Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (25 page)

The two friends quickly patched things up. But whatever devils were tormenting Taylor did not disappear. Mabel and Fellows weren’t the only ones to notice strange things happening in Billy Taylor’s life that month.

During the second week of January, the cast and crew of Taylor’s current production,
The Green Temptation
, piled into cars and headed out along Colorado Boulevard through Glendale to Pasadena. They were slated to spend three days in the “city of millionaires,” shooting location footage for the new film, a tale of the criminal underworld.

Among the actors was the forty-year-old Russian-born Theodore Kosloff, a former dancer with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. One day, while Kosloff was with Taylor, he
witnessed something he couldn’t explain.

As the two men were walking through a field, a man suddenly emerged “almost with a spring” from behind a thicket of brush. Yet even “quicker than this surprising stranger,” Kosloff observed, was Taylor, who lunged to confront the man. The two “stood eye to eye for a moment,” neither uttering a word. To Kosloff, the two men seemed locked in a battle of wills, each trying to stare the other down.

At last the stranger turned and walked away.

Taylor offered no explanation for the incident. He simply resumed the conversation he’d been having with his actor. Whether the director knew the stranger, Kosloff didn’t ask, and Taylor didn’t say.

On Thursday, January 26, having wrapped
The Green Temptation
, Taylor and his friend Antonio Moreno took in a performance of the famed dancing duo Maurice and Hughes at the Cocoanut Grove. Since going out on the town with another man was obviously problematic, Moreno asked the actresses Claire Windsor and Betty Francisco to accompany them. Windsor was Taylor’s date.

At the Grove, Windsor found the director
“extremely reserved and diffident.” At one point she asked him about the burglary at his house.

Taylor’s eyes darkened.
“If I ever lay my hands on Sands,” he said, “I will kill him.”

At another point the pair wandered over to the studio of the silhouette artist Gene Ross, located in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel.
Ross had known Taylor since her days sketching art titles for Famous Players. To her, the director had always seemed distant and emotionless. But on this night her sharp artist’s eye discerned a very different man.

As Windsor wandered around the studio, examining Ross’s work, Taylor bit his lips and paced the floor. He seemed “nervous, absentminded, haggard,” Ross thought. When other people came through the studio, he jumped. He seemed to be “under a ghastly strain of some sort,” Ross observed. Even his voice sounded different. “Usually he spoke in a calm, colorless, beautifully modulated voice,” Ross would recall, “but that night his remarks came in jerks.”

It was as if a veil had been stripped from his face. Was this, Ross wondered, the real William Desmond Taylor?

Finally, a few nights later, on Monday, January 30, Taylor’s neighbor Neil Harrington noticed more unusual activity in front of the director’s bungalow in Alvarado Court.

This time he spotted two unfamiliar men at Taylor’s door, one
“much smaller than the other.” The men had apparently rung Taylor’s doorbell, but when no one answered, they tried the door with a key, which did not appear to work. For some time thereafter they lingered on the front porch, talking.

Perhaps they were friends of Taylor’s, Harrington thought. Or studio employees.

Or perhaps they were something more sinister.

Gibby Gibson stepped off the trolley at the busy intersection of Sunset and Vine and made her way down the tree-lined street toward the Christie studios, returning to the Corner of Last Hope.

Al Christie wasn’t surprised to see her. Yes, he told her. He’d give her a job.

The forty-year-old Canadian producer had been one of the first to make pictures in California, back in the days when most of the traffic racing along Sunset Boulevard was still horses and wagons. Even Gibby could remember a time when this strip had been mostly farmland and citrus trees. Both she and Christie had been in Hollywood a long time.

Maybe that was why Al took pity on her, and why he could always be counted on to help her when she needed it. Gibby needed it now. She’d made two more features for Charles Seeling, but none of the films had made it to theaters. Seeling was still hoping for success the moment the government ruled against Adolph Zukor and Famous Players, but in the meantime Gibby was idle, doing nothing but growing older. So Christie came through for her, yet again.

Glancing down at the script she’d been given, Gibby probably felt her heart drop. But beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Her part in the two-reel comedy, a satire of hoary Northwest Mounted Police melodramas, was minuscule. The star would be the fresh-faced, nineteen-year-old Viora Daniel; Gibby would play an older woman with a baby. Her role required her to pretend to lose her baby to a pack of wolves and to carry on farcically. For that, Gibby would be paid maybe fifty bucks. Not much, but it would help pay the rent.

She drowned her sorrows with bootleg champagne with Don Osborn and Rose Putnam up at 2575 Beachwood Drive. Gibby was an indulgent landlady: when the locusts partied, she never asked them to turn down the music or put away the hooch. She was right there with them, raising her glass—and her skirts—as she shimmied to songs like “Ain’t We Got Fun” and “The Sheik of Araby” on the scratchy Victrola.

The Beachwood house was a “small, shanty-like arrangement,” with two small rooms and an enclosed porch. Osborn and Rose slept in the back room, but a sleeping couch in front and an army cot on the porch accommodated frequent guests. Blackie Madsen and May Ryan were often there. So were George Weh and Fred Moore and his wife, Jackie. A shady real estate agent named Jay R. Overstreet would recall plenty of
“cheap liquor” flowing at 2575 Beachwood—all paid for by Osborn, who, like Gibby, would be periodically flush with cash, then suddenly broke again, depending on the success or failure of their latest con job. Osborn’s parties sometimes spilled out into the street, where at least two neighbors, the small-time western actors Leonard Clapham and Leo Maloney, joined in the fun.

What none of them knew, as they partied and carried on, was that a small figure lurked outside in the darkness, watching them through the window.

Osborn’s former wife, Rae.

When she saw Osborn lean down and kiss Rose on the lips, Rae recoiled in disgust. Her ex-husband had
“a weak, diseased, decayed mind,” Rae concluded. But she remained as obsessed with him as ever. For three nights she prowled outside the house, watching the locusts and wallowing in her revulsion.

Rae kept tabs on everything Osborn did. She knew all about his bunco jobs. She’d heard how he’d squealed on Jim Bryson. How a man could “do a thing like that to his own friend,” Rae did not know. She prayed that one of the many men Don had fleeced (“God only knows how many there are”) could find the courage to fight back against him.

But that would never happen, Rae feared. Osborn and Madsen always chose patsies who were too compromised to fight back. Married men. Prominent men. Men with secrets.

Almost certainly, Gibby was still sending suckers their way and still getting a cut. How else could she buy the occasional nice dress? Certainly the movies weren’t making her rich.

In the early weeks of January 1922 Gibby spent much of her time drinking with her new tenants. She was lonely and depressed. She hadn’t had a man in her life since her dalliance with Osborn a year earlier, but Gibby wasn’t looking for romance. She was looking for someone who shared her dream to make it to the top. She’d thought she’d found him in Osborn, but she was starting to learn that real ambition is a solitary enterprise.

If only she could get a job at one of the major studios instead of Al Christie. If only she could get hired by the crème de la crème, Famous Players–Lasky.

Was there even still time left for Patricia Palmer to become a major Hollywood player? Gibby wasn’t sure anymore. In just two years, she’d be thirty.

So any money she could collect from Osborn—rent or otherwise—would have been very much appreciated. The sporadic kickbacks she got from Osborn must have felt like manna from heaven, a chance to splurge on shoes and earrings and presents for her mother. Osborn may have been a flop at making movies, but he’d perfected his bunco operation. He ran
“a gang of eleven [that] did nothing but look for schemes,” one source would later reveal. Most of the locusts were now in on the business: George Weh, Fred Moore, and probably newcomers like Leonard Clapham, too. The payola wasn’t enough to buy them cars or houses, but it kept the whisky flowing and the records playing. Until she made it as a big star, Gibby would have to be happy with that.

And, unlike Rae, she had to hope that the men Osborn and Madsen were swindling never found the guts to stand up and fight back.

While her chauffeur, William Davis, drove her around town on a series of errands, Mabel Normand sat in the backseat of her car, eating peanuts and dropping the shells all over the floor.

It was almost six in the evening. The sun was setting, staining the sky red and orange like a still-wet watercolor and sending purple shadows of palm trees across the roads. Mabel didn’t want to be out late. She needed to be up early the next morning, in costume and fully made up when the studio car came to collect her for location shooting for her new picture,
Suzanna
. But Billy had phoned earlier to say he’d bought a couple of books for her. So Mabel had told Davis to swing by Billy’s place before taking her home. Mabel always had time for presents from Billy.

The date was February 1, 1922.

The night grew dark. There was no moon. As Mabel’s car made its way through downtown, about a mile and a half away a man was stepping out from the shadows at the intersection of Alvarado and West Sixth Streets. Walking into the pale golden light, he headed up the asphalt to the Hartley and Son gas station. It was just before six o’clock.

Floyd Hartley, the station’s owner, looked up. The stranger appeared to be in his middle twenties. He had dark hair and wore a dark suit with a light cap.

Hartley’s employee, Lawrence Grant, also stopped work to observe the stranger, who asked them if they might know the address of William Desmond Taylor, the movie director.

Of course they did. Taylor’s flashy McFarlan often stopped by the station to fill up. Hartley gave the man directions to Alvarado Court, only about a four-minute walk up the street.

The stranger headed back into the shadows.

A couple of minutes after seven o’clock, William Davis brought Mabel’s car to a stop alongside the courtyard on Alvarado Street. Brushing peanut shells off her lap, Mabel stepped out onto the sidewalk, asking Davis if he’d mind sweeping the rest of the shells out of the car. The chauffeur agreed. Mabel told him she wouldn’t be long.

She hurried up the sidewalk. She’d brought a bag of peanuts for Billy as well.

It was a chilly night, especially for Los Angeles. Temperatures were sinking into the low forties and were expected to keep dropping. Billy’s front door was open, with only the screen door as a barrier from the cold night. But Billy liked fresh air, Mabel knew.

She rang the bell.

“Good evening, Henry,” Mabel chirped when she spotted Peavey through the screen. “Is Mr. Taylor here?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the valet replied. “He’s on the telephone.”

Mabel decied to wait for him on the step. A few minutes later, Taylor bounded out to greet her, laughing when Mabel gave him the peanuts. He took both her hands and led her inside, insisting she had to stay long enough for a drink. He didn’t have to twist Mabel’s arm.

Asking Peavey to bring in the serving tray, Taylor took a seat in front of his cluttered mahogany rolltop desk, while Mabel sat on the stool in front of the small upright piano. Billy seemed in a good mood, with no signs of the tension he’d been exhibiting lately. He asked Mabel to guess what books he’d bought for her.

Mabel grinned and guessed correctly: a translation of Nietzsche and
Rosa Mundi
by Ethel M. Dell, the popular English romance novelist. No doubt she’d been hinting to Billy she wanted them, and she was delighted. Billy had introduced her to so many great writers. Her current favorite was Stephen Leacock, the Canadian humorist who reminded some of Mark Twain. She also
“surprisingly, tenderly understood” the deeply psychological novels of Knut Hamsun, who’d just won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

How transformative Billy had been for her. As she leafed through his latest gifts, Mabel was happy and grateful. What would she ever do without him?

Outside on Alvarado Street, the night was getting darker.

Mrs. Marie Stone, age fifty, was walking up the block from South Carondelet Street to babysit for her nine-year-old granddaughter, who lived with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Wachter, at 412A Alvarado Court, on the other side of the complex from Taylor. As Mrs. Stone paused at the corner of Sixth, she noticed a man apparently waiting for the streetcar. But the streetcar came and went, and the man did not board. Instead, he walked “aimlessly” up Alvarado, Mrs. Stone observed.

For some reason, the man made Mrs. Stone nervous. She kept a safe distance behind him. Under the glow of the streetlamps, she could discern only a few details about the man. He wore an ill-fitting dark suit that bulged at the collar, tan oxford shoes, and a cap that was either plaid or checked. Mrs. Stone couldn’t tell the man’s age, but she could see that he was of medium height, with a ruddy complexion, and that his neck and earlobes were thick.

For a moment she thought the man might have been Edward Sands, Mr. Taylor’s former valet, whom Mrs. Stone had seen many times in Alvarado Court while visiting her daughter. Sands was bowlegged, so his walk was recognizable. But she couldn’t be sure.

At some point the man abruptly stopped walking. As Mrs. Stone watched, he “transferred something from his left hip pocket to the right-hand pocket of his coat.” Then he turned right on Maryland Street and disappeared from view. Mrs. Stone, heading up the steps to her daughter’s home in Alvarado Court, thought no more about the stranger.