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Post by ripper on Oct 28, 2015 9:49:37 GMT
A Cast of Killers by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick (Onyx, 1992)
William Desmond Taylor was a prominent film director in silent-era Hollywood. In February 1922 he was found shot dead in his house. In 1967 fellow director King Vidor decided to investigate the unsolved murder, hoping to turn the story into a screenplay. Vidor never published his findings during his lifetime, nor did he produce a screenplay, but author Sidney Kirkpatrick used Vidor's papers to write this dramatised account of the investigation, and the narrative follows Vidor as he meets and interviews various people who were still living at the time and were associated with the case. It is a fascinating book which pulled me in very quickly, and immersed me in the era of 1920s Hollywood. The murder of Taylor was a major scandal at the time, and it shook Hollywood, particularly as it happened just after the Fatty Arbuckle-Virginia Rappe case. In the case of Jack the Ripper, various authors have tried to bring prominent figures of the time into the events such as Sir William Gull, Prince Albert Victor, Lord Salisbury etc. In the murder of Taylor, there is no need to try to bring into the spotlight any famous people as they are already mixed up in the events. Mabel Normand, a comedic actress, was the last person to see Taylor alive, whereas teenage actress Mary Miles Minter was believed to be involved in some way with the middle-aged Taylor and her monogrammed silk nightdress was found in Taylor's bedroom, a scandalous detail at the time. I don't know enough of the Taylor case to make a judgement as to the merits of Vidor's conclusions, but the book is well worth reading as a detective story and as highlighting the off-screen lives of Hollywood's stars in the early 1920s, and of how the press of the time covered the case. If anyone is interested in this type of thing, I would also highly recommend googling the aforementioned Fatty Arbuckle-Virginia Rappe affair, in which an innocent man was dragged through the courts and his career destroyed.
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