An earlier version of this section was adapted for a blog post. This is a more finished version. While it still might be omitted from the final revised manuscript due to length, I feel that the sideshow of Virginia Rappe’s companion at Roscoe Arbuckle’s Labor Day party lends a certain pathos to all three trials in my narrative.
This version has better sources, quotes, and a rationale for why Maude Delmont was such a liminal presence throughout the three trials. I have placed this in the narrative where Gavin McNab’s opening statement devolves into an argument over Mrs. Delmont not being called as a witness. He was silenced once more when told he could have called her as a witness forthe defense at the previous two trials. He never did. Nor did the prosecutors. She could have compromised both sides with what she knew and what she thought she knew.
Postscript . . . Maude’s unrealized disambiguation
In early February [1922], Maude Delmont became front-page news—not as before, but back home in Lincoln, Nebraska, where she grew up, and in Omaha, where she spent two years running a beauty shop. She had arrived in Lincoln on January 31 and registered at a downtown hotel under her legal name “Mrs. J. C. Hopper,” imposed on her while she was on probation for being convicted of bigamy. But her presence was hardly a secret. Reporters were already waiting for her when she stepped off the train from Los Angeles. “I’d be glad if Fatty could convince me personally that he is innocent,” Maude told them.[1] “But I was the first one to enter the room where Miss Rappe lay ill, and Fatty, I’m afraid, never could clear himself in my eyes.” Then, when asked if she believed Arbuckle would be acquitted, Maude said she was certain he would. And what made her so certain? With an ironic smile, she shrugged her shoulders and simply answered, “Money.”
For the next few days, Maude enjoyed the attention she received. “I knew her when she was a girl,” said a Nebraska state representative who greeted her in a the hotel restaurant.[2] Other diners recognized her as well as she spoke to a reporter from the Omaha Daily Bee. “Arbuckle could never convince me of his innocence,” she told him. “I was the one who told the truth at the trial. Highly paid lawyers tried to sacrifice my reputation in an effort to protect their client, Arbuckle. I am trying to forget the tragic death of my friend, Virginia.” As for her return to Lincoln, Maude would spend the next few days “to dispose of some modest real estate holdings” that belonged to her grandmother. Maude also intended to rendezvous with an old boyfriend, Lawrence T. Johnston.
The son of a prominent lawyer, Johnston had served as a bailiff in Lincoln during the 1890s and later as a judge in Idaho. His real ambition, however, was in vaudeville. He studied ventriloquism and, by 1920, had performed all over the United States and as far away as Australia. Although still an itinerant judge in Idaho, Johnston considered himself the “King of Ventriloquists” and boasted a dummy that cried “real” tears.
Lawrence T. Johnston, the “King of Ventriloquists” (National Archives)
Maude had been courted by Johnston in her youth. They had been engaged more than once. “The last time,” however, he said, “she married a Cincinnati millionaire.”[3] But after hearing about the death of Maude’s grandmother and her coming to Lincoln, Johnston claimed that he left an engagement in Sioux City, Iowa, to be reunited with his old flame—and make her a star. He told the press that he was now vice president of a motion picture corporation and that his company whose first star would be Maude, given her celebrity. “We feel that she will be a great asset to us,” Johnston said.
Maude Bambina Delmont glamour shot with Virginia Rappe inset (Kansas City Post photograph)
They left Lincoln together on Friday, February 3—the day the second Arbuckle trial ended in a hung jury—for points beyond and ultimately New York City. But first Johnston had to perform his own act at the Globe Theater in Kansas City, Missouri, while Maude rested in her hotel room. But the reporters found her a second time and wanted her reaction to the majority vote for conviction and the death of William Desmond Taylor. “Politics again!” she exclaimed when told the news, giving audience in bed as she did once for San Francisco’s press, with her dark curly hair spilling across the pillow and a “distinctive dark streak.”
Don’t tell me it was really 10 to 2 for conviction. Why nobody ever thought it would be that strong. All the nice little fixers must have fallen down on the job this time. Everyone on the coast expected an acquittal when I left there. [. . .] Arbuckle is being tried on the murder complaint to which I swore—and yet my testimony is not good enough to be introduced into the trial.
I tell you a woman doesn’t get a square deal anywhere along the line. [. . .] Think of it! Virginia Rappe a lovely, clean girl—in spite of all the atrocious lies they’ve hatched up about her—absolutely murdered and no justice meted out to the brute who is responsible for her death. It’s money, money, money that has brought this about.[4]
“They wanted to get me out of the way,” Maude added, “and they succeeded.” She meant Matthew Brady and his men—but she also made a vague reference to Gavin McNab and his. “Yes,” she said, “I received an offer or was ‘approached’ in connection with my testimony of the death of Miss Rappe.” Then she pointed to a trunk of letters she had received from well-wishers commending her for her stand against Arbuckle as well as those who accused her of lying. She continued, describing how what happened was an accident, that the trip to San Francisco was unplanned, and that Arbuckle really left room 1219 and “Parked on one side of his head was Miss Rappe’s little Panama hat.”
As Maude recuperated, she and Johnston changed the venue to the Empress Theater on McGee Street on Sunday evening. Tickets for her “$5,000 act” would be “at pre-war prices,” that is, ten, twenty—and thirty cents for balcony and front-row seats.[5] The advertisement promised that Maude “Bambina” Delmont would appear as “Herself / The Woman Who Signed the Murder Charge Against Arbuckle / The Most Sensational Act on the American Stage.” As the “Complaining Witness in the Arbuckle Trial,” Maude was to “tell of the famous Arbuckle-Rappe murder case” and “rip wide the screen which hides Hollywood and the movie colony. Hers is a story for Every Father and Mother, every Young Man and Young Woman in Kansas City.” This would be “the woman’s side of the affair,” as she called it, to warn parents that those young girls going out to Hollywood to “get into the movies” were being exploited.[6]
The Kansas City Post also promoted Maude’s lecture and foreshadowed what she would disclose on stage,
of the effort she made to save beautiful Virginia Rappe; the fate she met; the first and second trial of Arbuckle, together with the true story of what goes on behind the carefully hidden screen of Hollywood—the movie colony—that has never been told. She will tell it this week. She is an intimate of Mabel Normand, Mary Miles Minter, Clari Windsor, Edna Purviance, and scores of other actors and actresses of the move world, now under the world’s spotlight in the sensational murder mystery surrounding the death of William Desmond Taylor.
The Monday Post ran Maude’s apology for disappointing “the thousands who sought to hear her story, but, upon physicians’ orders, is forced to seek seclusion.” She had to cancel after her first performance due to “a complete nervous breakdown, the result of the strain under which she has labored since the fateful Arbuckle party.”[7]
Newspaper advertisement for Maude Delmont’s performance on Sunday, February 5, 1922 (Kansas City Post)
The next day Maude and Johnston parted ways. He kept to the vaudeville circuit and, in a letter to his sister Mabel in Idaho, he denied the dispateches asserting that he and Maude were engaged.[8]) As for Maude, she traveled on to Chicago where she entertained an offer from a woman’s group but soon after fell ill once more—and under the watchful eye of Illinois State Attorney Frank Peska. And that would mean she was kept somewhere between arm’s length and a short chain by Matthew Brady.
Perhaps, too, a telephone call or telegram from him could have been the real reason for her “seclusion.” Although Brady had given Gavin McNab the opportunity to turn the “Avenger” into his asset, the People’s case against Arbuckle stood to gain more. But not in the same way that McNab saw in Zey Prevost hiding in plain sight in New Orleans. Brady surely did not want the circus that Maude and her promoters planned for Chicago and dreamed on Broadway during the run of the third trial.
The last known photograph of Maude Delmont, March 1922 (Chicago Tribune)
[1] “Bambina Delmont Returns to Lincoln in Estate Case,” Omaha Morning World-Herald, February 1, 1922; and “Mrs. Maude Delmont Arrives in Lincoln,” Lincoln Journal Star, February 1, 1922.
[2] “Arbuckle Witness Coming to Omaha,” Omaha Daily Bee, February 2, 1922.
[3] “Longtime Romance Buds: Mrs. Delmont and Lawrence Johnston Engaged,” Nebraska State Journal, February 3, 1922.
[4] “‘Fixers and Politics’ in Arbuckle Case, Says Mrs. Delmont,” in K.C.,” Kansas City Post, February 5, 1922.
[5] “EMPRESS, E-X-T-R-A! Mrs. Maude “Bambina” Delmont Herself,” Kansas City Times, February 4, 1922; and Kansas City Post, February 5, 1922.
[6] “Arbuckle’s Accuser is Here Mrs. Delmont,” Kansas City Star, February 5, 1922.
[7] “Announcement,” Kansas City Post, February 6, 1922.
[8] “Johnston Denies He and Mrs. Delmont Engaged,” Idaho Statesman, February 11, 1922.