Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (38 page)

From a letter by Roscoe Arbuckle to Joseph Schenck, October 1, 1921:

I want you to have explicit faith and confidence in me and tell Mr. Zukor to have the same. I have done no wrong, my heart is clean and my conscience is clear and when it is over I have the guts to come back and I will come back and make good…. I know what they [Paramount executives] have tied up in me at present and irrespective of whether we ever due [sic] business together again I will come out of this affair clean and vindicated so that they can realize on their tremendous investment. I am not asking for sympathy or forgiveness. I have done no wrong but I do want you and the ones financially as well as personally interested to know that I am innocent, a victim of circumstance, the only one of prominence in the party and therefore I had to be the goat.

San Francisco detectives tailed Arbuckle in Los Angeles, but they must have studied every branch and every brick on West Adams Street, for the accused who formerly rarely spent an evening in his mansion now rarely left it. “A palatial residence was to be our home for nearly a year on West Adams in the beautiful and exclusive part of Los Angeles, where we were to be veritable prisoners,” Durfee later wrote. Patrolled by his own newly hired security force, Arbuckle’s home was his bunker, fortified against a world that had largely turned against him. At all hours, people slowed outside to honk or hurl insults and sometimes stones.

And for the first time his wife of thirteen years was living there with him. “We slept in separate bedrooms, I think because Roscoe was
self-conscious,” Durfee remembered. “Neither of us wanted to speak about what actually happened in that suite at the St. Francis. And yet we both knew we couldn’t avoid the issue. It was what had brought us both together and had allowed me to come home with him. We had to live together for the sake of the public. We had to show everyone that we were a loving man and wife, even though there was that long separation.”

On October 7 Arbuckle was arraigned for manslaughter. Defense attorney Frank Dominguez was not present; the official story was that he had quit as chief counsel because the trial would require too much time and Arbuckle would be better served by a San Francisco attorney. However, the decision was likely made by Schenck and Zukor, who were displeased with Dominguez’s strategy in the preliminary hearing, especially his failure to call Arbuckle and Maude Delmont to the stand. They felt their money-minting superstar should have been cleared and his movies returned to big screens. So Dominguez was out.

Gavin McNab was in. Not only was McNab a San Francisco native and longtime political powerhouse, but the balding, gray eminence also had experience with celebrities, having successfully represented Mary Pickford (divorce) and boxer Jack Dempsey (draft evasion) the year before. McNab brought to the case one of his law partners, Nat Schmulowitz, and another local lawyer, Joseph McInerney, was also enlisted. The dream team of five also included two holdovers from the preliminaries: Arbuckle’s regular attorney from Los Angeles, Milton Cohen, and his original San Francisco lawyer, Charles Brennan. Later, Assistant DA U’Ren called them “a million-dollar array of counsel.”

The same day McNab took over the case, a story emerged from Chicago that Rappe had left a daughter there. Supposedly, the father vanished before the girl was born, and Rappe moved away soon thereafter, leaving her daughter with foster parents but sending money. The story’s one
source should have set off alarm bells: a Chicago-based traveling salesman named John Bates, who had written to officials in Los Angeles and San Francisco to determine the value of Rappe’s estate.
*
He estimated the daughter was eight or nine, and he claimed not to know her whereabouts but was confident he could locate her. “If [Rappe’s] estate is of any value I intend to see that her daughter receives the benefit of it,” Bates said. No such daughter was ever located. The abandoned daughter story was a harbinger, however; others in Chicago had more sensational tales about Rappe’s teen years and young adulthood. Eager to listen, defense attorney Brennan boarded a train heading east.

Meanwhile, the state was following leads of its own. Matthew Brady journeyed to Los Angeles twice in October on fact-finding tours of Hollywood’s underbelly. As the second such trip ended, the home team
Los Angeles Times
lambasted the San Francisco prosecutor with an article entitled “Ho, Hum, ‘Wild Parties’ Tame,” which chided that the parties “where hypodermic needles were passed around pasty-face guests on a tray have resolved themselves into knitting bees. Where, oh where (in a loud despairing wail) is the reputed wickedness of Los Angeles?”

D
EAD
M
OVIE
M
AN IN
A
RBUCKLE
C
ASE,
read a headline on October 11. Al Stein, an assistant director to Fred Fishback, died at twenty-six after a night of drinking. News coverage played up notes found in Stein’s Los Angeles apartment that were made by Fishback and pertained to the Arbuckle case. In death, Stein became a potential witness and possible murder victim. But he succumbed to alcohol poisoning, a common malady during Prohibition.

The investigation of Prohibition violations at the Labor Day party continued in parallel with the inquiries in the manslaughter case. Arbuckle’s was the most high-profile flaunting of the Volstead Act, and the feds were determined that it not go unpunished. On September 30
Gobey’s Grill, the restaurant that had provided the alcohol for the party, was raided. The manager and three other employees were arrested, but the cellar shelves where $40,000 in liquid refreshment was supposedly housed were empty. Gobey’s had been tipped off. Jack Lawrence, the deliveryman who had brought the alcohol from the restaurant to the party, had vanished but was eventually located in Oregon and returned to San Francisco. He pleaded guilty to transporting alcohol and was fined $250. After being arraigned for manslaughter, Arbuckle was arrested for violation of the Volstead Act and posted $500 bail. The hearing was superseded by his manslaughter trial.

What the microscope reveals of mute testimony from the floor and furnishings of Room 1219, the chamber where the film actress was in an hour transformed from a jovial guest to an hysterical woman with the touch of death upon her may prove as potent as the tale of any witness. Edward O. Heinrich, noted criminologist and microscopist, has for weeks been subjecting that room to the minutest expert scrutiny, and his findings, says the prosecution, will constitute the outstanding new development of the trial.

—“
MICROSCOPE’S
E
VIDENCE
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AY
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ETERMINE
A
RBUCKLE’S
F
ATE,”
EVENING
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NDEPENDENT
(M
ASSILLON,
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O
CTOBER
31, 1921,
FRONT
PAGE

Fingerprints were first admitted in an English criminal case in 1902. The first comprehensive forensic hair study was published in France in 1910. An antibody test for typing dried blood was developed in 1915. By the autumn of 1921, Edward O. Heinrich was a pioneer in such matters. Though most of his reputation as “the Wizard of Berkeley” or “America’s Sherlock Holmes” was earned afterward, he was, at the time of Rappe’s death, America’s foremost forensic scientist. Heinrich spent his teen years working in a pharmacy, remarking later that “a drugstore is a veritable laboratory in behavioristic psychology. I learned what people do in secret.” After obtaining a chemistry degree,
he consulted on criminal investigations, and in 1916 he was appointed chief of police of Alameda, California. In 1919 he accepted a post as a criminal expert to the city of San Francisco (and another as a chemistry professor at Berkeley). In his lab in Oakland, he studied and practiced to gain expertise in all fields of criminal science. Just before the Arbuckle case, he investigated the August 2 kidnapping and murder of a priest and helped to prove the guilt of the man who found the body (and wanted the reward money) by connecting him, via microscopic details, to beach sand and a tent cord on or near the corpse. It remains a landmark forensics case.

Heinrich strove to find forensic evidence in the Arbuckle case. However, he did not enter room 1219 until September 16, eleven days after the Labor Day party and after a maid had cleaned it. Visiting the room on three occasions, he compared hairs found there with those from Rappe’s head; he searched for fiber filaments that matched her clothing; he had 1219’s doors taken to his laboratory. America’s Sherlock Holmes peered through his microscope lens, searching for a clue invisible to the naked eye, a key to unlock the mystery of what happened on Labor Day at the Hotel St. Francis.