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

by Greg Merritt

  As for the exclusive clubs, none was more exclusive than the Embassy Club, an opuluent two-story space in Hollywood with a glass-enclosed rooftop lounge. The three hundred members included Charlie Chaplin, Sid Grauman, Gloria Swanson, and Roscoe Arbuckle, and only members and their guests could enter. The Embassy was the place for celebrities—especially fading silent stars—to eat, drink, and dance. On September 19, 1931, Arbuckle was there with a screenwriter and two unidentified women, one of whom was likely McPhail. After leaving at 2 AM, a policeman prevented Arbuckle from driving because he thought he was intoxicated. Arbuckle smashed a bottle of alcohol that had been in his car, saying, “There goes the evidence.”* At the police station, he and the screenwriter passed sobriety tests, and Arbuckle insisted the officer take the same test. He did and passed. In court, Arbuckle paid a twenty-five-dollar fine for breaking the bottle. Ten years prior, his name was splashed across front pages for a very different arrest. Now, when many had forgotten him, he made a dubious comeback: FATTY ARBUCKLE JOKES ABOUT MORNING ARREST was on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

  Before then, in August 1931, it was announced that Arbuckle and McPhail would marry—though she was not yet divorced. Some of the coverage led with the actress’s engagement and made no mention of her fiancé’s career—as if the reporter was unaware. For others, time had only coarsened their memories. An editorial in an Iowa newspaper opined, “There ought to be a law prohibiting the marriage of such types of men as Fatty Arbuckle. He has forfeited the right to the esteem of all right-thinking people.”

  In the March 1931 Photoplay, an article about Arbuckle appeared under the title “Just Let Me Work.” It summarized his struggle against censorship and his attempts to clear his name and reclaim his place in front of the cameras. “For years, his name and the news of the fight were good copy,” the article mused. “But then, inevitably, came the indifference that is worse, in ‘Fatty’s’ profession, than the most rabid condemnation. ‘Fatty’ was left to be forgotten.” The article concluded with Arbuckle making another argument for his return:

  All I want is to be allowed to work in my field. It isn’t for money. I’m not broke…. My conscience is clear, my heart is clean. I refuse to worry. I feel that I have atoned for everything. You know, people can be wrong. I don’t say I’m all right. I don’t believe the other side is all right. And anyway, so much worse has happened in history to people vastly more important than I am that my little worries don’t matter, in comparison. So why should I kick? People have the right to their opinions. The people who oppose me have the right to theirs. I have the right to mine—which is that I’ve suffered enough, and been humiliated enough. I want to go back to the screen. I think I can entertain and gladden the people that see me. All I want is that. If I do get back, it will be grand. If I don’t—well, okay.

  Two months later, Motion Picture Classic published “Isn’t Fatty Arbuckle Punished Enough?” which explained that one recent plan for Arbuckle’s return had been deterred by the protestations of women’s clubs. Still, the article tried to rally readers: “Statisticians have figured out a life sentence in prison is commuted on an average of ten years. Isn’t a decade a long sentence for any man to serve? Hasn’t Fatty suffered enough? Is he to be forever denied a chance to stage a comeback?”

  Meanwhile, Photoplay’s James Quirk went on a radio program and asked listeners to weigh in on Arbuckle’s possible return. Over three thousand letters poured in to the magazine, overwhelmingly in the affirmative. Among the letter writers was Matthew Brady, who averred, “Arbuckle should be allowed to make his own living in his own way.” A third fan magazine, Motion Picture, chimed in with two articles: “Doesn’t Fatty Arbuckle Deserve a Break?” and “The Fans Want Fatty Arbuckle Back on the Screen.”

  The subject of these articles had had his hopes dashed too often. In June 1931 he said, in an obvious play for sympathy, “I have no desire to return as an actor. In the dark hours of my life it was a consolation to know that I had given happiness to millions of people. There doesn’t seem to be much chance of happiness for me. No man can live and be happy without work, and all I want to do is to be permitted to use whatever talents and training I have in the writing and direction of pictures under my own name.”

  Arbuckle continued to make stage appearances, embarking on a vaudeville tour of eastern Canada with fiancée McPhail as his female lead. “Roscoe was warmly received, even in Montreal and Quebec, and met with only a little opposition,” she remembered. In early May 1932, he was booked for six weeks in and around New York City. Broadway’s Palace Theatre featured a sign above the marquee with two outsized names: QUEENIE SMITH and RoscoE ARBUCKLE.* Below were six additional names, including Milton Berle. Arbuckle was also part of a vaudeville benefit show at the Metropolitan Opera, where Berle, who often performed in drag, was “master or mistress of ceremonies.”

  As their vaudeville tour hopscotched Eastern cities, McPhail’s divorce finally went through. After difficulties in two other states, she and Arbuckle married in Erie, Pennsylvania, on June 21—at 2:30 AM, after rousing the court reporter and justice of the peace out of their beds.

  A month later, when the couple was back in New York City and performing in a Brooklyn vaudeville house, Arbuckle learned from his agent, Joe Rivkin, that Warner Bros. wanted him to star in a sound short. Filming was to take place at the Vitaphone studio in Brooklyn. “Roscoe felt like he had been given his life back,” McPhail remembered. “It was the call he had been waiting eleven years for.”

  He signed the contract in New York City on July 27. A photo of that moment, with his new bride and a studio executive watching, was titled “Star Emerging from Eclipse.” An Associated Press story effused, “Frankly gambling on Fatty’s chances for success, the producers decided to risk just one picture. If the Arbuckle box office power of the past is apparent, Fatty will be on a high road to the most spectacular ‘comeback’ in film history.”

  ”It’s kind of like home to me, you know—pictures,” Arbuckle told a reporter, and he explained that comedy styles were constantly changing. “You gotta adapt,” he said, but then added, reflexively, “But I can promise they’ll be good, clean, wholesome pictures. Broad comedy, with something for the children.” Yes, clean and wholesome for the children, since the event that drove him from screens nearly eleven years prior was never far from his thoughts. It was never far from most anyone’s thoughts when they thought of him.

  “They got all the money I had. I ended up a quarter of a million dollars in debt. I’ve paid it back in vaudeville. Did they cram it down my throat? Hun … plenty.” They was everyone who made him out to be a monster: the prosecutors, the press, the protestors, the censors. Then, as if to answer the question before it was asked, the question that was always there, almost never asked but forever lurking, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle said, “I never did anything. I’ve got a clear conscience and a clean heart.”

  * By then Normand’s health was in decline and her career was nearly over (she acted in her final two comedy shorts in 1927). She died of tuberculosis in 1930 at thirty-seven.

  * To fend off creditors after making the financially disastrous The Wizard of Oz (1925), Semon mirrored Arbuckle, directing two-reel comedies for Educational and returning to vaudeville. He died in 1928 at age thirty-nine.

  † He never actually used this pseudonym.

  * The deal reportedly had a $5,000-per-week salary; the other half of the estimated payday would come from Arbuckle’s share of profits.

  † Durfee claimed she was getting the minimum $200 weekly payments from Arbuckle but not 20 percent of his earnings as agreed.

  * The last holdout, Warners would switch to sound-on-film technology in early 1930.

  * Brooks was a star in comedies at Paramount and a flapper icon, but in 1928 the twenty-two-year-old snubbed the studio and went to Europe, where she starred in the sexually charged classic Pandora’s Box (1929).

  * At least two of these featured a teenage Betty Gra
ble (using the pseudonym Frances Dean), who became a major movie star in the 1940s.

  * Among the features was 1931’s Girls Demand Excitement, the second film starring John Wayne.

  † In March 1932 Deane married a banker; they divorced two years later. She died in Hollywood in 1974.

  * He later claimed to have no knowledge of where the bottle came from, saying, “I thought someone was playing a practical joke on me and, when the officer addressed me, I threw it out merely as a precaution.”

  * The rare absence of “Fatty” surely pleased Arbuckle. Queenie Smith was a Broadway actress.

  {21}

  LEGENDS

  “I suppose history never lies, does it?” said Mr. Dick, with a gleam of hope.

  “Oh dear, no, sir!” I replied, most decisively. I was ingenious and young, and I thought so.

  —CHARLES DICKENS, DAVID COPPERFIELD

  For decades, the narrative of the events of Labor Day 1921 and their aftermath did not change but merely faded, shrinking to the size of unfortunate but enduring epitaphs: “ruined by wild party,” “tried for rape death of actress,” “scandal-plagued,” “thrown out of Hollywood.” Proving some would never forget, in 1948, twenty-six years after Arbuckle’s acquittal, the Women’s Club of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, “passed a strong resolution expressing their opposition to the showing of any Fatty Arbuckle films.”

  Arbuckle’s greatest defender at that time was celebrity journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns. In 1950 she penned a remembrance entitled, tellingly, “The Arbuckle Tragedy” for the American Weekly, a magazine widely circulated as a newspaper supplement, and she quoted her own male housekeeper, who said he cleaned for Rappe until the day the naked actress ran outside shouting for help and lying that the housekeeper had attacked her. “The neighbors said whenever she got a few drinks in her she did that,” according to the unnamed housekeeper, and unnamed neighbors supposedly confirmed this. Rogers also framed the legal proceedings as a slam dunk for Arbuckle by not mentioning the first two trials but quoting the innocence statement of “the jury which acquitted him in less than a minute.”

  In 1957 movie power broker Donald Crisp claimed Arbuckle was framed: “He was no more guilty of killing that girl than the man in the moon. He wasn’t even in San Francisco. Her dead body was discovered at three in the afternoon. He didn’t get to San Francisco until eight that evening.” If nothing else, Crisp proved how effortlessly the case could be rewritten.

  As favorably as St. Johns and Crisp slanted his “tragedy,” they ignored Arbuckle’s artistry. With each passing year, knowledge of his comic expertise faded, as did the status of silent cinema. In a 1949 public opinion poll on the top fifteen funniest comedians of all time, Charlie Chaplin was the only silent star to make the list, and only at fifteenth, though Arbuckle did receive some votes.* That same year, in an extensive cover story in Life magazine titled “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” respected critic James Agee championed silent-era slapstick. One sentence of the sixteen-page article was dedicated to Arbuckle, mentioning his talents without noting his travails. Then, in separate, lengthy tributes, “the four most eminent masters” were christened: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon.† The history was being written without Roscoe Arbuckle.

  There were exceptions. “They get American movies here,” wrote Bob Hope from Moscow in a newspaper column in 1957. “But they’re a little late. Several people asked me if Fatty Arbuckle is up for an academy award this year.” It was the rare reference to Arbuckle that made no mention of his scandal; Hope never forgot his early debt to the ostracized star. Arbuckle was also one of the original 1,558 people chosen by the motion picture selection committee for the Hollywood Walk of Fame. These initial sidewalk stars were laid in 1960 and 1961 without ceremonies, and Arbuckle’s honor sparked no protest.* Likewise, Fatty footage was included in the 1960 feature documentary on silent slapstick When Comedy Was King and its 1961 sequel Days of Thrills and Laughter. His scenes in both are a celebration of his artistry, void of any mention of controversy.

  It was forty-one years after his arrest before the first (ridiculous) book-length attempt at retelling the story of Arbuckle’s case was published. (By contrast, within two years after the conclusion of another “trial of the century,” the market was glutted with more than forty books on the O. J. Simpson case.) The absence of Arbuckle books was in marked contrast to the abundance of book announcements from his ex-wives. The first, from Doris Deane, came in 1935: a biography and possible movie. Neither materialized. Four years later came the news that Minta Durfee had written a play about her former husband: “The Clown Speaks.” In 1951 she said she was penning a book of the same name. By 1955 the title had changed to “My Clown Cried.” By 1971 a news item would state that the book was finished and “Bob Hope is said to be interested in buying the movie rights.” No such book was ever published.†

  In 1960 a lengthy United Syndicate article focused on the trials. Its greatest impression is summarized in this sentence: “Then, in 1921, Funny Fatty became involved in a sordid sex affair and all the people who loved him suddenly and mercilessly decided to hate him.” Just how sordid that alleged “sex affair” was rumored to have been remained a whispered secret for decades after its occurrence, not even published in “underground” exposés like The Sins of Hollywood. By the early 1960s, however, these rumors had begun to find a new life in print.

  In 1952 Robert Harrison launched Confidential magazine. Its slogan was “Tells the Facts and Names the Names,” though facts and names were typically attached to caustic innuendo. Mostly by emphasizing celebrity sexuality, Confidential’s circulation soon soared to over three and a half million, and its huge success spawned more than a dozen imitators, their garish colors and SHOCKING headlines screaming for attention. Facing a phalanx of libel suits, the magazine was effectively tamed by the studios in 1958, and Harrison sold it. As his scandal had retreated into history, Arbuckle was never featured in Confidential, but later coverage of the case owes much to this free-speech pioneer. For better and worst, Confidential blazed a trail so that future publishers could explore Hollywood sex scandals—including Roscoe Arbuckle’s.

  “HERE Is THE SHOCKING, SOMETIMES SORDID, AND ALWAYS FASCINATING STORY OF ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS CRIMINAL TRIALS OF ALL TIME—THE FATTY ARBUCKLE CASE.” So screams, with caps locked, The Fatty Arbuckle Case just inside a cover complete with a giant, frowning Arbuckle head blocking out the disrobed parts of a brunette beauty lounging beside a bottle of liquor. Surely one of the most famous criminal cases of all time deserved better than this 1962 paperback penned by pulp fictionist Leo Guild, whom in 2007, on the tenth anniversary of his death, a newspaper dubbed “the Worst Pulp Novelist Ever.” Guild was once a columnist for the Hollywood Reporter, and over a lengthy career he churned out all manner of dreck, including gambling guides (he called himself “the Wizard of Odds”), horror (The Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman), humor (Bachelor’s Joke Book), and several blaxploitation/ sexploitation tomes with titles like Street of Ho’s, Black Bait, and The Girl Who Loved Black: White Girls Who Love Black Pimps. Guild also fashioned himself a celebrity biographer, penning lazy books about such legends as Josephine Baker, Darryl Zanuck, and Liberace.*

  In The Fatty Arbuckle Case, Guild wrote, “These are the rumors, the facts and the theories, sifted and arranged in what seems to this author the most reasonable and probable re-creation of that fateful day.” In his version, Arbuckle and Maude Delmont conspired in Los Angeles to get Virginia Rappe to a party in San Francisco so Arbuckle could have sex with her. The party livened up when Delmont stripped to only her panties for the amusement of all and compared her bare breasts with those of an unnamed and equally topless showgirl. Soon thereafter, Rappe, who called Arbuckle “despicable,” went willingly with him into 1219. With regard to what followed, the Wizard of Odds hedged his bet. The most “sane explanation,” he reported, is that Arbuckle and Rappe had intercourse and “by force or roughness, Virginia’s bladder
was broken.” But he also wrote, “One rumor was that the drunken Arbuckle had ravaged her with a coke bottle. Another said he used a jagged stick of ice.”

  Here, then, forty-one years after Arbuckle’s arrest, is the now-legendary supposition: he ruptured Rappe’s bladder while raping her with a bottle.* The broader rumor was that Arbuckle was unable to achieve an erection and thus substituted another item for his phallus, most often identified as a Coca-Cola bottle. Never mind that there was no evidence of this, and never mind that one could not puncture a bladder thusly without doing grave injury to the upper vaginal wall. Indeed, there was no evidence of any vaginal contact by Arbuckle, and no such contact was ever alleged in court (other than his application of ice). Rappe was clothed while he was alone with her in 1219. But four decades later, a persistent myth took root and grew.

  And it wasn’t merely relegated to pulp paperbacks. The following year, Charles Beaumont (best known for penning scripts for The Twilight Zone) revisited the case in a book of nostalgic essays, and though he made it clear he felt Arbuckle got a raw deal, he dished the dirt in a parenthetical aside: “(Three versions of the incident were in office and alley circulation: Arbuckle had raped the girl, killing her with thrusts of his presumably enormous penis;* he had used a coca cola bottle or a dildo; he had impaled her on a broom handle. Most people devotedly believed all three stories.)”

  The bottle rumor began its journey from whispers to legend even earlier than 1962. Leo Guild seems to have expanded on a version of the story contained in another lurid volume, which he probably consulted in its original, French-language edition when he wrote The Fatty Arbuckle Case. Its subsequent English translation would have the greatest impact on the public’s perception of the events in room 1219.