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

by Greg Merritt

  They stopped in the town of Selma, south of Fresno, where Delmont solicited subscriptions for a labor journal, her current job, and they spent the night at a ranch where a friend of Delmont’s lived. Rappe sent a card to Hardebeck, saying she was having a “very pleasant time.” At 1:30 PM the next day, the trio from Los Angeles headed to San Francisco. They checked into the Palace Hotel at 9:30 PM the evening before Labor Day.

  At 11:30 the following morning, while eating breakfast with the others in the hotel restaurant, Rappe was paged and received a message from Fred Fishback, a movie director she knew. He was at the nearby Hotel St. Francis with actor Lowell Sherman and the man who made the whole world laugh, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. The three men had a suite of interconnected rooms on the top floor, including a room for lounging and drinking and dancing. Would she care to join them?

  * It was later claimed that Rappe’s father was an English nobleman visiting Chicago for the World’s Fair—an assertion disproved by the fact that Virginia was conceived more than two years before the 1893 exposition opened.

  * Even at seventeen she was shaving two years off her age. By twenty-four, four years were subtracted, and at twenty-eight it was seven.

  * Stage actress Gladys Sykes had recently divorced Arthur Greiner, a race car driver remembered for a horrific crash in the inaugural Indianapolis 500 in 1911. The first to break her vow, she agreed to remarry him a year later.

  * If the nickname was derisive, Lehrman rolled with the punch. When he moonlighted for another company in 1912, he directed under the name “Henry Pathé.”

  * When the press mistakenly called the studio a Lehrman-Arbuckle partnership, Lehrman released a terse statement saying Arbuckle had merely leased space to make movies. Later, when the two were decidedly not friends, Arbuckle said his renting from Lehrman “was the only way I could get back money he owed me.”

  * It’s almost certain Rappe did not celebrate the date as the big three-oh. She may not have known her true age.

  † His Variety obituary perpetuated the myth that Richie died due to lingering injuries after being attacked by ostriches while filming a “Suicide” Lehrman production, but his death certificate lists the cause as stomach cancer.

  {4}

  SANITARIUM

  San Francisco can support both comic and tragic conclusions because the city is geographically in extremis, a metaphor for the farthest-flung possibility, a metaphor for the end of the line.

  —RICHARD RODRIGUEZ, “LATE VICTORIANS”

  When the morphine wore off around midnight the morning after Labor Day, Virginia Rappe awoke in the dark, screaming in agony again. A light came on, illuminating that woman again, Semnacher’s friend Maude Delmont. Rappe lay in a single bed in room 1227 of the Hotel St. Francis. She did not know where she was or why that woman was near. There was only the pain, relentless, merciless, like a sword run through her abdomen. Doubled over, writhing in the sweaty sheets, she wailed.

  The groggy Delmont summoned the hotel’s house physician, Dr. Arthur Beardslee, to return to room 1227. He was the second doctor to examine Rappe, and as he had five hours earlier, he injected Rappe with morphine and again she fell quiet. Her pupils constricted, and her eyelids grew heavy. He checked her pulse and examined her body. Her abdomen was sensitive to his touch. The doctor left. The room was again quiet and dark.

  Again, at five o’clock in the morning, the morphine wore off and Rappe was screaming. Again that woman was near. Again the doctor was summoned. Again a shot of morphine was administered. Delmont told Beardslee that Rappe had last urinated fifteen hours prior, so the doctor catheterized his patient, producing a small amount of urine, tinged with dark blood—the color indicating it was older and not from an open wound. He believed the catheterization would remedy Rappe’s ailment and she would recover with sufficient rest. He left.

  Frustrated with the house doctor, Delmont telephoned a physician she knew with the literary name of Dr. Melville Rumwell, and he agreed to take over the patient’s care after Beardslee was discharged. In addition to his private practice, Melville was then an assistant professor of surgery at Stanford University’s medical school and head of Stanford’s outpatient clinic. Arriving just before nine o’clock on Tuesday morning, September 6, he examined Rappe and found no visible signs of injury, despite the sordid story Delmont told. Rappe said she did not recollect anything that had happened. She had lost consciousness while in 1219 with Arbuckle, and when she woke she was in agony. She continued to feel pain from her lower abdomen to her chest. Rumwell’s diagnosis was alcoholism (in this case, meaning poisoning by alcohol), and he left without administering any more treatment than hot compresses on her midsection. In his professional opinion, she did not seem in dire health.

  The morning of Tuesday, September 6, Arbuckle spoke with Al Semnacher, and both men surmised that Virginia Rappe was merely ill from downing too much alcohol. After noon, Arbuckle picked up the $611.13 tab for all three interconnected rooms and room 1227, where Rappe then lay. Then he, Fishback, and Sherman checked out of the St. Francis.

  Arbuckle drove Fishback and Sherman to pier 7 on San Francisco Bay, and the three men boarded the steamship Harvard. The vessel, after being employed for troop transport during World War I, had just completed its first month of West Coast service, traveling two round-trips weekly between Los Angeles and San Francisco, alternating with its sister ship, the Yale. Arbuckle’s Pierce-Arrow was also on board for the fourteen-hour journey. The white steamer set off at 4:00 PM.

  On board, Fishback spotted a friend, who introduced him and Arbuckle to a young woman and her mother. Twenty-one-year-old Doris Deane was just beginning an acting career. That evening, at Arbuckle’s invitation, she and her mother joined the Hollywood men for dinner in the stateroom. Doris was charmed by the famous Fatty, thirteen years her elder. He was enamored with the young brunette. Before the ship docked in the port of Los Angeles the following morning, they made arrangements to go out together on Saturday evening. It was a date Roscoe Arbuckle would not keep.

  As she lay in the bed in room 1227, a sequence of three nurses administered to Virgina Rappe: Jean Jameson, Vera Cumberland, Martha Hamilton. Each encountered a patient who was sometimes hysterical with pain, sometimes calmly offering up her health history. The nurses generally blamed alcohol at a time when the home-brewed and counterfeit hooch of Prohibition was responsible for much abdominal pain. Their treatment was catheterizations, enemas, and hot compresses.

  On Thursday, September 8, Dr. Rumwell returned to check on his patient. He found her in no better condition, and he suspected a severe kidney infection and possible venereal disease. At around noon, he had her admitted to the sanitarium of Dr. W. Francis Wakefield, who specialized in obstetrics and gynecology. Maude Delmont and Nurse Jameson rode with Rappe in the black, hearse-like ambulance. The fact that Rappe was admitted there and not to a hospital was subsequently questioned, but Wakefield sanitarium was the closest medical facility (located just six blocks from the St. Francis), Rumwell had staff privileges there, and it was common then for even those with serious maladies to be treated outside of hospitals. Wakefield, which specialized in high-risk births, had two operating rooms as well as the staff and equipment to treat emergency patients.

  The greater question is why Virginia Rappe was left to suffer in a hotel room for three days, her severe pain deadened with morphine or merely comforted with a hot towel, despite being (cursorily) examined by three doctors and three nurses and despite the appearance of blood in her urine. (The first doctor was Dr. Olav Kaarboe, called on the evening of September 5 when Dr. Beardslee was at first unavailable. His diagnosis: too much to drink.) If she had been properly treated during this time, it’s likely the public would never have learned about a Labor Day party at the Hotel St. Francis, and the remainder of the lives of Virginia Rappe and Roscoe Arbuckle would have been very different.

  Arbuckle returned to his Los Angeles home on the morning of Wednesday, September 7. His mansion was
in the heart of the city’s prestigious West Adams district, just southwest of downtown. A capacious garage on the premises housed his six luxury automobiles. He had a secretary/housekeeper, a butler, a maid, a gardener, a cook, and a chauffeur. Upon Arbuckle’s arrival, the butler likely carried in his luggage. He was greeted by his three dogs, including Luke, his world-famous pit bull terrier.

  He checked in with his manager, Lou Anger. His feature Gasoline Gus was a huge hit, and Crazy to Marry was about to go into wider release. Two additional films, Skirt Shy and Freight Prepaid, had wrapped and were being readied for theaters.

  The next day, he met on the Paramount lot with the director of all four previous films, James Cruze, and they watched the final editing of Freight Prepaid and sketched ideas for The Melancholy Spirit, a comedy about a drunken ghost in which Cruze was planning to direct Arbuckle next. The actor suggested the young woman he had just made a date with, Doris Deane, for a role in The Melancholy Spirit, and Cruze and Arbuckle agreed to meet with her the following week. Arbuckle telephoned her with the good news. But like their scheduled date, this meeting would have to be canceled. He would not appear in The Melancholy Spirit, which was released the following January while he was spending his days in a San Francisco courtroom and was indeed melancholy.*

  As the night of Thursday, September 8, bled into Friday morning, Arbuckle dreamed in the ornate, oversized bed in his master bedroom, where the walls and draperies were orchid and green and the furniture was hand-painted to match. Luke likely slept nearby. But Arbuckle was otherwise alone in the bedroom of his West Adams mansion, filled with every luxurious furnishing and decoration he could cram into it. The house, like the cars, and the one car in particular, was a testament to excess—or so it would soon seem.

  At Wakefield sanitarium on the afternoon of September 8, Dr. Rumwell examined Virginia Rappe again. He believed her condition was the result of alcoholism and a resulting kidney lesion and infection. He arranged for the application of a Murphy drip to replenish her electrolytes rectally and for morphine injections every four hours.

  At around 9:30 PM, the doctor returned to find Rappe’s condition had rapidly deteriorated. Her pain was acute, her lower abdomen extended, her pulse elevated. He called in Dr. Emmet Rixford, a professor of surgery at Stanford University, vice president of the American Surgical Association, and one of the foremost medical professionals on the West Coast. After his examination, Rixford agreed with Rumwell’s new diagnosis: peritonitis, an inflammation of the peritoneum—the abdominal lining and cavity. The likely cause was an infection created by a ruptured fallopian tube or bladder. A third doctor, George W. Reid, concurred. They believed that in her present, severely weakened condition, Rappe would not survive surgery. She was administered antibiotics in an attempt to fight off the infection.

  Rappe instructed Maude Delmont to telephone her San Francisco friend Sidi Spreckels. Likely at Rappe’s request, Delmont asked Spreckels to telegram Henry Lehrman in New York and inform him of his former domestic partner’s dire health. Delmont also telegrammed Kate Hardebeck with the bad news. Spreckels came to Rappe’s side on Friday morning. The former model’s skin was pallid and clammy, her eyes sunken, her lips parched. She was so weakened, in and out of consciousness, that Spreckels was uncertain her old friend recognized her.

  ”Oh, to think I led such a quiet life, and to think I would get into such a party,” Rappe allegedly said.

  When Spreckels returned later with a telegrammed response from Lehrman, the patient had slipped into a coma. Spreckels telephoned Pastor James Gordon of the nearby First Congregational Church. He came immediately, dropped to his knees in the room, and prayed for the comatose woman’s recovery and spiritual peace, punctuated with “Thy will be done.” At 1:30 PM on September 9, 1921, left alone in a room at Wakefield sanitarium, Virginia Rappe died.

  * Retitled One Glorious Day and directed by Cruze, it starred legendary humorist Will Rogers in the role intended for Arbuckle.

  {5}

  HOLLYWOOD: 1909-12

  Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without color…. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre…. It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint.

  —MAXIM GORKY, AFTER VIEWING A MOVIE IN 1896

  There was no bolt of lightning striking a kite, no apple falling to earth. The development of moving pictures was more like a lace-work of waterways, some of which trailed off while others fed the rivers that reached the sea. The film projector’s antecedent was the sublimely named magic lantern, which dates to the seventeenth century and featured images painted on glass slides and projected via oil lanterns. In the 1830s, devices simulated motion by arranging a series of images in a spinning circle, and in subsequent decades this concept of revolving images was married to lantern projection. French science teacher Émile Reynaud hand-painted small panes of glass, each image slightly different from the one before, joined them with a perforated metal strip, and hand-cranked the panes through a lantern projector, magnifying the mini-paintings onto a screen. On October 28, 1892, he presented the first publicly viewed animated motion pictures. His Paris revue of three cartoons proved immensely popular and ran until 1900.

  Reynaud’s cartoons first screened in the midst of a race on both sides of the Atlantic to do the same with photographs. In 1889 Englishman William Friese-Greene created a camera capable of taking ten photos per second on strips of perforated celluloid film. That same year, Thomas Edison assigned his company’s photographer, W. K. L. Dickson, to head a team tasked with creating a machine for viewing moving photos. Edison’s Kinetoscope, unveiled in 1893, established the principles of modern projectors. But it wasn’t a projector. Films were watched via a magnifying glass while peering into a peep-show-style box. Kinetoscope parlors opened in 1894, but they were a novelty that peaked and waned rapidly. The public was soon ready for the next big thing.

  The intercontinental race for a photo-film projector finished in a near three-way tie in 1895. Contenders included the Cinématographe, invented by France’s Lumière brothers and used for the first public screening (March 22); the Eidoloscope, the creation of the by-then-independent Dickson and another former Edison employee, Eugene Lauste, which was used for the first commercial screening (May 20); and the Phantoscope, invented by Charles Jenkins and Thomas Armat and used for a series of commercial screenings (September). The Jenkins/ Armat partnership soon dissolved and Armat went to Thomas Edison, who purchased the rights to the Phantoscope, renamed it the Vitascope, and played the role he knew best: inventor, claiming the innovation as his own. On April 23, 1896, the American motion picture industry had its official coming-out party when a Vitascope projected movies onto a screen at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York City. The series of one-minute flicks played between vaudeville acts and included a shot of waves breaking, which caused the audience to recoil for fear of getting drenched.

  Edison, the American Mutoscope Company (launched by Dickson and later renamed Biograph), and American Vitagraph were the initial “Big Three” studios, producing most of the earliest American movies. Each peddled its own projector and churned out a stream of artless films that it sold to vaudeville theaters. Audiences quickly tired of seeing vignettes or mere action. After all, with their flickering shades of gray, two dimensions, and lack of sound, movies were delivering less than spectators received from stage performances.

  It was the development of “story films” such as The Life of an American Fireman and the phenomenally successful The Great Train Robbery (both 1903), both directed by Edwin Porter for Edison, that brought movies into the modern era. Audiences flocked to theaters to watch actual tales told on film, and nickelodeons began sprouting up where stores once were. For five cents, you got flat floors, 199 unfastened chairs (200 would be subject to ordinances), and a continuously repeating program of sile
nt shorts accompanied by piano or organ music. Such theaters catered to the working class who could not afford tickets to a play.

  In 1908 the Big Three formed a trust to squash competitors who wouldn’t purchase their licensed cameras and projectors. (Initially, Kodak was a signatory and sold its film stock exclusively to trust companies, but it rescinded this exclusivity in 1911.) One policy was to present no onscreen credits, thus suppressing the salaries of nameless talent. Instead, movies were marketed on the strength of each company’s reputation. The first movie star was world famous but known only as “the Biograph Girl.” Directing, writing, or acting in motion pictures was considered a routine chore, and it paid accordingly.

  The earliest film studios were in the New York metropolitan area, or in one case, Philadelphia, and two cases, Chicago. But this presented a quandary. At a time when the sun was a crucial component of even indoor lighting (via glass ceilings), the short, drab days of winter made it difficult to keep to production schedules, and the potential for inclement weather made exterior shooting impractical. Some studios wintered in Cuba, and in 1908 Jacksonville, Florida, emerged as “the World’s Winter Film Capital,” a title it kept for years afterward. However, Jacksonville had already, nearly unnoticed, gained a rival for the title from another city in another temperate coastal area, this one on the opposite side of what then seemed a much wider continent.

  By the spring of 1909, newly married and barely twenty-two, Roscoe Arbuckle had traveled all around the American West, but he had never been east of the Kansas farm where he was born. It was therefore fortuitous that the movie industry came to him.

  Started by former magician and minstrel show operator William Selig, the Selig Polyscope Company was one of the two aforementioned Chicago studios. It shot mostly slapstick comedies, travelogues, and industrial footage. In the winter of 1907, Selig director Francis Boggs and a small crew had journeyed west. Though the interiors were filmed in Chicago (with a different cast), they shot exterior scenes for The Count of Monte Cristo at a beach near San Diego and on a roof in downtown Los Angeles, earning incorrect renown as the first fictional film with footage shot on the West Coast. (The actual first was A Daring Hold-Up in Southern California, shot for Biograph in 1906.) Boggs moved to Los Angeles in March 1909 and set up an outdoor studio for Selig in the drying yards behind a downtown laundry. The third movie Boggs shot there was Ben’s Kid, a western that featured comic relief by a young actor named Roscoe Arbuckle.*