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the mighty of Hollywood, Taylor was their man, their voice. They saluted his oration with rousing applause. Pickford, Fairbanks, Ince—all of them commended Taylor for his advocacy. He seemed an impeccable propagandist to defend their industry, their livelihoods, their world. Difficult days still lay ahead; no one believed they’d put an end to the censorship movement overnight. But William Desmond Taylor had the strength, the authority, and the character to meet the challenges head-on.
    But looking out at his audience, Taylor knew something they did not.
    For all his noble bearing and dignity, he harbored some dark secrets of his own.
    Of course, everyone had secrets in Tinseltown. Mabel, Gibby, and Mary had trunkloads of them. Even the mighty Adolph Zukor had Brownie Kennedy in his past. The film colony was a bubbling cauldron of hidden lives.
    But the secrets of the man charged with its championship, William Desmond Taylor, would make the rest seem tame indeed.

CHAPTER 5
A RACE TO THE TOP
    In his eighth-floor office on Fifth Avenue in New York, Adolph Zukor cursed.
    Another movie mogul was going to beat him into the sky in Times Square. A skyscraper was going up on the northeast corner of Broadway and Forty-Fifth Street that would include offices and a state-of-the-art theater. Construction was projected to cost nearly $2.5 million, and the building would top out at sixteen stories.
    Exactly double the height at which Zukor sat at the moment.
    Worst of all, the mogul who would beat him was Marcus Loew.
    Zukor and Loew had been friends and rivals for a very long time. In the beginning, they’d been partners, too. They had run a business called Automatic Vaudeville, a penny arcade on Fourteenth Street, in the heart of the city’s tenderloin, surrounded by saloons and dance halls and immigrants looking for a cheap way to pass the time. For a penny, these uneducated laborers could peer into the peep shows and watch sexy girls swivel in serpentine dances. Their first year in business, Zukor and Loew raked in more than $100,000, a pirates’ booty of pennies and nickels. Soon they had a chain of arcades.
    But then they had split. Neither man was the type to share power easily. Both wanted to be the boss, so Zukor and Loew went their separate ways to run their own shows. Still, they remained intertwined in each other’s lives. In those early days, the two men lived across the street from each other on 111th Street and Seventh Avenue. Their wives went shopping together, and their sons played on the same baseball teams. Loew found success with a chain of theaters that showed only moving pictures, without any vaudeville—a radical move at the time. And of course, as the most powerful producer of moving pictures in the world, Zukor became one of Loew’s biggest suppliers.
    If only they could have maintained such a symbiotic relationship.
    But Zukor wanted more. When he started accumulating his own theaters, placing himself in direct competition with Loew, his former partner retaliated by taking over Metro Pictures, a struggling movie studio in Hollywood. That put him in direct competition with Zukor in film production, and Creepy was not pleased. Why was Loew always trying to show him up?
    And now he would beat Zukor into the sky, too.
    The two men couldn’t have been more different. Zukor dressed conservatively, trying not to look like the parvenu he was. Loew was“a dandy in a high hat and fur coat,” Zukor said, and Loew didn’t disagree.“I wear ’em to impress ’em,” he said. Where Zukor was private and deliberate, Loew was loud and impulsive,“a jolly mixer type, knowing everybody.” Zukor rarely socialized anymore. His days of raucous laughter and high spirits were over. Now he could be found in some dark corner at Delmonico’s restaurant, presiding over late-night, smoke-hung, business-heavy dinners. At another table across the way, Loew continued to party, with friends and acquaintances constantly pulling