Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (67 page)

Campbell’s had then (and maintains now) a reputation for discreetly and securely handling the mortuary needs of the rich and famous.
*
Funeral services were conducted by officers of an Elks Lodge (Arbuckle was an Elk) at 1:00
PM
on Saturday, July 1, at the Funeral Church. Three hundred people attended. Honorary pallbearers included Billy La Hiff, Joe Rivkin, Ray McCarey (the director of Arbuckle’s final three movies), and comic actor Bert Lahr (later the Cowardly Lion in
The Wizard of Oz).
Because only two days elapsed between his death and his funeral, Arbuckle’s famous friends in California didn’t have time to traverse the country via train. Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Joe Schenck were among those who sent flowers.

”We think of his love of children and how he brought a surcease of sorrow to those in pain,” the Elks elder said in the eulogy. “There is nothing in the world like laughter, and so we may say that he made the world laugh. And now that the end has come we know he will be judged by the good he has done.” After the service, a crying McPhail, wearing all white, followed the flower-topped casket outside to the hearse while police held back the rubbernecking crowd of five hundred. Then, by car, she followed the hearse to Fresh Pond Crematory in Queens. Soon thereafter, McPhail, her daughter, and her maid returned to Los Angeles.

Within weeks of his death, his older brother Harry and younger half-brother Clyde contested Roscoe Arbuckle’s will, claiming they had a right to over $100,000 in stocks and bonds. In July 1934 a New York court ruled that the estate’s assets totaled $2,000. Minus debts, $396 was awarded to Addie McPhail.
*

On September 6, 1934, Arbuckle’s ashes were shipped to McPhail in Los Angeles, and shortly thereafter she alone committed them to the Pacific Ocean off Santa Monica—the waters in which Roscoe Arbuckle had swum on those blissful days two decades earlier when his fame and fortune had only just begun to grow, when he could never have imagined the highs and lows his life would reach.

His obituaries mostly focused on the lows. In the briefest of hatchet jobs,
Time
told readers as much about Will Hays’s career as Arbuckle’s: “Died. Roscoe Conkling (“Fatty”) Arbuckle, 46, globular oldtime cinemactor; of a heart attack; in Manhattan. Although acquitted of manslaughter after the death of one Virginia Rappe eleven years ago, the malodorous evidence brought out at the trial dropped him to obscurity; resulted in the appointment of President Harding’s Postmaster General Will H. Hays as public apologist for Hollywood.”

Some obituary writers painted a cautionary tale: “Instead of being the innocent and jovial blunderer he so amusingly depicted, Arbuckle
was disclosed as a weakling who couldn’t stand prosperity and who, under the influence of intoxicants, became a coarse vulgarian. But now there can only be a feeling of pity for ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle—a man who muffed a wonderful opportunity in life. Young people should be able to learn something from a study of his life—it is as important to know the road to avoid as the road to take.”

Others told a tragic story: “Arbuckle got a rough deal in life. He was yanked from the heights and shot to the depths so that I sometimes wondered how he managed to survive the ordeal. And for what? For doing something that happens in every city, in every state, in every hotel on every day of the year. For staging a drunken party. But Arbuckle got the rap that most party-goers are fortunate enough to miss. In his case a sick girl died. And the holier-than-thous swooped down upon the man with such vengeance that they deprived him of a livelihood for many years.”

Will Rogers echoed this sentiment more poetically: “Those who demanded their pound of flesh, finally received their satisfaction. ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle accommodated ‘em by dying, and from a broken heart.”

His heart literally broke, but Arbuckle was as happy when he died as he had been in twelve years. He was married again, happily, and a firsttime stepfather. He was working onstage and acting in movies. He was no longer burdened by great debts. He was optimistic about his future, but June 29, 1933, may have been as good as it would get. His cinematic comeback would have continued, but judging by the careers of most silent stars, it likely would have expired within a few years, and it almost certainly never would have approached the heights of his previous peak. In that regard, his may well have been the right time to exit life’s stage.

Arbuckle’s final movies continued to play after he was gone. He continued to fall and chase and hurl pies, and audiences continued to laugh at him, forgetting for a while the tragedy and trials, and forgetting, like always, the reality outside the dark theater. They laughed with an old friend like old times, after he was gone.

*
With sound, Buster Keaton also returned to low-budget comedy shorts, starring in twentysix between 1934 and 1941. He later resuscitated his career better than any other silent star, scoring roles in feature films, plays, and television programs until his death in 1966 at age seventy.

†
St. John also had a prolific sound career, including more than eighty supporting roles in westerns as the bearded, comical “Fuzzy.” He died in 1963 at sixty-nine. Over a forty-year career, Al St. John acted in over 340 films.

*
Campbell’s secured this reputation when it handled the services of Rudolph Valentino in 1926.

*
McPhail acted only a few more times in bit parts. She remarried and lived in Los Angeles until her death at ninety-seven in 2003.

N
umerous people and institutions assisted in the research of this book. I would especially like to thank the staffs of the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Louis B. Mayer Library of the American Film Institute, the Library of Congress, the Los Angeles Public Library and the County of Los Angeles Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin, the San Francisco County Clerk’s Office, the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, the County of San Francisco Criminal Court, the California Department of Public Health, the National Archives and Records Administration, the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society, the Orange County Archives, the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum, the West Adams Heritage Association, the Culver City Historical Society, the Blackhawk Museum, the Nethercutt Museum, the International Buster Keaton Society, the Interstitial Cystitis Network, and the Westin St. Francis hotel—the enduring home of room 1219.

The following online databases proved especially useful: Ancestry .com, Chronicling America (the Library of Congress newspaper archive, at
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
), the Google News archives, the Internet Archive (
www.archive.org
),
NewspaperArchive.com
,
ProQuest.com
, and
Taylorology
(
www.taylorology.com
). Some Arbuckle movies
and video documentary material were viewed via the Internet Archive and YouTube.

The many individuals who assisted with research include Bruce Long (the force responsible for
Taylorology),
Dean Budnick (author of a doctoral thesis on the Arbuckle case, “Directed Verdict”), Howard Mutz (official historian of the Westin St. Francis), Don Wilson (Route 101 historian), Marilyn Slater (Mabel Normand scholar), Thomas Reeder (Henry Lehrman scholar), Henry E. Scott (author of
Shocking True Story),
Marion Gregston of the Montecito Association History Committee (for busting the myth that the Montecito Inn was owned by Arbuckle and Chaplin), and Kenneth Moses and Larry Stewart (fingerprint experts). A special thanks to Robert Young Jr., Don Schneider, and Stuart Oderman, all of whom interviewed Minta Durfee, and to Paul E. Gierucki for his work restoring Arbuckle’s films.

Thanks also to Yuval Taylor, Devon Freeny, Mary Kravenas, and everyone else at Chicago Review Press, Eric Myers of the Spieler Agency, Rose Bubert, Joe Weider, Roger Ebert, Charles Mitchell, Arnold Lip-kind, James Hosney, Peter McGough, Shawn Perine, Kevin Horton, and the clerk at Book Alley (Pasadena) who remembered she filed
Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger
in the “Psychology” section.

1. Labor Day

a custom-built right-hand-drive Pierce-Arrow …
“Conspicuous Consumption: Fatty Arbuckle’s Fabulous Pierce-Arrow,”
Special Interest Auto,
February 1990, 44-46.

“To attempt to describe in cold, unfeeling print…” Variety,
August 5, 1921.

“Paramount Week”…
Advertisement,
Literary Digest,
September 3, 1921, 8.

They invited Arbuckle …
Eleanor Keaton and Jeffrey Vance,
Buster Keaton Remembered
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 84.

“‘most polished villain”…
From the Studio Lot,
Oakland Tribune,
September 5, 1921.

an article attributed to Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle…
Roscoe Arbuckle, “Love Confessions of a Fat Man,”
Photoplay,
September 1921, 22-23.

twenty bottles were along for the ride …
“Probers Identify Men Who Carried Arbuckle’s Booze,”
Oakland Tribune,
September 17, 1921.

The St. Francis …
History and details via David Siefkin,
Meet Me at the St. Francis: The First Seventy-Five Years of a Great San Francisco Hotel
(San Francisco: St. Francis Hotel Corp., 1979), 10-11, 38.

His menu was noted…
Linda Civitello,
Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food and People
(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2011), 287.

Breakfast options …
Siefkin,
Meet Me at the St. Francis,
39.

The hotel’s brochure in the early 1920s …
Ibid., 46.

a deliveryman carried four bottles …
“Liquor Source Found,”
St. Joseph News-Press,
October 5, 1921.

a fully stocked speakeasy in the basement…
Charles Fracchia, “San Francisco During Prohibition,” forum with Michael Krasney, KQED radio broadcast, December 5, 2008.

she made the news for her elopement …
“Young Romance Is Short-Lived,”
Oakland Tribune,
December 7, 1912.

he had filed for divorce …
“Semnacher, Who Attended Party, Seeking Divorce,”
Oakland Tribune,
September 14, 1921.

“Virginia Rappe, the movie actress”…
“Put Miss Rappe in Tub, Fishbach [sic] Testifies,”
New York Times,
November 24, 1921.

“I’ll go up there …”
“Dead Girl’s Accusation Is Repeated,”
Oakland Tribune,
September 13, 1921.

she wore the same self-made clothes …
“Fate Sealed by Dress She Made,”
Los Angeles Times,
September 15, 1921.

At the time of the 1920 census …
US Census Bureau,
Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920,
population of San Francisco, CA, precinct 38, dist. 33, sup. dist. 4, enum. dist. 264, January 7 & 8, 1920 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921).

“Let’s have some music … “
“Arbuckle on Grill Tells of S.F. Party,”
Oakland Tribune,
November 28, 1921.

Arbuckle later described her as “peeved”…
“Virginia Rappe Film May Be Offered as Evidence in Trial,”
Pittsburgh Press,
November 29, 1921.

“Who are all these people?” …
Ibid.

The deliveryman from Gobey’s Grill…
“Liquor Source Found.”

“Roscoe liked nothing better …”
Buster Keaton with Charles Samuels,
My Wonderful World of Slapstick
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 158.

“If I would jump out of the twelfth-story window … “
“Comedian Ready to End Life, Party Guest Says,”
Oakland Tribune,
September 14, 1921.

2. Journeys: 1887-1908

Roscoe Arbuckle purportedly weighed sixteen pounds …
“Nobody Loves a Fat Man?,”
Movie Pictorial,
June 13, 1914, 20.