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

by Greg Merritt

  He was absent from Mishawum Manor. Still, was Arbuckle the sort of affluent celebrity who would willfully mistreat those occupying society’s lower strata? It was a question with implications for his trials, for he had interacted in the hotel suite with chorus girls, a former corset maker, and a minor actress. The behind-the-scenes view of him on a train playing dice with the African American waiters would suggest he went out of his way to treat lowly workers as equals. In addition, he generously gave his time and money to charities. He helped friends and even some strangers in need—and friends and hangers-on who weren’t in need. And he was an unusually big tipper whom waiters drew lots to serve.

  But boorish behavior toward the “little people” need only express itself occasionally to indicate insensitivity. Such an occasion may have occurred in July, when Arbuckle was in Chicago shooting scenes for Freight Prepaid and staying downtown at the Congress Hotel. The following news story appeared seven weeks before Arbuckle’s much more public arrest:

  “FATTY” ARBUCKLE $50 OUT AFTER HAVING REAL FIGHT

  Movie Funny Man Has Trouble with Bellboy and Forfeits Court Deposit

  Chicago, July 20 (Special)—Though the first reel was a riot, “Fatty” Arbuckle’s latest feature, “Ouch, My Eyes,” limped to a pepless finish in Police Court today. Arbuckle was to have stood trial on a disorderly charge lodged against him by Joe Greenberg, a bellboy at the Congress Hotel, who complained that “Fatty” hit him in the eye. “Fatty,” it was alleged, had engaged the bellboy to do some work, but they could not agree on the wage. Words, as is the movie custom, were followed by blows. The bellboy got the worst of it, he said. The judge heard Greenberg’s story and forfeited the $50 bond put up by “Fatty” when the celebrity failed to appear.

  On September 11, when every newspaper was screaming of Arbuckle’s arrest for a murder in the final minutes of the day before, the Los Angeles Examiner published a very different version of the Congress Hotel story, which reads like a Keystone comedy come regrettably to life. The setting was the hotel’s restaurant, Greenberg was recast as a waiter, and the plot revolved around Arbuckle entertaining his lunch mates by flattening one sandwich on Greenberg’s head and whizzing another past his nose before smashing a platter of creamed chicken into the waiter’s face in the manner of a custard pie. Outraged, Greenberg retrieved two policemen, but instead of a Kop chase, they escorted Arbuckle to the police station for booking. The conclusion remained unaltered: the movie star skipped his day in court, forfeiting fifty dollars.

  In her August 8 gossip column, Louella Parsons referred to “the row [Arbuckle] had with a waiter in Chicago,” thus giving some weight to the latter version, published a month later. The last account seems too outrageous, though, especially considering it occurred in a public setting but went unreported at the time. Regardless, a violent act was attributed to Arbuckle in another world-class hotel in another city. Was the incident, reported without Arbuckle’s comment, an unfair representation even before the Examiner rewrite? Was it the result of a flair of anger for which Arbuckle felt genuine remorse, or did it reveal a superstar’s contempt for the background players of his privileged life?

  The preponderance of evidence suggests that Arbuckle paid an unusual amount of respect to the working class from which he came. (He had, after all, performed menial jobs in hotels himself as a youth.) At worst, whatever happened at the Congress Hotel seems akin to his drawer-throwing, table-kicking outburst with his wife in the Cumberland Hotel four years prior—a glimpse at Arbuckle’s temper. Most of the time, the movie superstar was as blithe as one might expect of a man in his comfortable position, but he had never entirely shed his childhood insecurities—his feelings of unattractiveness and neglect, his need for familial love—and they could still fuel anger that would sometimes erupt.

  In early August, newspaper advertisements for Omar cigarettes began appearing, depicting a hand holding a lit cigarette. A small caption read, “This is an actual photograph of Roscoe Arbuckle’s hand holding an OMAR,” while the slogan stated, “Good nature is evident in the way Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle holds his OMAR.” Omar was the American Tobacco Company’s line of premium Turkish-blend cigarettes. For Arbuckle, a longtime smoker, the ads associated him with luxury—he was a glamourous movie star rather than a slapstick comic—but that association lasted little more than a month. The last Arbuckle/Omar ads ran on the weekend after Labor Day. Roscoe Arbuckle was the first American celebrity to have advertising halted on account of a scandal.

  On Wednesday, August 31, three days before he headed north to San Francisco, Arbuckle was at the West Coast premiere of The Three Musketeers, starring his friend Douglas Fairbanks. The screening, attended by numerous Hollywood notables—including Bebe Daniels, Alla Nazimova, and Jesse Lasky—was held in downtown Los Angeles, and the audience of movie stars, moviemakers, and movie executives repeatedly broke into applause.

  On September 4 the Los Angeles Times announced the local premiere of another film:

  “GASOLINE Gus ARBUCKLE SHOW AT GRAUMAN’S.”

  Roscoe Arbuckle in “Gasoline Gus” … combined with several special attractions, ushers in Paramount Week in Los Angeles, beginning Monday.

  Originally scheduled to appear at that opening, the star of Gasoline Gus had made other plans for Labor Day.

  * Writing of this “triple assignment” thirty-six years later, Jesse Lasky said, “It would be hard to imagine more strenuous work than making those old-fashioned lightning-paced comedies. I don’t know of another star who would have submitted to such extortionate demands on his energy. But Fatty Arbuckle wasn’t one to grumble. There were no temperamental displays in his repertoire. He went through the triple assignment like a whirling dervish.”

  * Arbuckle was friends with Harry Houdini. The magician and escape artist had visited the set of Back Stage.

  † In the September 1921 issue of Vanity Fair is a now-famous Ralph Barton caricature, “When the Five O’Clock Whistle Blows in Hollywood,” which depicts filmdom’s biggest stars leaving work. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd are among the seventeen actors and actresses. Mabel Normand is missing, reflecting her fallen popularity. Bebe Daniels is present, and, as she is near the center in a dramatically striped dress, eyes are drawn to her—as well as to the giant form of Roscoe Arbuckle nearby. The caption for Daniels jokes, “Still wearing stripes after her recent imprisonment for speeding.”

  * Coakley admitted that between $31,000 and $32,000 was left after payments, and he said a member of his staff was paid $14,000.

  † Upon appeal, Kingston pleaded guilty to the liquor charge and paid the hundred-dollar fine. The bordello charge was dismissed when the paid-off complainants refused to come forward again and it was established that Mishawum Manor was out of business.

  * Coakley was disbarred on April 21, 1922.

  {16}

  SECOND TRIAL

  ARBUCKLE ABANDONS HOPE.

  —Los ANGELES TIMES, FEBRUARY 3, 1922, FRONT PAGE

  During the month between the end of the first trial and the start of the second, Roscoe Arbuckle mostly stayed out of sight in his West Adams mansion, living with his no-longer-estranged wife. He granted an interview to the local press soon after returning from San Francisco, saying, “This case has put quite a crimp in my pocketbook. I resent the damage it has done me because I know I am innocent.” He later told a reporter he was broke as a result of the first trial and his lack of income,* but he didn’t mention that he’d bought Durfee a diamond-and-emerald brooch and a $1,000 jeweled purse for Christmas, both of which she would show off on the first day of the second trial. He also said he would never drink alcohol again and that he and Durfee were reunited for good: “My wife has proven that she is the one woman in the world for me, and I intend to keep her—if she’ll let me; and I think she will.”

  Movie Weekly was sort of the US Weekly of the Jazz Age, with cover lines like “Confessions of a Movie Wardrobe Mistress,” “What Is Hollywood Really Li
ke?,” and “The Convict Ship and the Movie Star.” For its last two issues of 1921, it featured Arbuckle on both covers. First came “The True Story of My Husband” by Mrs. Minta Durfee Arbuckle, followed one week later by “Roscoe Arbuckle Tells His Own Story.”

  “As surely as God is above me, and I believe in Him very sincerely, I know that Roscoe Arbuckle did not do the thing for which he has been made to stand trial.” So began Durfee’s forty-five-hundred-word “true story” of her husband, which was surely composed by or with the defense team and intended to answer pressing questions regarding her marriage, the case, and Arbuckle’s personality.

  Motives for his accuser(s): “As a matter of fact, he has told me that he did complain of the actions of certain members of the party and told them that they were going too far. Perhaps that very thing aroused a spirit of revenge that was responsible for the charges made against him.” She also said that with her husband’s reputation for generosity and his poor money management, “it is no wonder he attracted people who were after him for what they could get, to put it bluntly.”

  Maude Delmont: Durfee said “Mrs. Delmont” was “really the only one to accuse Mr. Arbuckle directly” before stating how flimsy Delmont’s story must be if the prosecution refused to put her on the stand.

  Virginia Rappe: “The minute I saw her name in connection with the case it made me more sure than ever that my husband was being made the victim of circumstances.” This was followed immediately by “I do not want to say anything against her.”

  His wearing pajamas at the party: “Not long before the trip to San Francisco, Mr. Arbuckle was accidentally burned with muriatic acid.” She did not say where the burn was but only that he had to wear a “thick dressing” and the loose pajamas were more comfortable than other clothes. She also said the pajamas and robe covered him in thick material from ankles to neck.

  His chasteness toward women: “I do want the women of the country to know that in spite of all the insinuations and ugly stories that have been circulated since this thing began, Roscoe Arbuckle is the most modest of men…. I never remember a single action or a single word that, by the farthest stretch of the imagination, could be called even immodest, to say nothing of vulgar or lewd.” Durfee even added a morsel about their sex life: “It is an actual fact that in all the years I have been his wife, I have never seen him when he was not clothed.”

  Further on this theme: “All his life Arbuckle has been embarrassed by his size. He has believed that women could not like a fat man, and for that reason he has hesitated even more than might be natural about developing friendships among women. He is not the type of man who caresses a woman. If he likes a girl, he will tease her or make her presents or generally be nice to her, but he will never think of putting his hands on her. In fact, he carries it so far that it is almost an obsession.”

  It was a curious article, in part because she referred to her husband only once as “Roscoe” (“Roscoe has no great faults; that I know”) and six times as “Roscoe Arbuckle” but a whopping twenty-four times as “Mr. Arbuckle,” thus making it read more like a trial argument penned by his attorneys and less like a wife’s portrait of her husband. The essay did deliver the sort of personal details about a marriage and a famous man that the readers of Movie Weekly doubtless coveted, but how many of those details were true is left in doubt.

  In contrast, Arbuckle’s three-thousand-word “own story,” published the following week, focused primarily on what occurred in the twelfth-floor suite on Labor Day, and it clung to the same tale of his finding and aiding a sick Virginia Rappe that he told in court. That narrative was relayed with minimal emotion, while at other points he passionately portrayed himself as the victim of his accusers, the prosecutor, the press, and those fans who turned on him.

  His accusers: “Whatever motive inspired the people who accused me, it was not knowledge that I had done the thing they said I did. It seems almost impossible to me that anyone could be so cruel and malicious as to make such terrible charges against a man without the most positive proof to support those charges, and yet that is what happened.”

  His wearing a bathrobe at the party: “I had arisen that morning about 11 o’clock and had put on my pajamas, bathrobe and slippers.” One wonders why he would have to put on his pajamas upon waking; perhaps this was a simple misstatement. Nevertheless, his admission that he woke an hour before noon and continued to wear sleepwear when women arrived (because he did not anticipate those guests, he said) is a much weaker defense than his wife’s acid-burn alibi, and thus is probably more truthful. As he made no mention of acid, it seems his “own story” was written without consulting Durfee’s “true story.”

  The party’s refreshments: “And by the way, the liquor which was served that afternoon was not mine.”

  Virginia Rappe: “All this talk of my having been infatuated with Miss Rappe or trying to ‘get her’ is absurd. I knew her for several years; we had worked at the same studios, and I had met her in other places, but that was absolutely all.”

  His marriage: “One really good thing has come out of all this trouble. It has been the means of reuniting my wife and myself after five years of separation. We are happy to be together again, and we have discovered that the things that kept us apart were very unimportant after all.” By name, he referred to Durfee only once, and in that case he called her “Mrs. Arbuckle”—the surname she adopted only after his arrest.

  In conclusion, he lamented his “great misfortune” in the same words he had used in his statement the day of the verdict. Arbuckle would have more to say on the subject shortly before the prosecution’s opening statement in the second trial, speaking with reporters in a corridor of the San Francisco Hall of Justice: “It’s not prison I’m afraid of. It’s not the loss of fame or fortune. It is the loss of regard; the loss of affection, the fact that the kids may think I am guilty that hurts me…. Guilty? The law says a man is not guilty until he is proven so. But, my friend, let a man once be arrested and charged with a crime; let his name go broadcast in those first, cruel stories, regardless of fact, and he is branded guilty…. I have suffered. All I ask in repayment of the wrong done me is that the world which once loved me now withhold its judgement and give me a chance to prove before another jury that I am innocent.”

  Dashiell Hammett penned such hard-boiled classic novels as The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, but before he wrote about private eyes he was one. In January 1922 he was twenty-seven, a transplant from the East to San Francisco and nearing the end of his intermittent six years of employment with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The Pinkertons were hired by Arbuckle’s defense team to find evidence and witnesses to aid their case, and Hammett was one such investigator.

  The legendary author later recalled, “It was the day before the opening of the second absurd attempt to convict Roscoe Arbuckle of something. He came into the lobby [of the Hall of Justice]. He looked at me and I at him. His eyes were the eyes of a man who expected to be regarded as a monster but not yet inured to it. I made my gaze as contemptuous as I could. He glared at me, went on the elevator still glaring. It was amusing.” Of the case itself, Hammett’s conspiratorial assessment was worthy of a hard-boiled detective plot, the sort that might only be untangled by his creation Sam Spade: “The whole thing was a frame-up, arranged by some of the corrupt local newspaper boys. Arbuckle was good copy, so they set him up for a fall.”

  On January 11, 1922, jury selection for the second trial began in Judge Louderback’s courtroom, while in a courtroom nearby, a remnant from the first trial was discarded. The perjury case against defense witness Minnie Neighbors had crept along for a month before a judge dismissed it.

  Voir dire proved more difficult for the second manslaughter trial, because so many San Francisco residents had formed an opinion based on the overwhelming coverage of the initial trial. Seventy-nine potential jurors were questioned before both the defense and prosecution agreed on a panel of eleven men and one woman and t
wo alternates (one man, one woman). The jury would again be sequestered in a hotel.

  District Attorney Brady predicated the second trial on the grand jury’s manslaughter indictment rather than the police court charge sworn to by Maude Delmont, hoping to sidestep criticism for not calling the avenger to the stand. The state began its case. Such familiar faces as Al Semnacher, Harry Boyle, Jesse Norgaard, Josephine Keza, Dr. W. Francis Wakefield, and Dr. Arthur Beardslee testified, reconstructing crucial events before, during, and after Labor Day.

  The state’s star witnesses remained showgirls Alice Blake and Zey Prevost, but neither had been a strong attestant in the first trial, and both proved hollow this time. The very definition of a reluctant witness, Blake spoke so softly in a morning session that all of her testimony was reread in the afternoon session. She recollected seeing Rappe and then Arbuckle go into 1219, Delmont demanding entrance, and Rappe saying, “He hurt me, he hurt me. I am dying,” but on the imperative point of Arbuckle being in the room when Rappe made the assertion, Blake could not remember. “I don’t recall” was her common, barely audible reply to numerous questions she had answered previously. A photo of her appeared in print under the heading HER MEMORY GONE with the caption “This is Alice Blake, who now, on the second trial of Fatty Arbuckle, forgets everything that happened at the famous party.”

  On cross-examination, McNab focused on Blake’s time in protective custody, using the terms “incarcerated” and “impounded.” “When did you escape?” McNab asked Blake, and, when laughter filled the courtroom, Judge Louderback ordered the bailiff to eject those responsible. “Well, what can you do when the lawyers furnish the comedy?” the bailiff replied.

  Prevost was even less of an asset for the prosecution. On a day so cold in a building so poorly heated that the jurors were brought overcoats and a recess was granted because the court reporter’s frigid fingers were stiff, the showgirl recanted her testimony from the first trial (as well as the grand jury and police court pretrial hearings) by stating she never heard Rappe say “He hurt me.” When Assistant DA Friedman pressed her on her previous statements under oath, she answered, “I did not remember. I’m telling the truth now.” To McNab, she explained that Brady’s team wanted her to sign an affidavit stating that Rappe said, “I’m dying. He killed me,” and when she refused she was placed in a cell and threatened with jail time before she finally signed, “He hurt me.”