Mrs. Helen Adeline Whitehurst, a witness for Arbuckle at his third trial, has been mentioned here and there in the Spite Work blog. This passage, from the work-in-progress, is a narrative of her testimony on April 3, 1922. She is a “set-up” witness for Arbuckle himself, who will testify two days later. She represents a sketchier witness “type” for the defendant, one of several, who saw Virginia Rappe behaving in ways that resembled her crisis in room 1219 of the St. Francis Hotel on September 5, 1921.
In regard to Rappe, Mrs. Whitehurst met her when she was modeling in Atlanta. She even testified that Rappe visited her in the hospital, even though she was abroad. But reporters and lawyers did not have Newspapers.com back then to know that Rappe was getting good press in the latter half of 1913. So, Arbuckle’s lawyers had Mrs. Whitehurst come from Chicago to take the stand, so as to show jury that Rappe had been suffering from abdominal pain, urine retention, and hysteria ever since adolscence, all triggered by drinking.
That she indulged in “brown spirits” is unique to Mrs. Whitehurst. That Miss Rappe worked for a Republican candidate in 1915 stands out as well. She was in San Francisco for the July 1920 Democratic Convention. Her boyfriend, the comedy director Henry Lehrman later hosted the nominee, James Cox, when he visited Hollywood to meet with motion picture people and donors.
What follows is one of the microhistories of the book. Will a publisher let me keep it?
N.b. For those not famiiar with the cast of characters here, I will be brief. Gavin McNab and Nat Schmulowitz are lawyers for the defendant; Milton U’Ren and Leo Friedman are prosecutors; and Matthew Brady is the District Attorney of San Francisco. Mr. Christopher Teeters is another one of Virginia Rappe’s unlikely Chicago drinking companions. There should be enough context for other walk-ons and -offs in this sad tale that can only be told in its greatest detail to fully see the folly of previous Arbuckle narratives.
That Virginia Rappe of the film colony, the fashion model, the “best dressed girl in Hollywood,” once consorted with the likes of Helen Adeline Whitehurst was a daring proposition for Arbuckle’s lawyers. Yet for someone familiar with her early life, with the testimony of two trials and the legends from Chicago, and the psychology of being a virtual orphan, Mrs. Whitehurst fit a type known to Albert Sabath. She was older and childless like Aunt Kate and Mrs. Fox. And like those foster parents, Mrs. Whitehurst could serve as a mother and big sister in one, filling the void of Virginia’s dead, namely her grandmother and Mabel Rapp.
Dark-haired, thin-lipped, in her mid-thirties Mrs. Whitehurst spoke fairly good English for the most part, with an accent that could have been from anywhere in Europe than her native Strasbourg. (A 1923 passport application reveals that she had relatives and friends in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and France.) She had immigrated to the United States in 1905 and two years later married her husband Charles, a lineman. She described herself as a housewife but had worked off and on as a saleslady and said she befriended Virginia in the women’s department of Siegel, Cooper, & Co., when the latter was shopping for a shirtwaist in the fall of 1913.[1]
Milton U’Ren undoubtedly heard this and, having a better idea of Miss Rappe’s chronology from this year, decided that needed to be reconciled—and so too her address in Chicago. It never moved back and forth between one foster mother and another. During 1913 and into 1914, Mrs. Whitehurst said Virginia lived at 4526 Indiana Avenue, which would have placed her just five blocks south of 40th and Indiana, where she had lived with Aunt Kate in 1912, before both relocated to Stony Island Avenue. McNab—or rather Sabath—had smoothed away such minutiae for the jury, as if they should only consider a series of incidents in regard to her health that foreshadowed almost everything in room 1219. These began in the fall of 1914, after Mrs. Whitehurst started going out with Miss Rappe “to dinners and to cafés to dance.” She recalled a dinner party at the Arlington Café at 31st and Indiana, which took place on October 29, which happened to be her birthday.
As a matter of propriety between two women going out together, to make it look less sapphic, McNab had to ask, “Who went with you?” The answer Mrs. Whitehurst gave, however, inserted a different dynamic. “Virginia and two gentlemen friends of mine,” she replied. As for the incident itself, Virginia was sitting across from Mrs. Whitehurst when she suddenly began to bite her lips, as her face looked “drawn.” Then Virginia grabbed her abdomen and began to scream. She threw head over as if to vomit. “I got up,” Mrs. Whitehurst continued,
and led her into the ladies’ waiting room; I put her on a chair and she screamed, she moaned, she doubled up, twisted her legs—her body and her legs weas pretty near double [. . .] and then she started to vomit. While she vomit she fell off the chair, and I asked the assistance of the colored maid to help me put Virginia on a couch. They have little couches always in the ladies’ waiting room. While I did that, with one hand she hold her abdomen, and the other hand she tore her waisted and scream and holler, “Oh, Helen, I am hurt, oh, Helen it hurt me; I am going to die!”
After U’Ren had Miss Rappe’s statement struck, Mrs. Whitehurst described how her friend kept screaming and “twitching and biting her fingertips. They bled from it, and also her lips.” The episode lasted an hour.
Q. Did you have any liquor before these appearances?
A. Yes, she had three or four straight whiskies, and I had Martinis.
Virginia recovered (not unlike the drinking companion of Mr. Teeters testimony of the day before) and continued her drinking after Mrs. Whitehurst’s birthday party moved on to another South Side bar, Al Tierney’s, at 35th and Calumet. There Miss Rappe fell ill again—and Mrs. Whitehurst took her back to her apartment building in a taxi.
Q. What was the name of the place?
A. 40th and Indiana; I don’t know exact the two last numbers, but was close to the
elevated [. . .] I went in the vestibule, and rang the bell for her, and the colored
maid came and took her upstairs.
The third incident took place in February 1915 at Heinley’s Café at Monroe and Dearborn, where Miss Rappe vomited so much that the proprietor made her leave—and she continued to vomit in the cab that Mrs. Whitehurst hailed to take them back to her house, where she put her friend to bed and then called Dr. Graves—whose deposition would have corroborated the event and what Mrs. Whitehurst did. “I put her in a tub of hot water,” she told McNab and jury, “kept her there, took her out and put her to bed and applied hot turpentine applications, as per directions.” Then it came time to have his witness touch on a symptom intended to link up to the medical experts yet to testify.
Q. Directing your attention to her physical condition, did you ever observe her in
relation to the passage of urine?
A. Yes, sir; this is the time that I did; she went in the bathroom, and phone was
ringing, and I went to the phone; and I heard her scream, and I went back, and
she said, “Oh, Helen, I can’t pass a drop.”
Two weeks later, Mrs. Whitehurst accompanied Miss Rappe to see a Dr. Miller, who treated her for abdominal pain twice, in late February and early March. And for both appointments, Miss Rappe used different aliases, “Miss Durant” and “Miss Stewart,” respectively.
The fourth incident occurred a year later in April 1915 at Lipman’s Café at North California and Division streets. Mrs. Whitehurst named the ten people who were present, all of whom had campaigned for William “Big Bill” Thompson, Chicago’s last Republican mayor. Once more Miss Rappe drank several whiskies and suffered all the same symptoms as before, falling at the corner of the stage “where the cabaret singers were performing” and Mrs. Whitehurst took her back to her building.
McNab, knowing that he had a very special witness on his way from Omaha, now asked a question in anticipation of one of his revelations to which Arbuckle’s lawyers were now privy.
Q. Did anybody call her up?
A. Yes, a woman called up—
Leo Friedman objected to any conversation getting into the record. The allusion to Mrs. Fox went no further. Mrs. Whitehurst asked for and received a glass of water—in anticipation of what would be a grueling cross-examination. And U’Ren’s first questions were to be sure he heard right, that Mrs. Whitehurst was a married woman. He even asked for her maiden name (“Bach”) and wanted the jury to know that she did not travel to San Francisco with her husband, but with a friend (“Dorothy Harmon”). Then U’Ren had Mrs. Whitehurst admit that she had not testified at any previous venue. Such an admission was necessary given that she was blatantly parroting witnesses, that her story was informed by reams of testimony at the disposal of Arbuckle’s lawyers. And one of them, Nat Schmulowitz saw these questions and answers stricken. U’Ren, nevertheless, persevered. He wanted to know more about how Mrs. Whitehurst had been deposed by Albert Sabath. He also wanted the jury to rightly guess for themselves that this woman was being paid for her story.
Although her husband told her to “keep quiet,” at the end of the second trial she sent Arbuckle a telegram “that, in case he needs me, he is welcome to call on me.” Then U’Ren asked if she had wired Arbuckle after the first trial—she had not—but that only confirmed what he suspected. Mrs. Whitehurst was another entrepreneurial witness, like Virginia Warren, and better positioned in the “market” for a third trial. Then U’Ren asked the question that he had, if effect, kept up his sleeve long enough and Mrs. Whitehurst pretended to have difficulty understanding him.
Q. At which one of these occurrences that you have testified was your
husband present?
A. All of them.
McNab and Schmulowitz objected to what was not in evidence and overruled. For his part, U’Ren wanted her to answer the same question. She still did not “get” it—and he reframed the question so there would be no more doubt.
Q. Now, at any of these times that you saw this girl suffer these strokes, as you
have testified, spells, whatever you want to call them, at the Arlington Café, or
any of the other cafés, was your husband present?
A. No, sir.
Q. At none of them?
A. No, sir.
U’Ren elicited other facts with less difficulty. Mrs. Whitehurst had worked in other department stores, including Mandel’s. She had never met Mrs. Hardebeck nor entered the “flat” Aunt Kate shared with Virginia. “I rang the bell for Virginia to come down and go out together,” Mrs. Whitehurst said, “but I never was inside.” And she was certain she had first met Virginia in September or October 1913. And hearing this, U’Ren was more certain than ever that his witness had simply picked up from where Dr. Rosenberg left off in 1913. But the jury would have to wait for the rebuttal witnesses to see that Virginia was likely still modeling clothes and not seeking out Mrs. Whitehurst for a second encounter, in the drapery department of Siegel, Cooper & Co.
For a juror with a good memory—such as Irene Wilde—where did that Mandel’s saleslady go, Frances Bates? That witness who assisted Miss Rappe when she fell ill twice at Mandel Brothers and tore apart two expensive gowns? U’Ren, of course, had such a memory and he knew either she was on the road or en route to Liverpool when the imaginary friendship formed during the weeks Mrs. Whitehurst recovered from surgery.
Q. Now, how often did you see her between September or October of 1913 and
the fall of 1914, when you went out with her?
A. Well, when I was taken to the hospital, I saw her pretty near every other day;
she came to see me in the hospital; that was in November; later—the 23rd day
of November, 1913, I was operated on in the German American Hospital,
and I [. . .] remained there for two weeks; and [. . .] she came pretty near every
other day to see me, alone or with my husband.
Mrs. Whitehurst recalled that for four or five weeks she did not see Virginia. Then they began to go out for lunch in January 1914. Yet, while Mrs. Whitehurst did not mention that her new friend had been to London and Paris, she did know that Virginia was in Memphis. She was certain that Virginia had returned to Chicago in the spring and joined her and her husband for the Decoration Day parade downtown on May 30. They also went out once or twice a week to the movies. Eventually, Mrs. Whitehurst disclosed another incident that took place in February 1915 at her home, after Virginia got sick from the bottle of whiskey she brought with her. (That U’Ren, knowing her preference for gin and cordials, did not frame any question to question Virginia’s acquired taste for “brown” spirits only reveals what a pedant he was about the rules of evidence.)
Mrs. Whitehurst knew that Virginia had gone to California in May 1915. And in addition to having never met Mrs. Hardebeck, she never met others from this period, such as Harry Barker, Mrs. Rafferty Roth, and Mrs. Bates. (She had heard Virginia speak of a Mrs. Burkholder.) And all this time Mrs. Whitehurst insisted that Virginia lived at 40th and Indiana, even though U’Ren gave her plenty of opportunities to correct herself. She seemed to have no idea that Virginia was often in New York City and, when in Chicago, either stayed at the La Salle Hotel or moved back and forth between Mrs. Hardebeck and Mrs. Fox.
The only help U’Ren gave her was to ask for the statement Mrs. Whitehurst had given and signed for Albert Sabath. He wanted to show her something and began perusing the pages while asking her one question after another, rehashing questions already posed by McNab. She knew the names of the two men at Virginia’s first “spell.” Mrs. Whitehurst, however, could not recall whose “colored maid” took Virginia upstairs on the night of her birthday party. Mrs. Whitehurst, however, did recall that a male friend of Virginia had introduced her to Dr. Miller as “Miss Stewart” and gave Mrs. Whitehurst $50 to pay his fee.
Meanwhile, U’Ren found something that in the signed affidavit that did not agree with Mrs. Whitehurst’s testimony. She had told McNab that Virginia had stayed overnight in her home on two occasions. When he asked her if there had been more than two, she did not remember. Then he had her look at a single sentence in her statement, where it read “At several other occasions during their acquaintance, Virginia was ill in affiant’s home three or four days a time with the same trouble.” Here Schmulowitz interrupted—but Mrs. Whitehurst explained away the sentence as a “mistake.”
Q. Didn’t you read this over before you signed it?
A. I did; I was very sick; I had temperature 103 when I was giving this statement in
Mr. Sabath’s office; I might have said it; but I think it is a mistake.
Mrs. Whitehurst was hardly terrified by perjuring herself. U’Ren saw something other than illness being the reason for Miss Rappe—or whoever this person was—to stay overnight for up to four days at a stretch.
Q. Now, give us the dates of these other times that she stayed at your house,
other than the times you were—
A. The nights my husband would work all night.
Mrs. Whitehurst could not give any dates, only that Virginia had stayed three or four nights in row, “that was the time I was ill myself.” Fortunately, the noon recess ended whatever may have distressed her. As for the rest of her cross-examination during the first hour of the afternoon session, she recalled her last contact with Virginia, a postcard from San Francisco sometime between July and August, 1915—one of several disclosures that stood out, that Mrs. Whitehurst was not only well-versed in how to present the “Miss Rappe” of this third trial. She had likely known the real person and, like Harry Barker did, assumed the patience of Job for a young woman whose intolerance of alcohol resulted in such predictable consequences, disturbing consequences, who spattered taxicabs and cafés with her vomit. Why would anyone ask her out for more of the same?
McNab used his recross-examination to insist that Mrs. Whitehurst’s affidavit be put in evidence as a stenographer’s “insert,” albeit without saying it was an egregious exaggeration on the part of Albert Sabath. Then McNab handed the document to the jury to see for themselves.
Mrs. Whitehurst’s reviews were hardly mixed. According to the San Francisco Call, she “gave the strongest testimony yet introduced regarding the alleged attacks suffered by Virginia Rappe after indulgence in alcoholic drinks.”[2] Marjorie Driscoll chimed in, that Mrs. Whitehurst “added materially to the case being built up by the defense.”[3] Oscar Fernbach agreed, that she “gave time, place and persons present with the minutest of detail, and with great positiveness.”[4] He described the day in court in terms of a military stalemate, a “fight being waged by the People of California against Roscoe Arbuckle” in which the scene of operations “bore all of the characteristics of stabilized warfare [. . .] that a large number of shells of varying caliber were landed in the sector for both the prosecution and defense, but that the front line remained unchanged.” Matthew Brady, however, was not so impressed and had decided to have Mrs. Whitehurst as well as Virginia Warren brought before the Grand Jury. Still, he and his fellow prosecutors were troubled by such press. [To be continued . . .]
Mrs. Whitehurst’s 1923 passport photograph (Ancestry.com)
[1] Ibid., “Mrs. Helen Adeline Whitehurst,” 2521–85.
[2] “Friend of Rappe Girl Tells of Illness,” San Francisco Call, April 3,1922.
[3] Marjorie C. Driscoll, “Virginia Rappe Often Ill, New Witness Says,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 4, 1922
[4] Oscar F. Fernbach, “Woman Aids Defense in Fatty’s Trial,” San Francisco Examiner, April 4, 1922.
Very interesting details.