Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood

by Greg Merritt

  Next, the Graumans purchased San Francisco’s Portola Café, which featured singing waiters. They offered the headwaiter/soloist position to Arbuckle. Thus, in 1904 the seventeen-year-old escaped his father’s reach and moved to the West Coast’s cosmopolis, a vibrant seaport and rapidly expanding city of over 350,000 inhabitants from around the globe. San Francisco was a mélange of unknown languages and streetcar bells, horses and motorcars, and foghorns from ships in the bay. Singing to the city’s moneyed crowd, he was generously tipped for his tunes. He worked late into the night and slept away many daylight hours. Nocturnally, the City by the Bay was lit in electric and gas lights and cast in deep shadows and dense fog. An aristocrat might slip him a fiver for a song at the Portola, and a knave might steal it from him at knifepoint in a Tenderloin alley.

  On March 21, 1904, the Hotel St. Francis opened its doors. A line of horse carriages and primitive automobiles stretched for blocks, as the city’s elite, dressed in tuxedos and gowns, waited to tour the brightly lit Grand Dame of Union Square. Perhaps, in the ensuing months, Arbuckle first strode the palatial lobby of the city’s newest attraction. If so, he would have marveled at the artwork, including an enormous painting of nearby Mount Tamalpais, purchased for $5,000 and hung behind the front desk. (The hotel’s art was ruined by the earthquake’s fire two years later and replaced before the 1907 reopening by newly acquired paintings and the lobby’s celebrated Magneta grandfather clock.) Whether he entered or not, he surely noted its twin towers, each twelve stories tall. That’s where the rich and famous stayed.

  In the same year he moved to San Francisco, Arbuckle’s baritone impressed another ambitious theater impresario, Alexander Pantages. A Greek immigrant who ran away to the sea at age nine, Pantages had been a sailor, boxer, Panama Canal digger, and gold prospector before entering the theater business in first the Yukon Territory and then Seattle. “Alexander the Great” would, in just a few years, build an empire of vaudeville and motion picture theaters, but when he and Arbuckle met he had but two, both in Seattle. He also had a vaudeville troupe traveling the West Coast, which, at Pantages’s invitation, Arbuckle joined.

  Teenage Arbuckle was a star singer on the Pantages circuit, performing with the troupe in theaters big and small from Phoenix to Seattle, spending much of his time in railroad cars. Unlike most other Americans then, who never ventured far from their places of birth, in his first eighteen years Roscoe Arbuckle had seen mountains and metropolises, the bleakest deserts and the densest forests. He had lived on farms as well as in the largest city west of St. Louis. He had traveled a thousand miles from his hometown of Santa Ana. He made an impressive fifty dollars weekly. He answered fan letters, greeted admirers, signed autographs.

  While doing a stint in a Portland, Oregon, theater in 1905, he agreed to join two burlesque comedians, Leon “Rubberlegs” Errol and Pete Gerald, during their run across the upper West. It was a gig that, despite halving his pay, allowed him to branch out from illustrated songs to sing numbers untethered to a slide show—and to try his hand at comedy.

  He said it was Errol “who persuaded me that I had a voice, ability, and that I would make a good actor.” Errol also “taught me several valuable things like how to fall all over the place without making myself a candidate for a hospital.” Practicing stunts, dancing soft-shoe, mastering comedic timing, personifying characters in costumes and self-applied makeup—this was Arbuckle’s education, Errol was his teacher, and stages were his schools. Other than his dodging the hook at an amateur show, there is no remembrance of Arbuckle being a funny youth. To the contrary, he was reserved, only coming out of his shell when he sang. But at eighteen, he began to develop the skills of a comedian.

  In Butte, Montana, a boisterous copper-mining town known for its vast district of bordellos, saloons, and gambling halls, the trio performed with a blonde singer of large proportions and dubious character who was popular with the overwhelmingly male audiences. A liberal drinker, she often missed her entrances, and one evening when she could not be found, a new woman appeared onstage, dressed in the female singer’s white gown and sporting a blonde wig, singing “The Last Rose of Summer” in a falsetto. It was Arbuckle. The audience loved it, and even more so when the enraged female singer showed up and chased him around the stage.

  The upper West circuit, known in vaudeville as the “death trail” because of the long distances between venues, was not lucrative, so Leon Errol accepted a better offer.* Arbuckle attempted to fill Errol’s role with Gerald but floundered. He was not yet a skilled comedian. Gerald found a new partner, and Arbuckle returned to the dying medium of illustrated songs, earning enough for a seat on a train back to San Francisco. There, at 5:12 AM on the morning of April 18, 1906, he was awoken by a tremendous earthquake. Fires, caused by ruptured gas mains, burned for another four days and nights.

  Arbuckle turned again to Alexander Pantages, who booked him as a singer in the prospecting town of Vancouver, British Columbia. When that engagement folded, he joined a stock company performing classic plays for appreciative audiences in Alaska. Heavy costumes guarded the actors against the chill of drafty theaters, just as beards and bearskin coats did for most in attendance. At the end of the year and the beginning of the next, he was in a burlesque revue in Seattle, singing solo and in choruses and doing two comedy roles per show. His rotation of characters included Jasper the Janitor, Little Willie Wilkinson, and Private Roundhouse, as he continued to refine his comedic abilities.

  Twenty-year-old Roscoe Arbuckle returned to San Francisco in February 1908. He had traveled far over the previous four years, and from boy to man, but he ultimately ended up where he started, no wealthier nor better established and still alone. There is no remembrance of him having had a girlfriend before that point, and there was little time for relationships to develop on the road. Life as a vagabond vaudevillian in the red-light districts of mining and ranching towns had grown wearisome. He wanted to stick somewhere long enough to establish his singing career. After auditioning, he was signed to sing with the Elwood Tabloid Musical Comedy Company when it moved south that June to the new Byde-A-Wyle Theatre across the street from Long Beach’s Virginia Hotel, a favorite getaway destination for the region’s elite and only seventeen miles from Santa Ana. Arbuckle was returning to Southern California as a featured performer at a first-rate venue.

  In romantic comedies the term “meet cute” applies to the contrived ways the male and female leads meet, such as one insulting the other on a train before realizing they’re both headed to the same workplace. One day, while returning to Long Beach from a sightseeing trip in Los Angeles, Arbuckle noticed a young woman seated across from him on the electric train. He offered up a smile to the auburn-haired, blue-eyed girl, who was barely five feet tall and one hundred pounds. She refused it. When her suitcase began to slip in the luggage rack above her, he pushed it back, again bidding for her attention.

  “Please don’t touch my suitcase,” she told him. “I don’t like blonds or fat men. I can manage for myself.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Gee, I’m sorry.” He moved to another seat.

  “I don’t know what got into me,” the woman later recalled. “Actually, I was attracted to him, but I couldn’t let myself be picked up, could I?” Of his appearance, she remembered: “He was heavy but handsome. Oh, God, he looked like he had been scrubbed to death. He had a complexion any woman in the world would die to have. His hair was so blond. And he was dressed meticulously, white trousers, white shoes, blue coat, and a straw hat.” Self-conscious about his excess weight, Arbuckle remained a meticulous dresser throughout his life.

  The young woman was Minta Durfee. Her family, living near downtown Los Angeles, was representative of the city’s working class. Just before the movies came, Los Angeles was a city of manufacturing and oil production, an “open shop” enclave as envisioned by a few business titans. Charles “Buck” Durfee was a railroad brakeman. His wife, Flora, was a seamstress. They had six children, the fourth
of whom, Araminta, was born October 1, 1889. Known as Minta, she was seventeen and the stagestruck veteran of only school theater productions when a family friend put her in the chorus of a play at Los Angeles’ Burbank Theatre. Afterward, she secured a chorus job with the Elwood Company in a new show at the Byde-A-Wyle. On a June day, preparing to stay in the Virginia Hotel with the rest of the company, she and her bulging suitcase boarded an electric train headed south to her new job in Long Beach. On the way, she deflected the attentions of the blond fat man.

  Durfee saw Arbuckle again at the first rehearsal, but when he laughed at her outrage after being called a “dame” by her employer, he only validated her initial reservations. It was during the show’s first performance, when Arbuckle’s baritone voice and soft-shoe dancing enchanted the crowd, that he began to enchant her too.

  The show ran twice daily. After each second show, some company members drank or danced, but Arbuckle and Durfee strolled the boardwalk beside the beach. Enamored of his singing, she encouraged him to try for bigger billings and venues. He had his own suggestion—that they sing a duet in the Byde-A-Wyle program. Holding hands at center stage, the round young man with the mellifluous voice and the waif beside him sang “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” to each other.

  Fifty years later, Durfee wrote:

  His ability to do everything naturally, humorously, artistically, and with ease, made me realize he was a genius. His [effect] on audiences, his poise, lack of vanity and jealousy amazed me. I was overwhelmed by his personality and talent. He was all artist on stage, but off the stage he was the big boy who played leapfrog on the beach, swam like a champion, shot billiards to perfection, and while he did so, drank huge pitchers of cold buttermilk.

  The show folded at the end of July, and Durfee planned to spend time with her family in Los Angeles before returning to chorus lines. After the final performance, Arbuckle and Durfee walked to the end of a pier, standing hand in hand, the inky waves shimmering with moonlight. He professed his love; she professed hers. It was the first romantic relationship for either of them.

  To Arbuckle, if two people were in love they should wed. “Will you marry me?” he asked.

  When she was noncommittal, he scooped her up and dangled her over the dark Pacific, threatening to cast her in if she said no. It was the gesture of a child, bullying playfully to hide his insecurities. She said yes. He subsequently asked her father for her hand in marriage.

  Six weeks after meeting, on August 5, 1908, the couple married in the Byde-A-Wyle. Their union was turned into a for-profit, “special, once-in-a-lifetime” attraction by the theater company. Accompanied by a twelve-piece orchestra, Arbuckle sang “An Old Sweetheart of Mine” while a picture of him and his bride was projected onto a screen. The audience applauded him for five minutes. It may have seemed fantastical to twenty-one-year-old Arbuckle: marrying an eighteen-year-old girl he barely knew onstage before a paying audience, but by then the often-awkward young man was most comfortable bathed in klieg lights with all eyes upon him. Perhaps to him, turning his own wedding into another performance was a means of making such an extraordinary event feel more ordinary and not less.

  Their scheduled honeymoon was replaced by a one-month run with a show in the farm town of San Bernardino, sixty miles east of Los Angeles. Durfee was bedridden with pleurisy. Arbuckle sang illustrated songs. As the newlyweds lived together in close quarters, Durfee (who kept her maiden name for stage purposes) was still getting to know the man she had married so soon after meeting him. Privately, he was sometimes shy and sometimes brooding but other times romantic or playful. He could be racked by insecurities and doubt, and yet he was supremely confident when singing. Onstage or off, he was happiest when he was performing.

  * It’s likely he was named after Republican senator Roscoe Conkling (1829-88).

  * There were no saloons. In 1881 Kansas became the first state to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages.

  * The Unique has a unique history. Sophie Tucker and Al Jolson performed there, and it screened the West Coast premiere of The Great Train Robbery (1903). The 1906 earthquake destroyed it, but for two years until they opened another theater, the Graumans screened movies in a tent in the lot where the Unique had stood.

  * After a lengthy run with the Ziegfeld Follies, Errol achieved moderate fame as a comedic film actor, appearing in more than 160 mostly short movies from 1921 to his death in 1951.

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  VIRGINIA

  Because the truth about art is the company it keeps with the slightly askew, and the real stunt of the beautiful is not to be too beautiful.

  —STANLEY ELKIN, “SOME OVERRATED MASTERPIECES”

  Then as now the fashion and film industries worshipped at the altar of youth, so it was common for models and actresses to shave years off their ages. Today virtually every source, including her tombstone, lists her birth year as 1895, and it is commonly believed she was born in New York City, but Virginia Caroline Rapp entered this world on July 7, 1891, in Chicago.

  Decimated by the great fire of 1871, Chicago rebuilt itself as a metropolis of wood and masonry but also metal. Steel skyscrapers reached ever higher beside Lake Michigan. Between the inferno and 1900, the city hosted a World’s Fair, and its population exploded from 300,000 to 1.7 million, landing it second in the nation, behind only New York City. It was America’s industrial heart, pulling in materials, pumping out goods. Waves of immigrants arrived from Eastern Europe, and after the Civil War a steady torrent of rural Americans migrated north in search of manufacturing, construction, and meat-packing jobs. Away from the towers of State Street, the mansions of Lake Shore Drive, and the monuments of the World’s Fair, the city was a patchwork of ethnic enclaves, row after row of bleak tenement houses, brown and gray boxes squeezed together.

  It is likely Virginia Rappe grew up in just such a brown or gray box. The only child of Mabel Rapp, Virginia was born out of wedlock when Mabel was either seventeen or eighteen. Virginia never knew her father,* and she initially believed her mother was her sister and that an older woman who answered to the name Caroline Rapp was her mother. Later, she believed Caroline was her grandmother. She was not—and was probably no relation.

  Two days before Christmas 1892, mother Mabel made the newspapers, described as “a pretty girl of nineteen,” after being locked in Chicago’s Veteran’s Building by a janitor. She was in the news again in 1898 when she was arrested for passing bad checks in association with “the most dangerous gang of forgers the police have dealt with for years.” Mabel was a part-time chorus girl and sometimes model. For some time between 1900 and 1905, she and her daughter lived in New York City. Mabel Rapp died before her thirtieth birthday.

  An orphan at eleven, Virginia lived in the Chicago household of her “grandmother,” Caroline Rapp, and was also looked after by Kate Hardebeck, who would later call herself Rappe’s “adopted aunt” and state that it was Mabel Rapp’s deathbed wish that “auntie” look after Virginia. Friends would describe Rappe in childhood as a “rollicking schoolgirl, addicted to roller skates, short skirts, bobbed hair and athletic sports of all kinds.” In addition to her athletics, she took dancing lessons, perhaps hoping to follow her late mother into choruses onstage.

  In 1907, the year she turned sixteen, Virginia began her modeling career, changing her name from the pedestrian Rapp to the more exotic Rappe (pronounced “Rap-pay”). The five-foot-five teenager was entering an infant industry. London designer Lady Duff Gordon is credited with training the first couture models in 1894 and staging the first runway show in 1904. Then and until World War II, Paris and, to a lesser degree, London dominated high fashion. When Rappe first struck a pose, American women were only beginning to earn a steady income modeling dresses and hats at live shows, mostly in department stores, and in newspapers and magazines. Like the earliest motion picture actors, models were widely perceived as déclassé and were virtually all anonymous.

  However, from nearly the start of her career, the ambitiou
s Rappe sought publicity. A 1908 article in the Chicago Tribune asked in a bold headline, ARE THE ARTISTS’ MODELS OF CHICAGO MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN THE FAMOUS MODELS OF PARIS? and featured two photo illustrations of Rappe. The piece, written by a man, paints the seventeen-year-old girl as both ingenuous and manipulative:

  It is predicted by the artists of the city that Virginia Rappe will be one of the world’s famous models after the years have mellowed her and taken from her posing the slight touch of childish gaucherie which still remains. She is unreservedly beautiful and, young as she is, shows remarkable understanding of and sympathy for the subjects she represents.

  She is a simple little girl of 15 years* who looks out on the world with the clear, dewy eyes of a child just awakened from sleep. She lives at home, where she is the pet of the family, and she poses because she is extremely pretty and she “wants to.” What Miss Rappe has wanted to do she generally has done. She is not spoiled; she has merely a happy faculty for making others see things in the same light in which they appear to her.

  For a year beginning in September 1911, she worked at the mammoth Mandel Brothers department store in downtown Chicago, sometimes as a model but mostly as a sales clerk. Also in 1911 she entered into a pact with sisters Gladys and Ethel Sykes, each promising to never accept a marriage proposal.* In October 1912, the three Chicagoans were living in New York City, where their beauty was “attracting considerable attention in the theaters and restaurants of the Longacre Square district” in midtown Manhattan. By then Rappe was likely a full-time model—and one of the first Americans who could state modeling as her occupation. She traveled extensively. When she appeared at fashion shows in the largest department store in Omaha, Nebraska, in September 1913, a newspaper interview noted, “Miss Rappe spends most of her time in New York when she is not touring the country to appear at style shows in big stores.”