The following passages from our work-in-progress cover the last good morning in Virginia Rappe’s life, September 5, Labor Day 1921.

---

Business, Pleasure, Revenge, and Revisionary Speculations

In The Day the Laughter Stopped, David Yallop asserts that Virginia Rappe came to San Francisco to beg Arbuckle for money to pay for an abortion. Yallop further intimates that the father was Henry Lehrman. Nearly four decades later a more sober explanation came into play.

Greg Merritt, in Room 1219, has a less desperate reason for Rappe’s being in San Francisco. She, like Arbuckle, was there for recreation, but with the overriding prerequisite to establish a new direction in her life at thirty. “Her designing and modeling careers were stalled,” he writes, “and after a promising film debut in 1917, four years later she had failed to establish herself as a marketable movie star.”[1]

Merritt makes a logical assumption. Rappe signed herself into hotels as a “motion picture actress.” But unlike other actresses, she pursued her film career intermittently, with none of the dedication, which could be ruthless and soul-crushing, seen in other women. The press releases about her being a “society girl” weren’t entirely fabrications. In the film colony, she was more that than a performer. Even to say she was Henry Lehrman’s fiancé cannot be entirely accepted as fact. She may have been closer to his “boarder” as the 1920 census has it, more of a live-in escort when he needed one, arm candy.

Rappe wasn’t her mother but she had an understanding of the precarious means of Mabel Rapp’s dodgy lifestyle. Rappe avoided drugs and crime. She got by on her looks honestly. But Rappe was still a decidedly unmarried woman who depended on a man for her existential freedom and choice. Even if the dress shops of San Francisco had been open on Labor Day, even if she wanted to do a little shopping in the city, she had no money. That she was “reputed to have independent wealth as a result of oil investments,” as was said of her, wasn’t true or had already been run through.

While Lehrman was gone, he may not have been out of her life entirely or unwilling to help her—if not with his own money than with favors owed to him or that he could still wheedle. Given what happened, the greatest irony is that Lehrman could have been instrumental in Rappe going to San Francisco in the first place. After leaving for New York, he surely left her with the impression that he would return to Los Angeles. Miriam Cooper and her husband, Raoul Walsh, believed Lehrman had a hand in getting Al Semnacher and Maude Delmont—whom Cooper called a “young couple”—to take Rappe to San Francisco. To do what?

Assuage Rappe’s loneliness? To make up for being left behind to fend for herself? To let her “get back” at the man responsible? And him off the hook? And Lehrman could have had a hand in going to San Francisco without being involved at all. If Rappe had some inkling about his other woman, his Ziegfeld Follies girl, why not make him jealous with someone who really bothered him, who made him feel even broker and a bigger failure? There were people who grated on Lehrman. People good for pleasure? And business? Income was always an ever-present reason, more so than seeing Sidi Spreckels. Rappe had not only herself to support but also Aunt Kate and her husband, “Uncle” Joe Hardebeck, whose stock trading schemes were hit or miss. (Indeed, he may have lost any money Rappe made on her supposed oil wells.) So, a casual, unplanned trip to San Francisco with her agent and a stranger with no intention other to meet a friend—a wealthy widow with a young daughter—on Labor Day should still be questioned. Any knowledge that Arbuckle was in San Francisco was a prospect for both Semnacher and Rappe. The chain of supposed coincidences that drew Arbuckle and Rappe to San Francisco were almost too opportune—just enough to see there was coordination between the two groups that may have started before Rappe left Los Angeles.

Al Semnacher, as a publicity man and talent agent, knew movie and casting directors, including Fred Fishback and his assistant, Al Stein. Semnacher also knew Arbuckle. Such contacts were necessary in getting actors and actresses work and making a percentage. Ideally, photographs and previous screen credits would be enough to sell the person. But personal encounters were still necessary to earn Semnacher’s percentage and this was especially true for actresses, “good fellows.” If Virginia Rappe and Helen Hansen knew Roscoe Arbuckle and two of his friends were in San Francisco without their wives, both knew what could be expected of them. But this expectation could be mitigated if there were other local women less inclined to worry about giving in when a gathering got “rough,” whose transaction wasn’t a motion picture or an interruption to a life centered in San Francisco.

For Al Semnacher to coordinate a congenial meeting, as though by coincidence, between Rappe and Arbuckle would require a combination of intelligence. A tip from Henry Lehrman? Someone in Arbuckle’s camp? That someone would have been Fred Fishback. He knew of Rappe’s financial predicament and had a good relationship with Arbuckle. Fishback also knew that she was looking for movie roles. She had a new short for his Century Film Corporation, A Misfit Pair, that would be in theaters in a matter of days—and a rumor would soon surface in the Los Angeles Times that she was slated to be in another Century comedy.

Rappe was comfortable enough around Delmont to call her “Maudie.” No doubt both women got to know each other and share stories about their lives in Los Angeles and going back further. Perhaps Delmont told Rappe the story behind the name “Bambina,” which seemed more of title than a pet name. She may have told the story behind her millionaire’s last name, which she still proudly bore despite the two marriages that followed, assuming Delmont told her. But Rappe never called her Bambina and Delmont didn’t get to call her new friend “Tootie.” They didn’t know each other long enough. But Delmont drank for both of them and was surely incapable of being anything but unreserved. “I liked that girl,” she later said wistfully. “She was whole-souled and genuine.”

Delmont’s later utterances, of taking the blame for what transpired on Labor Day, suggested that she herself was disingenuous. She was less a companion, a “good fellow” and more the lure for some ulterior purpose. “I had taken Virginia there and was responsible for her going,” she said, meaning San Francisco and all the rest.

Al Semnacher and his female passengers arrived at the Oakland ferry terminal around 10:00 o’clock at night on Sunday, September 4. By 11:00 p.m., he had parked and checked into the Palace Hotel, where he and his party occupied a two-bedroom suite at his expense, about $8 a day compared to $12 a day for the same accommodations at the St. Francis. For the traveling and frugal businessman, however, the Palace was a fashionable choice. The rooms had connecting doors between Semnacher’s bedroom and the room shared by Rappe and Delmont—and they were only so many floors below Sidi Spreckels.

The only time Semnacher mentioned entering their bedroom was on the following morning, to ask if they wanted to have breakfast. Then, between 10:00 and 10:30 a.m., the threesome took the elevator to the lobby. If they looked in on the bar, they may have noticed Maxfield Parrish’s painting The Pied Piper over the bar, in which the piper is depicted leading Hamelin’s children to “the place of no return.”

On their way, Semnacher undoubtedly stopped at the desk to check for messages. Even if he knew he likely had none, the impression made was of an important man—with a pair of attractive women in tow. Then he, Rappe, and Delmont stepped inside the Garden Court.

The Palace’s elegant lounge and dining room on the first floor is much the same as it was a century ago. Breakfast and lunch were served daily under a vast, gilded skylight of opaque glass, which added to the soft but generous light provided by the crystal chandeliers. Large potted palms and flowering plants were placed to give the illusion one dined outdoors.

Amid the sound of muted conversations, the deferential voices of the waiters, the polite clatter of silverware and dishes—these met and maybe some ceased as Semnacher and his companions followed a waiter to a table set for four.

Rappe’s presence in the Garden Court would have been hard not to notice amid a sea of white tablecloths. She stood out in a light green ensemble in contrast to Maude Delmont’s nondescript black broadcloth dress. Numerous accounts of what Rappe wore on September 5 exist in reportage and court testimony. One of the earliest described each piece as it lay in tatters before a coroner’s jury. Nevertheless, the reporter’s description of both garments reimagines the woman who wore them in life.

Just three yards of heavy crepe of the brilliant but cool green that the Chinese call jade. A two-piece skirt gathered on a belt. A little sleeveless blouse that hung in straight lines over the skirt. The wide armholes corded and a soft collar finishing the modest cut neck. For sleeves the long white ones of an ordinary white silk shirt waist that could be bought in any shop for $5.

What a contrast to the jetted and braided and embroidered and fringed atrocities of the most expensive modiste!

The sort of frock that any girl could have—if she were as clever as Virginia Rappe.

That girl knew what was becoming to her—had a fine color sense—knew the value of accessories. Her plain white Panama hat—the hat that Mrs. Delmont says Arbuckle was “clowning” in when they broke into the room, has a narrow band of jade green ribbon around the crown.

Ivory and jade—that was the color motif—as the designers would say. Just one touch of the show girl—and that hidden away under the ivory and jade. Garters of three-inch black lace, ruffled on silk elastic with a tiny green ribbon flower at the fastening.

The Gown Salesman

In the same memoir in which Buster Keaton and his coauthor claim Virginia Rappe and Roscoe Arbuckle dated prior to Labor Day 1921.[2] They also body-shamed her posthumously as “a big-boned, husky young woman, five feet seven inches tall, who weighed 135 pounds.” They also saw her as “virtuous as most of the other untalented young women who had been knocking around Hollywood for years, picking up small parts any way they could.”

Keaton and his coauthor were, of course, writing years later and after the standards of beauty had yielded to a slenderer profile. They also give no inkling as to why she would have been a favored guest in Arbuckle’s suite. The accepted story of her presence was due to a chance encounter with a gown salesman who was on his way to the Arbuckle suite at the invitation of Fred Fishback.

Rappe had caught the roving eye of Ira Gustav Fortlouis in the Palace Hotel, which he kept as his permanent address in the city. He allegedly saw Rappe in passing and admired her clothes and the way she carried herself. As he later told Frieda Blum of the San Francisco Call, “reasoning further, she appeared to be not too expensively dressed and did not give the impression of being employed”—a woman who could use some money, some work.

Fortlouis and his intuition played an important part in the events that transpired on Labor Day 1921. Variously called a “traveling man” and “salesman” with such modifiers as “cloak,” “gown,” or “wardrobe” to impart his line of business, he was by all appearances rather nondescript. Stout and having features that provoked one of Arbuckle’s female guests to refer to him as a “Jewish gentleman”—with no trace of being disparaging, just stating a fact as facts were in 1921—Fortlouis considered himself a lady’s man. He very much enjoyed the company of attractive women, of which there were many in his field. He hired models in San Francisco and his other markets on the West Coast. Women worked in his office and wholesale warehouse at 233 Grant Street, the new sales branch of Singer Bros. & Day Co. of New York. In early 1920, this manufacturer of ladies’ “cloaks and suits,” according the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, named Fortlouis manager of its new Pacific Coast headquarters.

Fortlouis had been working his territories and living out of hotels for much of his life thus far in San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Born in 1886, the son of a hotel manager, the younger Fortlouis grew up amid the prosperous Jewish enclaves of Seattle and Portland. As a young man he graduated from clerking in cigar, hardware, and dry goods stores to a life on the road as a traveling salesman in the Pacific Northwest. While still living and working out of Portland, Fortlouis’ private life became public in the city’s newspapers for a week in January 1914, when he was called as a witness in a $50,000 breach of promise suit brought by Gertrude Gerlinger against Lloyd Frank over a broken engagement. Forced by a subpoena to testify for Frank, Fortlouis had to admit he shared a stateroom and enjoyed an assignation with Gerlinger aboard a steamer on a pleasure trip to and from Astoria, Oregon during the time she was engaged to marry Frank. Gerlinger won the suit but was awarded just $1 by the court.

If the young Fortlouis had strayed himself, he made up for it the following year when he relocated to New York City and married. In 1917, however, he returned to Portland and worked as a salesman for Singer Bros. & Day Co. Based in Manhattan’s Garment District, Singer & Day was a leading manufacturer of ready-to-wear clothes for women and his territory extended to Los Angeles. The president of the company, Saul Singer, was also vice president of the Bank of United States, an aggressively entrepreneurial bank that, through its mergers and lending, exemplified the freewheeling financial world of the 1920s that ended with the Great Depression.

Although Fortlouis main clients were department stores, the wardrobe departments of motion picture studios needed clothes. And motion picture studios had plenty of pretty extras who could serve as models as well. Such common interests, such common benefits to be sure, brought men together like Fortlouis and Fishback.

“I got in town Sunday, September 4, 1921,” Fortlouis later told detectives, having found him six days later either at the Palace Hotel or at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, where he checked in on the day after the Labor Day party. Like so many other party guests, his responses were suspiciously vague, detached. “Somebody told me that Fishback was in town. I called him up at the St. Francis and left word for him to call me.”

When Fishback hadn’t returned the call, Fortlouis, either by dint of impatience or persistence—he was a salesman—kept ringing up “Freddy.” At about at 8:30 on Monday morning, Fortlouis finally spoke to Fishback.

“I was walking out of the Palace Hotel about 11 a.m.,” Fortlouis continued, “and saw a very stylish girl. I asked somebody who was standing there who she was. He said she was Miss Rappe, the moving picture actress.”

Fortlouis then walked hurriedly to the St. Francis Hotel on Powell Street. There, he called Fishback in room 1220 to let him know he was downstairs and coming up. Why Fortlouis was granted such a privilege, particularly as an unaccompanied male, was never given save that he was Fishback’s friend and even that made little sense. If we pretend that “Fatty” Arbuckle, Lowell Sherman, and Fred Fishback make for a kind of Jazz Age “Rat Pack,” what would a portly gown salesman bring to the party? There would be no answer for this. Nevertheless, Fortlouis felt accepted.

“We sat there and talked for a long time,” he recalled, “and in the course of the conversation I mentioned the fact that I had just seen Miss Rappe and asked the boys if they knew her. Someone at the party said he knew her and asked when I had seen her. I told them I had seen her in the lobby of the Palace Hotel. Someone in the party phoned to Miss Rappe.”

The combination of Fortlouis being at the Palace that day, knowing Fishback, serendipitously intercepting Rappe, and his persistence in calling Fishback until he picked up, almost defy credibility. Was it the phenomenon of “meaningful coincidences,” after Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity?

An early United Press report had Fortlouis denying to authorities “any responsibility for arranging the affair.” That such a denial was necessary suggests that detectives and district attorneys weren’t convinced. They entertained their own theory, that Rappe had been intentionally enticed to come to Arbuckle’s suite and Fortlouis played a part.

After seeing her for the first time in the Palace, two stories circulated in the press as to when he saw her at the St. Francis. In one he was present in room 1220. The other was more involved for lack of a better word. Here Fortlouis met Fishback in the lobby of the St. Francis and was then introduced to Rappe there, as she entered the building.

Much to his surprise, the gown salesman saw that Fishback and Rappe were already acquainted.

Paging Miss Rappe

If Semnacher intended to return to Los Angeles in the late afternoon, it meant he and the two women at the same table had four or five hours to fill before getting back into his Stutz. What does one do in that much time? Wander Chinatown? Ride a cable car? Take in a movie? Look for a theater showing The Misfit Pair? Meet Sidi Spreckels? Surprisingly neither Semnacher nor Delmont provided any clue as to what they would have done in San Francisco had there been no Labor Day party, as if they had traveled into the void at Rappe’s suggestion in Selma to just wait with her for her next suggestion. They didn’t wait long.

Around 11:30 a.m., as she enjoyed a late, leisurely, and presumably light breakfast, Rappe was paged, a hotel page approached and handed her a note. Delmont later testified that it read: “Come on up and say hello.” It was simply signed ARBUCKLE, lacking a full name.

A brief discussion took place. Was this Andy Arbuckle? The one who sold shoes in Texas. Whose older brother Maclyn had long been the only Arbuckle.

“It might be Roscoe Arbuckle,” Rappe pondered, “but I don’t know.”

The page also informed Rappe that she was wanted on the hotel desk’s telephone. When she returned, her Labor Day afternoon had its diversion. According to Maude Delmont, Rappe said Arbuckle and Sherman wanted her at the St. Francis. Neither had extended the invitation personally and the person who took credit for speaking to Rappe on the telephone was left a mystery for weeks—Fred Fishback. But her hunch was right.

The last thing Rappe did before leaving, according to Delmont, was telephone Sidi Spreckels upstairs in her apartment at the Plaza. Arbuckle, too, testified that Rappe made such a call in his presence. But she had used the telephone in his reception room at the St. Francis. In any case, Spreckels declined.

Around noon, Semnacher fetched his motorcar and drove Rappe and Delmont the five blocks between the Palace and the St. Francis. He testified he left them off in front of the hotel and didn’t wait to see them enter the building. Before that he said he did, in fact, wait for time because, if “the party didn’t suit them”—meaning Rappe and Delmont—there was an exit strategy.

“I’ll go up there and if the party is a bloomer, I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” Rappe promised Semnacher, giving Arbuckle and his friends about as much time as a comedy short.

---

[1] pp. 000–000: Merritt, 39; Cooper, 179; [Warren Woolard], “Mystery Death Takes Actress,” Los Angeles Times, 10 September, II:21; Ernest J. Hopkins, “Think Third Person in Room,” Buffalo Courier, 19 September 1921, 2; “Hotels of San Francisco,” Western Fruit Jobber, November 1919,21–22; “Fate Sealed by the Dress She Made,” Los Angeles Times, 15 September 1921, 6.

[2] pp. 000–000: Keaton with Samuels, 158; Freda Blum (Universal Service), “Idle Inquire Leads to Death of Rappe Girl,” Oakland Tribune, 27 November 1921, 11; “Many New Businesses Open Here,” San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Activities 7, no. 13 (26 March 1920), 114; “Dictaphone on Light Fixture Tells Tales,” [Portland] Oregon Daily Journal, 8 January 1914, 2; “Notables at Hotels,” San Francisco Examiner, 6 September 1921, 6; “Guest Tells Police Party Was ‘Noisy,’” San Francisco Examiner, 10 September 1921, 3: United Press, “Arbuckle To Tell Police of Actress’ Death,” St. Louis Star, 11 September 1921, 2; United Press, “Arbuckle Detained in Girl’s Death, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 11 September 1921, 6.

[3] pp. 000–000: “New York to Be Submerged Today, Avers ‘Professor.’” San Francisco Chronicle, 5 September 1921. 1; “Mrs. Delmont Gives Detailed Account of Rappe Tragedy,” San Francisco Chronicle, 12 September 1921, 4: “Member of Arbuckle Party in Hotel Makes Full Statement: Al Semnacher, Manager for Film Stars, Gives the District Attorney Deposition,” San Francisco Chronicle, 12 September 1921, 4: A.P. Night Wire, “More Interest in Trial,” Los Angeles Times, 24 November 1921, W1; “Arbuckle to Be Held in Death Probe,” Oakland Tribune, 10 September 1921, 2; “Arbuckle to Be Held in Death Probe,” Oakland Tribune, 10 September 1921, 2; Ernestine Black, “Arbuckle Dances While Girl Is Dying: Joyous Frolic Amid Death Tragedy,” San Francisco Call, 12 September 1921, 1, 2; Earnest J. Hopkins (Universal Service), “Film Star Who Makes Many Millions Laugh Gets First Taste of Life Behind Bars,” Shreveport Times, 12 September 1921, 2.

[4] More applicable to Rappe and the other guests of the Labor Day party. Albeit published in out-of-town newspapers, the daily horoscope of the McClure Syndicate advised readers that the “early part of the day should be profitable for all who deal in clothing, millinery or any accessory to wearing apparel.” Furthermore, and by “a strange contradiction in psychology,” men and women “who have won fame or high place will concern themselves about their personal appearance in a way that proves how great power the stars that encourage such vanity now are.” Furthermore, Uranus had its own adverse effect for the fifth of September, being “in an aspect stimulating to intrigue and deception which will largely be practiced by women as well as men.”