So I've been re-reading Sidney D. Kirpatrick's 1987 true-crime page-turner A Cast of Killers for the last day or two. If you missed it at the time, it's the amazing story of how King Vidor (the great director of Duel in the Sun and War and Peace, among others) investigated one of the most baffling unsolved crimes in Hollywood history -- the 1922 murder of filmmaker William Desmond Taylor.

Bottom line is it's a great read -- lots of sex and drugs and related dirt about Los Angeles as a company town in the silent era -- but one passage kind of jumped out at me this time around. The chapter opening below takes place in 1967.

Claire Windsor stood before an easel, studying her painting of the mission of San Juan Capistrano. Without looking at her palette, she smeared brown paint onto her brush and darkened the earth just below the mission. Even in her loose painter's smock she looked more voluptuous and attractive than Vidor had expected. He hadn't seen or spoken with her for nearly forty years, since he had directed her in Show People at MGM. Yet when she answered the door of her Spanish duplex on South Orange Drive, her powder-blue eyes, creamy white skin and long blonde curls were just as he remembered them.

I must confess that I only barely recollected Windsor at all, although I've seen Show People at least once; in any case, as you can glean from the above, she was indeed quite a piece of pastry. Apparently she mostly retired from pictures by the early 30s, although her private life (she had a penchant for affairs with married men) remained tabloid fodder for a while thereafter

I should add that A Cast of Killers is an absolutely smashing mystery story, and I'm rather at a loss to explain why it's never been filmed. Lord knows it has everything you'd need to make a great flick, including an ending that's beyond Gothic in its creepiness. You can order it here if I've piqued your curiosity.

Incidentally, famous publisher Robert Giroux, who was one of Vidor's sources in the Taylor investigation, was totally dismissive of Kirkpatrick's book; his own take on the case, A Deed of Death, came out in 1990, but apparently convinced few people, least of all reviewer Otto Friederich in The New York Times.