Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (25 page)

“Why, Maude, you know the only baggage you have is in that little handbag you’re holding.”

Enraged, Delmont shrieked and swung the bag with all her force at Semnacher’s face, missing.
*
“You dirty dog! Get out of here!” she screamed as she was subdued by policemen.

Leaving the room, Semnacher remarked, “Why should I pay her bills? I’m under no obligations to her.”

Subsequently, and presumably at her request, Henry Lehrman wired Delmont money to cover her stay at the St. Francis.

Also on Tuesday, Arbuckle was taken to a Prohibition office, where officials had opened an investigation the day before to determine who supplied the alcohol for the Labor Day party. He was questioned for nearly an hour but denied knowledge of any alcohol in his room, despite the discovery of two whiskey bottles in 1219’s wastebasket after the party. His repeated answer to repeated questions about the booze was “Never had any.”

District Attorney Brady’s strategy was evolving. He knew after her coroner’s inquest testimony that Maude Delmont was unlikely to fend off many blows under cross-examination in a criminal trial. Thus, two previously unknown chorus girls who dreamed of show business success and answered to stage names grew in importance. If Zey Prevost and Alice Blake—friends with no one at the party except each other—could back up Delmont’s version of events, then Brady believed a murder conviction was likely. The problem was that Prevost refused to tell the grand jury what she had told detectives on one occasion and prosecutors on another: that Rappe had said, “I’m dying. I’m dying. He killed me.” She claimed she’d been frightened and confused when questioned before.

Accompanied by her mother, Prevost was escorted to the Hall of Justice by police. Meanwhile, Blake was brought in by a family friend who claimed she had gone into hiding to save her wealthy Oakland family from embarrassment. Separately, prosecutors endeavored to get both showgirls to sign statements to back up Delmont’s charge that Rappe said, in Arbuckle’s presence, “He did it”—a less precise accusation than “He killed me.” Both eventually did. Prevost’s new recollection: “He hurt me, he hurt me. I am dying. I am dying. I am dying.”

Brady called the grand jury to session again at 8
PM
on Tuesday and produced three witnesses: Zey Prevost, Alice Blake, and Grace Halston, the nurse at the first autopsy. The chorus girls backed up Delmont’s version of events, though they still vacillated on specifics. Crucially, the grand jury had heard Prevost give a different account the day before, so it is unclear how much this “makeup” reappearance helped the prosecution.

The grand jury’s decision came in Wednesday’s first hours. In the death of Virginia Rappe, Roscoe Arbuckle should be indicted for involuntary manslaughter—a killing committed without malice aforethought. (A manslaughter conviction had a maximum penalty of ten years imprisonment.) However, Brady still had Delmont’s first-degree murder complaint ready to proceed in police court, and he was hopeful the coroner’s inquest would bolster it by recommending a murder trial.

In the morning in cell 12, Arbuckle was getting dressed when he heard the news from a guard that he had been indicted for manslaughter by the grand jury. He made no remark but told his cellmate Martin he had not slept well. His and Martin’s restaurant breakfast was delivered, as was Arbuckle’s usual stack of letters and telegrams.

“I protest in the name of this state against these girls being called. For them to testify will be detrimental to the case of the state.” So said Matthew Brady at Wednesday morning’s coroner’s inquest. The girls were Blake and Prevost, by then household names, and Brady did not want the defense to have a record of their inquest testimony, revealing possible discrepancies. “I repeat that there are but two people who know exactly what took place in that hotel room. One of them is dead. The body of Virginia Rappe, lying in the morgue, cannot speak. The other one is Roscoe Arbuckle, and he is in this room. Call him if you want the facts.”

Dominguez lifted his rotund form from his seat at the counsel’s table in order to forcefully assert that Arbuckle was within his rights not to testify. Coroner Leland deliberated with the jury in his chamber and
announced that they did not need to hear from Blake and Prevost. In conclusion, Drs. Strange and Ophüls testified again about their autopsies. Ophüls stated that only violence of “some force” could have created Rappe’s bladder rupture. Asked to elaborate on a violent cause, he replied, “Finger pressure.”

The coroner’s inquest jury began deliberating at noon. As they filed out, Arbuckle tried to light a cigarette, but his shaking hands betrayed him. When the jury returned a decision three and a half hours later, it suggested not just a cause of death but also a means of preventing similar deaths. Leaning forward as the verdict was read by the coroner, Arbuckle trembled slightly at the mention, twice, of his name. After briefly stating the particulars, the verdict read:

Said rupture was caused by the application of some force which, from the evidence submitted, we believe was applied by one Roscoe Arbuckle, and the undersigned jurors, therefore, charge the said Roscoe Arbuckle with the crime of manslaughter.
*
We recommend that the District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco, in conjunction with the Grand Jury, the Chief of Police and the Federal Prohibition officials, take steps to prevent a recurrence of affairs similar to the one in which this young woman lost her life, so that San Francisco shall not be made the rendezvous of the debauchee and the gangster.

That last sentence reads as if it were penned by a group, born nine months earlier, that regularly railed against the dangers facing the women of San Francisco. In the first hours of Thanksgiving Day 1920, a gang of at least eight young men drugged and sexually assaulted two teenage girls in a shack on Howard Street. The case was huge news in the Bay Area,
perpetuated when three additional young women made other gang rape charges. Understandably, headlines like G
IRL,
20, S
OBS
R
ECITAL OF
A
TTACK BY
19 fostered outrage and fueled a fear that the streets of the city were teeming with packs of rampaging males. On December 13, 1920, more than seventy-five San Francisco women’s clubs sent representatives to a meeting, and the Women’s Vigilant Committee was formed. The name drew purposeful parallels to the male vigilante groups of the 1850s that meted out frontier justice in San Francisco to ward off Gold Rush criminality.

Curbing vice was one stated goal of the WVC. Another was the support of females—victims, witnesses, and family members—at trials. On the Wednesday that the grand jury’s indictment and the recommendation of the coroner’s inquest were handed down, the WVC held a meeting about the Arbuckle case. It was attended by two hundred members and appointed a committee of twenty women to bolster female witnesses. Club president Dr. Mariana Bertola (a physician at an Oakland women’s college) said the Arbuckle case “is no better than the Howard Street gangsters case in many of its particulars. Nor should the ones responsible for it be shown here leniency.” Another WVC member said, “We are not going to stand for these orgies with their inevitably terrible results, whether their scene be a shack on Howard Street or a gilded caravansary in rich man’s row.”

Women’s clubs had blossomed in the early twentieth century, and many had worked to pass the Eighteenth (Prohibition) and Nineteenth (women’s suffrage) Amendments. The latter was ratified on August 18, 1920, four months before the Women’s Vigilant Committee was formed, and politicians were then eagerly courting the large new bloc of female voters. On Thursday Bertola met with District Attorney Brady and made arrangements for WVC members to monitor Arbuckle court proceedings. The WVC was the most prominent of several women’s clubs to side with the prosecution and encourage a hard line from Brady, whose employment depended on the vagaries of voters. The front-page subheading of the
Los Angeles Times
article about the Bertola/Brady meeting read “Women After Arbuckle.”

While Arbuckle was locked behind iron bars in cell 12 of the city jail, his $34,000 customized, purple-blue Pierce-Arrow was parked in an alley behind the Hall of Justice. Visited daily by throngs of curious viewers, it was the city’s newest tourist attraction. (Prohibition officials were threatening to seize it, if they could prove it had been used to transport alcohol.) In Los Angeles, residents came to gaze at Arbuckle’s West Adams mansion.