Murder in Hollywood: Solving a Silent Screen Mystery

8. What Happened to the Cast

8 What Happened to the Cast The tragic fate that dogged seemingly everyone in the Taylor affair did not spare Neva Gerber. She recovered slowly from his death, achieving considerable success acting and with her production companies, coowned with director Ben Wilson. She took months off to marry a young San Francisco oil geologist, Edward F. Nolan, and they moved to Palo Alto. The wedding was followed by disillusionment—Nolan was an alcoholic and suffered from depression. In 1926 he died, at the age of thirty-six, of alcoholic poisoning or suicide—no definite conclusion was reached by the coroner at the autopsy. Mabel Normand continued to be in the news, and in September, 1923, there was talk of her dismissing her chauffeur, William Davis, for reasons that had nothing to do with his driving. She replaced him with a good-looking substitute—Davis was jug-eared and plug-ugly— named Harold Greer. To avoid confusion with costume designer Howard Greer, he changed his name to plain Joe Kelley. Mabel spent New Year’s Eve 1923 as she always did, at the Cocoanut Grove—her party included Edna Purviance, and Purviance’s postChaplin beau, the thirty-five-year-old Denver-born oilman and bon vivant Courtland S. Dines. According to Betty Compson, the three were involved in a menage à trois, announcing the fact by turning up at the Grove as a trio after an earlier visit to Mack Sennett with Compson. Recovered from their hangovers at four in the afternoon the next day, 175 the three dizzy and romantic madcaps were at Dines’s apartment at 1325B North Vermont, just four blocks north of Normand’s bungalow court. Normand, as forgetful as ever, had forgotten to bring her gift for Dines, a toiletry set of hair brushes and a comb. It was wrapped and sitting under her Christmas tree a week after the holiday, even though she had seen Dines frequently since then. She called Howard Greer and asked him to bring the gift over. It was claimed later that when her housekeeper Edith Burns took that call Normand said she was being held prisoner by Dines. This was absurd; Howard Greer knew Dines well, and although a heavy drinker, Dines was not abusive or dangerous. The general consensus of those alive at the time was that Normand was having an affair with Howard Greer and that he was insanely jealous of Dines. The fact that Mabel was at Dines’s apartment maddened him; he went to her dresser and picked up one of the two .25 automatics she still kept there. He arrived at Dines’s home and began to berate him; the two women nervously withdrew to a small room next door. Howard Greer said later he saw Dines pick up a bottle of Prohibitionbonded Scotch whiskey and aim it at him; he shot Dines three times with intent to kill. Dines doubled over, bleeding from the mouth; Normand and Purviance came running in and Greer fled, dropping the Christmas present. Hysterical, crying, the two women called the police. After several hours in prison with Purviance, Normand collapsed with severe pain from an inflamed appendix and was rushed to Receiving Hospital where Dines already lay. The real-life melodrama had reporters jamming the hospital switchboard and the entrance lobby, but they were not allowed to see the patients. Even a distracted Mack Sennett, his loyalty to Normand tested yet again, was refused admission. His string-pulling with Woolwine’s successor , Asa Keyes, proved effective; charges against Normand of being an accessory in a murder plot were summarily dropped, and Charlie Chaplin pulled strings on behalf of Purviance, who was still under contract to him. Dines survived. Propped up in his hospital bed, a good sport to the last, he said that Greer must have been “full of hop.” He said he had been arguing with Normand when Greer arrived, advising her not to go to the 176 What Happened to the Cast • Santa Fe train depot that evening to meet friends because of her poor condition of health. The humorist Richard Henry Little wrote in the Chicago Tribune on January 3, 1924: Mabel says she was standing in front of a mirror powdering her nose when Mr. Dines was shot. When the late Mr. Taylor was shot Mabel was sitting in her limousine eating peanuts. If we ever happen...