Murder in Hollywood: Solving a Silent Screen Mystery

2. A Wandering Life

2 A Wandering Life The man who was killed that night, and thus became the subject of the greatest of Hollywood mysteries, was born William Cunningham DeaneTanner in Carlow, County Carlow, Ireland, on April 26, 1872. He was the second child and oldest son of the dashing, forty-year-old Captain Thomas Kearns Deane-Tanner of the Kings Royal Rifle Corps, known familiarly as the Carlow Rifles. Two years earlier Deane-Tanner had returned from military service in China following the British occupation of Peking in 1860 and the suppression of the T’ai P’ing Rebellion, before that. The Captain’s maternal grandfather was Sir Thomas Deane, one of the greatest Irish architects of his day. Deane-Tanner married an heiress of lands, Jane O’Brien, in 1870; their oldest child was the fair and beautiful Ellen, who grew up to become the most powerful, trusted, best-married and dominant member of the family—and the recipient of all its inheritances. William came next; then in 1874 a sweet, well-favored child, Lizzie, known to everyone as Daisy; then Denis in 1876; and finally, two years later, the youngest, Oswald, who died, at less than a year old, of whooping cough. Carlow, a village of no more than 880 souls, stood fifty-six miles south-southwest of Dublin, on the east bank of the pretty River Barrow; the hamlet was dominated by the ruins of a twelfth-century AngloNorman castle. Bought in 1814 to be turned into an asylum for the mentally ill, the castle was accidentally blown to pieces by workers’ dynamite, 26 a perennial subject of amused discussion when William was a child. Otherwise, Carlow had enjoyed almost no excitement since Oliver Cromwell’s time. The village was set in a fertile valley surrounded by mountains, the hedges neatly trimmed, the houses white-painted and spruce. At Straw Hall, the Deane-Tanner residence, the emphasis was on the army, money, horses, and politics. Jane, William’s gentle mother, had inherited from her father, Denis, the enormous sum of £17,000, or at least two million sterling in today’s money, in trust for her children. A displeasure of William’s future life was that this sum was slowly nibbled away by the cost of running both country estate and Dublin household. By the time William was in his teens, his father was compelled by expenses to abandon his role as country squire and become a Justice of the Peace for counties Carlow, Waterford, and Tipperary. He administered justice on poachers and Irish rebels with as much energy as he spent singing to family and friends in evening musicales. It was a pinched life in Carlow: just one narrow street where peasant women sat in black shawls and cotton dresses on doorsteps, and the only loud noises were cows mooing as they were herded past the tiny, dormerwindowed stores. There was no question of William being sent away to Winchester school like his uncles and cousins, or to Clifton, like his brother Denis; he was tutored at home, along with his sisters, as he was evidently considered “slow” and “difficult,” suitable only for private tutoring in history, German, and French. William soon proved to be a good student, adept at languages, and a fine horseman, with skills that were later to prove invaluable. Through the years in which he grew to manhood, Ireland was torn by a constant and ill-fated struggle for independence. Home Rule demonstrations proved noisy and violent. Riots occurred as British landlords threatened tenants with wholesale eviction; there were strikes against high rents, and nowhere was the conflict more clearly exempli- fied than in William’s own household. William’s uncle, the fiery surgeon-politician Charles Deane Tanner, Captain (and now Major) Deane-Tanner’s youngest brother, appalled the Major when, in 1884 as William just turned twelve, Charles abandoned his Conservative position and became a passionate supporter of A Wandering Life 27 • Home Rule. The next year, Charles was elected Member of Parliament for Mid-Cork. There is no hard evidence, but it is reasonable to suppose that William was supportive of Charles’s liberal position. This leaning toward Charles might have precipitated the otherwise inexplicable rift that caused both the Major and Jane to cast William off. If anything was the basis of William’s lifelong bitterness and disappointment in later life, it can only have...