Post by Joanna on Oct 20, 2014 20:59:19 GMT -5
Tinseltown probes unsolved 1922 Hollywood murder
MILFORD, Conn. – The murder of silent film director William Desmond Taylor was the ultimate cold case for more than 90 years. This might have changed last week with the publication of Tinseltown (Harper, $27.99), by William J. Mann, which leads a reader to a lucid solution to the crime that feels almost as airtight as the final chapter of an Agatha Christie mystery.
The book is more than just the study of one very old crime, however. As the book's subtitle, Murder, Morphine and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood, suggests, Mann shows us how the murder was part of a series of early 1920s Hollywood scandals that threatened the nascent movie industry with censorship. As Tinseltown shows, movies brought big-city sophistication to audiences all over the country. While the racier films played to minimal protests in places like New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, conservative elements in small towns and rural areas were horrified by the excesses that made movies so potent and so popular.
The Taylor case was intertwined in the public consciousness with the concurrent manslaughter charges against comedian Fatty Arbucklel after a woman died at one of his parties, and several widely reported cases of drug addiction and fatal overdoses involving major stars. The prudes and the would-be censors feared the off-screen behavior of show people was being endorsed by the films they made and those films would "corrupt" audiences.
"Hollywood has always been about selling images and illusions. When things like this happen, the illusions have to be managed," the Milford author said during a recent interview.
Tinseltown is a departure from the biographies of Hollywood figures that Mann has focused on in recent years, including Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn and Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand.
Like many other Hollywood scholars, Mann has been fascinated by the unsolved Taylor case for decades and began accumulating information on it in between his biographies. He knew the scope of the story of Hollywood in the 1920s and a search for a possible solution to the crime would take more time than one of his biography projects. "It is very much a departure for me and a book I've been wanting to write for a long time," Mann said of his years of research and analysis.
The author launched his national book tour at the Milford Public Library on October 12 and will be making two more Connecticut stops – at the Westport Public Library on Thursday, October 23, and the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford on Thursday, November 13.
For many readers, the real star of Tinseltown will be the silent film comedian Mabel Normand, who was a very close friend of Taylor's – in a strictly platonic sense – but whose problems with cocaine endangered her career and also led the public to believe that she was deeply involved in the murder case. "I kind of fell in love with her in a way," Mann said of digging into the life of the star. Normand's connection to the Taylor case was dramatized in the Jerry Herman cult musical Mack & Mabel, which also looked at the performer's love/hate relationship with the director Mack Sennett. I got tired of reading so many 'tragic' accounts of her life – that she was 'so sad' – by people who didn't see (how well she did despite) her troubles and struggles. She didn't have the kind of ambition that Margaret Gibson did," the writer said referring to another of the actresses linked to the Taylor case. Mabel was driven more by her father's desire to see the world and to make something out of herself. ... she was far happier than some people have made her out to be," Mann said of how the Staten Island, N.Y., native came to love her off-screen life of reading and traveling as much as she enjoyed working in Hollywood.
Source: Joe Myers, Connecticut Post, October 16, 2014.