Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (62 page)

In
The Fatty Arbuckle Case,
Guild wrote, “These are the rumors, the facts and the theories, sifted and arranged in what seems to this author the most reasonable and probable re-creation of that fateful day.” In his version, Arbuckle and Maude Delmont conspired in Los Angeles to get Virginia Rappe to a party in San Francisco so Arbuckle could have sex with her. The party livened up when Delmont stripped to only her panties for the amusement of all and compared her bare breasts with those of an unnamed and equally topless showgirl. Soon thereafter, Rappe, who called Arbuckle “despicable,” went willingly with him into 1219. With regard to what followed, the Wizard of Odds hedged his bet. The most “sane explanation,” he reported, is that Arbuckle and Rappe had intercourse and “by force or roughness, Virginia’s bladder was broken.” But he also wrote, “One rumor was that the drunken Arbuckle had ravaged her with a coke bottle. Another said he used a jagged stick of ice.”

Here, then, forty-one years after Arbuckle’s arrest, is the now-legendary supposition: he ruptured Rappe’s bladder while raping her with a bottle.
*
The broader rumor was that Arbuckle was unable to achieve an erection and thus substituted another item for his phallus, most often identified as a Coca-Cola bottle. Never mind that there was no evidence of this, and never mind that one could not puncture a bladder thusly without doing grave injury to the upper vaginal wall. Indeed, there was no evidence of any vaginal contact by Arbuckle, and no such contact was ever alleged in court (other than his application of ice). Rappe was clothed while he was alone with her in 1219. But four decades later, a persistent myth took root and grew.

And it wasn’t merely relegated to pulp paperbacks. The following year, Charles Beaumont (best known for penning scripts for
The Twilight Zone)
revisited the case in a book of nostalgic essays, and though he made it clear he felt Arbuckle got a raw deal, he dished the dirt in a parenthetical aside: “(Three versions of the incident were in office and alley circulation: Arbuckle had raped the girl, killing her with thrusts of his
presumably enormous penis;
*
he had used a coca cola bottle or a dildo; he had impaled her on a broom handle. Most people devotedly believed all three stories.)”

The bottle rumor began its journey from whispers to legend even earlier than 1962. Leo Guild seems to have expanded on a version of the story contained in another lurid volume, which he probably consulted in its original, French-language edition when he wrote
The Fatty Arbuckle Case.
Its subsequent English translation would have the greatest impact on the public’s perception of the events in room 1219.

If a book such as this can be said to have charm, I think it lies in the fact that here is a book without one single redeeming merit.

—F
ROM THE
NEW
Y
ORK
T
IMES
REVIEW OF HOLLYWOOD
B
ABYLON

Born Kenneth Anglemyer in 1927 and raised in Los Angeles, Kenneth Anger made his first experimental short films when a child and his homoerotic
Fireworks
at age twenty. His avant-garde movies, which often explored occultism and/or sexuality, generated both praise and protest and made Anger a minor celebrity in the cinematic underground—but supplied scant income. He had been living in Paris since 1950 when he collected stories of movie industry depravity, and, influenced by
Confidential
and the blunt writing style of occultist Aleister Crowley, he penned a photo-laden book of scandals,
Hollywood Babylone,
published in French in 1959. An item in American newspapers in 1961 read, “Vacationers returning from Europe are smuggling in a book called
Hollywood Baby-lone,
written entirely in French but apparently well worth translating.”

American Marvin Miller specialized in publishing quick knockoffs of successful sex-themed European books, and he encouraged Anger to translate
Hollywood Babylone
into English. The filmmaker translated
two-thirds, but Miller rendered the other third in a more vulgar style and added stories.
Hollywood Babylon
came out in 1964, and despite being sold in a plain brown wrapper like the pornography of the era, it made the shelves of mainstream American bookstores and appeared in newspaper ads. Estimates are that this “bootleg version” sold as many as two million copies, but none of the profits were returned to its author. Miller also turned the book into a 1972 sexploitation “documentary” with cheap recreations of tawdry scenes, including the 1921 Labor Day party.

Anger sued Miller, demanding over $500,000 in royalties and damages, and eventually won a small settlement, but he never collected from the elusive publisher. Made aware of the enduring interest in his poisonous tome, Anger Americanized and updated the text. Rereleased in 1975,
Hollywood Babylon
was again a success, and Anger took “the Hollywood Babylon Show” on the road, reading theatrically from the text and screening appropriately inappropriate silent film clips.

Stuffed with photos, some of shockingly gory crime scenes,
Hollywood Babylon
stands as a 305-page compendium of all the ways fame can defeat you: drug addiction, murder, sexual dysfunction, public humiliations, depression, suicide. As such, it has memorialized long-gone stars—but only via innuendo, rumors, or lies. F. W. Murnau is remembered not as a great, poetic director but for dying in a car crash while allegedly performing fellatio on his fourteen-year-old valet as the boy drove. Clara Bow is commemorated not as a leading actress of the late 1920s or the quintessential flapper but as a nymphomaniac who had group sex with the USC football team (including John Wayne).
*
Likewise, generations know nothing of Roscoe Arbuckle’s comedic artistry, but they were certain he had once killed an actress by raping her with a bottle—a legend promulgated foremost by
Hollywood Babylon.

The book’s very title harks back to the Arbuckle case, and its third chapter, “Fat Man Out,” is devoted to that subject. From its first line about Mack Sennett discovering “plumber’s helper” Arbuckle “when
he came to unclog the comedy producer’s drain,” the chapter is littered with falsehoods. Arbuckle supposedly stripped with the prostitutes in “Mishawn [sic] Manor,” and Rappe worked in minor roles at Keystone, where she “did her fair share of sleeping around and gave half the company crabs. This epidemic so shocked Sennett that he closed down his studio and had it fumigated.”

Anger tells a lively if false version of the Labor Day party. Maude Delmont (who is misidentified with a photo of Minta Durfee) is Arbuckle’s “friend” whom, as in Leo Guild’s account, he enlists to bring Rappe to San Francisco. Of what occurred in 1219 Anger offers no opinion but instead promulgates the rumors (italics and ellipses are his):

As headlines screamed, the rumors flew of a
hideously unnatural rape:
Arbuckle, enraged at his drunken impotence, had ravaged Virginia with a Coca-Cola bottle,
or
a champagne bottle, then had repeated the act with a jagged piece of ice …
or,
wasn’t it common knowledge that Arbuckle was
exceptionally well endowed?
… or, was it just a question of 266-pounds-too-much of Fatty flattening Virginia in a
flying leap?

It’s clear which rumor Anger prefers when, in reference to Arbuckle’s acquittal, he highlights “the lack of specific evidence (such as a bloody bottle),” as if a bottle theory had been examined in court. And at the chapter’s end, he presents the 1931 incident outside the Embassy Club when Arbuckle destroyed evidence of illegal drinking, and asks, “Was he thinking of another bottle that went sailing out the 12th floor window of the Hotel St. Francis on Labor Day 1921?”

The myth of “Fatty’s bottle party” spread like a contagious disease. For a visceral image of said myth, 1971’s self-published
Fatty
by Gerald Fine set the standard with a scene wherein a drunk and still drinking Maude Delmont privately tells Matthew Brady and Nat Schmulowitz about entering 1219 just after Arbuckle was alone there with Rappe: “She was all beat up and bruised … lyin’ on th’ floor between the two beds. There was a coke bottle on the floor. Fatty had shoved it up her
cunt, the son of a bitch…. She said that when she wouldn’t give in that he used the coke bottle to force her open. Then she said when he took the bottle out, he mounted her.” (Brady dismisses Delmont’s drunken account because “she had been bought or had some powerful hatred for Fatty.”) The book—labeled a “novel,” presumably for scenes like the preceding—is mostly sympathetic to Arbuckle.

An unsympathetic view can by found in the 1974 memoir of silent-era screenwriter Anita Loos,
Kiss Hollywood Goodbye.
She declared that Arbuckle caused Rappe’s death “when she was trying to fight off his unorthodox lovemaking.” A 1994
Newsweek
article, tied to O. J. Simpson’s arrest for double murder, concocted facts and cruel Arbuckle quotes to paint the silent star guilty, and it ran with another of Anger’s rumors: “Arbuckle had told others that he had jabbed a large, jagged piece of ice into [Rappe’s] vagina. Three days later she died from a ruptured bladder, having been literally raped to death.” And a 1998 article in London’s the
Independent
entitled “When Apes Put Men to Shame” chose the third and final rumor: “Hollywood has always had its share of call-girl scandals. In 1921, the American actor Fatty Arbuckle was charged with crushing to death a starlet during an orgy in San Francisco.”

One of the most perniciously false descriptions of the alleged assault was in a 1993 edition of the scholarly
Journal of Popular Culture
and penned by pioneering TV host Steve Allen:
*

The popular comedian Fatty Arbuckle, in the 1920s, never worked again in the motion picture business after his arrest in conjunction with an incident in which a prostitute died, apparently because Arbuckle, in a sexual context, had inserted in the poor woman’s body a Coca-Cola bottle, which broke and cut her internally, after which she bled to death. If such a thing were to happen today, I would not be surprised if Arbuckle ended up doing a TV commercial for Pepsi.

-esse-

As the preceding references to “call-girl scandals” and a “prostitute” demonstrate, Virginia Rappe’s reputation has also been assaulted by history. Adela Rogers St. Johns doubled down on her previous vitriol. In her 1978 book
Love, Laughter and Tears,
she placed all the blame on the victim: “During this vacation an extra girl named Virginia Rappe got some alcohol in her system, stripped off her clothes and plunged Fatty and Hollywood into our first major scandal.”

Minta Durfee was the other chief Rappe antagonist. Of her unpublished book, the
Los Angeles Times
said after her death, “Her manuscript was too circumspect to interest publishers.”
*
Nevertheless, her circumspect remembrances interested other writers, and by readily granting interviews, she contributed to their books. Durfee—who never remarried and appeared as an extra or bit player in over two dozen movies and TV shows from the mid-1930s to the early 1970s—had the advantage of longevity, living by modest means in Los Angeles until her death in 1975 at age eighty-five. She even chatted on TV’s
The Merv Griffin Show
in 1970 (advertised as “widow of film star Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle”). In a 1964 interview, she said Rappe “was suffering from several diseases,” one of which resulted in Sennett fumigating Keystone. This quote appears in Kevin Brownlow’s monumental history of silent film
The Parade’s Gone By,
published in 1968.

Durfee’s interviews were the greatest influence on Fine’s
Fatty
as well as on Stuart Oderman’s 1994 biography
Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.
In the latter, she’s quoted as saying, “Virginia Rappe was one of those poor young girls who came to Hollywood looking for a career and who wound up being
used
more in the dressing room or in some executive’s office than in front of the camera. At Sennett’s, she spread syphilis all over the studio, and Mr. Sennett had to have the place fumigated!” Note how Durfee in this 1969 interview upped the ante of Kenneth Anger’s
anecdote, turning crabs into syphilis, as if a venereal disease could be eliminated by an insect exterminator. There is no evidence that Rappe ever suffered from either crabs or a venereal disease. Also, Rappe never worked at Keystone. Facts be damned.

In a 1973 interview, Durfee said, “Mr. Sennett had to close the studio down for several days while he had everything repainted and fumigated” because Rappe had “spread syphilis all over the studio.” So painters, too, were enlisted in the health crusade. The interview, published as a chapter in 1975’s
You Must Remember This,
is laced with falsehoods, such as “Our lawyers proved with medical records that Virginia died of cystitis, an inflammation of the bladder. She had such a severe case that she had to use a catheter to eliminate. Her sphincter muscle wouldn’t work.” It’s likely Durfee didn’t know the lies from the truth by this point, so long had she been confusing the two to paint Arbuckle in the best light and all who opposed him in the worst.