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

by Greg Merritt

  William Harrison Hays was born on November 5, 1879, in the farming town of Sullivan in southwestern Indiana. His father was a lawyer, a Republican, and a Presbyterian elder, and the junior Hays followed the same path, joining Dad’s law firm after college, representing railroads, coal companies, and other corporations. A skilled orator with a passion for politics, he rose through the party ranks to become Indiana’s Republican chairman, even as he continued to live in Sullivan with his wife and—a new addition in 1915—their son.

  With elephantine ears, teeth like mixed nuts, and a nose that resembled the beak on a fruit-eating bird, Hays had—to put it kindly—a memorable face, one that would later bring much joy to editorial cartoonists. He was short and exceedingly thin, and thus whereas Arbuckle claimed to be too fat for soldiering in World War I, Hays was reportedly too frail. By then he was chairman of the Republican National Committee, a position to which the Progressive wing of the GOP elevated him in February 1918. In an era in which candidates were handpicked in smoky backrooms, party chairman was seen as a short step to a Senate seat or a governor’s mansion. Hays coveted the latter as he slept in train cars and hotel rooms, traversing the country, working to elect Republicans.

  He was expert at building alliances, but even if he had been lousy he would have been a success, for he had the great fortune to be Republican national chairman in 1918, when his party regained the Senate and House from the Democrats thanks to an unpopular war, and during a Depression in 1920, when his candidate, Warren G. Harding, triumphed in a landslide. Subsequently, Hays accepted the cabinet position of postmaster general in Harding’s administration. From the days of America’s first postmaster general, Benjamin Franklin, until the postal service was reformed in 1970, it was a powerful political job. In addition to overseeing mail delivery, the postmaster wielded much of his party’s patronage, appointing supporters to postal service management positions. Though Hays moved to Washington, DC, his wife, who suffered from “lifelong frailty,” and son stayed in Sullivan.

  After eight years of a Democratic administration, Republican Hays came to his job with a number of postal service reforms. In a luncheon speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, he proclaimed, “First, it is no part of the primary business of the Post Office Department to act as a censor of the press. This should not and will not be.” One month later, he granted second-class mail status to a socialist magazine, stating that Wilson’s administration had relegated it to a more expensive status as a form of censorship. It was the first of several radical publications to which he bestowed mail status previously denied.

  Hays was perceived as a political mastermind—an organizer, deal-maker, and publicist par excellence. He had built connections in small towns and large cities nationwide, the same communities that were now launching film censorship boards. Possible federal film censorship also loomed, and Hays was the premier power broker in the Republican Party, which now controlled Congress and the White House. He was a teetotaler and a Presbyterian elder from rural Indiana with long Dutch Irish roots into America’s heartland. His background contrasted with the major film studio heads, all of whom were Jewish and most of whom were immigrants—facts not lost on Hollywood’s critics, many of whom espoused anti-Semitism and nativism. And so when the movie industry was struck by a catastrophe after Labor Day 1921, it turned to Will H. Hays.

  A letter was drafted to enlist Hays to the cause of minimizing the catastrophe’s repercussions. It was signed by a dozen studio executives, including Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky, and hand-delivered to him on December 8. When word leaked, he denied accepting the offer for another month, until January 14, 1922, just before testimony began in the second Arbuckle trial. The announcement was front-page news, christening Hays “the Judge Landis of movies,” in reference to the first commissioner of major league baseball, appointed in November 1920 to resuscitate the national pastime’s image after 1919’s Black Sox scandal.

  But why would a forty-two-year-old longtime political operative with his own aspirations for higher office give up a plum cabinet position after one year to embroil himself in censorship fights, the Arbuckle trials, and an industry reeling from tales of drug-fueled orgies? The answer had six digits: $100,000—the annual salary, not including other financial incentives. His postmaster general salary was $12,000. The president made $75,000.

  Hays stayed on as postmaster general until March 4. By the time he assumed his position as head of the new Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (which replaced the old NAMPI) in uptown Manhattan, there had been a second film scandal, the murder of William Desmond Taylor. After devoting a month to studying the movie industry, Hays outlined how he hoped to modernize it and polish its tarnished image. “As to censorship I think that will be the least of our troubles,” he said. “We hope that our pictures will eliminate all causes for censorship…. The matter of censorship will take care of itself when our objects as to the pictures are accomplished.” Let the self-censorship begin.

  In the midst of the third Arbuckle trial, District Attorney Matthew Brady spoke about the reforms Hays needed to impart: “The public is tired of seeing some morally rotten but highly paid actor or actress glorified and held up as an idol. The public is tired of having sex flung in their faces. People who live decent lives, the mothers and fathers with families that they are trying to raise to be upright and decent, are tired of seeing film after film picturing infidelity and red love. They are tired of seeing the other man as a permanent fixture in the home—according to the movies. They are giving the producers their chance to reform from within. If they don’t, public opinion won’t do any reforming at all. It will simply annihilate the motion picture industry altogether, just as it did the saloon.”

  In April the Christian group Lord’s Day Alliance won headlines throughout the country for publicly calling for Will Hays to “use your authority to intervene and prevent the outrage to the moral sensibilities of the citizens of this country threatened in the proposal to again exhibit any Arbuckle films.”

  For thirty-three years it was assumed that Hays alone decided to ban Roscoe Arbuckle from the movies on April 18—a week after Arbuckle’s acquittal and a month into Hays’s new job. But the year after Hays’s 1954 death, his memoirs were published. Only three of the book’s six hundred tedious pages mention Arbuckle, whom Hays never met, but they lay the blame for Arbuckle’s banishment elsewhere. It was Joseph Schenck and Adolph Zukor, Hays claimed, who came to him after the third trial and asked him to ban their employee from their employment. He said Zukor insisted upon it, even though Paramount had two unreleased Arbuckle movies* and two that had barely been released. Hays wrote:

  With hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in completed but unreleased films, Zukor decided to make a sacrifice rather than bring further discredit on the industry or give the slightest added impetus to public outrage. So far as he was concerned, the outrage was very real. Arbuckle had let him down—he had let the whole industry down no less than his fans—and Zukor was prepared to take the loss.

  That’s the best possible spin. Over the course of three trials, Paramount had likely come to terms with writing off any further North American box office grosses from Arbuckle’s movies. Then came the protests, scathing editorials, and censorship calls when they rereleased Gasoline Gus and Crazy to Marry after the acquittal. During the trials, Arbuckle was rarely associated with Paramount. Now, with his movies returning to theaters, he was a Paramount star again. Zukor did the math and deduced that Paramount had more to lose in the long term by continuing its association with Arbuckle, whom much of the country disdained, than it had to gain in the short term from those who cheered or forgave him. The studio wanted a clean slate.

  Hays claimed he asked Zukor to issue the statement on Arbuckle’s banishment, but Zukor replied, “No, Will, let the Association give it out. That will show that the Association means business.” Hays said of this gesture: “Even that early in the game Adolph Zukor had pass
ed the stage in which profit was the primary concern of his activity. If any man had the ‘alma matter’ spirit for the industry which had made him, and which he had largely made, that man was he.” Hays was ever expert at spinning. Profit was surely Zukor’s primary concern. He was blacklisting Arbuckle from Hollywood, but rather than face any public backlash, he secretly passed that chore on to Hays, who dutifully obliged, exercising the authority so recently bestowed on him—in part, by Zukor. For the Paramount president, it was a win-win: sever ties with Arbuckle and let Hays absorb any blame. As a bonus, Hays could have the credit too, giving the appearance that the new MPPDA was rushing out of the gate to clean up Hollywood.

  With the Arbuckle ban in place, Hays went about combating governmental censorship. After a May 11, 1922, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, a proposed investigation of the movie industry fizzled. The Virginia legislature instituted a film censorship board in 1922, but Hays (and a $300,000 war chest) instituted a full-force public relations campaign against a Massachusetts referendum to censor motion pictures there. In November 1922 citizens of the Bay State voted the proposal down three to one—the only substantial popular vote on film censorship in America’s history. No other state ever again instituted movie censorship, nor, despite numerous attempts, did the US Congress.

  Hays utilized his political skills to form the MPPDA’s Committee on Public Relations, which gave organizations a forum to voice complaints to the studios. He also instituted 1924’s “the Formula,” a strategy for his office to use in reviewing synopses of every movie in preproduction. Keeping with its mysterious title, the Formula was vague, until a list of eleven “Don’ts” (nudity, profanity, miscegenation, etc.) and twenty-five “Be Carefuls” (international relations, brutality, treason, etc.) was adopted in 1927. The Hays Office, as the MPPDA came to be known, claimed to reject 125 proposed movies over the six years of the Formula, but submission was voluntary, any summation could easily avoid highlighting a Don’t or Be Careful, and a rejected synopsis could become a movie without consequence.

  Hays regularly made newspaper headlines for everything from establishing a movie copyright bureau to unionizing film production labor to leasing the highest apartment in New York City. More than anyone else, Will H. Hays became the face of the motion picture industry, characterized as the “czar of the movies.” His homely mug graced the September 13, 1926, issue of Time magazine (with the subtitle “Polychromatic Pollyanna”), making him one of only three people principally associated with Hollywood to receive that honor in the silent era.* Reporters never tired of presenting, if not mocking, him as a paragon of virtue, but he grew entangled in financial matters emanating from the Teapot Dome scandal—a bribery case involving President Harding’s secretary of the interior. And, in the greatest contrast to his public image, Hays lived apart from his family for over a decade until divorcing his wife in 1929 and winning custody of their son—and this while Be Careful number twenty-one was “the institution of marriage” and divorce was a cinematic taboo. He remarried in 1930.

  By 1930 silent films had given way to the talkies, the spoken dialogue of which greatly increased the odds of objectionable content. Momentum for federal film censorship swelled, and Hays faced renewed criticism from religious organizations. Meanwhile, civil libertarians sought ways to repeal censorship laws. Add to this the financial instability of the industry, teetering from the Great Depression and proposed antitrust legislation. All of this explains why Hays was receptive to the Motion Picture Production Code. The Code was outlined by Martin Quigley, the moralistic publisher of the Motion Picture Herald, Hollywood’s leading trade journal, and written by the aptly named Catholic theologian Daniel A. Lord. It had three general principles:

  No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin.

  Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.

  Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.

  This was vague enough to dance about artfully, but the devil was in the details. The twenty-one “Particular Applications” spelled out numerous topics to avoid: everything from the obvious (sex) to the criminal (illegal drug traffic) to the profane (ridicule of religion) to the peculiar (dancing costumes). A film could feature a transgression if “compensating moral values” were introduced. For example, a plot could follow a murderer as long as he was appropriately punished.

  The MPPDA adopted the Code on March 31, 1930. Both scripts and finished films were to be submitted to the Hays Office for approval. However, like previous attempts at self-censorship, this one lacked enforcement. Gangsters, monsters, and risqué humor ruled in what many now regard as a high point in movie history: pre-Code Hollywood—meaning pre—enforcement of the Code. It lasted until June 22, 1934. Then, under pressure from religious groups, the MPPDA formed the Production Code Administration. Any MPPDA member that released a movie without the PCA’s seal of approval received a $25,000 fine, and no member-controlled theater could show an unapproved film. The jig was up for all those cinematic rogues. The Production Code would dictate Hollywood content for the next thirty-four years. Its authority was weakened throughout the 1960s, but it was not abandoned until November 1, 1968, when a ratings system was instituted in its place.

  Hays stepped down as MPPDA president in 1945, functioned for five more years as a consultant, and retired to a life of luxury in New York City. Though he had rarely returned to Sullivan, Indiana, it was there that he died on March 7, 1954, at age seventy-four. Before and after his death, he was pilloried as the great censor of the movies. There is no doubt that the Production Code he instituted altered the history of motion pictures. It forced actors to speak via innuendos, and it frightened producers away from even broaching certain topics. Thus it was a form of censorship, but it was probably necessary to combat a more overt form. Government censors continued to function, but rarely did they even contemplate a film given the PCA’s seal. The Code went too far and lasted too long, but, contrary to popular belief, this was not a result of Hays’s personal morality. Will Hays’s overriding motive was to protect the business of making motion pictures. And this motive had its most profound effect on one Roscoe Arbuckle.

  * As an example of how draconian censorship rules could be, in Pennsylvania it was forbidden for a movie to portray “expectant maternity,” i.e., a pregnant woman or, presumably, someone knitting baby clothes.

  † This ruling would stand for thirty-seven years, until May 1952, when in what is known as “the Miracle decision” after the movie in question, the Supreme Court established that motion pictures are protected by the First Amendment.

  * Skirt Shy and Freight Prepaid were never released in America, though both played in Europe in 1922. Renamed Leap Year, the movie formerly known as Skirt Shy premiered overseas during the third Arbuckle trial.

  * The other two were Charlie Chaplin (July 6, 1925) and Adolph Zukor (January 14, 1929).

  {19}

  EXILE: 1922-25

  The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts …

  —WILLA CATHER, NOT UNDER FORTY

  Roscoe Arbuckle was devastated. His greatest hope over the preceding seven months was that once he was cleared of charges in Virginia Rappe’s death he could resume his film acting career. Durfee later wrote of this period:

  Suddenly we all realized the change in Roscoe, not that it was unusual nor not to be expected…. Did you ever see a person whose eyes were smiling thru sorrow and tears, well that was Roscoe’s condition. He who always had real mirth in his eyes, he was excessively nervous, which of course had never been a condition with him—or at least if he felt that way he had never showed it. He would sit endless hours silently patting our old darling dog Luke—and often I would hear him say: “Well, boy, do you know the future[?] I am sure I don’t.”

/>   He was deeply in debt. He had deeded his West Adams mansion to Joseph Schenck as security to pay for the trials, so he and Durfee were tenants when they returned to live there. He sold his $34,000 Pierce-Arrow and other luxury cars (the Cadillac went to Buster Keaton). And still he owed his trial attorneys at least $100,000 and perhaps much more. He needed Hollywood’s paydays just to get out of debt, so his unexpected banishment by Will Hays left him reeling. Five days later, on April 23, 1922, Arbuckle issued this response:

  The question of the release of my pictures is entirely within the jurisdiction of the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, owners of these pictures, who are undoubtedly working in harmony with Mr. Will Hays. I shall do everything possible to cooperate with the leaders of the industry. In the meantime, I shall prove to the world by my conduct that I am entitled to an opportunity to earn my living in the only profession I am equipped to follow, and shall patiently and hopefully await the final opinion of the American public, in whose sense of fair play I have never lost confidence.

  The most vocal segment of the American public in the wake of the Hays announcement was not interested in “fair play” toward Arbuckle—the living, breathing symbol of Hollywood licentiousness. Soon after his statement, the California Congress of Women and Parents voted in support of banning his films, and the San Francisco Federation of Women’s Clubs passed a similar resolution.