Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (45 page)

In public, he willingly played the clown, as was expected of him. At an American Society of Cinematographers ball, called “T
HE
social event of the season,” he stole the show. A
Photoplay
column noted:

Roscoe Arbuckle helped lead the orchestra part of the evening and did very well, but his prize performance of the night, to my way of thinking, was the last dance, which he had with a lovely little Follies girl. The rotund comedian had had a hard day, apparently, the evening had been long—and rather wet—and Roscoe went to sleep on the floor, resting his head gently against his partner’s rosy cheek and continuing to move his feet occasionally to the music.

On July 3 he was the biggest of the Hollywood stars at a charity rodeo on the expansive grounds of Pauline Frederick’s Beverly Hills mansion (the same grounds he and Keaton had threatened to tear up for a practical joke). Keaton and his new bride, Natalie Talmadge, were there, as was the notorious vamp Alla Nazimova. Will Rogers and Tom Mix rode horses.
Photoplay
noted, “Roscoe Arbuckle—not being much of a horseman—nevertheless did his bit in a clever way by pretending to get caught in the middle of the ring. It took him some time to make his way out past the horses and he had the grandstand in convulsions by the time he arrived in his seat.” He was forever the life of the party.

“‘F
ATTY”
N
OT AT
P
ARTY IN
R
OADHOUSE,
read the July 13 headline in the
Los Angeles Times,
with “road-” standing in for “whore-” and Arbuckle connected with said party via his absence. The subhead read, “Lew [sic] Anger Says Arbuckle Did Not Go to Frolic That Caused Scandal.” That scandal would, of course, be eclipsed two months later by a much greater one, but in mid-July the long-suppressed story of the Mishawum Manor “chicken and champagne orgy” of four years and four months earlier splashed onto front pages.

March 6, 1917, marked the last stop on the Paramount publicity tour celebrating Arbuckle’s signing with the studio. After the dinner banquet at Boston’s best hotel, where Arbuckle was the guest of honor, fifteen prominent attendees—including Jesse Lasky, Adolph Zukor, and Hiram Abrams—journeyed eleven miles north to the Mishawum Manor, a stately residence that had been converted into an upscale bordello. As he was traveling with his wife (shortly before their separation),
Arbuckle declined the invitation. Joseph Schenck also avoided the affair. The party was arranged by Abrams, Paramount’s president, and overseen by Lillian Kingston, a madam who went by the name Brownie Kennedy, and it included fried chicken, fifty-two bottles of champagne (all allegedly consumed), and sixteen women (euphemistically called “actresses”). The
Providence News
reported, “The orgy was described as a drunken debauch, with much transpiring which is unfit to print.” It began at midnight on March 7, and some men didn’t leave until daylight. Abrams paid the bill of $1,050.

Two months later, Kingston was tried and convicted for keeping “a liquor nuisance” and a “house of ill fame,” after the ill-famed house’s female piano player and one of its prostitutes testified against her. She was fined one hundred dollars and sentenced to six months in prison; she appealed. Names of Paramount executives who’d attended the party appeared in Boston papers, and a story was mailed to the wife of one such exec. But that was merely the first, faint thunderclap of a potentially devastating storm. The husbands of two female participants and the father of another (a minor) hired lawyers to bring civil complaints against the film executives and press county DA Nathan Tufts to file criminal charges. Abrams hired Boston lawyer Daniel Coakley, who met with Tufts to steer the execs clear of the storm. This was accomplished via $100,000 in Paramount hush money and some company stock. Coakley made payments of between $7,000 and $16,500 to potential complainants in exchange for signed agreements stating they would not pursue the Paramount executives legally.
*
No charges were made, criminally or civilly, and the drunken debauch remained a New England story, quickly forgotten.
^†

And so it remained for four years and four months. Then, on July 11, 1921, the long-dormant tale exploded when a hearing was held in Boston to remove Tufts from office. Though none of the hush money
was traced to him, that may have merely proved he was adept at covering the trail. Tufts was found in dereliction of his duty in not fully investigating potential crimes at the “orgy” and for conspiring with Coakley and with Kingston’s attorney to extort the Paramount executives under the threat of indictments.
*
On October 1, 1921, three days after Arbuckle was released from jail on bail, the Massachusetts Supreme Court would release a ruling that removed Tufts from office.

The hush money kept Zukor, Lasky, and Abrams out of court in 1917, but in July 1921 it placed them at the heart of a widely reported legal scandal. This had three effects on the fate of Roscoe Arbuckle.

First, it primed Paramount to sever ties with him. In September 1921 Abrams was the managing director of United Artists, but Zukor and Lasky were the top executives at Paramount. The prior negative publicity resulting from their involvement in an “orgy” in a “roadhouse” compounded their distress when Paramount’s biggest star was arrested for an “orgy” gone deadly. They left it to Schenck to support Arbuckle publicly while those at Paramount made no comment but suspended his contract and recast his planned movies. They wanted ticket buyers to stop associating Fatty with their studio. When the Tufts/Mishawum story broke, the press repeatedly referred to “Paramount executives.” Two months later, mercifully from Zukor and Lasky’s perspective, the press rarely referred to the arrested Arbuckle and Paramount together. Zukor and Lasky wanted that disassociation to continue.

Second, the story of motion picture heavyweights at an “orgy” in a “house of ill repute” whetted the public’s appetite for more such tales. Hence September’s orgy of orgy stories.

Finally, though the press was careful not to place Arbuckle at Mishawum Manor, the March 1917 affair was frequently described as a party in his honor. As the impeachment of Tufts stretched into October, Arbuckle was linked to two sex scandals simultaneously. What’s more, the Mishawum Manor “orgy” narrative portrayed crass, outrageously wealthy visitors from Hollywood or Manhattan preying on poor, vulnerable
women and then enlisting lawyers to buy their way out of trouble. As reported, it seemed as if the movie industry big shots didn’t think criminal laws or common morality applied to them, and this laid a treacherous foundation for the trials of Roscoe Arbuckle.

He was absent from Mishawum Manor. Still, was Arbuckle the sort of affluent celebrity who would willfully mistreat those occupying society’s lower strata? It was a question with implications for his trials, for he had interacted in the hotel suite with chorus girls, a former corset maker, and a minor actress. The behind-the-scenes view of him on a train playing dice with the African American waiters would suggest he went out of his way to treat lowly workers as equals. In addition, he generously gave his time and money to charities. He helped friends and even some strangers in need—and friends and hangers-on who weren’t in need. And he was an unusually big tipper whom waiters drew lots to serve.

But boorish behavior toward the “little people” need only express itself occasionally to indicate insensitivity. Such an occasion may have occurred in July, when Arbuckle was in Chicago shooting scenes for
Freight Prepaid
and staying downtown at the Congress Hotel. The following news story appeared seven weeks before Arbuckle’s much more public arrest:

“F
ATTY”
A
RBUCKLE
$50 O
UT
A
FTER
H
AVING
R
EAL
F
IGHT

Movie Funny Man Has Trouble with Bellboy and Forfeits Court Deposit

Chicago, July 20 (Special)—Though the first reel was a riot, “Fatty” Arbuckle’s latest feature, “Ouch, My Eyes,” limped to a pepless finish in Police Court today. Arbuckle was to have stood trial on a disorderly charge lodged against him by Joe Greenberg, a bellboy at the Congress Hotel, who complained that “Fatty” hit him in the eye. “Fatty,” it was alleged, had engaged the bellboy to do some work, but they could not agree on the wage. Words, as is the movie custom, were followed by blows. The bellboy got the worst of it, he
said. The judge heard Greenberg’s story and forfeited the $50 bond put up by “Fatty” when the celebrity failed to appear.

On September 11, when every newspaper was screaming of Arbuckle’s arrest for a murder in the final minutes of the day before, the
Los Angeles Examiner
published a very different version of the Congress Hotel story, which reads like a Keystone comedy come regrettably to life. The setting was the hotel’s restaurant, Greenberg was recast as a waiter, and the plot revolved around Arbuckle entertaining his lunch mates by flattening one sandwich on Greenberg’s head and whizzing another past his nose before smashing a platter of creamed chicken into the waiter’s face in the manner of a custard pie. Outraged, Greenberg retrieved two policemen, but instead of a Kop chase, they escorted Arbuckle to the police station for booking. The conclusion remained unaltered: the movie star skipped his day in court, forfeiting fifty dollars.

In her August 8 gossip column, Louella Parsons referred to “the row [Arbuckle] had with a waiter in Chicago,” thus giving some weight to the latter version, published a month later. The last account seems too outrageous, though, especially considering it occurred in a public setting but went unreported at the time. Regardless, a violent act was attributed to Arbuckle in another world-class hotel in another city. Was the incident, reported without Arbuckle’s comment, an unfair representation even before the
Examiner
rewrite? Was it the result of a flair of anger for which Arbuckle felt genuine remorse, or did it reveal a superstar’s contempt for the background players of his privileged life?

The preponderance of evidence suggests that Arbuckle paid an unusual amount of respect to the working class from which he came. (He had, after all, performed menial jobs in hotels himself as a youth.) At worst, whatever happened at the Congress Hotel seems akin to his drawer-throwing, table-kicking outburst with his wife in the Cumberland Hotel four years prior—a glimpse at Arbuckle’s temper. Most of the time, the movie superstar was as blithe as one might expect of a man in his comfortable position, but he had never entirely shed his childhood insecurities—his feelings of unattractiveness and neglect,
his need for familial love—and they could still fuel anger that would sometimes erupt.

In early August, newspaper advertisements for Omar cigarettes began appearing, depicting a hand holding a lit cigarette. A small caption read, “This is an actual photograph of Roscoe Arbuckle’s hand holding an O
MAR,”
while the slogan stated, “Good nature is evident in the way Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle holds his O
MAR.”
Omar was the American Tobacco Company’s line of premium Turkish-blend cigarettes. For Arbuckle, a longtime smoker, the ads associated him with luxury—he was a glamourous movie star rather than a slapstick comic—but that association lasted little more than a month. The last Arbuckle/Omar ads ran on the weekend after Labor Day. Roscoe Arbuckle was the first American celebrity to have advertising halted on account of a scandal.