Free A Cast of Killers by Sidney Kirkpatrick Page A

movies—pictures set from Coney Island to the Russia of War and Peace, and taking place in every era from that of biblical Sheba to the present day—Vidor had had occasion to work with experts in many geographical, historical, and cultural fields. Stallings’s area of expertise was World War I. He had met Vidor, in fact, during the twenties, while writing a script about the war. They were on the same Pullman, heading away from Los Angeles, Stallings’s berth directly above Vidor’s. For several hours they talked, Stallings telling Vidor about the horrors he had seen at Chateau-Thierry and the Metz. As he spoke, the train bounced over a rough length of track, causing Stallings’s wooden leg, hanging on a wall hook, to swing into Vidor’s berth, offering visual proof of just how real the horrors had been. In the forty years since, Stallings had become Vidor’s chief screenwriter as well as confidant, drinking buddy, and yachting partner.
    He arrived at Vidor’s room at the Lombardy Hotel armed with street-vendor hot dogs and an oversized briefcase. Vidor had just come back from seeing Swanson. “Hope you know what you’re getting into, King,” his deep gravel voice said as he made his way inside to a large overstuffed chair by the window, the only chair big enough for him. “Isn’t every day I’m asked to dump on a guy’s reputation. Even if the reputation isn’t deserved.”
    He sat his hot dogs on an ottoman, offering to share them with Vidor but letting Vidor know with a laugh that if he weren’t hungry not to worry—nothing would go to waste. He opened his briefcase. It was filled with papers from the British Recruiting Commissioner, and Taylor’s war journal, which Vidor had given him to study.
    “Taylor’s reputation wasn’t deserved?” Vidor asked.
    “Well, not his soldier’s reputation at least. Taylor did serve, there’s no question about that. But he was no hero.”
    Stallings told Vidor all he had been able to find out. On July 3, 1918, sixteen months after the United States had declared war, William Desmond Taylor, age forty-one, enlisted as a private in the British Army. He signed up in Los Angeles, which delayed the processing of his papers so long that by the time he actually arrived on the other side of the Atlantic, the Armistice had already been signed. He was stationed in Hounslow, south of London, where he was appointed lieutenant shortly before being discharged. In all, he served approximately nine months in uniform, during which he saw no wartime activity at all.
    Vidor wasn’t surprised. It was typical of Hollywood to canonize its celebrities, to take a known fact—such as Taylor’s having worn His Majesty’s uniform—and exaggerate it in the name of glamour. But he still wondered why, especially that late in the war, Taylor had enlisted at all. If the studio had pressured him to participate in the war effort as they had others in the public eye, he could have done so by selling war bonds, as had Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. Or he could have enlisted in the U.S. Army as an officer—a letter from Zukor or Eyton could have arranged it with no problem. But he had enlisted as a buck private for the British.
    “It’s not really any great mystery,” Stallings said. “There were British recruitment drives in New York and Los Angeles at the time. The greater question, to my mind, was his motivation. And for that you have to look at his background with the military.”
    Stallings, Vidor could see, has shifted into his screenwriter’s mode. He laid out a plausible story line.
    “Taylor’s father was a British officer who apparently governed his family the way he governed his troops. When Taylor ran away from the military life, he lost his father’s respect. Maybe he tried to get it back when he was in Kansas. Who knows? But there is a report that his father was later killed defending Taylor’s homeland, so maybe Taylor enlisted as a private to prove his worth to his family