A Cast of Killers (14 page)

With that, Vidor thought he detected the first flinch in Durfee since they had been talking. She attempted to cover her reaction by reaching for her teacup, but Vidor was sure the question made her uncomfortable. She picked up her cup. It was empty.

“The District Attorney grilled Mabel for days. They turned her house inside out. Don’t you think if she’d been on drugs it would have come out for sure, instead of a bunch of unfounded rumors?” She spoke with true emotion, but stopped before the point of tears. She gathered herself and continued as though she hadn’t broken. “Mabel was lonely, King, and Bill Taylor was a true friend. That’s all you, or anyone, needs to know about it.”

The interview was over. Vidor thanked her for speaking with him and for the lunch. As he stood to leave, Paul stood again for another hearty handshake. When Vidor drove off down Coronado Street, he saw Paul standing on the step waving good-bye and Minta Durfee sitting silently in her chair, her empty teacup in her hand.

18

“Cocaine.”

Claire Windsor stood before an easel, studying her painting of the mission at San Juan Capistrano. Without looking at her palette, she smeared brown paint onto her brush and darkened the earth just below the mission. Even in her loose painter’s smock she looked more voluptuous and attractive than Vidor had expected. He hadn’t seen or spoken with her in nearly forty years, since he had directed her in
Show People
at MGM. Yet when she answered the door of her Spanish duplex on South Orange Drive, her powder-blue eyes, creamy white skin, and long blonde curls were just as he remembered them. Seeing her took him back to the days when Windsor, Mabel Normand, and other friends had been at the core of the legendary Hollywood crowd that gave the Cocoanut Grove, in the Ambassador Hotel, its reputation as the swingingest nightspot in town.

She stepped back from the easel, inspected it in the light from a row of windows.

“Cocaine,” she said. “That’s the only real drug I ever saw Mabel use. But she did use a lot of it. Gave a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘powder room.’ “

“Where did she get it?”

“Oh, here and there. It wasn’t any harder to come by than alcohol, which as you know was just as illegal in those days.”

She set her palette on a window sill and lifted her smock over her head. The tailored dress beneath, the same blue as her eyes, complemented her full figure. Vidor watched her step toward him and settle onto a low chair.

“But I don’t think the cocaine killed her,” she said. “Not alone. She did have tuberculosis, you know. Since she was a child. I think it was the combination that did her in.”

Vidor asked her if Normand had any particular suppliers of narcotics who might have resented William Desmond Taylor’s publicized attempts to get her off drugs and clean up Hollywood.

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. It’s possible, I guess, but I never really thought much of that idea. Bill and Mabel had known each other for something like six years. And the whole time I’m sure he knew about the drugs. Bill was someone you couldn’t keep secrets from. You didn’t want to. He was a good friend, always there to lend an ear or a helping hand. If one of Mabel’s drug connections wanted to retaliate against Bill’s concern for her, he probably would have done it a couple of years earlier, when Bill sent her to that sanatorium to dry out.”

“When was that?”

“Nineteen-twenty, I think, somewhere up in New England. By the time Bill was killed, Mabel was back on her feet, making a new picture, not staying out all hours of the night. Why would one of her old pushers have waited until then to get back at Bill for something that happened so long ago?”

“You said the dope was part of what killed her. When did she start using it again?”

“I don’t know. Later. But not, at least not as much, around the time of the murder. I think Mabel had been in New York up until a few months before the murder.”

“The papers said she had a two-thousand-dollar-a-week habit,” Vidor said.

Windsor laughed. “Do you know how much cocaine two thousand dollars would buy in nineteen twenty-two? A card cost around two dollars. That’s how they sold the stuff, by the card. An entire deck was only fifteen or twenty dollars, and that’s not even buying in quantity, which would make it even less expensive. For two thousand dollars you could have supplied the whole Ambassador Hotel for a week. It’s ridiculous. The whole thing’s ridiculous. If there were even the slightest chance that one of her drug pushers had anything to do with Bill’s death, Mabel would have turned him in right away.”

Vidor made a note that in yet another area—narcotics—the press had painted a picture that grossly distorted reality.

“Didn’t anyone ever speak up about the newspapers’ twisting of facts like that?”

“Twisting? More like a flagrant disregard.” Windsor shifted in her seat, crossed one leg over the other. “As for speaking up, you know what it was like, King. We were all laboratory specimens, everyone in Hollywood was under such close microscopic scrutiny all the time that if we wanted to keep any secrets at all, we’d better just toe the line and keep our mouths shut. I started to defend Mabel—she was my friend—but the second I opened my mouth, my picture was splattered across the
Herald
along with my given name and the fact that I had a three-year-old illegitimate son, which, never mind the circumstances surrounding it, was just the kind of scandalous information the papers loved printing about us. If I hadn’t shut up, I would have been out of a job.”

“Did the studio tell you that?”

“Not in so many words.”

Vidor tapped his pencil against his notebook. The role the studio played in all of these events was growing rapidly, and Vidor began to wonder if the lack of storage space at Paramount had actually been the reason, as it had for so many other things, for the disposal of all records pertaining to Taylor; or if perhaps someone had decided long ago, and for entirely different reasons, to get rid of everything that might one day incriminate the studio in ... what? A cover-up of some kind?

“If you had been able to speak up more,” he asked Windsor, “what would you have said?”

She thought about it. “That we all loved Bill, I guess. And that Mabel was getting unjustly jerked around by the papers, while Tony Moreno and some others were the ones they should have been talking to.”

“Well, I’m not sure exactly, but Bill and Tony Moreno spent a lot of time talking, you know, privately, among themselves, and Bill seemed pretty upset about something.”

“You don’t know what they were talking about?”

“No, but it upset Bill enough that he didn’t even want to talk to me or Mabel or anyone. I even went to the party with Bill, but Mabel had to drive me home. Bill went off somewhere with Moreno. I don’t know where or why, but when a week or so later he was dead, it all did seem pretty suspicious. And I never read one thing about that in any of the papers.”

“Well,” he said, “this has been very interesting. I appreciate your talking with me. It’s really nice to see you again after all these years.”

As Windsor walked him to the door, he marveled once again at her appearance, thinking that he and she were the two exceptions to the popular notion that men grow distinguished with age while women merely grow old.

19

In Hollywood, there was never time for yesterday’s business, and yesterday’s business was all that Vidor found himself occupied by. By the time the second of his student researchers had brought him a folder of information about Mary Miles Minter, he had converted his cluttered storeroom into a crowded but functional office. Old appliances hung from hooks on the ceiling. A megaphone, viewfinder, and riding crop were dusted and sat alongside his baseball glove, walking cane, and collection of hats. Even threadbare costumes from old movies that no longer existed had their place. Though the room still had the feel of a pack rat’s den, it beat the cold sterility of the new morgue at Paramount. Vidor felt comfortable there.

He set the manila folder on the worktable and spread out its contents: newspaper clippings, Xeroxed copies, and typewritten notes. The clipping that first caught his eye dated from the early twenties and described the author’s discovery in Mary Miles Minter’s childhood Louisiana hometown of a tombstone with Minter’s exact name and birthdate engraved upon it. A quick check of the public records revealed only one birth certificate on file under that name, presumably the birth certificate of the actress then living and well in Hollywood and certainly in no need of a tombstone in Louisiana. The article went on to explain that Mary Miles Minter had actually been born Juliet Reilly, but at a very young age, at her mother’s insistence, had assumed the name (as well as “borrowed” the birth certificate) of a deceased cousin. The reasons for the name change illustrated clearly the one fact about Minter’s life that no one, in print or in person, had ever challenged: that any examination of her life would have to include an examination of her mother’s life. The two were, from Mary’s childhood on, indelibly intertwined.

Lily Pearl Miles, the future Charlotte Shelby, mother of the future Hollywood actress, grew up on a large plantation near Shreveport, Louisiana. Her father, a physician, died when she was twelve. Her mother never remarried.

At the Virginia Female Academy, where a visiting thespian told her that her acting talents were worthy of Broadway, she announced her intention to marry one of her instructors, a man nearly three times her age. Then, for unknown reasons, she suddenly eloped to San Antonio with a visiting Texan named Homer Reilly and was not heard from until she returned to Shreveport less than a year later with a child, Margaret Reilly.

In 1902, a second daughter, Juliet, was born.

Why Lily Pearl had married Homer Reilly no one knew. No one in Shreveport had witnessed any indication that they had ever gotten along. The marriage ended in 1907 when Lily Pearl sent Homer packing.

Later that same year, Lily Pearl left home for Broadway, entrusting her children to their grandmother Julia Miles.

In New York, Lily Pearl almost immediately landed a starring role in a Broadway production and adopted the name Charlotte Shelby. Reporters looking back could never ascertain how she had come to that particular name, or even how she, with no Broadway connections or particular stage experience, had landed such a plum role, though there was speculation that a politician named Shelby may have helped her along, in exchange for whatever she might have had to give.

Soon, with a bank account and a career growing, she wired her mother to bring her children to New York. Julia Miles arrived with the girls, whom she had, again for reasons reporters could only speculate about, renamed Juliet and Margaret Miles. Charlotte Shelby, from then on the only name Lily Pearl would answer to, disapproved of her mother’s changing her children’s names, and immediately changed them again, to Margaret and Juliet Shelby.

Charlotte’s producer, Charles Frohman, took an immediate liking to four-year-old Juliet and gave her parts in the plays
Cameo Kirby
and
A Fool There Was.
Margaret was given roles as well, but not as important as her sister’s. Early theatre magazine photographs of Juliet at this time reminded Vidor of a rag doll his sister had played with as a child: rosy red cheeks, curly golden locks, big blue eyes.

For a time, the family became divided. Charlotte’s mother, Julia, took charge of her favorite grandchild, Juliet, while Charlotte saw to the career of her Margaret. This was why, in years to come, Mary would always refer to her grandmother as “Mama,” and Charlotte as either “Mrs. Shelby,” “Charlotte,” or “Mother”—a source of great confusion whenever Mary was interviewed by the press.