Tinseltown - Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

Who killed Billy Taylor, one of Hollywoods most beloved men?For nearly a century, no one has known.Until now.In the early 1920s, millions of Americans flocked to movie palaces every year to see their favorite stars on the silver screen. Never before had a popular art so captured the publics imagination, nor had a medium ever possessed such power to influence. But Hollywoods glittering ascendancy was threatened by a string of lurid, headline-grabbing tragedies, including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the handsome and popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Associationa legendary crime that has remained unsolved since 1922.Now, in this fiendishly involving narrative, bestselling Hollywood chronicler William Mann draws on a rich host of sources, many untapped for decades, to reopen the case of the upstanding yet enigmatic Taylor and the diverse cast that surrounded himincluding three loyal ingenues, a grasping stage mother, a devoted valet, a gang of two-bit thugs, the industrys reluctant new morals czar, and the moguls Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew, locked in a struggle for control of the exploding industry. Along the way, Mann brings to life Los Angeles in the Roaring Twenties: a sparkling yet schizophrenic town filled with party girls and drug dealers, newly minted legends and starlets already past their prime, a dangerous place where the powerful could still run afoul of the desperate.A true story re-created with the thrilling suspense of a novel, Tinseltown is the work of a master craftsman at the peak of his powers.