Murder in Hollywood: Solving a Silent Screen Mystery

4. A Gay Association

4 A Gay Association In June 1920, Taylor was allowed, along with a small handful of Famous Players’ directors, to form his own unit. He could now commit himself to his beloved team of George Hopkins as art director, Julia Crawford Ivers as scenario writer, and her son James Van Trees as cameraman. He would be allowed the privilege of editing his films himself, an advantage enjoyed in Hollywood by very few. He started to develop a technique that, had he lived, might have revolutionized the industry. Instead of the tedious titles that interrupted the action of silent films, he would have subtitles printed under the images, making for greater speed of action and much more comfortable watching. It seemed he was about to embark on a career of the greatest distinction , but he and Hopkins, freedom going to their heads, instead embarked on lurid filmic devices, which were the only expressions of homosexuality seen in Hollywood at that time. For Julia Crawford Ivers’s melodrama The Furnace, Taylor and Hopkins scoured Los Angeles, not for beautiful boys, as in The Soul of Youth, but for bodybuilders who, stripped naked, were taken onto the set and told to writhe in simulated agony in a scene illustrating the tortures of hell. Naked women, also of great physical beauty, were hired; Taylor directed the extras as they descended to the inferno down a double staircase , girls to the right, men to the left. Studio employees came to gape at the spectacle through the glass wall that ran along the top of the stage; 74 there was something for everybody that day. From surrounding streets, onlookers forced their way in, longing for a look at the most magnificent bodies in Hollywood. In a special effect, flames were added later, concealing genitalia and breasts, but the effect was still shocking and outrageous. Taylor’s research for his pictures led him into strange places. The Chicago American wrote on February 9, 1922, that he had joined a bizarre Chinese homosexual secret society whose silk-kimonoed members smoked opium and “so commenced their ritual, old as Sodom.” From time to time, the article added, the members, painted and otherwise made up, would foregather in one of several luxuriously furnished studios at their disposal. There they would inhale the sweet smell of the opium smoke and carry out the sexual, passionate rites of the order. The American also reported that at a party given by a British nobleman in exile, men dressed as women were involved in “minor depravities ” until the lights suddenly went out. Six males dressed in underwear appeared on the staircase and chanted a funeral dirge as they carried a coffin down to the living room. An undergarmented auctioneer offered the coffin to the highest bidder, revealing that a very special item was hidden inside. The winner opened the coffin, and an exquisite naked youth stepped out. The studio publicists worked overtime to improve the Taylor image. They announced that, in a shipwreck scene in The Furnace, he turned lifeguard and dived in ahead of everyone who was plunging from the ship. In reality, when the extras who had pretended they could swim began struggling in the tank, Taylor sent in hand-picked lifeguards to pull them out. In the midst of all these activities, W. Somerset Maugham arrived in Hollywood on his way to the South Seas. Lasky had hired him, along with several other famous writers, headed by Maurice Maeterlinck, author of The Life of the Bee; Edward Knoblock, author of Kismet; Arnold Bennett, and Richard Henry Jones to write a script each, at $15,000 a head, for the studio. Maugham, pleased with Taylor, churned out a melodrama for him that he called The Ordeal, which Hopkins read quickly and despised, but which Taylor would eventually direct. However, Taylor’s next picture was Sacred and Profane Love, the A Gay Association 75 • original story woven in purple broadcloth by Arnold Bennett just to pay for a refit of his yacht. The star was Elsie Ferguson, famous in the theater and in film, who made the usual mistake of attaching her erotic fantasies to Taylor as director as well as to her co-star Conrad Nagel, a prim-and-proper Christian Scientist. Even before Taylor and George started work on the picture, Taylor got word that Ferguson had tried to cut her...