During the first week of February 1922, Roscoe Arbuckle came close to being convicted of manslaughter in a San Francisco courtroom; the director William Desmond Taylor was found murdered in his Los Angeles home; and Will H. Hays, the new motion picture czar, was planning to come West to “clean up” Hollywood.

The producer Carl Laemmle and other film executives insisted that the majority of actors, actresses, and those behind the camera were moral people. But there was an undercurrent that ran counter to such glowing self-regard and, for our work-in-progress, it deserves study, context, and certain degree of respect.

Helen Merrill of the San Francisco Journal wrote a regular column with a feminist slant—as it was in the early 1920s—and, on February 17, she turned to allegory and parody to describe the delicate situation that Arbuckle made for his stakeholders: They were losing women, or, at least very influential women who weren’t going to stop with suffrage and Prohibition.

Such opinion pieces are now antiquated. But they help us imagine the Zeitgeist of the era. They reveal the hole Arbuckle had dug for himself during the weeks before his third trial and ultimate acquittal for manslaughter. Despite the effort undertaken to win over American women in the movie magazines— including reuniting Arbuckle with his estranged wife, he was still tainted by, if not guilty of, the death of Virginia Rappe.

Mrs. Merrill, like many American women, wasn’t focusing on “Fatty” but rather his Labor Day party. We know little about what happened, but it was likely once common knowledge on the streets of San Francisco and as far away as Los Angeles. Mrs. Merrill only needed to have casual conversations with fellow journalists, the police, detectives, lawyers, bailiffs et al. If she had sat in on the two previous trials, she would have heard what was in the lost court transcripts. The scantily clad guests, the pairing off, the multiple partners, who participated, as well as the liquor, smoking, eating, the dirty dancing of 1921, and the rest could be imagined, inferred from the sanitized reportage. Mrs. Merrill was a fixture in a rather chummy, well-connected world so could read between the lines. She knew the showgirls who partied with Arbuckle, the actor Lowell Sherman, and other male attendees.

And Rappe? She is lost in this parable. Long before she was wrongly portrayed as a “bit player” in so many Arbuckle case narratives, Rappe really was a bit player to Mrs. Merrill and her kind. They didn’t know if she was just another working girl at Arbuckle’s party or a good girl as she was initially portrayed, a pretty face whose smile Arbuckle mistook for a genuine interest in him.

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Woman’s Editorial

by Helen Merrill

The moving picture Industry is a new empire containing the most powerful agencies for good and evil of any dominion since the beginning of the world. “It has no natural limit, but is as broad as the genius that can devise or the power that can win.” In its separate states, kings, queens and subjects have grown phenomenally rich as the empire’s sacred treasure, Aladdin’s lamp, has been passed among them. As they rubbed the lamp, behold! Precious gold poured into their laps. The multitude, rich, poor, old and young brought oil to feed the lamp. The children offered only drops of oil, but they were very precious and very great in number and made the flame burn more brilliantly than the oil that all others brought.

Certain rich men in the land discovered that the secret of releasing the lamp’s treasure was to turn its light upon pictures for the oil bearers to behold. Whoever conceived the most attractive pictures, whoever portrayed them were allowed to approach nearest to the lamp. Many fair maids and brave youth, in their eagerness. succumbed to temptation in order to win the magic lamp’s metal. Then, not I knowing what to do with their unaccustomed riches, wallowed in prodigality. Vice claimed them and they began to flaunt grossness, not only in their private lives. hut in licentious pictures.

But “the gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to scourge us.” Suddenly, a clown, Roscoe Arbuckle, whose antics made the people laugh, indulged in a base orgy where death entered in. It was then that the deceived multitude learned that the whole empire was threatened with decadency. As the lamp burned low, the rich men who had discovered its secret walled loudly and assembled to study the cause.

“It is because, though we have an empire,·we have no emperor,’’ they decided. So they sought in a place of honor, in the administration of the United States Government, one to become their ruler. He was Will Hays, who told them that the multitude brought lees oil to the lamp because they were offended, and feared that the hearts of the young would become petrified if they continued to behold evil.

The rich men at once decided to build a model city, where those who aspired to rub the lamp should live, and where there would be a community church erected for the dwellers in the city of virtue to rush in and hear good counsel.

But scarcely had the execution of the plans for improvement of the empire begun, when William D. Taylor, one or the rulers of an important state, was sent to his death. The multitude is again turning coldly from the lamp and the rich men of the empire are rending their garments and lamenting the changeableness of public opinion. Their new ruler, Will Hays, has doubtless counseled them that the world has at last awakened to the dangers which hover round the lamp, when its vicinity might so easily have been made a realm of security, honor and joy.

As the work or upbuilding goes on under his sway, may he succeed in persuading them to write in letters of fire upon the walls of all the temples: ‘‘Better that a millstone were hung about thy neck and that thou wert cast into the bottom of a well than that thou shouldst offend one of these little ones.’’