-
Prologue
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Prologue I have been interested in the William Desmond Taylor case for much of my adult life. The story fascinates: Hollywood in the glamorous, drugridden 1920s; a famous director murdered in his luxury apartment; major stars Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter investigated for the crime. In Los Angeles in 1971, I talked about the case with dozens of people; among them my friend James Wong Howe, the great Chinese American cinematographer, who cophotographed Mary Miles Minter in films she made after the crime; Billy Wilder (who said he thought of Minter in making Sunset Boulevard; his producer partner Charles Brackett had considered whimsically asking Wilder to offer Minter the part of Norma Desmond, until he remembered that she herself might have all too much in common with the subject); and Lee Garmes, who photographed Gone with the Wind, and knew Taylor at Inceville, Santa Monica , in the early days of film. I had lunch with another friend, King Vidor, the great director of The Crowd and The Big Parade, who told me he was planning a book and film on Taylor and would I like to collaborate with him? Would I? Of course I would. Vidor handed me a large, blue, clothbound dossier containing previously unavailable interrogatories with witnesses, drawn from police and district attorney’s files by permission of former LAPD chief Thad Brown, as well as a synopsis of police findings at the time, also drawn from LAPD records, and copied at headquarters by Vidor’s friend and 3 William Desmond Taylor in 1921. Courtesy of Bison Archives [3.237.186.170] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:23 GMT) associate Richard Marchman. These documents supplied the richest possible source; most of the information contained therein has not been published, even in the books that have appeared on the case. Vidor gave me unlimited use of this material, for then and in the inde finite future. At the time, I decided not embark on a book per se, but rather to assist Vidor with research and interviews that would fill out his own. I embarked on an adventure that kept me busy for several months until I signed a contract to write a book on Orson Welles and had to abandon the work. Since Mabel Normand had died in 1930, my first interview had to be, I realized, with Mary Miles Minter, but how was I to contact her? She had seemingly vanished off the face of the earth. Then, only days after I had lunch with Vidor, Milton Lubowiski, a Hollywood bookseller, called me to say that Miss Minter wanted someone to work on her memoirs . Would I come and see her? I called her; the voice on the other end of the line was Broadway British: high, sharp, commanding. I found out years later she was the great-granddaughter of Louisiana slave owners. I arrived at her house on a windy afternoon in March 1971. It stood high up on Adelaide Drive, near Santa Monica Beach. Built in the shape of a cross, it had once belonged to a bishop. The doorbell pealed hollowly, as doorbells always do in bad Gothic novels. No one appeared. I had time to listen to the buzz of flies, the growl of a lawn mower, the slow slurp of the Pacific on beige dirty sand. At last the door opened. A clubfooted German maid showed me into the living room, its tables piled high with books of verse and prose, all with stained page tops and heavy-stitched spines and colored silk markers , symbols of a more civilized age. She was Baby Jane. Enormous, she was dressed in a puff-sleeved 1938 cotton creation, white, with patterns of marigolds. Her stockings shone; they were probably silk; one of them was laddered. Her shoes were pink satin, with pompoms on the tops; she told me later she only received female visitors in mules. Her hair was dyed blonde, dressed in ringlets, with kiss-curls tight as clock springs on the remarkably unlined forehead. Her eyes were Prologue 5 • periwinkle blue, secretive and expressionless at first, sad and tear-filled later; they were surrounded by the kohl of a 1920s movie queen, and the eyelashes were false and long. Her lips were painted in a Cupid’s bow; her hips could have been sat on by two six-year-old children. She began by offering me Earl Grey tea; I was happy to have the brew after the...