Those who followed the Arbuckle case from the beginning were surprised that Virginia Rappe had no family members—or even an extended family. No one came forward to claim her body in a San Francisco mortuary. By the time she was buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery on September 19, 1921, ten days after her death, Virginia had an adoptive aunt, Kate Hardebeck. Those who attended the funeral noticed that she and her husband, Joseph Hardebeck, had supplied a pillow of roses for their late “niece.”

Although her presence on the stand saw some of better reportage, using the trial transcripts have brought to light the nature of the curious relationship between Virginia—called “Tootiie” in Hardebeck household—and her “Aunt Kate” or “Aunt Kitty.”

At this writing, I have no photograph of Aunt Kate for my book. Although very likely more of a facilitator than a guardian, Aunt Kate was fiercely loyal to Virginia and proved that on the stand. When she appeared as a rebuttal witness to vouch for Virginia’s good health and sensible lifestyle. Then there was Aunt Kate herself, whom Cohen could not intimidate. According to Bart Haley of the Philadelphia Evening Ledger, Mrs. Hardebeck seemed to be “a self-possessed and clever-looking woman, who in a quiet way had been doing considerable damage to his client’s position”—meaning Milton Cohen. He was not only “Fatty” Arbuckle’s personal lawyer, but Virginia’s as well. Cohen and his partner Frank Dominguez—who was Arbuckle’s first lead counsel—made the legal and financial arrangements for Virginia’s alleged paramour, Henry Lehrman and his Culver City studio in 1919. This allowed for Arbuckle to advance Lehrman the money to actually build two studios in one, thus allowing Arbuckle’s Comique Company to use one half as payback on the loan. This is, of course, a revealing rabbit hole down which to plunge—and something to save for the book.

Cohen, of course, knew a lot about Rappe’s household. He used that to exaggerate what may have been some isolated theatrics, the kind of thing expected of a “wild girl,” a “junior vamp,” to amuse the other film colonists when their parties needed some life, that someone, that is to be the life of the party. Such innocent escapades were transformed into bouts of hysteria that replicated and anticipated the fear if dying, loss of control and distress Virginia exhibited before losing consciousness in room 1219 of the St. Francis Hotel, after being alone with Arbuckle on the Labor Day afternoon of September 5, 1921.[1]

Cohen was very careful with Aunt Kate. Only during the third trial did he come close to revealing that “Uncle Joe” Hardebeck was an ex-convict and, like his wife, dependent on Virginia. But Cohen never did. Instead, he tried to exploit the curious dependence that Aunt Kate had on Virginia, that she was no blood relative, no aunt, but nothing more than Virginia’s housekeeper in Los Angeles, first at her apartment on Ivor Avenue and later at N. Wilton Place. It did not serve Cohen’s narrative to reveal too much about Aunt Kate’s other function, that of companion and chaperone when Virginia, that is, someone to intimidate the “boys,” the category under which Arbuckle fell. But Aunt Kate knew when to step aside, too, and not ask too many questions, like why was Virginia packing a lot more for an overnighter in Selma, just outside Fresno. Aunt Kate surely knew that her “niece” had to make some money, to get work, so that she could keep the Hardebecks and herself under the same roof. Virginia was no less loyal to the couple. This, perhaps, went back to a dire time in Virginia’s early life, after the death of her mother, Mabel Rappe, in 1905, which forced Virginia and her grandmother to move from New York back to Chicago and intermittent homelessness.

“I saw her two or three times a week,” Aunt Kate recalled on the stand, “and she and her grandmother would come out and stay overnight.”

---

Although very little is known about Aunt Kate’s early life, according to census data, she was born near Philadelphia in 1862 and was known as Kate Williams in 1900 and a widow. Her 1910 entry also reveals that she bore at least one child, whose absence might explain her connection to Virgina, which began on the South Side of Chicago, where Aunt Kate once worked as a housekeeper for a boarding house.

In 1903, in Covington, Kentucky, Kate married Joseph Hardebeck (b. 1863), a lawbook salesman. And this vocation certainly explained his title “the Judge,” as the leader of a gang of swindlers whose bad checks cost banks in the United States and Canada over $100,000 in 1909. When he was apprehended in the following year, Hardebeck was sentenced to four years in Missouri’s state penitentiary. Naturally, Aunt Kate told reporters she had no idea and believed her husband would be found innocent. And she stuck by him much as she did Virginia—until he barricaded himself in a bathroom in May 1923, a little over a year after the last Arbuckle trial, and shot himself to death. After that, Aunt Kate got by as a seamstress, something she also did for Virginia, whose outfits made her “the best dressed girl in Hollywood.”

---

[1] The “wild girl” can be compared to the Hollywood “bad girl” as personified by Bebe Daniels, whose best friend hovered inside the Arbuckle suite and downstairs in the Fable Room of the St. Francis. Arbuckle, incidentally, was a close friend of Bebe and I have a theory that she may have been hovering along with her friend.