Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (48 page)

Even if the machinations of the second Arbuckle trial had sometimes slipped off front pages, newspapers still needed to feed the public’s newly
stoked appetite for Hollywood scandal. On the final weekend before the case went to the jury, a large story appeared with the ungrammatical title N
ERO’S
O
RGIES
R
IVALED ON
C
OAST
F
OLK.
After first saying that the “madness” at the St. Francis party resulted in Rappe’s death, it purported to tell “some of the things discovered first-hand by a recent visitor in Hollywood,” including a two-day booze and gambling revel costing $10,000, “snow parties” (cocaine parties), and the following, presented under the subheading “When ‘Fatty’ Played Host”:

One night, some months ago, was called “Arbuckle Night” at the inn [Sunset Inn in Santa Monica, formerly Cafe Nat Goodwin]. As the Peruvian rum for which Arbuckle’s cellars are famous warmed the crowd, a game of “strip” poker was called between “Fatty” and one of the men in the party. The star played a losing game from the first. His party screamed wildly when he bet his shirt on a hand and lost. Another chorus of screams went up when its removal revealed the star wearing a corset cover elaborately trimmed in lace and pink ribbons. There was another round of drinks. He lost. Then “Fatty” nonchalantly wagered his trousers. Just then the two policeman crowded in at the door and arrested him.

Arbuckle paid his fine, slipped two bottles of Scotch whiskey into the policeman’s pocket and carried his party off to Mountain Inn, a resort in Laurel Canyon, which the sheriff has since closed, to finish the night.

Some said afterward that Arbuckle had staged the whole affair by way of entertainment, the arrest providing the thrill movie folks are constantly looking for.

In just a few days, those craving Hollywood scandal greater than PG-rated strip poker would get their wish.

Every seat in the courtroom filled as U’Ren began the state’s closing argument. He attacked Arbuckle’s testimony from the first trial. Of Blake and
Prevost, he said, “The defense charges that they were
processed
by the district attorney. From their attitude on the stand, they were certainly well prepared by the defense.” He cut to the essence of what occurred behind the locked door to room 1219: “The ailment which the defense says resulted in Miss Virginia Rappe’s death was of years’ standing. It is strange that it should have reached its fatal climax while she was alone in a locked room with Arbuckle. The prosecution has blasted part of the truth out of the lips of Zey Prevost and Alice Blake. What the whole truth is, it is for you to determine. Virginia Rappe entered Arbuckle’s room a well and vigorous girl. A few minutes later she was in a death agony.”

U’Ren’s ninety-six-minute argument was followed by a fifteen-minute recess, during which the defense team conferred. “Whatever you do is all right,” Arbuckle said, rolling a cigarette as he walked away from his attorneys. The court was gaveled back into session. The defense team whispered with Arbuckle again before McNab rose and addressed the judge: “If the court please, we have decided that it is unnecessary for us to make an argument. We feel that the case is so simple that argument on it would but weary the jurors. We therefore submit it without argument.”

Shocked murmurs.

The unusual strategy had the effect of cutting off the state’s concluding rebuttal, for which it had surely saved its strongest arguments (and the state still had nearly two and a half hours on the clock), but it also rendered the defense mute aside from McNab’s brief affirmation of confidence.

After instructions from Judge Louderback, the case went to the jury at 3:42
PM
on Wednesday, February 1. Durfee sobbed as the jurors strode out. Two hours later, the jury returned to the courtroom, and participants and observers rushed back in, anticipating a verdict. Instead, the testimony of eavesdropping maid Josephine Keza was reread. At 9:30
PM
the jury returned again, having requested that the judge reread his instructions to them.

“This is the end. No matter what this jury does, this is final. I’m through with this case for good,” Brady told the press that evening.

The jury deliberated until 11
PM
before retiring for the night. The front-page headline in the next day’s
Chicago Tribune
announced, J
URY
Q
UITS FOR
N
IGHT,
11 T
O
I
FOR
A
RBUCKLE.

William Desmond Taylor lay on his back on his living room floor, his left leg beneath a chair. At 7:30
AM
on February 2, Henry Peavey, Taylor’s African American valet/cook, arrived as usual at the house, one of eight two-story domiciles crowded around a courtyard in a fashionable district near downtown Los Angeles. Upon finding the lifeless body on the floor, Peavey shrieked, backed out of the house, and yelled for the landlord. The landlord and neighbors rushed in. When the police arrived, they failed to disperse the crowd, which obliterated evidence. A mysterious man who identified himself as a doctor but whose name remains unknown claimed without examining the body that death was due to natural causes. The general manager of Paramount removed letters and other personal items and later destroyed them. It wasn’t until the coroner’s deputies moved the body that a pool of blood was discovered beneath it. The postmortem tracked the deadly bullet’s unusual path: entering the left, lower side of Taylor’s back and traveling upward to lodge at the base of his neck on the right.

After abandoning his wife and daughter in New York City, William Desmond Taylor (an assumed name) had acted in his first film in Los Angeles in 1912 at age forty. Within a year, Taylor was directing, and he helmed approximately fifty films before enlisting in the army of his native Britain near the end of World War I. Upon returning to Los Angeles, the Englishman revived his directing career, signing with Paramount and serving as president of the Motion Picture Directors Association.

Mabel Normand was one of Taylor’s closest friends and the last known person to see him on the evening of February 1, 1922. Then twenty-eight, she was still starring in romantic comedies, though her popularity had waned. Her alcohol and cocaine use could be problematic, as evidenced by her stay in a New York sanitarium in the autumn of 1920 for a “nervous breakdown.” And yet the always-adventurous Normand
was an inquisitive reader, studying literature and philosophy. That fateful February evening she discussed books with Taylor, and he gave her two. She was in Taylor’s house from approximately 7:05 to 7:45
PM,
and afterward he walked her to her limo and returned to his home.

Then forty-nine-year-old William Desmond Taylor was murdered. Robbery was ruled out when his pockets were found to contain seventy-eight dollars and various valuables. No suspect was ever arrested. The case remains unsolved, and the endlessly engaging mystery has only grown with time as the multitude of tentacled subplots extended to drug dealers, obscure phone calls, buried pasts excavated, a body in a river, a collection of keys to unknown locks, a woman’s nightgown, homosexual solicitation, coded love letters from the then-seventeen-year-old movie star Mary Miles Minter to her then-forty-seven-year-old boyfriend (and director) Taylor, a woman dressed as a man, the kidnapping of Henry Peavey by reporters, and a bizarre 1964 confession. Over the decades, amateur detectives have pointed to over fifty suspects.
*
One of the prime suspects, Edward Sands—Taylor’s former valet, who embezzled from him and robbed his house—was never located after Taylor’s murder. Another, Charlotte Shelby—the threateningly overprotective mother of Mary Minter—possessed a rare gun that fired unusual bullets matching the .38 caliber slug found in Taylor. Though Normand had quarreled with Taylor and was implicated by Peavey (himself a suspect), she was cleared by the police. Nevertheless, in addition to her association with Arbuckle, the avalanche of press surrounding the Taylor murder quashed the image of Madcap Mabel and hastened her career’s decline.

The greater effect of the scandalous Taylor murder was to refocus newspaper stories and outraged editorials on depraved and dangerous Hollywood. Calls for censorship increased. Front-page reports throughout February of the ever-widening mystery of Taylor’s demise would
entangle it in the public consciousness with the Arbuckle manslaughter trials. The
San Francisco Chronicle
made the connection overt on its front page on February 3, running the banner headline W
OMEN
F
EATURE
F
ILM
M
URDER
(about Normand and Minter’s relationship to the Taylor murder) above A
RBUCKLE
J
URY
S
TILL OUT,
10 F
OR
A
CQUITTAL,
R
EPORT.

Arbuckle and Taylor were both employed by Paramount in 1921 and had attended the same social events for years. While the jury deliberated on February 2, Arbuckle, seated at the counsel’s table, was informed by a reporter of Taylor’s violent death. His eyes watered. “Taylor was the best fellow on the [Paramount] lot,” he said. “He was beloved by everybody, and his loss is a shock…. I cannot understand why anyone would wish to murder him as he was the last man in the world to make an enemy.”

Nearly two weeks later, a statement attributed to Arbuckle made a pointed statement about the Taylor case and Arbuckle’s legal ordeal:

The American public is ardent in its hero worship and quite as ruthless in destroying its idols in any walk of life. It elevates a man more quickly than any nation in the world, and casts him down more quickly—quite often on surmise or a mere hunch. It is the general inclination, when trouble happens to strike in film circles, for the thoughtless to whisper, malign and gossip and to speak with that mock sagacity of the times of “the inside dope” and “the low down.” This was brought out quite forcibly in my own case and has been accentuated in the case of William Taylor….

Never in history, perhaps, have men and women been so quickly elevated to prominence as have the successful folk in pictures. That is because of the millions before whom they appear via the screen almost nightly. Their names become household words. Their features widely familiar. They are virtually next door neighbor to everyone in the land. The man and the woman who thus accepts as worthy of esteem this filmland neighbor should do himself or herself the moral honor of refusing to accept tattle and shoulder shrugs in place of fact—as he undoubtedly would in the case of his respected physical neighbor.