarried, Ethel May did not use this opportunity to display the legendary “fury of the woman scorned.” Instead, she arranged for Ethel Daisy to correspond with, and eventually meet and develop a relationship with, her father.
As he grew older, Taylor believed he would do better behind the camera than in front of it. Hearing of an opening for a director at the Balboa studio, he applied for it and was hired. Balboa assigned him to direct The Awakening, released in October 1914.
While making The Awakening, Taylor fell in love with Neva Gerber, the lead actress. Gerber was married but separated. She was the mother of a small daughter. Her estranged husband was much older than she. He did not want a divorce and, in those days when divorces were much more difficult to obtain, easily blocked his young wife’s attempts to get one.
In 1914, The Judge’s Wife, a film directed by Taylor and starring Neva Gerber, was released. It told the story of a man’s sacrifice to save a lady’s reputation. Taylor apparently enjoyed romanticizing his own life because he told people that he had served three years in prison to “protect the honor of a woman he loved.” There is no evidence to support his assertion.
Balboa went out of business in 1917. Taylor and Neva dissolved their engagement in 1919. The love affair had simply died so they parted as friends and continued to see each other on occasion with Taylor sometimes extending financial help to his former fiancée.
Allan Dwan was to say, “I gave Taylor his big break” because Dwan hired him at the American Film Company after Balboa went under. Dwan was something of a directorial kingmaker for he also helped jumpstart the early careers of both King Vidor and Victor Fleming.
The American Film Company was nicknamed the Flying ‘A.’ Just before Taylor came on board, it had started a serial called The Diamond from the Sky. Mary Pickford did not want to play the heroine so the studio hired her sister Lottie. Unfortunately Lottie was not a dependable actress because she had a drinking problem. She was also pregnant although not yet showing. The director, Jacques Jaccard, abandoned Flying ‘A’ for Universal and William Desmond Taylor directed the remaining episodes of The Diamond from the Sky. He did an excellent job in finishing up the troubled project. The serial was a box-office smash and a grateful Flying ‘A’ cast presented their new director with a two-carat diamond ring as a special gift of appreciation.
He would work for other studios and direct many films, some of which were bombs and others that were successful both critically and commercially. Favorite Players, Pallas, Morosco, Fox, Famous Players-Lasky, Select, Realart and Paramount all made use of Taylor’s directorial talents.
The actor-turned-director took a break from the glamorous Hollywood life in 1918. World War I was raging and Taylor wanted to do his bit for the Allies. Although the British Army had turned him down in his youth, he was allowed (depending on the source) into either the British or its Canadian army in middle age. However, the war ended before Taylor could see combat. He was honorably discharged in 1919.
Returning home, he directed Anne of the Green Gables and The Green Temptation, and met his tragic demise soon after the latter project.
Right after the murder, police attention focused on his ex-valet, Edward Sands. Short and fat, ruddy-complexioned with straight, slicked-back brown hair, Sands impressed those who met him as an easygoing, affable sort. He spoke with a Cockney accent and to Taylor, who was a native of Britain, having another Englishman around must have been pleasant. Early on in his tenure, Taylor is said to have pronounced Sands “the most marvelous servant in the world.” Paramount art director George Hopkins said Sands seemed like “a Dickens character.” The 27-year-old man seemed to enjoy being a servant and once wrote to his employer, “I am your slave for life.”
However, Sands had a troubling history that Taylor apparently knew nothing about. His accent was phony. Records show that he had been born Edward Snyder in 1894 in Ohio. He had joined the Navy in 1911 when he was 17. He was court-martialed for embezzlement, convicted and sentenced to a year in a Navy prison. After being released from prison, he was dishonorably discharged.
Incredibly, the dishonorably discharged, convicted thief re-enlisted in the Navy when World War I broke out and was accepted. He became a clerk in the New York Navy Yard. In January 1919, in New London, Connecticut, he deserted.
This was a busy time for the young man. In February he enlisted in the Navy yet again but gave a false name. He called himself by the romantic moniker “Edward FitzStrathmore.” Then, after another three months, he deserted again — only to join up with the army a little over a month after that. In May 1919, Edward FitzStrathmore became a clerk in the finance department at the Columbus, Ohio, Army Depot. This must have been a welcome assignment for him. He soon passed a forged check, then deserted the Army in October.
In June 1921, Taylor sailed for England. He was recuperating from surgery and doctors advised that a vacation with a change of scenery would be a good idea. During his absence, a friend and colleague, playwright and novelist Edward Knoblock stayed in Taylor’s Alvarado Court home while Taylor would spend his vacation in a London apartment of Knoblock’s.
The director was concerned that Knoblock might want something during his stay and wished to make sure his friend was comfortable. So Taylor signed a blank check, handed it to Sands, and told him to use it if an emergency came up.
Bad move.
Sands filled the check in for $5,000 and cashed it. But that was only the beginning of his thefts. He forged his boss’s signature and cashed other checks. Shortly before Taylor’s expected return, Sands brought a large trunk into the house. He asked Knoblock for permission to take a week off for a honeymoon and the guest granted it.
Sands left and never returned. When Taylor returned, a variety of valuables were missing. The director’s car was gone but later found, deserted and wrecked. A complaint was issued against Sands on August 3, 1921 but the police were unable to locate him.
It is possible that the valet-turned-thief contacted his victim in December 1921. On Christmas Eve, Taylor received a letter along with two pawn tickets made out to “William C. Dene-Tanner.” The tickets were for Taylor’s diamond cuff links. The letter was brief and curious. “Dear Mr. Taylor,” it began, “So sorry to inconvenience you, even temporarily, also observe the lesson of the forced sale of assets. A Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.” It was signed “Alias Jimmie Valentine,” the title of an O. Henry story about a thief.
The police continued to search unsuccessfully for Sands after Taylor’s death, but they never charged him with murder. There was, after all, no evidence to support such a charge. There was not even anything supporting the contention that Sands was in the vicinity at the time of the slaying. Moreover, Sands’ crimes had always been motivated by a desire for gain. If he were the killer, why would he have left behind the cash and valuables? However, many believed then and still believe that Sands was the murderer.
Early in the investigation, authorities cleared Taylor’s current valet, a tall, muscular, black man named Henry Peavey, of any involvement in the slaying. However, a reporter named Florabel Muir was convinced that he was the killer. She believed she could trick Peavey into a confession, getting justice for the dead man and a great scoop for herself. She enlisted two men, Frank Carson and Al Weinshank, in a plan. Muir went to Peavey and pretended that she did not know where in Hollywood Park Cemetery Taylor’s grave was located. Could he guide her to it in exchange for $10? Peavey said he would. Muir, Carson and Peavey drove to the site.
When they got there, Weinshank, covered in a white sheet, appeared and shouted, “I am the ghost of William Desmond Taylor. You murdered me. Confess, Peavey!”
Peavey burst out laughing. Then, realizing what the trio had tried to do, he loudly and furiously denounced them all.
As it happened, Weinshank was one of the gangsters who died in the infamous St. Valentine’s Day massacre.
While the police were satisfied that Peavey had nothing to do with Taylor’s death, others beside Muir have thought he might have been the murderer. It is speculated that he and Taylor were having a gay affair and that Peavey may have killed his employer-lover in a fit of jealous rage.
Boardman
When film director King Vidor researched this case for a movie he planned to make he began to wonder if Taylor was gay or at least bisexual. According to A Cast of Killers, there was at least one source who credited those rumors.
That source was art director George Hopkins, a gay man who had worked with Taylor. In A Cast of Killers, King Vidor’s meeting with Hopkins is detailed. According to Hopkins, he was one of the people at the Alvadaro Court bungalow that morning.
“Charlie Eyton called and said Bill was dead,” Hopkins remembered, “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 and gathered every scrap of paper I could find and got the hell out.”
“What were you looking for?” Vidor asked.
“I figured you already knew that, too,” Hopkins replied.
“Taylor slept with men.”
director George
Hopkins
Hopkins indicated that Sands had blackmailed Taylor because of the director’s relations with men. Hopkins sprung a bombshell on Vidor with an unexpected question. “How do you know Peavey was homosexual?” Hopkins asked.
Vidor replied that the butler had been arrested for soliciting, “Peavey was obviously homosexual or why would he be in a park soliciting young boys?… Unless he was soliciting them for Taylor!”
The story has Vidor making several unwarranted leaps. First, he assumes on the basis of very little information that Taylor had gay affairs. Then he jumps from this possibility to that of the director’s having been interested in “young boys.” Whether Taylor had gay relationships is not known with certainty. Nor is there any evidence that, if he was bisexual, that he had an interest in young boys.
Also, the charges against Peavey himself were rather vague. Indecent exposure could have been connected with gay cruising. Then again, as is speculated in Taylorology, in those segregated days it could even mean that the black man had been denied the use of a “whites only” restroom and was caught urinating behind a bush in the park.
However, most of those who have investigated this baffling case agree that Peavey was not the killer. Peavey died in 1937. In 1930, he gave a press interview in which he is reported to have said that he believed that a famous actress and her mother murdered Taylor. They are not named but they do not have to be. Any reader with the slightest background in the case knew he was talking about silent film actress Mary Miles Minter and her mother Charlotte Shelby.
Many people suspected that Taylor was done in because of his love life. A director has a great deal of power and Taylor was a handsome man. He also had an ingratiating personality and a generous streak. This combination of characteristics made him very attractive to women.
Mary Miles Minter was known to be in love with Taylor. She was a lovely young actress who hated acting. Born Juliet Reilly in 1902, her mother Charlotte changed the family name to Shelby after her marriage to Juliet’s father, J. Homer Reilly, collapsed. Shelby appears to have been a classic stage mother.” She was determined to see that little Juliet became a successful actress. Mom wanted her child on stage or in the movies rather than in school so she decided that Juliet had to depict herself as older than she was. To that end, Charlotte got hold of the birth certificate of her dead niece, Mary Miles Minter, and christened her daughter with a new name and age.
Mary Miles Minter recalled how her ambitious mother had robbed Mary of her childhood. “My mother tried to keep me a ‘little girl’ with curls down my back,” she said, “but earlier she made me appear and act older than I was. When I was eight, I was passed off for 16, twice my age, and dressed as a midget, with high heels and long skirts, so that I could play the stellar role in ‘The Littlest Rebel’ at the Chicago Opera House.”
When Mary met Taylor in 1919, she was 16 and he was approaching 50. However, the teenager was already established as a screen presence, having appeared in well-received movies like Emmy of Stork’s Nest and Barbara Frietchie. She soon had a crush on Taylor. Did he reciprocate her feelings? Did he actually become intimate with her? She was under the age of legal consent so to have sex with her would have been a crime on Taylor’s part. Some observers believe Taylor had an affair with her. Others think he was only friendly with the young woman.
The death of the man she loved would be both a personal and a professional disaster for Mary. The revelation that she had, or at least wanted to be, involved with the older man caused a wave of public revulsion. Her films were boycotted.
However, Mary had never enjoyed acting, so the loss of her career did not appear to cause her much grief. She seemed to just want to forget her days as a star. Unlike so many of those close to the murdered director, she had a long, if not always happy, life and lived to be 82.
Some who looked at the Taylor mystery years later would wonder if Mary had been involved in it. Others would suspect her strong-willed mother, Charlotte Shelby. Adela Rogers St. John in The Honeycomb claims certainty that Shelby did in Taylor. Her motive? She disapproved of her daughter’s infatuation with a much older man. If she believed that the older man was actually enjoying sexual relations with Mary, she would have been outraged at such exploitative behavior on Taylor’s part.
How to explain the man seen by witnesses at the time of the shooting? Those who think Charlotte Shelby did it believe she cross-dressed to kill. Adela Rogers St. John champions that view in her book, The Honeycomb. She quotes Faith MacLean as saying that she saw a person in a man’s outfit “pulling her coat collar up and her hat down the way a woman does” and that she was certain it was “a woman dressed as a man.”
In A Cast of Killers, a story is told of a meeting between King Vidor and an elderly, obese Mary Miles Minter. He describes her as looking pitiful, surrounded by photographs from her silent film heyday, and giving the impression of being an overweight version of Sunset Blvd.’s Norma Desmond. She supposedly told him, tears in her eyes, “My mother killed everything I ever loved.”
Many investigators believe, however, that the person who entered Taylor’s apartment was a man, not a woman disguised as a man. Actor Carl Stockdale testified that he had been with Shelby in her house between 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. on the night Taylor was killed. In 1937, Shelby asked for a grand jury investigation into Taylor’s murder; this was hardly the action of someone who feared having the facts come out. Furthermore, Los Angeles district attorney Buron Fitts said there was no evidence on which to indict Shelby.
The depiction of an aging Mary Miles Minter as wrapped up in her past glory should also be taken with a grain of salt. She had never enjoyed her career and, after leaving the movie business behind, supposedly said at a party, “Don’t ever discuss my career, bravo!”
The magazine Taylorology claims that Peavey has been misquoted in saying that a young actress and her mother were responsible for Taylor’s death. That magazine claims that Peavey merely said “an actress” and that the context clearly indicates Mabel Normand.
Mabel Normand took naturally to show business. Born in 1892 on Staten Island to two Vaudeville entertainers, she grew into a vivacious adolescent beauty with a mass of dark, curly hair, big, expressive brown eyes, and a slim but shapely body. Her career as an artist’s model began at the tender age of 15. By 1909, Mabel was making comedies for Vitagraph. Her perfect timing and cute, clownish ways were divinely suited to the new medium of film and she would eventually be known as ‘the Queen of Comedy’ and called ‘The Female Chaplin.’
She left Vitagraph for the rival company Biograph, where she met Mack Sennett, a director who would be nicknamed ‘The King of Comedy.’ Since she was a good swimmer, Sennett suggested Biograph show her off in bathing suits. It was good advice, and Normand’s career took off in films like The Diving Girl, A Squaw’s Love and The Water Nymph, all of which demonstrated her skill in the water while regaling the audience with the svelte loveliness of her figure.
In 1912 Sennett began the history-making Keystone Comedies and Normand became their primary actress. The relationship between Sennett and Normand blossomed into a romance and they got engaged. Then disaster struck. Normand caught Sennett in bed with another woman.
Normand was severely injured shortly after this but there are at least three different versions of how that wound occurred. The newspapers carried stories saying she’d had an accident on the set. Other accounts say the woman Sennett was in bed with attacked Normand with a heavy object. Still others say she attempted suicide by trying to drown herself and was rescued.
At any rate, the wedding was off.
This disappointment apparently led Normand to take stock of herself. She became interested in more serious subjects and began reading widely and deeply.
She kept up her acting career and appeared with Fatty Arbuckle in several comedies including Fatty and Mabel’s Married Life, Fatty and Mabel Adrift, and Fatty’s Tintype Tangle.
Normand decided that she was being underpaid in comparison with similar stars. Giving Sennett (for whom she still worked) an ultimatum, she told him she would take her services to another company unless she got a raise. Sennett still hoped to win her back romantically and desperately wanted to keep her on as an actress. Not only did he instantly grant her the money she requested but he also set up a production unit within Keystone that he called The Mabel Normand Film company.
It would make only one film for Normand. That motion picture was called Mickey and was a great hit with the public. However, during the making of it, Sennett lost economic control of Keystone. Mickey was a great moneymaker for Keystone but not for Normand who was fed up.
She quit Sennett for the Goldwyn Motion Picture Company. Samuel Goldwyn took a more than professional interest in his high-spirited star. Some authors believe that, in 1918, Normand gave birth to Goldwyn’s child. It was stillborn.
Sometime during these periods of upheaval, Normand turned to narcotics to help her cope and got hooked. She also became involved with William Desmond Taylor, either as a close friend or a girlfriend. There are some reports that Taylor may have used narcotics but it is certain that he never became addicted. He sometimes broke into tears over Normand’s condition.
Concern over Normand’s drug dependency may have led Taylor to violence. Deed of Death recounts his having gotten into a fistfight with a dealer who was making a delivery to Normand. Assistant U. S. Attorney Thomas Green said publicly that Taylor had asked the government’s assistance in combating dope pushers who sold their goods to film people.
Some who thought Mabel Normand was having an affair with Taylor suspected her of killing him. They thought she might have been jealous of his relationships with other women. Others speculated that Mack Sennett, who was known to still be in love with Normand and always hopeful of rekindling their romance, had murdered Taylor.
Still others believe that a drug dealer Taylor had angered in his efforts to save her from addiction had killed him or hired a hit man to do it.
Normand’s career faded after Taylor’s death, partly because of the suspicions that followed it. Her addiction and emotional problems may also have contributed to her being out of work for a while.
Less than two years after Taylor was murdered, Normand found herself in the midst of yet another shooting scandal. She was at a New Year’s celebration in 1924, hosted by the wealthy Courtland Dines. Normand’s chauffeur, Joe Kelly, got into a fight with Dines and shot him. The latter suffered only superficial wounds and easily recovered. Kelly claimed he acted in self-defense and a jury believed him. The shooting further damaged Normand’s reputation leading to the banning of her films in some states and boycotts in others.
Tuberculosis took Normand’s life on February 22, 1930, at the age of 35.
It has been theorized that someone from Taylor’s past who had long nursed a grudge murdered him. One version holds that Edward Sands was really the director’s brother, Denis Gage Deane-Tanner. A purported tipster wrote to the police saying that William had once stolen Denis’ fiancée and that the younger brother was bent on revenge.
Denis Gage Deane-Tanner was a mysterious figure. He was born four years after William, their parents’ fourth and last child. Unlike William, Denis was able to please his father by getting into the Army as a youth. He was a lieutenant in the British Army during the Boer War in 1899-1902. He traveled to New York in 1903. Like his elder brother, Denis went into the antique business. He would eventually become the manager of an antique store. Denis wed Ada Brennan in 1907. The couple would have three children but one would die while still a baby. Ada’s health was not good and she had to be treated for tuberculosis. In 1912, while she was in a sanitarium for that purpose, Denis, like his brother before him, deserted his family without either warning or explanation.
It is rumored that he eventually got in touch with the brother he seemed to imitate and played a small part in Captain Alvarez. George Hopkins has said that Denis worked for William unofficially and without many people knowing about it.
Ada desperately tried to track Denis down. She was unsuccessful in finding her wayward husband but did locate William Taylor. At first Taylor told her she was mistaken, that he was not a Deane-Tanner and had no relationship to Denis Deane-Tanner. Then Ada burst into tears. She and her children were destitute. She did not know how she could possibly pay the bills. Taylor relented. He told her he would give her $50 per month and did until his death.
One reason people have speculated that Denis Gage Deane-Tanner was Edward Sands is that both had a talent for disappearing from their environments. Additionally, the pawn tickets Taylor received were from someone who knew his real name. However, since Sands read Taylor’s mail, it is likely he learned his employer’s real name from letters. Photographs exist of both Denis and Sands and they look nothing alike with Denis being lean and lanky and Sands quite overweight.
Some have said that Taylor made an enemy while in the army. A rancher named Andrew Cock reported picking up a couple of hitchhikers from Mexican border towns on the day before the Taylor slaying. Cock said that one of the men, ‘Spike,’ started talking about a Canadian captain under whom he and his fellow hitchhiker, a man the hitchhiker called ‘Shorty,’ had served. This captain had supposedly been unusually strict. At one point Spike said they were going to Los Angeles to kill this captain and Shorty brusquely told him to shut up. Cock was getting afraid and when he got to the main street in Santa Ana, stopped the car and told the men he was not traveling any farther. As Shorty exited the car, he dropped a gun that Cock recognized as a .38 caliber revolver.
Investigators took Cock to the border towns of Tijuana and Mexicali from where it seemed likely the men might have come. The group went in and out of resorts and saloons until Cock pointed out someone he recognized as one of the hitchhikers. That turned out to be a mouthy drug addict called Walter ‘Red’ Kirby who had previously been arrested after saying Taylor “got what was coming to him.” Kirby had been cleared.
After getting a better look at him, Cock said Kirby was not one of the men he had seen after all. The Army enemy lead, like so many others, hit a dead end.
Robert Giroux in his book, A Deed of Death, does not pretend to be able to identify the murderer by name but puts together a reasonable case that Taylor was done in by a professional hit man.
He rejects the idea that the killer was a woman because he believes that a man seen by several witnesses before the slaying was the person who entered Taylor’s apartment and took his life.
According to Giroux, two gas station attendants reported seeing a dark-haired male they did not recognize at about 6 p.m. The man, who was in his late 20s and weighed about 165 pounds, asked where William Desmond Taylor could be found and they pointed him to Alvarado Court. A Mrs. M. S. Stone, on her way to her daughter’s apartment near Taylor’s in Alvarado Court, saw a young, male stranger standing at the corner. A streetcar conductor and motorman remembered a man boarding their trolley at Alvarado and Maryland. They described him as “about 5-feet, 10-inches tall, around 165 pounds, about 27 or so.”
Going on the assumption that all of these are the same person and the individual who killed Taylor, Giroux believes the hypothesis of a woman dressed as a man can be ruled out. Charlotte Shelby in particular, a petite woman in her 50s, would have been unable to impersonate the man seen by these witnesses. Race rules out Henry Peavey. Age and build exonerate Edward Sands, Denis Deane-Tanner and Mack Sennett. The killer was unknown to the neighborhood since he had to ask directions.
That the killer was a professional is supported, in Giroux’s view, by his “true professional brilliance at the single moment of real crisis. Having accomplished Taylor’s murder without detection… he emerged to find Faith MacLean in her doorway, looking straight at him. Instead of panicking, he solved the crisis by instantly going back to Taylor’s door, pretending he’d forgotten something.” It is hard to imagine an amateur showing this type of “cool” under pressure.
Giroux believes it unlikely that a jealous lover or Charlotte Shelby hired this professional killer. Instead, he believes dope dealers had the strongest motive to want Taylor out of the way as well as the easiest access to hitmen. Taylor had gotten into physical fights with pushers and he had approached the U. S. attorney for help in putting such gangsters behind bars.
In Bruce Long’s William Desmond Taylor: A Dossier, flaws in Giroux’s theory are pointed out. “Would a professional killer deliberately expose himself to witnesses shortly before killing Taylor?” the author asks. “Isn’t it more likely that a professional killer would learn where Taylor lived and then commit the murder some other day, speaking to no one near the murder scene? And wouldn’t a professional killer have used a silencer so as not to disturb the neighborhood?”
Theories abound but none are without major problems. The mysterious death of William Desmond Taylor continues to fascinate. Part of the reason for the ongoing interest lies in the contradictory character of the victim, a man who could fecklessly flee his deepest responsibilities to wife and daughter but also express the greatest generosity and caring. Another reason is the unsolved nature of the crime and the likelihood that, no matter how many plausible theories are advanced, there will never be a solution satisfying to all observers. Then there is the fact that so many of early Hollywood’s best and brightest are on the list of suspects. Last is the environment in which this mystery took place, the post-World War I Hollywood of high spirits and hard crashes, Prohibition booze and illegal drugs. To explore the facts and fancies around this baffling murder is to be temporarily transported back in time to the birth and infancy of that uniquely modern art form, the motion picture.
Giroux, Robert, A Deed of Death, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY, 1990.
King, Ed, “I Know Who Killed Desmond Taylor,” Taylorology, Issue 50, Feb 1997.
“175 Errors and Contradictions in A Cast of Killers,” Taylorology, Issue 65, May 1998.
Kirkpatrick, Stanley D., A Cast of Killers, E. P. Dutton, New York, NY, 1986.
Long, Bruce, William Desmond Taylor: A Dossier, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., Metuchen, N. J., and London, 1991.
St. Johns, Adela Rogers, The Honeycomb, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1969.