Joan Myers, as she prepared to embark on writing her own revisionist history of the Arbuckle trials, saw that the primary sources, as of 2013, would be newspaper accounts.* At the time, searchable databases provided by the Library of Congress, Newspapers.com, the California Digital Newspaper Collection, and so on were game-changers for researchers. Nevertheless, Ms. Myers warned against relying on the reportage of the early 1920s, meaning, of course, that such accounts as they related to such a controversial event as the death of the actress Virginia Rappe were often unreliable, impossible to corroborate, and biased.
Myers knew then that to write anything further, anything revisionary, required the Arbuckle trial transcripts. These were lost or destroyed by the San Francisco County. This is certain. But one author claimed to have used these documents and his claim is suspect.
In 1976, David Yallop’s The Day the Laughter Stopped: The True Story of Fatty Arbuckle was published. He insisted that he had access to the transcripts for all three trials through the official court reporter, William A. Foster, whose name appears in the acknowledgments. Yallop, however, writes as an apologist for Roscoe Arbuckle and sees the District Attorney of San Francisco and his assistants as bent on destroying one of the world‘s most beloved silent film comedian.
Based on our research, which until recently relied on voluminous newspaper accounts, Yallop undermined his agenda for the sake of being entertaining. A case in point is his recreation of the Labor Day party in the St. Francis Hotel and an imaginary conversation between Virginia Rappe and Arbuckle in which she begs him to pay for an abortion. This is really Kenneth Anger–Coke bottle stuff. And since Yallop doesn’t couch this in any trial testimony, one would have to suspect that he also imagined what little of the examinations he does quote at any length.
Yallop also claimed that Rappe had been diagnosed with gonorrhea before her death. That factoid is something that should be in the transcripts, in the medical expert testimony. Newspaper reporters and editors were writing for the delicate sensibilities of American readers in 1921. This passage from Yallop would never happen.
At 10:30 P.M. that Friday evening [i.e., September 9, 1921], Roscoe Arbuckle sat quietly studying the script for his next picture. The doorbell rang and his butler opened the door. Two dozen reporters charged past the butler, knocking him over. They poured all over the house, taking photographs, and looking for Roscoe. Surrounding him, they began to fire questions based on the statements that had already been made in San Francisco by Maude [Delmont] and Alice [Blake].
“Who else was at this orgy you gave?”
“Did you rape her or was she agreeable?”
“How much did you pay the San Francisco police to keep it hushed up.”
“Is it true that you screwed five women during the afternoon?” (132)
This is the bricolage of a “good read” for the late twentieth century. It’s filmic. It’s noir. But there was no mob of hardboiled newspapermen. There was only one reporter and he arrived in the late afternoon. Indeed, the transcripts from the second and third trials would prove that. For some time, we had to disregard Yallop and the long shelf of Arbuckle narratives that rely on him.
The irony, of course, is that this British author, the kind American readers tend trust, really did have access to the transcripts and could have provided a provenance for them decades ago. As it appears, he only used a little of the 10,000 pages bound in brown cloth, in several volumes neatly divided into all three trials, with volumes devoted to the examination of the potential jurors. This was and is a daunting largesse of proof, of authenticity. So, what we get in The Day the Laughter Stopped are a few dialogues quoted from the first trial transcripts. A side-by-side comparison bears this out. However, the better book Yallop could have written, even for a general audience meant asking his publisher for more time, for more length. And there was his agenda, which gave us a heavily curated defensio in extremis of poor “Fatty.”
We must delay submitting our work-in-progress and revise accordingly. We must pore over the records of all three trials in the San Francisco Public Library, which quietly—but not too quietly—acquired the transcripts a year ago as a donation. We will read them without a blind eye for Arbuckle, Rappe, and others. Lastly, we can now delete a nota bene, a head note at the beginning of our trial narrative. It cautioned the reader that we had to use reportage in place of the transcripts to recreate the life of the trials. That said, we shall retain some of the editorial color of the newspapermen and -women in this form, for they are still part of the real story, which started like so in a courtroom over a century ago:
“We expect to prove on the third day of Saturday, September of the present year,” Friedman began, facing the jury, a young lady named Virginia Rappe, in the prime of womanhood, of about 24 or 25 years, left the City of Los Angeles for the City of San Francisco.” He spoke matter-of-factly for the most part, which made for poor copy. Where he dryly named Rappe’s traveling companions, “one Al Semnacher and one Maude Bambina Delmont,” Oscar Fernbach inserted some drama, “a third invisible companion, the Angel of Death.” (msp. 481)
The epilogue, like the introduction, is always in flux and won’t be finalized until we finish the next two trials. For the most part, the text feels sound—and much is devoted to the denouements of various principal and some minor witnesses. We have traced, for example, some of Maude Delmont’s life to the end. And we have much devoted to Arbuckle’s post-trial career with a certain emphasis on the incidents of misconduct that continue after Virginia Rappe.
The following passage may need to be shortened or cut. But what happened may have been more than what we have been previously told. The Merritt book, Room 1219, for example, devotes a vanilla paragraph to the incident and attributes Arbuckle’s injury to slipping and falling down a stairwell. Our treatment more relies on the eyewitnesses among the Japanese crew who spoke to reporters in Yokohama.
<rbuckle smile and pointing at his “hoodoo” number (Newspapers.com)
In late July, Hays traveled to Los Angeles and couldn’t avoid The Sins of Hollywood, with its lurid red Mephistopheles and his camera on a startled flapper and her beau. A respected Los Angeles minister handed him a copy at the behest of the author. Hays was appalled but didn’t change his glad tidings in the speech he gave at the new Hollywood Bowl. He declared, “The one bad influence in Hollywood is talk. And for the life of me I cannot see the horrors of Hollywood.”
Arbuckle’s reaction to the pamphlet and the grim presence of the motion picture czar is unknown. Still, his subsequent misadventure to remove himself from Los Angeles and the public eye may have been connected given the timing.
Not long after Hays returned to New York, the disgraced comedian applied for a passport for himself and his new secretary and minder, Harry R. Brand, a young publicist in the employ of Joseph Schenck. Their itinerary was to sail around the world with stops in Honolulu, Japan, China, the Philippines, India, and Egypt, where Arbuckle was to meet up with Schenck and his wife, Constance Talmadge, before continuing on to France, England, and New York. The voyage was to take months and invited much speculation. Did Arbuckle intend to resume his career abroad? Will he accept offers from Japanese and French producers?
Arbuckle was guarded about his plans. He only said he wanted to “rest.” Schenck was more explicit. He told reporters that Arbuckle was “jumpy and nervous” and in “poor personal health.” This was code to cover for Arbuckle and the real reason, which may have been a reward for the comedian’s good behavior. Arbuckle had certainly suffered not only being unable to work but to play—and the late summer had always been set aside his vacations and carousing.
Seen off by his lawyer Milton Cohen—and without Brand—Arbuckle boarded the SS Siberia Maru in San Francisco on July 16. On the first or second night at sea, Arbuckle was seen drinking sake in the company of friends. According the Japanese press, he got into a braw and threw a punch at a British passenger, cutting his hand on the other man’s teeth.
Arbuckle quickly denied the incident in a radiogram to Schenck. Then things got worse. The comedian contracted blood poisoning and a hospital room in Tokyo was quickly arranged. There Japanese doctors considered amputating Arbuckle’s arm at one point. But the comedian eventually recovered and returned via Seattle four weeks later. His arrival was intended to be “incognito.” But he was discovered and photographed outside his stateroom, number 13.
Our narrative doesn’t overlook rumors of Virginia Rappe’s alleged wealth reported after her death in 1921. We rely on its poignancy for what such rumors can say about the real person as well as the personal mythology that Rappe cultivated—and others did for her.
Two years before she set out for San Francisco and Roscoe Arbuckle’s Labor Day Party, in September 1919, Rappe must have smiled—or cringed—at how her boyfriend, the comedy director Henry Lehrman, wanted her described in the motion picture press. Despite being from Chicago—and a personal preference for identifying as a New Yorker—Rappe was reinvented as a “lovely western society girl,” as Grace Kingsley of the Los Angeles Times drolly put it, “who wearied of the gay round and decided to settle down and be serious. So, she went into comedy making![1]
Of course, Kingsley knew better. Rappe was Lehrman’s live-in girlfriend and he let her, at his expense, play the young Southern California society woman whose name was never published in a society column. Kingsley, too, was in a position to know that Rappe had exercised the same noblesse oblige already in her 1917 motion picture debut, namely Paradise Garden(which was a serious film, incidentally).
But a hundred years ago the American public memory wasn’t expected to answer for the ephemeral productions of Hollywood. That is to say, there was no such thing as “trivia night” in the tea rooms and speakeasies. But what about Rappe’s money? Lehrman or someone in his employ saw to that by a further embellishment: Rappe’s oil gushers, albeit without the black rain falling on James Dean in Giant.
With the announcement of the engagement of Miss Virginia Rappe to appear in a forthcoming series of Henry Lehrman comedy productions for the First National Exhibitors’ Circuit, Mr. Lehrman this week signalizes the successful culmination of negotiations which have extended over the past seven months, and which have finally assured the screen appearance of one of the wealthiest and most beautiful young women of western America.
It was only after the utmost persuasion that Miss Rappe was induced to forswear the intense social activities of a debutante and devote her attention to acting before the motion picture camera, but to Mr. Lehrman she represented the ideal of fresh American girlhood, and he consistently refused to take “no” for an answer. Miss Rappe, in addition to being an heiress in her own right, is the owner of more than eight hundred acres of the richest oil lands of Texas, and her wells and leases in this territory yield what is reported to be a fabulous income. Since her wealth is computed in the millions, it may be gathered that financial considerations had little bearing on her decision to make at least a temporary entry into the field of motion pictures.
Among her friends, Miss Rappe’s predilection for stunning gowns is well known, and it is promised that in her coming pictures she will display a sartorial splendor which will make them particularly attractive to feminine theatre patrons. But it is her fresh and wholesome beauty which forms her greatest asset, and it is stated that the Henry Lehrman comedies in which she appears will afford every opportunity for the display of this richest girl of stage or screen.[2]
Virginia Rappe, 1919 (Hoover Studio)
[1] Grace Kingsley, “New Fun Factory: Lehrman Starts Production of Comedies,” Los Angeles Times, 29 August 1919, III:4.
[2] “Wealthy Young Woman to be Screen Actress,” Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, 21 September 1919, IV:7
The criminologist Edward Oscar Heinrich (1881–1953) was an expert witness enlisted by the prosecution for People vs. Arbuckle. He was pitted against Roscoe Arbuckle’s chief counsel, Gavin McNab, and rebuttal witnesses, all rival experts drawn, for the most part, from Los Angeles.
The following passage is from our working draft, a narrative that covers Heinrich’s first appearance on the stand in November 1921.
Heinrich also discussed in a previous blog entry about the way to properly “see” room 1219 of the St. Francis Hotel on September 5, 1921.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” in which Sherlock Holmes solves a murder by using his magnifying glass to compare the wax impression of a thumb to a thumb stain on a wall, was inspired by a real crime. A decade earlier, in 1892, a young Argentinian woman murdered her two children so that her boyfriend would marry her. Instead, she became the first person convicted of a capital offense based on a finger print, a single bloody thumb mark left on a wall. But this revolutionary way of solving crimes had begun even earlier, when, ironically, two Indian civil servants needed a way to identify people of color in criminal cases for the British Raj because “they all look alike.” This became the Henry system of finger print classification that was adopted by Scotland Yard and subsequently by police departments in the United States during the first decade of the twentieth century.
In 1910, the first American criminal case to be decided solely on the basis of finger print evidence occurred when Thomas Jennings, an African American, was convicted for the murder of a white homeowner during a botched burglary attempt. For the next ten years, police departments in the United States further perfected their methods of finger print identification—dactyloscopy—and the routine taking of finger prints from criminal suspects and crime scenes.
By 1920, finger print evidence became as much a sensation as DNA evidence is today in solving seemingly unsolvable crimes, especially when there was no other witnesses than the alleged perpetrator, as in the case of Roscoe Arbuckle. Proving that he had fatally injured Virginia Rappe provided a challenging test of the scientific method and the District Attorney of San Francisco took advantage of what was then the epicenter of modern criminology and forensics just across the bay at the University of California in Berkeley.
The first Chief of Police of Berkeley, California, August Vollmer, was already known around the world for his progressive innovations in creating one of the first modern police forces in the country. He had also encouraged the University of California to establish the first program in criminology in the United States, where Brady’s expert witness, Edward O. Heinrich, was hired as the first lecturer in 1919.
Known as “Oscar” to his friends and students, Heinrich started out as a self-trained pharmacist in his native Tacoma, Washington. With nothing but a high school diploma, he earned a degree in chemistry at Berkeley as a special student in 1908.
Edward O. Heinrich, ca. 1919 (Carnegie Library, Denver)
Over the next decade, Heinrich worked as a chemist in Tacoma, a police chief in Alameda, California, and as the city manager of Boulder, Colorado. He returned to Berkeley in 1919 at the invitation of Chief Vollmer to take over the laboratory of the late Theodore Kitka, a handwriting expert and authority on inks and ink stains. Kitka, obsessed with freeing Tom Mooney from prison for the 1917 Preparedness Day bombing, had made important strides in the science of finger print analysis—and Heinrich continued this work.
For Kitka, Heinrich, and other handwriting experts, going from the loops of and downstrokes of a subject’s handwriting to the loops, whorls, and tent arches of finger print analysis was a logical progression. Both disciplines required a practiced eye, patience, an inquiring mind—and a good microscope. In his advertisements in San Francisco’s legal newspaper, The Record, he billed himself as a “Legal Chemist and Microscopist.”
Heinrich’s work had made news when William Hightower was arrested for the kidnapping and murder of a Catholic priest in August 1921. He had shown the court how the word “tuberculosis,” stenciled on Hightower’s tent to ward away the curious from his campsite, was obviously the work of a cake decorator—and matched the lettering of a ransom letter for the dead priest. Although Hightower was a drifter, he was also an itinerant baker. As further proof, Heinrich employed soil analysis, forensic geology, and the microscopic examination of rope and tent fibers as well as nicks on Hightower’s pocketknife.
While Heinrich was still involved in the Hightower case, he was already at work in the Arbuckle suite and had two doors from 1219—the one that connected to the hotel corridor and the one innermost door of the two that connected to room 1220—removed and taken to his Berkeley lab. In a matter of days, between September 17 and 21, he had a general idea that a crime had been committed in the room based on enlargements of finger prints of Arbuckle and Rappe taken by the San Francisco Police.
That the Arbuckle case was Heinrich’s first as a finger print expert wasn’t lost on the defense team but he had to be taken seriously in another way, given that high-profile cases involving finger print evidence were being lost by criminal defense lawyers. Juries that had an ear for the Cross of Gold oratory of the 1890s were now being swayed by science in the courtroom. Nevertheless, a William Jennings Bryan could still beat evolution at the Scopes Monkey Trial—and McNab could be said to have had it easier than his fellow Democrat did in 1925. Milton U’Ren, relying on finger prints alone, was no Clarence Darrow in 1921—and Heinrich was no Darwin. The scientist from Berkeley resembled a solemn-looking young man with a high-forehead and lock of hair falling over it. He spoke in a quiet and reasoned voice, as though to a room full of students rather than jurors already growing bored with the trial, already making up their minds.
Shortly after the Tuesday afternoon session convened, the bailiffs moved two oblong objects, covered with sheets, from behind Judge Louderback’s desk. Spectators gaped at them, including the jury as they filed in and took their seats in the jury box. An easel was set up to display enlarged photographs and placards. Matthew Brady himself, for the first and only time, conducted the examination after Heinrich was sworn in. But reporters barely noticed the rare appearance as the chief prosecutor ceded the floor to the man who had made it possible to visualize what happened in room 1219 on the afternoon of September 5.
Heinrich described himself as a “consulting criminologist,” according to Oscar Fernbach, “declaiming to the jury his many accomplishments like some Pied Piper of Hamelin.” But what Heinrich had learned from room 1219 was extensive and as yet unknown to everyone save the prosecutors. They wouldn’t see the hundreds of notes and equations for probability distribution that Heinrich had made. He had also identified many of the hairs found in room 1219. Under the microscope, he could tell which ones came from men and women, which had been “barbered” or pulled out by the root.
He had pored over her clothes in the evidence room and his lab in Oakland. The “sport suit,” as he called her green outfit, had been torn in various ways. The left arm of her green coat had been torn at the seam for a distance of five inches. The cuff links had been torn out of their cuffs, one of which hung by a few threads. The right sleeve of her shirtwaist had been ripped to the elbow from the back. The white silk underpants of Rappe’s “teddy bear” had been torn down the left side. In his final notes, Heinrich had no opinion about the clothes that Rappe wore into room 1219.
Heinrich had found some stains on the double bed’s quilted pad. Most of these he described these as “seminal in character” but had passed through the hotel’s laundry. When he turned the quilt over, however, he found a fresh blood stain one-quarter of an inch in diameter and near it a semen stain about three-fourths of an inch long and almost as wide. But he decided that these couldn’t be attached to the case even though he suspected a maid had just turned the mattress pad over.
One of the doors that Heinrich had brought from the hotel to his laboratory and to the courtroom was the outer door from room 1220 to 1219. He had found the impressions left by Maude Delmont’s shoes. He found scuffs from their toes but, more importantly, the impressions left by the nails and center screws of her French heels. After he conducted his own test with the shoes, strapping them to wooden handles so that they could be pounded like hammers in doors that were, like those of Arbuckle’s suite, either oak or birch. These tests revealed that Maude Delmont had kicked the door as she had said.
By Thursday, September 22, as the preliminary investigation got underway, Heinrich met with Brady, U’Ren, and Golden at the Hall of Justice. He had provisionally identified Rappe’s and Arbuckle’s finger prints on 1219’s bathroom door as well as the door leading into the corridor. Heinrich photographed Delmont’s heel marks on the door between 1220 and 1219 and collected hair samples and bobby pins. Semen stains were found on the comedian’s mattress. But Heinrich deemed them too old. U’Ren agreed to leave them out of the case. Lastly, Heinrich found nothing to suggest Delmont’s claim that Arbuckle had ripped off Rappe’s clothes, a hypothesis that the prosecutors let go.
As a criminologist, Heinrich risked being imprinted by the suppositions of the men who would pay for his meticulous list of expenses and his fee. It was a matter of ethics and academic discipline. Given the prints he had taken from the bathroom door and the inside of 1219’s room door and the hair he had found on the floor, Heinrich wrote in his notes as early as September 17, that
the action under investigation in this case may be interpreted as an opening of the [bathroom] door from without by a push of the man’s hand and an increase of the opening by the shoving aside of the door by the woman running out toward the hallway door; the woman at the time standing at the end of a rug adjusting clothing from which hairs dropped.
As the trial date approached in November, the evidence and testimony would be mostly limited to the prints on the hallway door. The conjectured image of Rappe escaping from the bathroom and making her way to leave room 1219 via the hallway, of turning to face Arbuckle, frantically straightening out her clothes and brushing herself off, wouldn’t find its way into testimony—at least not yet.
As Heinrich unveiled one of the hotel doors, he moved like a photographer positioning it “so that it catches the light at the right angle,” reported Walter Vogdes of the Examiner.
Visible on the door was a brilliant coat of aluminum dust spattered over one of the upper panels. He pointed out two hand prints, one on top of the other. Then, using a series of photographs and diagrams, he explained to the court what he believed these indicated.
First Heinrich revealed where Rappe’s palm had been pressed against the door. Superimposed, as though the fingers were interlaced, were the fingertips of Arbuckle’s hand. Heinrich had also made drawings that methodically, mathematically identified the owner of each set of prints.
As Heinrich spoke, a rival handwriting expert, Chauncey McGovern, and Ignatius McCarthy, a former investigator for the Department of Labor, looked on from the defense counsel’s table. They were not only there to observe and take notes for when they took the stand, but as supernumeraries for McNab’s theater of incredulity.
McGovern and McCarthy expressed their disagreement with Heinrich’s findings. They made faces for the jurors to see. They rolled their eyes and shook their heads. Arbuckle, too, got in on the act. In a courtroom caricature, a cartoonist for the San Francisco Call depicted the comedian studying his hand in mock skepticism. Heinrich is also depicted, engrossed by his own demonstration, working away with a drawing on a large sheet of paper.
Sitting next to the cartoonist, the reporter Edgar T. Gleeson jotted down the notes that later described Heinrich stepping from exhibit to exhibit, pointing out the various differences in the curves, broken contacts, lifelines, and ridges of the prints made by Rappe’s palms and fingers and then compared them to Arbuckle’s. With his eyes “peering, hands clasped, and brow rising and falling,” Gleeson compared Heinrich to “a man from Mars” and a “human thinking machine” on par with “Professor Craig Kennedy,” the popular pulp novel scientist detective.
In the end, Heinrich told the court that his evidence suggested the possibility of a struggle between Rappe and Arbuckle, that the comedian had the young actress pinned to the door leading out to the corridor. This theory neatly fit the voices that Josephine Keza heard, of a woman begging as though for her life as much as her virtue, and the cruel voice of the man’s telling her to shut up. Thus, with a ring of circumstantial evidence closing around the defendant, Matthew Brady handed Heinrich over to Gavin McNab for cross-examination.
The defense counsel didn’t take long to get to a simple question.
“If that door had been wiped would not these finger prints have been obliterated?”
“Surely,” answered Heinrich.
“They can be rubbed out, can’t they?” McNab continued. “Otherwise, in a long period of time, I suppose they would protrude into the room. They don’t have to be taken off with an axe, do they?”
Despite McNab’s sarcasm, Heinrich gave him a proper answer. He said the finger prints could be rubbed off. But he had proved to himself—and likely colleagues as well to stress-test his opinion—that prints he found on the door were Arbuckle’s and Rappe’s. He explained that there were thirteen points of identification in the prints of the dead girl’s fingers and seventeen in those of the defendant. The chances of her finger prints being duplicated by another woman were 393,000 to 1. The chance of any man having the same points as Arbuckle were 3,300,00 to 1.
To begin the part that narrates—and documents—the first Arbuckle trial, we begin with an anecdote. This is, admittedly, formulaic. You know, what we learn in the writing seminar, the way a piece should begin with the indirect, something that seems beside the point but has an ulterior meaning that “haunts” the reader as the rest of the text unfolds.
The burial site of Virginia Rappe is an early example of the interments that helped to make the unique funerary culture of Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Eventually, over time, the plots became more and more attractive nuisances—at least to the cemetery’s groundskeepers—by intention, when it was seen the celebrity can continue into this quiet afterlife.
As for Crystal Rivers, toward the end of his life, in the late 1930s, he began to write letters to the editor of the Santa Barbara newspapers, expressing a certain pacifism as another world war loomed.
Update: We are still revising the 200+ pages that cover the first trial and its aftermath. We may, as we do here, reveal the sections of the work-in-progress.
The First Trial Begins
The forthcoming trial of Roscoe Arbuckle, the celebrated film comedian, on the charge of manslaughter, is of interest and significance to the whole civilized world.
Gouverneur Morris
In the weeks after the funeral of Virginia Rappe, “the Littlest Cowboy,” Master Breezy Reeves Jr., the son and namesake of director B. Reeves Eason, was laid to rest.[1] The six-year-old had been killed by a runaway truck as he rode his bicycle to a piano lesson. His interment added another player to those who died too young, well before Rudolf Valentino’s vault made Hollywood Forever Cemetery a shrine visited by legions of devotees and the curious. Their pilgrimages, their attendant rites were still in the future. Rappe’s modest plot by the reflecting pool, however, anticipated who was to come in the person of her lone mourner.
Cemetery employees observed the same man in his forties almost daily. He often put fresh flowers in the urn on her grave and removed the withered ones. On a nearby palm tree, he hung a framed picture of a bouquet of roses that bore a legend in verse and a humble request to leave the offerings undisturbed.
You fought for the honor God gave to you A beautiful bridal flower. And through the years your heart beat true| Till the day and the fatal hour.
This is a promise delayed, Crystal P. Rivers. Please do not remove this from the grave of Virginia —Semper Fidelis (always faithful) from C. P. R.
The police were consulted. The poet broke no laws. But with Roscoe Arbuckle’s trial date of November 7 fast approaching, the newspaper editors saw a human-interest story. They printed the poem appended to the rose bouquet and sent reporters to lie in wait for the mysterious visitor. Finally, one of them confronted Rivers on his way to Rappe’s grave and with much persuasion, he consented to talk.
Rivers said nothing about his curious name for a man, at once feminine yet paean in keeping with the poetry of the American frontier. He said very little about his vocation—he worked in a factory—but admitted to being an artist, inventor, and a widower. Living in virtual seclusion, he devoted much of his time to study and writing. And with tears beginning to brim, his voice trembling with emotion, he said he knew Rappe well. Her friends had introduced him in 1917. “I loved Virginia Rappe,” he confessed,
for her innocence, her beauty and her gracious charm. The memories of my meetings with her are the most precious of my life. I loved her as a father does his only daughter. She was the embodiment of all I have missed in life—a child on whom I might lavish my affections.
Rivers claimed to have an “unusual platonic romance” with Rappe. But it didn’t last the winter. His poem faded in the rain. A cemetery employee removed his decorations. Eventually, a new visitor took up the rite and filled the urn with sprays of black acacias.
As Crystal Rivers mourned his imaginary daughter, newspapers continued to publish stories speculating in the existence of Virginia Rappe’s real daughter. Since such hearsay could prejudice the jury pool for People vs. Arbuckle, Matthew Brady spoke from the bully pulpit of the District Attorney’s office. “We are getting ready to fight tooth and nail for the conviction of Arbuckle,” he declared. “The propaganda being spread by the press is not worrying us a particle.” [. . .]
A recent image of the Rappe gravesite maintained by the Silent Film Cemetery Project
[1] pp. 000–000: John Berryman, “Dream Song 222,” The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux), 241; Gouverneur Morris, America and Arbuckle Trial, San Francisco Call, 7 November 1921, 1,2; “Grave of Girl Daily Visited,” San Francisco Examiner, 3 November 1921, 12; “Mystery Visitor Decorates Grave of Virginia Rappe,” Los Angeles Evening Herald, 3 November 1921, A12; “Identify Grave Visitor,” Los Angeles Evening Herald, 5 November 1921, A3; “Solve Rappe Grave Puzzle, Los Angeles Record, 5 November 1921, 2; “Mystery Suitor of Rappe Girl Tells of Affection,” San Francisco Examiner, 5 November 1921, 9; “Mystery Suitor Tells of Love for Rappe Girl,” Buffalo Times, 11 November 1921, 5; [, , ,]
We are finalizing our draft manuscript and not slacking off. Although some wags say it is too biblical in proportion, creating readable and engaging narrative is the priority. That said, this blog won’t be neglected for very long. We’d like to show some sample passages—teasers, if you will.
The title page for that part of the book devoted to the first Arbuckle trial. The epigraph is from “Dream Song 222,” by the poet John Berryman.
The following passage from our work-in-progress. Here we end our discussion of Virginia Rappe’s mother, Mabel Rapp and segue from her involvement with a wealthy young Chicago black sheep and check forger to her untimely death. Like other parts of the book, here we correct the mistakes made by other authors and disprove the myth that Mabel’s daughter, Virginia Rappe, appended the lowercase e to Rapp.
Such a revelation hasn’t been picked up yet by Wikipedia. We would rather someone else take the honor. FamilySearch.com is a valid source. You must search for “Rappi.”
The passage below also corrects her daughter’s middle name. It wasn’t “Caroline.” That can be corroborated by the 1910 Census.
While this may seem pedantic, such facts have a deleterious effect on the factoids told by others. Ultimately, we present a victimology and a revisionary history of the Arbuckle trials. Incidentally, we are still conducting research for certain voids. This includes finding an image of Mabel Rapp (and even a very young Virginia Rappe} from the 1890s. We know that Mabel resembled the actress Johnstone Bennett, who also died of a similar form of tuberculosis in 1906.
(1894) The Marie Burroughs Art Portfolio of Stage Celebrities, Chicago: A. N. Marquis & Company
Frank Parker and members of his gang, some of whom belonged to other wealthy Chicago families, were eventually released from jail for lack of evidence. Augustus Parker was reunited with his errant son who took up residence at the Auditorium Hotel and regained his listing in the Chicago Blue Book of 1900. During the last two years of his life, the elder Parker saw his investment of money, love, and tolerance pay off as his son joined the family firm and began to work his way back to Chicago from the Omaha office. Frank Parker lived in a succession of boarding houses, married in 1914, and died at the age of 49 in January 1918.
Mabel Rapp’s life—and that of the daughter seemingly absent from her life—also changed with her separation from Parker. But where he had the means to reform himself back in Chicago, Mabel had far fewer. She relocated to New York City to start a new life with her daughter in tow. There was likely little choice given the notoriety she had attracted in Chicago and the possibility of fame in the other city’s vaudeville circuit. The syndicated columnist Marjorie Wilson, during the weeks after Virginia Rappe’s death, interviewed individuals who knew of Mabel in New York in the early 1900s. They claimed that Mabel reinvented herself in the dance halls and theaters around Times Square as a performer who
dazzled admirers with her vivacity, her coquetry, her physical perfection, as she had done in Chicago. She sparkled in the chorus of Lillian Russell’s comic opera company. [. . .] She had little time for mothering the baby Virginia. The two lived at boarding houses and hotels and some of the time in a little flat on the outskirts of Greenwich Village. The baby called her “Mabel.”
Although Wilson refers to Virginia as “a baby,” she was old enough to attend grade school. And her “sister” Mabel was surely not the only one raising or supporting her “kid sister.” The woman who served as grandmother or mother to Virginia, depending on the time, place, and context, was certainly on hand.
Mabel Rapp had also added the extra syllable to her name with an acute French accent. But her reinvention as Mabel Rappé proved short lived and likely worse than maudlin as Wilson continues.
Probably it was to forget the mistake she had made, the place she had lost socially, that Mabel Rapp became a queen of night life in the cafes, drowning bitterness, sorrow, disillusion in waves of sensation, craving the excitement of gay music, the admiration and caresses of men, the tinkling of wine glasses, dulling the pangs of the misery of the past in the superficial pleasure of the moment.
Life in New York was good for a time. Mabel, her “mother,” and her “little sister” lived at 247 W. 50th and, later at 359, just off 8th Avenue in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen not far from the “Tenderloin District,” a neighborhood known for its gambling dens, burlesque halls, and poolrooms—and “creep joints,” the lowest kind of brothel, where patrons were robbed. Mabel, however, more likely provided for her family as she always had seeking out male admirers as a chorus girl in various Broadway productions according to Variety, whose informant, in 1921, also recalled an anecdote about Virginia Rappe. At the time, the automobile was “just coming into vogue” and Mabel and her kid “sister” were often seen being chauffeured to and from their apartment building, chased by street urchins teasing Virginia and calling her “Gasoline Zealine.”
Mabel had made a new life for herself and her family in New York City while her health gradually declined. She coughed. She spit up blood. On December 21, 1904, her condition had worsened to such an extent that she was taken to old St. Luke’s Hospital, near the cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue. She lingered over the Christmas holiday and died on January 7, 1905, in the early hours of the morning, attended by a Dr. Capito.
Mabel’s Rapp’s death certificate reveals she died of chronic pulmonary tuberculous and tuberculous adenitis, that is, scrofula. Once called the “king’s evil,” for it was once believed that if the English monarch touched the sufferer’s throat, the disease would cease to spread in its grotesque fashion. Thus, Mabel’s final moments would hardly resemble anything like the romantic notions of consumption found in, say, a popular novel of her day, Camille. Mabel’s fine neck and pretty face were likely disfigured by swellings and ulcers. She would have been unable to swallow.
Her death certificate is the only document that recorded her embellished name at the time. The informant also spelled the deceased woman’s father as Henry Rappé. The informant also knew the maiden name of the first, the real Virginia Rapp, Mabel’s mother. Of course, the woman who succeeded her, who cared for Mabel’s daughter and maintained the charades of mother, daughter, sister could have provided such details that make this document one of the few that seems honest. So, too, could the thirteen-year-old Virginia Z. Rappé.
There was a funeral in Chicago but no obituary in the newspapers. There were likely a few friends present but no family beyond the two who accompanied Mabel’s body back home, the woman who called herself Virginia Rapp and the adolescent Virginia Rappe. As for Mabel’s brother, Earle Rapp had grown up into a respectable young stock broker in the Chicago Exchange with an office in the Rookery building. He had a wife and a baby daughter. His child had been born in wedlock—and a man of his position relied on the trust placed in him. He could hardly risk being associated with his sister’s notoriety—or risk that of his niece seventeen years later.
During the third Arbuckle trial, in early April 1922, the prosecution called a surprise witness to the stand, Lillian Blake, a San Francisco photographer who claimed to have taken a single photograph of Virginia Rappe in September 1914. She testified that Rappe had spent about thirty minutes in her Geary Street studio.
Her purpose was to rebut the testimony of a defense witness, Helen Whitehurst, who claimed that Rappe attended her birthday party in Chicago in October 1914, where she drank an alcoholic beverage and fell ill. Arbuckle’s lawyers hoped to prove that she had a long history of exhibiting such symptoms as abdominal pain, hysterics, and tearing off her clothes, triggered by the effects of alcohol. These were the same symptoms she presented at the comedian’s Labor Day party on September 5, 1921.
Prosecutors contended that Rappe wasn’t in Chicago. Another of their witnesses said she was in New York during the autumn of 1914. A third also said San Francisco. Naturally, Arbuckle’s lawyer, Gavin McNab, used this confusion to his advantage. He asked the jury: How could Rappe be in two places at once? McNab could see the prosecutors were floundering. Their witnesses lacked credibility and the evidence was weak. As further proof that Rappe had been, at least, on the West Coast in late 1914, Blake held up an undated newspaper clipping of her photograph. She didn’t have an original.
We dug deeply for a source for that photo as we began to revise the work-in-progress. The problem was that Rappe wasn’t newsworthy on the west coast in 1914—except when she returned from abroad during the first week of January. She and another model made a splash when they exposed the frills and a good portion of the leggings of their long underwear or “pantalets.” Photographs of the pair aboard the SS Baltic appeared in U.S. newspapers for two months. Then she disappeared, leaving a void that Arbuckle’s lawyers filled with physicians who said they treated her and alleged companions in Chicago whose real lives proved to be, if we could use a contemporary expression, “sketchy.”
In the spring of 1915, however, Rappe’s image was again seen in newspapers across the nation as she began to publicize her new line of clothes. She also appeared in the society pages of some American newspapers in connection to her short-lived engagement to the Argentine diplomat Don Alberto d’Alkaine, who oversaw his nation’s pavilion at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
This made us question whether the prosecution co-opted one of these images to convict Arbuckle? We probably won’t ever know. But thanks to having more recently digitized and searchable San Francisco newspapers archives, we did uncover a little more of Rappe’s deeper connection to San Francisco and it does go back to September 1914. We discovered that Rappe’s liaison with d’Alkaine began around that time. The clue is a story in a front-page feature published in the San Francisco Bulletin in late July 1915. A week later, it was followed by a full-page spread devoted to Rappe’s design collection—and fashion advice.
What one can see below is that Rappe was committed to and invested in designing all kinds of outfits for women. So, why did she give it up—as well as d’Alkaine—for a precarious existence as merely the “best-dressed woman in Hollywood”?
During the first week of February 1922, Roscoe Arbuckle came close to being convicted of manslaughter in a San Francisco courtroom; the director William Desmond Taylor was found murdered in his Los Angeles home; and Will H. Hays, the new motion picture czar, was planning to come West to “clean up” Hollywood.
The producer Carl Laemmle and other film executives insisted that the majority of actors, actresses, and those behind the camera were moral people. But there was an undercurrent that ran counter to such glowing self-regard and, for our work-in-progress, it deserves study, context, and certain degree of respect.
Helen Merrill of the San Francisco Journal wrote a regular column with a feminist slant—as it was in the early 1920s—and, on February 17, she turned to allegory and parody to describe the delicate situation that Arbuckle made for his stakeholders: They were losing women, or, at least very influential women who weren’t going to stop with suffrage and Prohibition.
Such opinion pieces are now antiquated. But they help us imagine the Zeitgeist of the era. They reveal the hole Arbuckle had dug for himself during the weeks before his third trial and ultimate acquittal for manslaughter. Despite the effort undertaken to win over American women in the movie magazines— including reuniting Arbuckle with his estranged wife, he was still tainted by, if not guilty of, the death of Virginia Rappe.
Mrs. Merrill, like many American women, wasn’t focusing on “Fatty” but rather his Labor Day party. We know little about what happened, but it was likely once common knowledge on the streets of San Francisco and as far away as Los Angeles. Mrs. Merrill only needed to have casual conversations with fellow journalists, the police, detectives, lawyers, bailiffs et al. If she had sat in on the two previous trials, she would have heard what was in the lost court transcripts. The scantily clad guests, the pairing off, the multiple partners, who participated, as well as the liquor, smoking, eating, the dirty dancing of 1921, and the rest could be imagined, inferred from the sanitized reportage. Mrs. Merrill was a fixture in a rather chummy, well-connected world so could read between the lines. She knew the showgirls who partied with Arbuckle, the actor Lowell Sherman, and other male attendees.
And Rappe? She is lost in this parable. Long before she was wrongly portrayed as a “bit player” in so many Arbuckle case narratives, Rappe really was a bit player to Mrs. Merrill and her kind. They didn’t know if she was just another working girl at Arbuckle’s party or a good girl as she was initially portrayed, a pretty face whose smile Arbuckle mistook for a genuine interest in him.
Woman’s Editorial
by Helen Merrill
The moving picture Industry is a new empire containing the most powerful agencies for good and evil of any dominion since the beginning of the world. “It has no natural limit, but is as broad as the genius that can devise or the power that can win.” In its separate states, kings, queens and subjects have grown phenomenally rich as the empire’s sacred treasure, Aladdin’s lamp, has been passed among them. As they rubbed the lamp, behold! Precious gold poured into their laps. The multitude, rich, poor, old and young brought oil to feed the lamp. The children offered only drops of oil, but they were very precious and very great in number and made the flame burn more brilliantly than the oil that all others brought.
Certain rich men in the land discovered that the secret of releasing the lamp’s treasure was to turn its light upon pictures for the oil bearers to behold. Whoever conceived the most attractive pictures, whoever portrayed them were allowed to approach nearest to the lamp. Many fair maids and brave youth, in their eagerness. succumbed to temptation in order to win the magic lamp’s metal. Then, not I knowing what to do with their unaccustomed riches, wallowed in prodigality. Vice claimed them and they began to flaunt grossness, not only in their private lives. hut in licentious pictures.
But “the gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to scourge us.” Suddenly, a clown, Roscoe Arbuckle, whose antics made the people laugh, indulged in a base orgy where death entered in. It was then that the deceived multitude learned that the whole empire was threatened with decadency. As the lamp burned low, the rich men who had discovered its secret walled loudly and assembled to study the cause.
“It is because, though we have an empire,·we have no emperor,’’ they decided. So they sought in a place of honor, in the administration of the United States Government, one to become their ruler. He was Will Hays, who told them that the multitude brought lees oil to the lamp because they were offended, and feared that the hearts of the young would become petrified if they continued to behold evil.
The rich men at once decided to build a model city, where those who aspired to rub the lamp should live, and where there would be a community church erected for the dwellers in the city of virtue to rush in and hear good counsel.
But scarcely had the execution of the plans for improvement of the empire begun, when William D. Taylor, one or the rulers of an important state, was sent to his death. The multitude is again turning coldly from the lamp and the rich men of the empire are rending their garments and lamenting the changeableness of public opinion. Their new ruler, Will Hays, has doubtless counseled them that the world has at last awakened to the dangers which hover round the lamp, when its vicinity might so easily have been made a realm of security, honor and joy.
As the work or upbuilding goes on under his sway, may he succeed in persuading them to write in letters of fire upon the walls of all the temples: ‘‘Better that a millstone were hung about thy neck and that thou wert cast into the bottom of a well than that thou shouldst offend one of these little ones.’’
Art imitating life? Lowell Sherman with a pair of lovelies on his hands in Molly O (1922). This scene was filmed a few weeks before Arbuckle’s ill-fated party on September 5, 1921. (Archive.com)
. . . it is ever the trial of the scrupulous explorer to be saluted with the impatient scorn of chatterers who attempt only the smallest achievements, being indeed equipped for no other.
—George Eliot
The triteness of this entry’s title is, we hope, offset by gravitas of the above quote, found in another long book—but not as long as this one. Now for a report on the work-in-progress.
It is still seeing a second revision. But It is complete from end to end: the first honest exposé of Virginia Rappe and her accomplishments beyond having suffered a fatal injury at Roscoe Arbuckle’s Labor Day party in 1921. Of course, we parallel her brief life with Arbuckle’s abbreviated career as a motion picture actor. Then we cover each of his three trials for manslaughter in as much detail as the available sources allow.
As of today, the second trial, which occurred in January–February 1922, is done. It ended the day after the next big Hollywood scandal/mystery took place, the murder of William Desmond Taylor, which helped to make Arbuckle’s near-conviction a nonevent. Indeed, the second trial is typically the orphan proceeding among the other books on the Arbuckle shelf. That is because the second trial leaves in much of the implicit doubt, the uncertainty that these books leave out. Let’s hear from one of the jurors.
Nat Friedman was no less open regarding the jury deliberations and was counterintuitive to what the press—and Arbuckle’s lawyers—believed. His conviction “was the only logical verdict.” And did Arbuckle’s failure to take the stand influence the vote? Friedman answered with a qualified no. The jurors had to follow Judge Louderback’s instructions, that Arbuckle’s taking the stand at the first trial was “tantamount to a personal appearance” at the second. McNab wanted that very line item. However, that Arbuckle’s lead counsel failed to make an argument “certainly did” affect things, forcing the jurors to argue the case among themselves, so as to be thorough.
Going over the evidence in “businesslike fashion,” as Friedman put it, the majority from the beginning favored the state—and there was no ill feeling among the jurors as there was with the first trial jury. They had been civil throughout and
left the jury room as friendly a mind as when we went into it. Those who favored conviction were agreed that the case presented by the defense was one of the weakest we had ever heard. And as the evidence was presented, there was nothing else for us to do. We endeavored to follow the instructions of the court not to give weight to the fact that the defendant did not appear as a witness. From the reading of Arbuckle’s testimony at the last trial, the majority of the jurors were of the opinion that his story was contradictory.
Personally, I regarded the failure of the defense to argue the case as a confession of weakness [. . .] as though they were throwing up their hands. In our opinion, the case presented by the prosecution against Arbuckle was conclusive.
Friedman ended with praise for another Friedman and no relation. The young assistant district attorney, who shared the same surname, had presented the prosecution’s side of the case in a manner that was convincing and sincere. Leo Friedman, too, had also shown a certain empathy for Rappe, as the “victim” of a real crime. But her name had yet to come up as reporters went from one juror to another to get another juror to tell all.
(msp. 749)
We are well over 700 pages in manuscript. No small achievement—but the paragraphs are short, the dialogue that we have reclaimed keeps things moving, interesting, and committed to the truth—and the uncertainty.
Postscript: This is intriguing. Is the woman in the middle really Virginia Rappe? The hair looks right for 1919. The face could be hers. The gif was created from one of the Photoplay Magazine Screen Supplements. These monthly shorts, the brainchild of publisher James Quirk, ran from 1919 to mid-1920 and promised to show “The Stars as They Are.” Presumably, an intertitle identified the three actresses enjoying each other’s company: Edna Purviance, Virginia Rappe and, flanking her, Olive Thomas, months before her tragic death. What these images prove again is that Rappe wasn’t seen as a bit player among her peers. As to the provenance, the archival footage may have been included in the documentary Edna Purviance, the Angel from Nevada, shown at the 2006 Cinecon Film Festival.
Edna Purviance, left, with Virginia Rappe and Olive Thomas, from a Photoplay screen supplement pic.twitter.com/wUuQN6XW82
— Silent Movie GIFs (@silentmoviegifs) July 17, 2018
Spite Work: The Trials of Virginia Rappe and Fatty Arbuckle 