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

by Greg Merritt

  After which a cocaine-sniffing actress announced, “I want the most beautiful man here. I am his.” This was presumably the start of the orgy part of the orgy, but the detectives then pounded at the door. When it was finally opened, all evidence had been destroyed or concealed and the host had escaped.

  Likewise, a headline in the Denver Post that Thursday reads like something from the Onion today: NARCOTICS NEEDLES TURNED TAME PARTY AT HOLLYWOOD INTO ASTOUNDING SUCCESS. Indeed. Suddenly, every Hollywood rumor, scandal, and peccadillo was dragged into the morning light in the morning paper. A short United Press story, which ran on the front pages of numerous newspapers on Monday, linked Rappe’s death with six other Hollywood “scandals,” including Charlie Chaplin’s divorce on grounds of cruelty, that previous Arbuckle “orgy”—described as a “girl and wine revel”—and the accidental death by poisoning of actress Olive Thomas, who in September 1920 mistakenly drank a solution of mercury bichloride.*

  A September 13 editorial in the Los Angeles Times was equivocal on Arbuckle’s guilt in the Rappe case but nonetheless offered:

  For three or four years the smart set in the movies has been traveling at a furious pace. Their marital infidelities have clogged the pages of the divorce records. They have taken supreme delight in flinging their money from the windows. However moderate might be the pictures they produced, in real life the machine was always running in the high. Now one of the fastest of the furious set has driven his machine into the ditch…. The Times trusts that the example will prove a salutary warning to others who have been going at a similar pace; for Arbuckle is not the only cinema star who has given mixed parties at which the host received the guests clad only in bath robe and pajamas.

  The constant drumbeat about the Labor Day “orgy” attended by those in and around the movie industry, the linkage of it with other such “orgies” and “scandals,” and a rash of moralistic editorials all painted Hollywood as Babylon. This rocked the movie industry and had censorious repercussions for decades to come.

  But the greatest impact that first week was to Arbuckle’s reputation. He had gone from a beloved comedy icon to, at best, a degenerate lout deserving of universal condemnation, and, at worst, a rapist and murderer deserving of the gallows. His physique, previously a signifier of joie de vivre, suddenly symbolized carnality and unbridled impulsiveness. On Tuesday the Denver Post printed a front-page artist’s illustration of a pitiful Arbuckle behind bars in which he seemed twice as heavy as his 266 pounds and twice as old as his thirty-four years. The next day, the same paper published an article entitled “Arbuckle’s Fat Is to Blame for His Trouble, Declares Famous Psycho-Analyst,” wherein the psychoanalyst proclaimed that “the hundred too many pounds rolling over the film comedian’s body is so much moral weakness and potential crime.” That reads nearly complimentary next to a Dayton Daily News editorial: “Arbuckle is a gross, common, bestial, drunken individual, and it is perfectly apparent that he has never deserved the patronage he has received. This is not his first escapade. Filled up with liquor, his low bestiality asserts itself in treating a woman like a grizzly bear would a calf.”

  Whereas before, Arbuckle had been revered as the working-class vaudevillian whose wealth came via talent and long hours of labor, he was now portrayed as a lucky-to-be-rich degenerate living outside society’s norms. Envy clearly fueled some of the reaction. An editorial in the Atlanta Constitution entitled “Ruined by Wealth” averred, “Arbuckle, made suddenly famous because his grotesque figure and comical antics before the camera was amusing to the ‘moviegoing’ world, accumulated money so rapidly that his most difficult problem was to spend it as fast as it came up.”

  Newspaper photographs of Arbuckle captured him either unsmiling and pensive, as if troubled by what he had done, or in his Fatty character—the mischievous, somewhat lecherous man-boy in the undersized bowler. In contrast, the press never tired of publishing glamour shots of smiling Rappe, frequently referred to as “the best dressed girl of the movies.” Many of her photos were five or more years old and thus served to emphasize her youth and vitality. Photo montages with titles like “Once in Happy Repose” and “Beautiful, Laughing Virginia Rappe in Film Scenes” grabbed attention. Sometimes lurking nearby would be a dour or ridiculous shot of Arbuckle. Sometimes the photo of one would overlap the other, as if he was interrupting her carefree life. Plastered across the front page of Thursday’s San Francisco Examiner was a spiderweb, spun via an illustrator’s pen, ensnaring photographs. In the center was arachnid Arbuckle and two bottles of booze while around him was his prey, seven female guests at the Labor Day party, including Rappe. This striking image was entitled “They Walked into His Parlor,” and the caption began, “Caught in the web spun lightly at an afternoon ‘party’ a week ago, the eight persons shown in the above photographic cartoon today find the mealies still sticking to them.”

  Open up the New York American the day before and you would have found “Hope for Fame Lured Actress to Her Death” and its assertion that “the lure of ‘something better’ in her motion picture career, possibly, the stardom she had craved for years but never had attained, was the snare with which Roscoe Arbuckle, charged with her murder, enticed Virginia Rappe into his net.” Outside of statements from his relatives, friends, and coworkers (and the loyalty of his dog) and biographical articles that sketched his improbable rise to superstardom, the preponderance of press that first week cast Arbuckle in a negative light and often presumed his guilt. He was the spoiled movie star who knew no boundaries, forever seeking the next thrill, openly disdainful of his marriage, a gaudy beast, Fatty. Rappe was the stylish but innocent beauty lured into his lair, engaged to marry, perpetually smiling, Virgin Rape.*

  Arbuckle’s defense attorneys faced a seemingly unwinnable war. The prospects of even assembling an impartial jury were dim after the ceaseless barrage of vitriol from the Bay Area newspapers. On Tuesday the San Francisco Examiner published the following portrait of the man who, until recently, made the whole world laugh:

  But in his innermost soul, deeper than the casual eye can reach, slept the Arbuckle that Virginia Rappe knew. Sated with money, contemptuous of success from years of familiarity with its constant presence, bored by life’s decency, scornful of straight roads, disdainful of what men call honor, bathing his decadent soul in every fountain of viciousness which lines the by-roads of life, on his shoulders the mantle of lawlessness, on his head the Grape leaves of Bacchus.

  “Roscoe Arbuckle is just a great big, lovable, pleasure-loving, overgrown boy whose success and prosperity have been a little too much for him, but he is not guilty of the hideous charge made against him in San Francisco.” So said the ever-supportive Minta Durfee in New York City on Tuesday while preparing for a five-day train trip to San Francisco. She had been vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard with her mother and had not learned of her estranged husband’s arrest until she received a telegram from her sister on Sunday night. The next day, mother and daughter returned to Manhattan to find reporters had staked out the lobby of Durfee’s midtown apartment building.

  By Tuesday Durfee was ready to talk. “I am going to him because I think it is my duty to be near him. I want to help him in any way I can.” Speculation was swirling about the Arbuckle marriage; that day, the New York Times reported the “rumor” that the couple had recently separated. Durfee, who suddenly preferred the name “Mrs. Arbuckle,” clarified: “Five years ago we agreed to disagree and I received a separation maintenance…. A reconciliation? That depends on whether I find that my place is with him and whether he finds that he is ready to return to the life we led when we were married, when I was his inspiration. All I know now is that I am going to a friend who needs every bit of help he can get.”

  As ordered, star witness Mrs. Bambina Maude Delmont took the stand at the coroner’s inquest on Tuesday morning. She wore black, like a mourner—or a villain. The press described her as a “beauty specialist.” In a photo of her from that day, her head is tilted sli
ghtly, chin up, as if in defiance, black hat over her graying black hair. Gray eyes glare from under weary lids; a dim frown tugs downward the corners of her thin, closed lips. Despite this rigid appearance, she was described as “an exceedingly nervous witness” who took frequent drinks of water. Perhaps this was due to Arbuckle’s presence nearby; he stared at her throughout her testimony, averting his gaze only to whisper to an attorney.

  Delmont recounted a tale that mostly clung to her affidavit and previous statements—but with a few crucial modifications, principally that Arbuckle did not take hold of Rappe nor drag her into the room. Her account was punctuated by Rappe saying, “I am hurt! I am dying! He did it!” with he being Arbuckle. “Right from the start,” Delmont testified, “Virginia accused Roscoe—she always called him that—but she didn’t want anyone to tell Lehrman about it.” Thus, Delmont served up the crucial accusation from Rappe’s lips and placed Arbuckle there to hear the dying woman and not deny it.

  Still, her account was erratic. Coroner Leland frequently cautioned her to “consider your statements well.” “Maybe I was leading you,” he said once after a question and affirmative answer. “Sometimes people go to sleep and just say ‘yes.’”

  Bizarrely, Delmont replied, “I’m not asleep, for I had a little hypodermic before I came here and I’m all right.” What drug was in that hypodermic is unknown.

  As for why she was wearing a pair of Lowell Sherman’s pajamas at the Labor Day party, she said she had grown warm from dancing. And as for her Prohibition violation, she seemed to revel in it, confessing to drinking from her own pint of whiskey on the Saturday ride from Los Angeles. (Though consuming liquor in one’s own home or a private residence in which one was an invited guest was not illegal, transporting liquor was.) When the coroner asked her what she did after the doctor came to 1219, she replied, “Oh, the [hotel] detective, he was very nice; he and I went back and drank all the gin and orange juice.” She claimed Rappe had had three orange blossoms, and of Rappe’s accused murderer she said, “It impressed me that Arbuckle was more intoxicated than anyone else in the party. He was just a little gone. He showed it in his eyes and by being very talkative. He was not staggering or anything of that sort.” But Delmont was likely not an astute judge of anyone else’s state of mind on that previous Monday, having, by her own admission under oath, consumed “eight or ten” whiskeys at the party.

  The coroner asked, “How do you know what happened if you had so many drinks of whiskey?”

  Delmont replied, “My memory is always good.”

  Nurses Jean Jameson and Vera Cumberland were two presumably impartial witnesses who had heard from the ill Rappe in the days before her death. Each testified in ways that aided the defense, with the former testifying that Rappe claimed she “had been suffering for six weeks with internal trouble” and the latter saying, “The patient admitted to me that her relations with Arbuckle in the room had not been proper.” Both corroborated one element of Delmont’s testimony, recalling that Rappe had expressed anxiety about Henry Lehrman hearing of the events in 1219, indicating that she still had strong feelings for him. Their inquest testimony barely registered in the press.

  Al Semnacher explained that he had not been at the party during the events in question and only returned around the time the assistant manager was called. When he next saw Rappe on the bed, she was naked. According to him, she was not much of a drinker (“I have seen her take one or two drinks and get dizzy”), and he reiterated his odd reasoning for taking her torn clothing, which was introduced as evidence: “I thought the shirtwaist would make a nice dust cloth for my machine [car].” When he visited Rappe on the day after Labor Day, she supposedly told him, “Roscoe hurt me.” Salesman Ira Fortlouis, having been asked to leave the party before Rappe grew ill, proved not much of a witness.

  Because Alice Blake and Zey Prevost still had yet to testify, the jury could not deliberate, and the coroner once again chastised the prosecution. The DA’s office assured the coroner the two women would testify the next day. Once again, Roscoe Arbuckle was led toward cell 12, ignoring the barrage of reporters’ questions and the smoky explosions of cameras.

  Some of those reporters captured the confrontation when Semnacher stopped to say good-bye to Delmont. She asked why he hadn’t brought Rappe’s “aunt” to the proceedings from Los Angeles, and he replied that he was not aware Kate Hardebeck was without money, and he had left for San Francisco in the middle of the night.

  Growing excited, Delmont asked, “Well, what am I going to do about my bills at the St. Francis? They come to about $250.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Semnacher replied.

  “Well, if you were a man you’d pay them. And what am I going to do about my baggage?”

  “Why, Maude, you know the only baggage you have is in that little handbag you’re holding.”

  Enraged, Delmont shrieked and swung the bag with all her force at Semnacher’s face, missing.* “You dirty dog! Get out of here!” she screamed as she was subdued by policemen.

  Leaving the room, Semnacher remarked, “Why should I pay her bills? I’m under no obligations to her.”

  Subsequently, and presumably at her request, Henry Lehrman wired Delmont money to cover her stay at the St. Francis.

  Also on Tuesday, Arbuckle was taken to a Prohibition office, where officials had opened an investigation the day before to determine who supplied the alcohol for the Labor Day party. He was questioned for nearly an hour but denied knowledge of any alcohol in his room, despite the discovery of two whiskey bottles in 1219’s wastebasket after the party. His repeated answer to repeated questions about the booze was “Never had any.”

  District Attorney Brady’s strategy was evolving. He knew after her coroner’s inquest testimony that Maude Delmont was unlikely to fend off many blows under cross-examination in a criminal trial. Thus, two previously unknown chorus girls who dreamed of show business success and answered to stage names grew in importance. If Zey Prevost and Alice Blake—friends with no one at the party except each other—could back up Delmont’s version of events, then Brady believed a murder conviction was likely. The problem was that Prevost refused to tell the grand jury what she had told detectives on one occasion and prosecutors on another: that Rappe had said, “I’m dying. I’m dying. He killed me.” She claimed she’d been frightened and confused when questioned before.

  Accompanied by her mother, Prevost was escorted to the Hall of Justice by police. Meanwhile, Blake was brought in by a family friend who claimed she had gone into hiding to save her wealthy Oakland family from embarrassment. Separately, prosecutors endeavored to get both showgirls to sign statements to back up Delmont’s charge that Rappe said, in Arbuckle’s presence, “He did it”—a less precise accusation than “He killed me.” Both eventually did. Prevost’s new recollection: “He hurt me, he hurt me. I am dying. I am dying. I am dying.”

  Brady called the grand jury to session again at 8 PM on Tuesday and produced three witnesses: Zey Prevost, Alice Blake, and Grace Halston, the nurse at the first autopsy. The chorus girls backed up Delmont’s version of events, though they still vacillated on specifics. Crucially, the grand jury had heard Prevost give a different account the day before, so it is unclear how much this “makeup” reappearance helped the prosecution.

  The grand jury’s decision came in Wednesday’s first hours. In the death of Virginia Rappe, Roscoe Arbuckle should be indicted for involuntary manslaughter—a killing committed without malice aforethought. (A manslaughter conviction had a maximum penalty of ten years imprisonment.) However, Brady still had Delmont’s first-degree murder complaint ready to proceed in police court, and he was hopeful the coroner’s inquest would bolster it by recommending a murder trial.

  In the morning in cell 12, Arbuckle was getting dressed when he heard the news from a guard that he had been indicted for manslaughter by the grand jury. He made no remark but told his cellmate Martin he had not slept well. His and Martin’s restaurant breakfa
st was delivered, as was Arbuckle’s usual stack of letters and telegrams.

  “I protest in the name of this state against these girls being called. For them to testify will be detrimental to the case of the state.” So said Matthew Brady at Wednesday morning’s coroner’s inquest. The girls were Blake and Prevost, by then household names, and Brady did not want the defense to have a record of their inquest testimony, revealing possible discrepancies. “I repeat that there are but two people who know exactly what took place in that hotel room. One of them is dead. The body of Virginia Rappe, lying in the morgue, cannot speak. The other one is Roscoe Arbuckle, and he is in this room. Call him if you want the facts.”

  Dominguez lifted his rotund form from his seat at the counsel’s table in order to forcefully assert that Arbuckle was within his rights not to testify. Coroner Leland deliberated with the jury in his chamber and announced that they did not need to hear from Blake and Prevost. In conclusion, Drs. Strange and Ophüls testified again about their autopsies. Ophüls stated that only violence of “some force” could have created Rappe’s bladder rupture. Asked to elaborate on a violent cause, he replied, “Finger pressure.”

  The coroner’s inquest jury began deliberating at noon. As they filed out, Arbuckle tried to light a cigarette, but his shaking hands betrayed him. When the jury returned a decision three and a half hours later, it suggested not just a cause of death but also a means of preventing similar deaths. Leaning forward as the verdict was read by the coroner, Arbuckle trembled slightly at the mention, twice, of his name. After briefly stating the particulars, the verdict read:

  Said rupture was caused by the application of some force which, from the evidence submitted, we believe was applied by one Roscoe Arbuckle, and the undersigned jurors, therefore, charge the said Roscoe Arbuckle with the crime of manslaughter.* We recommend that the District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco, in conjunction with the Grand Jury, the Chief of Police and the Federal Prohibition officials, take steps to prevent a recurrence of affairs similar to the one in which this young woman lost her life, so that San Francisco shall not be made the rendezvous of the debauchee and the gangster.