A Cast of Killers by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick

[Find Hats Off]

There's a very interesting book called A Cast of Killers by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, which is about film director King Vidor's efforts in 1967 to investigate the 1922 murder of director William Desmond Taylor. By this time, 45 years had gone by since the unsolved murder, and Vidor was 72 years old. There were still a number of people alive who had known Taylor, and this book is an intriguing real-life detective story. Apparently he wanted to make a film about Taylor and his murder, and he investigated every lead he could follow. It looks like in the end he solved the mystery, but decided to keep it all locked away because certain details of an apparent coverup would make a lot of people who were still around at the time look bad. I'm only a little more than a third of the way through this book, so I can't tell you that much about it, but I wanted to share this with everyone, because I found a reference to Stan and Babe:

One page 106, Vidor remembered the 1930 funeral of Mabel Normand:
"An organ was playing. A flower-bedecked casket sat at the front of the aisle, just before the altar. In the pews Vidor saw Chaplin, Mack Sennett, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Buster Keaton, Minta Durfee, Fatty Arbuckle. Hollywood's comedians were crying."

There's also a reference to the loss of nitrate films, on page 101. Vidor went to the Paramount Studios in 1967 (where the murdered director had worked), trying to find out more about his subject:
"Over the years Vidor and [Colleen] Moore had seen many of their own films destroyed. In the early sixties, silent films were thought to have no commercial value. They were difficult to store, dangerous to handle, and a fire hazard. Vidor's had been destroyed in a Bekins Storage Company fire, and Colleen's entire collection had burned up in a fire at Warner Brothers.

Vidor's friend brought him the news of Taylor's films. What titles had not disintegrated by the fifties were in such bad condition that they were taken out of the vaults, cut into small pieces with a chain saw, then burned, to salvage the silver content of the film stock."

I hope that I'm not totally depressing Forum members with all this, but it was so interesting that I had to share it with you. In general, it's a lively book, for it keeps switching from Vidor in 1967 to various memories of his and other people's of long-gone events of the silent era. He even gave some investigating assignments to his students from a film class that he was teaching at UCLA at the time, in order to fill in background information and follow different leads at the same time that he himself was interviewing people and poring over documents. For an officially semi-retired 72-year old man, he sure had a busy schedule!

[earwig]

Thanks for this interesting insight, FHO. This case has always been fascinating. But don't give away the ending!

[Find Hats Off]

Thanks for this interesting insight, FHO. This case has always been fascinating. But don't give away the ending!

I think that it was either Noah Young or Walter Long!

But seriously, I won't, but I'll let you know if there are any more references to Stan, Babe, or anyone else interesting. There's a reference to Mae Busch in the often-repeated story of Mabel Normand catching her with Mack Sennett, but then there's someone else who claims that in anguish, Mabel jumped off of a pier into the ocean and hit her head on one of the pilings, and that's what that person says caused Mabel's head injury.

Just to let you know, the book was published in 1986 by E.P. Dutton in New York. I believe that there was another printing about 20 years later, but I haven't seen it, so I don't know if there was any added information in that edition.

[Find Hats Off]

You won't like this, but there's a reference to Emmett Flynn, the director of Early To Bed on page 259 (as well as on page 262) of the book:

"In 1937, at the age of forty-four, not long after his marriage to Margaret [Mary Miles Minter's sister], director Emmett J. Flynn was found dead in his Hollywood apartment, rumoured by some to have been killed by a blow to the back of the head. His murderer was never found...
The similarities between the two crimes were frightening: two Hollywood directors, roughly the same age, killed under mysterious circumstances after being involved with..."
...and I'll leave this open for those who want to read the book for themselves. I'm really finding this book, A Cast of Killers, to be extremely interesting, and I find it hard to put down (except to read what everyone has posted here on the Forum!).

[Find Hats Off]

Now that I've gotten to the end of the book, there's a note on page 286 about Emmett Flynn, contradicting something that was written earlier (which I posted above):

"EMMETT J. FLYNN, film director, former husband of Margaret Shelby and Nita Flynn, died suddenly in Los Angeles on June 4, 1937, at eh age of forty-four. Rumors that circulated about his death were the result of an autopsy performed on June 5, 1937, but never made public. The final diagnosis revealed that he had died from a brain hemorrage due to chronic alcoholism, and not from a blow to the head."

That's what I get for hurrying to quote something from a book that I wasn't finished with! The above report apparently contradicts what someone else had reported to Vidor in the later part of this book, but this detail is based on an autopsy which was never officially released to the public. Anyway, this book is a very interesting story of the investigation of a mysterious murder. I think that Mr. Vidor solved the case, and I understand why he left it as it was, and never made a film out of it, as he was originally planning to do. I still wish that he had written a book about it himself, even if he delayed its publishing, but this writer Sidney D. Kirkpatrick really did a great job putting it all together in this book that he wrote.

[Find Hats Off]

Thanks for this interesting insight, FHO. This case has always been fascinating. But don't give away the ending!

Actually, there were a couple of gunmen on a grassy knoll...

No, I won't give it away, but it sure makes a convincing case. I would be surprised if this book were wrong.

The interesting thing about this whole botched murder investigation is that there were two different semi-conspriacies going on right about at the same time. First, the studios did their own "spin control" (as we call it now), by sending people into Taylor's house to confiscate any papers, letters, etc. that they didn't want publically revealed, as the dead man's body lay there on his living room's floor. It wasn't until the police arrived that it was discovered that Taylor had been shot. The studio guys had thought that Taylor had died of something more natural. A mysterious non-existant "doctor" had arrived and quickly examined the body, saying that he had died of a stomach hemorrage, according to the studio staff. They were as shocked as can be when they were told that the man had been murdered.

Then, apparently, the various District Attorneys were paid off by someone I won't mention, in order to not ever complete their investigation, so that basically, they investigated just enough to make it look like they were working at it, while systematically "leaking" enough nonsense to the press to keep them busy writing their "reports", while doing away with any true evidence they may have come up with. The Hollywood studio also leaked things to the press, in order to maintain their "spin control" over the story. They figured that one certain type of scandal was better than the other type that might have come out instead.

Anyway, I have found this a very interesting real-life story which is both sad and intriguing. Maybe that's all a bit redundant, but there it is. I just wonder how Sherlock Pinkham and Ferdinand Finkleberry would have investigated this.

Laurel and Hardy tie in: King Vidor recieved a mysterious phone call from actor Antonio Moreno, who appeared with Thelma Todd in some scenes (many cut out of the final edit) in The Bohemian Girl. Mr. Moreno was a friend of William Desmond Taylor, and he told Vidor that he was one of the many people who were going through Taylor's house on the morning that he was found dead. Vidor was in New York at the time, when he received this call. Afterward, when he had returned to California, he called Moreno back, only to find that the actor had died a few days earlier from a heart attack. How's that for mysterious?

So, what do all you folks here at the Forum think of all this?

[RandyS]

Flynn had a very hectic year in 1937, or what little he lived of it. On March 17, he married Mary Miles Minter's sister, Margaret Shelby, without having bothered to divorce his previous (second) wife, Nita. The marriage was annulled on April 3. (This likely didn't please mother Charlotte!) Emmett's older brother, assistant director Ray Flynn, died at 47 on April 16. And Emmett died on June 4, age 44.

I don't know about Emmett being an alcoholic, but evidently something was going amiss in his film directing career. He'd been making feature films for Fox at a good pace through 1926 (three or four films a year), then made only one in 1927. "Early to Bed" is his only known credit for 1928, and it's a short for Roach, which whether we like it or not would have been seen as a comedown for someone who had been directing features.

In 1929, he made one talking feature for Fox and two for Universal, and evidently then left the picture business at 37. Whether this was due to his not adapting to sound, or alcoholism, or other factors, I don't know.

[RandyS]

Regards Stan and Babe being mourners at Mabel Normand's funeral, this is entirely possible, as both had worked with her at the Roach studios.

Babe Hardy, rather surprisingly, has a connection with another Hollywood scandal. A friend of mine who is doing research on Virginia Rapée, the young woman who died at Roscoe Arbuckle's San Francisco party over Labor Day weekend of 1921, has found some photographs of her funeral. Babe Hardy is unquestionably one of the pallbearers. I can only imagine that this was because Babe had worked with writer-director-actor Henry Lehrman, who seems to have been an intimate of Miss Rapée.