Letter from Hollywood

Editor’s Note: One hundred years ago today, Hollywood’s highest-paid film actor celebrated Labor Day dancing with perhaps its lowest-paid actress.

Those days, you could pay a dime to dance with any girl in the room. Fatty Arbuckle paid much, much more. The story of Tinseltown’s first celebrity trial, for his alleged rape and murder of that actress, is told here by lawyer Mark Phillips and his daughter, postdoctoral researcher Aryn Phillips, who last year in these pages wrote about the Charles Manson murders.

Both are retold from their book, “Trials of the Century.”

Arbuckle’s tale is told in two parts. This month: the accusation.

The French called it “The Crazy Years,” for the extraordinary social, economic and artistic changes that occurred.  The British called it “The Golden Age Twenties,” for its years of economic boom.  In America, it was “The Roaring Twenties,” and it was the decade in which the Twentieth Century came of age.  The Twenties brought peace and prosperity to most, and a sense of social evolution.  Charles Lindbergh piloted the Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris.  Baseball was America’s pastime and Babe Ruth its unquestioned king.  Prohibition in 1925 did little to slow the party atmosphere of Jazz, Flappers and excess, which roared unabated until the stock market crash of October, 1929.  And above all, America went to the movies.

In 1921, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was the highest paid film star in Hollywood. King of the two-reel comedies, he was beloved by millions for his pratfalls, his pie fights and his innocent, angelic smile. Studios churned his movies out by the score, and excited ticket buyers across the country stood in line to watch them.

But all that came to an end on September 5, 1921. Coming off a punishing year-long schedule of back-to-back filming, Arbuckle drove with friends to San Francisco for rest and relaxation over the Labor Day Weekend. Prohibition was in full swing, but liquor was available to those who could afford it, and Arbuckle certainly could. That weekend, after a drunken revel in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel, Arbuckle was wrongfully charged in the rape and death of bit-part actress Virginia Rappe. Rumors swirled of his callousness, brutishness and sexual deviation, none of it true. Caught in a firestorm of ambitious politicians, rapacious studio owners, social reformers and newspaper publishers, Arbuckle was tried in both the courts and the press. Three trials later he was acquitted, but the damage was done. He was blacklisted, financially ruined and one of the most reviled men in America.

Just thirty-four, his rise and fall in the world had been dizzying from every perspective. Born March 24, 1887, Arbuckle was one of five children in a poor farming family in Smith Center, Kansas. His father, William, presumed him to be the product of his wife’s infidelity, and in revenge and derision named him Roscoe Conkling Arbuckle, after controversial New York senator Roscoe Conkling, a power broker in the unconventional election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. Infamous as a womanizer and a philanderer, Conkling was notorious for an affair with Kate Chase Sprague, daughter of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase and wife of William Sprague, U.S. senator and Governor of Rhode Island. According to popular rumor, in 1879 Sprague had surprised the couple and chased Conklin off his Narragansett estate with a shotgun.

Arbuckle’s movie success was neither chance nor favor, but rather the result of talent and many years of hard work. His family had packed up their few worldly goods and trekked west by 1892, living in a rundown home in Santa Ana, California. That winter, Arbuckle’s father walked out on the family. All of the Arbuckle children went to work, including Roscoe, then aged five. He dropped out of school at seven and began working in bars and vaudeville theaters until his mother’s death in 1899, when he was packed off to his father, then living in San Jose.

But his father never appeared at the station to pick him up. Twelve years old and with no family, friends or money, Arbuckle found a job at a local hotel as bell hop and janitor. He was big, even then 185 pounds, and people thought him older.

His first taste of show business came early. Arbuckle was in the habit of singing while he worked, and a hotel patron overheard him and invited him to perform in an amateur talent show at the Empire Theater in San Jose. The show consisted of the audience judging acts by clapping or jeering, with the worst of the performers pulled off stage by a large hook. Arbuckle’s singing did not impress the audience, and they screamed for his removal. Light on his feet despite his size, when he saw the hook emerge from the wings he avoided it by dodging and dancing, eventually somersaulting into the orchestra pit. The audience loved it, and that night Arbuckle not only won the competition but began a career in vaudeville.

In the spring of 1902, then fifteen, Arbuckle was offered a permanent job by David Grauman at his Unique Theater in San Jose, earning the then decent salary of $18 per week. Grauman, father of impresario Sid Grauman who would go on to build the opulent Chinese and Egyptian motion picture palaces in Hollywood, had followed Arbuckle’s local performances and had privately encouraged him to continue to hone his singing and dancing skills. Arbuckle stayed with Grauman nearly two years, opening each night’s show by singing, and filling in after with small acting parts. In 1904, Grauman moved Arbuckle to the Portola Café in San Francisco, which featured singing waiters and was evidently an improvement over small-town vaudeville. It was there that Grauman introduced Arbuckle to Alexander Pantages, the grand showman of the early twentieth century American stage, and the young singer soon joined Pantages’s traveling troupe.

What followed were several years of extensive touring, initially for Pantages but eventually on his own with ever changing acts and partners. His salary increased to $50 per week, and he was no longer required to clean and sweep between shows. Despite his size, Arbuckle was a talented performer, capable of broad slapstick physical humor, dancing and pratfalls. His humor and charm were popular with audiences. He played parts of every ethnicity and age. One night when the only female member of the troupe was nowhere to be found, Arbuckle went on in her place, dressed in her complete costume, wig and makeup. Weighing in at 250 pounds and in an outfit padded where appropriate, he brought the house down, and his female character became a standard. Re-teamed with Pantages, Arbuckle toured California, Canada, and Alaska.

In 1908, now married to fellow tour member Araminta “Minta” Durfee, Arbuckle took the acting company to El Paso, Texas, where the picnicking troupe found themselves surrounded one afternoon by soldiers of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. Arbuckle and Villa introduced themselves, and in a moment of sublime historical mischance, began in fun throwing fruit pies at each other. When Arbuckle later introduced the gag in early films, the pie fight became a mainstay for him and scores of other comedians who adopted and perfected it.

Arbuckle began his film career with Selig Polyscope Company in July of 1909, appearing in Ben’s Kid. The one-reeler, lasting approximately ten minutes, earned Arbuckle five dollars. Movie actors were held in low regard in 1909, often barred from rooming houses and stores, and certainly not accepted into polite society. To act in films was considered by many an admission of failure as a stage performer, but Arbuckle needed the money to support himself and Minta. He worked sporadically for Selig until he finally landed a permanent job with Keystone Studios, the seminal early movie studio in Los Angeles founded by Mack Sennett. Between 1912 and 1917, many Hollywood stars got their start at Keystone, including Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Gloria Swanson, Mabel Normand and Harry Langdon. Sennett, the son of Irish Catholic Canadian farmers, had an unerring feel for comedy, and his Keystone Kops, anchored at one end by the sizable girth of Arbuckle, have entered the American lexicon as any group that mismanages its affairs despite an excess of energy and activity. So recognizable were the disaster-prone Kops with their tall, British helmets, that police departments throughout the United States quickly abandoned the headgear in favor of military-style officers’ caps.

By 1914, paired in films with actress Mabel Normand, Arbuckle moved to Paramount Pictures for the then unheard of offer of $1,000-a-day plus 25% of all profits and complete artistic control. The movies they made, primarily twenty-minute two-reelers, were so popular that Paramount signed Arbuckle to an unprecedented three-year, three million dollar contract which made him the highest paid movie actor of his age.

But by 1916, Arbuckle’s weight and heavy drinking were impacting his health. Then age thirty, he tipped the scales at more than 300 pounds. Wherever he went he was known as “Fatty” and that nickname appeared everywhere; in articles, movie posters and product promotions. But it was only a screen name, and Arbuckle never used it himself nor did his friends use it in conversation with him. He discouraged anyone from addressing him as “Fatty” off screen, and when they did his usual response was “I’ve got a name, you know.”

His marriage to Minta cooled and by 1916 they were separated, with Minta living in New York. Though Arbuckle certainly lived the life of a visible and highly paid motion picture actor, tales of a promiscuous and dissolute lifestyle are probably inaccurate. His much-discussed relationship with perennial co-star Mabel Normand was close but not sexual. She was involved in her own stormy relationship with Mack Sennett, and Arbuckle once saved her life by taking her to a hospital after she was struck in the head with a vase in a particularly nasty episode in the Sennett home. Within days of her release from the hospital Normand attempted to drown herself, and then spiraled into a life of drug addiction and abusive behavior. In 1922 she was implicated as a prime suspect in the murder of director William Desmond Taylor, one of the great scandals of its day. She contracted tuberculosis, her health rapidly declined, and she died ruined and unhappy at the age of thirty-five.

By the summer of 1921, Arbuckle was at the height of his success and popularity. His two-reel comedies played in every city and small town in America. He had paid the then enormous sum of $250,000 to purchase the Theda Bara mansion on West Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles, with another mansion for relaxation some twenty miles south on Ocean Avenue in Long Beach. Both homes were opulently furnished with antiques at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, mostly bought on credit. He entertained often, spent freely and saved nothing. He employed staff, including a butler and a chauffeur. He kept six cars, including a Rolls Royce. In early September of 1921, he bought a custom-built Pierce-Arrow touring car four times the size of an average car. Arbuckle told interviewers “Of course my car is four times the size of anyone else’s. I am four times as big as the average guy!” At $25,000, the car cost one hundred times the average American’s annual salary.

These excesses of Hollywood stirred the passions of the national press and caught the attention of politicians. Newspapers, particularly the Hearst dailies, ran editorials critical of movie actors, and calls came from many directions for the industry to police itself, which would ultimately come to fruition with the organization of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, known as the Hays Office, under the dictatorial regime of William Hays. It was in this charged environment that Arbuckle, exhausted from his work schedule, announced an “open” party at the St. Francis Hotel, loaded his Pierce-Arrow with supplies, and headed north to San Francisco.

Arbuckle left Los Angeles on Saturday morning, September 3, accompanied by his friends, actor Lowell Sherman and director Fred Fischbach. According to Arbuckle, they arrived in San Francisco late that afternoon, checked into the St. Francis and after an early dinner, went to bed. The St. Francis was, even then, legendary for its luxury and clientele. Built in 1904 by the Crocker heirs, one of California’s wealthiest families, during the 1920s it was the fashionable place to stay for politicians, celebrities and film actors.

Arbuckle took three adjoining rooms; 1219 for himself and Fischbach, 1221 for Sherman, and the middle room, 1220, from which the bed had been removed, as the party room. Rooms 1219 and 1221 each had their own bathroom, but 1220 was only rented by the hotel as an adjoining room for either 1219 or 1221 to make either a suite, and thus did not.

On Sunday, September 4, the three did some sightseeing and visited friends across the bay.

The following day was Monday, September 5, and the national holiday. Beginning in the morning Arbuckle’s suite began to fill with friends, and witnesses estimate that anywhere between fifteen and twenty people dropped by at various times throughout the day. Amongst them was a curious trio invited by Fischbach; petty criminal Maude Delmont, who described herself as a model, 25 year old bit actress Virginia Rappe, and Rappe’s manager, Al Semnacher. Arbuckle had never met any of them except in passing and there is some dispute about what they were doing in San Francisco that weekend, but according to witnesses familiar with the individuals the young actress was in San Francisco to have an abortion.

Young Virginia Rappe’s brush with history is limited solely to the events of that day in Arbuckle’s suite at the St. Francis. Born Virginia Rapp, she added the “e” to her last name because it sounded more elegant. According to interviews given after her death by her grandmother, Rappe was born out of wedlock following an affair between her mother, Mabel, and an English nobleman visiting Chicago where she lived. In an era where illegitimacy was still frowned upon, the pregnant Mabel moved to New York where her daughter was born, and where Mabel died eleven years later. Young Rappe then returned to Chicago to be raised by her grandmother.

Growing up she was indiscriminate in her relationships. She had at least five abortions by the age of sixteen, and at age seventeen gave birth to an out-of-wedlock child which she gave into foster care. Her good looks led to a modeling career in her teens and she moved to San Francisco where she pursued that work. She was engaged to a dress designer named Robert Moscovitz, but he was killed in a trolley accident before their wedding. Distraught and in financial straits, Rappe moved to Los Angeles where she took a room with an aunt.

In 1917, Rappe met and began dating director Henry Lehrman, and he helped her find the roles in her four credited films, although it is likely that she supported herself by prostitution. Rappe’s stormy relationship with Lehrman was well-known in Hollywood and unpopular. The two were accused of spreading venereal disease and lice, and Mack Sennett once ordered them off the Keystone lot and had it fumigated. Some people close to Rappe believed that in September of 1921 she was pregnant by Lehrman and heading to San Francisco that Labor Day weekend to abort his child.

Maude Delmont was a different kettle of fish entirely. Of uncertain age, her photo reveals her to be a woman of middle age with a dour expression. Using a string of aliases, she had an extensive police record, with at least fifty charges filed against her on crimes ranging from bigamy to extortion. She has been described as a professional co-respondent, a woman hired to provide compromising photos or evidence in divorces. How she met Semnacher is a matter of conjecture, but just the month before he had filed in San Francisco for divorce from his wife, and he admitted to having hired Delmont to obtain evidence of his wife’s adultery. Delmont met Semnacher at his Hollywood home on Saturday, September 3, where she was introduced to Rappe, and the three drove north to San Francisco.

By midmorning on Monday, September 5, the party in Arbuckle’s suite was in full swing. There was food, bootleg liquor, music and dancing, and a stream of guests coming and going. Fischbach, who had invited Semnacher, Delmont, and Rappe to the party, left to give someone a ride. Delmont retired with Sherman to his bedroom, evidently to have sex, leaving Arbuckle, Rappe and the other guests in the party room. Rappe became extremely drunk, then inexplicably erupted into hysterics and ran through the suite ripping at her clothes. Startled witnesses believed she had been accidentally kneed in the abdomen by Arbuckle while dancing. When Arbuckle later attempted to use the bathroom in his room, the door was blocked. When he finally opened it sufficiently to allow him to enter, he found Rappe on her knees vomiting into the toilet. She was crying with pain, and he carried her to his bed in Room 1219 to lie down. She continued to tear at her clothes.

Arbuckle left the bedroom and reentered the party room to get some ice, believing, he later testified, that it would calm her down. He placed several pieces of ice on her stomach and held one against her thigh. When Delmont next entered the room she found Rappe disheveled and screaming, with Roscoe leaning over her. The clamor brought other guests into the room, including actresses Zey Prevon and Alice Blake, along with Fischbach who had returned from his errand. Delmont ordered those present to fill the bathtub with cold water to cool Rappe’s fever. As Fischbach carried her, the young actress screamed at Arbuckle, “Stay away from me! I don’t want you near me!”

The cold bath apparently calmed Rappe down. Arbuckle and Fischbach located vacant room 1227 down the hall and took her there to lie down, Delmont following to keep an eye on her. Arbuckle phoned the hotel manager and asked for the physician on call, but he was busy with other guests. Eventually a Dr. Olav Kaarboe examined Rappe and determined that she was simply suffering from too much to drink.

The party continued without Delmont or Rappe for the rest of the afternoon in high spirits, and with no other incidents. Arbuckle left for a few hours to make arrangements to ship the Pierce-Arrow back to Los Angeles and when he returned to the hotel the primary hotel physician, Dr. Beardslee, had just arrived at Room 1227 to examine Virginia. She was screaming again, and Dr. Beardslee gave her an injection of morphine.

The next day, Tuesday, September 6, Rappe was no better. Dr. Beardslee checked on her four times during the day and gave her additional injections of morphine. Convinced now that the pain in her abdomen was not the fault of too much drink, he inserted a catheter to drain her bladder. Delmont, who had taken over the supervision of Rappe, summoned another doctor, Melville Rumwell, a physician associated with the local Wakefield sanitarium. This was an unusual selection but perhaps telling, as Dr. Rumwell was a specialist in maternity, and Wakefield an institution with a reputation for performing abortions.

Delmont now began telling people that Rappe’s injuries were the result of a sexual assault by Arbuckle. Both Beardslee and Rumwell ignored Delmont’s accusations, either because they were inconsistent with Rappe’s injuries, or in the case of Rumwell because he knew differently. That afternoon, Arbuckle, Fischbach, and Sherman checked out of the St. Francis, Arbuckle picking up the tab for the entire weekend including the bill for Room 1227. They boarded the ferry Harvard for the trip south to Los Angeles. On Wednesday, September 7, Arbuckle returned to work.

Back in San Francisco, Rappe’s condition continued to deteriorate. She was moved to the Wakefield sanitarium on Thursday afternoon. By then she was delirious with a high fever, her abdomen was distended, and Rumwell diagnosed her as suffering from peritonitis, an acute infection caused by a ruptured bladder. He felt her condition too delicate for an operation, and she died in the early afternoon of Friday, September 9.

In an unusual turn of events, Rumwell called in Dr. William Ophuls, a Stanford University professor in pathology, to assist in a post-mortem examination. They performed an illegal autopsy without the consent of the coroner’s office, removing and later destroying the bladder, uterus, rectum and fallopian tubes. With its reputation as an illicit abortion clinic, gossip suggested that Rappe had had her abortion at the clinic the day before the party, and that Rumwell had removed and disposed of her organs to destroy any evidence that her death was somehow a consequence of that operation.

After Rappe’s death, Maude Delmont contacted the San Francisco Police Department and swore out a complaint against Arbuckle, swearing that he had dragged Rappe in his bedroom and raped her, either personally or with a Coca-Cola bottle, and that her death was the result of his assault.

Coming in November, Part II: the trial.