The Arbuckle case narrative, while seeing some judicious cuts in the coming weeks, will not lack for fine detail. A case in point is Virginia Rappe’s modeling career, which began early, in 1905, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, given what is found in the trial testimony.

Rappe was certainly young for such work. Those who knew her insisted that she was no more twelve at the time and still in grade school—the Moseley School—at E. 24^th and Wabash.*

While girls her age might have learned to sew after school, help with supper, take care of younger siblings, and the like, Rappe posed for aspiring commercial artists and photographers. And it’s possible that even at her tender” age she posed for figure drawing and life studies at a time when Georgia O’Keefe and Thomas Hart Benton were students as well as other notable alums.

Rappe’s image was commodified early, as well. She appeared in newspaper illustrations, wearing “sweaters and hats,” according to one of her foster mothers. But it would be hard to pick her out. Like her later magazine covers, such illustrations were highly stylized. They all look like Gibson Girls.

In any event, in some attic, an old sketchbook, a tattered portfolio, perhaps even a crude first sculpture, Virginia Rappe’s likeness still exists in sublime anonymity.

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*My reading of the transcripts has cast some doubt on the 1891 birth certificate first cited in Greg Merritt’s Room 1219. That said, as an adult, Rappe’s was rather petite as an adult. Without her French heels, she was 5’4”.