Our narrative doesn’t overlook rumors of Virginia Rappe’s alleged wealth reported after her death in 1921. We rely on its poignancy for what such rumors can say about the real person as well as the personal mythology that Rappe cultivated—and others did for her.

Two years before she set out for San Francisco and Roscoe Arbuckle’s Labor Day Party, in September 1919, Rappe must have smiled—or cringed—at how her boyfriend, the comedy director Henry Lehrman, wanted her described in the motion picture press. Despite being from Chicago—and a personal preference for identifying as a New Yorker—Rappe was reinvented as a “lovely western society girl,” as Grace Kingsley of the Los Angeles Times drolly put it, “who wearied of the gay round and decided to settle down and be serious. So, she went into comedy making![1]

Of course, Kingsley knew better. Rappe was Lehrman’s live-in girlfriend and he let her, at his expense, play the young Southern California society woman whose name was never published in a society column. Kingsley, too, was in a position to know that Rappe had exercised the same noblesse oblige already in her 1917 motion picture debut, namely Paradise Garden (which was a serious film, incidentally).

But a hundred years ago the American public memory wasn’t expected to answer for the ephemeral productions of Hollywood. That is to say, there was no such thing as “trivia night” in the tea rooms and speakeasies. But what about Rappe’s money? Lehrman or someone in his employ saw to that by a further embellishment: Rappe’s oil gushers, albeit without the black rain falling on James Dean in Giant.

With the announcement of the engagement of Miss Virginia Rappe to appear in a forthcoming series of Henry Lehrman comedy productions for the First National Exhibitors’ Circuit, Mr. Lehrman this week signalizes the successful culmination of negotiations which have extended over the past seven months, and which have finally assured the screen appearance of one of the wealthiest and most beautiful young women of western America.

It was only after the utmost persuasion that Miss Rappe was induced to forswear the intense social activities of a debutante and devote her attention to acting before the motion picture camera, but to Mr. Lehrman she represented the ideal of fresh American girlhood, and he consistently refused to take “no” for an answer. Miss Rappe, in addition to being an heiress in her own right, is the owner of more than eight hundred acres of the richest oil lands of Texas, and her wells and leases in this territory yield what is reported to be a fabulous income. Since her wealth is computed in the millions, it may be gathered that financial considerations had little bearing on her decision to make at least a temporary entry into the field of motion pictures.

Among her friends, Miss Rappe’s predilection for stunning gowns is well known, and it is promised that in her coming pictures she will display a sartorial splendor which will make them particularly attractive to feminine theatre patrons. But it is her fresh and wholesome beauty which forms her greatest asset, and it is stated that the Henry Lehrman comedies in which she appears will afford every opportunity for the display of this richest girl of stage or screen.[2]

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[1] Grace Kingsley, “New Fun Factory: Lehrman Starts Production of Comedies,” Los Angeles Times, 29 August 1919, III:4.

[2] “Wealthy Young Woman to be Screen Actress,” Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, 21 September 1919, IV:7