The comedy director Fred Fishback and his extended second-trial testimony occupied most of last week. His role in Roscoe Arbuckle’s Labor Day party has been discussed here in an earlier blog entry, about his carrying the water for the comedian—or rather Virginia Rappe to bathtub filled with cold water to revive her after she went into shock after suffering a ruptured bladder.

What Arbuckle’s lawyers and prosecutors avoided was adding any unnecessary contest to Fishback’s presence in San Francisco. Assistant District Attorney Leo Friedman cross-examined Fishback closely on how he could, between 1:45 and 2:00 p.m. on Monday, September 5, 1921, leave the twelfth floor of the St. Francis Hotel and

(a) borrow Arbuckle’s car and chauffeur;

(b) pick up three friends in front of the hotel;

(c) drive out to Ocean Beach;

(d) view a retinue of trained seals for possible use in Century Studios comedies featuring the child actress Baby Peggy;

(e) drive back to the St. Francis Hotel;

(f) meet his friend Mrs. Mae Taube in the hotel restaurant (most likely the one suitable for female clientele, the Fable Room);

(g) pay for her late lunch;

(h) stop off on the third floor and look in on the Far Western Travelers Club; and

(i) return to room 1220 and, presumably, inform Arbuckle that he now had his car and chauffeur back.

Just how he did all this in about an hour would suggest Patricia Highsmith’s resoureful Ripley. So, Friedman grilled Fishback about how much time he had spent driving back from the Beach to the hotel and get back upstairs to the twelfth floor within minutes of Arbuckle having opened the door to room 1219 on a fatally injured Miss Rappe—all this before the hotel assistant manager Harry Boyle entered the Arbuckle suite just before 3:30 p.m. For his part, and this is where he is talented too, Fishback alluded every question with a question, as well as everything from being obtuse to mendacious. Jurors would never know for sure when he entered 1219, performed his various ministrations on Rappe, and left to go back downstairs to play cards in the Far Western Club. He had surely been coached not to provide any timeframe that might jeopardize Arbuckle’s testimony, to wit, that he had entered room 1219 at 3:00 p.m. sharp to dress in his street clothes and take Mrs. Taube for a drive in his car, an appointment that had no fixed time.

Most of the “time blindness” in the Arbuckle case will remain as much a black hole as it was for the prosecution and anyone writing an honest book. But most assuredly, a lot of it was not one big coverup but several coverups in the service of self-preservation. And these add up to how long Virginia Rappe was allowed to suffer in room 1219.

That Fishback had known Rappe for as long as she had been in motion pictures and once worked for her putative boyfriend and his mentor, Henry Lehrman, and would seemingly care for her welfare, also became one of the fixed ideas for Leo Friedman. In an unsigned statement that Fishback made to the District Attorney’s office on September 21, 1921, during the preliminary investigation, he said that she was in “agony.” During his cross-examinations, however, and despite being read what he said, Fishback refused to use that word or admit that she was suffering visceral pain. He kept insisting that she was simply intoxicated. He also refused to say that Arbuckle shouted at her to be quiet.

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Although Fred Fishback is not shown in this image of a lean “Fatty” Arbuckle following his courthouse marriage to the young actress Doris Deane on May 16, 1925. Fishback, according to Deane, saw her boarding the S.S. Harvard the day after the Labor Day party. He pointed her out to Arbuckle, who was smitten and invited her and her mother to his cabin and later his table in the ship’s dining room (which is discussed in another earlier blog entry). Was this what Fishback meant as being in San Francisco on “business” rather than pleasure? Did he really come along for the ride to do some seal watching, which proved to be a disappointment? He called all the girls who came to the party, including Virginia Rappe. In the case of Deane and Arbuckle, however, Fishback exercised his matchmaking talent, so it would seem. Unfortunately, he did not live to see the nuptials, having passed away in January 1925 from a form of throat cancer not unlike the kind that Michael Douglas survived.