Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood Read Online Free PDF Page B

dreams and different dilemmas. But it was the same man, William Desmond Taylor, who would unspool the common thread among them.

CHAPTER 4
THE ORATOR
    On the afternoon of Sunday, September 26, 1920, the sun filtered through the fronds of the eucalyptus trees along Melrose Avenue, etching a lacy pattern of shadows across the partly dirt road. Steering an open cabriolet automobile around the potholes was a young man by the name of Harry Fellows—blond hair, brown eyes, medium build, professional demeanor. Behind him, perusing some notes, sat his employer, William Desmond Taylor.
    Fellows pulled into a parking lot beside a long concrete building. Taylor stepped out of the car, the afternoon sun casting shadows across the chiseled architecture of his face. Forty-eight years old, clean-shaven, with iron-gray hair, the Irish-born movie director possessed the“bony look of a stone bishop on a medieval tomb,” as one writer would describe him. Striding through the parking lot of the Brunton Studios, Taylor carried himself with the studied grace of an experienced stage actor. As always, he was dressed in monochrome grays and tans. There was never“even a bit of jewelry or a striking cravat to relieve the dullness of his costuming,” one studio artist observed.
    Although well regarded in the film colony, Taylor was a bit of a cipher. His prominent participation in the Motion Picture Directors Association notwithstanding, he kept mostly to himself. No one knew much about his past, or what he’d done before he came to Hollywood, besides acting some years on the stage. A confirmed bachelor, Taylor would offer condolences when acquaintances got married. Yet he wasn’t like Tinseltown’s other bachelors, cutting up the rug at the Alexandria Hotel with starlets on weekends. In fact, his neighbors in genteel Alvarado Court observed that Taylor was home from the studio most nights by seven, and usually spent his evenings alone, reading at his desk until late at night.
    The only clew to his past that Taylor ever offered was to say that he had known“great sadness” in his life. That, perhaps, explained why his face seemed perpetually somber and grave. Rarely did a smile curl Taylor’s thin lips, and when it did, it was anger, perversely, that summoned it, not pleasure. In those instances, Taylor’s cool blue eyes hinted at things he preferred to keep hidden from the prying gazes and wagging tongues of the young, impetuous movie colony. A colleague described him as “quiet, like a camouflaged man.”
    Yet while Taylor’s reserved demeanor served as a kind of armor, it also commanded respect. His boss, Mr. Zukor, regarded Taylor highly because he did not let emotion rule his actions—a rare attribute in a town of temperamental artists. For that reason, Taylor had been asked to preside over this afternoon’s gathering of film folk at the Brunton Studios. The movie chiefs hoped the event might serve as an antidote to the recent run of damaging headlines and generate a cycle of more sympathetic press coverage for Hollywood.
    In the last few months, Taylor had become the movies’ most ardent defender against the increasing calls for censorship. In his deep, commanding voice, he argued in interviews and public speeches that audiences wanted pictures that reflected life as it was, not life as the moralists wanted it to be.“Give the public real human pictures with hearts in them, and life and love and passion,” Taylor told one reporter, “and the public will rise up and call you blessed.”
    He’d been especially busy these last few weeks as criticisms of the film industry mounted following Olive Thomas’s drug-related death in Paris. Few were as articulate as Taylor as spokesman for an industry in dire need of some major public-relations varnishing.
    That, ultimately, was what this assemblage at the Brunton Studios was about, though it was also what it was billed as: a tribute, a place for people to come together and grieve. The