We may never learn who shot Taylor, but in A Deed of Death (275pages. Knopf. $19.95), Robert Giroux takes a good crack at explaining why Taylor tumbled so quickly off his pedestal: he was pushed by studio moguls panicked by a slew of scandals. Fearful that Normand’s coke habit would come to light in the course of the investigation, they diverted the public, and police, by besmirching a dead man.
“The key to the mystery of the Taylor murder,” Giroux writes, was “the era in which it happened … [times] when the American public voted for Prohibition, while the national consumption of liquor became heavier than ever.” Morphine, heroin and cocaine were also easy to come by, and Hollywood had its share of dopers, including Normand, who sought Taylor’s aid in kicking her habit. Giroux thinks Taylor, an outspoken critic of drugs, was killed for his trouble.
Giroux’s solution to the murder–a hit man hired by drug dealers–is plausible, but others have argued with equal persuasiveness that Minter’s dragonish mother either killed Taylor or had him murdered. What makes “A Deed of Death” worth reading is its bitter portrait of the fledgling motion picture industry. Hollywood then was a swaggering brat that didn’t know its own strength, and innocent only while the cameras were rolling. But no matter how unsentimentally he catalogs that era’s sor-did hypocrisies, Giroux never allows us to forget that it also witnessed “the coming of age of the century’s new art form.”
A decade later, the movies that haunted Ray Bradbury’s childhood had learned to talk, but art and mendacity were still a matched team. In this old conflict Bradbury finds the theme for A 6raveyard for Lunatics (285 pages. Knopf. $18.95), a loosely autobiographical novel in which he pits an innocent young screenwriter against the specter of a dead producer who won’t stay dead. He shamelessly rigs the game. The novel is one big hat tip to the moment when “King Kong fell off the Empire State and landed on us. When we got up, we were never the same.” For anyone who grew up on Bradbury’s stories, this Baedeker to the fantasies of his own youth is like camping out with Santa Claus. Never mind that you can forecast the ending a mile off, or that the narrator’s voice is too often adolescently shrill. Out of a lot of wire and paste and cardboard, Bradbury has convincingly conjured a lost world, “lovelier than tonight or all the nights to come.”
