Ever since I was a kid I’ve had a deep love for classic murder mysteries like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. Combine this with my obsession with history and biography—especially Hollywood biography—and you get something like William J. Mann’s Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood, the true story of one of the most notorious crimes in American history.
Centered on the still-unsolved killing of director William Desmond Taylor in 1922, Mann’s book comes as close to a “nonfiction novel” as I’ve seen since Truman Capote first coined the term. Being lit geek, I know that 1922 happens to be the year in which The Maltese Falcon is set, and Mann’s story might well have been lifted from one of Hammet’s books, filled as it with hoods, con-men, cops, junkies, sugar daddies and blackmailers.
And beautiful women, of course. Beautiful, deadly women.
The Los Angeles police implicated three women in Taylor’s murder, all actresses of some renown: Mabel Norman, a one-time star whose addiction to cocaine and booze nearly ended her career; Mary Mile Minters, a vapid teenage starlet whose romantic delusions were exceeded only by her considerable box office appeal; and Margaret “Gibby” Gibson, a former Vitagraph player (and occasional prostitute) determined to make herself into a producer.
Mann’s genius lies in drawing each of these three “desperate dames” in such vivid, distinctive strokes that I found myself liking all of them, despite their many flaws. Norman is by far the most compelling character, an extremely intelligent young woman who preferred writing poetry in Greenwich Village to acting in films. Besides being the most interesting and sympathetic of the “dames,” Norman also had a genuine sense of decency, valiant as she was in her attempts to protect Taylor’s many secrets after his death. (These included a wife and child whom Desmond has abandoned years previously and his love-life as a closeted homosexual.) Finally, she was several years into recovery from addiction when the murder occurred—a fact the local scandal sheets conveniently overlooked, preferring to paint her as an unrepentant coke-fiend (who might also be Taylor’s killer).
Minters and Gibson are much darker, more venial characters, although they too have a kind of fascinating appeal. Minters was a child-star whose screen appeal bordered on mild pornography, targeted at the more pedophilic segments of the male film-going public. Kept firmly under the thumb of her tyrannical mother—a stage parent whose sheer villainy exceeds that of Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest—little Mary longed for a rich, older man who would sweep her away from the confines of her narrow, pampered life. Unfortunately, she fixated on Taylor, who had directed one of her pictures. In more ways than one, Mary was barking up the wrong tree. Besides being gay, Taylor was much older than Mary and vastly more intelligent. By all accounts (excepts Mary’s), he found her romantic overtures annoying, if not pathetic.
Gibby Gibson is the most louche figure of the three dames, a girl from the Styx whose minor success as a bit-player in Westerns was never enough to fund her gin- and cocaine-fueled lifestyle. Tired of moonlighting as a hooker, Gibson soon found a better way to supplement her income as the land-lady and matriarch of group of two-bit thugs. Chief among these was John Osborn, who had once directed some of Gibby’s films but found his real calling a master blackmailer and con-artist. Osborne specialized in honey-trap schemes, using actresses like Gibby to lure married men into compromising situations, which they would pay dearly to get out of.
I have to admit that I found a lot to admire in Gibby Gibson, who in Mann’s account was a genuinely shrewd and driven woman (think Scarlett O’Hara with a coke habit). Where Mabel Norman hated Hollywood and filmmaking in general, Gibson was determined to conquer it, if not as an actress then as a producer, a lofty ambition that she came close to achieving. She got as far as starting her own film company (financed with dirty money) whose pictures she starred in.
Unfortunately, her company was soon smothered by the vice-like grip of Adolph Zukor, the first genuine movie mogul, whose own story overlays Mann’s tale like a Greek tragedy. Zukor had a lot in common with Gibby, being a poor kid from Hungary who was determined to find riches in America. Besides being a ruthless businessman, Zukor was also one of the first businessmen to recognize the disruptive nature of the new technology of cinema. As the nation’s first true form of mass entertainment (arriving even before radio), the cinema posed an implicit threat to traditional values and hierarchies, a fact that was apparent to religious and social conservatives of the day. What early moguls like Zukor realized, however, was that for every Bible-thumping church lady who wanted to shut the movies down, there were thousands of rabid fans who would queue up to see the latest featuring staring the likes of Fatty Arbuckle, Lilian Gish, and Randolph Scott.
One of the most salient points of Mann’s book, in fact, is how the movies have always captured the American imagination, even as they revealed its dark underbelly. By 1922, Hollywood already burned in the American psyche as a kind of modern-age Sodom, a glittering nest of decadence, greed, and sex. The frenzy of media attention that followed Desmond’s murder fed directly into this fantasy—and was fueled by it—and resulted in Hollywood’s permanent enshrinement as a national focus of corruption. (The industry was forced to begin a policy of self-censorship not long after Taylor’s murder.)
Beneath all this fine historical context, however, Mann’s book is primarily a thriller, a Whodunit of the first order. Amazingly, Desmond concludes his book with a genuine twist—a plausible solution for the murder, for which he makes a very compelling argument. (No, I won’t reveal his suspect here; you’ll just have to read the book.)
(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)
Ash Clifton, Writer 