Wide-angle vision places a colorful cast of characters in meaningful relief against nascent Hollywood, politically corrupt...
Perceptive Hollywood historian and biographer Higham (Howard Hughes, 1993, etc.) tackles one of Tinseltown’s most notorious unsolved crimes.
The murder of silent-film director William Desmond Taylor on February 1, 1922, has fascinated writers, film buffs, and journalists, Higham included, for decades. Many books, articles, and even a now-defunct publication called Taylorology have covered the story. One reason for the interest may be that none of the suspects, or the victim, could in any way be described as “usual.” Nearly everyone in the case packs a revolver. Taylor, his film career peaking, led a double life as a closeted gay man (clues in his bathroom included a woman’s nightgown) and the brief, indifferent lover of actress Mary Miles Minter. Did an obsessed Minter rub out Taylor after he eventually spurned her passionate declarations of love? Or did Minter’s mother Charlotte, who makes Gypsy’s Mama Rose look like a nun, shoot Taylor to keep him away from her daughter? Did Taylor’s male lover do it out of jealousy over Minter and Taylor’s tepid affair? Or was the culprit cagey Edward Sands, a cook who had already robbed Taylor? Drawing on unpublished documents compiled by director King Vidor, and making witty, insightful comments as he does, Higham cuts through a thicket of suspects, motives, and cover-ups to point the finger where it had rather clearly been pointing all along, arguing that for some years a hypocritical, moralistic press did its best to point the finger in other directions. More than the solution, what impresses here are Higham’s portraits of Taylor, Minter, et al., as scarred souls who believed Hollywood would be their Lourdes on the Pacific. They were mistaken.
Wide-angle vision places a colorful cast of characters in meaningful relief against nascent Hollywood, politically corrupt LA, and the dysfunctional American family.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-299-20360-3
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Terrace Books/Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
The freakish tale of wife-killer Eric Napoletano and the mother who protected him from the police. Napoletano was reared in New York City by his racist mother, Carolyn, and a smarmy hustler he referred to as ``Uncle Al.'' Al and Carolyn disliked each other but doted on Eric, a surly youth with a taste for Hispanic and black women, those his mother hated most. Napoletano's victims—a girlfriend, a mother-in-law, and his second wife—were murdered with great savagery, and it's clear from phone records and witnesses cited by Pienciak (Murder at 75 Birch, 1992, etc.) that Al and Carolyn knew about the killings. Napoletano, a onetime trucker, dumped the mutilated bodies of his girlfriend and wife along rural roads near New York. He simply shot his mother-in-law in the street. His mother worked for the NYPD and managed to destroy records and files pertaining to her son's crimes. The story is bizarre, and the players uniquely evil, but the narrative is curiously dry and frequently dull. The details of the crimes are vague since Pienciak gives only the most cursory explanations of how they were carried out. It's clear that Eric's sadism had something to do with events in his childhood, but no theories about its origins are offered, and the details given here of Eric's trial for the murder of his wife are hopelessly muddled. The book works best in the brief sections where we are given Carolyn's own corrosive words, which do tell us concretely about these hideous lives. Pienciak's sarcastic tone, from the book's title to his mockery of Carolyn's appearance, repeatedly disrupts the narrative, which never adequately explains what happened, or why. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 10, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-93851-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
A fast-paced account, bloody and suspenseful, of a defining event in the history of the New Left. On August 21, 1971, the radical writer (Soledad Brother) and Black Panther leader George Jackson tried to shoot his way out of San Quentin Prison, where he had been jailed on a murder charge. Jackson died; so did three guards and two other inmates. The breakout attempt had been carefully planned, writes Bay Area journalist Liberatore, but no one could foresee its reverberations. One man whose life was forever altered was Jackson's white attorney Stephen Bingham, ``blue-blooded, reared in wealth and privilege,'' who had come to embrace Jackson's goals of a unified political struggle. (``When the races start fighting,'' Jackson had written, ``all you have is one maniac group against the other. That's just what the pigs want.'') After Jackson's death Bingham went underground, a wanted man for his supposed role in smuggling a pistol for Jackson into the prison; he resurfaced a dozen years later and defended himself in a dramatic, emotional trial whose recounting occupies the last part of the book. Liberatore traces the evolution of Jackson and Bingham's political thought through the tumultuous years of Vietnam and the civil-rights struggle, and his portrait of the ever-changing New Left will fascinate those too young to remember times full of what a San Quentin official aptly called ``bullshit talk by dilettante revolutionaries.'' While clearly admiring Jackson and Bingham for the strength of their convictions, Liberatore is no hero-worshiper; neither does he entertain radical-chic nostalgia for an era whose wounds are still fresh. Published to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the attempted breakout, Liberatore's chronicle adds considerably to our understanding of that time of trouble.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-87113-647-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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