by Nancie Clare
In January 1922, a second trial for manslaughter began in San Francisco with the same legal cast and a new jury. If anything, the testimony this time was more sordid than the first. One witness claimed that San Francisco D.A. Brady had forced her to lie; another, a studio security guard who claimed that Arbuckle had bribed him to get a key to Rappe’s dressing room, was revealed under cross-examination by the defense to have an open charge against him for sexually assaulting an eight-year-old girl. Once again the jury deadlocked ten-to-two for acquittal. And, once again, San Francisco D.A. Brady refiled the charges.
For the third trial Arbuckle’s defense team went on the offensive. Rappe’s scandalous past and tragic medical history of serial abortions was introduced. Arbuckle’s defense attorney made a point of the fact that Maude Delmont, the woman who had initiated the criminal case, had never been called as a witness. The case went to the jury on April 12, 1922; six minutes later, they returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty that included an apology that read: “Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him … for there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of crime.” That wasn’t exactly true. After three trials for manslaughter, Arbuckle pled guilty to one count of violating the Volstead Act. He paid a $500 fine. But he was free, exonerated of all charges of harming Virginia Rappe. He was also broke. Arbuckle owed more than $700,000 (almost $10 million in 2017 dollars) to his legal team. And in spite of his innocence, his career was finished.
Innocent or not, the damage was done. Arbuckle’s exoneration meant less than nothing to those who occupied the high ground of righteous rectitude. The trials, with the relentless, speculative press coverage, had given them a moral platform so elevated, nothing short of Arbuckle’s ruin would sate them. Theater owners who attempted to show Arbuckle films faced boycotts and worse. Adolph Zukor’s studio, which had a number of unreleased Arbuckle films ready to go, was faced with the prospect that it would not be able to recoup its investment. In the end, Hollywood, or more specifically Adolph Zukor, served up Roscoe Arbuckle as a sacrificial lamb to appease the moral high grounders. It was that or face the reality that the religious zealots might use Arbuckle’s fall as the excuse to seize full control in perpetuity over movie content.
As the trials progressed, Hollywood producers, especially Zukor, had been fighting a multifront war against those calling for censorship of movie content. The producers would have to concede defeat in the battle to reclaim Arbuckle’s career if they were to win a truce against interference from those who wished to exert censorship control. And it fell to Will H. Hays, recently of the Harding administration and newly anointed head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America censor board, to bring down the hammer on Roscoe Arbuckle. It’s to Hays’ credit, and the self-appointed morals enforcers’ eternal shame, that he banned Arbuckle’s films, past, present, and future, from American screens with great reluctance, and in the aftermath did his best to get Arbuckle reinstated. Hays was himself a deeply religious man and what he had to do to appease the self-righteous howls from the hinterlands never sat well with him, because Arbuckle had been found not guilty. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t necessary to keep the wheels of Hollywood turning with minimal interference from censors of all stripes.7
Arbuckle’s prominent Hollywood friends did their best to offer support. From London, Charlie Chaplin, who had kept his Leftist leanings and pacifism under wraps during World War One, told the press that he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, believe that Arbuckle had anything to do with Virginia Rappe’s death. Buster Keaton delivered a public statement supporting Arbuckle’s innocence, for which he received a tepid rebuke from his studio. Arbuckle’s estranged wife, and frequent co-star, Minta Durfee attended the trial and was steadfast in her belief that Roscoe was innocent. After their divorce, Durfee continued to call her ex-husband one of the nicest men in the world. Even Will Hays wrote Arbuckle a letter of apology, something that the fallen actor treasured.8 But in spite of these measures, as well as his work under the pseudonym William Goodrich, Arbuckle never regained the prominence, or the bank balance, he had once enjoyed.
What happened to Arbuckle was a rude awakening to his fellow stars. For Roscoe Arbuckle, even though he was innocent—and wealthy—the scandal inflamed by the press was taken as proof of the perfidy of Hollywood and everyone who toiled there. In spite of the public’s continued enthusiasm for his comedic movies, his career was effectively ended.
Just before Roscoe Arbuckle’s sojourn through the criminal court came to an end, the third major Hollywood scandal of the early 1920s hit the filmmaking community with the January 1922 murder of actor-turned-director William Desmond Taylor, the same English-accented paragon of cultured reticence who had eulogized Olive Thomas in September 1920. And unlike Olive Thomas and Roscoe Arbuckle, this scandal was geographically at Mary Pickford’s doorstep.
Once again the press went wild with speculation. The studios were forced to manage yet another messy scandal that could feed into the moralists’ frenzy against the movie industry. In fact, representatives from Taylor’s studio showed up to remove many of Taylor’s personal belongings at about the same time the police arrived, which meant the studio became privy to Taylor, and his friends’, secrets. The investigation ran into roadblocks at almost every turn. Likely suspects in the Hollywood community turned to their friend District Attorney Thomas Lee Woolwine, who otherwise was known as a reform-minded prosecutor who targeted public corruption, to protect them from being interviewed by the police. (Woolwine’s brother lived in Beverly Hills.) Detectives in the Los Angeles Police Department turned to cooperative members of the press to plant stories with the hope of flushing out the individuals they felt were being protected by the district attorney. The police also secured the services of private investigators to circumvent laws.
Taylor, who was a very private individual, had secrets. Secrets that, had he lived, quite probably would have been known by very few. Taylor had changed his name before coming to Hollywood. He lived in Hollywood as a bachelor, but he had been married and had a daughter. He was homosexual, carrying on a long-term relationship with set designer George James Hopkins, who would go on to win multiple Academy Awards for A Streetcar Named Desire, My Fair Lady, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Hello, Dolly! Taylor was a kind man, loyal to his friends, and he spent most evenings reading. Mabel Normand, who co-starred with Roscoe Arbuckle in many films, was a close friend and confidante—although not a lover—and credits Taylor with helping her overcome her dependence on cocaine.9 Taylor was universally liked and admired in Hollywood, as rare an occurrence in the 1920s as it is today. And yet, after his death, his life was put under a microscope, his secrets revealed, and his legacy eviscerated. All because he had the very bad luck to be shot dead in his home late one night by a killer who, considering there was no evidence of forced entry or theft, must have been known to Taylor, but was never identified and apprehended. At first the police suspected Henry Peavey, his valet, a flamboyant gay man of color, who discovered Taylor’s body but who had a rock-solid alibi for the night before when his boss was killed. Then the police focused on Charlotte Shelby, the mother of Mary Miles Minter, a young actress who had deluded herself into thinking Taylor was in love with her. The suspicion of Shelby was reinforced by D.A. Woolwine’s obvious interference in protecting Mary and her mother, Charlotte (who had chosen her last name to infer that they were direct descendants of Kentucky’s first governor, Isaac Shelby).10 Members of the LAPD investigating Taylor’s murder who wanted to question Mary Miles Minter and Charlotte Shelby and were prevented from doing so, drew the conclusion that there must be a reason Woolwine was protecting them and that reason was they were either guilty or complicit. Mary Miles Minter and Charlotte Shelby were frequently mentioned in the press in association with the case, which must have driven Mary Pickford, whose mother’s name was also Charlotte,
to distraction at the thought readers might think she was somehow involved. Because the studio had disturbed the crime scene by removing many of Taylor’s possessions, and other investigators were tripping over themselves trying to either set up those they thought were guilty or obfuscate suspicion from those they wanted to protect, the person who actually shot Taylor slipped under the investigative radar and was never discovered. William J. Mann, who wrote the engrossing Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood about the Taylor murder, posited that the actual murderer was a man known as Blackie Madsen, one half of a blackmail duo that was in cahoots with a down-and-out actress named Margaret “Gibby” Gibson, who had targeted Taylor. According to Mann, the murder was a shakedown gone wrong.11
Fame was the catalyst for the over-the-top attention. People of all walks of life behaved badly, often reprehensively and sometimes criminally. For the socially secure, a big bank account and connections often mitigated repercussions for bad behavior. When ordinary people got into trouble with the law, got into debt, or associated with, and often married, the wrong people, their misfortune went unexamined by strangers. Olive Thomas liked to party and in all likelihood she ingested mercury bichloride accidently, but she would forever be associated with the salacious details of her demise. (Not to mention the world was now aware that Jack Pickford had syphilis.) Being innocent hadn’t saved Roscoe Arbuckle—scandal had robbed him of his career. It wasn’t enough that someone murdered William Desmond Taylor—the aftermath deprived him of his dignity as well as his legacy. Everyone has secrets they would prefer remain hidden, and that included Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. And the greater a person’s fame, the more vulnerable that person was to the revelation of their secrets. It’s very possible that Pickford had an abortion while married to Owen Moore; she certainly had carried on a long, extramarital affair with Fairbanks, who was at the time a married man. Fairbanks may have been the last, but he probably wasn’t Pickford’s only lover while she was married to Moore, and Pickford hadn’t been Douglas Fairbanks’ only dalliance while he was married to his first wife, Beth Sully, either. Douglas Fairbanks’ father was Jewish, a fact that haunted him, and to be fair, the rampant anti-Semitism of the time reinforced his desire to keep his religious background just that, in the background. Pickford must have realized that if she became either the victim or, unlikely as it may seem, the perpetrator of a crime, nothing would protect her privacy entirely. But she also must have felt that living in a city separate from Los Angeles, as well as the geographic distance from Hollywood that Beverly Hills offered her and her friends, could act as a shield from the excesses of both the press and the Los Angeles Police Department.
Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks could have lived in a beautiful home anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area. It was no accident that they remained cocooned in Beverly Hills, a city that would offer them a buffer from the meaner surrounding municipality and its bureaucracy.
7
Meanwhile, in Beverly Hills …
By the early 1920s Beverly Hills was running out of readily available water. The principals of the Rodeo Land and Water Company learned that they had to be careful what they wished for. Their bottom line depended on land sales picking up and the building of fine homes to commence, which would, in turn, attract more residents. But the sources of water that had sustained the city when the population was negligible—and for which Rodeo’s utility company was responsible for providing—were beginning to feel the strain. And the emerging glitterati of the motion picture industry who were following Doug and Mary to live in Beverly Hills weren’t helping, what with their grand homes that included not just lush gardens and fully grown trees, but waterfalls as well.
As part of the enticement to make its land development in a region that was notoriously water parched attractive to potential buyers, the Rodeo Land and Water Company had promised to provide water and municipal services to the city’s residents for fifteen years. That promise of readily available local water for robust, sustained growth over the next decade and a half was one that it probably knew couldn’t be kept even as it made it. The truth was, the Rodeo Land and Water Company had found it was easy to get into the water business when it wanted to sell land, but hard to get out of it when the demand for water exceeded the readily available supply. After all, Rodeo was first and foremost in the business of land development.
Since the Rodeo Land and Water Company no longer wanted to be in the water and sewage business, but was unwilling to turn over the utilities to the Beverly Hills city government without being compensated, the remedy seemed obvious: Beverly Hills should join the City of Los Angeles and be entitled to share the abundant water that was flowing into the city from the Owens Valley. For the Rodeo Land and Water Company, proposing an election to annex to Los Angeles was all about the water, something that had been a motivating factor in the city’s politics since before Beverly Hills incorporated. It had been all about the water in 1900, when, after failing to find enough oil to make drilling economically feasible but finding ample amounts of groundwater, the Amalgamated Oil Company reinvented itself as the Rodeo Land and Water Company, with the idea of developing what had originally been Maria Valdez’s Mexican land grant and then the Hammel and Denker Ranch into a residential community.
Writing a series of articles on the history of Beverly Hills for the Beverly Hills Citizen, B. J. Firminger, who had been the Beverly Hills city clerk at the time, opined that the prospect of annexation to Los Angeles and the subsequent vote could have been avoided if cooler heads in the city’s government had prevailed. When the water crisis began in earnest in the early 1920s, the Rodeo Land and Water Company suggested selling its Beverly Hills Utility Company along with the water rights and distribution systems to the City of Beverly Hills at a price set by the State of California’s Railroad Commission, which at the time was the government agency in charge of public utility price negotiations. But according to Firminger, there was a group of “hot heads who felt the Rodeo people were under an obligation to furnish water without the penalty of annexation to the City of Los Angeles; that if [the Rodeo Land and Water Company] was unable to or unwilling to do this it should turn over [the Beverly Hills Utility Company] to the city without cost.”1
Upon hearing the demand that it turn over the Beverly Hills Utility Company to the city without receiving payment, the Rodeo Land and Water Company exercised the nuclear option: It proposed annexation to Los Angeles and the elimination of Beverly Hills as an independent city entirely. During the tense period that followed, legal lines were drawn at meetings of the Beverly Hills trustees, as the city council was called. Paul E. Schwab, who would succeed Silsby Spalding as mayor of Beverly Hills, asked the trustees of the city to file suit against Rodeo Land and Water’s utility arm to compel it to find the water it was legally obligated to provide by either drilling new wells or purchasing from other water companies. Upon learning of the potential lawsuit, the Rodeo Land and Water Company hired Francis Haney, considered one of the state’s top criminal attorneys, because it thought it might lose the court case.2
The message from representatives of the Rodeo Land and Water Company’s Beverly Hills Utility Company to the citizens of the city they served was dire: The city was running out of fresh spring water; joining up with Los Angeles was the only way out and they had the reports to prove it. The water coming from the newer wells in the southern part of the city contained sulfur, with its attending odor of rotten eggs. To further build the case for annexation, the quality of this water was being called into question by proxies of the Rodeo Land and Water Company. In late 1922 the California State Board of Health in Sacramento was asked to hold hearings on the quality of the water from the new sources.3 Faced with the question of what could be done about the odious water from the new wells, the Rodeo Land and Water Company had a ready answer: annex to Los Angeles and share in the bounty of its fresh Owens Valley water. And even though the Rodeo Land and Water Company eventually f
ound out from local hydraulic engineers that more water could be obtained—for a price—it didn’t feel the need to share this fact with the City of Beverly Hills in the months leading up to the proposed annexation to Los Angeles.
* * *
From the perspective of the Rodeo Land and Water Company, joining the City of Los Angeles seemed like the most reasonable course of action, and its public position was that it couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t see the situation as it did. Beverly Hills was running out of water and Los Angeles was swimming in the stuff. But Silsby Spalding and the majority of the trustees of the City of Beverly Hills felt otherwise. For one thing, they were acutely aware that the self-interests of the Rodeo Land and Water Company and the City of Beverly Hills were not aligned. And there was not a great deal of trust built up between Beverly Hills and Los Angeles; contentious interactions between them—a fight over improving schools, and Los Angeles running roughshod over the smaller municipality when it ran a pipeline for its water through their city—made a precipitous annexation to Los Angeles seem shortsighted to Beverly Hills’ civic leadership.
