Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (15 page)

He is decked out in the tight tux as he attends the benefit with Durfee, and the movie’s highlight is his ludicrous heel-kicking dance. Chase sneaks in and unravels the stolen pants, leaving the embarrassed Fatty in his underwear. Chase then fires a barrage of bullets at Fatty, hitting him with all the effect of slaps. Fatty leaps out a window and to a street where a cop, noting his state of undress, places a barrel around him and beats him with a club. The final image is of Chase and Durfee laughing at crying Fatty as the clubbing cop herds him to jail.

T
HE
E
ND

Unlike Chaplin’s Little Tramp, we have scant sympathy for the title character of
Fatty’s Magic Pants,
for he is insincere, cruel, lazy, and corrupt. Upon greeting him, Chase offers his hand, and after they shake, Fatty’s smile melts into a scoff. A minute later, Fatty distracts Chase and coldcocks him with a board wrapped in a newspaper, only to then laugh heartily at his rival laid out on the ground. Though he resorts to stealing the formal wear, he doesn’t appear impoverished; his only legitimate effort to attain a tux is begging his mother for money. The punishment for his minor thievery—public humiliation, dodging and absorbing bullets, police brutality, jail—does not fit his crime, but we have no qualms about enjoying Fatty’s downfall.

This man-child is not
that
bad, so we smile at his innocence when he naively gives a hatcheck man not just his hat and cane but also his shoes, and we revel in his joy when, among high society, he dances about in unbridled ecstasy. But he’s not that
good
either, a grown-up delinquent, and so, like his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s new boyfriend, in the end we laugh as Fatty cries.

In 1914 Arbuckle and his wife rented a large house near the beach in tony Santa Monica. After years of traveling, they were happy to be
rooted to one place. They lived there with their pit bull, Luke, a gift to Durfee from Keystone director Wilfred Lucas (the canine’s namesake) after Durfee performed a dangerous stunt. They employed a Japanese servant, Oki, who lived in the guest house. Arbuckle often stayed up late, plotting out gags, stunts, and camera angles, smoking and drinking.

The couple, who had been broke the year before, spent their lavish paychecks soon after receiving them on extravagances befitting movie stars: she on designer clothes and perfumes and he on expensive jewelry for her and—something he had coveted for years—his first automobile: a secondhand Stevens-Duryea Model C-Six touring car. His love of cars bound him to race car driver Barney Oldfield, co-owner of the Oldfield-Kipper Tavern in downtown Los Angeles—a trendy refuge for male sports and movie celebrities, including Arbuckle. It was also an interest he shared with Mabel Normand.

The close friendship Normand shared with Arbuckle and Durfee provided her respite from her boyfriend. Sennett wrote, “Mabel and I were engaged and unengaged more than twenty times, I suppose, and once or twice we set a date. But things being like they were around Hollywood, she would hear stories about me and I would hear stories about her, and our affair was a series of fractures and refractures.” Perhaps to heal fractures and certainly as a relief from the grueling shooting schedules, Normand spent most Sundays with Minty and Big Otto, often with Durfee’s family, eating meals cooked by Durfee’s mother.

Arbuckle also swam in the Pacific with Normand nearly every Sunday. Durfee remembered:

So one Sunday morning they came back, and instead of the two of them getting out of the water immediately and coming up on the sand, there was something going on…. Well, what it was, as they were swimming back from the Venice pier, up came a dolphin, and instead of Mabel being frightened like anybody would, because none of us knew anything about dolphins in those days, she just put her arm over the neck of this dolphin, and he swam right along with them. And do you know, every Sunday, for nearly a year, he
came and swam with them, down and back, until one day they came back and then he disappeared, and they never saw him again.

Though Durfee was content merely to observe Arbuckle and Normand’s aquatic adventures, she and her husband often partook in the local nightlife together. Recalled Durfee: “If either of us went anywhere in the evening, the other always went along. I was brought up in the belief—they call it old-fashioned now—that a wife’s place was to suit herself to her husband’s wishes, and to go where he wanted to go…. Perhaps we made a mistake by being so much together. It is the safest thing for married couples to take an occasional vacation from each other. I know that now, but you couldn’t make me believe it then.”

One can picture Roscoe Arbuckle and Minta Durfee as 1914 came to a close, him twenty-seven, her twenty-five, walking near the sea as they had six years before when they fell in love. Santa Monica’s amusement center had burned down two years prior, but they could see the palatial auditorium and the schooner-shaped Cabrillo Ship Café at the Abbot Kinney Pier in neighboring Venice, the signpost for his Sunday swims. They talked about their future. Their marriage was sometimes strained; his drinking could darken his mood and breed arguments. But unlike Normand and Sennett, they
had
a marriage, and unlike in their first years together—mostly spent in strange towns and cities in the West and Far East—they now had the comfort of financial security and a permanent home with family and friends nearby. The sun spilled into the ocean. Then and there when everything was building, it seemed it could never end.

*
Their tumultuous love story was adapted into the 1974 Broadway musical
Mack & Mabel.

*
Peeping Pete
was released on June 23, 1913, with
A Bandit;
they are the oldest surviving Arbuckle movies.

*
Custard tended to break up in flight, and it faded into the background when shot in monochrome, so later pies consisted of blackberries and whipped cream—a concoction local bakeries readily learned to devise.

*
Some movies then were released under multiple titles. So
Fatty Again
might be
Fatty the Fourflusher
a week later at a theater across town.

*
Macklyn Arbuckle (no known relation to Roscoe) was a Broadway star. His most famous stage role was Sheriff “Slim” Hoover in
The Round Up,
and it was as this character that he uttered, “Nobody loves a fat man.” Roscoe Arbuckle eventually starred in the same role and made the line his own.

D
ETAIN
A
RBUCKLE

Fat Comedian in Trouble As Girl Dies from Orgy

S
AN
F
RANCISCO,
Sept. 10—Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, motion picture actor, is to be “held in custody” pending the action of the police investigation of the death of Miss Virginia Rappe, motion picture actress, following a party in Arbuckle’s room in the St. Francis Hotel, acting Captain of Detectives Michael Griffith
[sic]
announced today.

T
he giant D
ETAIN
A
RBUCKLE
banner and its subheading were the spin of the
Evening News
editors in San Jose, Arbuckle’s former hometown. Earlier on that Saturday, the
Los Angeles Examiner
shouted, A
CTRESS
D
IES AFTER
H
OTEL
F
ILM
P
ARTY.
The
San Francisco Chronicle
ran with the similar G
IRL
D
EAD AFTER
W
ILD
P
ARTY IN
H
OTEL,
while its rival, the
San Francisco Examiner,
alleged a crime with S.F. B
OOZE
P
ARTY
K
ILLS
Y
OUNG
A
CTRESS. AS
details developed throughout the day, the
San Francisco Bulletin
went for the jugular: G
ET
R
OSCOE IS
D
EATHBED
P
LEA.
Others were more cautious. The
New York Times
chose R
OSCOE
A
RBUCKLE
F
ACES AN
I
NQUIRY ON
W
OMAN’S
D
EATH,
the
Los Angeles Times
the obscure M
YSTERY
D
EATH
T
AKES
A
CTRESS,
the
Pittsburgh Press
the optimistic “F
ATTY”
A
RBUCKLE TO
H
ELP
C
LEAR
A
CTRESS’
D
EATH.
But sensationalism would win out before the weekend was through.

According to the
Evening News,
the police had received two different accounts of Rappe’s death. The first was “an affidavit given Detective Griffith Kennedy by Miss Alice Blake, actress”—one of the chorus girls at the party. The second was “a statement said to have been telephoned them from Los Angeles by Roscoe Arbuckle, motion picture comedian, which denied portions of Miss Blake’s affidavit.”

From Blake’s affidavit: “About half an hour later Mrs. Delmont tried to get into the room, but the door was locked. She banged on the door and Arbuckle came out. As he opened the door we heard Miss Rappe moaning and crying ‘I am dying, I am dying.’ Arbuckle came out and sat down and said to us, ‘Go in and get her dressed and take her back to the Palace. She makes too much noise.’”

From Arbuckle’s statement: “We sat around and had some drinks and pretty soon Miss Rappe became hysterical and complained she could not breathe and began to tear her clothes off…. At no time was I alone with Miss Rappe. There were half a dozen people in the room all the time.”

Picture a spy with multiple enemies who is courting allies and underworld connections he can never truly trust, endeavoring to attain a secret code—by any means, bit by bit—before his enemies get it first. Newspaper journalism in 1921, particularly the crime beat when the crime was worthy of daily eight-column headlines, was a devious sort of warfare. When the Arbuckle/Rappe story broke, there were five general-interest daily newspapers in Los Angeles and as many in San Francisco. In New York City, there were fourteen. Except for those owned by the same company, they were rabid competitors, segmented by Democratic, Republican, or Socialist party politics and also by the relish with which they pursued the more sordid criminal stories. There were morning papers, evening papers, and to disseminate the results of the day’s final horse races, late editions. When the news warranted it, extra editions were published; there could be multiple extras throughout a day, each with a new headline on a new development, each rushing to beat competitors to
the crowded stands. Today we think of the print press as a staid medium caught flat-footed when a whirlwind of events kicks up, but newspapers in 1921 were closer to today’s twenty-four-hour cable news networks and the Internet’s plethora of news sites and political blogs: rapid responses, strong opinions, factional politics, relentless competition.