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Taylorology Issue 21
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* T A Y L O R O L O G Y *
* A Continuing Exploration of the Life and Death of William Desmond Taylor *
* *
* Issue 21 -- September 1994 Editor: Bruce Long bruce@asu.edu *
* TAYLOROLOGY may be freely distributed *
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CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE:
The Last Day of Taylor's Life
Wallace Smith: February 16, 1922
"Has Mabel Normand Solved the Taylor Murder?"
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What is TAYLOROLOGY?
TAYLOROLOGY is a newsletter focusing on the life and death of William Desmond
Taylor, a top film Paramount film director in early Hollywood who was shot to
death on February 1, 1922. His unsolved murder was one of Hollywood's major
scandals. This newsletter will deal with: (a) The facts of Taylor's life;
(b) The facts and rumors of Taylor's murder; (c) The impact of the Taylor
murder on Hollywood and the nation. Primary emphasis will be given toward
reprinting, referencing and analyzing source material, and sifting it for
accuracy.
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The Last Day of Taylor's Life
The following information was obtained from items giving details of Taylor's
activities on Wednesday, February 1, 1922, the last day of his life.
* Sometime during the morning he went to the First National Bank, where he
deposited two $800 paychecks, and stock dividend checks for $600 and $150.
[1]
* Sometime during the morning he posted bail (or sent his chauffeur to post
bail) for his servant Henry Peavey. Some press reports indicate Peavey was
bailed out on the morning of the same day Taylor was killed, some reports
indicate this happened a few days earlier. [2]
* Sometime during the day he purchased a silver-mounted pocket flask and
watch crystal at a jewelry store downtown. [3]
* Sometime during the day he wrote a check for $100 payable to Jack O'Brien.
[4]
* Sometime during the day he went to Robinson's Department Store, where he
purchased ROSA MUNDI, by Ethel Dell, and the translation of a German
criticism on Nietzche. [5]
* Sometime during the day, he was riding in his McFarlan car when he was
passed by a car containing Mary Miles Minter and her grandmother, Julia
Miles. Minter said this happened at 7th and Alvarado, and only mentions
that the the car passed hers. [6] Julia Miles said this happened on
Broadway, and that they stopped the cars and exchanged a few friendly
greetings. [7] (The two women are not referring to two separate incidents-
-both women commented that this was the first time Minter had seen
Taylor's car since it was repainted.) After Taylor's death several of
Minter's blonde hairs were reportedly found on his jacket, and it's
possible that those hairs were transferred through a hug given during
those "friendly greetings."
* Possibly, at noon he had lunch with Frank E. Garbutt, manager of
Wilshire/Realart studios. Garbutt said he had lunch with Taylor "on the
day before he was killed." That might mean the previous day, but Taylor
was on location at Mt. Lowe on Tuesday. So it appears that Garbutt was
referring to the date of Taylor's death, but before the killing took
place. [8]
* He met with J. Marjorie Berger, his income tax advisor, in her office for
two hours, between approximately 2:00 and 4:00 p.m. [9]
* He briefly went to the Lasky studio, and left at 4:30. [10] The last person
he saw on the Lasky lot was Barrett Kiesling, the publicity director. They
talked about Taylor's upcoming film, "The Ordeal," which was scheduled to
begin production on the following Monday. [11]
* Shortly before 5:00 he stopped at C.C. Parker's Bookshop and bought the
two-volume anthology "The Home Book of Verse." (He had previously given
the books to Mabel Normand as a gift, but she had lost one of the
volumes.) [12] His chauffeur then drove him home. He told the chauffeur to
deliver the volume to Mabel Normand's home, then go to dinner and call for
instructions by 7:30. [13] As soon as the chauffeur departed, Taylor
telephoned Mabel Normand's home, but she was not in. He left the message
with her maid that he was sending over his chauffeur with a book for Mabel
from Parker's, and that he also had two books from Robinson's--she should
stop by and pick them up. [14]
* At 5:00 he left home on foot, and walked to his dancing lesson, at the
Payne Dancing Academy on Orange St. [15]
* Between 5:00 and 6:00 he had his dancing lesson from his regular
instructor, Mrs. Waybright. Then he walked back home. [16]
* When he arrived home, he began working on his income tax. He telephoned
Berger with some questions. [17] Berger did some checking and called him
back. [18]
* Peavey fixed dinner for Taylor, which he ate at 6:45. [19]
* At 7:00 he returned a telephone call to actor Antonio Moreno at the L.A.
Athletic Club. (Moreno had called at 6:00, when Taylor was out.) Moreno
was having a contract dispute with Vitagraph and he wanted Taylor's
assistance. They agreed to meet at 10:00 a.m. at the Lasky studio on the
following day. [20]
* At approximately 7:05, while the phone call with Moreno was still in
progress, Mabel Normand arrived. She left at approximately 7:45, and
Taylor was murdered within a few minutes of her departure. [21]
*****************************************************************************
Wallace Smith: February 16, 1922
The following is another of Wallace Smith's sensationalizing dispatches on
the Taylor case.
February 16, 1922
Wallace Smith
CHICAGO AMERICAN
Seven hours after Mabel Normand left the home of William Desmond Taylor
on the night he was murdered a half-hysterical woman madly drove a roaring
motor from Los Angeles and sent it hurtling at breakneck speed over the coast
road toward San Francisco.
She was clad in an evening gown and furs that matched her own striking
beauty. It was 3 in the morning when she flung the car recklessly through the
dark. Its speed increased as the first faint rays of morning began to streak
the sky and filter into the study where the body of the slain man lay.
And today, just two weeks after the wild flight, the police hurried over
the same trail in desperate hope of at last running down the slayer of the
eccentric director and solving the sinister mystery that came with the murder
in Alvarado St.
They were directed in their search of the fleeing beauty by the employees
of an automobile station at Ventura, three hours' hard drive from Los Angeles,
and a Los Angeles motorist who passed the woman -- after narrowly escaping a
collision -- on the road to San Francisco.
It was at the station in Ventura that the woman in the machine, excited
and eager to be off again, crashed on the brakes and halted long enough to
take on a fresh supply of gasoline and oil. Her hair had been disarranged by
the wind that screamed at her in her nightmare race. She sobbed as she gave
orders to the men. She reached the station at 6:20 a.m., they said, and left
about ten minutes later.
So strange was her behavior that the men at the station took plains to
identify the car she drove. This identification was said to place the car as
the property of a wealthy Los Angeles man, known to be familiar to the moving
picture world.
He was to be questioned by the police upon his return today from town.
He had been absent, it was explained, "on a business trip."
As the car leaped away from the gasoline station, the wild-eyed driver
crammed on all speed. The car went careening down the road. Six miles away
from the station the car of the Los Angeles witness sighted the oncoming
motor.
The Los Angeles man, observing the speed of the approaching machine,
cautiously took his own car far to the side of the road. He was just in time.
As the car driven by the woman came abreast of his it swung half across the
road and seemed about to turn over. The woman in the car turned out, twisted
at the wheel, and finally regained control.
The car sped out of sight and out of the mystery until investigators
found the Ventura witnesses. [22]
Their story strengthened the theory that a woman was in the study of
Taylor when he was shot to death, and seemed to make clearer the picture of
the "kiss of death" theory that Taylor was embracing a woman when he was shot.
It also gave new credence to the yarn of the mysterious bootlegger who
declared he saw a woman fleeing the Taylor home immediately after the shot was
fired.
It even led the police to a belief that their arbitrary fixing of the
time of the crime might be off a few hours and that Taylor might have been
slain by the actress known to have visited his rooms in the still hours of the
night.
The Ventura story was one of several startling new developments of the
day. Among others were:
The alleged confessions of one of the chief Hollywood drug peddlers
regarding his deals with moving picture favorites, and especially his
transactions with one of the film beauties who has been named in the Taylor
mystery.
The threat of an expose in the federal court, through government
prosecution of certain dope peddlers, of the names of the screen actors and
actresses named as drug users.
The declaration by physicians that Taylor may have lived for some time
after the fatal shot was fired instead of dying instantly, as the first police
theory decided.
The questioning of the dope peddler chief--it was nearer to the method
indicated by the term "third degree"--began at midnight and lasted through
well into the morning. The dope peddler is a man of foreign birth; known to
have been a member of the "dress suit mob"--a gang which uses fashionable
clothes as its chief disguise -- mentioned several days ago in The Chicago
Evening American dispatches.
He was seized in Hollywood and held incommunicado there. According to
the police he was persuaded to reveal many of the secrets of the gang and the
names of the film folks who traded in cocaine, morphine, opium and other
drugs.
They were interested most of all in his statement that he had personally
dealt with the actress named in connection with Taylor's death, known for
years as a victim of the drug habit and said to have been blackmailed by an
eastern gang of dope peddlers. [23]
Stung by the recent criticism of their so-called inactivity, the police
threatened to lay the confession of their prisoner before the federal
authorities and demand his prosecution and the prosecution of other members of
the band.
This would result, it was stated, in placing before the open court the
long list of Hollywood film people said to be users of the bamboo pipe and the
hypodermic needle.
There was considerable agitation in moving picture circles at this threat
of the police officials, and those who guide the affairs of the screen stars,
never idle since the latest scandal shocked the nation, began to get busier
than ever.
The statement of physicians that Taylor might have lived for an hour or
two after the shot--which did not reach the heart as first reported--was
fired, opened the way for considerable interesting speculation. It seemed to
shed a new light, too, on the carefully "laid out" position of the body when
found.
It was pointed out that had the assassin fired in a mad desire to kill
his man and see him dead he would have emptied every chamber in his revolver.
Only one shot was fired. It was set forth as well that Taylor, a powerful
man, would have made some sort of struggle had there remained in his body
strength enough to lift an arm. Everything was in order.
It was declared possible that a woman, maddened by jealousy or infuriated
by Taylor's taunts, had fired the single shot. Then, overcome by remorse, she
attempted to save his life, remaining at his side until he finally died and
fleeing at last to save the shreds of her own reputation.
Undersheriff Eugene Biscailuz, working with District Attorney Lee
Woolwine in attempting a solution of the mystery, made a dramatic examination
of William Davis, chauffeur for Mabel Normand, who drove her to Taylor's home
the night of the slaying. He repeated his earlier story in detail,
corroborating Miss Normand in most of her statements about her entrance and
exit on the night of the drama
But he was made to repeat his statement on the scene of the killing,
sitting in the sheriff's car in front of Taylor's home and about 150 feet from
Taylor's door, as he says he did the night he drove Miss Normand there.
"It was before 7:30 that I drove Miss Normand here," he declared. "She
had bought a Police Gazette and a bag of peanuts. She was eating the peanuts
and reading the Gazette as we drove out. When she went into Taylor's I got
out of the car and swept the shells out. Then I started to read the paper
myself."
As Davis stepped from the car to illustrate his movements, it was
observed that some of the peanut shells still lingered at the curb.
"Henry Peavey, Taylor's houseman, came out," Davis went on.
"He was all dressed up fancy in his golf things. We talked a little
while about whose car was best, Taylor's or Miss Normand's. Then he went
away."
"Wasn't there a third man there?" asked Biscailuz. George Arto, a
mechanician, had told the police that he saw Peavey and Davis talking to a
third man that night.
"Positively not," declared Davis.
"Arto says there was," Biscailuz went on.
"Arto was mistaken, then," insisted Davis. "I talked to no one but
Peavey. I remember very well that when Miss Normand came out she seemed very
cheerful. She may have carried a book, as she says, but I did not see it. I
remarked that it was time for dinner and I was getting hungry. It was 7:40
then."
The officers had Davis indicate where Taylor stood saying farewell to
Miss Normand.
"He seemed to be in a good humor, too," said Davis. "She waved good-by
and we drove straight home."
Undersheriff Biscailuz announced that he would question Miss Normand
again. It was stated that the detailed reports of his investigators had
suggested a new line of questioning.
At the same time it was reported that Miss Normand was preparing to leave
town to recover from a very severe cold which, according to her manager, in
connection with her shock at Taylor's death, might result seriously.
"The only reason we are staying," declared the manager, "is that there
would be many people ready to say that Miss Normand was running away. But if
the strain keeps up I would not be surprised if it killed her."
District Attorney Woolwine continued his investigation in secret.
Because of the "embarrassment" that might be caused famous figures in the
moving picture world, the district attorney decided not to call them in, but
to send his men to question them at their convenience.
The statement made by Mack Sennett, producer, to one of the prosecutor's
agents was not made public.
The general atmosphere of secrecy thrown about the case by officials also
smother an official denial or affirmation of the report that a threatening
letter had been found among Taylor's papers. The letter, it was stated, was
sent by a prominent moving picture man who had been bitter toward Taylor since
the two had words at the outbreak of the world war.
The district attorney's agents also were watching the examination of the
eight members of an alleged Black Hand gang, captured after a brisk shotgun
and pistol battle with federal and state officers Tuesday night. The members
of the alleged gang, it was said, had organized a campaign of blackmail
against wealthy Los Angeles residents and might have had Taylor included in
their list of victims.
*****************************************************************************
"Has Mabel Normand Solved the Taylor Murder?"
The following item is certainly fiction on both levels: it never
happened, and it was never related to the author by Mabel Normand. But it
nevertheless is interesting as a novelty, showing how the Taylor murder began
to be used for "true" crime fiction.
November 1931 / January 1932
H. L. Gates
ILLUSTRATED DETECTIVE MAGAZINE
Has Mabel Normand Solved the Taylor Murder?
EDITOR'S NOTE [which prefaced the original article]: H.L. Gates, the
author of this remarkable document--almost as if the voice of Mabel Normand
were speaking from the grave--was one of the dead star's intimate friends.
Editor, novelist, scenario writer, he lived for some time in Hollywood and
was closely associated with the impish Mabel and her scores of friends.
It was only by accident, or as if fate, knowing that Miss Normand was
not long for this earth, intervened--that Mabel Normand told to Mr. Gates the
plans for her great screen play to be based on the murder of William Desmond
Taylor, the famous director and Romeo of the film colony whose ambition it
was to marry her. Mabel had promised and then withdrawn.
Mr. Gates went to call on her at the Savoy Hotel in London. He was
living in London and at that time was editor of the "London Daily Sketch." It
was only to be a friendly call, a social call upon an old friend. Without any
particular reason, Miss Normand began talking of the Taylor case, probably
because the newspapers were full of it. An then, in her impetuous way, she
began to talk of what she knew about Taylor and his life, his loves and his
hates. Then came the story Mr. Gates tells here.
Does Mabel Normand solve at last the mystery of who killed Desmond
Taylor?
For three days London streets had been dismal lanes of fog. Still
thousands of men and women of all ages milled on the sidewalks before the
Savoy Hotel, hoping for a lift in the murk that would bring one girl's face
to her balconied window.
Some of the watchers had kept their vigil through part of the night.
They wanted to see the smiling, impish face of Mabel Normand, who had
slipped into town unheralded but whose arrival was bulletined by newsboys
within the hour.
A policeman helped me through the crowd to the hotel lobby. When he
discovered that I was bound for Mabel Normand's door, he touched his helmet
with new respect.
The question, "Will she ever tell who killed Taylor?" was in the mind of
perhaps everyone who waited and watched outside for a glimpse of the famous
star, as it was in the minds of other thousands around the world. There were
few then, as now, who doubted that Mabel could, if she would, come very near
to pointing the way to a solution of the famous Hollywood murder which has
remained through almost a decade one of the greatest mysteries in the world's
annals of crime.
The director, William Desmond Taylor, had been dead many months. One by
one the hopeful clues to a slayer's identity had been followed to a blank
wall. Screen reputations had been shattered, ache and trouble had been
implanted in the gentle soul of Mabel herself, and high policemen had been
reduced to the ranks. But Taylor's murder was already on its way to becoming
historic mystery.
When her inner door opened and she came, a tempest as ever, into the
outer room, I wondered if the crowds on the streets below would see in the
impish face the thoughtful lines that had grown there since that murder night
under the Hollywood palms. I happened to be the first of old friends to
welcome her to England. She rushed across the room to salute me with a kiss.
It was not, of course, the kiss of a woman to a man but the gesture of a soul
that brimmed fraternity with all the world and all who were of it.
She accused me suddenly: "That kiss doesn't mean so much to you, does
it?"
Now that was a question hard to answer. One never dealt in platitudes
with Mabel Normand nor ever waxed sentimental. Her laugh was too handy.
I wondered what she had on her mind, and it came out abruptly and was
startling.
"I kiss everybody in the world," she said. "It's my very nicest habit.
I've heard that a woman was hung in London at daybreak this morning, and
somehow that reminded me that, light as you all take my kisses, it was a kiss
that snatched me away from perilously close to the gallows."
I could only stare and wait. Her brown eyes were sombre. She touched the
cablegrams from American police, all as yet unopened. Then she went to her
window and looked down upon the street, the Strand. The watchers were
spectral figures in a smoky mist.
"They are all thinking of me as being part of the 'Taylor Case,'" she
said. "They are wondering what I know--and if I shall ever tell."
"What about the kiss that saved you?" I reminded her.
"I've thought about it a lot on the boat coming over," she said in
preliminary explanation, "and of the woman who was hung before the sun came
up this morning. Perhaps she, too, might have been saved if all the truth
were known. This kiss I will tell you about was one of the incidents of real
life, one of the things that happen that wouldn't be believed as possible if
it were put into fiction. You remember the last half hour of Taylor's life?"
I did. On her way from Los Angeles to her Hollywood home Mabel had
stopped her car at the house of the director, who was one of the outstanding
personalities in the screen world. Leaving her chauffeur in her car, she had
run in for a chat. That was a little after six o'clock. At a quarter to eight
she went on, Taylor accompanying her to her car. He then re-entered his house
and was killed five minutes later.
"They were all so certain that I had done it," Mabel said, "that I was
stunned. There was only my chauffeur to say that I had left the house and
left Taylor alive. As those first terrible hours of investigation drew out I
was being drawn closer and closer into the murder put, for the authorities
would not be satisfied with my chauffeur's support. But one of my kisses
saved me.
"When Taylor came out to see me off he closed the car's door window,
warning against the chill that was coming down from the hills. I pressed my
lips against the inner side of the glass pane. He put his lips to the same
spot, but outside. Prints of the kiss, his lips outside, mine inside, were
observed by Hollywood detectives. They proved that Taylor had been alive and
that I had been in my car when we said good-bye for the night. It was only
then that they authorities began seriously to look elsewhere for the slayer."
So we bridged the ocean and talked of the crime that was baffling every
police brain on the other side of the Atlantic. And we talked of the mystery
through other days of her visit to London, days that remained fog bound.
Mabel confessed at last that she would some day make her revelations, but in
her own characteristically dramatic way. She would create a play, a screen
play, she declared, or perhaps a novel. She would build it out of her
knowledge of William Desmond Taylor's life and use for its characters the
real men and women who paraded through that life up to the moment of its end
in the Hollywood bungalow.
"Will it turn out to be a woman? One of the women we all know, or will
it be an old vengeance come out of the past to take a belated toll?" I
wondered aloud.
Mabel got up and went through her window onto the balcony that overlooks
the famous Strand and the old theater where Gilbert and Sullivan rehearsed
their tuneful operettas. Days had passed by now, since Mabel's coming, but
the crowds, new crowds, still watched from the sidewalks. The fog was
thinning and when the petite figure appeared a shout went up. Bright faced
girls threw kisses from the tips of their fingers. A far solemn note from Big
Ben announced the cocktail hour. Mabel waved to her fans and came back into
the room.
"About its being a woman, wait!" she commanded. "I think I shall tell
you the story, just as I shall some day write it down. And we must begin at
the beginning." She laughed a little when she added: "Of course I must be the
heroine. Anyhow, I am the one people think of when they talk of the 'Taylor
Case.' But at the beginning there will be another woman, one who would have
killed Taylor a long time ago if she could have done it. And after her there
will come others. And at last we shall come to the back door of the house in
Hollywood, where the person--man or woman--who was to take his life at last
waited while I sat and talked with the man who was to die as soon as I had
gone."
Mabel began, then, to tell me how she would write her screen play, of
her "mystery novel," with its living characters walking across its record of
the man who, in the end, paid with his life. Slowly but surely the identity
of the one who killed the director began to take living image and to come at
last to the back door of the Hollywood bungalow.
But before I put down Mabel's mystery story, and its dramatic episodes
out of human happenings, perhaps we had better picture the murder night
itself. Mabel leaves that for the last.
Her beginning is in a cabin in Alaska, with snow drifting high against
an ice bound door. A woman stands over a man who is asleep in a bunk. She is
slender, with fierce dark eyes and long black hair. Robert Service--as the
story goes--once knew her and Mabel declares that she might have been the
"Lou" of his famous poem--"the woman who was known as Lou." At any rate, we
will call her Lou. She stands over the sleeping man, whom we will know as
"Cunningham Deane," but whom we shall meet in Hollywood presently as William
Desmond Taylor, with her calico dress open to the waist. Her body as gleamy
white as the snow glare, is like rigid marble. Her hair, unbound, falls over
her shoulders. In the fierce dark eyes there is grim and deadly purpose and a
knife, poised in mid air, is pointed at the sleeping man's heart.
Mabel begins there and builds, out of her knowledge of Taylor and his
life, to the murder scene in Hollywood on that chill February night. We,
however, shall look at that night and then go back to Mabel.
There was no better known, no more liked or violently hated figure in
Hollywood than William Desmond Taylor. Scholarly, cultured, arrogant, he
remained aloof from the gayer elements but to his intimates was known as a
gentle, considerate man, who gave deft touches to his screen dramas out of
his own store of experiences. Mary Pickford had called him her "best"
director. Constance Talmadge and Myrtle Stedman declared they owed their
successes to him. Others chimed in on this adulatory note.
Many women loved him to their unending sorrow. He loved freely, often
and ardently. But he tired abruptly. Today's love went from his arms with
lips aglow to return tomorrow and be told by a servant that he wasn't at home
to her any more. It was said that he never sought or wooed a woman. They
proffered themselves and were taken or refused according to their
attractiveness. His dismissals were cruel--and final. He was the autocrat of
the Famous-Players studios, but it was agreed that he never granted favors
there or advancement because of sentimental influence.
Of his steady procession of women only one was permanently enshrined in
his heart. He hoped to persuade Mabel Normand to become his wife. She, he
wooed. Mabel had promised but had withdrawn her promise. She thought at times
that she loved him, but she saw in his character a harshness, a cruelty, that
was so opposite to all her emotions, that she was afraid.
On the night she kissed him good-bye through her window-pane and left
the lipstick record that was to stand her in such good stead, someone waited
behind the Taylor bungalow and nervously smoked cigarettes, while she was
inside. It was a someone who stood close to the door and held it ajar so that
the voices of the two filtered out.
At last Mabel was gone. A cigarette the murderer had just begun to smoke
was tossed to the ground. It was an expensive foreign cigarette of the same
brand used by the director. A brand that sells for a dollar the package of
ten. The rear door was opened stealthily. Taylor, at his table poring over
his check-book, looked up into the grim warning of a leveled pistol. He threw
up his hands but the pistol came close, inexorable. Its steel-jacketed
messenger went straight to his heart.
Edna Purviance telephoned the bungalow that night, as did Mary Miles
Minter and Neva Gerber. They all wondered that there was no "Hello!" in
response. They little dreamed that he was stretched on his rug, dead!
A colored houseboy found his master in the morning. Then came the
vanguard of police authorities, and with them the beginning of the end of
three bright screen careers.
Love letters, some of them signed in school-girl fashion with
sentimental X's, created motives for anyone of half a score of Hollywood
beauties. The partially smoked cigarettes at the back door, Taylor's own
brand, pointed to a former servant who had robbed the director and become a
fugitive from the police. Taylor's merciless antagonism to sinister purveyors
of drugs who were wrecking the souls of some of the screen world's best loved
young women, pointed to retaliation by a "drug ring."
But the murderer was never found! Neighbors heard the shot, but mistook
it for an ordinary, unsuspicious sound. Mrs. Douglas MacLean, who lived next
door, saw a man, small and slight, leave the Taylor house immediately after
the sound. Footprints picked from the Taylor steps next morning indicated
that the one who had left the house had been a woman, for they were prints of
shoes so small, and with heel so pointed, that they indicated a woman must
have worn them. Was the murderer, the police asked at once, a woman in man's
garb?
The director had been mulcted by blackmailers, it was learned. And there
were Mary Miles Minter's love letters, her dressing robe and other things in
the house. Had she wanted her letters back? was a question that was never
quite asked aloud, but nevertheless was sharp in the police mind.
But shall we not sit aside, and watch while Mabel Normand builds the
structure of eventual murder, beginning that day in the Yukon? Mabel was very
particular that you should know "Lou."
The man who had been asleep in the cabin bunk, (Mabel begins) was
stirred by the telepathy of a premonition that penetrated his dreams. The
woman who stood over him had held her blade while she studied the man she was
about to kill.
She had met him in a rough music hall at Nome, where she played the
banjo for what nuggets she could wheedle out of the pouches of lucky miners.
She, like so many women after her, read the promise of ecstasy, of
heaven and happiness in the handsome face of the young Englishman who then
was known as Cunningham Deane and had come into the north on the gold search.
And like the women to follow her, she did the wooing.
She was young, this Lou. Young in years and in body and kiss, though old
in lore. There were many men in Nome who would have given much, pretty well
emptied their nugget pouches, if the "banjo girl" would have saved her lips
for them, as she offered to save them for the young Englishman who only
opened his arms to her when she pleaded his condescension.
Love, sometimes, comes like that.
That Alaska winter threatened to settle down earlier than usual and the
miners were coming in off the trails, but young Deane was determined to push
on into the open country for a prospecting survey before the winter finally
closed down. He was advised against any such foolhardy venture, he a
newcomer, with neither dogs nor experience. It pleased Deane, however, when
Lou told him that if he insisted upon going out she would go with him. He
told her she had more courage than the old-timers.
And when they were caught at last, in the first big snowdrift that shut
them in for the winter, she was the sturdiest and most cheerful.
They were alone in the cabin for a week before another human face showed
up. A pack team, scurrying into Nome, sighted the cabin. The team's drivers
left provisions.
When the decision to remain was reached, Lou was secretly glad. Months
ahead with her lover in the solitude of white vastness would be continuous
enchantment. But an incident of the pack team's departure worried her. Taylor
had written a letter which he would not discuss with her.
Taylor had not told Lou his own story. She knew nothing of why, nor from
what, he had come into Alaska.
The girl slipped out of the cabin and followed the trail of the pack
team. She coaxed the letter from the driver, opened it hurriedly, and scanned
its voluminous pages. Color drained from her cheeks.
The driver offered her room on a sled. She thought, silently, for a long
time, ever and again sending her glance back to the horizon behind, dotted by
the rise of snow banked against the cabin. With the letter dropped into her
dress she waved the pack team ahead, and returned to her lover.
Taylor questioned her changed mood. She evaded explanations. When he
awakened from his first sleep after that she was standing over him, her knife
ready to descend. The man whose feet were frostbitten could not stand on
them, but he managed to catch her wrist and twist it until the blade
clattered noisily to the floor.
"I read the letter," Lou said. Her voice was steady and quiet, despite
the flames in her fierce eyes.
"If what you read has made you unhappy," he returned, "you deserve it.
It was not meant for you."
The letter had been addressed to Taylor's brother, then in Denver. It
discovered to Lou that her lover's name was Deane-Tanner. That there was
another girl, a girl who waited in the East for the return of her affianced
who had gone into Alaska on the gold hunt.
And Lou learned what Taylor's plans for her were. There was to be no
trek south to the haven of Seattle after the Winter ended.
It was when she read that paragraph that Lou decided to kill her
handsome lover.
Lou recovered the fallen knife from the floor. It had dropped out of
Taylor's reach and he could not interfere with her. To stand on his crippled
feet was bitter agony. The girl smiled at him grimly when he braced himself
in the bunk for her attack.
"You could stab while my back is turned," she said. "I tried to do that
to you, and couldn't. Nor could I kill you when you are helpless. We will
make a bargain."
What, perhaps was one of the strangest bargains ever made in the barren,
silent North, was made that day between the banjo-girl and the man whose feet
required her careful nursing.
At least two months of imprisonment were ahead of them. Their jail was
to be the single room cabin. There was a scant supply of fuel, barely enough
for an occasional fire should Lou's forays for game meet with success.
Taylor pleaded for reconciliation. He would not disavow his letter. An
ingrained, deep-rooted pride of self, the haughty arrogance of the Briton,
made retractions inconceivable to him. He reminded Lou of what she was--banjo
girl from the Yukon dives. He reminded her of what he was. A "Deane-Tanner"
with family prestige behind him.
Again Lou's thin, sinister smile.
Warning, there, and threat! Quiet, monotoned words that Taylor forgot as
soon as they were uttered, but remembered a long time afterward!
Through the Winter Lou kept to the terms of the pact she had dictated.
She occasionally went out with their gun. Almost hourly through the first
weeks she packed Taylor's feet with snow until she had nursed them back to
strength. [sic!]
When the trail opened Taylor stumbled into Nome ahead of his lone pair
of dogs. By sheer strength he had compelled Lou to ride in, bundled in her
furs, on the now empty pack sled. Habitues of the music halls who greeted the
banjo girl were shocked by the tragic sadness that had crept into the dark
eyes.
At their parting Taylor begged to hold her in his arms for a moment. He
thought to make one last effort to soften the ice in her heart. She shrank
from him.
In a little while Lou was back in the booths and between tables of the
halls. Her daring red skirt was shorter than it had ever been. Her waist was
tighter. And Taylor, with her.
He may have thought that Lou had forgotten. Lou hadn't!
What pioneers of the old Alaskan days are still left to look across the
years to the great gold rush, remember "Arizona Charlie" Meadows, who had
come up from the States to preside over varied activities of the famous
"Standard Music Hall." Arizona Charlie was noted for the readiness of his gun
and for the softness of his heart. A grizzled veteran with a wide-brimmed
hat, sharp gray eyes, and a human understanding. He put down his glass when
Lou's red skirt brushed against him the day of her return to the Hall. The
banjo girl wanted to talk with him in his cubby-hole of an office behind the
ornate bar.
"Have you ever known anything about love, Charlie?" she asked to her
employer.
"What brand you aimin' to talk about?"
"I love him, Charlie. He didn't ask me to love him, not at first, but I
couldn't help it. That's why I went with him. I thought the banjo days and
the red dress were all behind. I thought he understood that I was clean
inside, cleaner maybe, than he, and that he was taking me as I was. What's
outside you can get rid of, you know, like taking off my dress. But I found
out differently. Read this letter, Charlie."
When she had finished his sharp gray eyes bored through the banjo girl.
"I'm to do something about it?"
"Yes. I want him to stay in Nome. I want him kept here, until I'm ready
with what I've got in mind. He is broke. He will find some way of going down
to Seattle. You can keep him. And he mustn't know you're keeping him for me."
If Arizona Charlie was dubious at first, the banjo girl soon made him
her ally.
"You can hire him to put on a regular show for you," Lou said. "There
are actors in Nome and it will be good business. Until I am ready!"
Charlie was struck by a sudden thought. "Is it killing you're figurin'
on, Lou? Cause if it is I ain't goin' to help. Not that it would make any
difference to me about him, but because o' you. The boys wouldn't do anything
to you, maybe, most of 'em holdin' a hankerin' for you, but your hands is too
pretty to be stained thataway. It sort o' don't rub off, that kind of a
stain, and it gets redder and deeper as you grow older and look back. I won't
help you kill 'im."
"I tried to kill him once and I couldn't. I know that I never could. I
loved him. You can't kill what you once loved. Much less what you still love
and always will. But somebody else can. And somebody else must."
"Who you pickin' on."
"Nobody--yet."
Through the weeks that followed the man who later on was to be termed by
Mary Pickford her "best director," and who was to lift Myrtle Stedman,
Constance Talmadge, Alma Rubens and half a score of others to screen stardom,
developed the genius that was later to stamp great screen dramas to come out
of Hollywood. The little stage of the music hall was enlarged and curtained.
Actors were assembled, some brought from the States. Charlie's venture was a
success.
From his desperate straits young Taylor was lifted to affluence. From
his post behind the scenery on his stage he could watch the dark-haired banjo
girl playing between the tables. From the booths along an upper balcony came
down to him the low rumble of miner's voices while they paid her their rough
compliments and made their uncouth wooings.
Now and again they sat together at a table in the Hall, while the actors
on the stage were rehearsing. Lou did not avoid him. Seldom, when they sat
and chatted, never referring to those dramatic cabin days in the snow, did
her deep eyes seek or meet his. Only when his head was turned would they rest
on him, their flames a sudden conflagration.
At last the banjo girl was ready!
Part II
Mabel had drawn a vivid picture of the banjo girl of the Nome music
halls. More vivid than I have been able to recall it as I write of those
London days when Mabel was so eager with her plan to blossom some day as the
author of a screen play in which she would reveal to a curious world the true
murderer of William Desmond Taylor.
She liked Lou, did Mabel. And this liking was odd. Mabel Normand, of the
soul that never knew hate, nursing a fondness for the dark-haired girl whose
hatred consumed her heart and absorbed her passions!
"She loved," Mabel said when I expressed my wonder. "And what is more
marvelous in all the world than a woman who loves, completely, with no
thoughts of reckonings?"
"Even one who plans to climax her love with murder?" I questioned.
Mabel was thoughtful a moment. We had come from the Savoy Hotel to
Ciro's, the bright dinner rendezvous of London. We sat on the balcony
overlooking the dance floor peopled by sinuous Russian princesses, celebrated
Parisian demi-mondaines and the beauties of London's stage world. Mabel
seemed to estimate the women who danced to the lilts of Paul Whiteman's
visiting band. Down there were women who had suffered, some who had lived
through tragedy. On the floor was a Russian girl who all London knew had
passed through the ravaging embraces of a Bolshevist band. There was a
Belgian woman, smart in sleek black velvet and with carmine lips, who had
been found in a trench dug-out by a British Tommy. The Tommy had saved and
married her, but now a lord's son was dancing with her. Her velvet gown cost
more than the five years' pay of a king's soldier. But it was said that if
she could get him back she would trade for him all of the lords' sons in the
Empire. And there was another woman on the floor Mabel watched while she
danced. A slender, beautiful but sad-eyed woman, who, as everybody knew,
loved a prince at Buckingham Palace. And, also, as "everybody knew," was
loved by him. A tremendous diamond, flashing on her throat, had been the
prince's present--and that, her diamond, was all she could ever acknowledge
of him, or he of her, before the world.
Mabel knew the little story of "The Japanese Sandman" and its
significance. "Point out the woman to me, won't you?" she asked. I pointed
her out, finding her by the flash of her great diamond, and Mabel watched
her. Then she answered my question.
"Plan murder? Yes," she said. "I think that if ever I should love
deeply, and wholly, I would recognize no taboos. Allow none. A woman who
loves knows nothing of codes. If she does, they smother her. If my love were
at stake there is nothing I would not do to save my man from another woman's
arms or punish him for taking mine lightly."
Sir Gerald du Maurier, son of a famous father who created Trilby and
Svengali, came onto the balcony to take Mabel down for an encore of "The
Japanese Sandman." Lionel Tennyson, a descendant of the poet laureate,
claimed her for an ensuing dance. But she was eager to continue her
reconstruction of the sequence of events which led to that tragic moment in
the Hollywood bungalow when William Desmond Taylor faced Nemesis.
"Lou was ready with her revenge," Mabel repeated. "She had found the
lover who, in trade for her promise of unending faithfulness, would collect
what she held to be Taylor's debt to her."
Don Seviers, recently graduated from a mining school near Denver, was
barely more than a boy. He had pushed northward from Seattle on the gold hunt
to realize in the end that he was out of place in the grim North. In the Nome
of those days there was a desolate army of men who could not win against the
hardships of the snow trails; men, young and old, who had come with the fire
of hope and purpose in their steady eyes, to sink by degrees to the level of
the derelicts. Taylor himself had been one of this helpless army of hangers-
on until Arizona Charlie Meadows had listened to Lou's plea and installed him
as his stage manager. Taylor now was prosperous. But meanwhile Don Seviers
had come to take his place among the hungry ones.
Letters young Seviers had sent to his home in Denver asking for money
with which to return had miscarried. There was no word from the States
throughout the tight winter Lou and Taylor had spent in their cabin. When Lou
returned to the music-hall floor with her banjo, Don Seviers was a dejected,
unkempt frequenter of the tables at the back of the hall--the tables reserved
for those who could not buy beer but needed the warmth of the stoves that
bordered the room. Arizona Charlie always insisted that no man who needed
warmth and a chair to sit in should be turned away from the hall.
Lou discovered the thin, ascetic face of the young man during her
moments of refuge from the more prosperous habitues. Sympathetic, as were all
of her kind, the banjo girl found ways of cheering and helping the young
stranger. When she read something deeper than gratitude in his face, Lou came
more and more often to his table among the derelicts.
Don Seviers slowly regained his courage and his strength. There were
many ways for a banjo girl to help a Don Seviers. Work, which he had sought
so futilely before, came to him now unsolicited. After a plea from Lou the
keeper of a resort that rivaled Charlie Meadow's "Standard Music Hall"
installed Seviers as a cashier. Men who could be trusted with an employer's
money were scarce in Nome, and Seviers proved that he was honest.
It was noticeable, after a time, that young Seviers spent his mornings,
when the halls were empty of patrons, at the back tables in Charlie Meadows'
place. Taylor rehearsed his company in the mornings, and Seviers watched the
director with gloomy, hating eyes--eyes that grew to hold as much fierce
hatred as Lou's own.
In the background Charlie Meadows watched from under the shadow of his
wide-brimmed hat. Now and again he went back into the rear of his hall during
the rehearsal hours and condescended to drop into a chair beside the young
director.[sic] The proprietor frequently bought the one-time derelict a
drink, and as often spoke to him about Lou. Meadows noted that when he talked
of the banjo girl the younger man's face lighted.
It was because the music hall owner liked Don Seviers and not on
Taylor's account that he summoned the latter to the office behind the bar.
Taylor had brought added prosperity to the hall and sent its fame across the
Alaskan gold fields, but Charlie never liked him.
"There'll be a boat goin' down to Seattle next week," Meadows stated to
the director. "I'm wanting you to be aboard."
Taylor was puzzled. He had planned to remain with Meadows until his
savings were enough to fund another prospecting expedition, with enough left
over to carry him on in the event of failure.
"On business for you?" he asked. "If so, hadn't you better send someone
else?"
"Business of mine, maybe, but business of your own, too. You bein'
killed might matter considerable, and then again it might not. I ain't
sayin'. But the fellow who kills you might have to answer. Particularly if he
don't do it cleverlike. That would be a mess I'm aimin' to prevent. I'm
wanting you to take the boat for Seattle."
Taylor demanded the identity of the man who proposed to assassinate him-
-and his reason. Feuds sprang up over night in the gold camp, and blossomed
over a single word. But Taylor knew of no enemies. He was no one's rival and
participated in no bar-room brawls. He could not imagine who could hold an
enmity to the death against him.
Meadows would not enlighten him. That would have been against his code.
Taylor refused to run away. He discounted Meadows' alarm and proposed to
continue with the stock company. Meadows tried his best to persuade him, but
the director stubbornly refused to run from an unknown enemy. He left the
office behind the bar still wondering what could lie behind his employer's
warning.
That night he sat at one of the tables watching his show on the stage.
A vague premonition caused him to turn suddenly. Lou stood close behind him.
Her dark eyes were fixed upon him. Taylor started. Across his mind flashed a
vision of that day in the isolated cabin when he awoke to see her standing
over him, her knife poised in mid-air. In her eyes now were the hatred and
resolve that had been in them then.
In that moment Taylor knew! Lou had not forgotten. Intuitively he
realized that Lou was associated with the strange advice given by Meadows.
Of young Don Seviers and his devotion to the banjo girl who had helped
him rise from his despair, Taylor was scarcely aware. All of Nome knew that
Lou had taken on a new love. Prospectors who came in from the snow and tossed
nuggets into the neck yoke of her tight waist teased her about her new
absorption. But the director, aloof, concerned only with his own stage
affairs, had been too uninterested to observe.
He would not have run away from a man, perhaps. He did not hesitate to
run away from Lou. It seemed to be the only course if she was to be saved
from the consequences of the rashness he sensed as her determination, after
he had surprised that hatred in her eyes and when he remembered the cryptic
warning from Meadows that he should take the boat for Seattle.
He would have quietly disappeared and left Lou to forget if she could,
but Don Seviers intruded upon his plans. The stage curtain had fallen after
the night performance. Shadows from a single pilot light traced the floor
with grotesque shapes. There young Seviers, wrung to sobs by the passion of
his desperate intentions, a pistol shaking in his hand, confronted the man
who had played too carelessly with the kisses of the banjo girl.
The boy's first shot, after he had shouted to the director to turn
around and face his fate, went wild. In the dimness Taylor could not make out
the features of his would-be assassin. Perhaps he would have spared the mere
boy whom he might have remembered as having come to the music hall
occasionally with Lou. As it was, he shot the boy down.
Charlie Meadows, his own gun drawn, held back the patrons who would have
swarmed up the stage stairs at the sound of shooting behind the curtains. The
red skirt of Lou, however, flashed past him. Don Seviers was writhing on the
floor, his pistol still in his grasp, and stubbornly rising for another shot
at the director. Taylor would have finished him, as men did in the gold-rush
days, but the body of Lou intervened. She flung herself upon her prostrate
lover, screaming her hatred and accusation at the astonished Taylor.
Because of Lou, the director might not have escaped from Nome alive.
There were many ready to avenge a wrong, real or fancied, done the banjo
girl. And a human life was cheap. Charlie Meadows saved him, aided by Robert
W. Service. These two got him on the boat for Seattle.
Of a music-hall banjo girl and her favorite sweetheart there are few
records kept in a mining camp. But one record of Lou and Don Seviers has come
down through the years. An itinerant preacher, who later won fame as
Frederick Updyke, the evangelist, married them in an improvised, canvas-
roofed church. Charlie Meadows remembered that the young man was nursed back
to health and that Lou was tender and devoted. One of his arms was amputated
and one shoulder hopelessly shattered, but Lou remained loyal, and according
to her code, faithful. Charlie also remembered that when a girl child was
born, the patrons of the Standard raised a purse to send her and Don Seviers
back to the States where it would be possible for the child to grow up never
knowing of her mother's red dress and banjo.
Thus Mabel finished her story of the Yukon girl whom Taylor left in
Alaska. "How much of it all," I asked her, "is really true?"
"I have spent many hours with Will Taylor," Mabel replied, "trying to
learn to know him. He understood me perfectly--understood, I mean to say, why
I wanted to talk of the early days when the first of his women played their
parts in building his character and shaping his moods. He never avoided my
prying for details of his life with, and his life near, the music-hall girl.
All that I have told is true. In his treatment of her I saw the mask lifted
from his secret self--and that was why I could never bring myself to marry
him."
"You thought," I observed, "that there would always be another woman--
one in the background while you occupied your season in his affections?"
While Mabel sought for just the right reply to this probing question, I
remembered the frieze of autographed photographs around the walls of the
bungalow room in which the director's body was found.
Mary Pickford, Blanche Sweet, Gloria Swanson, Norma Talmadge and Kathlyn
Williams, foremost of the stars of the day, were in that border of faces.
Each had written her regard for the director in her own hand. But the row of
photographs contained other faces, other autographs with names not so well
known.
"Do you remember that mine was the only face in Hollywood that wasn't
found among the others on his living-room wall?"
I did remember! Mary Miles Minter, and Neva Gerber, and Edna Purviance
was there, and Edna Purviance was then Mabel's closest woman friend. But
Mabel was not tacked on the wall with the others.
"But you were framed in silver on his desk," I reminded her. "And you
were framed in a gold locket that he wore on a gold chain."
"Yes," she said, softly. "I was. But so far I had managed to be kept
separate--not with the others. How long would I remain in the locket, I
wondered? How long before my picture would come out of the silver frame and
take its place in the row on the wall?"
In building her story that reveals the murderer of the director and
answers at last the most baffling of all murder mysteries, Mabel jumped from
Alaska to Hollywood. She bridged the years with the swift gesture of the true
dramatist.
And these years amounted to more than twenty. The "Cunningham Deane,"
who spent a winter in the snow-bound cabin outside of Nome, and who really
was William Deane-Tanner of Dublin, had become William Desmond Taylor of
Hollywood. None of his associates knew of his life before his arrival in
Hollywood in 1912. There were rumors that he had been married; and he had
been. He had married in New York, a Florodora girl, while Lou was nursing her
Don Seviers onto his feet.
From this wife he went out, one evening, on a domestic errand for his
household, which included a little daughter. He never returned. He entered
Hollywood, years after that, as penniless as when he came in with Lou from
the Alaska snow. But he rose rapidly after his first job in the studios.
Rose, until at last he was the foremost of all screen directors, save only
D. W. Griffith.
The death that finally caught up with Taylor (she continued) really
began to stalk him that day when he took the boat for Seattle on his flight
from the North. It began to draw close, and to cast its shadows of the tragic
day to come, when the director chose his extras for the crowd scenes in a
picture of the Klondike in which Dustin Farnum was the star.
The director himself chose his "crowds." One man he chose was an odd
little fellow, with thin, pointed face, a small mouth and deep, restless
eyes. Perhaps the little man reminded him of the Don Seviers he had shot down
on the stage of the Standard Music Hall, for the type was quite identical.
The Dustin Farnum production was completed; but Edward Sands, the new
"extra," remained on the studio payroll. Taylor found other work for him to
do. No foreshadow of the day when the world would accuse the little fellow of
his murder touched Taylor then. And certainly, the new "crowd type" could
have felt no premonition of what Fate had in store for him.
The famous director's personal interest in him astonished him. A bright,
intelligent fellow, he was not so foolish as to believe he had shown any
unusual screen abilities. He was too slow, however, to take full advantage of
those recurring moments when the director, so austere and unapproachable as a
rule, stopped to speak to him, to question him.
But Sands impressed himself upon the director's thoughts. He made it a
habit to be always handy for the rendering of some slight service. He managed
that the director should know that he had held responsible positions in the
East--had been a bookkeeper and a rich man's personal attendant.
Taylor was one of the first of the screen directors to engage for
himself a "confidential secretary." They all have them now, as well as press
agents, valets, business and income-tax advisers. But at that a "private
secretary" was a curiosity. It was young Sands he chose for the post.
Sands, triumphant in the sudden good fortune that had descended upon him
out of the clear California skies, took up his residence in Taylor's house.
And, also, Death moved into the Taylor bungalow!
Part III
Now read this concluding chapter in Mabel's own words.
"Sands, of the eager, restless eyes, studied his master. He learned to
know his moods and whims, and his weaknesses.
"Among the private secretary's treasures there was but a single
photograph. Like all of those on his master's wall, this was autographed in a
stiff, girlish handwriting. But while Mary Pickford had written, 'To the
nicest director of all,' and Anna Q. Nilsson had inscribed, 'To the best
among men,' the girl of Sands' photograph had put down simply, 'To my
friend.' Sands had wished there had been more heart in that description, and
planned that some day Noma Trent should be far closer than a 'friend.' It was
this wish that had brought him from St. Louis to California seeking new
fields, new opportunities.
"It was one of Sands' first plans, while he watched golden fortunes
being made by those who could hold the director's favor, to bring Noma Trent
to Hollywood. He wrote her glowingly of his own new fortunes and of the power
he could wield. Like almost any other girl, Noma had dreamed of 'the
pictures.' But she had been sensible enough to know that there would be
little chance of such dreams coming true. Sands wrote her that the time would
soon come when she might bring her dreams to Hollywood.
"But Sands did not send as quickly for Noma Trent as he at first planned
that he would! From his post of vantage he saw too many tragedies in the army
of young women from the East who came so eagerly to Hollywood to end up in
the restaurants or in that sad regiment that patrols the pavements. Noma
Trent would not be grateful to him if he roused hopes that should turn into
despair.
"Like many another of Hollywood's later 'private secretaries,' Sands
sought diligently for profits to himself out of his confidential post.
"In the bungalow basement were boxes and trunks that were nailed or
locked. Sands spent every possible hour rummaging through these personal
effects of his master. He came at last to a yellowed, crumbling sheaf of
Alaskan newspapers. Among these were play bills illustrated with crude
woodcuts. The illustrations pictured the theatrical stock company of the
Standard Music Hall, and in many of them was the face of Cunningham Deane,
the stage manager, which Sands recognized as the William Desmond Taylor who
was his master!
"The private secretary read the old newspapers assiduously. There were
frayed letters from Taylor's brother in which were references to the 'banjo
girl.' And in the time-stained and crudely printed newspaper sheet that bore
the latest date was the account of the shooting of Don Seviers on the stage
of the Standard Music Hall.
"In his own room Sands sat in deep thought, now glancing at his
photograph of Noma Trent, now at the paper which told of the scene that had
taken place behind the stage curtains.
"Then he sent for Noma.
"She came, from St. Louis. Sands had hoped she would come alone, but her
mother accompanied her. A quiet, dark-eyed woman who seldom smiled. Noma, who
was twenty, smiled often, with the ready enthusiasms of youth.
"She was happy and hopeful, but puzzled. Sands' letter had been
mysterious. He had written surely, confidently. He had discovered something.
A thing he would not reveal to her now, but that she would know when she had
become a star.
"Noma was too excited to probe deep into the assurances of the man who
had become so important to her dreams. But her mother watched him from out of
dark, brooding eyes, and made her appraisals. With Noma out of hearing she
asked her question sharply, directly:
"'Who will she have to pay for this success and how?'
"Sands was reassuring. 'I shall watch over her. I will protect her. Have
I not said, many times, that I want her some day to acknowledge that she has
learned to love me?'
"All thought of love, however, had flown from the private secretary's
mind, after he learned that his employer had been Cunningham Deane, of
Alaska. Noma had taken on a new significance. In her lay hopes of better
fortunes for himself.
"So Noma Trent came to Hollywood. And Taylor moved farther into the
shadow of death!
"There were preliminary weeks during which she became familiar with the
studios and 'the pictures.' The private secretary of the powerful director
had, as he had boasted to Noma, a certain influence of his own. In those days
the studios had not been purged of their heinous elements. Backers of the
evil 'drug ring' had their representatives within the gates, often close to
executive desks. With these Sands had long before made a secret pact.
"Taylor was the enemy of the growing narcotic pestilence. He strove
valiantly, and often single-handed, to save thoughtless girls and weak men
who had careers ahead of them, from the spreading drug habit.
"And his most trusted servant was a dangerous traitor in his own
household. In his master's confidence, and always watching his every action,
Sands learned the names of young women whose supply of the menacing drug
Taylor had managed to cut off. These names he sold to the drug sellers, and
now, to these drug sellers, who could sway a potent influence among their
victims, he turned in Noma Trent's behalf.
"While other newcomers
haunted the studio gates until their courage was
broken, Noma was taken in by directors themselves. From the ranks of the
'extra girls' she was rapidly promoted to lesser parts which brought her into
more prominence.
"And as little Noma progressed, and earned roles more and more
important, something of a lost glow crept into the tired dark eyes of her
mother, and she smiled oftener. She was almost as excited as her young
daughter when Noma burst in upon her to announce that the most powerful of
all the studio directors, William Desmond Taylor, had deigned to notice her!
"Noma suspected, and frankly said so, that Sands had been instrumental
in that meeting.
"'Barbara La Marr spoke to me only yesterday,' Noma ran on in her
eagerness. 'She chose me of all the other girls in her picture as the one to
be kind to. And today, when Mr. Taylor was passing, she went over to him,
taking me with her. Mr. Taylor asked who I was, and Barbara left us
together--oh! for many minutes. He talked to me!'
"What influence Sands had with the popular Barbara La Marr will never be
known. Perhaps only the promise that he would intercede for her with his
master if she would do a kindness for the beginner he wanted to favor.
Barbara might even have granted such a request from Sands without a bargain.
She was a lovable, gentle soul.
"'And I am to have lunch with him, in Hollywood!' Noma Trent confided to
her mother. 'If he should like me and my work on the screen, my future is
made!'
"The infatuation of the director, who was at the threshold of middle-
age, for a little newcomer into the screen world was whispered about and
wondered at in the boudoirs and dressing rooms of Hollywood.
"And some of us felt a little sorry for the girl who had gone so
blithely into the most fickle arms in studio-land. We watched her little
airs, her new poise, her new confidence, and because we liked her, we shook
our heads.
"And Sands watched. Skillfully, he wore the aspect of the wounded,
betrayed suitor. Noma avoided him, or tried to avoid him. But what a hopeless
effort that was! It was Sands, in whose face reproach was lined, to opened
the bungalow door to her ring. It was Sands, whom she had jilted when he had
brought about her screen enthronement, who lifted her wrap from her gleaming
bare shoulders when she appeared in the foyer, to be called to from within
the house by the welcoming voice of his master.
"It was Sands who, now and again, drove her home in the dawn hours in
his master's car.
"The situation became unbearable to the poor girl. Across Taylor's
shoulder when he held and kissed her she could see the 'suffering' private
secretary, watching from the background. And then came realization, one day,
that a worse and more dreadful secret was shared by her 'betrayed' admirer.
"On one of those early morning drives to her home, where her mother
waited, supposing her to be on a 'late call' at the studio, Sands reached for
her purse and quietly opening it before she could object, brought out her
morphine needle!
"The girl's terror was lest Sands reveal her double fall to her mother.
Cruelly, he fed this terror. Noma proffered him all that a girl could lay at
his feet.
"She would go away with Sands. She would marry him, if he still wanted
her. She would sacrifice her film career, give up her lover. Or she would
strive to purify herself and be worthy of the man who had done so much for
her, if he would wait and trust her.
"It was none of these things Sands wanted. He looked ahead, not to
Noma's return to him, but to a share of the money earnings he planned should
mount until even a portion of them would be, to him, a moderate fortune.
"Noma was happy and relieved when he proposed that she repay him by an
arrangement, legalized, that would give him a fixed percentage of her future
salary. He pointed out that all the stars had paid in cash for the promotion
of their careers. Noma agreed enthusiastically that Sands should have a third
of all she earned from that time on.
"Noma's mother had not seen William Desmond Taylor. Noma had managed,
possibly unconsciously, to keep her mother from the studios. But the mother,
who sensed the unwonted brilliance in her daughter's eyes, on those mornings
when she came in before dawn, was harried by uneasy premonitions.
"'Tell me,' she asked unexpectedly, 'something of the man who has taken
such an interest in you.'
"'But what shall I tell, darling,' Noma countered, 'save that he is very
wonderful and that--he likes me?'
"Noma soon was asleep, wearily relaxed under the Marie Antoinette
hangings over her white bed. But her mother stole in to stand over her, stand
silently, her dark eyes brooding and mutely questioning.
"In her sheer, web-like pajamas, Noma was a little pink pool in the
silken white. Her hair, a brown swirl on the pillow. Her lips, their make-up
still vivid, a tired red flower. The mother stood there at the bedside,
looking down, motionless until shafts of sun crept through the drawn
curtains. Then she went out. Not to find her own bed, but to hurry in a taxi
to the Vine Street gates of the Famous Players studio.
"The great director, William Desmond Taylor, she had been told by Noma,
was always on the set or in his studio office early in the mornings. Noma's
mother pushed to the forefront of the early group of 'extra people' waiting
outside the gates for their hoped-for summons inside, and asked the gate man
if he would point Taylor out to her when his automobile arrived.
"Taylor, intent upon a morning paper, sat beside his chauffeur. The
gates swung open for him, a buzz of recognition swept through the hangers-on,
and then the gates closed behind him.
"That night, and many other nights, Noma's mother went into Alvarado
Street and walked through the neighborhood of William Desmond Taylor's
bungalow. Once, when she had seen her daughter arrive, she went to the
bungalow door. Douglas MacLean and his wife on one side, Edna Purviance on
the other, Myrtle Stedman across the court--any of these might have seen her,
or if Sands had come to the door he might have found her.
"Perhaps she would have returned again to the bungalow's front door, at
a time when Noma wasn't beyond it, but a change came suddenly over the girl
that held the mother. Taylor's interest was waning! Noma went out, 'to the
studio,' one evening, and returned within the hour.
"She would have stolen quietly into her own room, but her mother met
her.
"'The call was cancelled. We are not working tonight,' Noma said, but
now her eyes were turned away. Her voice was tremulous. Her mother
understood.
"'His door didn't open to you? At last you were turned away. Isn't that
it?'
"Noma crumpled at her mother's feet, a sad little heap. Her mother knelt
beside her and took her into arms that knew how to be inexpressibly tender.
"Downstairs Noma's gold mesh bag lay on the floor where it had fallen.
Her mother recovered it--and looked inside.
"Tiny glint of steel rested in her palm, and before that mute symbol of
Noma's sinister secret, horror closed her dark eyes.
"When Noma awakened the morning after, she was lost in delirium. She
screamed for the surcease the needle would give her. Through long weeks she
fought bravely under the skillful care of a famous Los Angeles specialist who
had saved others before her. Noma's mother fought with her, and if ever she
smiled again, after she left the studio gate that day when she way Taylor
pass through, it must have been when Noma proved that her body and soul had
been rescued.
"We talked, Taylor and I, on that last evening of his life, of many
things during the hour I spent in the bungalow. Among them, we talked of
little Noma. I recalled her when Taylor asked me, as he had been asking so
regularly, when I would become his wife.
"'The others I could forgive, and forget,' I said. 'But little Noma
always troubles me. She was lovely, and sweet, and trusting. She believed in
you--and wanted your arms more, I am sure, than she wanted the fame you might
have given her.'
"So we talked of Noma, and wondered if she still were in Hollywood. She
had dropped out of the studio completely. When I left him it was with his
warning that first I must forget her before he and I could talk seriously of
our being married. He was unperturbed. He was certain he would win me in the
end.
"But the kiss through the window of my car was to be our last.
"He went back to the bungalow after a cheery wave from under its palms.
He shut himself in, alone, as he thought.
"Taylor had dropped to a chair before his table and spread his check
books before him for a session with their figures. He looked up at a sound
and sprang to his feet.
"The figure that confronted him was strangely masked, but its face was
free--its face and two fiercely burning dark eyes.
"Taylor cried a single syllable:
"'Lou!'
"'Noma's mother!"
"'Noma's mother!' he echoed in unbelief. 'Noma Trent?'
"'Noma Seviers--who took mine and her step-father's name!'
"Taylor must have felt the shadow bearing down. Lou's voice was low and
steady, an ominous monotone. Her eyes so fascinated him that he stood
speechless, helpless, when she moved--and came close.
"'You were not content to hurt the mother. You must do worse to the
daughter. The mother was tainted, but the daughter was unstained.'
"Again Taylor cried out, a cry that was heard by Mrs. Douglas MacLean,
next door, but muffled in a deadlier sound.
"'Good God, Lou!'
"When the police came, next morning, in response to the alarm given by
the house boy who found the director's body, Mrs. MacLean remembered that
after the sound, she looked into the court and saw a short, slender man who
had just left her neighbor's door. The man walked curiously, Mrs. MacLean
said, and wore a cumbersome plaid cap.
"When the police told me of this man I remembered the plaid cap. Noma
Trent had worn a plaid cap as part of her costume in a Western picture. It
had been a cumbersome cap, voluminous that it might conceal her hair.
"And when the police were puzzled by the foot-prints in the court,
small, pointed foot-prints that were surely a woman's, I remembered that
Taylor often had recalled gay scenes in the old Standard Music Hall when the
banjo girl would doff her red skirt and dance between the tables, trim and
graceful in trousers and jacket borrowed from some conspiring youth.
"Around the world flashed the police conviction that a woman had masked
herself and punctuated her accusations with the shot that sent Taylor to the
floor. But no one in Hollywood remembered that Noma Trent had worn that plaid
cap! In the faces of some of my friends--who had been Taylor's also, and
little Noma's, I saw that memory--but it remained mute in answer to the plea
in my eyes--a plea I never had to voice. To the absent Sands the police gave
much thought. They found the Alaskan papers and identified Taylor as
Cunningham Deane. They did not know how Sands had identified Noma Trent whose
history he knew as Noma Seviers.
"So those of us who knew, those of us who after a little while, sat with
Lou and talked with her, never two of us at a time, have watched while the
tragic night fades away into unsolved mystery. No one must--no one shall!--
pay for William Desmond Taylor's death. Other judgment than ours must be
passed upon the banjo girl.
"Sometime, when Lou is gone--and safe--perhaps my 'screen play' can be
done for the public to see, and for the world to know who it was in the
Hollywood bungalow that night. But not while Lou is with us."
And it is only now--when Lou has gone--that Mabel's amazing story can be
told!
The End
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NOTES:
[1] See WDT:DOSSIER, pp. 370,380-1
[2] See note 16 to TAYLOROLOGY #16.
[3] See LOS ANGELES EXAMINER (February 9, 1922).
[4] See Taylor's probate file.
[5] See TAYLOROLOGY #16 and KING OF COMEDY, p. 243.
[6] See LOS ANGELES RECORD (February 2, 1922).
[7] See LOS ANGELES EXAMINER (February 5, 1922).
[8] See OMAHA WORLD-HERALD (February 26, 1922).
[9] See LOS ANGELES EXPRESS (February 14, 1922).
[10] See LOS ANGELES TIMES (February 3, 1922).
[11] See LOS ANGELES EXAMINER (February 3, 1922).
[12] See LOS ANGELES RECORD (February 4, 1922).
[13] See LOS ANGELES EXAMINER (February 8, 1922).
[14] See KING OF COMEDY, p. 243.
[15] See LOS ANGELES TIMES (February 7, 1922).
[16] See LOS ANGELES TIMES (February 7, 1922).
[17] See LOS ANGELES EXAMINER (February 15, 1922).
[18] See LOS ANGELES TIMES (February 3, 1922).
[19] See LOS ANGELES EXAMINER (February 3, 1922).
[20] See LOS ANGELES EXAMINER (February 5, 1922).
[21] For details of Mabel Normand's visit with Taylor, see WDT:DOSSIER,
pp. 263-270.
[22] This entire tale appears to be press fabrication, originating in Los
Angeles newspapers. The local newspaper in Ventura was unable to confirm the
story or locate any of the purported Ventura "witnesses."
[23] Mabel Normand.
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For more information about Taylor, see
WILLIAM DESMOND TAYLOR: A DOSSIER (Scarecrow Press, 1991)
Back issues of Taylorology are available via Gopher or FTP at
etext.archive.umich.edu
in the directory pub/Zines/Taylorology
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