Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (43 page)

On Saturday the jury continued deliberating. The women who packed the courtroom saw Arbuckle joking with reporters, attorneys, and bailiffs, chatting with the alternate juror, smoking, eating, reading newspapers, and performing magic tricks. Hours dragged on. The jury adjourned at 10:37
PM,
and Judge Louderback ordered them back at 10:00 the following morning.

Though the sequestered jury was kept away from newspapers during the trial, their names, occupations, and addresses appeared in the same papers they couldn’t read, as did a group photo of them posed in the jury box. Curiously, one person hid when that photo was snapped, ducking to reveal only the top of her black hat. As the jury remained deadlocked
on Saturday, that juror—Helen Hubbard, the forty-six-year-old wife of an attorney—grew internationally famous as the “lone holdout.”

On Sunday morning, while the jury deliberated for its final two hours, Arbuckle played hide-and-seek with a child in the corridors. It was as if he was reverting back to a time before he was rich and famous, back eleven years to when he played daily with his brother-in-law and neighborhood kids in a Los Angeles street. At noon, nearly forty-four hours after the trial went to the jury, the jury was declared hopelessly hung. The tally of the final ballot was ten to two for acquittal. Hubbard had been joined, as she frequently was on ballots, by fifty-four-year-old candy shop owner Thomas Kilkenny, the former alternate juror who had only been seated after one of the original twelve admitted a bias toward Arbuckle’s innocence.

“We had some wild times in the jury room,” one of the ten said of the heated attempts to convince the stubborn two to side with them. “We felt the case had not been sufficiently proved,” another said. “Some of the jurors believed that Arbuckle was innocent, others believed that not enough proof had been presented to warrant a conviction.” The jury foreman, August Fritze, a sales manager, released a statement that read in part:

The ten members of the jury who voted on the last ballot for acquittal felt that they voted on the evidence—fully considering it all. One of the two minority refused to consider the evidence from the beginning and said at the opening of the proceedings that she would cast her ballot and would not change it until hell froze over. The other was fluctuating, sometimes casting a blank ballot, sometimes voting for the defense and sometimes for the prosecution.

The fluctuating Kilkenny never spoke to the press and quickly faded into history. It was reported that he voted with Hubbard in an effort to win her confidence and thus convince her to change her vote to one for acquittal, but that seems illogical. More likely, he didn’t fit the press’s narrative; their arc light was aimed at the intractable Hubbard. A typical
front-page headline read, W
OMAN
J
UROR
B
LOCKS
A
GREEMENT IN
T
RIAL OF
R
OSCOE
A
RBUCKLE.

Hubbard granted one interview to two female reporters, one with the
San Francisco Chronicle,
the other with the
San Francisco Examiner.
Because she was married to an attorney, she expressed her surprise at being allowed to serve. She felt she did not need to read through the over thirteen hundred pages of trial transcripts nor review the evidence in the jury room, for she had heard the evidence presented firsthand. “It was the matter of fingerprints purely in the final analysis that decided me,” she said. “Arbuckle failed to convince me with his story absolutely. Once on a jury I would vote my own husband guilty if I really believed him to be that in my heart, and nothing could shake me once that belief was established in my mind.” She reserved her harshest criticism for Fritze and the other men on the jury, whom she accused of verbal abuse in attempting to cajole her to change her vote. “There is no place for the woman on the jury,” Hubbard lamented. “Any woman is a fool to even get on one if she can possibly get out of serving. I’d rather die than go through it again. The general attitude and language of the men is offensive to a woman.”
*

Male editorial writers agreed with her general proposition that women should not serve on juries. The
San Francisco Chronicle
opined, “The jury was subjected to indignities which could not have failed to affront any woman. Certainly a woman’s mind and body are less well equipped to withstand strains to which they are put in cases of this character.” Rappe’s hometown
Chicago Tribune
concurred: “It is a fair presumption that the cause of exact justice was injured by the presence of women on the Arbuckle jury. A woman might have to overcome her aversion for a man charged with immorality before she could get anywhere near the issue of whether he was guilty of manslaughter.”

The Women’s Vigilant Committee praised Hubbard’s independence. They also chastised Arbuckle, though in a subdued tone: “Regardless of
the guilt or innocence of this defendant, this committee wishes he had shown more humility at the end of his trial. He admitted that he had staged a drinking and dancing party.”

Upon hearing of the jury’s indecision, Arbuckle rolled another brown cigarette. His wife dabbed away tears. And when the date of January 9 was agreed upon for a retrial, Arbuckle lit the cigarette, inhaled, and exhaled smoke.

Assistant DA U’Ren offered his hand to McNab. “I just want to congratulate your client on his gameness.”

Standing nearby, Arbuckle retorted, “I’m game because my conscience is clear, much clearer than yours, U’Ren.”

Afterward, as Arbuckle and his attorneys drafted up a statement, Minta Durfee stood with her mother and friends outside the San Francisco Hall of Justice. “The poor boy,” she said. “Now he’ll have to go through it all again.”

Arbuckle’s posttrial statement read:

While this is not a legal acquittal, through a technicality of the law, I feel it is a moral one. But for one woman on the jury of thirteen, who refused to allow her fellow jurors to discuss the evidence or to reason with her, and who would give no explanation for her attitude, my trial would have resulted in an immediate acquittal.
*
After the organized propaganda designed to make the securing of an impartial jury an impossibility and to prevent my obtaining a fair trial, I feel grateful for this message from the juror to the American people. This comes, too, after the jury had heard only part of
the facts. The effect of the District Attorney succeeded in excluding from the evidence statements made by Miss Rappe to people of high character, statements completely exonerating me.

The undisputed and uncontradicted testimony established that my only connection with this sad affair was one of a merciful service, and the fact that ordinary human kindness should have brought upon me this tragedy seems a cruel wrong. I sought to bring joy and gladness and merriment into the world, and why this great misfortune should have fallen upon me is a mystery that only God can reveal. I have always rested my cause in a profound belief in divine justice and in the confidence of the great heart and fairness of the American people. I want to thank the multitudes from all over the world who have telegraphed and written me in my sorrow and expressed their utmost confidence in my innocence, and I assure them no act of mine ever has or ever shall cause them to regret their faith in me.

*
California was the fourth state to do so. By the end of 1921, seventeen states allowed women jurors.

*
Her estate consisted of her personal effects, $800 in a bank account, and some stocks and bonds.

*
She recounted seeing Lowell Sherman sneaking out of a room with a woman, both dressed only in underwear, and another underdressed man chasing a lingerie-clad woman down the hall. Whatever her veracity, Keza at least fleshed out the “orgy” aspects of the story.

*
It would seem likely that Arbuckle’s defense team uncovered this crime. If so, they left no fingerprints. The matter came to light when Hopper was granted an annulment of the marriage, at which time Delmont acknowledged consciously breaking the law when she married Woods.

*
Gouverneur Morris was the great-grandson of the Founding Father of the same name, who is credited with writing much of the US Constitution. The younger Morris wrote the short stories “What Ho, the Cook,” “You Can’t Get Away with It,” and “The Bride’s Dead.”

*
In the hours after the party, Arbuckle offered “girlie” (as he called Brennan) a generous tip of two dollars and fifty cents for cleaning the room. He also offered her whiskey. She refused the latter and accepted the former.

*
Under cross-examination, Barker denied the contention that he had been engaged to Rappe and she had broken off the engagement. Three days later, Catherine Fox, a rebuttal witness for the state, would claim she witnessed Rappe breaking said engagement.

*
McNab’s questions have been eliminated here, for they merely propelled Arbuckle’s story.

*
Actual name: Dot Nelson.

*
Mrs. Hubbard also told the DA’s office that two men known to her husband had phoned Mr. Hubbard on the final night of deliberation and urged him to tell his sequestered wife to vote for Arbuckle’s acquittal.

*
The alternate was counted in the tally of thirteen jurors, as that man stated he would have voted for acquittal. The tally also failed to count Kilkenny with Hubbard, helping to perpetuate the image of the lone, biased female juror. This statement was released before Hubbard granted an interview, thus the remark about her lack of “explanation for her attitude.”

But yet I know them. They have forced my barriers. Fatty Arbuckle, Elmo the Mighty, Mary Pickford, Norma Talmadge, Theda Bara … I know them by sight. They live with me. They eat their meals beside me.

—P
HILIP
C
URTISS, “IS
F
AME
B
ECOMING
E
XTINCT?”

I
t was the worst of times. The shock of peace sent America’s economy into a nosedive. Manufacturing had ramped up during World War I and the armed forces employed millions, but afterward factories closed and returning men flooded an overwhelmed job market. After a mild recession, a depression hit at the start of 1920 and lingered for eighteen months. The stock market gave up nearly half its value. Deflation was the most acute in American history. Unemployment peaked at nearly 12 percent.

And it was the best of times. Eight hundred fifty-four feature films were produced by Hollywood studios in 1921, more than in any other year before or since; by 1922 nearly 40 percent of Americans would go to the movies every week. They saw
The Kid,
Charlie Chaplin’s first feature;
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,
a box office smash that launched a tango craze and Rudolph Valentino’s career; Mary Pickford playing the titular boy (and his mother) in
Little Lord Fauntleroy;
Douglas Fairbanks at his swashbuckling best in
The Three Musketeers;
Lillian Gish in
D. W. Griffith’s last major commercial success,
Orphans of the Storm;
and a whopping five feature films from Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, a tally that would have been even greater if not for a Labor Day spent in San Francisco.