William Desmond Taylor

Biography

Carlow, Ireland, delivered William Desmond Taylor to the world; by 1890 the twenty-something adventurer had swapped the Barrow’s banks for the bustle of America. Between odd jobs—drawing blueprints, peddling antiques, digging for gold—he tried his hand at stock-company greasepaint until the flicker of nickelodeons lured him west. In 1912 he stepped before the camera, swaggering through Vitagraph’s Captain Alvarez (1914) in a sash and a scowl. Two years later he traded acting for a megaphone, launching his directing career at Balboa and soon shuttling among American Film, Favorite Players, Pallas, Morosco, Fox, Famous Players-Lasky, Select, Realart, and Paramount. War interrupted: 1918 found him in khaki with the British Army; 1919 saw him back in California, gavel in hand, steering the Motion Picture Directors’ Association through three presidential terms. Behind the camera he guided Mary Pickford, Dustin Farnum, Wallace Reid, and Mary Miles Minter, coaxing frontier vigor from Davy Crockett (1915), river-raft mischief from Tom Sawyer (1917), red-haired dreams from Anne of Green Gables (1919), and barefoot wanderlust from Huckleberry Finn (1920). On 1 February 1922 a single pistol shot echoed through his Alvarado Court bungalow; Taylor crumpled, his killer vanished, and Hollywood’s most tantalizing whodunnit was born—still stubbornly unsolved a century later.