A Cast of Killers by Sidney Kirkpatrick Read Free Book Online Page A

deal more rustic and provincial than Mallow, and Taylor’s origins far more humble than he led one to believe.
    The birth certificate of William Cunningham Deane Tanner read April 26, 1872, not 1877, as reported in dozens of newspapers. And the family wasn’t from a long and important line of Irish families, as Taylor had told many of his Hollywood friends, but from a simple, hard-working, and upright Catholic family that placed a high premium on firm discipline, good education, and Irish nationalism.
    The information Giroux had collected presented William Tanner as a handsome, friendly, and hard-working young boy. He enjoyed traveling, even if it was only to the next town where he attended school. He had two sisters and two brothers, including Denis Deane Tanner. He didn’t get along very well with his father, known as a hot-tempered major in the British Army who had severely punished his son on occasion. Nothing was known about William’s mother.
    Giroux, like Vidor, was particularly interested in the details of an early, unsuccessful marriage arrangement between William and a young neighbor and companion. That friend, Eva Shannon, like William, was only fifteen. From what Giroux had been able to cull from published records, William’s interests didn’t lie in her charms as a lady, but in her abilities to catch salmon in a nearby river, where William often went to be alone. Giroux had little more to go on. All he could say for sure was that wedding plans had suddenly soured, and William had left, destination unknown.
    Giroux’s guess was that Tanner had left with an actor, Charles Hawtrey, then managing a repertory company touring that part of Ireland. He based his guess upon the fact that two years later, William was playing roles in Hawtrey’s company. The young boy might have begun building sets or running errands, Vidor suggested. Whatever happened, according to studio publicity, William was waiting for his cue to go on stage in London when a family friend spotted him and wrote his father.
    Within days, Major William Tanner had reportedly snatched his son from the stage and sent him to Clifton College, then to Heidelberg, Germany, to study engineering, and prepare to follow his father’s footsteps to the military academy at Sandhurst. The exact details of what followed were unimportant, but it was clear that William spent very little time at school, and may not even have attended Clifton College at all, resulting in bitter arguments with his father over the acting profession—considered by the head of the family to be the lowest form of gypsy existence.
    Disgraced, Tanner’s father turned to friends he had in the military and, at their suggestion, sent him to Runnymeade, a ranching settlement in Kansas run by Ned Turnley. In the American West, where Turnley promised a disciplined environment and strenuous physical activity, William’s father believed his son would develop more in his own image.
    Vidor helped fill in the rest of that story. Turnley’s daughter was still alive. While Vidor and Carr had been doing research at the Los Angeles Public Library, Colleen Moore had made contact with the daughter. In a letter from Kansas to Moore she recounted what she remembered.
    Runnymeade, so the story unfolded, had been set up as a retreat for young Englishmen who had failed to live up to the standards set by their families. Though William got along well with the other residents, he didn’t fit the mold. While the others went into the next town and raised havoc in the saloon, William kept to himself, reading heavily, drawing, writing, and spending time in the company of one or two carefully chosen friends. He left Runnymeade after a year and a half, when money from home dried up.
    According to Giroux’s notes, William’s father demanded nothing short of a ten-year term defending his country when his son returned to Ireland. Perhaps there was some kind of showdown, perhaps not; neither Vidor nor Giroux knew. In