Among classic American murder cases, the 1922 shooting death of Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor is one of the most intriguing. Although Lizzie Borden’s axe murders, the assassinations of Kennedy and Lincoln, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and the O. J. Simpson trial continue to inspire retelling and speculation, these cases are all generally regarded as solved. But no one knows for sure who fired the shot that brought down the handsome and well-liked Taylor, an admired and influential figure in the film community, albeit with a shady past.
Early on the morning of February 2, 1922, Taylor’s valet Henry Peavey found the director dead in his apartment at the fashionable Alvarado Court. Peavey’s screams awoke the neighbors, including actor Douglas MacLean, his wife Faith (who would prove an important witness), and Charlie Chaplin’s leading lady, Edna Purviance. Colleagues from the film industry got to the scene ahead of the police, who were already in thrall to the power of the studios and whose first representative on the scene could find no evidence of a crime. Fellow employees at the Famous Players-Lasky studio were ordered by the general manager to search Taylor’s bedroom and remove anything written. A series of recent Hollywood scandals made it important not to provide ammunition for another.
Taylor was born in Ireland in 1872 as William Cunningham Deane-Tanner, the son of a retired British Army officer. Coming to America in 1890 to work on a Kansas dude ranch, Taylor later moved to New York, married, and entered the antiques business. In 1908, he suddenly deserted his wife and daughter. After some time mining for gold in Canada and Colorado, he became a stage actor and began his career before the camera by starring in the 1914 feature Captain Alvarez.
Taylor’s subsequent directing career was interrupted by a year as a Canadian military volunteer. (He joined in 1918, near the end of the Great War, and continued into 1919.) Returning to Hollywood, he became a leader in the defense of the fledgling film industry against charges of immorality, and he was especially concerned with stamping out narcotics use. Though he had relationships with women, Taylor was bisexual, and his lover at the time of his murder was a set designer named George James Hopkins, who would later win multiple Oscars.
Most notorious unsolved murder cases, such as the Jack the Ripper crimes and the Black Dahlia killing, make for unsatisfactory whodunits since the accused is usually someone unknown to all but a few. The William Desmond Taylor case is an exception: The chronicler can introduce a large cast of possible suspects and attempt to fix guilt on someone known to most readers. Here, William J. Mann does not reveal his murderer-candidate until his closing pages, and up to that point, he misdirects the reader’s suspicions in the best mystery-novel fashion.
Prior to Tinseltown, there were at least five full-length volumes about the Taylor case. Samuel A. Peeples’s The Man Who Died Twice (1976) is fiction closely based on fact, a time-travel variant in which a Los Angeles cop is shot by a fugitive in the present and wakes up in 1922, at which point he gradually realizes that he has entered the body of a still-living William Desmond Taylor and determines to prevent the crime he knows is coming. This preposterous premise is brought off remarkably well, and the main figures appear under their real names, with the exception of the one pegged as murderer. (Caution about potential lawsuits can compromise the whodunit element.)
Sidney D. Kirkpatrick’s A Cast of Killers (1986) is nonfiction, but with its volume of reconstructed dialogue, it reads more like a novel. It is based primarily on the notes and manuscripts of director and amateur sleuth King Vidor, a Taylor contemporary, who chose the same culprit Peeples fingered under an alias: Charlotte Shelby, the mother of actress Mary Miles Minter. By some accounts, Robert Giroux’s A Deed of Death (1990) was written specifically to counter the claims of Kirkpatrick. Giroux doesn’t name the killer, but his well-argued theory is that a hired assassin in the pay of illicit drug interests was sent to kill Taylor because of his efforts to reduce the Hollywood narcotics trade.
The most valuable pure reference source on the case is Bruce Long’s William Desmond Taylor: A Dossier (1991), a compilation of official documents and contemporary newspaper accounts. It also includes sections of possible errata in Kirkpatrick and Giroux. Long even maintains a website devoted to the case.
Generally derided as the weakest Taylor volume is Charles Higham’s Murder in Hollywood: Solving a Silent Screen Mystery (2004). Higham offers more on Taylor’s early life than do other sources, plus background on figures remotely related to the mystery, as a means of padding out his thin volume. Much attention is paid to false confessions, off-the-wall suspects, and various rumors. Higham’s unlikely suspect is not the mother of Mary Miles Minter but the actress herself.
Tinseltown is the best and most fully documented of the lot, offering a thorough account of the main characters, the event itself, and the aftermath, while broadening the scope to the troubled Hollywood scene of the early 1920s, centering on the machinations of the ruthless mogul Adolph Zukor, touching on the case of Fatty Arbuckle and other sex- or drug-related scandals, and detailing the appointment of former postmaster general Will Hays as a reformist Hollywood “czar.”
The Taylor case usually focuses on three women: Mabel Normand, the brilliant silent-film comedian who was a close friend and visited the director on the night of his death but was never a serious suspect; Mary Miles Minter, Higham’s unconvincing candidate, a screen ingénue in the Mary Pickford mode who was besotted with Taylor and claimed he loved her as well; and Charlotte Shelby, Minter’s controlling mother, who has been the most frequently mentioned suspect.
To these three Mann adds a fourth: the ambitious actress Margaret Gibson (1894-1964), known as Gibby, who amassed about 150 film credits between 1913 and 1929, adopting the stage name Patricia Palmer around 1918. Gibby didn’t mind resorting to prostitution or participating in blackmail and extortion schemes to finance her up-and-down career, and she had at least some passing connections to Taylor. But where most statements here are presented as fact and buttressed by source notes, points about Gibby often include the usual speculative hedges: “maybe,” “quite possibly,” or “may well have been.”
Some possible interpretations are advanced as questions rather than statements. The reader has the occasional sense that Gibby is being shoehorned into the narrative; but if the chapters about her are often the least interesting, they do include some surprising tidbits. A hanger-on among her criminal associates was the western actor Leonard Clapham, who later took the name Tom London and was said to have appeared in more movies than any other performer. (His most memorable role was probably as Sam, Katy Jurado’s right-hand man, in 1952’s High Noon.)
While some books about classic unsolved crimes rise or fall on the quality of the solutions they advance, Tinseltown is not one of them. Mann’s answer to the question of who killed Taylor is well-argued and plausible, if not necessarily airtight; but his portrait of the time and people involved is central to the book’s value.
The most interesting villain is Zukor, who began as an East Coast exhibitor in competition with Marcus Loew and became the most powerful mogul in Hollywood, founder—with Jesse Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn, and Cecil B. DeMille—of Famous Players, the predecessor of Paramount. A stern, unsentimental businessman, Zukor was called “Creepy” behind his back by employees. He torpedoed Mary Miles Minter’s career, not because of her connection to the Taylor case but because he wanted to avoid raising her inflated salary, and he threw Fatty Arbuckle under the bus, demanding that his pictures be banned even though they were making money. (Following his acquittal on rape and manslaughter charges, Arbuckle was embraced by most of his fans and well-liked by Hollywood but was undone by pressure groups.)
Among the most sympathetic figures here is Mabel Normand, an intelligent and talented woman who battled a drug problem and whose early death is rendered even more tragic by the fact that her final years were not as miserable and wasted as usually depicted. Will Hays emerges as an honest, principled public servant who walked a fine line between his impulse to do the right thing and his loyalty to the moguls who hired him. As for Taylor, he appears to have been a man of honor and dignity who made up for some of his early lapses, including restoring contact with (and supporting) his deserted family and at times approaching the heroic stature his contemporaries saw in him.
Jon L. Breen is the author, most recently, of The Threat of Nostalgia and Other Stories.
