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* T A Y L O R O L O G Y *
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* A Continuing Exploration of the Life and Death of William Desmond Taylor *
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* *
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* Issue 21 -- September 1994 Editor: Bruce Long bruce@asu.edu *
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* TAYLOROLOGY may be freely distributed *
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CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE:
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The Last Day of Taylor's Life
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Wallace Smith: February 16, 1922
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"Has Mabel Normand Solved the Taylor Murder?"
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What is TAYLOROLOGY?
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TAYLOROLOGY is a newsletter focusing on the life and death of William Desmond
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Taylor, a top film Paramount film director in early Hollywood who was shot to
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death on February 1, 1922. His unsolved murder was one of Hollywood's major
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scandals. This newsletter will deal with: (a) The facts of Taylor's life;
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(b) The facts and rumors of Taylor's murder; (c) The impact of the Taylor
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murder on Hollywood and the nation. Primary emphasis will be given toward
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reprinting, referencing and analyzing source material, and sifting it for
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accuracy.
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The Last Day of Taylor's Life
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The following information was obtained from items giving details of Taylor's
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activities on Wednesday, February 1, 1922, the last day of his life.
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* Sometime during the morning he went to the First National Bank, where he
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deposited two $800 paychecks, and stock dividend checks for $600 and $150.
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[1]
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* Sometime during the morning he posted bail (or sent his chauffeur to post
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bail) for his servant Henry Peavey. Some press reports indicate Peavey was
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bailed out on the morning of the same day Taylor was killed, some reports
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indicate this happened a few days earlier. [2]
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* Sometime during the day he purchased a silver-mounted pocket flask and
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watch crystal at a jewelry store downtown. [3]
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* Sometime during the day he wrote a check for $100 payable to Jack O'Brien.
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[4]
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* Sometime during the day he went to Robinson's Department Store, where he
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purchased ROSA MUNDI, by Ethel Dell, and the translation of a German
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criticism on Nietzche. [5]
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* Sometime during the day, he was riding in his McFarlan car when he was
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passed by a car containing Mary Miles Minter and her grandmother, Julia
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Miles. Minter said this happened at 7th and Alvarado, and only mentions
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that the the car passed hers. [6] Julia Miles said this happened on
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Broadway, and that they stopped the cars and exchanged a few friendly
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greetings. [7] (The two women are not referring to two separate incidents-
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-both women commented that this was the first time Minter had seen
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Taylor's car since it was repainted.) After Taylor's death several of
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Minter's blonde hairs were reportedly found on his jacket, and it's
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possible that those hairs were transferred through a hug given during
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those "friendly greetings."
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* Possibly, at noon he had lunch with Frank E. Garbutt, manager of
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Wilshire/Realart studios. Garbutt said he had lunch with Taylor "on the
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day before he was killed." That might mean the previous day, but Taylor
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was on location at Mt. Lowe on Tuesday. So it appears that Garbutt was
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referring to the date of Taylor's death, but before the killing took
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place. [8]
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* He met with J. Marjorie Berger, his income tax advisor, in her office for
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two hours, between approximately 2:00 and 4:00 p.m. [9]
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* He briefly went to the Lasky studio, and left at 4:30. [10] The last person
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he saw on the Lasky lot was Barrett Kiesling, the publicity director. They
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talked about Taylor's upcoming film, "The Ordeal," which was scheduled to
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begin production on the following Monday. [11]
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* Shortly before 5:00 he stopped at C.C. Parker's Bookshop and bought the
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two-volume anthology "The Home Book of Verse." (He had previously given
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the books to Mabel Normand as a gift, but she had lost one of the
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volumes.) [12] His chauffeur then drove him home. He told the chauffeur to
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deliver the volume to Mabel Normand's home, then go to dinner and call for
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instructions by 7:30. [13] As soon as the chauffeur departed, Taylor
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telephoned Mabel Normand's home, but she was not in. He left the message
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with her maid that he was sending over his chauffeur with a book for Mabel
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from Parker's, and that he also had two books from Robinson's--she should
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stop by and pick them up. [14]
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* At 5:00 he left home on foot, and walked to his dancing lesson, at the
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Payne Dancing Academy on Orange St. [15]
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* Between 5:00 and 6:00 he had his dancing lesson from his regular
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instructor, Mrs. Waybright. Then he walked back home. [16]
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* When he arrived home, he began working on his income tax. He telephoned
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Berger with some questions. [17] Berger did some checking and called him
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back. [18]
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* Peavey fixed dinner for Taylor, which he ate at 6:45. [19]
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* At 7:00 he returned a telephone call to actor Antonio Moreno at the L.A.
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Athletic Club. (Moreno had called at 6:00, when Taylor was out.) Moreno
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was having a contract dispute with Vitagraph and he wanted Taylor's
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assistance. They agreed to meet at 10:00 a.m. at the Lasky studio on the
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following day. [20]
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* At approximately 7:05, while the phone call with Moreno was still in
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progress, Mabel Normand arrived. She left at approximately 7:45, and
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Taylor was murdered within a few minutes of her departure. [21]
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Wallace Smith: February 16, 1922
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The following is another of Wallace Smith's sensationalizing dispatches on
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the Taylor case.
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February 16, 1922
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Wallace Smith
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CHICAGO AMERICAN
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Seven hours after Mabel Normand left the home of William Desmond Taylor
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on the night he was murdered a half-hysterical woman madly drove a roaring
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motor from Los Angeles and sent it hurtling at breakneck speed over the coast
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road toward San Francisco.
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She was clad in an evening gown and furs that matched her own striking
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beauty. It was 3 in the morning when she flung the car recklessly through the
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dark. Its speed increased as the first faint rays of morning began to streak
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the sky and filter into the study where the body of the slain man lay.
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And today, just two weeks after the wild flight, the police hurried over
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the same trail in desperate hope of at last running down the slayer of the
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eccentric director and solving the sinister mystery that came with the murder
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in Alvarado St.
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They were directed in their search of the fleeing beauty by the employees
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of an automobile station at Ventura, three hours' hard drive from Los Angeles,
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and a Los Angeles motorist who passed the woman -- after narrowly escaping a
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collision -- on the road to San Francisco.
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It was at the station in Ventura that the woman in the machine, excited
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and eager to be off again, crashed on the brakes and halted long enough to
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take on a fresh supply of gasoline and oil. Her hair had been disarranged by
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the wind that screamed at her in her nightmare race. She sobbed as she gave
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orders to the men. She reached the station at 6:20 a.m., they said, and left
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about ten minutes later.
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So strange was her behavior that the men at the station took plains to
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identify the car she drove. This identification was said to place the car as
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the property of a wealthy Los Angeles man, known to be familiar to the moving
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picture world.
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He was to be questioned by the police upon his return today from town.
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He had been absent, it was explained, "on a business trip."
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As the car leaped away from the gasoline station, the wild-eyed driver
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crammed on all speed. The car went careening down the road. Six miles away
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from the station the car of the Los Angeles witness sighted the oncoming
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motor.
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The Los Angeles man, observing the speed of the approaching machine,
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cautiously took his own car far to the side of the road. He was just in time.
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As the car driven by the woman came abreast of his it swung half across the
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road and seemed about to turn over. The woman in the car turned out, twisted
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at the wheel, and finally regained control.
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The car sped out of sight and out of the mystery until investigators
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found the Ventura witnesses. [22]
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Their story strengthened the theory that a woman was in the study of
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Taylor when he was shot to death, and seemed to make clearer the picture of
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the "kiss of death" theory that Taylor was embracing a woman when he was shot.
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It also gave new credence to the yarn of the mysterious bootlegger who
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declared he saw a woman fleeing the Taylor home immediately after the shot was
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fired.
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It even led the police to a belief that their arbitrary fixing of the
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time of the crime might be off a few hours and that Taylor might have been
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slain by the actress known to have visited his rooms in the still hours of the
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night.
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The Ventura story was one of several startling new developments of the
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day. Among others were:
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The alleged confessions of one of the chief Hollywood drug peddlers
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regarding his deals with moving picture favorites, and especially his
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transactions with one of the film beauties who has been named in the Taylor
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mystery.
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The threat of an expose in the federal court, through government
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prosecution of certain dope peddlers, of the names of the screen actors and
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actresses named as drug users.
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The declaration by physicians that Taylor may have lived for some time
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after the fatal shot was fired instead of dying instantly, as the first police
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theory decided.
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The questioning of the dope peddler chief--it was nearer to the method
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indicated by the term "third degree"--began at midnight and lasted through
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well into the morning. The dope peddler is a man of foreign birth; known to
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have been a member of the "dress suit mob"--a gang which uses fashionable
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clothes as its chief disguise -- mentioned several days ago in The Chicago
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Evening American dispatches.
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He was seized in Hollywood and held incommunicado there. According to
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the police he was persuaded to reveal many of the secrets of the gang and the
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names of the film folks who traded in cocaine, morphine, opium and other
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drugs.
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They were interested most of all in his statement that he had personally
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dealt with the actress named in connection with Taylor's death, known for
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years as a victim of the drug habit and said to have been blackmailed by an
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eastern gang of dope peddlers. [23]
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Stung by the recent criticism of their so-called inactivity, the police
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threatened to lay the confession of their prisoner before the federal
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authorities and demand his prosecution and the prosecution of other members of
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the band.
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This would result, it was stated, in placing before the open court the
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long list of Hollywood film people said to be users of the bamboo pipe and the
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hypodermic needle.
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There was considerable agitation in moving picture circles at this threat
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of the police officials, and those who guide the affairs of the screen stars,
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never idle since the latest scandal shocked the nation, began to get busier
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than ever.
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The statement of physicians that Taylor might have lived for an hour or
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two after the shot--which did not reach the heart as first reported--was
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fired, opened the way for considerable interesting speculation. It seemed to
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shed a new light, too, on the carefully "laid out" position of the body when
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found.
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It was pointed out that had the assassin fired in a mad desire to kill
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his man and see him dead he would have emptied every chamber in his revolver.
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Only one shot was fired. It was set forth as well that Taylor, a powerful
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man, would have made some sort of struggle had there remained in his body
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strength enough to lift an arm. Everything was in order.
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It was declared possible that a woman, maddened by jealousy or infuriated
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by Taylor's taunts, had fired the single shot. Then, overcome by remorse, she
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attempted to save his life, remaining at his side until he finally died and
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fleeing at last to save the shreds of her own reputation.
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Undersheriff Eugene Biscailuz, working with District Attorney Lee
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Woolwine in attempting a solution of the mystery, made a dramatic examination
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of William Davis, chauffeur for Mabel Normand, who drove her to Taylor's home
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the night of the slaying. He repeated his earlier story in detail,
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corroborating Miss Normand in most of her statements about her entrance and
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exit on the night of the drama
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But he was made to repeat his statement on the scene of the killing,
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sitting in the sheriff's car in front of Taylor's home and about 150 feet from
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Taylor's door, as he says he did the night he drove Miss Normand there.
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"It was before 7:30 that I drove Miss Normand here," he declared. "She
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had bought a Police Gazette and a bag of peanuts. She was eating the peanuts
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and reading the Gazette as we drove out. When she went into Taylor's I got
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out of the car and swept the shells out. Then I started to read the paper
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myself."
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As Davis stepped from the car to illustrate his movements, it was
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observed that some of the peanut shells still lingered at the curb.
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"Henry Peavey, Taylor's houseman, came out," Davis went on.
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"He was all dressed up fancy in his golf things. We talked a little
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while about whose car was best, Taylor's or Miss Normand's. Then he went
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away."
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"Wasn't there a third man there?" asked Biscailuz. George Arto, a
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mechanician, had told the police that he saw Peavey and Davis talking to a
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third man that night.
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"Positively not," declared Davis.
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"Arto says there was," Biscailuz went on.
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"Arto was mistaken, then," insisted Davis. "I talked to no one but
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Peavey. I remember very well that when Miss Normand came out she seemed very
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cheerful. She may have carried a book, as she says, but I did not see it. I
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remarked that it was time for dinner and I was getting hungry. It was 7:40
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then."
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The officers had Davis indicate where Taylor stood saying farewell to
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Miss Normand.
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"He seemed to be in a good humor, too," said Davis. "She waved good-by
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and we drove straight home."
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Undersheriff Biscailuz announced that he would question Miss Normand
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again. It was stated that the detailed reports of his investigators had
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suggested a new line of questioning.
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At the same time it was reported that Miss Normand was preparing to leave
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town to recover from a very severe cold which, according to her manager, in
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connection with her shock at Taylor's death, might result seriously.
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"The only reason we are staying," declared the manager, "is that there
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would be many people ready to say that Miss Normand was running away. But if
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the strain keeps up I would not be surprised if it killed her."
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District Attorney Woolwine continued his investigation in secret.
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Because of the "embarrassment" that might be caused famous figures in the
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moving picture world, the district attorney decided not to call them in, but
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to send his men to question them at their convenience.
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The statement made by Mack Sennett, producer, to one of the prosecutor's
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agents was not made public.
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The general atmosphere of secrecy thrown about the case by officials also
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smother an official denial or affirmation of the report that a threatening
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letter had been found among Taylor's papers. The letter, it was stated, was
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sent by a prominent moving picture man who had been bitter toward Taylor since
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the two had words at the outbreak of the world war.
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The district attorney's agents also were watching the examination of the
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eight members of an alleged Black Hand gang, captured after a brisk shotgun
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and pistol battle with federal and state officers Tuesday night. The members
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of the alleged gang, it was said, had organized a campaign of blackmail
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against wealthy Los Angeles residents and might have had Taylor included in
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their list of victims.
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"Has Mabel Normand Solved the Taylor Murder?"
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The following item is certainly fiction on both levels: it never
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happened, and it was never related to the author by Mabel Normand. But it
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nevertheless is interesting as a novelty, showing how the Taylor murder began
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to be used for "true" crime fiction.
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November 1931 / January 1932
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H. L. Gates
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ILLUSTRATED DETECTIVE MAGAZINE
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Has Mabel Normand Solved the Taylor Murder?
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EDITOR'S NOTE [which prefaced the original article]: H.L. Gates, the
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author of this remarkable document--almost as if the voice of Mabel Normand
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were speaking from the grave--was one of the dead star's intimate friends.
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Editor, novelist, scenario writer, he lived for some time in Hollywood and
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was closely associated with the impish Mabel and her scores of friends.
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It was only by accident, or as if fate, knowing that Miss Normand was
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not long for this earth, intervened--that Mabel Normand told to Mr. Gates the
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plans for her great screen play to be based on the murder of William Desmond
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Taylor, the famous director and Romeo of the film colony whose ambition it
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was to marry her. Mabel had promised and then withdrawn.
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Mr. Gates went to call on her at the Savoy Hotel in London. He was
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living in London and at that time was editor of the "London Daily Sketch." It
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was only to be a friendly call, a social call upon an old friend. Without any
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particular reason, Miss Normand began talking of the Taylor case, probably
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because the newspapers were full of it. An then, in her impetuous way, she
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began to talk of what she knew about Taylor and his life, his loves and his
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hates. Then came the story Mr. Gates tells here.
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Does Mabel Normand solve at last the mystery of who killed Desmond
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Taylor?
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For three days London streets had been dismal lanes of fog. Still
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thousands of men and women of all ages milled on the sidewalks before the
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Savoy Hotel, hoping for a lift in the murk that would bring one girl's face
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to her balconied window.
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Some of the watchers had kept their vigil through part of the night.
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They wanted to see the smiling, impish face of Mabel Normand, who had
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slipped into town unheralded but whose arrival was bulletined by newsboys
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within the hour.
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A policeman helped me through the crowd to the hotel lobby. When he
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discovered that I was bound for Mabel Normand's door, he touched his helmet
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with new respect.
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The question, "Will she ever tell who killed Taylor?" was in the mind of
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perhaps everyone who waited and watched outside for a glimpse of the famous
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star, as it was in the minds of other thousands around the world. There were
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few then, as now, who doubted that Mabel could, if she would, come very near
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to pointing the way to a solution of the famous Hollywood murder which has
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remained through almost a decade one of the greatest mysteries in the world's
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annals of crime.
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The director, William Desmond Taylor, had been dead many months. One by
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one the hopeful clues to a slayer's identity had been followed to a blank
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wall. Screen reputations had been shattered, ache and trouble had been
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implanted in the gentle soul of Mabel herself, and high policemen had been
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reduced to the ranks. But Taylor's murder was already on its way to becoming
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historic mystery.
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When her inner door opened and she came, a tempest as ever, into the
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outer room, I wondered if the crowds on the streets below would see in the
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impish face the thoughtful lines that had grown there since that murder night
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under the Hollywood palms. I happened to be the first of old friends to
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welcome her to England. She rushed across the room to salute me with a kiss.
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It was not, of course, the kiss of a woman to a man but the gesture of a soul
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that brimmed fraternity with all the world and all who were of it.
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She accused me suddenly: "That kiss doesn't mean so much to you, does
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it?"
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Now that was a question hard to answer. One never dealt in platitudes
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with Mabel Normand nor ever waxed sentimental. Her laugh was too handy.
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I wondered what she had on her mind, and it came out abruptly and was
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startling.
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"I kiss everybody in the world," she said. "It's my very nicest habit.
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I've heard that a woman was hung in London at daybreak this morning, and
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somehow that reminded me that, light as you all take my kisses, it was a kiss
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that snatched me away from perilously close to the gallows."
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I could only stare and wait. Her brown eyes were sombre. She touched the
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cablegrams from American police, all as yet unopened. Then she went to her
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window and looked down upon the street, the Strand. The watchers were
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spectral figures in a smoky mist.
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"They are all thinking of me as being part of the 'Taylor Case,'" she
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said. "They are wondering what I know--and if I shall ever tell."
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"What about the kiss that saved you?" I reminded her.
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"I've thought about it a lot on the boat coming over," she said in
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preliminary explanation, "and of the woman who was hung before the sun came
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up this morning. Perhaps she, too, might have been saved if all the truth
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were known. This kiss I will tell you about was one of the incidents of real
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life, one of the things that happen that wouldn't be believed as possible if
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it were put into fiction. You remember the last half hour of Taylor's life?"
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I did. On her way from Los Angeles to her Hollywood home Mabel had
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stopped her car at the house of the director, who was one of the outstanding
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personalities in the screen world. Leaving her chauffeur in her car, she had
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run in for a chat. That was a little after six o'clock. At a quarter to eight
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she went on, Taylor accompanying her to her car. He then re-entered his house
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and was killed five minutes later.
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"They were all so certain that I had done it," Mabel said, "that I was
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stunned. There was only my chauffeur to say that I had left the house and
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left Taylor alive. As those first terrible hours of investigation drew out I
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was being drawn closer and closer into the murder put, for the authorities
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would not be satisfied with my chauffeur's support. But one of my kisses
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saved me.
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"When Taylor came out to see me off he closed the car's door window,
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warning against the chill that was coming down from the hills. I pressed my
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lips against the inner side of the glass pane. He put his lips to the same
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spot, but outside. Prints of the kiss, his lips outside, mine inside, were
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observed by Hollywood detectives. They proved that Taylor had been alive and
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that I had been in my car when we said good-bye for the night. It was only
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then that they authorities began seriously to look elsewhere for the slayer."
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So we bridged the ocean and talked of the crime that was baffling every
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police brain on the other side of the Atlantic. And we talked of the mystery
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through other days of her visit to London, days that remained fog bound.
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Mabel confessed at last that she would some day make her revelations, but in
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her own characteristically dramatic way. She would create a play, a screen
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|
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
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smiled again, after she left the studio gate that day when she way Taylor
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pass through, it must have been when Noma proved that her body and soul had
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been rescued.
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"We talked, Taylor and I, on that last evening of his life, of many
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things during the hour I spent in the bungalow. Among them, we talked of
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little Noma. I recalled her when Taylor asked me, as he had been asking so
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|
regularly, when I would become his wife.
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|
"'The others I could forgive, and forget,' I said. 'But little Noma
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|
always troubles me. She was lovely, and sweet, and trusting. She believed in
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you--and wanted your arms more, I am sure, than she wanted the fame you might
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have given her.'
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|
"So we talked of Noma, and wondered if she still were in Hollywood. She
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|
had dropped out of the studio completely. When I left him it was with his
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|
warning that first I must forget her before he and I could talk seriously of
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|
our being married. He was unperturbed. He was certain he would win me in the
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|
end.
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|
"But the kiss through the window of my car was to be our last.
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"He went back to the bungalow after a cheery wave from under its palms.
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He shut himself in, alone, as he thought.
|
|
"Taylor had dropped to a chair before his table and spread his check
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|
books before him for a session with their figures. He looked up at a sound
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|
and sprang to his feet.
|
|
"The figure that confronted him was strangely masked, but its face was
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|
free--its face and two fiercely burning dark eyes.
|
|
"Taylor cried a single syllable:
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"'Lou!'
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|
"'Noma's mother!"
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|
"'Noma's mother!' he echoed in unbelief. 'Noma Trent?'
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|
"'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
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|
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!'
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|
"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.
|
|
*****************************************************************************
|
|
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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|
***************************************************************************** |