Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A Deed Of Death The Story of the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor by Rob A Deed Of Death: The Story of the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor by Robert Giroux. Born: 8-Apr-1914 Birthplace: Jersey City, NJ Died: 5-Sep-2008 Location of death: Tinton Falls, NJ Cause of death: unspecified. Gender: Male Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Publisher. Nationality: United States Executive summary: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Military service: US Navy (lt. com, WWII) Father: Arthur J. Giroux Mother: Katharine Lyons Wife: Carmen de Arango (m. 1952, div. 1969) High School: Regis High School, Manhattan, NY (dropped out) University: Columbia University (1936) Farrar, Straus & Giroux Partner (1964-) Farrar, Straus Editor-in-Chief (1955-64) Harcourt Brace and Company Executive Editor (1948-55) Harcourt Brace and Company Editor (1940-48) CBS Public Relations Dept. (1936-40) The Jersey Journal National Board of Review of Motion Pictures President (1975-82) Author of books: The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare's Sonnets ( 1982 ) A Deed of Death: The Story Behind the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor ( 1990 ) A Deed Of Death: The Story of the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor (Hardcover) Robert Giroux 's analysis of the 1922 unsolved murder of film director William Desmond Taylor focuses on the two actresses in Taylor's life-- ingenue Mary Miles Minter and Mabel Normand, a star and a drug addict. Reviews. Well-born but disinherited Anglo-Irish actor and one-time Yukon prospector William Desmond Taylor was a prominent Paramount movie director at the time of his unsolved murder in 1922. Suspects included his secretary Edward Sands, a thief and forger; Henry Peavey, his Black, gay cook; and two flamboyant screen stars: drug-addicted Mabel Normand, whom he loved; and 20-year-old Mary Miles Minter, who yearned to be his mistress. In a meticulous probe that reads like a detective thriller, editor-publisher Giroux ( The Book Known as Q ) makes a strong case that the murderer was a contract killer. He shows that Normand had incurred the wrath of dope peddlers, as had Taylor when he tried to help her break her addiction. Brimming with details of Hollywood's silent era and its rampant post-WW I drug culture, this procedural offers glimpses of Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Sam Goldwyn, Mack Sennett, Fatty Arbuckle. Illustrations.-- Publishers Weekly. Books of The Times; Who Killed Director? Was There a Cover-Up? On the evening of Feb. 1, 1922, someone walked into the Hollywood bungalow of the prominent Paramount director William Desmond Taylor and shot him in the back. Taylor's body was found the next morning by his cook, Henry Peavey. The murder has never been solved, though it has given rise to endless speculation, gossip and scandalmongering. Taylor, 49 years old when he died, was a romantic and mysterious figure who was thought to be involved with two prominent stars of the silent-screen era, Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter. Robert Giroux, a member of the publishing firm Farrar, Straus & Giroux and the author of ''The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare's Sonnets,'' has written a cool analysis of the case, ''A Deed of Death,'' whose title comes from Titus's words to Marcus in Shakespeare's ''Titus Andronicus,'' ''A deed of death, done on the innocent.'' The appeal of Mr. Giroux's reconstruction lies more in its clearheaded reasonableness and the author's affection for Hollywood in the silent era than in its revelations. In fact, Mr. Giroux can't specifically identify the victim's killer. But he does everything short of identifying the guilty party. Mr. Giroux's theory of the Taylor case is that the scandal surrounding it is precisely the key to its solution. At the time of the director's murder, Hollywood was already staggering under the bad publicity generated by what Mr. Giroux calls ''the sensational sex scandal of the Fatty Arbuckle case'' and by ''the revelation that the actor Wallace Reid, a model of all-American manhood, had died as a result of drug addiction.'' ''Alarmed at the possibility of boycotts and national censorship,'' Mr. Giroux writes, the studio moguls ''hired Will Hays, a member of President Warren Harding's Cabinet and chairman of the Republican National Committee, to institute controls and act as a morals czar.'' ''Senator Henry L. Myers of Montana, a Presbyterian pillar of society (he was also a Mason, a Knight of Pythias and an Elk), then gave Hollywood the fright of its life by drafting a bill for Federal regulation of the movie industry,'' he continues. ''One of Hays's earliest priorities was to use his Washington connections to block the Myers bill from getting anywhere in Congress.'' In this atmosphere, Mr. Giroux reasons, the studios could not afford the revelations that a solution to the Taylor case would have unearthed. So the people investigating the murder chose to ignore the testimony of seven witnesses who had either seen or heard a stocky ''rough-looking'' young man approaching and departing from Taylor's bungalow precisely at the time he was killed. For had the investigators identified this figure, they would have discovered that he was a ''hit man'' for drug dealers Taylor had confronted while trying to break Normand of her addiction to cocaine and heroin. As Mr. Giroux concludes, Hollywood covered up these facts out of fear of Federal interference. This solution contradicts other theories of the case that have variously settled on nine different murder suspects, among them Edward F. Sands, a former cook, valet and secretary of Taylor's who is known to have robbed him; Peavey, the cook, and even the producer Mack Sennett, a former lover of Normand's. Perhaps most prominent among these theories is that of the director King Vidor, who was long obsessed with the case and whose investigations were extrapolated novelistically in ''A Cast of Killers'' (1986), a book by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, a journalist, documentary film maker and Vidor's authorized biographer. In Mr. Kirkpatrick's dramatic reconstruction of Vidor's investigation, the murderer appears to be Minter's overbearing stage mother, Charlotte Shelby, who was jealous of Taylor's attention to her 19-year-old daughter. In a recent interview, Mr. Kirkpatrick said he had seen a newly discovered diary by Minter stating flatly that her mother was the killer. Mr. Giroux does not acknowledge ''A Cast of Killers'' except in his bibliography, where he cites his own article, ''The Farce of 'A Cast of Killers,' '' which appeared in the November 1986 issue of Films in Review. But he challenges Mr. Kirkpatrick indirectly. By turning up much new material on Taylor's mysterious past, he shows, among other things, that the director was not likely to have been romantically involved with Minter, even though he was not homosexual, as some have speculated. She, on the other hand, seems to have fantasized about a love affair with him. More germanely, Mr. Giroux cites Betty Harper Fussell's observation in her biography of Normand that to match the descriptions of the many witnesses who said they saw the presumed killer, ''Mother Shelby would have had to strap on elevator shoes six to eight inches high, and strap 60 to 70 pounds of padding to her body.'' Yet most persuasive is a piece of evidence that Mr. Giroux doesn't mention but that Mr. Kirkpatrick reveals in his book. As ''A Cast of Killers,'' reports, when King Vidor had finally solved the case, he decided not to make the movie in which he had planned to reveal his findings because too many people would have been hurt. The conclusion that Shelby killed Taylor hardly explains that decision. Presumably, only Shelby (and possibly her daughter, who was continually at war with her) would have been hurt. In contrast, Taylor's having been killed by drug dealers might have injured the entire movie industry. So at least the reader is made to feel by Mr. Giroux's painstaking and lucid account of this famous case. Advance Publicationsd(Alfred A. Knopf) The Shocking Murder of William Desmond Taylor in Hollywood’s Silent Era. He was one of the most prolific directors in Hollywood—until he was fatally shot by an unknown killer in his Westlake home. Want more chilling true crime tales? Sign up for The Lineup 's newsletter and receive our eeriest investigations delivered straight to your inbox. Born William Cunningham Deane-Tanner in 1872, the man who would become William Desmond Taylor left Ireland for the United States in 1890, where he worked at a dude ranch in Kansas before moving to New York where he married Ethel May Hamilton in 1901. They were married for almost seven years before William abruptly disappeared, deserting his wife and young daughter. After his disappearance, it was revealed that he had suffered from “mental lapses,” and some friends thought that he might have wandered away while suffering from amnesia. William traveled through Canada and the northwestern United States until, in 1912, he found himself in Hollywood. He had changed his name to William Desmond Taylor, and he quickly found work as an actor before directing his first film, The Awakening , in 1914. In the decade that elapsed between Taylor’s arrival in Hollywood and his murder, he directed dozens of films, and also served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force near the end of World War I. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. On the morning of February 2, 1922, Taylor’s body was found in his bungalow in Westlake, Los Angeles by his valet Henry Peavey. A crowd quickly gathered, and someone who identified himself as a doctor stepped forward and declared that Taylor had died of a stomach hemorrhage. When the police examined the body, however, they found that Taylor had been shot in the back with a small-caliber pistol. The “doctor” vanished, and was never seen again. It was only the first of several strange clues and unexplained disappearances that would plague the case. Taylor’s wallet held $78 in cash, and he wore a two-carat diamond ring, which would seem to discount the idea that the murder was a robbery gone bad. And yet the day before, Taylor had shown his accountant a large sum of money which was nowhere to be found. The ensuing investigation became as much a matter for the papers as for the police, with many sensational—and often inaccurate or downright fabricated— newspaper reports coming out surrounding the murder. A sensational headline from The Washington Times about Taylor’s death. Photo: Via The Library of Congress. Robert Giroux, a renowned book editor, publisher, and author of the 1990 book about the murder A Deed of Death , has been quoted as saying that, “The studios seemed to be fearful that if certain aspects of the case were exposed, it would exacerbate their problems.” A police detective who worked on the case claimed, many years later, that within the first week of the investigation they “got the word to lay off.” Perhaps due to these desires to hush up certain aspects of the crime, much of the physical evidence relating to the murder was lost either right away or over the intervening years. In spite of these setbacks, the police and press identified more than a dozen possible suspects in the killing. There was even one confession, though no one was ever charged and the case remains officially unsolved to this day. While most of the suspects were ultimately cleared by the police, many of them present their own strange stories that could have come straight out of a film noir: Edward Sands had worked as Taylor’s valet until about seven months prior to the murder, during which time he had forged Taylor’s name on checks. Sands had even burgled Taylor’s bungalow, leaving his footprints on the bed. For some, Sand is considered the most likely suspect, while for others he’s another victim of a larger conspiracy. In the wake of the murder, he was never seen or heard from again. Murder suspects Henry Peavy and Mabel Normand. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Henry Peavey took over as Taylor’s valet after Sands and found the director’s body. While the police cleared him after intense questioning, the story goes that a reporter for the New York Daily News was convinced that Peavey was the killer, and thought she could trap him into a confession. Believing that he would be afraid of ghosts due to his race, she offered to pay him $10 if he could identify Taylor’s grave in Hollywood Park Cemetery. An accomplice had already gone ahead and was waiting at the grave site draped in a white sheet. When Peavey approached, the sheeted accomplice claimed to be the ghost of Taylor and said, “You murdered me. Confess, Peavey!” Unfortunately for them, Peavey saw right through their charade, thanks in no small part to the fact that they hadn’t known that Taylor had a strong British accent while the “ghost” was from Chicago. Mabel Normand , a popular comedic actress, was said to have been a lover of Taylor’s, and is one of the last people to have seen him alive. While most have ruled her out as a suspect, she was, at the time, addicted to cocaine, and, in an effort to help her kick her dependency, Taylor had recently met with federal prosecutors to assist them in charging her suppliers. Some have since theorized that Normand’s suppliers may have hired a contract killer to take care of Taylor. Murder suspects Mary Miles Minter and Charlotte Shelby. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Mary Miles Minter was a former child star and protégé of Taylor who was allegedly deeply in love with him. Passionate letters from Minter to Taylor were found in his bungalow, and many sources alleged a sexual relationship between the two that had begun when Minter was only 17 and Taylor was 47. According to Minter’s own statements, however, Taylor refused to reciprocate Minter’s advances and said that he was too old for her. Charlotte Shelby , Minter’s mother, who many contemporary sources characterized as manipulative and greedy, is a favorite suspect among many amateur detectives and true crime writers in the years since the murder. Circumstantial evidence connecting her to the killing is exacerbated by the fact that she owned a rare gun similar to the one that killed Taylor, and after his murder she threw it in the Louisiana bayou. Margaret Gibson , an actress who worked with Taylor when he first came to Hollywood, died of a heart attack in 1964. Having recently converted to Catholicism, she gave a deathbed confession in which she is said to have confessed to having “shot and killed William Desmond Taylor.” This didn’t become public until 1999, when it was printed in the newsletter Taylorology, devoted to collecting and transcribing newspaper articles and other accounts relating to the murder. In spite of these and other suspects, the murder of William Desmond Taylor remains a tale with more mysteries than solutions, and has left behind a legacy that influenced films like Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Story , as well as dozens of true crime writers and Gore Vidal’s novel Hollywood . We may never know what really happened to William Desmond Taylor, and perhaps that’s where much of our continued fascination with his death lies. Old Timey Crimey #35: William Desmond Taylor - "Dr. Pepper's Misdiagnosis​"​ Old Timey Crimey. We're off to Hollywoodland for a look at the puzzling murder of a man whose name was on everyone's lips, but who few people seemed to truly know. Whodunnit, you ask? Well, it might have been the heartbroken underage starlet, her bonkers mother, or maybe it was the coke dealers! Along the way, we'll talk horror authors, conspiracy theories, and how sex has apparently REALLY changed in the past century. Don't forget our giveaway! Send us your creepy stranger stories, and you might get a sticker. Send them to [email protected]. We have a shiny new Patreon--come be a private dick! Or a gumshoe, or a flatfoot. If a one-time donation is more your style, you can paypal us at [email protected]. Also, give us that 5-star review you know we deserve! You can also follow us here on Podbean, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're at it, hit us up on our FB group, Twitter, Reddit, or Insta to talk Old Timey Crime. And remember, kidnapping is a crime, not a legitimate interview technique. Tony Fontana. “William Desmond Taylor.” IMDb https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0853336/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm. “Anglo-Irish People.” Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_people. “William Desmond Taylor.” Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Desmond_Taylor. “Marlborough College.” Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlborough_College. “Church of the Transfiguration.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Transfiguration,_Episcopal_(Manhattan) Currency Converter. https://www.currency-converter.org.uk/currency-rates/historical/table/GBP-USD.html. “Inceville.” Wikimapia. http://wikimapia.org/6841399/Inceville. Laura Smith. “The sordid murder of this Hollywood director took the fun and sex out of Tinseltown.” Timeline. https://timeline.com/murder- william-desmond-taylor-374fb3a5f0c. Mary Miles Minter interview. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpP9rF1KhLc. Dina Di Mambro. “William Desmond Taylor: The Unsolved Murder.” Classic Hollywood Bios. http://www.classichollywoodbios.com/WilliamDesmondTaylor.htm. Sidney Kirkpatrick. “Review: The Butler Didn’t Do It: A DEED OF DEATH The Story Behind the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor.” L.A. Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-07-22-bk-837-story.html. Robert Giroux. “A Deed of Death.” NY Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/22/books/l-a-deed-of-death-625390.html. Excerpts of Witness Statements. Silent Era. https://www.silentera.com/taylorology/documents/files/testimony.pdf. “Jealous Man Hunted as Slayer of Taylor!” L.A. Examiner. http://www.taylorology.com/press/0203a/LAEx0203a.jpg. Bruce Long, editor of Taylorology. http://www.taylorology.com. More Episodes Copyright 2019 All rights reserved. We're off to Hollywoodland for a look at the puzzling murder of a man whose name was on everyone's lips, but who few people seemed to truly know. Whodunnit, you ask? Well, it might have been the heartbroken underage starlet, her bonkers mother, or maybe it was the coke dealers! Along the way, we'll talk horror authors, conspiracy theories, and how sex has apparently REALLY changed in the past century. Don't forget our giveaway! Send us your creepy stranger stories, and you might get a sticker. Send them to [email protected]. We have a shiny new Patreon--come be a private dick! Or a gumshoe, or a flatfoot. If a one-time donation is more your style, you can paypal us at [email protected]. Also, give us that 5-star review you know we deserve! You can also follow us here on Podbean, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're at it, hit us up on our FB group, Twitter, Reddit, or Insta to talk Old Timey Crime. And remember, kidnapping is a crime, not a legitimate interview technique.