A Cast of Killers: The Sensational True Story of Hillywood's Most Scandalous Murder -- Covered Up for Sixty Years and Solved at Last by the Great Film Director King Vidor [FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]

Kirkpatrick, Sidney D.

Verlag: E.P. Dutton, New York, 1986

Beschreibung

Fine unread condition black boards with a white cloth spine and silver front cover and spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped photographic dust jacket. Includes Author Dedication; Preliminary Page Quote; Preface; Afterword; Notes and Acknowledgments. Illustrated with a section of black-and-white photographic plates, map drawing frontispiece, and color front and rear endpapers. "As last, Hollywood's most baffling murder is solved . and it took one of Hollywood's greatest directors to crack the case. Sindey Kirkpatrick's meticulously researched account of King Vidor's sixty-year obsession is as juicy a tale as you'd expect from movieland." - A. Scott Berg, author. "A horrifyingly compelling story. It reads like a screenplay, but is packed with the sort of detail screenplays leave out." - Edmund Morris, author. "On February 1, 1922, the distinguished silent film director William Desmond Taylor was shot to death in his Los Angeles bungalow by an unknown assailant. Reports of strange activities at the scene of the crime circulated soon after. When the police arrived, was the head of Paramount Studios burning a bundle of papers in the fireplace, and was a well-known actress searching the house for letters she claimed were hers? Despite a full-scale investigation, the case was never solved; for sixty years it has remained a lingering Hollywood scandal. In 1967, more than forty years after Taylor's death, the great King Vidor, whose directing credits include Northwest Passage, The Fountainhead, Duel in the Sun, and War and Peace, determined to solve the mystery, which had haunted him throughout his career, in order to make a film about it. Through his intimate knowledge of both the studios and the stars, he succeeded, where dozens of professioanl detectives had failed, in discovering the identity of the murderer. But because his findings were so explosive, he decided he could never go public and locked his evidence away. After Vidor's death in 1982, SIdney KIrkpatrick, Vidor's authorized biographer, gained access to the evidence and reconstructed the amazing story of Taylor's murder and Vidor's investigation. With a cast of suspects that includes the actress Mabel Normand, a reputed drug addict; the beautiful ingenue, Mary Miles Minter; Mary's domineering mother, Charlotte Shelby; Taylor's homosexual houseman; and Taylor's secretary, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Taylor's mysteriously elusive brother, this true crime story has all the elements of a classic murder myster. Covered up for more than half a century, the full story can now be told in all its riveting, shocking detail." - from the inner front jacket flap. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 006368

Bibliografische Details

Titel: A Cast of Killers: The Sensational True ...

Verlag: E.P. Dutton, New York

Erscheinungsdatum: 1986

Einband: Hardcover

Zustand: Fine

Zustand des Schutzumschlags: Fine

Auflage: 1st Edition