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

by Greg Merritt

  By mid-1919 Arbuckle was in a position to be particularly generous. Just a few months earlier, he’d signed a deal worth $3 million.

  The inmates took over the asylum. The seed had been planted the previous year, when Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and William S. Hart were together promoting war bonds. With their power and popularity, why couldn’t they oversee the distribution of their own films, thus maintaining creative control and ownership from the first spark of an idea until the final print was projected? D. W. Griffith joined them, and as negotiations progressed, the press dubbed the quintet the “Big Five.” Hart eventually bowed out, but on February 5, 1919, Chaplin, Fairbanks, Pickford, and Griffith launched United Artists. With neither contract players nor acres of stages, UA was an affront to the increasingly powerful studio system. It was a “studio”—a film exchange incorporating four independent production companies—run by artists to distribute their own art. Only three UA films were released in 1919, and none were Chaplin’s (due to contractual obligations to First National Pictures, he would not make his UA debut for another four years). Nevertheless, the news of United Artists’ formation rocked the industry—including Arbuckle’s employer, Paramount, which was by then the premier Hollywood company.

  UA was launched, in part, by former Paramount president Hiram Abrams, who became the new company’s managing director. Fairbanks and Pickford had only recently declined to re-sign at Paramount. That left Arbuckle as the studio’s brightest star. Fortuitously for him, his contract was expiring. Rumors swirled in early 1919 that the “Big Five” would become six (or remain five, when discussions with Hart fell through), with Arbuckle joining his friends Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Pickford. It would be a major coup for Abrams, with whom Arbuckle had maintained a friendship, to pull the strongest remaining pillar away from Paramount. Negotiations ensued.

  But on February 21 Arbuckle met Adolph Zukor in Kansas City, Missouri, where the superstar signed a three-year Paramount contract reportedly worth $1 million annually.* “Anyhow, you can see by this contract that the big one decided not to take in the big five,” Arbuckle quipped. The big contract for the “big one” accomplished its immediate intention, stirring up nationwide publicity for Paramount and its star: $1,000,000 A YEAR FOR MOVIE “FATTY,” screamed one front page, and similar $1 million or $3 million headlines appeared throughout the country. Arbuckle set out on another Paramount promotional tour, two years after his initial contract victory lap, traveling by train to New York City, Washington, DC, and New Orleans. “With all the stars I have had Mr. Arbuckle is the least tempermental and the most appreciative,” Zukor effused.

  During a brief stay in Manhattan, Arbuckle met opera legend Enrico Caruso (Arbuckle was a fan). He also hung out with Louella Parsons; the celebrity gossip pioneer was present in a smoky Manhattan screening room with Arbuckle, Zukor, Schenck, and others as actresses were considered for Arbuckle’s love interest in future Comique comedies. Parsons accompanied the men to Sherry’s, a French restaurant popular with high society. There, over oysters, chicken, and cocktails, Arbuckle revealed that if he were not an actor/director/writer, he would like to be a surgeon. For entertainment and enlightenment, he frequently witnessed a doctor friend operating in the Los Angeles county hospital. “I have watched Doc take out so many appendices, I believe I could do it myself,” he mused. “It is a pretty sight to see Doc work.” Several times, Charlie Chaplin accompanied him, and the world’s two greatest comedic actors spent evenings peering inside human bodies.

  Also in the month of February, an article entitled “On the Advantages of Embonpoint” appeared in Photo-Play Journal under Arbuckle’s name. It contended:

  [A fat man] is regarded as harmless and innocent just because he looks so solid and easy-going. He may be harboring the most malicious thoughts, but he is disarmed by his own fat. Nobody suspects him…. A fat man makes a comfortable person to have around the house. His lap is a favorite perch for young and beautiful debutantes and sub-debs. They call him Uncle and punch him in the solar-plexus and generally kid him along. What fat man could fail to be happy under such circumstances?

  When a sub-deb was not perched upon his lap, and when he was not gazing at an appendectomy or betting on a boxing match or buying yet another round for friends and hangers-on, Arbuckle continued to make movies without his best friend, Buster Keaton, who was still serving Uncle Sam. All told, Arbuckle made six shorts while Keaton was in the army.

  In the first years of the twentieth century, the West Adams district near downtown was the most exclusive area in Los Angeles. Its Victorian mansions housed Southern California’s titans of industry. The home at 649 West Adams Boulevard was built in 1905 for US Navy officer Randolph Huntington Miner and his socialite wife, who furnished the twenty rooms with treasures from their foreign travels. The drawing room alone could accommodate two hundred guests. The house was constructed in the Tudor revival style, with a gabled roof, stained glass windows, and exterior walls of red brick on the ground floor and a second floor decorated with half-timbering that formed branch-like trusses near the roof. It was as if a European country estate had been transported into the heart of a city born yesterday. The image was not just old money but medieval money—a salient point to Hollywood’s nouveau riche.

  The first movie star to live there was the original vamp, Theda Bara, who rented it from the Miners in 1917 when they headed to France and Bara’s fame and fortune were soaring. Bara was born Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati, but Fox publicized her as an Egyptian-born occultist with an affinity for snakes and raw meat, and the Jewish star’s new name was supposedly an anagram of “Arab Death.” She played along, in part by filling the mansion’s elegant rooms with sarcophagi, crystal balls, and other exotica. Her home was portrayed in the press as a sort of proto-Addams Family dwelling, one you had best be wary of. When Bara’s contract with Fox lapsed near the end of 1919, she retired. By then, she had left West Adams.

  Meanwhile, Comique’s productions had moved from Long Beach to a studio in Edendale, next door to Keystone. Arbuckle was in need of a home nearer his workplace, and Joe Schenck encouraged him to live in a house worthy of a millionaire celebrity. He moved in to the West Adams house, also renting from the Miners. He ordered the removal of Bara’s ghoulish or feminine decor and began decorating to match his own ostentatious tastes—befitting, so he thought, a wealthy movie star. A tongue-in-cheek article in the Los Angeles Times wondered if the refinements of such a house—its Japanese meditation garden and koi pond, for instance—and the bourgeois neighborhood would cause Arbuckle to forsake the “shimmey at Vernon,” “wild, rude games of poker,” and the Tuesday-night fights in favor of drinking “tea with his little finger crooked daintily.” The article concluded with the assertion that “Theda Bara’s astral mind” was leading Arbuckle to Ibsen and Oscar Wilde.

  Arbuckle was indeed behaving like a man possessed, but his preoccupation was an old one and not especially genteel. With haste, he was stocking the walled shelves in the basement of his new abode with a collection of alcohol that grew to legendary proportions: gin, scotch, rye, rum, wine. This was his doomsday shelter, meant to protect him against the coming ravages of Prohibition. It’s unlikely his regular parties, which typically lasted until dawn, significantly depleted his stockpile—but not for lack of trying.

  The rapid rise in the popularity of movies over the fist two decades of the twentieth century coincided with the similar ascension of baseball. Grander stadiums—including Wrigley Field and Fenway Park—opened, and such players as Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, and Babe Ruth garnered headlines and pulled in an ever-expanding fan base. Arbuckle was one such fan. He had played the game as a youngster and on Keystone’s team, and he had regularly attended games, whether on the vaudeville circuit or in Southern California.

  Until the late 1950s, baseball teams traveled via train, and by train, the West Coast was days away from eastern cities. That’s why in 1919, there were sixteen major leagu
e teams but none farther west than St. Louis. The West Coast had the Pacific Coast League. Unaffiliated with major league clubs, the PCL for the first half of the twentieth century was, in effect, a shadow major league, and it nurtured such legends as Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. Until 1958, when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and the Giants to San Francisco, the PCL was the big league for baseball fans in California.

  Thus, it was huge news when on May 5, 1919, Arbuckle bought controlling interest in the PCL’s Vernon Tigers and installed himself as president. Since their inception in 1909, the Tigers had been unprofitable. Their location was not ideal for family entertainment. Vernon, home of the aforementioned boxing arena and nightclub, was Los Angeles’ adult playground, and the ballpark was located adjacent to Doyle’s Bar, billed as “the longest bar in the world,” with thirty-seven bartenders working thirty-seven cash registers and space to serve more than a thousand patrons.

  After Arbuckle’s purchase, Lou Anger, whose wife was the sister-in-law of the team’s ace pitcher, became the Tigers’ general manager, despite having no previous baseball experience. Arbuckle professed, “I’m just going into it for the sport of the thing and nothing else.” He later said he “just bought them to please Anger” and all he did was “sign checks.”

  Still, as the first celebrity owner of a sports franchise, he received a windfall of publicity. Game reports referred to the Tigers as “Fatty’s Team.” He appeared in team photos and on the covers of game programs. He even had his own baseball card (dressed in the Tigers’ uniform, he is biting into a baseball).* He was the biggest attraction at any game. A May 16 story noted, “San Francisco won a ball game for itself, 8 to 5, when Vernon got back on the losing end. Yet President Fatty Arbuckle is no less a hero. Even in the hour of defeat, fond mothers stood at the exit and pointed out this great man to their children.” At another May game, he, Al St. John, and Buster Keaton, fresh from his military stint, performed in Tigers uniforms, pitching and hitting with plaster-of-Paris bats and balls that, when ball met bat, exploded to the delight of the crowd. By August the press had nicknamed the Tigers the “Custard Pies” in a nod to Fatty’s Keystone roots.

  On August 8 Arbuckle and his entourage—including Anger and Keaton—headed by train to San Francisco for several games pitting the Tigers against the San Francisco Seals and the Oakland Oaks. The actors performed baseball sketches before record crowds of thirty thousand. San Francisco nights were spent at parties in Arbuckle’s honor and drinking and dancing at the Tait-Zinkand Cafe. One night began at Tait’s by the bay and ended, sometime in the morning, at Tait’s downtown. Arbuckle presumably stayed at the Hotel St. Francis, which soon thereafter began touting him in its advertising. As always, he picked up the bill for everyone. He estimated ahead of time the trip would cost him about $2,000 (about $26,000 in today’s dollars).

  On October 5 the Tigers won their first-ever Pacific Coast League title, edging past their chief rival, the Los Angeles Angels, by sweeping a doubleheader on the series’ final day. But, in the year of the Chicago Black Sox scandal, the Tigers’ championship was blighted by its own gambling infraction. Allegedly, opposing players were bribed to throw games in Vernon’s favor. Five players were expelled from the PCL. Arbuckle was not implicated, but the publicity for “Fatty’s Team” had gone from good to bad. Owning a team had required more time and money than he had bargained for, and when he should have been celebrated as the president of the league champions, his name was instead sullied via its association with cheating. He sold the Vernon Tigers less than seven months after purchasing them.*

  Corporal Buster Keaton had not left France until more than three months after the armistice that ended World War I. Suffering a hearing impairment, he convalesced in a military hospital in New York and at another in Baltimore. After being discharged from the army on April 29, he returned to Los Angeles, where he again acted opposite his best friend, Roscoe Arbuckle.

  Comique’s acting roster had changed over the previous nine months. Molly Malone was in. Alice Lake was out. Jackie Coogan was in.† Al St. John would soon be out. Back Stage, the first movie Keaton made upon returning, was St. John’s last with Comique. Arbuckle’s nephew signed with Paramount before moving to Fox, where he was the prolific star and director of slapstick shorts.

  The three shorts Arbuckle and Keaton made in 1919 each have bursts of brilliance. Back Stage has a stunt in which the front of a house falls toward Fatty but misses him as the open window passes over him.* The Hayseed presents Fatty at his most likeable in a subdued, more character-driven comedy. And The Garage, which, like The Hayseed, was shot at Henry Lehrman’s studio, includes some inspired gags involving the overuse of motor oil and a giant turntable for washing and drying cars.† Best of all is a bit in which Keaton hides from a cop by walking, stride for stride, in front of or behind the much-wider Fatty. There is also an in-joke wherein Fatty kisses a photo of Mabel Normand. Released in January 1920, The Garage marked the fourteenth and final comedy short with Arbuckle and Keaton together.

  Offscreen, when not watching a Tigers game or boxing match or partying at a nightclub, Arbuckle and Keaton reveled in practical jokes. When Adolph Zukor attended a dinner party at Arbuckle’s West Adams mansion with Sid Grauman, Alice Lake, and others, he was the only one not in on the joke that the clumsy butler spilling the turkey dinner was Buster Keaton, even after an “outraged” Arbuckle shattered a breakaway bottle on the butler’s head. When Marcus Loew came to town, Keaton played Arbuckle’s chauffeur, inflicting upon the theater magnate a horrifying ride through Los Angeles. Pretending to be gas company workers, Keaton and Arbuckle nearly tore up the pampered front lawn of actress Pauline Frederick’s Beverly Hills mansion. And they convinced Vic Levy, a Belgian dressmaker who clothed the Hollywood community, that the king and queen of Belgium wished to dine at his house. At the resulting dinner, only Levy was unaware that the royal couple were actors. Keaton said, “Few of us in that whole Hollywood gang had had time to acquire an education. I suppose we were doing the things in our twenties* that we would have done earlier if we’d gone to high school and college.” In his autobiography, Keaton detailed these shenanigans in a chapter titled “When the World Was Ours.”

  Six years after Keystone’s feature Tillie’s Punctured Romance, Arbuckle had still not appeared in a movie longer than two reels. Comedy was the genre of shorts, and those shorts played prior to features on the same bills. In the fall of 1919, he was eager to transition to feature films. “I mean to have some real drama interspersed with comedy,” he said. Features were beyond the scope of his current production company, so Joseph Schenck sold Arbuckle’s contract from Comique to Paramount—the studio that was already paying handsomely to distribute Arbuckle’s movies. Keaton would become the new solo star of Comique shorts, and Arbuckle would star in Paramount feature films written and directed by that studio’s top talents.

  Along with seemingly everyone else in the film industry, Roscoe Arbuckle spent the early hours of Thanksgiving 1919 at the Hotel Alexandria, dancing, drinking, and dining at the Directors Ball, then Hollywood’s most glamourous annual event. Most evenings he pursued the low entertainments of boxing, gambling, and jazz dancing, but when Hollywood’s formal galas occurred, he was almost always there. He was a member of the Motion Picture Directors Association and attended events of the American Society of Cinematographers. Fraternal organizations were popular then, and Arbuckle joined a Los Angeles Elks Lodge. He was not a recreational reader, the first commercial radio broadcast in Los Angeles was still two years away, and he had no children, so it was rare that he would spend an evening at home unless he was throwing a party.

  Just before Christmas, he fulfilled a longtime dream by performing on a New York stage—and not just in any theater, but in the fifty-three-hundred-seat Hippodrome. He was part of a one-night all-star benefit that included singer Sophie Tucker. He subsequently spent the holiday with his wife. They had remained on good terms, corresponding via affectionate letters and f
requent long-distance telephone calls.

  Brewed over decades by an alliance of puritans and Progressives, the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect at the stroke of midnight on January 17, 1920, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors. The Volstead Act put the devil in the details of its enforcement. On the eve of Prohibition, an especially cold night in the East, the expected last-chance revelry failed to materialize. The New York Times noted, “Instead of passing from us in violent paroxysms, the demon rum lay down to a painless, peaceful, though lamented, by some, death.” Billy Sunday had staged the demon rum’s funeral in Norfolk, Virginia, the day before, complete with a twenty-foot coffin carried by twenty pallbearers. The evangelist told ten thousand “mourners”: “The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.” Reports of the demon’s death were greatly exaggerated.

  Just before Prohibition took effect, Arbuckle bought the West Adams mansion from the Miners for $250,000 (about $3 million in today’s dollars). “Had to do it to save my cellar!” Arbuckle joked of the purchase and its liquor-filled basement. “The authorities won’t let me move it, so I bought the whole house to protect it. Also I’m thinking of giving out to the newspapers a story that my cellar has been robbed, so if there’s anybody contemplating doing this they’ll lay off.”

  According to the census, on January 2 Arbuckle lived in the house with a thirty-seven-year-old male cook and a twenty-seven-year-old female maid. Both were Japanese immigrants. His secretary/housekeeper, butler, chauffeur, and gardener lived elsewhere. The house’s other movie star, Luke the dog, was not counted in the census. Arbuckle now had three dogs. Durfee said, “He and the big St. Bernard have wonderful times. Mr. Arbuckle gets into his bathing suit, and puts a tub in the garage, and he and the dog are perfectly happy there for half a day.”