Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (17 page)

Arbuckle made no postarrest statement, but Captain of Detectives Duncan Matheson said, “This woman without a doubt died as a result of an attack by Arbuckle. That makes it first degree murder without a doubt. We don’t feel that a man like ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle can pull stuff like this in San Francisco and get away with it.” A man like “Fatty” Arbuckle was any nouveau riche partier from Los Angeles. In statements, both Assistant DA U’Ren and Chief of Police Daniel O’Brien noted Arbuckle’s refusal to answer the charges against him.
*

The top floor of the Hall of Justice was the jail, and its “felon’s row” was a long corridor lined with cells. Cell 12 was Roscoe Arbuckle’s new home. It was six by six with three walls of solid steel and a fourth of steel bars. The ceiling, too, was bars of steel. There were three wooden bunks stacked vertically, a wooden bench, and a washstand. As he stood just inside the door, void of the wallet he had given his lawyers, he asked for some of his money, and a jailer said, “You don’t need money in here.”

“Are you going to give me a partner in here?” Arbuckle asked.

“Do you want one?” the jailer replied.

“No, I guess I’ll sleep better alone.”

The door swung shut and locked. Arbuckle rigged up a way to hang his overcoat and jacket. Eventually, when all was dark and quiet but for stirring and snoring in the neighboring cells, Roscoe Arbuckle was alone in the dark under a blanket on a wooden bunk. Unable to sleep, he sat up several times to smoke cigarettes. He was not a religious man, but many an agnostic in his position would hedge his bet. If, as he lay there then,
he gazed upward in prayer, he may have seen, in the gloom above his cell’s bars but below the black abyss of the jail’s ceiling, a walkway and, staring down at him, a guard with a gun.

In churches across the nation that Sunday morning, preachers condemned the alleged murderer. Fatty Arbuckle had long been a Hollywood archetype on-screen—the unruly, not-so-innocent man/boy—and now he came to symbolize Hollywood offscreen: a Gomorrah unrestrained by adherence to Christian morality. “The shame of it all,” preached Reverend John Snape of Oakland’s First Baptist Church, “is that good people like you in this congregation make possible the continuance of such a man before the public.”

The first cancellation of an Arbuckle film had occurred in San Francisco on Saturday as its star was returning to the city:
Crazy to Marry
was pulled from two theaters. Before Sunday was through, San Francisco theater owners joined together to ban Fatty movies throughout the city. Also on Sunday,
Gasoline Gus
was pulled from the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles—the very theater in which Arbuckle had met with witnesses and advisers at midnight the day before. What’s more, owner Sid Grauman and his father had known the star for years, having cultivated the teenage Arbuckle’s singing career, and the Million Dollar Theatre was where Arbuckle had been scheduled to promote the film on Labor Day. The swiftness with which Grauman pulled
Gasoline Gus,
a popular movie with only one day of its run remaining, sent shockwaves through Hollywood.
*

Here was proof that the studios’ worst fear was coming true. The public outrage had only just begun, and already it was shrinking box office grosses. The fear was greatest at Paramount Pictures. Its biggest star was now an accused murderer. Paramount had released two of his films
over the previous month. It had two in the can. It had four in development. Panic reigned.

Still, the most prominent member of the motion picture community came forward to support his friend on that first Sunday. Vacationing in his native London, Charlie Chaplin averred, “There’s nothing like that in his makeup. On the coast, Fatty is popular with everybody, and I hope he will be proved innocent.”

Upon waking, Arbuckle had no toiletries. Soap, a towel, and a comb were lent to him by a fellow inmate—a recent prison escapee who claimed to know witness Zey Prevost. The two men walked the corridor together, talking. “I’m through with booze. Forever. No more,” Arbuckle was heard to say.

Residents of the San Francisco City Jail with the financial wherewithal could order food from outside, thus Arbuckle’s Sunday morning breakfast of eggs, toast, and coffee came courtesy of a nearby restaurant. The prison barber shaved him. Then the most famous resident ever locked in the San Francisco City Jail held a sort of meet and greet with his new neighbors. Chatting with the other accused felons, he answered their questions and accepted their sympathy. “He’s a regular guy,” one noted.

Throughout that Sunday, investigators took depositions from witnesses and searched for any available evidence. In one of the case’s strangest developments, Los Angeles police, acting on instructions from their San Francisco counterparts, went to the Hollywood home of Al Semnacher and there took possession of a woman’s silk shirt (missing three of five buttons) and a woman’s tattered silk undergarments. They had been worn by Virginia Rappe at the party one week prior. Semnacher said he found them on the floor of room 1219 and took them to dust his automobile. Rappe’s outer garments—the jade skirt and blouse she had made herself and the white Panama hat with the jade band—were in a
closet in a Hotel St. Francis guest room occupied by Rappe’s other travel companion, Maude Delmont.

On Sunday evening, Arbuckle met with his attorneys, then including his usual lawyer, Milton Cohen. Subsequently, the movie star asked for better accommodations but was denied, for there was only one sort of room on felon’s row: small and bleak. Telling a jailer “It’s too lonesome alone,” he was allowed a cellmate, and he selected Fred Martin, described in the press as “a laborer accused of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” The man who made the whole world laugh told others in his cellblock: “I’ve heard often of ‘Blue Sunday,’ but until today I never knew what it meant.” In retrospect, Blue Sunday was but a repose before Black Monday.

*
While there were scattered radio stations then, the medium as we know it today was born in 1922 with a major wave of proliferation.
Time,
America’s first general-interest weekly newsmagazine, was launched in 1923.

*
By 1924 its circulation of 750,000 would make it the best-read (or best-browsed) newspaper in America.

*
O’Brien did not share Matheson’s antagonism toward Hollywood, as he and Mayor James Rolph frequently greeted film royalty. O’Brien’s son, George, became a movie star, best remembered for his lead role in
Sunrise
(1927).

*
Grauman offered no comment for pulling
Gasoline Gus.
He likely feared the midnight meeting would tarnish him and his theater, and thus he hoped to diminish criticism.

A film is a ribbon of dreams.

—O
RSON
W
ELLES

I
t was like a magical spell—seated in the dark staring up at life projected bigger than life, cowboys and swashbucklers and a little tramp, a sinking ocean liner, a patchwork girl, and the assassination of President Lincoln. The first American feature-length films had screened in 1912. Lasting approximately an hour, they commanded two or three times the nickel admission of shorts and won greater prestige. Beginning in February 1915,
The Birth of a Nation,
a motion picture that lasted more than three hours, reined in more viewers than any other film of the silent era. Frequently banned and legally challenged,
everyone
knew about it, and seemingly
everyone
had an opinion.
*

As movie running times grew, feature-length films before and after
The Birth of a Nation
migrated from nickelodeons to larger venues with larger ticket prices, including converted playhouses and what were called movie palaces, with velvet curtains and pseudoclassical names.
*
In the best movie houses, full orchestras played and choruses sang. (Composers wrote scores, and the sheet music was distributed with the celluloid prints.) Shades of gray were replaced with tinted color: amber for daylight scenes and blue for night scenes; lavender for scenes of passion, green for danger, red for fury.
^†
No longer was the audience made up almost exclusively of the working class. By 1915 everyone was enchanted.

Movie stars were no longer just famous faces, familiar in their onscreen personas but otherwise anonymous. Audiences knew their names and hungered for details about their personal lives. The original nameless celebrity, the Biograph Girl, had been the first to break out, when the company that became Universal Pictures lured her to sign with them in 1910 and masterfully marketed her name, Florence Lawrence, via advertisements and pioneering personal appearance tours.
^‡
She soon had company. Beginning in 1914 M
ARY
P
ICKFORD
was splayed boldly across theater marquees above the titles of her films. Pickford was the first movie superstar. Hollywood went into the fame business, and the young studios looked for ways to promote not just their movies but their performers as well.

Studio publicity worked hand in hand with a new presence in the industry: movie fan magazines. The first such publications,
Motion Picture
Story
and
Photoplay,
had been launched in 1911, but they were mostly filled with movie-based short stories until
Photoplay
reinvented itself in early 1915 with a focus on the off screen lives of actors.
*
Photoplay
was the first true celebrity magazine, and it ushered a larger female audience into movie theaters. Before 1915 was done, thirteen additional magazines emphasizing Hollywood fame were launched.