by Greg Merritt
Arbuckle clammed up when Dominguez returned to the car. Born into one of California’s original Spanish families, Frank Dominguez resembled an older version of Arbuckle, every bit as rotund but with white hair rimming his bald head. Regarded as one of the premier attorneys in Los Angeles, he had the wealth and celebrity friends to show for it. He enlisted Charles Brennan, an experienced lawyer who knew San Francisco’s authorities and reporters. Brennan met Arbuckle and Dominguez outside San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. So did police detectives. And so did the press, firing a barrage of questions that went mostly unanswered.
Ushered by the detectives, Brennan accompanied Arbuckle and Dominguez when, at 8:30 that Saturday evening, they pushed past reporters and photographers and climbed the steps to the San Francisco Hall of Justice. In case the worst happened and Arbuckle was charged with manslaughter, Brennan carried in a briefcase $5,000 in hundred-dollar bills, more than enough for any bail. But all were confident the spectacular show of wealth would be unnecessary.
Arbuckle released a statement regarding the events in room 1219. In it he contradicted his previous quote by saying, “[I] have known Miss Rappe for the last five years.” (He would later claim he was initially misquoted.) He otherwise reiterated his previous recollection of events: After “a few drinks,” Rappe became hysterical and complained of difficulty breathing and began ripping off her clothes. Two “girls” disrobed her and placed her in a tub. When that failed to help, he called the hotel manager. “I was at no time alone with Miss Rappe.”
He and his attorneys were ushered into room 17, where assistant district attorneys Milton U’Ren and Isadore Golden informed them they had sworn affidavits from witnesses Alice Blake, Zey Prevost, and Maude Delmont, all claiming Arbuckle had assaulted Rappe and was responsible for her death. Dominguez had instructed his client to admit to only Prohibition violations and not answer the assistant DAs and detectives. It’s unlikely the movie star could have talked his way out of arrest, not in San Francisco with the rabid press just outside the door, but as the interrogation progressed, the assistant DAs grew angered by Arbuckle’s stoicism. Sworn witnesses had said one thing; Arbuckle said nothing. He was as silent as his movies.
“Roscoe Arbuckle will not even admit that his name is Roscoe Arbuckle,” Dominguez declared.
After three fruitless hours, Arbuckle was allowed to leave room 17. He consulted with Dominguez while the assistant district attorneys conferenced. Shortly thereafter, just before midnight, Roscoe Arbuckle was arrested for the murder of Virginia Rappe.
Murder.
The charge: violating section 189 of the California Penal Code, which defines first-degree murder to include a killing “which is committed in the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate … rape.” There would be no bail, as it was forbidden for a murder charge in California.
Murder.
There was his life before the arrest and his life after. From that moment on, nothing would be the same.
In the hallway, reporters crowded him, demanding a statement, but the stunned movie star offered none. Photographers fired off boxlike cameras while holding up trays of magnesium flash powder that ignited with bursts of light and smoke, like bombs exploding, over the hats of shouting, jostling men. When photographers asked Arbuckle to smile, he replied, “Not on an occasion of this sort.”
He is unsmiling in his mug shots, which label him inmate number 32052. His bow tie is woefully uneven. His weight was 266 pounds; his height was 5’83/8”; occupation “actor,” hair “medium chestnut,” eyes “blue,” complexion “ruddy.” Two distinguishing marks were noted: a scar at the root of his nose and another on the fourth finger of his right hand.
Arbuckle made no postarrest statement, but Captain of Detectives Duncan Matheson said, “This woman without a doubt died as a result of an attack by Arbuckle. That makes it first degree murder without a doubt. We don’t feel that a man like ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle can pull stuff like this in San Francisco and get away with it.” A man like “Fatty” Arbuckle was any nouveau riche partier from Los Angeles. In statements, both Assistant DA U’Ren and Chief of Police Daniel O’Brien noted Arbuckle’s refusal to answer the charges against him.*
The top floor of the Hall of Justice was the jail, and its “felon’s row” was a long corridor lined with cells. Cell 12 was Roscoe Arbuckle’s new home. It was six by six with three walls of solid steel and a fourth of steel bars. The ceiling, too, was bars of steel. There were three wooden bunks stacked vertically, a wooden bench, and a washstand. As he stood just inside the door, void of the wallet he had given his lawyers, he asked for some of his money, and a jailer said, “You don’t need money in here.”
“Are you going to give me a partner in here?” Arbuckle asked.
“Do you want one?” the jailer replied.
“No, I guess I’ll sleep better alone.”
The door swung shut and locked. Arbuckle rigged up a way to hang his overcoat and jacket. Eventually, when all was dark and quiet but for stirring and snoring in the neighboring cells, Roscoe Arbuckle was alone in the dark under a blanket on a wooden bunk. Unable to sleep, he sat up several times to smoke cigarettes. He was not a religious man, but many an agnostic in his position would hedge his bet. If, as he lay there then, he gazed upward in prayer, he may have seen, in the gloom above his cell’s bars but below the black abyss of the jail’s ceiling, a walkway and, staring down at him, a guard with a gun.
In churches across the nation that Sunday morning, preachers condemned the alleged murderer. Fatty Arbuckle had long been a Hollywood archetype on-screen—the unruly, not-so-innocent man/boy—and now he came to symbolize Hollywood offscreen: a Gomorrah unrestrained by adherence to Christian morality. “The shame of it all,” preached Reverend John Snape of Oakland’s First Baptist Church, “is that good people like you in this congregation make possible the continuance of such a man before the public.”
The first cancellation of an Arbuckle film had occurred in San Francisco on Saturday as its star was returning to the city: Crazy to Marry was pulled from two theaters. Before Sunday was through, San Francisco theater owners joined together to ban Fatty movies throughout the city. Also on Sunday, Gasoline Gus was pulled from the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles—the very theater in which Arbuckle had met with witnesses and advisers at midnight the day before. What’s more, owner Sid Grauman and his father had known the star for years, having cultivated the teenage Arbuckle’s singing career, and the Million Dollar Theatre was where Arbuckle had been scheduled to promote the film on Labor Day. The swiftness with which Grauman pulled Gasoline Gus, a popular movie with only one day of its run remaining, sent shockwaves through Hollywood.*
Here was proof that the studios’ worst fear was coming true. The public outrage had only just begun, and already it was shrinking box office grosses. The fear was greatest at Paramount Pictures. Its biggest star was now an accused murderer. Paramount had released two of his films over the previous month. It had two in the can. It had four in development. Panic reigned.
Still, the most prominent member of the motion picture community came forward to support his friend on that first Sunday. Vacationing in his native London, Charlie Chaplin averred, “There’s nothing like that in his makeup. On the coast, Fatty is popular with everybody, and I hope he will be proved innocent.”
Upon waking, Arbuckle had no toiletries. Soap, a towel, and a comb were lent to him by a fellow inmate—a recent prison escapee who claimed to know witness Zey Prevost. The two men walked the corridor together, talking. “I’m through with booze. Forever. No more,” Arbuckle was heard to say.
Residents of the San Francisco City Jail with the financial wherewithal could order food from outside, thus Arbuckle’s Sunday morning breakfast of eggs, toast, and coffee came courtesy of a nearby restaurant. The prison barber shaved him. Then the most famous resident ever locked in the San Francisco City Jail held a sort of meet and greet with his new neighbors. Chatting with the other accused felons, he a
nswered their questions and accepted their sympathy. “He’s a regular guy,” one noted.
Throughout that Sunday, investigators took depositions from witnesses and searched for any available evidence. In one of the case’s strangest developments, Los Angeles police, acting on instructions from their San Francisco counterparts, went to the Hollywood home of Al Semnacher and there took possession of a woman’s silk shirt (missing three of five buttons) and a woman’s tattered silk undergarments. They had been worn by Virginia Rappe at the party one week prior. Semnacher said he found them on the floor of room 1219 and took them to dust his automobile. Rappe’s outer garments—the jade skirt and blouse she had made herself and the white Panama hat with the jade band—were in a closet in a Hotel St. Francis guest room occupied by Rappe’s other travel companion, Maude Delmont.
On Sunday evening, Arbuckle met with his attorneys, then including his usual lawyer, Milton Cohen. Subsequently, the movie star asked for better accommodations but was denied, for there was only one sort of room on felon’s row: small and bleak. Telling a jailer “It’s too lonesome alone,” he was allowed a cellmate, and he selected Fred Martin, described in the press as “a laborer accused of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” The man who made the whole world laugh told others in his cellblock: “I’ve heard often of ‘Blue Sunday,’ but until today I never knew what it meant.” In retrospect, Blue Sunday was but a repose before Black Monday.
* While there were scattered radio stations then, the medium as we know it today was born in 1922 with a major wave of proliferation. Time, America’s first general-interest weekly newsmagazine, was launched in 1923.
* By 1924 its circulation of 750,000 would make it the best-read (or best-browsed) newspaper in America.
* O’Brien did not share Matheson’s antagonism toward Hollywood, as he and Mayor James Rolph frequently greeted film royalty. O’Brien’s son, George, became a movie star, best remembered for his lead role in Sunrise (1927).
* Grauman offered no comment for pulling Gasoline Gus. He likely feared the midnight meeting would tarnish him and his theater, and thus he hoped to diminish criticism.
{9}
MUDDLE: 1915-16
A film is a ribbon of dreams.
—ORSON WELLES
It was like a magical spell—seated in the dark staring up at life projected bigger than life, cowboys and swashbucklers and a little tramp, a sinking ocean liner, a patchwork girl, and the assassination of President Lincoln. The first American feature-length films had screened in 1912. Lasting approximately an hour, they commanded two or three times the nickel admission of shorts and won greater prestige. Beginning in February 1915, The Birth of a Nation, a motion picture that lasted more than three hours, reined in more viewers than any other film of the silent era. Frequently banned and legally challenged, everyone knew about it, and seemingly everyone had an opinion.*
As movie running times grew, feature-length films before and after The Birth of a Nation migrated from nickelodeons to larger venues with larger ticket prices, including converted playhouses and what were called movie palaces, with velvet curtains and pseudoclassical names.* In the best movie houses, full orchestras played and choruses sang. (Composers wrote scores, and the sheet music was distributed with the celluloid prints.) Shades of gray were replaced with tinted color: amber for daylight scenes and blue for night scenes; lavender for scenes of passion, green for danger, red for fury.† No longer was the audience made up almost exclusively of the working class. By 1915 everyone was enchanted.
Movie stars were no longer just famous faces, familiar in their onscreen personas but otherwise anonymous. Audiences knew their names and hungered for details about their personal lives. The original nameless celebrity, the Biograph Girl, had been the first to break out, when the company that became Universal Pictures lured her to sign with them in 1910 and masterfully marketed her name, Florence Lawrence, via advertisements and pioneering personal appearance tours.‡ She soon had company. Beginning in 1914 MARY PICKFORD was splayed boldly across theater marquees above the titles of her films. Pickford was the first movie superstar. Hollywood went into the fame business, and the young studios looked for ways to promote not just their movies but their performers as well.
Studio publicity worked hand in hand with a new presence in the industry: movie fan magazines. The first such publications, Motion Picture Story and Photoplay, had been launched in 1911, but they were mostly filled with movie-based short stories until Photoplay reinvented itself in early 1915 with a focus on the off screen lives of actors.* Photoplay was the first true celebrity magazine, and it ushered a larger female audience into movie theaters. Before 1915 was done, thirteen additional magazines emphasizing Hollywood fame were launched.
An article in the August 1915 edition of Photoplay, “Heavyweight Athletics,” covered the eating habits of Roscoe Arbuckle. His ideal dinner: “Martini or Bronx, crabmeat cocktail, dozen raw oysters, thin soup, stuffed celery parisienne, cold artichokes with mayonnaise, fried salmon steak or sand dabs, hungarian goulash with homemade noodles, roast turkey with dressing and cranberry sauce, fresh asparagus, green peas, stewed corn, fresh pastry, Roquefort cheese with toasted crackers, large cup of coffee.” This and similar “athletic” feats of calorie consumption were surely exaggerated; Arbuckle had an average appetite.
But the celebrity press, intertwined with Keystone publicity, presented a portrait of Arbuckle more in line with the role he played onscreen: that of a man with unchecked and outsized appetites. To that end, they also exaggerated his weight, athletic ability, and gambling habits, and implied a seemingly unquenchable thirst for alcohol. In the same Photoplay article, Arbuckle shared an admonition: “Do not drink more than six steins of beer during the course of the meal.”
Eleven floors below room 1219, six years and six months before the fateful Labor Day, Roscoe Arbuckle sat on a plush chair beneath a rococo ceiling in the palatial lobby of the Hotel St. Francis, drinking a highball.
While much of the world in April 1915 was embroiled in World War I, San Francisco was staging a World’s Fair, ostensibly to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal the previous August but primarily to advertise the city’s recovery from the 1906 earthquake. The same World’s Fair that attracted an ambitious model and fashion designer named Virginia Rappe also brought Roscoe Arbuckle. The Keystone cast and crew were there to shoot two movies, both directed by Arbuckle and starring him and Mabel Normand. As they waited out the rain, Arbuckle, Normand, another Keystone actress, and Keystone moneyman Adam Kessel sat in the St. Francis lobby for an interview with Flickerings from Film Land columnist Kitty Kelly.
While dramatic feature films were the rage, Kessel explained the Keystone formula for comedy shorts: attract children and their parents will follow. “I cater to the kids,” Arbuckle said, before explaining how a famous operatic concerto waited twenty minutes to meet him because her eight children “are so crazy about these Keystone pictures. I really felt much complimented.” Still, the column’s prevailing image is Arbuckle “blinking unconcernedly at his highball.” It is likely this cocktail consumption was encouraged by Kessel. If his image demanded such indulgences, the star would oblige.
With the departure of Chaplin, Arbuckle and Normand were the top box office draws at Keystone. Sennett returned to the “Bunnyfinch” formula, pairing them as husband and wife and highlighting the twosome in titles such as Mabel and Fatty’s Wash Day, Fatty and Mabel’s Simple Life, and Mabel and Fatty’s Married Life. These sound like anything but must-see cinema, but their coupling meant childish playfulness and slapstick shenanigans within an adult plot. Audiences loved them.
Both Keystone stars were making $500 weekly, but Arbuckle was nursing some discontent. Sennett had offered the upstart Chaplin $750 a week to renew his contract, only to watch him defect to Essanay for even more. And the studio head had paid Broadway star Marie Dressler, a big-screen rookie, $2,500 weekly to headline Tillie’s Punctured Romance, cinema’s first
feature-length comedy.* The 1914 production had been directed by Sennett and featured, with one exception, the entire Keystone company at the time, including Chaplin, Normand, Al St. John, and Minta Durfee. The exception was Arbuckle. According to legend, the full-figured Dressler insisted Keystone’s rotund star not appear onscreen for fear he would upstage her. Arbuckle was feeling underpaid and underappreciated.
Arbuckle’s pay was spent as quickly as he got it. “Roscoe bought me a Rolls Royce, the first one in Hollywood with a genuine silver radiator,” Durfee remembered. “And jewels, my darling, like you’ve never seen. He was the most generous man on earth. I never knew a man as generous as he was, not only to me but to everybody. He couldn’t say no to anyone. Roscoe used to give me all the money he didn’t spend himself. My dear, I’ve sat with thousands and thousands of dollars in my purse. Roscoe always said, ‘I’ll make it, darlin’, and you spend it.’”
At least others in his Santa Monica home were bringing home star salaries as well. In addition to his wife, their dog was making many times more than most working stiffs. Pit bull Luke’s cinematic debut came in January 1915, and since celebrities were manufactured overnight at the Fun Factory, two months later he was headlining in Fatty’s Faithful Fido, stealing scenes and pulling off stunts, some involving ladder climbing, for which the canine had a preternatural proficiency. Luke would appear in ten Fatty movies over five years, and whether the two were sharing a sandwich, drinking from the same garden hose, or snuggling in straw, the affection between Fatty and his dog registers in scene after scene. Theirs was a love story, on- and offscreen.
