A Cast of Killers (15 page)

By 1911, Mary’s career had completely eclipsed that of both her mother and sister, and the entire family moved with their new breadwinner to Chicago, where she was to star in
The Little Rebel.
During rehearsals, the Gerry Society, which policed the use of children in theatre, demanded that Juliet be withdrawn from the production because she was not yet of legal age to work full-time. The Chicago producers, unlike their more powerful colleagues on Broadway, were unable to sidestep the rules. Charlotte Shelby, however, had an idea.

Eight years earlier, her own sister’s child had died at the age of eight. Charlotte quickly traveled to Louisiana, borrowed her late niece’s birth certificate, and within a week nine-year-old Juliet Shelby was back on stage as Mary Miles Minter, age sixteen.

By 1915, Charlotte had decided that the stage offered only limited opportunities for Mary. The real money for a beautiful young actress was in the movies. So after a long series of heated negotiations with New York film producers, she signed Mary to a six-picture contract with Metro Pictures. The announcement was made in
Motion Picture News
:

Metro’s game plan, as was common in the industry, was to advertise Mary’s films heavily, make Mary a star, and then, without having to advertise further, reap the profits as Mary’s loyal fans all turned out to see her next series of films. But Charlotte, already the shrewd prototype for all future Hollywood stage mothers, hired lawyers to find a loophole in her contract, thus allowing her to pull away from Metro just when the public interest in Mary was at its height. Immediately after a loophole was found, Charlotte signed Mary to an exclusive contract with Flying A Studios in Santa Barbara, California.

Mary made headlines in California as she began making the first of twenty-six films Flying A had contracted to put her in. She also made headlines as an amateur pilot at Mercury Field, owned by Cecil B. deMille. Minter’s flying lessons, it turned out, were her own idea, and not a publicity stunt thought up by zealous studio executives. She took to the skies with the greatest of pleasure until one afternoon Charlotte discovered what she was up to and had her grounded. But at Mercury Field Mary met a handsome new director named William Desmond Taylor, who was lining up shots at the same airfield for Jack Pickford’s new picture,
The Spirit of
‘17.

Though Charlotte continued to pursue careers for both herself and Margaret, Mary was clearly the star. When Mary Pickford suddenly announced that she was leaving Paramount, Charlotte saw the best opportunity for Mary. She immediately brought in lawyers to find a loophole in Mary’s Flying A contract, then negotiated a picture deal with Paramount, for the staggering sum of $1.3 million.

The family then moved into a mansion at Fremont Place, one of the most exclusive private communities in Los Angeles. Charlotte was the perfect society matron, hosting teas and garden parties and commanding her staff of butlers, housekeepers, and chauffeurs. Eventually an even larger home was purchased, the grandest home any of Paramount’s stars or producers had ever built—Casa de Margarita—which was down the road from where Mabel Normand was living. While Casa de Margarita was being renovated, the family intermittently lived in a second home on Hobart Avenue, shuttling between the two.

Vidor had heard stories about Casa de Margarita. Colleen Moore had told him of her own first visit to the mansion, in 1921. Marshall Neilan had asked Moore and her friend Thomas Dixon to double-date with him at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub. Neilan’s own date was Mary Miles Minter. Moore hadn’t met Mary before, but she knew the studio gossip about her. Mary was the young blonde Paramount was trying to transform into the next Mary Pickford, and a girl with an overbearing mother who would never let her little meal ticket out of her sight. Moore was surprised that the mother would allow Mary to go to the notorious nightclub with a reputed playboy like Neilan. But when they arrived at Casa de Margarita to pick Mary up, Moore realized that Charlotte had not granted such permission to her daughter at all. Mary introduced Thomas Dixon as her own date, pointing out that he came from the rich and important family of pencil makers, then told her mother they were all going to a large party that Neilan was throwing, a party that a lot of girls Mary’s age would be attending.

Deceiving Charlotte was the only way Mary could maintain any kind of social life at all. Anything that would not meet with Charlotte’s approval (which was nearly anything involving Mary with the opposite sex) had to be done on the sly. And the image that Charlotte insisted that Mary convey was the same image the studio wanted her to have. She was her public’s virgin sweetheart—but not for long.

Mary’s involvement in the William Desmond Taylor murder scandal came as a shock to virtually everyone who knew her. Before the murder, few had seen Taylor and Minter together in public except on official business-related occasions. The discovery of her love letters and her monogrammed nightie in Taylor’s bedroom told everyone that little Mary was not the innocent sweetheart she seemed.

Mary made four more pictures after the murder, but neither the public nor the studio was interested in them. Just days before her twenty-first birthday, on April 25, 1923, Paramount paid off the rest of her contract for $350,000 and released her.

The only other information contained in the file concerned later years. One article from 1929 claimed that Charlotte Shelby owned a pistol similar to the one that killed Taylor and that her alibi for the night of the murder was not as solid as the District Attorney’s office seemed to think. Her alibi was provided by a man named Carl Stockdale, an often unemployed actor who had played supporting roles in several of Mary’s movies. Another article, from December of that year, with an Adela Rogers St. Johns byline, contained both Mary’s and Charlotte’s denials of wrongdoing, and demands that the police make public any evidence they might have linking either of them with the murder. The police were not forthcoming. D.A. Fitts, however, went a step further by declaring that the Taylor murder case, as far as he was concerned, was closed. Mary and Charlotte, it seemed, were presumed to be innocent.

Another article, printed after Margaret’s death in 1939, told of the family’s ever-declining fortunes, of how they had fought legal battles against their accountant (who had replaced Marjorie Berger) to account for the money Mary had earned during her career, and had been forced to spend much of their time in Europe, where the cost of living was lower than in the United States. Charlotte died in 1957. Soon after, Mary married her former Beverly Hills milkman, Brandon O’Hildebrandt. He died in 1965.

But the last article in the file was the one that intrigued Vidor the most. He read it many times, and though he wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, or even if it was true, he knew it was exactly the sort of thing he needed for his screenplay. The article was written by playwright Leonard Sillman. One night in the late 1920s Sillman attended a party given by Mary Miles Minter in New York. Among the guests was a curious array of fortune-tellers, batik merchants, psychics, and spiritualists. At one point in the evening, with no apparent provocation, Mary stood in the middle of the room, clasped her hand to her throat, and screamed, “Each man kills the thing he loves!” Then she fainted.

Vidor had no idea what she might have meant by the statement, or that she had meant anything at all. And there was certainly no reason, given the time and place that the incident occurred, to suspect it had anything to do with the Taylor murder several years earlier. Still, it was such a powerful scene, so filled with mystery and (especially since it took place among such metaphysical company) foreboding, that Vidor wrote it immediately into his notebook. He wasn’t sure it would find its way into his script, but he knew that if in any way the line Mary spoke at that party fit the ultimate solution that he would find for the Taylor mystery, the scene would be a natural. He might even close the picture with it.

He put everything back into the file. His next step would be to seek answers for the questions raised by Mary Miles Minter’s capsule biography, just as he had done with Mabel Normand. He had thought about talking with Florence, his first wife, who had been a friend of Minter’s, but had hesitated, hoping the research done by his student would tell him everything he needed to know. Reluctantly, he concluded that he would have to talk to his ex-wife. Also, he decided as he locked the file into the strongbox, he might talk with Mary Miles Minter herself. She was apparently still alive. Finding her shouldn’t be all that difficult. And it would be interesting to get her firsthand impressions of what went on so long ago. That is, if the thing that destroyed her career and drove her and her family out of Hollywood were something she would talk about.

20

The fog on March 15, 1967, reminded Vidor of Galveston. It enveloped the landscaped hills of Bel Air with a somber grayness that recalled mornings along the Gulf of Mexico. Only in the springtime, during the few weeks of its annual rainy season, did Los Angeles in any way resemble Vidor’s childhood home. When working on a picture, Vidor often cursed such mornings; this was, after all, exactly the sort of weather his entire industry had migrated west to escape. But today he savored the cold dampness of the air rushing through him as he drove the T-Bird, top down, along the winding westernmost stretches of Sunset Boulevard toward Pacific Palisades.

At the top of a long rise, he slowed the car, assured himself that no other vehicles were approaching through the fog, and eased across the left side of the road, stopping on a narrow summit that afforded an unobstructed view of the Pacific shoreline just north of Santa Monica. He turned off the car. The fog was thicker below him, like a low-lying cloud hiding the ocean. Vidor’s earliest childhood memory was of a day that began with just such a morning and ended with a storm that completely washed away the city of Galveston. Vidor had used the memory as the inspiration for what some critics considered the single finest film sequence he ever directed: the Kansas twister that initiated Dorothy’s magic adventures in
The Wizard of Oz.

It was absolutely peaceful there on the summit as Vidor replayed distant moments from his own past. Lately, it seemed to take very little to send him into a reverie of old times. Every aspect of the project he was working on was tied in some way to a chapter of his own life. He had known many of the people he was now interviewing. And there was Colleen Moore. For forty-five years she had been a friendly ghost, a fond memory of the one true love that got away. Now she was his producer and, as a postcard he’d received from Cairo reminded him, his partner in every way. He had set out to solve the mystery of William Desmond Taylor’s murder with purely professional intentions, not realizing he might pay an emotional price for the solution. He was now seventy-two years old; the fact struck him harder with each memory awakened by his investigation. His marriage to Betty, barely a consideration when he was first faced with the opportunity to revive his interrupted romance with Moore, filled more and more of his thoughts as it approached what he knew must be a confrontation. But he knew he wasn’t going to let Betty stand in the way of a romance with Moore, or his investigation, so he drove back onto Sunset and headed down into the fog, to find more answers to the questions in his pocket notebook.

Florence Arto was Vidor’s first wife. They’d left Texas in 1915, and worked together until Florence signed with Paramount and made at least one picture with Mary Miles Minter. Vidor and Florence had never lost touch with each other, and though their conversations through the years had grown less frequent and usually shorter, Vidor was always a welcome guest in her home. Today they sat in her living room overlooking the barely visible Pacific and talked about Minter.

“She and her mother were at each other’s throats from the day I met them. They fought about everything. But her mother always won. Mary was like Charlotte’s cute little puppet. I don’t think she ever cared about acting too much, really, but Charlotte wanted her to be a star, so Mary did what she was told.

“One of the other girls, Alice Brady or Justine Johnson or somebody, I don’t remember, made up a rhyme one day:

“Did she have any boyfriends?” Vidor asked. Florence laughed. “We didn’t think so. The way she acted around the studio you’d hardly thought she ever knew what a boyfriend was. She was like a child. She must have been, what, at least seventeen or so, but for all we could tell, when she wasn’t working she was playing with dolls or something.”

“Then no one suspected she was having an affair with Taylor?”

“No one suspected she was having an affair with anyone. When would she even have time, with Charlotte always breathing down her neck?

“After the stories came out, about the love letters and the pink nightie and everything, we girls all talked about it and decided the only time they could have even been together without Charlotte was on the set, which Taylor always kept closed to stage mothers. So they might have had some kind of flirtation going on, which might explain the letters, but they certainly couldn’t have done anything physical. Besides, unless there was a whole other side to Mary that no one I know ever saw, the whole idea of her even having grown-up silk underthings, monogrammed yet, was ridiculous.”