by Greg Merritt
—MARCEL PROUST, “FILIAL SENTIMENTS OF A PARRICIDE”
An angry mob of 150 men and boys spilled into the movie theater in Thermopolis, Wyoming. Cowboys pointed their six-shooters at the screen and fired, riddling the jolly image of Roscoe Arbuckle with holes. Then they stormed the projection room, ripping the latest Fatty movie from the spools and carrying it into the street, where they set the nitrate ablaze. WYOMING MOB SHOOTS UP FATTY, screamed the front page of a newspaper that same day, September 18, 1921.
The next day, the story made front pages from coast to coast. Few editors could resist such a tale of frontier justice, the good guys riding in with guns blazing to save society from America’s greatest villain. The perfect story. Print it, page 1. Except it was a lie, concocted by the theater’s manager to drum up publicity. Four days later, a brief retraction was buried in middle pages, if it ran at all.
Adolph Zukor wrote to William Hearst, who was not just a newspaper tycoon but also the owner of a movie production company, asking him to tone down his papers’ reportage of the Arbuckle case. “Will do best I can,” Hearst replied curtly but then continued, “It is difficult to keep news out of a newspaper. I agree that certain kinds of publicity [are] detrimental to moving pictures but the people who get into the courts and coroners are responsible. The newspapers are no more responsible than the courts.” The coverage did not change.
Iron walls. Iron bars. Wooden bunks. Wooden bench. Washstand. Beginning his second week of captivity, Roscoe Arbuckle sat in cell 12 on the top floor of the San Francisco Hall of Justice. He chatted with cellmate Fred Martin and others on felon’s row. He read his letters and telegrams.* He smoked. He worried.
On Saturday the seventeenth of September, he’d been arraigned for manslaughter—a formality since District Attorney Brady was proceeding with the murder charge. The next morning, Arbuckle requested that the city newspapers be brought to him, and he read news of the outside world for the first time in over a week. He was visited by his brothers, Arthur (living in San Francisco) and Harry (living in Fresno). For twenty minutes, they sat on a bench. The conversation was unheard, but the famous brother was seen smiling broadly. Perhaps they recounted tales of their deceased parents, of their boarding house in Santa Ana, of their older sisters Lola (deceased) and Nora (living in Los Angeles), of the brief times long ago when they were together under the same roof and a happy family.
District Attorney Brady and Assistant DAs U’Ren and Golden entered the twelfth-floor suite of the Hotel St. Francis on Sunday, accompanied by their principal witnesses: Maude Delmont, Alice Blake, and Zey Prevost. The three women were instructed to arrange the furniture in 1219, 1220, and 1221 as it was on Labor Day. The rooms had been cleaned by a maid and, only two days prior, searched for fingerprints. Now Brady wanted to approximate the conditions of the party. In 1219 he examined marks on the wall and on the small table between the two beds. He listened, in 1220, to the volume of voices in 1219 behind a closed door. He said he was there “to get the lay of the land.”
“Fatty Stands Before Nation with Leering Grin While His Hands Drip Blood” was the title of a sermon delivered that same Sunday by John Roach Straton, one of the country’s foremost evangelists, and widely excerpted in newspapers. Needless to say, it presumed no innocence for the leering grinner with bloody hands. Instead, the sermon averred, “Lured by lust and fueled by liquor, we find him turned into a raging beast, more heartless and brutal than a tiger of the jungle could have been.” Prominent evangelist Robert Shuler stated, “He has assaulted public decency and morality. He has betrayed the thousands of little children who laughed at his antics. He has defied chastity and mocked virtue.” They were just two of the many preachers who condemned Arbuckle that Sunday and for many Sundays thereafter. From America’s pulpits, the movie star was typically presumed guilty of murder. At best, he was a married man in a hotel room cavorting with showgirls, openly consuming alcohol, and pursuing extramarital sex.
There was one notable exception to the homiletic assaults, and it was delivered by America’s premier Protestant preacher, Billy Sunday, whose daughter-in-law Mae Taube had been at the Labor Day party. “I feel sorry for ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle and do not see how any court in the land could convict the fallen idol for murder or manslaughter,” Sunday began. He blamed liquor for Rappe’s death and called for greater funding of Prohibition enforcement. “The girl died, but I believe her death was caused by an accident and not by Roscoe Arbuckle.” He concluded with a cautionary note, invoking an image of Babylon that would later become pervasive. In so doing, he previewed what would eventually be a key defense strategy: tarnishing the victim. “The party of Arbuckle’s was just a case of a modern Belshazzar entertaining. ‘Fatty’ fell for whiskey and wild women.”
Virginia Rappe appeared angelic, shrouded in white silk and adorned with white roses. She lay in her silver casket in the Strother and Dayton funeral parlor on Hollywood Boulevard as thousands milled past for six hours on Sunday.* Among the assortment of bright flora was a bouquet of roses from Maude Delmont with a note that read, “To Virginia: You know I love you as though you were my sister.” As at the San Francisco visitation three days earlier, there was an overwhelming display of lilies from Henry Lehrman to his “brave sweetheart,” though, in an era before commercial airline travel, Lehrman himself remained in New York City.
On Monday morning at Rappe’s funeral, Strother and Dayton’s chapel was filled two hours early with curious strangers, mostly women. The police were enlisted to clear the pews and lock the doors. Afterward, only intimate friends of the deceased were admitted, and police kept at bay the growing throng on Hollywood Boulevard. Among those attending were actress Mildred Harris (Charlie Chaplin’s teenage ex-wife), Al Semnacher, and Rappe’s “adopted aunt and uncle,” Kate and Joseph Harde-beck. The services there and at the burial site were conducted by the rector of Hollywood’s St. Thomas Church. There was no eulogy.
The six pallbearers were a who’s who of Hollywood then and after: directors Al Herman, David Kirkland, and future Oscar winner Norman Taurog (Taurog was a friend of Lehrman’s who oversaw Lehrman’s requests for the funeral and burial); actor Frank Coleman, who performed in three movies with Rappe; comedic actor/director/writer Larry Semon, who achieved great popularity in the early 1920s; and actor Oliver Hardy, recently Semon’s villain of choice, who, with Stan Laurel, went on to form one of cinema’s most beloved comedy duos. They carried Rappe in her flower-shrouded coffin through the parted crowd and to the white hearse parked on the boulevard. Followed by a procession of automobiles, the hearse traveled only a mile to Hollywood Memorial Park (now Hollywood Forever Cemetery). Surrounding streets were clogged with Model Ts, as were lanes inside the cemetery gates. The throng that scurried over graves and clustered around the burial site was estimated at fifteen hundred. The plot was Lehrman’s (his secretary had been buried there two years prior), and it was just four blocks from the home Rappe had shared with the Hardebecks after coming to Hollywood five years prior. There, after a brief ceremony, on the nineteenth day of September 1921, on a gentle slope beside a lily pond, Virginia Rappe was laid to rest.
Frank Dominguez was in Los Angeles as well, digging dirt on the primary prosecution witness, Maude Delmont. Delmont herself remained in San Francisco. From her bed in her room at the Plaza Hotel—where she was cared for by a nurse and guarded by a policewoman—she told the press on Monday, “I’m ready for the defense anytime. All I have to do at the trial is to tell the truth. And all the ‘Fatty’ Arbuckles and Frank Dominguezes in the world won’t be able to shake me. Virginia Rappe was a good girl. Any suggestion to the contrary is a lie and a defamation.”
In an earlier interview, she had admitted her testimony at the coroner’s inquest was weak and sometimes wrong, blaming it on illness and the medication—presumably self-administered with the “hypodermic” she referenced at the time. She said she planned to alter her testimony for the manslaughter trial to shore up her story and “greatly be
nefit the prosecution’s case.”
Also on Monday, Minta Durfee and her mother, Flora Durfee, arrived at the San Francisco Hall of Justice. So Arbuckle’s legal team could coach them not to speak to the press, their train had been met by Milton Cohen and Charles Brennan in Sacramento, after which a boilerplate statement from Durfee about her estranged husband’s innocence was released. In the visitor’s pen of the city jail, Arbuckle embraced his wife. With her mother and his brother Arthur, they talked for thirty minutes.
From a newspaper story on Tuesday, September 20:
Ada Gillifillian, sixteen years old, a farmer’s daughter, was found in a straw stack eighteen miles from home [in southwest Iowa]. She had been without food and water for three days.
“Fatty” Arbuckle was her film favorite and she had pictures of him in her room. She said her mother whipped her when she refused to take them down, so she ran away. When found in a semiconscious condition she had a picture of Arbuckle clasped tightly to her chest.
On Tuesday the San Francisco grand jury took up two new questions. First, was the initial autopsy of Rappe illegal? The accused, Dr. Melville Rumwell, testified. Second, did the defense tamper with a prosecution witness? This stemmed from an allegation that party guest Joyce “Dollie” Clark, fresh off her hat-pilfering conviction, had said, “There is money in this Arbuckle case, and I am going to get some of it.” She and two men (one described as a “man-about-town and sportsman,” the other “president of the Italian-American Oil Company”) allegedly plotted to collect this money from the defense by suggesting that Clark could impeach the testimony of her friend Zey Prevost. The two men had visited Milton Cohen and asked what Clark should say under oath. Cohen’s reply: “Tell the truth.” The grand jury took no action on either matter.
The following day, at DA Brady’s request, a Los Angeles grand jury questioned Al Semnacher about something he had not previously shared. Semnacher said that the morning following the Labor Day party, Arbuckle claimed he had “forcibly applied a piece of ice to Miss Rappe’s body.” Coverage of this development varied greatly. On the hysterical end was this screaming headline: DECLARES ARBUCKLE TOLD OF USING FOREIGN SUBSTANCE IN ATTACK ON MISS RAPPE. And thus a meme was born.
In San Francisco on Wednesday, Brady investigated Semnacher’s story further by questioning Fred Fishback and Ira Fortlouis. Lowell Sherman was subpoenaed while on a train bound for New York City. A process server, a detective, and reporters waited for him at Grand Central Station only to learn he had given them the slip by exiting the train at an earlier stop and leaving in an automobile driven by a red-headed woman.* After he was located the next day in his Manhattan apartment, he gave a statement to the New York DA regarding Rappe and the party that essentially supported the defense, and he agreed to return to San Francisco, where the preliminary hearing on Arbuckle’s murder charge was beginning. He never did. He later gave a deposition swearing that Arbuckle was never alone in a room with Rappe—a definitive (and false) declaration that ultimately clashed with the strategies both of the prosecution and the defense. Meanwhile, he acted in Broadway plays, keeping a continent between himself and the courtrooms.†
On Wednesday, eleven days after his arrest, Paramount invoked a nonperformance clause to halt payments to Arbuckle. The next day, Universal became the first studio to institute a morality clause in contracts, permitting the stoppage of salaries to “actors or actresses who forfeit the respect of the public.” Universal’s attorneys stated that although the studio had no relationship with the accused murderer, the clause was “a direct result of the Arbuckle case in San Francisco.”
Thursday, September 22, was the first day of the preliminary hearing, which would determine whether the state had sufficient evidence to bring Arbuckle to trial for murder. That day, an editorial in the San Francisco Bulletin was syndicated throughout the country. It harked back to the infamous gang rape case that gave rise to the Women’s Vigilant Committee, and telegraphed the difficulty that lay ahead in seating an impartial jury:
The drunken orgy at the St. Francis will be probed as thoroughly as was that in the Howard Street shack…. It was the merest chance that the Howard Street girls escaped with their lives, but had they died as a result of their ordeal their murderers would still have been less fiendish than the monster that perpetrated the foul crime in the St. Francis Hotel…. From the details at hand, the attack appears to have been savage without qualification. A veritable giant, one that has been described as a mountain of lecherous flesh, hurled himself upon a frail woman and fought with her after the manner of a mad elephant. But for that final avalanche of lard, the woman might have saved at least her life, for she seems to have struggled until the last vestige of her clothing had been torn to tatters….
We know that a fiendish crime has been committed and that one of the principals in that crime is a man suddenly raised from obscurity and a difficulty in earning his living into the spotlight of the world and an affluence greater than many kings. Petted by the public and showered with riches, he lost all sense of decency and came to the belief that he was above the moral code and could write whatever code he chose. He lived a law unto himself, flaunting his new found wealth and spending it with all recklessness of immoral and bestial ignorance. Like the most brutal of the feudal barons, he believed that he could command whatever was necessary to satisfy his savage passions.
Women began showing up at the Hall of Justice at 8 AM, for a preliminary hearing that was not set to begin for another five hours. Said the Los Angeles Times of the gathering storm, “Men are being excluded everywhere, shoved forcibly out through thick ranks of women, laughed at, snickered at, jeered at. It is a ‘no man’s land.’” Hundreds of women, many dressed in their Sunday best and fortified with box lunches, crowded hallways and stairways outside the women’s court of Judge Sylvain Lazarus—the same room and judge as at the arraignment one week prior.
A phalanx of policemen cleared the courtroom at noon, much to the consternation of those seated. They reopened the doors a half hour later. As the DA instructed, eighteen seats in the front row were occupied by members of the Women’s Vigilant Committee. After all the courtroom seats filled up, five hundred women remained in the hall. With great difficulty, policemen parted that sea of womanhood to make way for the defendant, his wife, his mother-in-law, and his defense team.
Judge Lazarus would decide whether the murder charge could proceed. Before he ruled, both the prosecution and the defense could call witnesses, introduce physical evidence, and cross-examine. With Assistant DA U’Ren questioning, the prosecution called three witnesses the first day: Dr. Shelby Strange, Dr. William Ophüls, and nurse Grace Halston. They testified to the ruptured bladder, the newness of the injury, and the injury’s probable cause (Ophüls: “some force from outside”). Photographs of bruises on Rappe’s limbs were placed into evidence. Dominguez offered no cross-examination.
The next day, Al Semnacher was the only witness. It was up to him to tell the tale of the Labor Day party, but he relinquished details of drinking and cavorting so reluctantly the prosecution declared him a hostile witness. The session finished after three contentious hours, with Semnacher still on the stand and yet to explode his bombshell. It went off the following day. That’s when the crowded courtroom of mostly concerned mothers heard more than they bargained for, and all the vague stories about ice or a foreign substance forcibly applied suddenly came into focus.
Assistant DA Golden asked Semnacher about what he had heard the morning after the party: “Did Arbuckle say anything at that time about a piece of ice?”
“He did,” Semnacher replied.
“What did he say?”
“He told us that he had placed a piece of ice on Miss Rappe.”
“On?” Golden asked.
”No,” said Semnacher.
“Well?”
Semnacher’s response was not printed in newspapers. He said Arbuckle claimed to have placed the ice in Virginia Rappe. A collective gasp rose in
the courtroom as the meaning was inferred. Red-faced Arbuckle stared at his fidgeting fingers. Behind him, Durfee also looked downward, fussing with a long stream of amber beads draped about her neck. She summoned strength and patted her husband on his shoulder with her tan-gloved hand.
Golden pressed on: “Exactly what did Arbuckle say?”
Semnacher glanced about the room of mostly women staring back at him. “I don’t want to say his words.”
“I insist,” said Golden. “They are important.”
When Semnacher hesitated again, Golden told him to whisper it to the court reporter. He did. This was then written on a note, which was passed to the prosecution and defense.
Arbuckle allegedly said he had placed the ice in Rappe’s “snatch”—her vagina.
Semnacher conveyed the word only to the stenographer and never again uttered it in court. However, Golden had no such compunctions about saying “snatch” in mixed company, again and again, wielding it like a knife, stabbing it at his hostile witness, slashing it at Arbuckle’s reputation, as if to say any man who could cavalierly use such a crude profanity about a woman as she lay dying in a room nearby was capable of anything—including rape and murder.
The United Press correspondent described the testimony as follows, and his version was syndicated widely: “[Arbuckle’s] time in court today was only ninety minutes, but he heard Al Semnacher, his friend, and Miss Rappe’s former manager, charge that when Virginia was lying nude on one of Arbuckle’s twin beds, the big baby-faced comedian had tortured her indescribably.” Semnacher was not Arbuckle’s friend and not really Rappe’s manager; more important, the ice incident was presented in court not as torture but as a very coarse joke by a heartless celebrity. Under Golden’s questioning, Semnacher indicated that Arbuckle made no explanation for inserting ice into Rappe’s vagina, but that when he mentioned it at least some of the listeners laughed. (Semnacher refused to pinpoint any man in particular as having done so, however, including himself.) But the United Press account of his testimony spawned frontpage headlines such as WITNESS TESTIFIES ARBUCKLE CONFESSED HE TORTURED ACTRESS.
