Tintseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood. By
William J. Mann. New York: Harper, 2014.
Who killed Billy Taylor? Investigators, conspiracy
theorists, and scholars have been asking this question since 1922, when William
Desmond Taylor, president of the Motion Pictures Directors Association, was
discovered in his Los Angeles bungalow with a .38 slug fired from close range lodged
in his body. Writer William J. Mann–known for his biographies of Hollywood
luminaries such as Katherine Hepburn and Barbara Streisand–is the latest to
finger a culprit. Although be builds a meticulous case for his suspect, he
probably won't convince those invested in a different suspect. It's of little
consequence, as the greater value of Mann's lies in its vivid portrayal of
Hollywood in the silent era.
Celebrity scandals, infidelity, substance abuse, bad
behavior, and innuendo are the lifeblood of today's tabloid- and
paparazzi-fueled culture, but those who consider Hollywood to be a modern-day
Gomorrah will learn from Mann's book that it was always thus. His Hollywood is
a literal Tintseltown–shiny and glamorous on the surface, but with a tawdry
interior of casual sex, rampant drug use, ruthless ambition, backroom
abortions, hard drinking, and poorly kept secrets. The biggest difference
between then and now is that there were more powerful Americans disgusted by
Hollywood immorality than fascinated by it. The history of the 1920s is often
poorly refracted through a Jazz Age lens, a perspective that pays too little
attention to surging fundamentalism, Prohibition, social intolerance, and the
disproportionate political power held by rural conservatives. In short,
powerful groups of religious and political moralists sought to cleanse American
society and Hollywood was one of their main targets.
In 1922, the Hollywood film industry was not yet a decade
old and movies themselves not much older. As numerous film historians have
noted, early films were often more risqué than they would become when movies
migrated from down-market working-class neighborhoods and into middle-class
theaters. Not coincidentally, the industry consolidated into precisely the
vertical monopolies attacked by Progressive Era reformers. By 1922, Adolph
Zukor's Paramount Pictures was aptly named, and Zukor was so powerful that friends
and foes alike nicknamed him "Creepy." Among Mann's fascinating
insights is Zukor's megalomaniacal obsession with rival, Marcus Loew, who was
as affable as Zukor was cold.
Zukor 's greatest insight was his realization that changing
Hollywood's image was necessary to fend off regulators and moralists. Hollywood
had serious PR problems, including starlet Mabel Normand's publicized cocaine
addiction, Wallace Reid's dependence on morphine, the poisoning death of Olive
Thomas, and the rape/murder accusation against comic actor Fatty Arbuckle, one
of Hollywood's biggest stars. Although acquitted, Zukor sacrificed Arbuckle's
career to keep moralists at bay. He also engineered the elevation of Will Hays
to the post of president of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of
America in charge of censoring movie content–just enough to get regulators off
Zukor's back, but not enough to dull salacious consumers. Mann argues that Hays
was not the prude of legend. He took his job seriously but, if anything, he was
star-struck and prone to follow Zukor's lead.
Director Billy Taylor was a fulcrum around which all that
was promising and unseemly about Hollywood revolved. Mabel Normand, the last
person known to see Taylor alive, acted in several Taylor films and, depending
on whom one asked, was either a dear friend, a former lover, or a murderous
revenge-seeker. She certainly kindled the jealousy of Mary Miles Minter, an
ingénue in love with and obsessed by Taylor. Minter was also rumored to be a
Taylor paramour–troubling, as she would have been just 16 when their alleged
affair began. Minter's stage mother, former Broadway actress Charlotte Selby,
believed the scuttlebutt and made numerous threats against Taylor. Margaret
Gibson also harbored a grudge; she made four films for Taylor under the name of
Patricia Palmer, before he dumped her because of a reprobate life that included
running con games, consorting with organized crime, prostitution, and drug use.
And Taylor had a passel of secrets of his own, including his birth identity and
his bisexuality. The latter cast suspicion upon his flamboyantly gay black
valet, but Gibson made a deathbed confession to the murder in 1964. Mann isn't
buying any of those suspects and identifies a different culprit.
Tintseltown is a
real-life Day of the Locust. It's a
history book and could be usefully pared back in length, but it is frequently
as gripping as a work of fiction. Mann shows that the Hollywood Dream Machine
has always been just a fantasy.
Rob Weir
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