What must be said about William Desmond Taylor is that he made an exceptionally good impression on those he met. He was able to walk away from jobs that others would kill for, and walk into better jobs in unrelated fields. Beautiful movie stars half his age fell madly in love with him and wanted to marry him, not once but at least three times. In the early days of Hollywood, when most everybody was a poseur and bullshit was the main credential, he was able to move easily from bit player to movie star to director. He was handsome, articulate, composed, considerate, and had great dignity. He was always able to get the jobs, and the girls, that everybody wanted. At the time of his murder the newspapers said that he had been the world’s greatest director.
He was murdered about 7:50 PM on February 1, 1922 in what is called his bungalow. We think of a bungalow as a one-story starter house; this was a nice place. I’m not sure why it is called a bungalow. Anyway, his body was found the next morning by his house servant, Henry Peavey, arriving for work a little less than twelve hours later. The murder was never solved. One newspaper suggested it was called a bungalow because the police had bungled it so badly.
King Vidor was a part of old Hollywood, another director. King was his given name. He had known Taylor, and had worked with him. Not quite a half-century later Vidor decided to figure out who had killed Taylor and to make a movie about it. Vidor was an old man by then; perhaps that would have gone without saying. He had directed the black-and-white scenes in The Wizard of Oz. Hollywood had left him behind after a 40-year career, and he was trying to get back in the game. He thought the Taylor story might be his ticket. He worked on it for a year, but the movie never went anywhere and he put it away.
After Vidor’s death in 1982, a young writer/director/film student named Sidney Kirkpatrick was working on a biography of him. Kirkpatrick discovered Vidor’s cache of notes and tapes about the Taylor case, and decided to turn that into a book. "The Sensational True Story of Hollywood’s Most Scandalous Murder," says the cover of A Cast of Killers, "Covered Up for Sixty Years and Solved at Last by the Great Film Director King Vidor." E. P. Dutton, 1986.
Nathaniel Hawthorne loved the concept of a story within a story. Hawthorne was fond of pretending that his stories were based on some old, dusty manuscript that he had found in the back room of a warehouse. This gave his stories two levels, the first told with the concrete, present-day clarity of events well understood, and the second told through a haze of time and memory, hanging in the air as an ancient myth. This is a story within a story; Kirkpatrick is telling the story of the murder of William Desmond Taylor through the story of King Vidor.
Kirkpatrick is not a bad story teller; he’s pretty good. There is a serious problem with the concept of telescoping a crime story inside of another story. A crime story by its nature is particular, specific, tied to its details. The precise sequence of events and observations is the critical essence of the narrative. Relating those events in a jumbled, non-linear sequence, as they are seen through the eyes of the second principle character, is rather like chopping the Mona Lisa into a kaleidoscope. It’s interesting, but I’m not sure that’s what DaVinci intended us to see.
Mary Miles Minter was a silent screen movie star. In 1919, at the age of 16, she was making more than $2,000 a week, perhaps the highest-paid star on the screen for a while there. She was hot.
She was really hot. Maybe it’s just me. After the Taylor murder, the Des Moines Tribune commented that the great advantage of a murder in Hollywood was that "it was not a difficult matter to get hold of pictures of the various persons involved." By 1922 Minter was 19 years old; Taylor was 49. They weren’t exactly engaged, but lingerie was found in his bedroom, embroidered "MMM", and love letters from her. (The Seattle Star remarked that every time there was a shooting in Hollywood, "some screen star finds out where the rest of her clothes are.") She insisted as long as she lived that she would have married Taylor, had it not been for the tragedy. The last person to see Taylor alive was Mabel Normand, another young movie star of the era; she had dropped by Taylor’s apartment to borrow a book. Like Minter she was poorly educated and naive, and she was being exploited for her beauty and her talent, although she was well paid for it. Normand had had drug and alcohol issues. Her account of their relationship was that Taylor was one of the few men she knew who didn’t try to take advantage of her. An outspoken opponent of drug use, he had paid out of his own pocket to get her cleaned up, and he had encouraged her to read and improve herself. Other people have suggested that the relationship was not so innocent, but. ..that was what she said.
Mabel Normand was involved in a period of three years in three separate murder scandals. In none of these does she appear to have done anything wrong. Fatty Arbuckle….well, you probably all know the outlines of the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, and if you don’t I’m not going to get into it, but it wasn’t exactly a murder and Arbuckle was, after all, acquitted, and Mabel Normand wasn’t anywhere near any of those events, but she and Arbuckle had starred together in several movies, and so her name was tarnished by association. Fatty Arbuckle was on trial at the time that Taylor was murdered, and then, two years later, Normand’s chauffeur was so inconsiderate as to shoot somebody with Mabel’s pistol. Normand’s career was swept away by these scandals, and she died of tuberculosis at the age of 37.
Hundreds of people have been accused over the years of murdering William Taylor, among them, of course, Minter and Normand. King Vidor’s conclusion (spoiler alert) was that Taylor was murdered by Charlotte Shelby, who was an actress herself, but more importantly Mary Minter’s mother.
Vidor’s argument for this conclusion, however—or at least Kirkpatrick’s explanation of it—is so weak that one doesn’t even really understand why he believes this to be true. This appears to be one of the critical passages in his argument against Shelby (p. 185):
Minter was not asked to explain how, if as she claimed she’d never had a physical relationship with Taylor, her nightgown came to be found in his bedroom, or how hair from her head had found its way to Taylor’s jacket collar.
OK, two critical facts there: (1) Minter vigorously denied that Taylor had ever given her a monogrammed silk nightie, but such a nightgown was in fact found in his apartment by the police, and (2) two or three hairs identified by police as Minter’s were found on Taylor’s jacket, the jacket he was wearing at the time of his demise.
But the explanation for the nightie seems stupefyingly obvious: Taylor had purchased the nightgown and had it embroidered for MMM, but, as they had not yet consummated their relationship, he had not yet given it to her. And as to the hairs, which "the police had identified" as Minter’s, there was no forensic technique to identify hairs as belonging to a specific individual until many, many years after Taylor’s murder. There not only was no such method in 1922, when Taylor was killed, there was no such method in 1967, when Vidor was investigating the case. Even in the 1980s, when Kirkpatrick was writing about Vidor’s research, such evidence was speculative. Hair and fiber evidence was introduced in Wayne Williams’ trial in 1981-1982, but it was a fight to get it admitted, and I personally thought that the "hair" portion of it was BS. I believe that the police thought that those were Mary Minter’s hairs, but that’s as far as I would go with that.
And if they were Mary Minter’s hairs, so what? No one denies that there was some sort of relationship between these two people. It is not unusual that her hair would be clinging to his jacket. Those facts don’t seem to me to contribute anything toward the case against Shelby, which is, in essence, that Shelby murdered Taylor because he was threatening to take her meal ticket away from her.
The time frame surrounding the discovery of Taylor’s body is confused and confusing. Peavey apparently discovered the body about 7:30 AM or earlier, did not realize that there had been a homicide, and immediately called the police. But then, not realizing that Taylor had been murdered, he also called a couple of other people, including Taylor’s studio. Taylor’s studio, hoping to avoid another scandal in the midst of the ruinous Fatty Arbuckle affair, sent people rushing to the bungalow to get anything out of there that might be considered scandalous. By the time the police arrived there were eight to twelve other people already on the scene, carrying out things that might have made Taylor, or Taylor’s bosses, look bad.
A bookkeeper claimed (three years after the fact) that Charlotte Shelby called her on the morning of the murder, about 7:30, and told her about Taylor’s murder. Shelby said that a) it was the bookkeeper who called her, and b) it was more like 9:00.
The police claimed that they were at the bungalow a half-hour after the call came in. Yeah, right. Some of the people who were at the bungalow before the police reported that they had been roused from their beds and told to rush to Taylor’s place. It is virtually impossible to see how the studio could have responded to a call from Peavey after he had called the police, called their employees at home, and gotten that many people to the bungalow in less than half an hour.
The newspapers of the time printed substantially varying reports about the time of the discovery of the body and the time the police responded. Vidor tries to make this into evidence against Shelby by insisting that there is only one time line—the police time line—and that that means that Shelby called the bookkeeper about the murder before the police even turned over the body and discovered that Taylor had been shot. What seems much more likely is that either the police timeline is a fiction designed to make it appear that the police responded much more quickly than they actually did, or Peavey in fact called other people before he called the police. Or both.
Let’s face it; Vidor’s solution to the mystery is not a real solution; it is a Hollywood solution. A movie has to tell a story; I understand that, and I’m not criticizing it. But the fact that Vidor picked this as the story he wanted to tell does not make it true.
On the morning of the murder, Henry Peavey was due to appear in court, on a charge of soliciting teen-aged male prostitutes from a nearby park. Taylor was scheduled to appear and speak up for him. Vidor believes that Peavey was soliciting prostitutes on Taylor’s behalf, that Taylor was a secret homosexual with a taste for young boys.
He has, in my view, no evidence for this whatsoever. He points out that Henry Peavey kept an apartment near Taylor’s house, and that Taylor paid for the apartment. Vidor thinks it was a place to take young boys. He quotes several instances of Taylor’s lack of interest in young actresses. Page 51, from an interview with an aging co-worker:
I don’t know if Taylor ever slept with (Mabel Normand). He wasn’t the kiss-and-tell type. He didn’t even stand in line to peep through the secret holes in the walls of the actresses dressing rooms.
Vidor wonders whether Taylor did not engage in this adolescent sexual behavior because he was not interested in girls. A more plausible explanation is that he was not an adolescent. He was a grown man who understood the process of earning respect by behaving respectfully. Page 185:
Another Athletic Club member said Taylor himself told of Mary’s once bursting into his bungalow, undressing, and begging to be made love to. Taylor again turned her down.
Oh, yeah; that kind of stuff happens all the time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to tell Keira Knightley to put her clothes back on. It reflects poorly on Kirkpatrick’s judgment that he finds space in his book for this anecdote, apparently told to Vidor forty years later by someone who claimed to have known Taylor from his athletic club.
And, if Taylor was in fact homosexual, so what? It doesn’t have anything to do with Vidor’s theory of the crime; it is merely a rabbit trail. If he wanted to argue that Taylor was murdered so that his "true" sex life wouldn’t come to light in a criminal proceeding, I could see the relevance. But given Vidor’s theory of the crime, it’s of no relevance anyway. Even were it true, which seems unlikely.
I wanted to double back to the issue of the hairs. I would bet that many, many people who read this book at the time of its publication in 1986 immediately spotted the problem with Vidor’s claim that hairs found on Taylor’s jacket were identified by police as Mary Minter’s hairs. Anyone who reads crime books would have known that that was impossible, given the forensic science of the time.
The thing is, Kirkpatrick doesn’t read crime books. Many people who write crime books quite obviously never read crime books. This is obvious first because they often say things, like this, that reveal an underlying ignorance of the general subject, and second because they will often spend pages explaining things that, if they read crime books, they would know that almost all of their readers are already familiar with.
This is one of the key reasons that I wrote Popular Crime, which I didn’t quite get to explain in the book: I wrote it in an effort to attack the general, underlying ignorance of the good writers—like Kirkpatrick—who occasionally will whip out a crime book. Think about it: wouldn’t it be strange if you had people writing books about physics who never read books about physics? Wouldn’t you think it odd if you had people writing books about politics who had quite obviously never read very much about politics?
But that is the real condition of the crime publishing industry: many of the people who write crime books quite obviously never read them. It has to do with how people think about crime books, as a sub-professional diversion. I was trying to elevate the field, just a little bit, by challenging the writers of future crime books to read up on the subject before they dive in.
Regarding the death of Bill Taylor, my instinct is that it was not Charlotte Shelby who killed him. Just a small thing; I would never argue that details like this are persuasive, but. ..just a little thing that bothers me. Taylor was shot in the back while standing with his hands over his head, which we know because the bullet hole in the jacket only lines up with the bullet hole in his body if he had his hands in the air at the time he was shot.
Vidor’s argument is that Shelby wanted Taylor for herself, and was furious at him because he rejected her and was trying instead to take her daughter away from her (not knowing the true facts about Taylor’s sexuality.) But if you visualize that confrontation, at what point does Shelby say to him, "OK, face the wall and put your hands in the air?" It doesn’t happen that way. If he was shot by an angry, jealous woman, he’d have been shot in the chest in the middle of a sentence. When somebody points a gun at you and orders you to face the wall and get your hands in the air, that’s not an angry woman; that’s a career criminal. Just my opinion.
(Some information for this article was taken from the web site Taylorology, and in particular from the article "The Humor of a Hollywood Murder", by Bruce Long.)