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

by Greg Merritt

  * Ben’s Kid is now lost, as are the five additional films Arbuckle made for Selig.

  * The other entertainment that evening was for gambling purposes: a wrestling match that ended in a draw, a cane spree (one-on-one fight for a walking cane) that ended in a draw, and a duel between a dog and a badger in which the dog was victorious. If that’s the entertainment at your country club, what are your saloons like?

  * Arbuckle would later act in Nestor comedies, over the course of four weeks in 1913 just before joining Keystone, but the titles of those lost films are unknown.

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  POSTMORTEM

  California State Board of Health

  Bureau of Vital Statistics

  Standard Certificate of Death

  Wakefield Hospital

  Dr. William Ophüls, the fifty-year-old, German-born and German-schooled dean of medicine at Stanford University and one of the country’s foremost experts on pathology and bacteriology, received a telephone call from his Stanford colleague Dr. Melville Rumwell with the message that a woman had just died from an apparent case of peritonitis.

  Full Name: Virginia Rappe

  Female White Single

  Occupation: Motion Picture Actress

  In the presence of Dr. Rumwell and nurse Grace Halston, the goateed Dr. Ophüls peered through his wire-rim glasses, examining the exterior of the corpse on a table in a white-walled operating room at Wakefield sanitarium. (The facilities did not have an autopsy room.) He checked Virgina Rappe’s face, scalp, and neck, the front and back of her torso, her arms and hands, legs and feet, her genitalia. He found no evidence of a sexual assault. He noted two bruises on her upper right arm and two on her thighs. He poked and prodded her bloated abdomen.

  Birthplace: No Record

  Name of Father: No Record

  Birthplace of Father: No Record

  Maiden Name of Mother: No Record

  Birthplace of Mother: No Record

  A block was placed under her back to raise her chest. Wielding a scalpel, the doctor or the attending nurse made a deep incision from Rappe’s pubic bone to her sternum, slicing through the abdominal wall but being careful not to incise the organs beneath. Absent blood pressure, there was little bleeding, but body fluid leaked from her open abdomen. Without an autopsy table to collect such fluid, it likely fell to the floor and into a drain there. Two further incisions, as deep as the rib cage, were made from the sternum to each shoulder, curving under her breasts. Together the three cuts formed a giant Y on the front of the dead woman’s torso.

  Date of birth: 1895

  Age: About 25

  Three large flaps having been rendered—one on either side and one above—the skin, muscle, and soft tissue were pulled back. The ribs were cut away with a saw and shears.

  Then Virginia Rappe was truly naked. Revealed in the bright light of the examination room was the dark world inside us all, the intricate patchwork of glistening purple, red, brown, and beige. These were the organs that circulated her blood, distributed oxygen and removed carbon dioxide, digested her food and drink, eliminated waste. The model/ designer/actress/daughter/”niece”/lover/friend known as Virginia Rappe was then reduced to the parts that had worked for thirty years to keep her living and the part that stopped working first.

  Date of death: September 9th, 1921

  And that death occurred on the date stated above at: 1:30 PM

  Dr. Ophüls examined the organs, searching for abnormalities. Blood had congested in Rappe’s lower abdomen, though he did not yet know the source of the bleeding. He likely removed the intestines. They appeared normal and virtually empty. The pericardial sac was cut open, revealing her heart inside, purplish and veiny. Arteries were flayed and parted to search for clots. He may have taken a heart-tissue sample and drawn blood from a heart chamber for further testing. Each of her spongy lungs was sliced like a loaf of bread and prodded with his gloved hands as he felt for areas of pneumonia or other abnormalities. The lower lobes of one were congested, likely the effect of a common virus. Though stained brown and black, for Rappe was a smoker, her lungs were functional.

  Length of residence at place of death: 4 days

  If nonresident, give city or town and state: Los Angeles, Calif.

  The peritoneum was inflamed, the thin membrane having been stretched outward. Dr. Ophüls prodded the liver and kidneys. The stomach, pancreas, duodenum, and spleen were treated similarly. Whenever asked, the nurse handed him a scalpel, a large knife, scissors, or forceps. Dr. Rumwell observed and assisted Dr. Ophüls as Rappe’s parts and pieces were inventoried and inspected. The two doctors inspected the ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, rectum, and bladder, removing each.

  Did an operation precede death? No

  Was there an autopsy? Yes

  Beneath the penetrating light in a room at Wakefield sanitarium, Dr. Ophüls, Dr. Rumwell, and Nurse Halston stared at the pinkish-red bladder, the ball of smooth muscle that had collected urine secreted from Virginia Rappe’s kidneys. It was unusually small. As suspected, this was the organ that had failed first. There before them was the proof: in an inflamed area of the bladder’s outer wall was a hole, about an eighth of an inch in diameter. With a scalpel handed to him by Nurse Halston, Dr. Ophüls made an incision beside the tear. The two doctors could then see inside the organ to a small clot of blood. There was a tear in the bladder’s inner wall, about three-quarters of an inch long, that corresponded to the outer hole. It was later described by Ophüls as “a clean break.” Dr. W. Francis Wakefield was also called into the room to examine the bladder. There was no doubt. This, then, was the flaw in her mortal flesh that had led, four agonizing days later, to Virginia Rappe’s demise.

  The cause of death was as follows: Rupture of the bladder

  Contributory: Acute peritonitis

  Signed: W. Ophüls

  Sept. 10, 1921*

  A second autopsy was performed on the day of Rappe’s death, beginning at 8:15 PM, this one by Dr. Shelby Strange, autopsy surgeon of the San Francisco coroner’s office. He too examined Virginia Rappe’s five-foot-five, 140-pound body. He noted eleven bruises (right upper arm, torso, legs) as well as a small puncture mark on her left arm, likely from a hypodermic needle used during her time at the sanitarium. Photographs were taken. The bladder and what Dr. Strange later called “the female organs” had been removed, but Dr. Ophüls brought them to Dr. Strange in specimen jars. Viewing through a microscope, Dr. Strange noticed a chronic inflamation in the tissue of the ruptured bladder. He sent the stomach to the city chemist for further analysis.

  Barring any indication from the chemist of poisoning, his conclusion was the same as Dr. Ophüls’s, but he reversed the cause and contributory factors. Cause of death: acute peritonitis resulting from rupture of the bladder. Owing to the extreme rarity of spontaneously rupturing bladders, Strange came to a logical conclusion—one coroners now would concur with. As he later testified, he believed that the tear in Virginia Rappe’s bladder was caused by “some external force.”

  * Though the death certificate was signed on the tenth, the autopsy occurred on the ninth.

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  RISE: 1913-14

  Overnight the obscure and somewhat disreputable movie performers found themselves propelled to adulation, fame and fortune. They were the new royalty, the Golden People.

  —KENNETH ANGER, HOLLYWOOD BABYLON

  They called it the “Fun Factory,” and he called himself the “King of Comedy.” Together they invented or perfected the tropes of cinematic slapstick: car chases, foot chases, custard pies to the kisser, incompetent policemen, frantic pacing, and gravity-defying feats. They propagated a working-class aesthetic that appealed to nickelodeon audiences, including millions of recent immigrants who needed not be English-literate to laugh at the universal language of buffoonish authorities and pratfalls. They spawned technical innovations in editing, stunts, and set design, and over a mere five-year run incubated some of the greatest acting talents of the silen
t era, including Charlie Chaplin, Ford Sterling, Mabel Normand, Harry Langdon, Chester Conklin, Charley Chase, Harold Lloyd, Gloria Swanson—and Roscoe Arbuckle.

  The Fun Factory was Keystone Studios, and the King of Comedy was its chief operating officer, Mack Sennett. Born Michael Sinnott in 1880 to Irish immigrants, he was raised in rural Quebec, where his father was the town blacksmith. When he was seventeen, his family moved to Connecticut; they subsequently relocated to Massachusetts, where he worked as a boilermaker for a year and in a pulp mill for several. Dissatisfied with manual labor and inspired by a vaudeville show, he took singing lessons and in 1902 moved to New York City.

  In his own perhaps apocryphal remembrance, he ventured to Broadway to audition at the Metropolitan Opera House for a celebrated theatrical impresario, who declared, “But let’s be practical about you. If you won’t go home, young man, the best way for you to start is this: go down to the Bowery and start in burlesque.” Thus, the legend goes, Sennett’s introduction to show business laid bare the divide between the leisure class (Broadway) and the working class (Bowery), which became a prominent theme of his films and fueled his lingering resentment toward the producers of “highbrow” entertainment.

  Of the Bowery burlesque houses where he was soon performing, Sennett said, “The round, fat girls in nothing much doing their bumps and grinds, the German-dialect comedians, and especially the cops and tramps with their bed slats and bladders appealed to me as being funny people. Their approach to life was earthy and understandable. They whaled the daylights out of pretension. They made fun of themselves and the human race. They reduced convention, dogma, stuffed shirts, and Authority to nonsense, and then blossomed into pandemonium…. As a thoroughly accredited representative of the Common Man … I thought all this was delightful.”

  After struggling to eke out a living in theater, in 1908 Sennett turned to moving pictures. He found a job as an actor for Biograph, which was headquartered in a converted Manhattan mansion. Sennett joined the company around the same time as a writer/actor named David Wark Griffith. Within months, D. W. Griffith was Biograph’s head director, and many of his films featured Sennett; the director thought the burly, dark-eyed Irish Canadian had a memorable appearance and used him in mostly oafish bit parts like “gypsy” and “peddler.” The Canadian and the Kentuckian shared a passion for walking, and while strolling Manhattan’s streets, the former absorbed all he could from the latter about the infant art of moving pictures. Of Griffith, Sennett said, “He was my day school, my adult education program, my university.”

  Cinema’s first great filmmaker, D. W. Griffith was humor-deficient, as were most of his movies. It was Sennett who began directing and writing Biograph’s comedies in late 1910. If Griffith was his university, the otherwise barely educated Sennett earned a graduate degree in comedy on his own, reading comedic short stories and plays and all he could about directing theatrical comedy. Via trial and error, he deduced the timing necessary for generating laughs in two dimensions without sound.

  In July 1912, having helmed more than one hundred shorts for Biograph but frustrated with the meager financial rewards and eager for more autonomy, Sennett broke away from the studio, accepting an offer to run a new comedic film company for Charles Baumann and Adam Kessel. The budding producers had been poaching Biograph talent for the previous two years, and when Sennett partnered with them, he brought along not only Virginia Rappe’s future boyfriend Henry Lehrman but also his own girlfriend, actress Mabel Normand, as well as actor Ford Sterling. Baumann and Kessel supplied $2,500 in seed money, and as equal partners with Sennett, they launched Keystone Pictures Studio, which shot a handful of movies in New York and New Jersey before Sennett, Sterling, Normand, and Lehrman headed west.

  Keystone opened up shop in a former horse ranch east of Hollywood, in a part of Los Angeles that is now Silver Lake but was then called Edendale. Expanding by both buying and constructing a hodgepodge of buildings, it became the Fun Factory, a plant devoted to churning out comedies as efficiently as Ford assembled Model Ts. “Overnight our place was busting its seams with idiotics. Anything went, and every fool thing you might think of under the influence of hashish or a hangover went big. We were awash with pretty women, clowns, and storytellers who couldn’t write. We made a million dollars so fast my fingers ached from trying to count.” So said Sennett in his 1954 autobiography, embracing and enlarging the mythos of Keystone as the studio that rewrote the rules of comedy by subverting conventions on-screen as well as off.

  Keystone’s dubious press releases presented it as a madhouse and its employees as the instigators and/or victims of chaos: a script editor worked on a pile of logs; Sennett and actor Fred Mace were chased through a park by a bear; Ford Sterling was nearly turned to dust in an exploding taxicab. The industry press greeted the stream of “shocking but true” stories with some skepticism but promulgated them nonetheless. Keystone even shot “behind-the-scenes” films, imbuing its casting calls and productions with slapstick antics.

  There was at least one true eccentric at Keystone. Mack Sennett reveled in his persona as the original Beverly Hillbilly. He wore a Panama hat with the crown cut out, believing sunshine on his prematurely gray and perpetually chaotic hair would stave off baldness. He rode on horseback around the lot every morning. For “health,” he breakfasted on raw radishes and onions and downed whiskey shots. Stains from the tobacco he chewed colored his ill-fitting suits. He had a gargantuan marble and silver bathtub installed in his office on the top floor of the lot’s tallest building, and while bathing daily, he surveyed his employees down below and gave orders, drafted letters, and held story and business conferences. After each lengthy bath, his flesh was kneaded by a Turkish ex-wrestler.

  There were few motion picture conventions in the infant industry, and the lack of sound was the greatest liberator. Constricted by neither dialogue nor microphones, most of Keystone’s stories were improvised after sketching out threadbare plots, and all of Southern California was the studio’s backlot. Its filmmakers shot performers amid public events big and small, from the World’s Fair to a bakery fire. The lake, streets, and houses near the studio appeared in movie after movie. Sennett’s greatest innovation was speed—the accelerated editing pace of chase scenes and fights, the breakneck repetition that drew giggles into guffaws. Presaging the animated shorts of later decades, the films’ violence often escalated to crashes through walls, fired bullets, and exploded bombs, and yet the victim always rose again with no greater damage than a blackened face and a frown. Critics dismissed the movies as vulgar, and yet that vulgarity—as with vaudeville and burlesque—appealed to the average moviegoer. Keystone comedies embraced a contorted logic all their own. They were live-action cartoons for adults.

  Watching the early Keystone flicks today, their weaknesses are as apparent as their strengths. Plots are vaporous and repeatedly recycled. Acting can veer into wild pantomime. Racial and ethnic stereotypes abound. Much screen time is merely filler before the next round of mayhem. Still, you wait for the infectious moment when the uppity heiress lands in the lake or the Keystone Kops give chase in cars, bicycles, and shoes but can’t quite catch the crook. Or when, again and again, a fat man falls.

  In early April 1913 Roscoe Arbuckle got off the trolley car wearing his best white suit and strolled onto the bustling Keystone studio lot in Edendale. He met Mabel Normand, he met Mack Sennett, and he was hired for a salary of three dollars per day—40 percent less than he’d made for his film debut four years prior. The popularity of movies was rising in 1913, however, and Arbuckle likely felt motion pictures could provide greater long-term financial security than vaudeville.

  Other histories say that Arbuckle’s nephew Al St. John followed his uncle to Keystone, but the opposite is true. On the heels of an acrobatic vaudeville career, in which his specialty was bicycle tricks, the gawky, loose-limbed St. John had begun doing bit parts for Keystone the previous January. The nineteen-year-old likely introduced Uncle Roscoe, just
six and a half years his senior, to Sennett. St. John, Henry Lehrman, and Sennett himself all acted in Arbuckle’s first Keystone film, Murphy’s I.O.U., released on April 17, 1913.

  Sennett called Keystone “a university of nonsense where, if an actor or actress had any personality at all, that personality developed in full blossom without inhibition.” Still, he was initially oblivious to Arbuckle’s skills. The new arrival was relegated to background roles—until another Keystone trailblazer intervened.

  If Mack Sennett was the King of Comedy, Mabel Normand was the Queen. Born into poverty in 1893 in New York City, she was an accomplished swimmer and diver as a teen and labored in a garment factory before taking up modeling and working as a bit player at Biograph. There she met Mack Sennett. For greater opportunities, she moved to Vitagraph, where she usually played a mischievous comic character named Betty, but Sennett encouraged her to return to Biograph. By August 1911 she was back in the fold, acting first in D. W. Griffith’s dramas and then almost exclusively as the star of Sennett comedies. She was a dark-haired, doe-eyed pixie with a coy smile, and the camera loved her. So did the man behind it.

  Contentious romantic relationships between directors and actresses are now a Hollywood cliché, but Mack and Mabel were the first and set the template.* He was a gray-haired bear in ill-fitting clothes who never shed his rural Canadian sensibility; she was short and slender, fashionable, almost fourteen years younger, a native New Yorker. But they shared a contagious sense of humor, dedication to their developing crafts, and a laissez-faire attitude toward many of life’s concerns.