A Cast of Killers (13 page)

Goldwyn didn’t know how to handle Normand as Mack Sennett had. No sooner was she back working than he discovered that she wasn’t cashing a single salary check. Investigating the situation, he discovered that she kept most of her money in a shoebox in her bedroom. He was amazed. Money meant nothing to her. She not only didn’t cash his checks, but what other money she had she was known to give freely to her friends and, occasionally, perfect strangers. For her own good he decided to keep her on an allowance, the majority of her salary paid in the form of $1 ,000 Liberty Bonds automatically put into her savings. (Years later, at a time when she thought the studio was in financial trouble, Normand handed Goldwyn a thick envelope containing all the bonds she had accumulated, along with all the cash and real estate deeds in her name. Always the gentleman, Goldwyn refused the offer.)

Normand made sixteen films for Goldwyn before her popularity began to fade. In 1921, released from her contract, she returned to Mack Sennett, one of the few producers to offer her a contract. Her first picture for him,
Molly 0
, was released just two months before the Taylor murder. Though the film was reported as being a financial success, her career was already in a tailspin. Sennett made two more movies with her, but both bombed at the box-office.

Then, on the first day of 1924, her career all but over, she found herself involved in another scandal when her chauffeur shot a millionaire boyfriend of Normand’s friend Edna Purviance with a pistol owned by Normand. The boyfriend lived and refused to press charges, but the chauffeur, who called himself Joe Kelly, was in fact an ex-con and cocaine addict named Joe Greer.

Even Sennett wouldn’t use Normand after that. Unable to find any work in motion pictures—her name was popularly linked to censorship czar Will Hays’s rumored Hollywood blacklist—she accepted an offer to star in a Broadway musical,
A Kiss in the Sky
. But by the time she arrived, the producer had changed his mind. Instead, he gave her a role in a road production of
The Little Mouse
, hoping her name would draw an audience to a play that had already flopped several times under different titles. The play ran less than a month.

By 1926, Normand was back in Hollywood, appearing in film shorts as she had at the beginning of her career. Though Mary Pickford welcomed her back with a full-page letter in
Motion Picture World
, most of her former friends and associates failed even to acknowledge her return. And to those who did, it was clear that Normand was not well. At some point in her dramatic decline, she had become a habitual drug-user.

At a party on September 17, to the amusement of everyone present, actor Lew Cody offered her an exaggerated, vaudevillian proposal of marriage. She accepted and, maintaining the whimsical mood of the proposal, the entire party drove to Ventura County for an impromptu ceremony at 2:00 A.M.

Though they actually were married, Normand and Cody kept separate residences until shortly before Normand’s death. Her obituary named tuberculosis as the cause of death, but many who knew her suspected that her addiction to drugs had hastened her demise.

It was a sad, lonely ending to a story that had begun as a fairy tale. And clearly the Taylor scandal marked the turning point. But seeing her entire life outlined on the table before him, Vidor couldn’t help but recognize the feasibility of Herb Dalmas’s theory. Normand’s popularity had indeed already faded before the Taylor murder scandal; the scandal merely accelerated her fall. And her later drug dependency suggested that perhaps she had, as many had theorized, been using narcotics during the time she was involved with Taylor. These were questions Vidor jotted into his pocket notebook, along with the names of the friends of Normand’s who were still living, and who he felt would be best qualified to answer them: Minta Durfee and Claire Windsor.

He added the Mabel Normand file to his strongbox, pleased with the footwork he had saved by having his student do the research for him. Another should be giving him a file on Mary Miles Minter soon. But meanwhile there was work to do that only he could accomplish. He locked the strongbox, slipped his notebook into his back pocket, and made his way through the still unstraightened half of the basement. Then he turned out the light and walked back to his office.

17

Vidor paused in front of Minta Durfee’s bungalow. A man was sitting on the front steps, pulling greeting cards from envelopes, looking at them with fascination, putting them back into the envelopes, then taking them out again. Vidor judged him to be not terribly younger than himself, early sixties maybe. But the innocent wonder on his face each time he reread one of the cards said that mentally he hadn’t aged since childhood.

On the porch behind him, Durfee sat in a white wicker chair, watching him with loving matronly eyes. She was tiny, wrinkled, and wrapped in a tobacco-brown comforter. Her hair, though thin and wiry, was the color of orange soda. On a side table beside her sat a perfect arrangement of crustless sandwiches and an antique porcelain tea set. She looked up as Vidor walked up the steps.

The brother stood and offered Vidor a gentleman’s handshake. “Valentines,” he said, showing Vidor his envelopes. Then he sat back down.

“I’ve made some sandwiches,” Durfee said, as Vidor took a seat across the table from her. “I hope you like tuna fish.”

As they ate their lunch, they reminisced about the early days in Hollywood. Durfee spoke freely and animatedly, thoroughly enjoying the opportunity. Even when King broached the subjects of the Arbuckle and Taylor scandals—which he brought up with delicacy, wanting neither to tip his true hand nor touch upon uncomfortable subject matter—she spoke as frankly and openly as if they were discussing events that had taken place the week before.

About Mabel Normand she said, “We used to spend a lot of time together out in Fatty’s pool house. We thought it was the only place we could talk without worrying about someone listening in. It seemed like for months after Fatty’s trouble and Bill Taylor’s murder, we couldn’t take a breath without some reporter or detective asking something. We even thought they had our homes bugged. I don’t know if they did or not, but it always seemed safer to talk out in the pool house.”

“What did you talk about?” Vidor asked, refilling their cups with mint tea.

“Mostly the troubles. And why the press had it in for her. No matter what she said, they turned it around somehow. She would have laid down her life for Bill Taylor, and they kept saying she was the one that killed him.”

“Just what she told the police and reporters. What she always told everybody: the truth. She went to see Taylor. They talked about books. He was teaching her about literature. She never had any real education, you know, and hadn’t read much more than the scripts of the movies she made. Taylor was opening up a whole new world for her.” Durfee sipped her tea. She looked at her brother, who was now turned around, facing them, listening to their conversation.

“Well, she was getting dressed for work—I think she was making
Suzanna
at the time—when Edna Purviance called and told her the news.”

“Did she go to the bungalow?”

“Not that morning. She went a couple of days later, at the request of the police.”

“I see.” Vidor recalled all the published accounts he had read of that morning. One of the facts that so many of the later reports agreed upon—something that he had taken as a given—was that Normand had been at the bungalow when the police arrived, scrounging around for her letters to Taylor. But then again, the same reports claimed that studio executives were burning papers in a non-existent fireplace.

“She didn’t have to. The studio got them. Then the police. Then when the press got wind of them, they made them seem like torrid love letters, like Mabel and Bill were spending all their free time behind locked doors. They even tried to make it out that Mabel and Mary Miles Minter were fighting over Bill. Mabel and Mary hadn’t even met each other till after the murder.”

“After?” Vidor said.

“Of course not. They traveled in entirely different circles. The murder came as a revelation to both of them. Afterward, that is, after the murder, Mabel and Mary had a long talk about all of it. From that moment on they were the best of friends.”

“If you mean did I read them, no. But I knew Mabel, and I’m sure they were just about books and movies and things. Taylor was teaching her all kinds of things.”

“Were Mabel and Taylor lovers?” Vidor asked.

Durfee paused as though thinking about it. Finally she said, “Bill was like a father to her. He was probably the only man in her whole life—and that includes Mack Sennett, who was supposed to be so in love with her—who never took advantage of her, who really cared for her as herself and not as the movie star Mabel Normand.”

her a curveball.

“Well, for one thing, it would mean that Taylor was not a homosexual.”

Durfee wasn’t fazed. “I suppose it would,” she said, then laughed. She leaned forward, speaking softly as though she didn’t want innocent Paul to hear. “Then again, I’ve heard tales of some men who went after anything, didn’t care which sex it was.”

She smiled naughtily. Vidor reciprocated, wondering if she were just being facetious or if there were a message behind her joke that he hadn’t even considered before: that Taylor was bisexual? Either way, he had recognized Durfee’s hesitance to address the question of Normand’s physical relationship with Taylor. He turned her attention back to the night of the murder.

“There were two calls, I think. At least one was from Marjorie Berger. I don’t know if that was who Bill was talking to when Mabel came inside. Berger was Taylor’s accountant. She was also the accountant for Mabel and Mary Miles Minter, and did work for Charles Chaplin, Mack Sennett, and Mickey Neilan.”

“And the call bothered Taylor?” Vidor asked.

“It bothered him a lot. I don’t know why the police never looked into it. When he walked Mabel out to her car to leave, the last thing he said to her was, ‘I have the strangest, most ghastly feeling that something is going to happen to me.’ “

“Was there a call from Tony Moreno?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Durfee said. “Marjorie’s call was the only one I heard about.”

Vidor quickly wrote the line in his notebook. He knew it was too hackneyed for his script, but he also knew that if Taylor had actually foreseen trouble after talking with Marjorie Berger, then Berger might be the missing link that held the whole mystery together. Or perhaps Durfee was mistaken. The murder was forty-five years ago.

“Did Mabel tell this to anyone else?”

“She told the police.”

Then why was this the first time he had heard about it? Vidor wondered. He hoped Dick Marchman was faring well in his quest for the police files on the case.

“Did she say whether Marjorie Berger mentioned any of her other clients?”

Durfee was shaking her head almost before Vidor even finished the question.

“She said just what I told you. But you can forget about the whole Mack Sennett-jealousy angle. Mack and Mabel were finished well before Bill Taylor was killed.”

“But he was with her the morning after the murder, that was in a lot of the press accounts,” Vidor said, checking Durfee’s reaction before going on. “Some people have suggested that he was actually protecting his own interests when he appeared to be protecting her.”

“There was hardly anything that someone didn’t suggest,” she said. Her sneering pronunciation of the word “suggest” embodied all the contempt she obviously held for the way the press had handled the Taylor affair. “They really do revere their copy above all else, including the truth. Like the time that one woman, the one Mack was seeing and Mabel walked in on them, the time she smashed a bottle over Mabel’s head?”

Vidor remembered the story well.

“That wasn’t how it happened. Mabel walked in on them, then walked straight to the Santa Monica pier and jumped off. She tried to kill herself. Some men saw her hit the pilings and fished her out of the water. One brought her to our house. It just made better reading to say that the hole in her head was caused by that other woman.”