Update on the work in progress
Someone who, a hundred years from now, falsely repeats something evil about me, injures me right now. Immanuel Kant* Spite Work: The Trials of Virginia Rappe and “Fatty” Arbuckle, a revisionist history by James Reidel and Christopher Lewis is a completed manuscript of 970 mspp. and presently being copyedited The titles of the book’s parts…
The modern Sappho on the Arbuckle jury
[This entry is from our research, to trace how various individuals found their way into the Arbuckle case and how they fared afterward. Some end in tragedy. Some in ellipses, like Maude Delmont. But Irene Wilde was exceptional.] Irene Wilde (1884–1964) was one of five women on the jury of the third Arbuckle trial jury…
The urodynamics of the Arbuckle case
Consideration and respect for the female is all but universal in the sexual relationships of the animals below man; it is only at the furthest remove from the “brutes” among civilized men that sexual “brutality” is at all common. —Havelock Ellis Bladder rupture, the most consequential event leading to the death of Virginia Rappe, is…
Virginia Rappe’s “Pyjamarama” of 1915
Anyone who writes objectively about the manslaughter trials of Roscoe Arbuckle will notice that the image of Virginia Rappe, his alleged victim, fades from the press coverage of the three trials between November 1921 and April 1922. Immediately following her death on September 9, 1921 though there was a surfeit of Rappe photographs published. Many of…
NOLA: Zey handicaps the prosecution
The following passage from our work-in-progress is based on research for an earlier deprecated post and prefaces the third Arbuckle trial narrative. “Burn it up,” said Frank Mayo, “The Hollywood film colony is a pernicious influence.[1] Scatter it, abolish it—something ought to be down. Burn it up—I say!” The young leading man had been quoted…
Maude Delmont’s unrealized disambiguation
The following is an interpolation from our work-in-progress that allows for a segue between the second and first Arbuckle trials. The day after second Arbuckle trial ended in a hung jury, the San Francisco’s newspaper announced the possible engagements of the two women who were present when Virginia Rappe passed away in September.[*] Sidi Spreckels,…
A magic lantern slide for A Twilight Baby, Virginia Rappe’s only star billing
As we have been writing and editing our work-in-progress on Virginia Rappe and Roscoe Arbuckle, our blog entries have been fewer in number but hardly pushed aside. We were recently alerted to the object depicted below, an artifact from a critical turning point in the life of Virginia Rappe. Of course, many things we do…
Artist’s sketches from the second Arbuckle Trial
To our knowledge, the Arbuckle trials saw no courtroom artists as we have come to know their work, which often captures some compelling moment in a jury trial of public interest. During the second Arbuckle trial, however, the San Francisco Call enlisted the well-known American engraver and Western artist Fred Grayson Sayre to draw Roscoe…
Maude Delmont takes the blame, September 10, 1921
As we posted last week, during the second Arbuckle trial, the defense asserted that Maude Delmont had been the first to sign a statement that accused Roscoe Arbuckle of assaulting Virginia Rappe and dragging her into room 1219—not Alice Blake and Zey Prevost. But the prosecutors insisted that Blake and Prevost had done so, hence…
Minta Durfee takes the stand (or getting ahead of the court of public opinion)
We have been toying with incorporating certain contextualized documents in the book as interpolations or as parts of a conventional appendix. This piece, now in public domain, is inserted between the end of the first Arbuckle trial and the beginning of the second. Intermezzo: The True Story About My Husband[*] Mrs. Minta Durfee Arbuckle In…
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Spite Work: The Trials of Virginia Rappe and Fatty Arbuckle 