Hollywood Gothic (1922-1986) a Cast of Killers

By Otto Friedrich

It was 7:30 a.m. on Feb. 2, 1922, when William Desmond Taylor's houseman came to work and discovered the film director's body lying faceup on the floor. When the police arrived an hour later, they found Taylor's Los Angeles bungalow swarming with reporters and souvenir hunters. The press made much of reports that Mabel Normand, the heroine of Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops comedies, was seen rummaging through desk drawers in search of her old love letters. A Paramount executive was sitting in front of the fireplace burning papers. A man claiming to be a doctor examined the corpse and announced that Taylor had died of a stomach hemorrhage. Only an hour later did an official turn the body over to find that he had been shot in the back with a .38 pistol.

The corpse still wore a diamond ring and a platinum watch, but there were many other motives besides robbery. The police discovered a closet filled with women's lingerie, monogrammed or labeled with the names of Taylor's conquests. One pink silk nightgown bore the letters M.M.M., for Mary Miles Minter, then 19 and Paramount's reigning blond. There were also stories of pornographic photos showing Taylor flagrante delicto with other stars.

Both Normand and Minter were regarded as suspects. So was Minter's fiercely protective mother and manager, Charlotte Shelby, who happened to own a .38. So was the houseman, Henry Peavey, who had recently been arrested for soliciting young boys. Or was it some drug dealer angered by Taylor's efforts to get Normand off her cocaine habit? Or one of several lunatics who made false confessions?

Coming shortly after the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, the Taylor murder and its accoutrements of drugs and sex led to the creation of the Hays Office and its puritanical Production Code. For nearly 30 years, Hollywood films were forbidden to show even a married couple making love or to allow the use of words like pregnant or virgin. The careers of Normand and Minter were ruined, but nobody was ever prosecuted for the Taylor murder.

That is only the first mystery in this Chinese box of a thriller. The second, nearly a half-century later, stars King Vidor, veteran director of such epics as Duel in the Sun and War and Peace. Vidor had worked in Hollywood ever since 1915 and had known both Taylor and Minter, but as he entered his 70s, he could no longer find assignments. Teaming up with another oldtime star (and onetime lover) named Colleen Moore, he decided late in 1966 to make a film about the Taylor murder.

Vidor interviewed all the survivors and gained access to secret police files. One of his most surprising discoveries concerned the "evidence" found in Taylor's bungalow: it had been planted there by Paramount. The studio wanted Taylor portrayed as a Casanova to disguise his homosexual private life. Even more surprising was the fact that the police had barely investigated several obvious leads. Working alone, Vidor traced the crime to its source. But he never made the movie, and never made any use of his more than 650 pages of notes and records .

The third mystery stars Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, 30, a documentary filmmaker and teacher of writing at California State University, Los Angeles. Vidor's family asked him to put the director's papers in order and write the official biography. Kirkpatrick found that Vidor had saved just about every scrap of paper he had accumulated in his long life--some 200 boxes of letters, manuscripts, Valentine cards, income tax returns--but almost nothing from 1967. The biographer ransacked Vidor's three houses, prying up attic floorboards, prowling through crawl spaces. After three weeks of searching, he found a padlocked strongbox in the garage of Vidor's Beverly Hills guesthouse. With a tire iron he smashed the lock, and there it all was, Vidor's archive on the Taylor murder. Kirkpatrick is a writer whose prose is merely serviceable, but the story that he has unearthed is a spellbinder.

The killer, Vidor concluded, was Charlotte Shelby, who not only wanted to protect her daughter from Taylor but also had a yen for him herself. According to this scenario, the ultimate stage mother locked up her love-hungry daughter on the night of the murder. Minter escaped and fled to Taylor's house. When Normand came by on a social visit, the girl hid upstairs in the bedroom. Mama arrived with her trusty .38 just in time to see her daughter descending the stairs. Assuming the worst, she opened fire. The case was never solved because Shelby used most of Minter's movie earnings, nearly a million dollars in all, to pay off various officials.

Vidor felt obliged to present his solution to Minter, whom he remembered as a beautiful nymphet. He found a grossly obese sexagenarian living in a dusty % and heavily curtained mausoleum. In a scene out of Sunset Boulevard, or even Great Expectations, she answered his questions by reading poems, which all bore the byline of her hated mother. When Vidor asked her to confirm his theory, she snapped: "You don't know anything about it. Mr. Taylor was a great man." Then as Vidor pressed harder, she sobbed: "My mother killed everything I ever loved." Well, what good would it do to make all this public? Vidor wondered. The decent thing was to keep the discoveries private until Minter died. As it turned out, Vidor died first, in 1982; Minter survived him by less than two years. What remains more alive than all their half-forgotten films is the murder that eventually engulfed them all.