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

by Greg Merritt

  If a book such as this can be said to have charm, I think it lies in the fact that here is a book without one single redeeming merit.

  —FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF HOLLYWOOD BABYLON

  Born Kenneth Anglemyer in 1927 and raised in Los Angeles, Kenneth Anger made his first experimental short films when a child and his homoerotic Fireworks at age twenty. His avant-garde movies, which often explored occultism and/or sexuality, generated both praise and protest and made Anger a minor celebrity in the cinematic underground—but supplied scant income. He had been living in Paris since 1950 when he collected stories of movie industry depravity, and, influenced by Confidential and the blunt writing style of occultist Aleister Crowley, he penned a photo-laden book of scandals, Hollywood Babylone, published in French in 1959. An item in American newspapers in 1961 read, “Vacationers returning from Europe are smuggling in a book called Hollywood Baby-lone, written entirely in French but apparently well worth translating.”

  American Marvin Miller specialized in publishing quick knockoffs of successful sex-themed European books, and he encouraged Anger to translate Hollywood Babylone into English. The filmmaker translated two-thirds, but Miller rendered the other third in a more vulgar style and added stories. Hollywood Babylon came out in 1964, and despite being sold in a plain brown wrapper like the pornography of the era, it made the shelves of mainstream American bookstores and appeared in newspaper ads. Estimates are that this “bootleg version” sold as many as two million copies, but none of the profits were returned to its author. Miller also turned the book into a 1972 sexploitation “documentary” with cheap recreations of tawdry scenes, including the 1921 Labor Day party.

  Anger sued Miller, demanding over $500,000 in royalties and damages, and eventually won a small settlement, but he never collected from the elusive publisher. Made aware of the enduring interest in his poisonous tome, Anger Americanized and updated the text. Rereleased in 1975, Hollywood Babylon was again a success, and Anger took “the Hollywood Babylon Show” on the road, reading theatrically from the text and screening appropriately inappropriate silent film clips.

  Stuffed with photos, some of shockingly gory crime scenes, Hollywood Babylon stands as a 305-page compendium of all the ways fame can defeat you: drug addiction, murder, sexual dysfunction, public humiliations, depression, suicide. As such, it has memorialized long-gone stars—but only via innuendo, rumors, or lies. F. W. Murnau is remembered not as a great, poetic director but for dying in a car crash while allegedly performing fellatio on his fourteen-year-old valet as the boy drove. Clara Bow is commemorated not as a leading actress of the late 1920s or the quintessential flapper but as a nymphomaniac who had group sex with the USC football team (including John Wayne).* Likewise, generations know nothing of Roscoe Arbuckle’s comedic artistry, but they were certain he had once killed an actress by raping her with a bottle—a legend promulgated foremost by Hollywood Babylon.

  The book’s very title harks back to the Arbuckle case, and its third chapter, “Fat Man Out,” is devoted to that subject. From its first line about Mack Sennett discovering “plumber’s helper” Arbuckle “when he came to unclog the comedy producer’s drain,” the chapter is littered with falsehoods. Arbuckle supposedly stripped with the prostitutes in “Mishawn [sic] Manor,” and Rappe worked in minor roles at Keystone, where she “did her fair share of sleeping around and gave half the company crabs. This epidemic so shocked Sennett that he closed down his studio and had it fumigated.”

  Anger tells a lively if false version of the Labor Day party. Maude Delmont (who is misidentified with a photo of Minta Durfee) is Arbuckle’s “friend” whom, as in Leo Guild’s account, he enlists to bring Rappe to San Francisco. Of what occurred in 1219 Anger offers no opinion but instead promulgates the rumors (italics and ellipses are his):

  As headlines screamed, the rumors flew of a hideously unnatural rape: Arbuckle, enraged at his drunken impotence, had ravaged Virginia with a Coca-Cola bottle, or a champagne bottle, then had repeated the act with a jagged piece of ice … or, wasn’t it common knowledge that Arbuckle was exceptionally well endowed? … or, was it just a question of 266-pounds-too-much of Fatty flattening Virginia in a flying leap?

  It’s clear which rumor Anger prefers when, in reference to Arbuckle’s acquittal, he highlights “the lack of specific evidence (such as a bloody bottle),” as if a bottle theory had been examined in court. And at the chapter’s end, he presents the 1931 incident outside the Embassy Club when Arbuckle destroyed evidence of illegal drinking, and asks, “Was he thinking of another bottle that went sailing out the 12th floor window of the Hotel St. Francis on Labor Day 1921?”

  The myth of “Fatty’s bottle party” spread like a contagious disease. For a visceral image of said myth, 1971’s self-published Fatty by Gerald Fine set the standard with a scene wherein a drunk and still drinking Maude Delmont privately tells Matthew Brady and Nat Schmulowitz about entering 1219 just after Arbuckle was alone there with Rappe: “She was all beat up and bruised … lyin’ on th’ floor between the two beds. There was a coke bottle on the floor. Fatty had shoved it up her cunt, the son of a bitch…. She said that when she wouldn’t give in that he used the coke bottle to force her open. Then she said when he took the bottle out, he mounted her.” (Brady dismisses Delmont’s drunken account because “she had been bought or had some powerful hatred for Fatty.”) The book—labeled a “novel,” presumably for scenes like the preceding—is mostly sympathetic to Arbuckle.

  An unsympathetic view can by found in the 1974 memoir of silent-era screenwriter Anita Loos, Kiss Hollywood Goodbye. She declared that Arbuckle caused Rappe’s death “when she was trying to fight off his unorthodox lovemaking.” A 1994 Newsweek article, tied to O. J. Simpson’s arrest for double murder, concocted facts and cruel Arbuckle quotes to paint the silent star guilty, and it ran with another of Anger’s rumors: “Arbuckle had told others that he had jabbed a large, jagged piece of ice into [Rappe’s] vagina. Three days later she died from a ruptured bladder, having been literally raped to death.” And a 1998 article in London’s the Independent entitled “When Apes Put Men to Shame” chose the third and final rumor: “Hollywood has always had its share of call-girl scandals. In 1921, the American actor Fatty Arbuckle was charged with crushing to death a starlet during an orgy in San Francisco.”

  One of the most perniciously false descriptions of the alleged assault was in a 1993 edition of the scholarly Journal of Popular Culture and penned by pioneering TV host Steve Allen:*

  The popular comedian Fatty Arbuckle, in the 1920s, never worked again in the motion picture business after his arrest in conjunction with an incident in which a prostitute died, apparently because Arbuckle, in a sexual context, had inserted in the poor woman’s body a Coca-Cola bottle, which broke and cut her internally, after which she bled to death. If such a thing were to happen today, I would not be surprised if Arbuckle ended up doing a TV commercial for Pepsi.

  -esse-

  As the preceding references to “call-girl scandals” and a “prostitute” demonstrate, Virginia Rappe’s reputation has also been assaulted by history. Adela Rogers St. Johns doubled down on her previous vitriol. In her 1978 book Love, Laughter and Tears, she placed all the blame on the victim: “During this vacation an extra girl named Virginia Rappe got some alcohol in her system, stripped off her clothes and plunged Fatty and Hollywood into our first major scandal.”

  Minta Durfee was the other chief Rappe antagonist. Of her unpublished book, the Los Angeles Times said after her death, “Her manuscript was too circumspect to interest publishers.”* Nevertheless, her circumspect remembrances interested other writers, and by readily granting interviews, she contributed to their books. Durfee—who never remarried and appeared as an extra or bit player in over two dozen movies and TV shows from the mid-1930s to the early 1970s—had the advantage of longevity, living by modest means in Los Angeles until her death in 1975 at age eighty-five. She even chatted on TV’s The Merv Griffin Show in
1970 (advertised as “widow of film star Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle”). In a 1964 interview, she said Rappe “was suffering from several diseases,” one of which resulted in Sennett fumigating Keystone. This quote appears in Kevin Brownlow’s monumental history of silent film The Parade’s Gone By, published in 1968.

  Durfee’s interviews were the greatest influence on Fine’s Fatty as well as on Stuart Oderman’s 1994 biography Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. In the latter, she’s quoted as saying, “Virginia Rappe was one of those poor young girls who came to Hollywood looking for a career and who wound up being used more in the dressing room or in some executive’s office than in front of the camera. At Sennett’s, she spread syphilis all over the studio, and Mr. Sennett had to have the place fumigated!” Note how Durfee in this 1969 interview upped the ante of Kenneth Anger’s anecdote, turning crabs into syphilis, as if a venereal disease could be eliminated by an insect exterminator. There is no evidence that Rappe ever suffered from either crabs or a venereal disease. Also, Rappe never worked at Keystone. Facts be damned.

  In a 1973 interview, Durfee said, “Mr. Sennett had to close the studio down for several days while he had everything repainted and fumigated” because Rappe had “spread syphilis all over the studio.” So painters, too, were enlisted in the health crusade. The interview, published as a chapter in 1975’s You Must Remember This, is laced with falsehoods, such as “Our lawyers proved with medical records that Virginia died of cystitis, an inflammation of the bladder. She had such a severe case that she had to use a catheter to eliminate. Her sphincter muscle wouldn’t work.” It’s likely Durfee didn’t know the lies from the truth by this point, so long had she been confusing the two to paint Arbuckle in the best light and all who opposed him in the worst.

  In the same published interview, she picked off her former husband’s perceived accusers one by one, and her spurious attacks jaundiced much of the case’s history until now….

  On Maude Delmont: She “had seventy-two affidavits out against her for being a professional correspondent, a woman that’s found in bed with a husband when a photographer bursts into the room and takes a picture. That was when they had these setup divorces and the only grounds for divorce was adultery. Maude Delmont had gone to the well too often, she’d made it into a racket, and so the cops were down on her. When the cops found out Maude Delmont had been at the party at the Hotel St. Francis, she must have made a deal with the district attorney. They’d forget about the seventy-two affidavits if she’d frame Roscoe.”

  Truth: There were many rumors about Delmont, some stemming from her alleged relationship with Earl Lynn, but there is not one known affidavit as described.

  On the Women’s Vigilant Committee: “Roscoe was in handcuffs when he was taken from his cell and walked through a hallway to the courtroom for that [first] hearing. There were people milling around who’d seen this man on the screen. They knew him and started to applaud. But there was one woman in the crowd, the head of a vigilante women’s group with thousands of members, who had a lot of her followers with her. As soon as she saw Roscoe, she said, ‘Women, do your duty.’ And they all spat at Roscoe. His face and clothes were covered with spit.”

  Truth: The press would have made much of this event had it occurred.

  On William Randolph Hearst: He was “that dreadful, dreadful old man” who attacked Arbuckle relentlessly in his newspapers to extract revenge against Hollywood for not making his mistress Marion Davies a star.

  Truth: Between 1918 and 1929, Davies starred in twenty-nine films, financed by Hearst and released by Hollywood studios, so the publisher had no reason for a vendetta against Hollywood in 1921. Also, Durfee failed to mention that Arbuckle directed one of those twenty-nine films for that “dreadful, dreadful” man.

  On Will H. Hays: “This awful Will Hays, who was the censor in our business, instead of standing up like a man and declaring Roscoe absolutely guiltless, was absolutely ruthless…. I’ve never seen a man in all my lifetime that looked more like a rat dressed up in men’s clothing than Will Hays.”

  Truth: As previously discussed, Hays banished but then reinstated Arbuckle. He did look like a rat.

  But back to Virginia Rappe. In most accounts of the case, she is diminished to a bit part, as if it was not her tragedy. She’s a showgirl, an extra, a slut if not a whore. A 1994 Associated Press story on the case was typically jaundiced: Arbuckle hired the “notorious” Maude Delmont “to supply party girls,” one of whom was Rappe, who had been fired by Sennett “after she allegedly infected several actors with a venereal disease. An alcoholic, she drifted in the Hollywood lowlife.”

  In 1976, at last, came the first book-length biography of Arbuckle and the first extensively researched (though unsourced) portrait of the trials, David Yallop’s The Day the Laughter Stopped: The True Story of Fatty Arbuckle. Once again, we’re treated to the tale of Rappe’s venereal disease causing the fumigation of Keystone. Yallop also has Dr. Melville Rumwell concluding that Rappe had gonorrhea—though Rumwell never stated this at any of the three trials, nor did any other doctor who examined her before or after her death. Likewise, the following game-changer was never mentioned by the medical experts, witnesses, or attorneys of the time: Rappe hit Arbuckle up for “a great deal of money” at the Labor Day party because (Yallop’s italics) “She was pregnant, and she was sick. She needed money to have an abortion, and she wanted to have the abortion as soon as possible.” Explaining away the lack of physical evidence, Yallop conveniently suggests Rumwell performed an illegal autopsy to cover up an illegal abortion he’d performed on the dying Rappe. Yallop pegs the bladder tear on either a spontaneous rupture or a catheter used to treat a prior medical condition. (There was no evidence to suggest that a catheter caused the tear.) He also pins an unspecified scheme to blackmail Arbuckle on Delmont and suggests that Rappe may have initially been involved, seeking money for her abortion.

  The next book on the subject, 1991’s Frame-Up!: The Untold Story of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle by Andy Edmonds, collapses under its own conspiracy theory (it too lacks source notes). Again, Durfee is listed as a principal source,* and again we get her portrait of Rappe—the ultimate version: “I couldn’t stand that girl. She was sweet enough, naive. But had no morals whatsoever. She’d sleep with any man who asked her. In fact, Mack Sennett had to shut the studio down twice because of her … because she was spreading lice and some sort of venereal disease. She was a sad case.”

  Then Edmonds tops Yallop. Rappe, who had had “at least five abortions by the time she was sixteen” and a baby at seventeen (placed in a foster home), wasn’t just in San Francisco for her latest “hatchet job” abortion—though the procedure, performed by Rumwell before the party, “account[ed] for the tenderness of her abdomen.” In room 1220 Rappe supposedly tickled Arbuckle, who then reflexively kneed her in the abdomen. Pained, she ran into 1219; her bladder was ruptured. Arbuckle later found her in the bathroom, as he explained. As farfetched as Edmonds’s version of the party is, it’s not as bizarre as the author’s contention that Adolph Zukor designed a frame-up and Fred Fishback pulled it off, bringing together “a nightgown salesman [Ira Fortlouis], an actress who was known to strip [Rappe], and a woman who would take compromising pictures and say anything in court for the right price [Delmont].” Zukor supposedly wanted to obtain compromising photos of Arbuckle to use against him in contract negotiations. The plan failed—or worked too well—when the actress who was known to strip died. Edmonds’s outrageous theory seems devised to justify the book’s exclamatory title.

  There has never been a movie version of Roscoe Arbuckle’s story, on the big or small screen, despite interest dating back to the 1930s.* Durfee first optioned the film rights to her version in 1957, and that same year a TV network was planning a musical about Arbuckle. Then and for a decade afterward, Jackie Gleason was the first choice for the role. The lead in a proposed big-screen biopic might have gone to John Belushi, who was eyeing the part before his 1982 death. Likewise,
John Candy was studying for the role in 1993; he died in 1994. And in the sort of coincidence that seems a curse, Chris Farley met with playwright/screenwriter David Mamet in January 1997 to plan an Arbuckle biography in which he would star; Farley died that December. The closest thing to a Fatty movie was 1975’s The Wild Party, a Merchant Ivory production starring James Coco as “Jolly Grimm,” an aging silent star who stages an orgy in the late 1920s and ends up killing his mistress (Raquel Welch) and her actor boyfriend. The movie might have done much to confuse the facts of 1921’s real “wild party” had it not been such a box office dud.

  In the 1990s the Arbuckle case did make it to television in other forms: on the syndicated series Hollywood Babylon, based officially but loosely on Anger’s book; on an episode of E! Mysteries and Scandals; and on A&E’s Biography, which served up a spoiler in the episode’s title: “Fatty Arbuckle: Betrayed by Hollywood.” In the 2000s it was the focus of two novels: Ace Atkins’s Devil’s Garden, which follows the trials as observed by private detective Dashiell Hammett, and Jerry Stahl’s fictional Arbuckle autobiography I, Fatty, which greatly exaggerated Fatty’s drug addiction.

  Still, most Americans who recognize the name Fatty Arbuckle know it only as the punch line to a dirty joke, even if they’re foggy about the setup.* They heard he raped someone with a bottle, but they’re unsure of who he was or why he mattered. The Simpsons captured this with a wink when Krusty the Clown asks, “What has Fatty Arbuckle done that I haven’t done?”

  Almost always, the press provides only one answer. In the December 31, 1999, issue of Time, Arbuckle was included in the “People of the Century,” but only as one of four “lethal cocktails” of “crime and fame” in a section called “Murder, Inc.” Its mangled single-sentence remembrance: “In 1921, the comic was charged with, but never convicted of, the rape and murder of a starlet he met at an orgy.” Eight years later, Arbuckle’s “scandal” was featured in a Time special issue on the “Crimes of the Century.” The paragraph summation implied that he was charged with puncturing the bladder of “a naive young actress” during “forced sex (with a beer bottle!).” It also said that he died “after falling into alcoholism and lurid obscurity.” If it’s possible to be both lurid and obscure, that has only befallen him in the years after his death.