Infamous America - HOLLYWOOD MURDER Ep. 1 | William Desmond Taylor, Part 1

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

By the early 1920s, William Desmond Taylor is one of the hottest directors in Hollywood … which makes it all the more surprising when he is found dead in his home. The circumstances of the discovery of his murder are bizarre, and a scandal erupts in the capital of the movie industry. As detectives try to unravel the mystery, they quickly learn that all is not what it seems with the man who is known as the “gentleman director.” Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons. Hit “JOIN” on the Infamous America YouTube homepage.  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm4V_wVD7N1gEB045t7-V0w/featured For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. To purchase an ad on this show please reach out: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After the Civil War, land speculators and the richest class of Americans at the time, railroad tycoons, started buying up land in Southern California, specifically in a place that would eventually be called the L.A. Basin. Indigenous peoples had lived there for almost 10,000 years, but that changed after the Empire of Spain conquered Central and South America. In 1781, 44 people from Spain's province of Mexico, journeyed through the desert to establish a village on the spot that would be the city of Los Angeles. About 70 years later, after a war, the Mexican state of Alta, California,

became part of the growing nation of the United States of America. The state's name was shortened to California, and at about the same time, gold was discovered in the northern part of the state. Americans and gold seekers from around the world flooded into northern California. Meanwhile, the southern part remained relatively quiet. There was no shiny gold in Southern California, and the insatiable desire for black gold, also known as oil, was about 50 years away.

In Southern California, the hot commodity was land. The weather was perfect, the scenery was stunning, and in some areas the land was rich for farming. That helped fuel migration in the 1860s and 70s. In 1880, the census listed the population of Los Angeles at 33,000 people. A couple years later, a man named Harvey Wilcox bought 500 acres of land northwest of the city center. He wanted to turn it into a new subdivision, but it was a man called Hobart John Stone Whitley, who actually completed the transformation.

Mercifully, Hobart was known as H.J. Whitley, so that podcasters 140 years in the future wouldn't have to continuously say Hobart Johnstone. Whitley completed the community that was eventually named Hollywood. And if you're familiar with the city, you're probably familiar with Wilcox Avenue and Whitley Avenue in the city that is now West Hollywood. They're two blocks from each other, though few people know how they got their names. Now you do. There are almost endless legends about the origin of the name Hollywood, but it was well established when the work moved into the new century of the 1900s. By that time, photographic technology had advanced to the point where engineers could dazzle

spectators with moving pictures. Those early moving pictures were basically demonstrations. Women showing off dance moves or clothing or showing off dance moves without clothing, men displaying feats of strength or other athletic abilities, things like that. But in 1903, Edwin S. Porter produced the first moving picture that told a story. The 12-minute production was called The Great Train Robbery, and with it, narrative films, known as movies, were born. After that, the motion picture industry raced into life with surprising speed. New companies formed overnight.

Old vaudevillians, theater emprosarios, and aspiring filmmakers from New York quickly moved to Southern California, where the weather was always warm, the landscape had every type of feature that could be desired, and there was tons of land on which to build movie studios and movie sets. Just eight years after the Great Train Robbery, the first movie studio was created on Sunset Boulevard. The growing town of Hollywood became the home of a new type of business called the movie industry, and the name of the town, Hollywood, became a shorthand reference for the industry itself. Over the next 10 years, the industry exploded. Now people flock to Southern California, just like they had flocked to Northern California

75 years earlier during America's first gold rush. And my how the world had changed in those 75 years. A journey to California that once took months by wagon and killed thousands along the way, now took days by train. There were automobiles and a let me. electric lights and telephones. And in 1922, the industry was already so popular that Charles Toberman built a venue to watch movies that became known as the first movie palace. The architecture had an over-the-top Egyptian theme, and the interior had all the extravagance of a high-class stage venue in New York, but it was primarily for movies. Toberman hired Sid Grauman to manage and program the theater that was called Grumman's Egyptian Theater.

That same year, five prominent men were in the process of organizing an opulent hillside community within the boundaries of the Hollywood subdivision. They called their new community Hollywood Land, and to advertise it to the wider city, they planned to construct a huge sign near the top of Mount Lee, the small mountain that hovered over Beachwood Canyon in the heart of their new neighborhood. The sign would spell out the word Hollywood land in big white letters, and it would be impossible to miss. Beachwood Drive, the street that would eventually run through Beachwood Canyon, would lead straight down to the first movie studio on Sunset Boulevard. Exactly one mile south of that studio was a studio called the famous players Lasky Corporation,

which would evolve into the studio known today as Paramount Pictures. One of the most popular motion picture directors at famous players was William Desmond Taylor. And on February 2nd, 1922, scandal erupted in Hollywood when Taylor was found murdered in his home, four miles from what is now the Paramount Lot. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling two murder mystery stories from the Golden Era of Hollywood, The case of director William Desmond Taylor and the notorious Black Dahlia case.

This is episode one, William Desmond Taylor, part one of two. Lights, camera, murder. The name William Desmond Taylor doesn't mean much to anybody these days, other than Hollywood history buffs or true crime enthusiasts. But Taylor was among the most talented and well-regarded directors of the silent film era, and he was one of the most prolific. Many of his films have been lost to time, so an accurate count is impossible,

but by 1922, Taylor had directed at least 50 films. Taylor had once been an actor and was loved by the actors who worked with him. His employer, the famous Players Lasky Corporation, loved him because his films made lots of money. And his fellow directors thought so highly of him, they elected Taylor the first president of the Directors Association, which is now the Director's Guild of America.

But most importantly, the audiences loved his movies. That was why the events of February 2nd, 1922, were all the more mysterious. Henry Peavy, Taylor's Butler, arrived at Taylor's home at 7.30 in the morning to begin work for the day. When he found Taylor dead on the floor, the discovery set in motion a mystery that required investigators to simultaneously work forward and backward through time. It turned out, like a Hollywood movie, nothing was what it seemed. The famous director lived in an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood that was popular with movie people.

When the cops arrived at the address, they found the owner of the craftsman bungalow, William Desmond Taylor, lying dead on his living room floor. When the officers stepped inside the bungalow, they found a bizarre scene. The dead man, dressed in a suit and tie and lying face up on the floor, had company. While the butler calmly washed dishes in the kitchen, two other men were in the living room. One was rummaging through the drawers of an antique mahogany desk and handing papers and photographs to another man who crouched beside the fireplace and burned them. And the scene became stranger.

In the bedroom, one of the most famous movie stars of the day, Mabel Norman, was frantically rifling through the dead man's closet and bureau drawers. The officers didn't know what to make of the scene. They surely recognized Mabel, but who were the two men ransacking Taylor's desk and burning his personal papers in the fireplace? Turns out, they were executives from famous players Lasky, and the bizarre situation still wasn't done. The officers were told that a doctor had already been to the house, examined Mr.

Taylor and pronounced him dead of natural causes. That cause, allegedly, was a stomach hemorrhage. The actress, the two studio executives, and the butler, all said Taylor was known to have chronic stomach problems. But to continue the sequence of strange things, the doctor was nowhere to be found, and nobody remembered his name. The confused and increasingly suspicious officers ordered everyone out of the house. Then came the real shocker. At first glance, the officers saw no reason to dispute the diagnosis of death by natural causes because there were no outward signs of foul play. Not at first anyway. But when they turned Taylor's body over, they discovered the true cause of death. There was nothing natural about a 38-caliber bullet hole in the middle of the man's back.

One of Hollywood's hottest movie directors had been murdered, and now the mystery began. And if the police thought things were strange and bizarre in the beginning, those feelings would only continue. There was a lot more to Taylor's life and probably his death than anyone realized. William Desmond Taylor was not only admired for his talent, but also for being the consummate English gentleman. In fact, he had been nicknamed the gentleman director. but nobody knew that their gentleman director had secrets. He had done a pretty good job of keeping those secrets, but after his murder, a complicated backstory began to come into focus,

and it was not very flattering. William Desmond Taylor's 50-year journey from his birthplace to his final resting place in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery had some interesting plot twists. If his life story were made into a movie, it would be an epic, but probably a little hard to find. It would, however, have all the elements of a good who-done it, plenty of drama, a little

romance, and even some comedy. The secrets and complexities began right off the bat. His name wasn't William Desmond Taylor, and he was only kind of English. William Desmond Taylor was born William Cunningham, Dean Tanner, in County Carlo, Ireland, in 1872. And his was no rags to Rich's story. William's family, although Irish, were of British descent and considered themselves subjects of the British crown. At that time, the crown was worn by Queen Victoria, who was then roughly halfway through her 63-year reign.

The Dean Tanners were prominent members of an elite British social class known as Landed Gentry. The gentry class owned vast tracts of land and typically lived in grand manor houses on big estates, where they enjoyed the carefree lives of country aristocrats. William and his four siblings grew up on the Dean Tanner family estate. William, the oldest, was being groomed to one day run the estate after his father, a retired British Army officer. Both his parents were devout members of the Anglican Church of Ireland, an offshoot of the Church of England.

William and his siblings enjoyed an idyllic life of privilege in the Irish countryside. But with an officer-turned-father commanding his children like a small battalion and a mother with a fervent belief in God in the Anglican Church, the Dean Tanner Brood also had a very strict upbringing. William followed the rules as best he could, but his parents didn't know that he had much bigger plans for his life than what they had in mind for him. Becoming a country gentleman and having an ongoing relationship with the Anglican Church were not part of those plans. This was where things got complicated, because William's aspirations in life were not remotely in keeping with what was expected of a young man of the landed gentry class at the height of the Victorian era. More importantly, his future plans were not what his father expected or demanded of his eldest son.

Major Dean Tanner was not an easy man to disobey, but William was not a young man who easily fell into step. He intended to stick to his plans for the future, whether his parents approved or not, or so he thought. And those plans were to be in show business. While William was in secondary school, he had been bitten by the acting bug and had begun acting in school plays. But knowing this would not sit well with the major, he kept it under wraps. When he finally worked up the courage to tell his father he wanted to pursue a career as an actor, it did not go well. The Major forbade it. No son of his was going to have anything to do with the profession as undignified as acting.

But William was undeterred. When the Major later discovered that his son had flagrantly disobeyed him and had secretly become involved with a local acting troops' production of Hamlet, he was irate. As punishment for disobeying orders, and to rid their 13-year-old son of his unholy fixation with the stage and becoming an actor, William's parents sent him away to a boarding school in Wiltshire, England, called Marlborough College. It was a school founded primarily to educate the sons of the Church of England clergy.

But if William's father thought the Church of England was going to have any more luck than he'd had in curbing his son's burning desire to become an actor, he was sadly mistaken. The more William was told to ignore his dream of acting, the more determined he became to pursue it. After graduating from Marlborough College at age 18, William made his way to London where he answered the siren call of acting again. Ignoring his father's directive to stay off the stage or else, he began acting in various stage productions in London's West End. William thought he had finally found the freedom to pursue his true vocation and his future on the stage was looking bright. But it wasn't long before William learned what his father meant by, or else. If William had been a terrible actor, maybe his calling to the stage would not have been so

loud, or it would have at least been easier to ignore. But he wasn't. He was good. William was tall and handsome. He had a strong, deep voice and a way of carrying himself, which theater critics described as elegant. There was, however, one thing William was terrible at, keeping secrets from his father. when, purely by chance, a family friend happened to see William performing in a production on the London stage. The man sent word to William's father. Within days, the major arrived in London. He informed William, now 19 years old, that he was not going to allow him to disgrace the family name any longer, on the stage or off it. William's father handed William a ticket to sail to America, to make sure he got on the ship and didn't run off with a traveling acting troop along the way,

William's father escorted him to the dock to see him off personally. After sailing across the Atlantic and disembarking in New York City in 1891, William instantly became enthralled with the bright lights of Broadway. But unless he was prepared to be disowned, he knew he couldn't stay. So, after only a few days, he begrudgingly boarded a train and headed west, two of all places, Kansas, where his father had arranged for him to work on a ranch. In that era, wealthy British aristocrats were investing in the livestock business in America. Some of them were at the heart of the land wars and cattle wars in the American West,

like the Johnson County War in Wyoming. Williams' father was one such investor. He had probably called in a favor from the Kansas rancher he'd invested in. If they could break wild horses on the ranch, then maybe a bunch of rambunctious, whiskey-drinking Kansas cowboys could break his son's wild notions of becoming an actor. Exactly how long William remained in Kansas is unknown, but it didn't take long for him to learn that the cowboy life was not for him. While he was there, though, he found a way to make his time more bearable.

Kansas didn't have what you would call a vibrant theater scene in the 1890s. but William discovered a small theater troupe in a town near the ranch. So when he wasn't busy learning how to rope horses or brand cattle, he was back on the stage and acting again. Before long, the familiar calling grew louder than ever. Broadway was calling, and William was determined to answer. He knew there would be serious consequences when his father found out that he had left the ranch, but William decided the consequences were worth it.

He wrote to his father and announced his plans to move to New York City to pursue a career on the stage. The only ammunition the major had left in his arsenal now was to cut his son off financially and hope maybe poverty would serve as a wake-up call. So that's what he did. William went from landed gentry to landing in the Big Apple flat broke. But not for long. William experienced a stroke of luck. He met a famous English.

American stage actress named Fannie Davenport. Fanny, who was roughly 20 years his senior, liked what she saw. Fanny took the young, handsome, aspiring actor under her wing and gave him small roles in her plays. William was having a pretty good run, thanks to Fanny, and he was earning a modest living as an actor. But in 1898, Fanny died unexpectedly at the age of 48. With William's benefactress gone, he had to go back to auditioning like everyone else. That was when he discovered that being a poor, out-of-work actor in New York City was even less appealing than being a cowboy in Kansas. But before long, fate stepped in to assist him again. William wasn't exactly setting the New York theater scene on fire. He was considered a good actor, but not that good. He rarely landed acting

jobs on his own, and being poor was not a lifestyle he wanted to continue. Now at 29 years old, he was beginning to question his career choice. Then one day, after being rejected a yet another audition, he met an actress named Ethel May. The two began dating, and soon after they were married. William tried to convince himself that it was time to play the role of a responsible adult. William's new father-in-law was a wealthy stockbroker who also owned a high-end English antique shop on the city's Upper East Side. And who better to manage it than his new son-in-law, an elegant youngish English gentleman who was actually Irish. William decided it was time to be a dutiful husband, so he began a new career selling expensive English antiques. By all accounts,

William enjoyed married life, and he especially enjoyed being part of New York High Society. Ethel May had also given up on the stage, and a year after they were married, they had a daughter named Daisy Ethel. William was finally back in his father's good graces, and everything appeared to be going along swimmingly. He had married into a prominent American family, he was earning a good living, and he was playing the role of husband and father pretty convincingly. That was until 1908, when William suddenly vanished. Without a word to anybody, he packed up one day and disappeared, abandoning his wife of seven years and their six-year-old daughter.

Obviously, William couldn't stay in New York after pulling a stunt like that, and going back to England wasn't an option, so he headed as far west as he could. In 1908, one of the first major motion pictures to be completed in Hollywood, California had just been finished. It was the Count of Monte Cristo. It started filming in Chicago and finished in Hollywood. And with that, the film industry in Hollywood was officially born. But Hollywood was not William's first stop. The details are a bit fuzzy, but we know he ended up in San Francisco, where he started acting again. He remained in San Francisco for a few years,

but as was his nature, he once again grew restless and decided to head down to Hollywood to see what this new film business was about. He would have been about 40 years old when he arrived there in 1912, one year after the first movie studio opened on Sunset Boulevard. He also arrived with a new name, William Desmond Taylor.

He first got work as an actor, but it was tough. This was the silent film era. The first film with synchronous sound, the jazz singer, was still 15 years away. He had many years of stage experience, but acting in front of a camera, without words, was a whole new frontier. It turned out that he was a natural. The camera loved him, and he was soon playing small roles opposite some of the rising stars of the earliest days of feature films. But something was missing. Acting was no longer as fulfilling as it once was.

Maybe it was because there was no live audience on a movie set, but whatever it was, he decided to make the transition from film actor to film director. William was able to convince studio executives at Famous Players Lasky Corporation that he had what it took to be a great director, and he was right. William's first film, Battle at Gettysburg, was released in 1913, and it was a thundering success. William Desmond Taylor instantly became an A-list director. A whole new life unfolded for the dashing new film director with the fake name and the murky past.

William Desmond Taylor cranked out movies like he was operating an assembly line, which was pretty similar to what was happening. Most of the movies he directed were only 50 minutes long, and he churned out 8 to 10 movies of various lengths per year. Among the highlights were Davy Crockett in 1916, Tom Sawyer in 1917, Captain Kidd Jr. and Anne of Green Gables in 1919, and Huckleberry Finn in 1920. And over the course of the nine years between his directing debut and his death, the movie industry evolved rapidly. The history of Hollywood has been one of mergers and acquisitions since the very beginning. Taylor was a contract director for the Famous Players Lasky Corporation.

That company was a merger of the Famous Players Film Company and the Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company. Those two companies were film production companies. They made the movies. The man who founded famous players also founded a company to distribute the movies. He called that company Paramount Pictures. A few years after William Desmond Taylor was killed, the film production company, famous players Lasky, consolidated with the film distribution company

under the single name of Paramount Pictures, and the movie studio we know today was born. And while that evolution unfolded throughout the 19-teens and early 1920s, Taylor's star continued to rise. He moved into a bungalow on South Alvarado Street. It was a popular setup at the time, a collection of bungalows in what was known as a bungalows, The Bungalow Court.

The setup still exists today all over Los Angeles, but famous film directors now prefer mansions in Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel Air, and the Hollywood Hills. In the 1920s, the Bungalow Court at 404 South Alvarado Street was just a couple blocks away from the space that would become MacArthur Park and just two miles outside downtown. It was four miles from the future home of the Paramount Pictures Studio lot. And at about 7.30 in the morning, on February 2nd, 1922, Henry Peavy arrived at the bungalow to begin his day's work as a butler for the famous movie director. But even before he went inside the house, Henry noticed something strange. The living room lights were on. They were never on when he got to work. Mr. Taylor was not an early riser. Like most Hollywood movers and shakers, he went to bed late and woke up late.

When Henry walked inside, he saw something unexpected. His boss, 49-year-old William Desmond Taylor, lay dead on the living room floor. The famous director was still dressed in a suit and tie, with his hair still neatly combed. Peavy was probably surprised and maybe saddened, but he seemed like he must have believed that Taylor died of natural causes. As such, he didn't immediately call the police. The sequence of events isn't clear, but working backward through the process of deductive reasoning, PV probably called the studio where Taylor worked. That was why, when the police eventually arrived, there were two men from famous players Lasky in Taylor's home.

And presumably, PV called Mabel Normand, the popular actress who was known as the Queen of Comedy. She had starred alongside two of the biggest actors of the age, Charlie Chaplin, and Roscoe Faddy Arbuckle. But her presence provoked an obvious question. Why? If Peavy called her to alert her of Taylor's death, why? Mabel was a top actress and William was a top director. But maybe there was more to it than that for her to be one of the first people who learned about William's death. And it wasn't like the three people who didn't belong in the house, the two studio executives and the actress, were just standing around crying over the loss of a beloved colleague. The executives were in the living room burning Taylor's papers, and the actress was in Taylor's bedroom, sifting through his closets

and drawers. The first police officers on the scene didn't know what to make of the bizarre circumstances. They were told that Taylor died of natural causes, but a simple inspection of the body showed a bullet hole in the man's back. The case of William Desmond Taylor was about to become a real-life Hollywood murder mystery. The backstories, the secrets, and the rumors would produce a scandal. And the case would prove nearly impossible to solve. Next time on infamous America, the police try to unravel the confusing details surrounding Taylor's murder. They interview the prime suspects, two of whom were major movie stars. They uncons. They unconsored. cover things about William Desmond Taylor that lots of people in Hollywood would rather stay hidden.

And then, a fellow movie director believes he has solved the mystery. That's next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. This series was researched and written by Michael Byrne and myself. Original music by Rob Valier.

I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrell Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.