UBC: Mann, Tinseltown

[truepenny]

Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book about the murder of William Desmond Taylor was solidly on track for "quite good," which is my 4-star rating, until the epilogue, wherein Mann veers off into wild speculation, promoting a theory that COULD be true, but is based on (1) eyewitness testimony, (2) the dying confession, 40 years later, of a woman who may not have been entirely sane, (3) a VERY STRETCHY hypothesis about the ammunition used.

None of this is evidence any better than that for the primary suspect, and frankly, while the scenario he constructs is plausible enough, it has the kind of plausibility I expect in detective fiction , not in real life. It could be true, but there's absolutely NOTHING that persuades me that it is.

Otherwise, this book was quite good. Mann examines the (still unsolved) murder of William Desmond Taylor in 1922 through the lives and careers of three women: Mabel Normand, Mary Miles Minter, and Margaret Gibson (a.k.a. Patricia Palmer). Mabel was probably Taylor's best friend, Mary had a crush on him the size of Gibraltar, and Margaret (Mann claims) was responsible for his death. It's also a book about Adolph Zukor and Will Hays and Hollywood between 1920 and 1924, so the Arbuckle scandal is loomingly present (Mann thinks Arbuckle was innocent of wrong-doing, but the excellent Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood has a much more nuanced take). I'm interested in early Hollywood, so found the details of the lives of directors, ingenues, comediennes, and failures fascinating, but in retrospect, it's really NOT a book about William Desmond Taylor's murder, even though that's the event it's (more or less) organized around. At this distance, with the evidence lost, stolen, or destroyed, we're not GOING to solve Taylor's murder; I certainly don't think Mann's elaborate scheme is the answer.

(I could be wrong.)

So if you want a long, in-depth discussion of early Hollywood, this is a fine book. If you want any of the other things this book might have been, not so much.



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Comments

[hominysnark]

Have you ever read A Cast of Killers, by Sydney D. Kirkpatrick? It was meant to be a biography of King Vidor, but Mr. Vidor had apparently conducted his own investigation of the Taylor murder, so Kirkpatrick’s book evolved into an account of that.

It’s been years since I read it, so I can’t speak to the style, but Vidor’s theory makes the most sense of any of the others I’ve heard.