A Cast of Killers (7 page)

Dwan laughed and finished his breakfast. Vidor asked if Taylor and Normand ever worked together.

“I don’t think so. Normand was always the comedienne, Taylor the dignified hero. If she was tied to a track with a locomotive barreling toward her, Taylor’d be more likely to be sipping a goblet of wine and striking a handsome pose than racing off to save her.”

Soon, tired of constantly traipsing from the Alexandria to the studio casting offices, Taylor turned to directing. His first opportunities were at the financially unstable Balboa Studios, where he directed his future fiancée, Neva Gerber. Though newspapers at the time made much of the romance, Dwan told Vidor it was more studio publicity than anything else. They were good friends, and remained that way for the rest of Taylor’s life. Just weeks after the romance hit the press, Taylor moved to Santa Barbara to work for Flying A Studios, where Dwan was head director.

“And I never once saw them together,” Dwan said. At Flying A, Dwan hired and fired as he saw fit, hating the nepotism that existed at all the other studios. He gave jobs to people who might never have gotten breaks otherwise, including Victor Fleming, who would later direct
Gone With the Wind,
and an eager, young, all-around gofer from Texas with the highfalutin name of King Vidor.

Taylor completely enchanted Dwan as he did everyone else on the lot. He displayed such confidence that no one doubted he was destined for greatness both on and off the screen.

And yet he made no truly close, lasting friendships at Flying A. Where most of the directors shared their private lives with one another—everyone knew of Victor Fleming’s rendezvous with a certain studio head’s wife—Taylor remained secretive about himself. He passed on the popular trips to the local brothel, and was not known to have approached any of the Flying A actresses, even, Dwan recalled with another laugh, Mary Miles Minter, whose mother made a nearly full-time job of saving her from the clutches of amorous directors like James Kirkwood, or actors like Monte Blue.

“Maybe he
was
homosexual, I don’t know,” Dwan said. “But I do know about the dope, and Taylor was against it. He actively tried to stop the drifters who used to come up from Los Angeles with cocaine and opium.”

“Were there a lot of those drifters?” Vidor asked.

“There were as many dope dealers as there were prostitutes—and there was never a shortage of prostitutes, believe me. But I don’t recall Taylor actually fighting any of them, though he was known to throw a mean lecture on the evils of drugs, which makes all those later reports about his Paramount years highly questionable.”

Taylor’s crowning achievement at Flying A was directing twenty episodes of the serial
The Diamond from the
Sky.
The serial’s star, Lottie Pickford, Mary’s younger sister, was highly temperamental, pregnant, and saddled with a serious drinking problem. But Taylor handled her expertly and the serial was a smashing success, gaining Taylor industry-wide recognition as an important young director. The two-carat diamond ring found on Taylor’s finger on the day of his death was Flying A’s way of saying thank you for
The Diamond from the
Sky.

“You make him sound like the boy wonder of the movies,” Vidor said. “He must have changed dramatically when he moved to Paramount.”

“Maybe so,” Dwan replied, “or maybe the newspapers just didn’t give the whole story. They’re not known for emphasizing one’s finer points, you know.”

Vidor wondered if he was getting the whole story from Dwan.

“Is there anything else you remember about Taylor?” Dwan rubbed his hand over his bald head, then, sitting back, rested it on his belly.

“There is one thing. In
Captain Alvarez,
there was a blacksmith, and the man who played him, when he had his makeup off, looked strikingly like Taylor. I never met the man myself, but everyone I knew on the lot said there was no doubt they were brothers. I don’t know what might have happened to him, whether, like some people seemed to think, he might have become... what’s his name?... Taylor’s secretary that some people thought killed him and disappeared...?

“Sands,” Vidor said.

“Right, Sands. I don’t know about that, but whatever later became of him, for a while at least, Denis Deane Tanner was definitely in Hollywood with Taylor.”

8

Vidor sat alone in the Russian Tea Room on Sunday, January 29, 1967. Around him the lunch-hour crowd bustled noisily in and out, the air filled with the patois of show business. Names and faces that Vidor recognized surrounded him, but he paid them no more mind than they paid him. He ordered the lunch special and made screenplay notes into his pocket notebook. His talk with Allan Dwan had further convinced him that the Edward Sands/Denis Deane Tanner connection was something worth looking into. If, as Dwan suggested, so many people were convinced that the bit actor in
Captain
Alvarez
had been Taylor’s brother, then it was likely that when Denis Tanner’s wife, Ada, stormed into Taylor’s office demanding her husband’s whereabouts, she wasn’t simply assuming that Taylor would know, but had seen
Captain Alvarez
herself and knew perfectly well Tanner was somewhere in Hollywood. And if that was the case, why hadn’t she said so to the press? Why had Denis Tanner’s very existence been shrouded in so much mystery?

Vidor finished his chicken cutlet and checked his watch. He had an hour before his appointment with Gloria Swanson. She probably hadn’t known Denis Tanner, having met Taylor only after his return to Hollywood from Santa Barbara and Flying A Studios. But she was an integral part of Taylor’s social crowd once he made entry into Hollywood royalty at Paramount. She knew who Taylor’s friends—and enemies?--were in the years prior to his death. Perhaps she had met Sands.

Vidor had encountered Swanson nearly fifty years earlier at a Hollywood party where she and William Desmond Taylor had had a great laugh at Vidor’s expense. Vidor had worn to the party a special shirt he had bought at his favorite discount basement, Knock-‘Em-Dead Murphy’s, for $3.50. The exposed cuffs and collar were silk, but the rest of the shirt, designed to be hidden under a jacket, was made of matching but decidedly cheap cotton. Vidor had enjoyed the party, drinking his share of bootleg punch, until the men all started removing their jackets. It was a summer afternoon, and everyone implored Vidor to make himself comfortable. Vidor begged off, claiming his Texas blood was unaccustomed to the California chill. Finally, after a spirited round of joking, Swanson and Taylor egged Vidor into a mock wrestling match that exposed Vidor’s deceptive shirt to the entire party.

The incident had embarrassed Vidor but had made him known to everyone at the party. Afterward, several who had attended, including Taylor, offered jobs to both Vidor and his wife, Florence.

Vidor reached Swanson’s Fifth Avenue penthouse precisely on time. She met him at the door. It had been nearly twenty years since Swanson had appeared as the tragic Hollywood has-been, Norma Desmond, in
Sunset Boulevard
, a film in which many had cruelly said Swanson had merely played herself, yet Vidor detected nothing of her most celebrated character in her. She was still, at a very health-conscious sixty-seven, as vibrant and attractive as Vidor remembered her.

“So, what is this project you’re working on?” she asked after friendly reminiscing.

“It’s about the old days,” he told her. “Up to around the time Bill Taylor was killed.”

Swanson looked at Vidor in silence, as though her clear blue eyes were boring right through him. Finally, slowly, her famous toothy smile appeared.

“Well,” she said, “it’s about time someone told that story. Or at least as much of the story as anyone knows to tell. How can I help you?”

“When did you meet Taylor?”

Swanson seemed amused by the subject matter, as though she suspected Vidor’s specific interest in Taylor were not as casual as he was trying to make it seem. But, to Vidor’s relief, she didn’t push the matter. She settled comfortably onto her love seat and answered.

“It was just after he’d been working up in Santa Barbara. He came to work for Oliver Morosco at the old Bosworth-Morosco Studios. Then Paramount bought them out. Adolph Zukor took Charlie Eyton as his right-hand man, and Taylor went with the package. Eyton and Taylor were friends right up to the end.”

Under Zukor, at Paramount, Taylor directed no fewer than twenty films in three short years, including such hits as
Davy Crockett, House of Lies,
and
Tom Sawyer.

“Taylor fit right in in Hollywood,” Swanson said. “He always arrived at places in style, always spoke with that impeccable English accent. I think Zukor liked him because he wasn’t always after all the actresses in his films the way most directors were. That and the fact that he knew how to keep his mouth shut.”

“What do you mean?” Vidor asked.

“You know what I mean. Secrets have always been harder to keep in Hollywood than youth and marriage partners. And Taylor wasn’t a talker. Take Wallace Reid, or Mary Pickford’s brother, Jack. They both had horrendous drug problems. Morphine. At least with Reid, the studio supplied the drugs.”

Vidor wondered if Taylor had kept any sort of diary or had any other evidence that might hurt the reputations of the people he’d worked with at Paramount. That might explain what Charles Eyton was looking for in Taylor’s bungalow the morning after the murder.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Swanson told him. “But I doubt it. Taylor didn’t seem the type even to risk hurting someone, should his diary ever be stolen or anything.”

By the time Swanson met Taylor, he was living at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, an exclusive residence where his neighbors included Charles Chaplin and friends Marshall Neilan and James Kirkwood. He was in demand socially as well as professionally, always seated beside the guest of honor at formal affairs, and welcomed heartily at such less formal gatherings as the boxing matches at the Vernon Club, dinner and dancing at Nat Goodwin’s on the Santa Monica Pier, and the regular Saturday night parties at the Sunset Inn on Ocean Avenue, where Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, and other comedians entertained everyone well into the morning hours.

“But what Taylor liked more than anything else,” Swanson recalled, “was going up in the mountains and sitting around the Mount Lowe Lodge with his drinking buddies.”

“Who were?”

“Oh, let’s see. James Kirkwood, Marshall Neilan, Tony Moreno, Doug MacLean, that bunch. They’re the ones you should be talking to, if any of them are still alive. It’s too bad Marshall’s gone. He could have told you all kinds of things. Including who killed Taylor. I’m certain of it.”

“He told you?”

“He never told me anything about it. But the night Taylor was killed,” she said, then paused, as though deciding whether to complete the sentence. Then she went on, “The night Taylor was killed, Marshall Neilan and I were ... together. The next day, an emergency meeting was called at the studio. All the studio heads were there. The meeting lasted all day and into the night. When it was over, I met Marshall at the studio commissary. He was in a hurry, said he had to talk with Mary Miles Minter. So we picked her up at her house and took her back to Marshall’s. She seemed to be in a good mood. She cooked up some scrambled eggs, and we had a lot of champagne.

“Then all of a sudden, Marshall told me to go home. He said he had some ‘heavy talking’ to do with Mary and would come over later that night. He showed up the next morning, just in time to shower, shave, and get to the set. He never did tell me what it was all about, and when everything started coming out in the papers, I knew better than to ask. Are you listening, King?”

The question jarred King back to attention. The mention of the emergency meeting at Paramount had reminded him of something MGM head Louis B. Mayer had said after Taylor’s death. Mentioning the same secret meeting, Mayer had talked of “all the things we have to do now, in light of the Taylor murder.” At the time, Vidor had assumed Mayer was referring to general efforts to improve the movie industry’s public image. Now he wondered.

“I’m listening,” he said. “Neilan never told you anything at all about the meeting?”

“Not a word. But it was obviously not because he didn’t have a lot to tell. Same with Jimmy Kirkwood. He once told me he knew more than the police did about Taylor’s murder, but he wouldn’t go into any specifics. Except that the Thursday night before the murder, Taylor was with Claire Windsor, the actress, at a party. I don’t know if that’s important, or how Kirkwood knew this, but Claire Windsor is alive, if you want to talk with her. I got a letter from her just a few weeks ago.”

“I may do that.” Vidor wrote the names Kirkwood and Windsor in his notebook. “And you mentioned Tony Moreno and Doug MacLean?”

“Yes, they were part of the Mount Lowe bunch. MacLean wasn’t just a neighbor, but a good friend—he was in a number of Taylor films. Moreno knew Taylor for years. He lived at the Athletic Club. Apparently, Moreno had a meeting scheduled for the morning Taylor was murdered—with Taylor and District Attorney Woolwine. Taylor was on the phone with Moreno the very night of the murder. Minutes before he was killed.”

“How do you know that?”

“That’s what Mickey—I mean Marshall—told me. He never said what the call was about, or what was to take place at the meeting, but the fact that Woolwine was put in charge of investigating Taylor’s murder, and Taylor was also scheduled to appear on behalf of his servant, Henry Peavey, makes the whole thing sound pretty suspicious.”

“Not for years. But at the time, how could I help it? Being that close to Marshall Neilan, I felt like an accessory or something.”