by Greg Merritt
Published in newspapers throughout the country in 1913 was an article focused on Rappe’s advice to young women. The suggestion of “Virginia Rappe, who as a commercial model travels over the United States and Europe at a salary of $4000” was that women avoid being stenographers (“too many of those”) or waiting in line for poor-paying jobs and instead think outside the box. Specifically, she advocated working for wealthy families, doing tasks such as shopping or caring for silverware—the sort of jobs employers may not have known they could hire someone to do. “Be original—every girl can be that,” Rappe concluded. Today the prospect of domestic work as a novel solution to unemployment seems quaint at best, but at a time when only 18 percent of American women were employed for wages, and when their most common jobs were seamstress, teacher, nanny, or maid, the idea of women creating their own positions and approaching employers rich enough to necessitate such positions was presumed a newsworthy strategy. Rappe followed her own advice by networking with people much wealthier than herself. It’s also notable that at a time when the average annual salary for employed men and women was $1,296, Rappe claimed to make $4,000 (more than $90,000 in today’s dollars).
She traveled abroad in a manner mostly reserved for the moneyed class. A front-page news story early in 1914 focused on her and a female friend returning to New York City from Europe on an ocean liner: “Girls in Pink Bloomers Mystify Ship’s Passengers.” Staking out the cutting edge of fashion, the pair (smiling in a photo, bloomers covered) stirred up some TMZ-style publicity for their underwear—though seen only via the “pink puffs” at their ankles.
Taking her own advice to be original, in early 1914 Rappe began designing her own line of clothing. She subsequently relocated to San Francisco, in part to market her fashions at the World’s Fair, which launched on February 20, 1915. There she befriended a dancer who had married a millionaire, Sidi Spreckels, who ushered Rappe into high society.
Rappe the entrepreneur continued to use the press regularly for publicity. If she were designing fashions today, she would surely be a maven of social media. Then, she supplied a steady stream of stories about her designs to the papers. In May 1915 alone, there were four syndicated newspaper articles about her latest clothing creations, each with a photograph. In one, she is smiling in a gossamer hat of discoid lines: “The hat of the moment is the spider-web hat, and it’s the creation of Miss Virginia Rappe, a young woman who has lifted fashion designing to the plane of fine art.” A similar story showcases her ridiculous “monoplane hat,” shaped like its namesake by “aviation enthusiast” Rappe. (She made a submarine hat too, as U-boats were much in the news.) Another features her “summer muff” and says her “artistic conceptions of fashion have made her famous as a creator of original style.” Women’s high fashion was adventerous then, but Rappe was exploring new territories, and the gambit kept her in the news.
The fourth story that May was headed “Here’s the Tuxedo Girl, How Do You Like Her?” and in a photo Rappe wears a black tuxedo coat and skirt and white hat, smiling with hands upon her hips, as if confidently asserting women’s liberation. The article states:
Equal clothes rights with men!
That’s the important plank in the summer girl’s clothes policy and she’s already putting it in practice—behold the Tuxedo coat!
It was Miss Virginia Rappe of Paris and Chicago, an artist whose medium is clothes, not paint nor oils nor clay—who first invaded the masculine wardrobe, carried off the Tuxedo coat idea and immediately converted it into a chic little street suit, attractive enough to wear to a tea, and practical enough for a shopping tour or an out-of-town journey.
“Personality is the secret of dress,” says Miss Rappe. “If women would study their individual style and their temperament as well, and dress to suit their personality American women would be the best dressed women in the world.”
The next month, her “peace hat,” shaped like two dove wings, scored publicity. A month earlier, a German U-boat had sunk the British steamship Lusitania, and among the 1,198 deaths were 128 Americans. The cry among many Americans to join the Great War was thunderous when Rappe publicly cast her lot with the pacifists:
“The women of America want world peace,” said Miss Rappe today. “We should express our peace sentiments in our clothes. If we believe in peace why wear military jackets and soldier caps. Clothes influence our minds. I believe that if we wear the dove of peace and the beautiful American colors have a place in our scheme of dress we will soon create a strong sentiment for peace.”
Here, then, is the reality of Virginia Rappe, who at twenty-four years old established herself as an entrepreneur, demonstrated creative acumen and political independence (feminism, pacifism), adeptly utilized the press, and provided career advice to her fellow women. It contrasts sharply with the jaundiced view of her that was born in the courtroom in 1921 and only grew in the decades that followed.
Though Rappe never married, she repeatedly broke her pact to never become engaged. She committed to marry at least three men, and perhaps two more. In 1910 in Chicago, she met Harry Barker, a real estate developer from Gary, Indiana. After Rappe’s death, he denied having been engaged to her. However, she did wear “a man’s diamond ring of his,” and another witness testified that she broke off their engagement.
Her first confirmed engagement was to forty-year-old sculptor John Sample, who reportedly broke up with her. In July 1915 it was Argentine diplomat Alberto d’Aklaine, described as a “member of an old aristocratic family of Argentina.” Rappe told friends he was “nice but old enough to be my grandfather.” He was followed by dress designer Robert Moscovitz, who died in San Francisco in a trolley car accident.
The d’Aklaine engagement, especially, indicates that social climbing affected some of her romantic choices. At that time in San Francisco, her best friend was Sidi Spreckels, who was notorious for marrying up. As we shall see, a final Rappe engagement was claimed by one more powerful man, and if true, it was severed only by her death.
Robert Moscovitz’s tragic death may have contributed to Rappe’s decision to move to Los Angeles in the spring of 1916, but she was likely motivated chiefly by the same magnet that pulled thousands of beautiful young women to Hollywood annually. So-called “movie-struck girls,” most still in their teens, poured into Los Angeles from all over America, seeking the sudden fame and fortune of Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish. Each may have been the cutest girl in her high school and star of the drama club too, so of course she figured the studios would leap at the chance to make her a star. All but a few were destined for an endless stampede of disheartening cattle calls. Many faced poverty and hunger. In a sense, they were following Rappe’s advice to “be original,” but the migration inspired alarmed editorializing in the small towns those daughters left behind. Some such editorials painted the movie community as a den of prostitution, venereal disease, and drugs.
Rappe took up residence in the Hollywood Hotel, a palatial resort in the heart of Hollywood that was home and office to actors, producers, directors, and writers—the famous, the soon-to-be, and the never-to-be. She later moved in with her “adopted aunt” Kate Hardebeck and Hardebeck’s husband, Joseph, who at this point lived just off the southeastern edge of Hollywood. Prolific film star Louise Glaum was a friend.
There were likely days when Rappe felt that big-screen stardom would remain as elusive for her as it was for thousands of other movie-struck girls, most of whom were years younger than her and many of whom had acted onstage. However, because the films of the era were silent and thus void of spoken dialogue, acting acumen was of lesser importance in many roles than it would be when sound was married to pictures. Physical appearance and personal connections could be the deciding factors in casting.
Rappe’s fashion design career had sputtered, but she continued to model and travel. She struck poses in an Atlanta department store in the spring of 1917. The same year, she scored her big break when she won a lead role in the feature film Par
adise Garden. The picture is now lost, but the Variety review states:
“Paradise Garden,” a seven-part Metro featuring Harold Lockwood, contains numerous twists away from the conventional “vamp” ideas…. Virginia Rappae [sic] as Marcia Van Wyck and Vera Lisson as Una Habberton were opposite Lockwood, the former a mild “vamp” and hardly doing justice to a number of closeups. She possesses a dreamy pair of eyes, with the black hair of this type. It will take a number of like roles before she reaches a number of other established “vamps.”
It’s ironic that her first and juiciest role was that of vamp, then a new and trendy word (derived from “vampire”) for a woman who uses her sex appeal to entrap and exploit men. Furthering this irony is the fact that Lockwood’s character is initially infatuated with her but upon discerning her promiscuous nature grows violent and “tears her dress in the rear, leaving her practically nude down to the waist.”
The following year, Paradise Garden’s director cast Rappe again, this time in the anti-German World War I film Over the Rhine. But with the signing of an armistice between Germany and the Allies on November 11, 1918, the movie was shelved. Two years later, it would be recut and released as An Adventuress but barely make a blip. Another two years would expire before, in 1922, it was recut again and released as The Isle of Love in an effort to take advantage of the recent fame of two previously unknown actors: Rudolph Valentino and the late Virginia Rappe.
Only this version survives, and it is an incoherent mess, often reaching the status of “so bad it’s good”: an amalgamation of bathing beauties at a beach, biplanes, a cross-dresser, a lengthy fistfight in the back of a speeding convertible, and a convoluted, contradictory plot about schemers taking over an island of pleasure that inexplicably harbors German soldiers. Cuts are jarring. Intertitles seem stolen from another awful movie. The movie does live up to its title in featuring some surprisingly risqué content, including topless women in a stage show entering and exiting a pool.
Rappe is nearly as revealing when she steps out of the same pool dressed only in a sheer, sleeveless gown. Her role as Valentino’s love interest is stretched out via repeating shots of them together in an automobile. Introduced with “Just about the neatest of all the fair femininity on the Isle is VANETTE,” Rappe is first seen lounging on a sofa with one leg up, dressed elaborately, smiling slyly, and casually smoking—the very vision of emancipated womanhood, including a flapper’s hairstyle.
The factor that most impacted Rappe’s acting career was her relationship with director Henry Lehrman. Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1881, Lehrman had immigrated to America from Vienna in the final days of 1906, and in 1909 he began working at the Biograph movie studio in New York City. According to legend, the thickly accented immigrant told pioneering director D. W. Griffith he was an agent with France’s Pathé, then the world’s largest film production company, and when the ruse was debunked, Lehrman was christened “Pathe.”* He appeared as a bit player in Griffith’s films before collaborating on Biograph comedies with actor/writer/director Mack Sennett. When Sennett left Biograph in 1912 to form Keystone Studios in Los Angeles, Lehrman joined him.
Comedy movies then were one reel, lasting ten to twelve minutes, and they were churned out with great rapidity. Lehrman directed at least twenty-eight in 1913, overseeing such greats as Mabel Normand, Ford Sterling, Charlie Chaplin, and Roscoe Arbuckle, and he earned a second nickname, “Suicide,” for pushing actors to do dangerous stunts. He formed his own production company, L-KO (Lehrman-KnockOut) and made better-than-average comedy shorts, then moved over to the Fox Film Corporation to head up its comedy division. Off the lot, he spent lavishly on luxury automobiles, and the dapper bachelor was a regular fixture in nightclubs.
In late 1918 Rappe began a romantic relationship with Lehrman. By January 1920 she was listed as “boarder” at his Hollywood residence, along with a twenty-four-year old maid. (Rappe’s occupation was “actress.” Her mother was from her namesake state of Virginia; father from New York. Benjamin Button—style, her age was twenty-two.) She was by then living the high life in Hollywood, complete with her own limousine driver and personal trainer. Dating the head of a production company had another perk. Lehrman cast Rappe in at least four films, all comedy shorts. The first, the 1919 Fox production His Musical Sneeze, starred Lloyd “Ham” Hamilton, then a comedic star on the rise.
After more than two years with Fox, Lehrman struck out on his own again in early 1919, forming Henry Lehrman Productions and constructing his own $200,000 studio near Hollywood. His old friend Roscoe Arbuckle rented space there to film.* In a peculiar newspaper article from September 1919, the company announced the signing of Rappe, labeling her “one of the wealthiest and most beautiful young women of western America” and the “richest girl of stage or screen.” The announcement identified her as both an “heiress” and “the owner of more than 800 acres of the richest oil lands of Texas,” with her “wealth computed in the millions.” The story was bunk, likely devised by Rappe or Lehrman to garner publicity, but the fiction points to Rappe’s high aspirations.
Henry Lehrman Productions’ first movie, 1920’s A Twilight Baby, again starred Lloyd Hamilton and featured Rappe in a supporting role. Publicizing it, Rappe returned to her advice formula, this time serving up old-fashioned moralizing delivered while she was living out of wedlock with her employer. This lengthy headline and subhead screamed from a newspaper on March 4, 1920:
BACK TO QUAKERLAND! “Nix OF LOUNGE LIZARDS AND JAZZ BABIES,” SAYS VIRGINIA RAPPE, PRAISING “LESS SOCIETY” MANORS Communities Seeking To Put A Sensible Damper On Midnight Larks, “Seven-Dates-A-Week” And Other Health-Robbers Of Young Girls Have A Hearty Endorsement From Virginia Rappe, Plucked From Dazzling California Society By Henry Lehrman And Who Will Be Seen In “A Twilight Baby,” One Of The 3 Ring Jazzy Circus Features At The Dome Theater. She Has A Way Of Curtailing Mothers’ Fears.
The worldly Rappe offered cautions about Jazz Age partying and concluded, “Maybe it wouldn’t hurt any of us to be more Quakerfied.” Whether any Quakers attended A Twilight Baby is unknown. Rappe, though, certainly enjoyed Jazz Age dancing; she won prizes for such at a Santa Monica resort popular with the Hollywood crowd. Trial testimony later placed her at several Hollywood parties during this time.
Invoices drowned Henry Lehrman Productions before it was truly established, and Lloyd Hamilton fled the sinking ship. Rappe acted in two more Lehrman productions without him, The Punch of the Irish and the unfortunately titled A Game Lady. But by the time the latter film was released, less than two months before Labor Day 1921, Lehrman had lost his studio and his house. Debts would burden him for years. Perhaps coincidentally, his two-and-a-half-year relationship with Rappe also faltered. He signed on to direct four films in Fort Lee, New Jersey, moving, alone, to New York City in the spring of 1921.
Rappe moved back in with the Hardebecks, and she paid Kate Hardebeck twenty-five dollars weekly for housekeeping duties (or perhaps not, for Hardebeck later made a claim against Rappe’s estate for over $1,000 in unpaid labor). She probably hoped to rekindle the romance with Lehrman eventually. She seldom went out socializing. “Her chief delight was in tramping over the hills around Hollywood with her dog,” Hardebeck stated.
On July 7, 1921, Rappe turned thirty, a pivotal age, especially for a model/actress cognizant of the relentless march of time.* Billie Ritchie, who acted in at least sixty motion pictures, all of them for Lehrman, including A Twilight Baby, died the day before and was buried the day after, likely clouding Rappe’s birthday with a melancholy pall.†
She had other reasons for glum introspection. Her designing and modeling careers were stalled, and after a promising film debut in 1917, four years later she had failed to establish herself as a marketable movie star. Judging only by the scant evidence that survives, she was not a particularly gifted screen performer, and her acting reputation within the industry may have been harmed by her relationship with Lehrman and the resultant perception
that she was not earning her plum roles via talent. After at least three engagements and one lengthy cohabiting relationship, she remained unmarried. The great financial success she sought, which friends like the upwardly mobile Sidi Spreckels and celebrated screen vamp Louise Glaum enjoyed, had eluded her. Perhaps as she treked over the Hollywood hills, alone with her dog and her thoughts, this innovator who preached “be original” was planning the next phase of her life.
As August came to a close, a low-level movie publicist named Alfred Semnacher, whose marriage was ending, asked Rappe if she wanted to ride with him to her former home of San Francisco. (Semnacher would later claim he had known Rappe for “about five years” but only well for the previous six weeks, during which time he had tried to place her in one movie role.) Rappe said yes. Like Semnacher, she was in need of a vacation. A woman named Maude Delmont, whom Rappe had never met, would be joining them.
They left early on Saturday, September 3, traveling in Semnacher’s automobile on the future Highway 99 up through Bakersfield, passing herds of sheep and cattle, orange groves and lettuce farms. They had sandwiches and coffee in vacuum bottles, packed by Kate Hardebeck. Delmont later claimed she brought a pint of whiskey along for the trip and had six drinks on the way; her two travelmates did not partake.
