Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (23 page)

F
ATTY
A
RBUCKLE,
M
OVIE
C
OMEDIAN,
B
ATTLES FOR
L
IFE

—C
HRONICLE-TELEGRAM
(E
LYRIA,
O
HIO),
S
EPTEMBER
12, 1921,
FRONT
PAGE

When the grand jury hearing commenced at 7:30
PM
on Monday, a throng of reporters and other observers crowded the hallway and pressed as near to the closed doors as guards would permit. Over the remaining
hours of the evening and into the next morning, witnesses, flanked by police officers, were brought in and out to much commotion and a barrage of camera-powder flashes.

A grand jury room is void of reporters, observers, defense attorneys, the defendant (unless testifying), or a judge. Questioning is done by the prosecutors and jurors, and the sole mission of the jurors is to determine if there is sufficient evidence for a trial.

The first witness was Maude Delmont, who was questioned for more than an hour and later brought back for an additional fifteen minutes. When she emerged from the closed doors, she was leaning heavily on a policewoman and said to be ill “due to the shock induced by the death of her friend.” Subsequently, Al Semnacher, Zey Prevost, and Drs. Rumwell, Ophüls, and Rixford testified, as did the surgeon from the coroner’s office who performed Rappe’s second autopsy, Dr. Shelby Strange.

Two floors above in cell 12, Arbuckle was sitting nervously on the edge of his bed when guards approached shortly before 1 A
M.
He was wanted in the grand jury room. He dressed hastily. A reporter described him trudging to the courtroom, flanked by guards: “He looked nervous, his comedy face was gloomier than that of a tragedian, and beads of perspiration sparkled on his brow.” Inside, the jury foreman asked Arbuckle to give his account of the events in question. His answer: “My attorneys have advised me to say nothing at this time.” He was in the courtroom for three minutes before he was led back to his cell by a phalanx of guards.

After the prosecutors were excluded from the room, the jury deliberated for nearly an hour. At around 2 A
M,
the foreman announced the jury had decided against voting on the matter and instead wished to give “District Attorney Brady more time in which to secure certain information which we desire.” Brady addressed the press, contending the case had not been weakened by the grand jury’s equivocation.

He then made an announcement that would scream in Tuesday’s headlines: “We have sent Miss Zey Prevon
*
home under [police] surveillance.
The girl changed her story completely before the grand jury. Whether or not we shall arrest her and charge her with perjury depends on further developments. I am convinced that undue influence and pressure has been brought to bear on her and other witnesses, one of whom, Alice Blake, has mysteriously disappeared from her home in Berkeley. We have been unable to find her.”

H
IS
F
AMOUS
S
MILE IS
G
ONE

—L
OS
A
NGELES
E
VENING
H
ERALD,
S
EPTEMBER
12, 1921,
PAGE
4

It is hard to fathom today how pervasive the newspaper coverage was that first week. The tsunami of ink was greatest in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but if a newspaper covered any national events, it likely splashed A
RBUCKLE
or F
ATTY
prominently across front pages. From Seattle to Miami, in big cities and small towns, the Arbuckle case was the overriding news story, just as it was, in a melange of languages, in cities across the Atlantic and Pacific—oceans Arbuckle and his movies had traveled.

The tidal wave reached its zenith on Tuesday, September 13, when the
San Francisco Examiner
printed seventeen stories related to the case and the
San Francisco Chronicle
and
Los Angeles Times
each published sixteen. There was much fast-breaking news that day, with both the coroner’s inquest and the grand jury hearing in progress, new evidence and witnesses introduced, and charges of perjury, missing witnesses, and “undue influence and pressure.” But it wasn’t enough to merely cover the legal proceedings. After all, your competition was printing Brady’s statement the same as you were. You had to ferret out what the others didn’t have.

That Tuesday an interview with Arbuckle’s housekeeper (“Roscoe is just a big, good-natured boy”) was newsworthy, as was the fact that the inmate in the cell
next to his,
a convicted murderer, would soon be returning to Maryland, where he had escaped from prison (
ARBUCKLE
W
ILL
L
OSE
N
EIGHBOR IN
J
AIL).
Another headline stated, G
RAVE OF
A
RBUCKLE’S
M
OTHER IS
N
EGLECTED
and explained that the wooden slab
marking Mary Arbuckle’s final resting place in a Santa Ana cemetery was so faded it was unreadable and “overrun with grass and weeds.” (Arbuckle had repeatedly paid for its upkeep.) Minta Durfee made her first public statement on Tuesday, and effusively supportive comments by Arbuckle’s sister Nora were widely published (“He has the kindest, tenderest heart in the world”) as was his brother Harry’s “no comment” the next day (under the misleading heading B
ROTHER IS
N
EUTRAL).
Housekeeper, neighbor, mother, wife, sister, brother—what next?

B
ULLDOG
M
OURNS FOR
A
RBUCKLE

Faithful Pet Waiting at Door for Return of Comedian

Fatty Arbuckle has one sincere mourner, one mourner whose love and faith no reports can shake. That mourner is Luke, Fatty’s old bulldog. Luke usually goes with Fatty on his long trips, but the comedian didn’t take him to San Francisco with him.

This is the longest time that the comedian and Luke have been separated. And out at Fatty’s house, Luke sits, disconsolate at the door, waiting for the familiar step and the well-known voice. He doesn’t eat. He waits.

Whatever befalls Fatty, Luke will not forget.

Apparently, with Arbuckle away then for only one day longer than he had been the week before, Luke had gone on a solidarity food strike. If true, he had surely been reading the newspapers.

It’s always easier to create news than find it.

A headline promised O
THER
I
LLEGAL
A
CTS
C
HARGED TO
F
ILM
S
TAR
and then suggested that Arbuckle may have attended Hollywood “drink and drug orgies.” Another header asserted, S
ECOND
G
IRL
E
SCAPES
F
ATE OF
M
ISS
R
APPE,
but dealt with Lowell Sherman luring a model into his room after Rappe was moved to 1227. An article in a Flagstaff newspaper was headlined F
ATTY
A
RBUCKLE
T
REATS
W
IFE
R
OUGH IN
A
RIZONA
and alleged that, twelve years prior, not only did he beat Durfee, blackening both of her eyes, but he also abandoned her penniless at the train stop in Benson, Arizona, where she was rescued by the good citizens of Bisbee.
The one source listed for this was “word received here today.”
*
Words could convey anything.

In fact, the very words “Virginia Rappe” seemed to denote a heinous felony: Virgin Rape. It was the sort of on-the-nose name no Hollywood screenwriter would dare pen, but it was exploited by newspaper editors in headlines that referred to the “Rappe Girl” or “Rappe Tragedy.” Most newspapers then had policies against even printing the word
rape (assault
was the popular euphemism), which imbued the name Rappe with even more power.

Many of the same papers that shunned
rape
freely printed
orgy.
The word, unstated by the police or prosecutors, had first appeared in bold print on September 11: D
YING
G
IRL
L
AID
B
LAME ON
C
OMEDIAN:
S
O
C
HARGES
W
OMAN AT
B
EDSIDE OF
O
RGY
V
ICTIM IN
S
TATEMENT TO
S.F. P
OLICE.
There was soon thereafter a national orgy of “orgy” headlines. The September 5 party—originally just an informal gathering—was an “orgy,” a previous Arbuckle “orgy” was referenced (more about this in
chapter 15
), and the prevalence of Hollywood “orgies” was documented. A headline in Tuesday’s
Baltimore Sun
was typical: A
RBUCKLE
A
FFAIR
N
O
S
URPRISE AFTER
O
RGIES OF
F
ILM
C
OLONY.
Wednesday’s
San Francisco Examiner
said of Arbuckle, “Tales of his sickening orgies have spread from one coast to the other. Everybody who knows anything about him or his kind ought to know what a ‘party’ given by him would mean.”

Most “orgy” headlines promised more salacious specificity than they delivered, but an article published in Philadelphia’s
Evening Public Ledger
was a notable exception. Positioned on the page next to two large photos of Rappe and an article entitled “Arbuckle Party Drank Forty Quarts” was “Hollywood Orgies Exposed by Police,” which purported to blow the lid off a group called “the Live Hundred,” made up of Hollywood heavyweights including, allegedly, Arbuckle. The “orgy” best detailed was reportedly attended by witnesses in the Arbuckle case, and “the host spent $20,000 for decorations” alone. There’s no telling what the host,
”a prominent male actor of the screen,” dropped on this refreshment budget:

From without, as the group sat down at the long table in the “grotto,” the watchers [detectives] saw a maid push a wheeled tea tray in after extensive indulgence by all in drinks. On the tray was an assortment of needles, opium pipes, morphine, cocaine, heroin and opium. Each guest hilariously helped himself or herself to liberal doses of drugs and selected needles or pipes as the individual desire demanded.

After which a cocaine-sniffing actress announced, “I want the most beautiful man here. I am his.” This was presumably the start of the orgy part of the orgy, but the detectives then pounded at the door. When it was finally opened, all evidence had been destroyed or concealed and the host had escaped.

Likewise, a headline in the
Denver Post
that Thursday reads like something from the
Onion
today: N
ARCOTICS
N
EEDLES
T
URNED
T
AME
P
ARTY AT
H
OLLYWOOD INTO
A
STOUNDING
S
UCCESS.
Indeed. Suddenly, every Hollywood rumor, scandal, and peccadillo was dragged into the morning light in the morning paper. A short United Press story, which ran on the front pages of numerous newspapers on Monday, linked Rappe’s death with six other Hollywood “scandals,” including Charlie Chaplin’s divorce on grounds of cruelty, that previous Arbuckle “orgy”—described as a “girl and wine revel”—and the accidental death by poisoning of actress Olive Thomas, who in September 1920 mistakenly drank a solution of mercury bichloride.
*