Every time there is a shooting scrape in the movie colony
some screen star finds out where the rest of her clothes are.
William Desmond Taylor, world’s greatest director, British Army captain, art connoisseur, traveller, dilettante, divorcée, bon vivant, occultist, et cetera, et cetera, as well as sole proprietor of the finest, best appointed, most frequently visited and most generously occupied love nest in the city of Los Angeles – William Desmond Taylor, Love Avalanche of Alvadoro is found dead!`
- Seattle Union Record, 15 February 1922
On the morning of February 2, 1922, the Los Angeles police arrived at the home of William Desmond Taylor in a wealthy suburb of the city to find the prominent film director dead on the floor of his study.
With the agreement of Police Lieutenant Ziegler, a doctor from the crowd of onlookers made a preliminary examination of the body and declared death from natural causes, possibly heart trouble.
The case was closed.
Until, a few moments later when the body was turned over to reveal a pool of blood and a neat bullet hole puncturing his left lung, the case was re-opened, and it remains so today.
The identity of the doctor was never discovered, nor was he seen again. Ultimately, no one was entirely sure he had ever existed.
And it all just gets weirder from there.
The investigation into the untimely death of the murder of the man described in the memoirs of Special Investigator Ed C King as: “a cultured, dignified gentleman with a charming personality and considerable magnetism,” spanned decades. It ruined the careers of two of the most prominent actresses of the day, left countless reputations in tatters, and caused the Seattle Star to remark: “every time there is a shooting scrape in the movie colony some screen star finds out where the rest of her clothes are.”
In fact, if I am completely honest, it was the headlines produced by this very investigation that really got me obsessed with this period. Take this work of art, for example:
March 13, 1922
DES MOINES TRIBUNE
The charge that movie actors are drug fiends may explain some of the awful acting we have been compelled to witness.
Reportedly, in 1928, the dying words of Mabel Normand, a close friend of Taylor’s and reportedly* the last person to have seen him alive, were,
“I wonder who killed poor Bill Taylor?”
*more on that later - that is its own post
Despite numerous leads, suspects and unsubstantiated confessions the case has never been conclusively solved. The most popular theory, favoured by Special Investigator Ed C. King and director King Vidor, was that Charlotte Shelby, mother of Paramount Star – and varyingly reported as Taylor’s lover, fiancée, unrequited admirer and protégé – Mary Miles Minter, killed Taylor. Charlotte Shelby was, however, never charged nor arrested and was even publicly exonerated by Prosecutor Asa Keyes in 1928.
In private papers made public after his death, director King Vidor wrote:
“Before we can make accurate speculations on the case and guilt of those involved we must know something of the community in which the victim lived, and in which he died. It is my first contention that the murder itself and its consequent lack of solution had its roots buried deeply in the inner character of the community. I am convinced of this. I was there!”
And this is where it gets really interesting to me, because I think he’s exactly right. There is much to commend about this wild, Bohemian, early period of Hollywood. This newsletter celebrates the good. The 50% of Hollywood released being written by women. The powerful female directors and execs. The fact that the first all-Black feature had already been produced and the fact that Hollywood closed its doors to Arbuckle despite his being found not guilty.
But there was toxicity there too.
Virginia Rappé’s death proved that. Olive Thomas, who was married to Jack Pickford (brother of Mary), also died a horrible death when, in a drunken frenzy, she overdosed on medication intended for Jack’s syphilis. Despite what Chaplin-stans like to pretend today (*cough* telling on themselves *cough*), there was no time at which it was perfectly fine for him to have impregnated thirteen-year-old Lita Grey.
We all reacted with horror a few weeks ago at the tragedy of Halyna Hutchins’ death, but accidents like that were barely uncommon on sets in those early days. There are stories of directors arranging to trip stampeding horses without warning the stunt riders so as to get genuine falls on film. Extras were known to leave Erich von Stroheim’s sets bruised - and rumours flew that some of the orgies on his sets weren’t just acted.
Writer Adela Rogers St. Johns rather cheerfully remembers in Kevin Brownlow’s Hollywood: the Pioneers:
“Oh, we kept having scandals right along. If you throw into one small town and one small industry, the people who can impress the world with their drama, their sex appeal, with their lovemaking, with all of the big emotional dramatic things that can happen, and you put them all together in one little bowl, you're going to have some explosions. I'm only surprised we had so few.”
The murder of William Desmond Taylor was a tabloid editor’s dream.
The debonair British (possibly Irish-but-posh) director had the prerequisite murky past.
Shortly after his death it emerged that he had been born William Deane Tanner. He changed his name in 1908 after scarpering from his New York home, abandoning a wife and a young daughter. He might have been in the Canadian army at some point, he almost certainly sent away to a military school for wayward sons of the aristocracy in England. It was claimed he had been panhandling for gold on the California coast, and his personal chauffeur may have been a blackmailer or an ex-lover depending on which tabloid you read.
An editorial in the Salt Lake Telegram on February 11, 1922 opened: “With each succeeding day producing new gossip concerning life California’s film colony, it is to be hoped that the Taylor murder mystery, which has baffled the coast police for a week, will soon be solved. “
But it was not to be so, because a hundred years later, here we are.