X-Nico

8 unusual facts about William Desmond Taylor


Charlotte Shelby

Charlotte Shelby (Lily Pearl Miles Reilly) (19 December 1877 - 13 March 1957) was a popular Broadway actress in her youth and was long noted as a suspect in the murder of Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor.

Homer Scott

For three years Homer Scott was closely associated with director William Desmond Taylor.

Johanna Enlists

The film was directed by William Desmond Taylor from a short story by Rupert Hughes, The Mobilization of Johanna.

McFarlan Automobile

The McFarlan was a luxury automobile owned by celebrities of the day such as Wallace Reid, William Desmond Taylor, Fatty Arbuckle, Paul Whiteman, Jack Dempsey and Virginia governor E. Lee Trinkle.

Monroe Doctrine Centennial half dollar

These included the mysterious shooting death of film director William Desmond Taylor, and the subsequent evasive testimony concerning it by actress Mabel Normand, which helped destroy her career.

Return to Babylon

Photographed with a hand-cranked camera and scored with music of the roaring twenties, this silent film strings together the lives of the most famous and infamous stars of the 1920s, including Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow, Lupe Vélez, Fatty Arbuckle, and William Desmond Taylor.

Servants' Entrance

This film was adapted from Sigrid Boo's 1930 Norwegian novel Vi som går kjøkkenveien ("We Who Enter Through the Kitchen") which has an almost identical plot to Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd's popular 1917 novel How Could You, Jean? Brainerd's novel had already been adapted into the film How Could You Jean? (1918), directed by William Desmond Taylor and starring Mary Pickford.

William J. Mann

Forthcoming work includes Tinseltown: Madness, Morphine and Murder at the Dawn of the Movies, due in 2014 from HarperCollins, the story of how the Hollywood studio system and the Hays Office were established during the early 1920s, told alongside the famous, unsolved murder mystery of director William Desmond Taylor, which Mann promises to solve.



see also