Murder in Hollywood: Solving a Silent Screen Mystery

7. False Leads and Red Herrings

7 False Leads and Red Herrings Behind all the blarney and ballyhoo of a press on fire with callous excitement over a celebrity murder, there was the tragedy of two people who were innocent of the crime: the out-of-town stranger who would never be able to discuss his trip to Los Angeles, and Edward Sands, who went into hiding. Taylor’s funeral took place on February 7, 1922, at the shabby, dirty St. Paul’s Pro-Cathedral on Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles, a ramshackle architectural folly already marked for demolition to make way for the Biltmore Hotel. A crowd of 10,000 swarmed through the Square; sensation seekers, the out-of-work, tourists, and employees of Famous Players-Lasky who were given a day off. Squads of mounted and foot police barely managed to keep back the screaming, laughing, jostling spectators, who were greatly disappointed when all of the great figures of Hollywood—except for Mabel Normand, Constance Talmadge, and Cecil B. DeMille— stayed sensibly at home. Scots-born movie director Frank Lloyd, who had been a stumbling block to Una and George Hopkins when they came to Pallas Pictures in 1915, and was in every way opposed to the kind of artistic settings Taylor favored, was, with peculiarly ironical inappropriateness, chosen to 136 take charge of the proceedings. With the same flair for vulgar spectacle and self-aggrandizement he had shown in such films as Madame X and The Eternal Flame, Lloyd seized on Taylor’s insignificant and short-lived military service to turn the occasion into a celebration worthy of the rites accorded to a four-star general or a member of the Royal House of Windsor. He arranged for Taylor, still in his old Royal Fusiliers uniform, to be placed in an open coffin in the cathedral’s vestibule after the service; upon his chest lay his Fusiliers khaki cap. The British flag was draped over the catafalque, surrounded by heaps of his favorite American Beauty roses sent by Mabel Normand. Amid the wreaths sent by the stars, including Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Rudolph Valentino, there was no sign of anything from Neva Gerber, who may have been too grief-stricken to send flowers. Mary Miles Minter sent roses; so did George Hopkins and Julia Crawford Ivers; Taylor’s daughter, Daisy Deane-Tanner, (but not her mother, stepfather, Uncle Denis, or Aunt Ellen) sent violets and lilies of the valley; she herself was not up to making the five-day journey from New York. Lovers and friends gathered in the front pews: Hopkins, Gerber, Normand , Ivers, Howard and Harry Fellows, Purviance, Betty Compson, Theodore Kosloff, Cecil B. DeMille, Antonio Moreno, and a sobbing False Leads and Red Herrings 137 • Taylor’s funeral, Pershing Square, Los Angeles, 1922. Courtesy of Bison Archives Henry Peavey. Among the eight honorary pallbearers were Charles Eyton , as well as William C. deMille, Frank Lloyd, and actor Arthur Hoyt. Lloyd had arranged for a British Commonwealth military honor guard to stand at all corners of the catafalque, as if at a royal funeral. British, Scots, Canadian, and Australian “soldiers” composed the guard, which King Vidor, Betty Compson, and George Hopkins admitted later were actually movie extras. The Episcopal service and paid choir, singing Handel’s Messiah, the mingled screeching of Lloyd’s beloved Scots bagpipes and the crowd, were almost unendurable for George Hopkins. He wrote in 1980: The noise from the mob, echoing through the apse, was horrendous. Throughout the service Mabel Normand sat next to me, sobbing hysterically . There was no sign of Mary Miles. When Taylor’s open coffin was placed in the vestibule afterwards one was forced to pass it. I didn’t look in the coffin; I knew how Taylor would value his privacy and would have hated this macabre affair. Open coffins were not to be found at English funerals, nor were extras dressed as soldiers; nor were private citizens, no matter how eminent , accorded royal funerals. When they saw the ghastly, waxen, doll-like look of the dead man, both Mabel Normand and Julia Crawford Ivers collapsed. They did not attend the interment at Hollywood Cemetery. Mary Miles Minter’s absence from the funeral can be explained by the fact that Thomas A. Woolwine, who had not had the grace to attend Taylor’s last rites, had simultaneously invited her to...