Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (30 page)

While stationed at a New York base awaiting a ship, Keaton was visited by Natalie Talmadge in a chauffeured limousine. That day, spent dining and dancing at Long Island’s finest establishments, was the genesis of the Keaton/Talmadge romance. Stationed in Amiens, France, Keaton saw no combat, but it was cold and frequently rainy, and he slept on the ground or on equally dirty floors and developed an ear infection that permanently impaired his hearing. When the Germans agreed to a ceasefire on November 11, 1918, the war on the Western Front was over, but Keaton’s service was not. He was transferred to a town near Bourdeaux, and there the movie star organized entertainment for anxious soldiers awaiting ships to carry them home. He remained in southwest France, performing for his fellow doughboys, even as his audience was continuously shipping back to America.

In its 1918 “Analytical Review of the Year’s Acting,”
Photoplay
said:

Roscoe Arbuckle shares comedy honors this year with Chaplin—though no comedian, it must be admitted, even approaches Chaplin in personal variety and appeal. But Arbuckle’s material—his own make—has, in the main, been consistently funny and human. He has surrounded himself with good people. He has made good productions. He has kept moving.

He kept moving in Keaton’s absence, enlisting a Comique gag writer, the Italian-born Mario Bianchi, to step in front of the camera, acting under the name Monty Banks. (Banks became a prolific comedic actor and director.) After completing
Camping Out,
his second movie without Keaton, Arbuckle spent two weeks at the end of 1918 in San Francisco, seeking more nightlife than Los Angeles could provide.

The press did not note the peculiar absence of his wife on the trip, nor did they mention a different female companion—though it is probable Arbuckle did not sleep alone on a two-week holiday sojourn. He was subsequently romantically linked to Alice Lake (as was Keaton). She called him “Arbie.”
*
Actress Viola Dana, who dated Keaton, claimed the Arbuckle/Lake relationship was off and on for three years, but it stayed out of the fan magazines because Arbuckle remained married.

The press was mindful of Arbuckle’s privacy, but his audience could be more demanding. When out in public, Arbuckle was frequently mobbed by fans. Around the time the war came to an end,
Photoplay
said:

The people adored “Fatty,” I soon discovered—young and old. They felt that somehow he was a rock to cling to, a prop against the
shadows that are falling all too heavily these days of stress. He represented the way of escape—he and his merry-making crew—the defiance that we humans must hurl at woe; in a way he typified the happy, serious spirit of the American: the ability to see the funny side of anything, however seemingly tragic.

*
Automobile fanatic Arbuckle had the Elgin Six touring car delivered from the Elgin Motor Car Corporation, located in suburban Chicago. He had his own such car in Los Angeles.

†
What Fatty ate remained a press preoccupation. A Philadelphia newspaper published “Breakfast a la Arbuckle,” the menu of the first meal the movie star consumed on his day in Philly: fruit, cereal, steak and potatoes, six eggs on toast, three cups of coffee, butter and rolls.

*
When Schenck met Talmadge in August 1916, she was starring in movies for Triangle, and the hammer-faced thirty-seven-year-old Schenck was smitten by the comely twenty-three-year-old brunette. He promptly set up her film company, and two months after meeting, they were married.

*
Keaton claimed he had never discussed pay with Arbuckle and was surprised to find only $40 in his first weekly pay envelope. This climbed to $75 weekly six weeks later and “not long after that” to $125 weekly.

*
Arbuckle debuted this gag three years earlier in
The Knockout.

*
Reisenweber’s, which originated as a tavern in 1856, was not around for most of that age. A prime target for Prohibition raids, it closed in 1922.

*
He was soon replaced by Adolph Zukor, who had installed Abrams as a figurehead the previous July but grew dismayed when Abrams treated his title as more than honorary.

*
The last film shot at Balboa Studio was
The Cook,
made in June 1918. The Horkheimer brothers’ production company had declared bankruptcy that April. The studio facilities were demolished in 1925. Hollywood won.

†
The café was popular then with movie stars working or staying in Long Beach, including Charlie Chaplin, Theda Bara, and Douglas Fairbanks. Long Beach was dry while neighboring Seal Beach was not.

*
Camping Out
was the last movie Lake made with Arbuckle. In 1919 she acted for Keystone before signing a deal with Metro that made her a minor star.

… that abominable and voluptuous act known as reading the paper.

—M
ARCEL
P
ROUST,
“F
ILIAL
S
ENTIMENTS OF A
P
ARRICIDE”

A
n angry mob of 150 men and boys spilled into the movie theater in Thermopolis, Wyoming. Cowboys pointed their six-shooters at the screen and fired, riddling the jolly image of Roscoe Arbuckle with holes. Then they stormed the projection room, ripping the latest Fatty movie from the spools and carrying it into the street, where they set the nitrate ablaze. W
YOMING
M
OB
S
HOOTS UP
F
ATTY,
screamed the front page of a newspaper that same day, September 18, 1921.

The next day, the story made front pages from coast to coast. Few editors could resist such a tale of frontier justice, the good guys riding in with guns blazing to save society from America’s greatest villain. The perfect story. Print it,
page 1
. Except it was a lie, concocted by the theater’s manager to drum up publicity. Four days later, a brief retraction was buried in middle pages, if it ran at all.

Adolph Zukor wrote to William Hearst, who was not just a newspaper tycoon but also the owner of a movie production company, asking him to tone down his papers’ reportage of the Arbuckle case. “Will do best I can,” Hearst replied curtly but then continued, “It is difficult to keep news out of a newspaper. I agree that certain kinds of publicity [are] detrimental to moving pictures but the people who get into the courts
and coroners are responsible. The newspapers are no more responsible than the courts.” The coverage did not change.

Iron walls. Iron bars. Wooden bunks. Wooden bench. Washstand. Beginning his second week of captivity, Roscoe Arbuckle sat in cell 12 on the top floor of the San Francisco Hall of Justice. He chatted with cellmate Fred Martin and others on felon’s row. He read his letters and telegrams.
*
He smoked. He worried.

On Saturday the seventeenth of September, he’d been arraigned for manslaughter—a formality since District Attorney Brady was proceeding with the murder charge. The next morning, Arbuckle requested that the city newspapers be brought to him, and he read news of the outside world for the first time in over a week. He was visited by his brothers, Arthur (living in San Francisco) and Harry (living in Fresno). For twenty minutes, they sat on a bench. The conversation was unheard, but the famous brother was seen smiling broadly. Perhaps they recounted tales of their deceased parents, of their boarding house in Santa Ana, of their older sisters Lola (deceased) and Nora (living in Los Angeles), of the brief times long ago when they were together under the same roof and a happy family.

District Attorney Brady and Assistant DAs U’Ren and Golden entered the twelfth-floor suite of the Hotel St. Francis on Sunday, accompanied by their principal witnesses: Maude Delmont, Alice Blake, and Zey Prevost. The three women were instructed to arrange the furniture in 1219, 1220, and 1221 as it was on Labor Day. The rooms had been cleaned by a maid and, only two days prior, searched for fingerprints. Now Brady wanted to approximate the conditions of the party. In 1219 he examined
marks on the wall and on the small table between the two beds. He listened, in 1220, to the volume of voices in 1219 behind a closed door. He said he was there “to get the lay of the land.”

“Fatty Stands Before Nation with Leering Grin While His Hands Drip Blood” was the title of a sermon delivered that same Sunday by John Roach Straton, one of the country’s foremost evangelists, and widely excerpted in newspapers. Needless to say, it presumed no innocence for the leering grinner with bloody hands. Instead, the sermon averred, “Lured by lust and fueled by liquor, we find him turned into a raging beast, more heartless and brutal than a tiger of the jungle could have been.” Prominent evangelist Robert Shuler stated, “He has assaulted public decency and morality. He has betrayed the thousands of little children who laughed at his antics. He has defied chastity and mocked virtue.” They were just two of the many preachers who condemned Arbuckle that Sunday and for many Sundays thereafter. From America’s pulpits, the movie star was typically presumed guilty of murder. At best, he was a married man in a hotel room cavorting with showgirls, openly consuming alcohol, and pursuing extramarital sex.