Note: This is an encore post from 2012.
Mary Mallory points out that this is the 90th anniversary of William Desmond Taylor’s death. I did several posts when the Daily Mirror was at The Times:
William Desmond Taylor, Mystery Guest | Crime scene photos | William Desmond Taylor, on the Frontiers of Fashion
ladailymirror.com 
Sick as this may sound, there’ll always be a special place in my heart for that murder.
When I first arrived in LA, I took temp jobs before getting picked up by a small production company. One day I was working a Xerox machine in a Beverly Hills office when Peter Stone showed up. He was a friend of the boss and wanted to make copies of old newspaper articles. As I helped set the tint, I considered and discounted the notion of gushing and asking about Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, or 1776. What could he say that he hadn’t already rehashed for fan after fan?
Luckily, HE broke the ice, asking me, “Do you know who William Desmond Taylor was?”
I had the presence of mind to immediately respond, “What the heck was up with that fake Englishman?”
Stone lit up and regaled me for about twenty minutes with speculation about the case. If you ever heard him and Stanley Donen on the Criterion commentary track of CHARADE, you’ll get a sense of what a lively conversationist he could be. It was the sort of celebrity encounter you always want to have, as I was lucky enough to get him started on a subject HE wanted to talk about.
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