Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (63 page)

In the same published interview, she picked off her former husband’s perceived accusers one by one, and her spurious attacks jaundiced much of the case’s history until now….

On Maude Delmont:
She “had seventy-two affidavits out against her for being a professional correspondent, a woman that’s found in bed with a husband when a photographer bursts into the room and takes a picture. That was when they had these setup divorces and the only grounds for divorce was adultery. Maude Delmont had gone to the well too often, she’d made it into a racket, and so the cops were down on her. When the cops found out Maude Delmont had been at the party at the Hotel St. Francis, she must have made a deal with the district attorney. They’d forget about the seventy-two affidavits if she’d frame Roscoe.”

Truth:
There were many rumors about Delmont, some stemming from her alleged relationship with Earl Lynn, but there is not one known affidavit as described.

On the Women’s Vigilant Committee:
“Roscoe was in handcuffs when he was taken from his cell and walked through a hallway to the courtroom for that [first] hearing. There were people milling around who’d seen this man on the screen. They knew him and started to applaud.
But there was one woman in the crowd, the head of a vigilante women’s group with thousands of members, who had a lot of her followers with her. As soon as she saw Roscoe, she said, ‘Women, do your duty.’ And they all spat at Roscoe. His face and clothes were covered with spit.”

Truth:
The press would have made much of this event had it occurred.

On William Randolph Hearst:
He was “that dreadful, dreadful old man” who attacked Arbuckle relentlessly in his newspapers to extract revenge against Hollywood for not making his mistress Marion Davies a star.

Truth:
Between 1918 and 1929, Davies starred in twenty-nine films, financed by Hearst and released by Hollywood studios, so the publisher had no reason for a vendetta against Hollywood in 1921. Also, Durfee failed to mention that Arbuckle directed one of those twenty-nine films for that “dreadful, dreadful” man.

On Will H. Hays:
“This awful Will Hays, who was the censor in our business, instead of standing up like a man and declaring Roscoe absolutely guiltless, was absolutely ruthless…. I’ve never seen a man in all my lifetime that looked more like a rat dressed up in men’s clothing than Will Hays.”

Truth:
As previously discussed, Hays banished but then reinstated Arbuckle. He did look like a rat.

But back to Virginia Rappe. In most accounts of the case, she is diminished to a bit part, as if it was not her tragedy. She’s a showgirl, an extra, a slut if not a whore. A 1994 Associated Press story on the case was typically jaundiced: Arbuckle hired the “notorious” Maude Delmont “to supply party girls,” one of whom was Rappe, who had been fired by Sennett “after she allegedly infected several actors with a venereal disease. An alcoholic, she drifted in the Hollywood lowlife.”

In 1976, at last, came the first book-length biography of Arbuckle and the first extensively researched (though unsourced) portrait of the trials, David Yallop’s
The Day the Laughter Stopped: The True Story of Fatty Arbuckle.
Once again, we’re treated to the tale of Rappe’s venereal disease causing the fumigation of Keystone. Yallop also has Dr. Melville Rumwell concluding that Rappe had gonorrhea—though Rumwell never
stated this at any of the three trials, nor did any other doctor who examined her before or after her death. Likewise, the following game-changer was never mentioned by the medical experts, witnesses, or attorneys of the time: Rappe hit Arbuckle up for “a great deal of money” at the Labor Day party because (Yallop’s italics)
“She was pregnant, and she was sick. She needed money to have an abortion, and she wanted to have the abortion as soon as possible.”
Explaining away the lack of physical evidence, Yallop conveniently suggests Rumwell performed an illegal autopsy to cover up an illegal abortion he’d performed on the dying Rappe. Yallop pegs the bladder tear on either a spontaneous rupture or a catheter used to treat a prior medical condition. (There was no evidence to suggest that a catheter caused the tear.) He also pins an unspecified scheme to blackmail Arbuckle on Delmont and suggests that Rappe may have initially been involved, seeking money for her abortion.

The next book on the subject, 1991’s
Frame-Up!: The Untold Story of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle
by Andy Edmonds, collapses under its own conspiracy theory (it too lacks source notes). Again, Durfee is listed as a principal source,
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and again we get her portrait of Rappe—the ultimate version: “I couldn’t stand that girl. She was sweet enough, naive. But had no morals whatsoever. She’d sleep with any man who asked her. In fact, Mack Sennett had to shut the studio down twice because of her … because she was spreading lice and some sort of venereal disease. She was a sad case.”

Then Edmonds tops Yallop. Rappe, who had had “at least five abortions by the time she was sixteen” and a baby at seventeen (placed in a foster home), wasn’t just in San Francisco for her latest “hatchet job” abortion—though the procedure, performed by Rumwell before the party, “account[ed] for the tenderness of her abdomen.” In room 1220 Rappe supposedly tickled Arbuckle, who then reflexively kneed her in the abdomen. Pained, she ran into 1219; her bladder was ruptured. Arbuckle later found her in the bathroom, as he explained. As farfetched
as Edmonds’s version of the party is, it’s not as bizarre as the author’s contention that Adolph Zukor designed a frame-up and Fred Fishback pulled it off, bringing together “a nightgown salesman [Ira Fortlouis], an actress who was known to strip [Rappe], and a woman who would take compromising pictures and say anything in court for the right price [Delmont].” Zukor supposedly wanted to obtain compromising photos of Arbuckle to use against him in contract negotiations. The plan failed—or worked too well—when the actress who was known to strip died. Edmonds’s outrageous theory seems devised to justify the book’s exclamatory title.

There has never been a movie version of Roscoe Arbuckle’s story, on the big or small screen, despite interest dating back to the 1930s.
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Durfee first optioned the film rights to her version in 1957, and that same year a TV network was planning a musical about Arbuckle. Then and for a decade afterward, Jackie Gleason was the first choice for the role. The lead in a proposed big-screen biopic might have gone to John Belushi, who was eyeing the part before his 1982 death. Likewise, John Candy was studying for the role in 1993; he died in 1994. And in the sort of coincidence that seems a curse, Chris Farley met with playwright/screenwriter David Mamet in January 1997 to plan an Arbuckle biography in which he would star; Farley died that December. The closest thing to a Fatty movie was 1975’s
The Wild Party,
a Merchant Ivory production starring James Coco as “Jolly Grimm,” an aging silent star who stages an orgy in the late 1920s and ends up killing his mistress (Raquel Welch) and her actor boyfriend. The movie might have done much to confuse the facts of 1921’s real “wild party” had it not been such a box office dud.

In the 1990s the Arbuckle case did make it to television in other forms: on the syndicated series
Hollywood Babylon,
based officially but loosely on Anger’s book; on an episode of
E! Mysteries and Scandals;
and on A&E’s
Biography,
which served up a spoiler in the episode’s title: “Fatty Arbuckle: Betrayed by Hollywood.” In the 2000s it was the focus of two novels: Ace Atkins’s
Devil’s Garden,
which follows the trials as observed by private detective Dashiell Hammett, and Jerry Stahl’s fictional Arbuckle autobiography
I, Fatty,
which greatly exaggerated Fatty’s drug addiction.

Still, most Americans who recognize the name Fatty Arbuckle know it only as the punch line to a dirty joke, even if they’re foggy about the setup.
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They heard he raped someone with a bottle, but they’re unsure of who he was or why he mattered.
The Simpsons
captured this with a wink when Krusty the Clown asks, “What has Fatty Arbuckle done that I haven’t done?”

Almost always, the press provides only one answer. In the December 31, 1999, issue of
Time,
Arbuckle was included in the “People of the Century,” but only as one of four “lethal cocktails” of “crime and fame” in a section called “Murder, Inc.” Its mangled single-sentence remembrance: “In 1921, the comic was charged with, but never convicted of, the rape and murder of a starlet he met at an orgy.” Eight years later, Arbuckle’s “scandal” was featured in a
Time
special issue on the “Crimes of the Century.” The paragraph summation implied that he was charged with puncturing the bladder of “a naive young actress” during “forced sex (with a beer bottle!).” It also said that he died “after falling into alcoholism and lurid obscurity.” If it’s possible to be both lurid and obscure, that has only befallen him in the years after his death.

Cinematic stardom offers the ability to stay forever young, captured in moving images and viewed by generations long after perishing. Roscoe
Arbuckle achieved such immortality, but it has been far exceeded by a different sort. Always, it seems, when there’s a celebrity scandal of sex or violence, he returns, if only briefly, to the news. And not only then. He garners mentions when there are censorship battles and obscenity questions, when there is a sensational trial or the tragic death of an actress or a Hollywood celebrity arrest. A severely abbreviated list of the events his name has been associated with includes the 1943 paternity suit against Charlie Chaplin, the 1947 Black Dahlia murder, the TV quiz show scandal of the 1950s, the 1962 suicide of Marilyn Monroe, the 1969 Manson Family murder of Sharon Tate, the 1988 videotaped sex-capades of Rob Lowe, the arrests of Pee-wee Herman and Hugh Grant for lewd contact, O. J. Simpson’s arrest for double murder, the Clinton impeachment, Michael Jackson’s molestation trial, and Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction.

The names of even silent film superstars like Mabel Normand and Buster Keaton are largely unknown today, for they have little reason to appear in the press and their movies are watched mostly by a loyal but small cadre of silent film aficionados. In contrast, the name Roscoe Arbuckle—or, much more likely, Fatty Arbuckle—reappears when there is a scandal or controversy as big as an impeachment or as small as a nipple slip. He is forever the life of the party, forever a defendant, forever a villain or a victim or both, forever remembered—when he is remembered—for his tremendous and devastating fall from grace.

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So did Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Bob Hope won the poll by a wide margin.

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Langdon was another Mack Sennett protégé (post-Keystone), and he rose to prominence starring in comedy features in the mid-1920s. His star has since faded as well, leaving only Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd in the silent comedy pantheon. But if the triumvirate was ever a quaternity, Arbuckle had to be the fourth. It’s also debatable whether Lloyd’s contributions to silent comedy were greater than Arbuckle’s, despite the latter’s pantomime career ending in 1921.

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In contrast, Charlie Chaplin was rejected because of his leftist politics. Arbuckle’s inclusion and Chaplin’s exclusion prompted “one Hollywood observer” to quip, “It is apparently all right to rape and murder, but it’s not all right to be a pinko.” Chaplin got his star in 1972.

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Sections of Durfee’s unpublished book manuscripts reside in the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. They are the source for many of Durfee’s recollections quoted in this book.

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The Loves of Liberace
(1956) was an attempt to paint the flamboyant pianist as the ultimate ladies’ man. How straight was Liberace? Guild wrote, “Liberace is the perfect specimen of a well-groomed gentleman, he doesn’t chew tobacco or drive a truck; but he is as hairy as Rosselini, and who has ever questioned his masculinity? He can move a piano by himself, he chops wood for exercise; and he has always, since he was a very small child, liked to be clean.”