He was born in Greenfield, Massachussets, in 1864. He was the eldest child and only son of Dwight Bixby Taylor and Nellie E. (Farr) Taylor. His father, who became a photographer after serving in the Union Army, moved his family to Oakland, Calif. , in 1869 because of the failing health of his wife, who died when Charles was thirteen.
During adolescence, the boy spent much of his time in the Oakland railroad yards. At first performing menial errands for the yardmen, he rapidly became an assistant fireman. In 1883, while serving on the trains that were hauling Chinese laborers in boxcars into the desert, where they were to build the track from Mojave to Needles, he acquired, by his own admission, his taste for high adventure.
While still in his teens, he became a conductor on the run between Oakland and Tulare. Here, legend has it, he pulled the brake on a runaway Pullman car, thus saving the lives of Gov. Leland Stanford and Senator George Hearst, the father of William Randolph Hearst. As Taylor was to remember the incident, the Senator gave him a hundred dollars and said, "If you ever need a job, go see my son, Billy, in San Francisco. "
Taylor, whose interest in railroad work was diminishing as it became more prosaic, soon secured a position as a reporter on the younger Hearst's newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner. His newspaper career was a brief one, for his editors discouraged the imaginative touches he added to his reporting.
Attracted to the theatre in childhood, Taylor had performed in skits and minstrel shows of his own devising while working for the railroad, and he now turned to writing for the stage. His first effort, The Brother's Crime, enjoyed a short run in San Francisco in 1891. His second, based upon a tour of Yosemite Valley, was staged during the same season and became immediately popular, first as The Devil's Punch Bowl and later simply as Yosemite. This, like all of his works, contained a sweet, virtuous heroine, a handsome and courageous hero, and a corrupt figure of wealth and influence determined to destroy the sanctity of American womanhood. To this well-established formula Taylor added a couple of touches of his own. One was a liking for exotic settings--San Francisco's Chinatown, a Turkish harem, or the tea-houses of Japan. Another was a yen for spectacular effects. Mechanical devices fascinated him, and often a troupe of acrobats would travel with the company, so that standing on each other's shoulders they might rescue heroines from burning buildings and the like. To such effects he was willing to sacrifice characterization, in a medium already noted for stereotyped characters, and even plausibility.
Traveling soon after his second marriage to New York City, Taylor found there a ready market for his talents as author and showman. He began with The Derby Mascot (1894), a slightly altered version of The Brother's Crime, and then wrote, for Al Woods, The Queen of the White Slaves. During the following decade he was to turn out twenty of these melodramas; in 1898 he reportedly had five playing at one time in the ten-twenty-thirty-cent theatres of New York, besides several companies on tour. Best among his "blood-and-thunder" dramas were The King of the Opium Ring, The Queen of the Highway, The Female Detective, Through Fire and Water, The White Tigress of Japan, and The Child Wife (subsequently titled Daughter of the Diamond King).
Laurette Taylor's first successful vehicle, however, was a widely popular melodrama that Taylor wrote for Loretta Cooney in 1903 titled From Rags to Riches. She continued to appear in his melodramas over the next few years, in road companies which toured the country and as the star of a stock-company venture of Taylor's in Seattle. They separated, however, late in 1907, he to tour the gold camps of Alaska with a dramatic company and she to begin the Broadway career that won her fame. Ever the impresario, Taylor wrote himself into a life drama in which it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. It is clear, however, that his fortunes and prestige declined as rapidly as Laurette's grew.
He traveled constantly around the United States until settling in retirement at Glendale, Calif. His hearing, impaired in a railroad accident in his youth, grew steadily worse in later life. In 1930 he was afflicted with heart disease; he died twelve years later, at Glendale, of acute dilatation of the heart. Following cremation, his ashes were returned to the family plot in South Hadley, Massachussets.
While still in railroad work, on June 3, 1888, Taylor had married Emma McNeill, who died in December 1890 following the birth of their son, Charles Edward. A second marriage, to Nellie Follis in 1891, proved unsuccessful.
In 1901 Taylor discovered an actress who personified the dewy-eyed virginity which his scripts attributed to his heroines. Her name was Loretta Cooney, and she was appearing at that time at the Athenaeum in Boston under the billing "La Belle Laurette. " Taylor, a tall, nattily dressed ladies' man, was attracted to this girl twenty years his junior and, after taking her on tour for one season, swept her into marriage (on May 1, 1901) and into the title role of The Child Wife. The marriage, which ended bitterly in divorce in September 1910, produced two children: Dwight (who became a motion picture scenarist) and Marguerite.
His fourth marriage, about which little is known, was to a woman from Virginia, "Dixie" Cameron, and took place in Chicago in 1912.
