“McNab, Victorian, Flounders”—Bart Haley on the first day of jury deliberations, December 2, 1921

January 14, 2022January 17, 2022 / The Authors / Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, we reprinted one of Bart Haley’s reports from the first Arbuckle trial, which originally ran a century ago in the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger.

Haley’s pieces are more editorial than strict reportage and here he discusses the role of the woman jurors in the trial and the problem they presented for Arbuckle’s lead attorney, Gavin McNab.

Ultimately, the first Arbuckle trial ended in a hung jury when one woman, Helen Meany Hubbard, refusing to cast a ballot for acquittal. Over and over again she voted to convict Arbuckle of manslaughter in deliberations that dragged from December 2 to December 4, 1921. She might have been alone had not a fellow juror, Thomas Kilkenny, eventually joined her in the vote to convict.

Haley is prescient in regard to the kind of modern juror McNab faced. Mrs. Hubbard, the wife of a lawyer, attributed her decision to the prosecution’s logical presentation of the circumstantial evidence, especially the fingerprints that indicated a struggle between Arbuckle and Rappe. Hubbard, too, found Arbuckle’s “Good Samaritan” testimony to be false. But it was Gavin McNab’s courtroom performance that she found particularly offensive. (For more on Hubbard, we suggest reading Joan Myer’s “Virginia Rappe & the Search for the Missing Juror.”)

Arbuckle Jury Split; Is Locked Up Over Night

Two of Women Jurors Reported Holding Out for Conviction of Comedian
Acquittal May come When Court Meets Today
Fatty and Friends Worried by Delay—Had Hoped for Speedy Liberty
His Wife Breaks Down
Prosecutor Arranges to Guard Actor from Violence in Case He Is Freed

By Bart Haley

San Francisco, Dec. 3.—The jury before which Fatty Arbuckle has been on trial for manslaughter is split and temporarily deadlocked.

Two of the five women members were reported this morning to have been holding out for the conviction. After seven hours of deliberation and seven ballots, the foreman reported at 11:10 last night that no agreement had been reached.

The court had remained in special session. The jury was locked up with orders to go to work again today. The court will reconvene at 10 o’clock. Fatty and his counsel and his friends, who had been hoping and laboring for an immediate and spontaneous acquittal, were shocked.

(It will be 1 o’clock in Philadelphia when the court meets today.)

The big comedian, whose troubles, the first real ones of his life, began with the Labor Day gin-and-orange juice party which Virginia Rappe was carried with mortal injuries, was badly shaken for the news from the jury room. For hours he had waited in an agony of anxiety which he could not quite conceal.

The building was invaded by a curious mob. Judge Louderback had informed the jury that he would wait until 11 0’clock. This decision followed the failure of the jury to reach a verdict in two hours of wrangling that preceded the dinner hour. At 11 o’clock there was no sign of life from the jury room. A deputy sheriff was sent to make inquiries. He returned with the news that a verdict had not been reached and that the jury wanted ten minutes of grace to try again. It tried again and failed.

Fatty stood up in the brilliantly lighted courtroom and reached wearily for his hat. Even the anti-Fattys felt a momemt of pity. Mrs. Arbuckle, who was sitting behind her husband, arose, sat down again, opened her handbag, got out her handkerchief and began to cry.

Only Gavin McNab, chief of Fatty’s counsel, appeared unmoved. The other lawyers looked dismal, but resigned.

“I’m not worried,” said Fatty, “it’ll be all right. But I wish they would hurry.”

There were good reasons why hurry seemed desirable. Doubts and wrangling and delays and the dim possibility of a permanent disagreement were not likely to help toward a calf-killing in the land of films or to make the way easy for the return from Elba, which, to Fatty, is almost as important as liberty itself.

A verdict of acquittal is expected today. Arbuckle, his sisters, his wife, his counsel and the friends who were with him when he went unhappily through the jammed corridors on the way to his hotel felt so sure of an acquittal on the first ballot that they were prepared to leave for Los Angeles this afternoon.

District Attorney Brady and his assistants were not in court last night. They left with the manner of men washing their hands of the whole business at the close of their final arguments and after a day of extremely bitter interchanges with the lawyers for the defense.

But Brady has provided a strong guard to protect the tragic funny man from cranks who have been sending him violent and threatening letters.

The ground over which the battle for Fatty’s liberty and rehabilitation has raged furiously and without rest since November 11 was strewn with strange wreckage last night. Mrs. B. Maud Delmont, who was the most conspicuous of the women guests at the fatal Labor Day party, was taken from her hotel last night and placed in jail under a bigamy charge registered by the authorities of Madera County. It was Mrs. Delmont who first accused Arbuckle of being the direct cause of Virginia’s injuries.

Irene Morgan, who was found poisoned in her hotel here on Thursday, returned, still very ill, to Los Angeles this morning. She had been brought into court as a witness for the defense. The police and private detectives, after working for twenty-four hours without sleep in an effort to find a man who was presumed to have poisoned Irene, quit the search in disgust.

They had sought high and low for a vehicle called, in the bright idiom of the police, “the poison taxicab”—a taxicab in which Miss Morgan said she rode just before a mysterious gentleman, “appearing much like one of District Attorney Brady’s detectives,” gave her deadly orange juice and poisoned candy. Physicians who were called in frantic haste to the Clift House [Hotel], where Irene was found, said last night that so far as they could determine, the young woman took a great overdose of headache powders, accidentally or otherwise.

The ante-mortem statement obtained by the physicians when they thought Irene was going to die glistens with the strange poetry of delirium. It is all about love and a noble past and proud ancestors in Sweden and a Duke from Spelice and the dead Virginia.

Mrs. Minnie Neighbours, of Los Angeles, another of the women who gave some of the most helpful evidence for the defense, is waiting here to answer formally to a perjury charge on Monday. District Attorney Brady caused Mrs. Neighbours’ arrest and said that her evidence was wholly false.

Fatty and his counsel have found time from all their other troubles to stand manfully by the refugees. Their doctors treated Miss Morgan. The lawyers will defend Mrs. Neighbours. Mrs. Delmont, who started all the trouble, will seemingly see the last of it. She will be left to shift for herself.

The mill of the trial ground on unhindered by these reports from the outside world or news of stragglers overcome by the wayside. The jury retired at 4:10 after Gavin McNab and Assistant District Attorney U’Ren finished their respective appeals. The courtroom and the corridors were packed and there was a mob in the street. McNab assailed District Attorney Brady by name and the District Attorney assailed McNab.

“No innocent man,” said Mr. U’Ren, “would have kept still as Arbuckle did, until he was driven by the collapse of his counsel’s case to stand in this court and tell a story that is obviously untrue. Through perjury and hypocrisy, he is seeking his freedom.”

McNab again bitterly charged Brady with maintaining a system of organized terrorism in his office. When he was not addressing himself particularly to the women of the jury. McNab made masterly use of the material at his disposal. When he addressed himself to the women, he made it clear, perhaps for the first time, that equal rights of citizenship have created a new dilemma for lawyers.

Should you appeal to the minds or to the emotions of women in the jury box? Mr. McNab appealed proudly to their emotions, to their emotions only, and the experiment—which may become historic—didn’t terminate auspiciously.

Judge Louderback’s charge to the jury sounded almost like a recommendation for conviction. And the first rumors from the jury room indicated that all five women members desired ardently to send Mr. Arbuckle to jail. Stephen Hopkins, a thirteenth juror, who was held as an alternate until the deliberation of the jury began and then released, reflected the other side of the jury’s mind when he said he could see no reason for a conviction.

About the state of mind of the five women of the jury there were from the first differences of opinion as wide as the seas. They were among the first women who ever sat in judgment on a case of the sort which, involving spectacular crimes or spectacular misfortunes of one of their own sex, would normally be decided by the blundering and purely masculine code known in courts as the unwritten law.

The jury had a wide, an almost limitless, latitude for the exercise of its sympathies or its prejudices. Neither the prosecution nor the defense pleaded a clear case. To an impartial eye it was plain that the State’s direct evidence was not sufficient to prove Fatty guilty, in a court or out of it. Neither did Mr. McNab and his associates demonstrate Fatty’s innocence. Only Fatty himself knows what went on in the room from which Virginia Rappe was carried to die.

When, after all the noise and clamor of the closing arguments was over, the lawyers admitted that they had felt, addressing the women of the jury, as if they were talking into a void or appealing to a granite wall. But the jury women toward the last were not merely inscrutable. They were more obviously bored and weary—weary of Fatty and the wrangling of McNab and Brady, of the doctors and the lingo of the clinics, of everybody in the courtroom, of the repeated loud references to gin and orange juice.

When at last the jury left the courtroom at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, Fatty looked after them forlornly and his lawyers crowded about to make cheerful prophecies. Women, they told themselves and their client, were not fools about these things. Women could not be swayed by the befuddling sentimentalism that might cause men to do crazy things in cases like this. Women might be tender-hearted about all the rest of the world, but they were hard-boiled in relation to one another.

So the minutes passed. Fatty’s lawyers watched the clock anxiously and returned to the fear that was rending with them within. McNab, they were sure, had got to the jury. They felt that his address had been very moving. But it was not moving. Upon McNab it fell to initiate the long, long series of experiments which may have to be continued for years before lawyers of the present schools are able to talk effectually to mixed juries.

And upon the site of the Hall of Justice, lawyers of the future may yet erect in gratitude a monument in memory of Fatty’s chief of counsel and inscribe upon it: “On this spot Gavin McNab first demonstrated for posterity the manner in which a jury of the new age should not be addressed.”

McNab was Victorian. He begged the ladies of the jury to have no illusions. Yet he himself seemed full of them. McNab, the winner of a thousand great suits, the wise guide of a political party and mentor of a multitude of young lawyers, floundered when he sought to touch the consciousness of five average women and behaved like a mariner in uncharted waters at night. He began with Bethlehem and ended with “suffer the little children to come unto Me.”

He talked of the millions of children who had laughed at this most unfortunate man and dwelled long and tenderly upon the tradition of an unerring child’s instinct which he recommended as culminating proof of Fatty Arbuckle’s innocence and the cold brutality of the District Attorney’s office. McNab told of the need for a continuous reverence for all women.

At about the same moment, Irene Morgan in a mild delirium was telling them at the Clift Hotel to prepare for Duke of Spelice, who was coming to take her riding, and begging to be told where Virginia Rappe was. Mrs. Neighbours, another Arbuckle witness, was waiting to face a charge of perjury and Mrs. Maud Delmont, the third troubled woman in the case, was being taken to jail.

Fatty’s big car—someone said casually the other day it cost as much as a good-sized church—was waiting outside at the curb. It was not going to hang around the Hall of Justice a moment longer than was absolutely necessary. It was gassed and chauffeured for swift departure from this scene of trouble.

The jury had been out about twenty minutes when one of the Arbuckle counsel, who had passed a door that leads almost directly into the jury room, sat down among his associates and in almost inaudible whisper uttered one word:

“Wrangling!”

Had McNab trusted too greatly to the woman of bright legend, to the woman of books written by sentimental men who make the unwritten law and not enough to the woman who votes? The thought may have occurred to some of the watchers.

It clearly did not occur to Fatty. He was not thinking. The blood was beating in his temples and upon his face fell the look of a man falling endlessly through space. There ensued a period of harrowing suspense until the jury disappeared stolidly to its hotel for dinner.

And the big car turned and rolled slowly down the street, but only to return at 8 o’clock. One salient had been lost. The battle waged for three weeks was not only for the Arbuckle of the present but for the Arbuckle of the future as well. A quick, unhesitating acquittal by the jury had been hoped for by the defense.

After the shock of the first disappointment, Fatty recovered and seemed to feel better. He loafed for a while in the corridor, when he returned, and smoked cigarettes, leaning comfortably against the wall.

“It’ll be all right,” said he. “I’m not a bit worried now, but I wish they’d hurry.”

Roscoe Arbuckle in court, December 1921 (*Calisphere*)

First Arbuckle trial: Milton U’Ren’s closing argument, December 2, 1921

January 7, 2022January 17, 2022 / The Authors / Leave a comment

Milton U’Ren grinned, his teeth crooked and sharp in the long, lean face.

—Ace Adkins, Devil’s Garden

The hiatus in our blog entries is, of course, due to the holidays. But we are drafting one of the key chapters in the book, with the working title “Spontaneous Rupture of the Bladder.” What follows is the final argument of the first trial given by one of Roscoe Arbuckle’s most dogged prosecutors, Assistant District Attorney Milton U’Ren. Arbuckle case narratives—with the exception of Greg Merritt’s—don’t give U’Ren his due as an important figure in the three Arbuckle trials. Typically, if there is a mention of him, he is demonized, albeit as a minor demon. While many writers attribute some personal animus for Arbuckle on the part of District Attorney Matthew Brady, it is evident in the transcripts that it was U’Ren who was most determined to see Arbuckle brought to heel.

This hostility was noted during the first week of the Arbuckle trial, when U’Ren routinely referred to Arbuckle as a has-been.

Having no real political aspirations or agenda, U’Ren likely saw Arbuckle as an avatar of the sins of the motion picture industry. U’Ren was a Progressive Republican who shared Theodore Roosevelt’s belief that an unhealthy body betrayed unhealthy behavior. (Roosevelt, as a boy, took to heart being diagnosed as “suffering from a handicap of riches.) Then there is also the possibility that U’Ren wanted to avenge Virginia Rappe—a task that could hardly be left to Maude Delmont, a woman he saw as just another debauchee. But, lastly, and more likely, U’Ren was the father of two young daughters, aged five and seven. That motivation also applied to two others who regarded Arbuckle as an uninhibited predator. Matthew Brady’s only child was a daughter and Captain of Detectives Duncan Matheson also had two daughters.

On December 1, 1921, Milton U’Ren’s fellow prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Leo Friedman, presented the first half of the prosecution’s closing argument. He was followed by Arbuckle’s lead defense attorney Gavin McNab, whose closing argument continued into the next day.

Otis M. Wiles of the Los Angeles Times thought “the dynamic and youthful prosecution attorney” had an effect on the jury. “For one hour and forty-six minutes,” Wiles wrote, “Friedman literally dragged Roscoe up and down before the jury of five women and seven men, nailed him to the cross of justice and pelted him with the defilements of his mental makeup.” Indeed, without using a rather new word for 1921, Friedman presented Arbuckle as a sociopath. But any “wounds” he delivered on the comedian, according to Wiles, “soon were alleviated by the healing power of McNab’s soothing syrup voice”, his “mellow Scotch accent,” and his “genial smile.”

A natural orator like fellow Democrat William Jennings Bryant, McNab could sway a jury with the force of his voice, figures of speech, and frequent allusions to American decency and the Bible. Most journalists at the trial sided with him and devoted more column space to his exposition.

Milton U’Ren’s was treated as footnote in most newspapers. We wanted to present as much of it as possible because the prosecution of Roscoe Arbuckle was very much U’Ren’s project and his contribution deserves to be restored. The following is taken from our work-in-progress. Without a transcript of the first Arbuckle trial—which exceeded 2,200 pages or 525,000 estimated words—we extracted quotations from the extant reportage, compared them, and harmonized them to render a narrative that comes close to the original language and order of each speaker’s address to the jury. This method is provisional and comes with caveats that all the quotations used are based on contemporary reporters’ notes. Their objective was to get the feel and intent of the original. So have we. But our objective is to pull as much together of the Arbuckle trial experience as possible.

From left to right, Milton T. U’Ren sitting next to Roscoe Arbuckle and his criminal defense lawyer, Frank Dominguez, September 1921 (*San Francisco Public Library*)

Gouverneur Morris was a regular attendee at the Arbuckle trial and published his occasional vignettes.[1] Like other journalists behind the rail of Judge Louderback’s courtroom, he had taken sides. Morris believed that Arbuckle had “spoken the truth” on the stand. Morris questioned nothing and took to task the person responsible for the comedian’s long ordeal. “[Frank] Dominguez,” he wrote, “lost his head, forgot that it was his client who was the million-dollar actor, assumed the role himself, ranted, mistook friends for enemies, antagonized everybody in sight and imposed absolute silence upon Arbuckle.”

Morris had good reason to take sides. He had just enjoyed a year of success as a scriptwriter and hoped to enjoy another, as well as the perquisites and status of the film colony in Los Angeles. No doubt, too, Morris represented the feelings of not only the press but many in the motion picture industry, that what happened to Virginia Rappe should be put behind them. Nothing would bring her back and there was barely enough of her on screen to remember, to fill a couple of matinees.

As to the closing arguments, in the last piece Morris posted from the Arbuckle trial, he hardly looked forward to them. “[W]e shall listen to Friedman and U’Ren saying absolutely nothing for four mortal hours.”

* * *

Gavin McNab would be a hard act to follow. Even fair-minded observers had to admit that Arbuckle’s lead attorney had the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, as well as the press, in the palm of his hand. That Matthew Brady had chosen not to speak was noticed. To his harsher critics, Brady’s not taking “the splendid opportunity to deliver an address to the jury,” wasn’t a result of exhaustion or burnout but that he was distancing himself from an impending acquittal.

All that remained was for the prosecution to go through the motions of a challenger falling behind on points and trying to avoid a knockout. Nevertheless, the “challenger” had the irrefutable fact that two people entered room 1219 and one came out.

Around 2:15 p.m., Assistant District Attorney Milton T. U’Ren rose to speak, picking up where the defense had left off—the image of Arbuckle’s adoring young fans—and with a voice that rivaled McNab’s at least in volume. Taking umbrage at McNab’s comparing Arbuckle to Christ and praise for simply not dropping Virginia Rappe on the way to room 1227, U’Ren responded:

What would the millions of little children say if they could have seen “Fatty,” the modern Belshazzar, dressed in pajamas, surrounded by his lords and ladies, drinking, dancing, and “kidding around?” What would these children say if they could have seen him putting the ice on the nude body of Miss Rappe as she writhed in pain? And what would their mothers say? The great Belshazzar saw the handwriting on the wall and quaked as it was interpreted. “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Your kingdom shall be divided among the Medes and Persians. That night Belshazzar was killed and the city overrun with enemies.

“The modern King Belshazzar has also seen handwriting on the wall,” U’Ren continued, alluding to the fingerprints on the hotel door in the same breath as he alluded to the ill-fated King of Babylon in the Book of Daniel. “The king is dead, and his kingdom is divided. He will never make the world laugh again. The king is dead. Thank God!”

Described like a cartoon character, Edward Doherty of the Chicago Tribune simply wrote a “little man, U’Ren, red faced, spectacles, bald—but he can shout.” But those familiar with Milton U’Ren from other trials knew that he, while not the orator, could sway juries “by talking quietly and reasoning logically.” And in a calmer voice, U’Ren explained that the defense had based its case upon “perjury and hypocrisy rather than upon facts. [. . .] Arbuckle’s story cannot withstand your scrutiny,” he said, “nor can it weaken the chain of circumstances against him.”

Arbuckle’s testimony was what the prosecution had been waiting for, having been limited to nothing but circumstantial evidence. In Arbuckle they surely believed they had the ultimate perjurer—one who had foolishly testified on his own behalf when he wasn’t required to do so. McNab wanted to credit Arbuckle for that. But he knew the day before he agreed to letting Arbuckle take the stand that it could work against him. U’Ren only needed to present it as a fabrication. Then, at best, only one juror was needed to keep the case alive and so move past this jury, which U’Ren, like Brady, like his other deputies, saw as tampered, an impression reinforced by the jurors nodding, smirking, winking, and their rapt attention to McNab this morning.

U’Ren declared that the defense had been opportunists, having no basis for their case and having proposed no theory for Rappe’s death until they heard the prosecution’s evidence. Here, of course, U’Ren exaggerated, given that Frank Dominguez had already introduced the argument that Rappe had a preexisting condition that made her bladder prone to spontaneous rupture.

“It was then” he said, “that they manufactured the story that Arbuckle told—manufactured it to meet the evidence presented by the prosecution.” McNab’s argument yesterday and today “was not a summary of the case but merely an attack upon the District Attorney.” Then U’Ren cannily reminded that Matthew Brady had been a reform candidate who had beaten Charles Fickert, a man the defense presumably would have preferred. “The present District Attorney is not Mr. McNab’s District Attorney,” U’Ren continued. “Attacking this public officer is merely throwing dust in the jury’s eyes.”

After excoriating Arbuckle for his silence and testimony, U’Ren refuted the defense’s clever dismissals of the fingerprints as the ghostly hands of “spooks” and turned the incessant ridicule of Professor Heinrich against them. U’Ren, too, should have been credited with the cleverest allusion of the day, besting his comparison of Arbuckle to Belshazzar.

Another writer fascinated by the science of criminology and fingerprinting in the late nineteenth century was Mark Twain. U’Ren returned to the prosecution table and picked up a copy of Twain’s 1894 satire of penny-dreadfuls, Puddin’head Wilson, to illustrate that such an admired American author, familiar to everyone, understood the reliability of fingerprints in criminal cases.

Sitting at the defense table, Nat Schmulowitz, a bibliophile of satirical works who prized the issues of Century Magazine in which Twain’s novel had been serialized, knew where U’Ren was headed. Twain’s hero, an eccentric small town Missouri lawyer, David Wilson, could be seen in the person of Professor Heinrich during the presentation of the fingerprints on the hotel door. Deemed soft in the head by fellow townsfolk for his then-obscure use of fingerprints in crime detection, Wilson solves a murder with by distinguishing between the fingerprints of twins. Comparing him to Heinrich, who had been made out to be an egghead, a fool, and an innocent fraud by the defense’s fingerprint experts and many in the press, was a master stroke by U’Ren and not too obscure for the jury. Twain’s novel was still popular twenty years later and had been adapted into a stage play and motion picture. The maxims of Puddin’head Wilson’s Calendar were and still are pearls of Twainian wisdom (e.g., “It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.”).

Schmulowitz objected to U’Ren’s attempt to read from the book but was overruled by Judge Louderback (a personal decision, perhaps, since the novel centers around the murder of a judge). The “offending” passage is unknown, but it was likely from the penultimate Chapter XXI, Doom, in which Wilson, much like Heinrich, describes the criminal act in a courtroom with white sheets of cardboard with pantographic enlargements of “bewildering maze of whorls or curves or loops,” a person’s “natal autograph.”

Just after three o’clock, U’Ren closed in a long speech, excoriating Arbuckle before the jury much as he had in the beginning of his argument.

He sat there surrounded by his lords and his ladies, this man who Mr. McNab says has made the children of America laugh. He appeared in his pajamas before this mixed audience, this world’s comedian, this Good Samaritan who Mr. McNab says was merely helping a sick girl. A Good Samaritan! I proclaim him a moral leper!

This man who made the world laugh—my God!—who made the world laugh. I wonder what the children and their mothers would have though could they have seen him as he placed the ice on this poor girl’s body. He may have made them laugh before, but thank God! He never will make the world laugh again!

Do your duty so that when you go home and you can look your fellow citizens in the face. Do your duty so that you may take your children to your breast with the full knowledge that they will be protected from this man and others like him. Do your duty so that this man and all the other Arbuckles in the world will know that the womanhood of American is not their plaything.

U’Ren ended his argument at 3:20 in the afternoon. Not long afterward, the trial entered its third phase as Judge Louderback instructed the jury on coming to a verdict.

[1] This passage is based on Gouverneur Morris, “‘Fatty’s’ Story Late but True, Thinks Morris,” Des Moines Tribune, 29 November 1921, 3; Gouverneur Morris, “Rebuttal Adds Little to Case against Fatty,” Des Moines Tribune, 1 December 1921, 17; ; James Gordon, “Minister Tells Highlights in ‘Fatty’ Case,” Los Angeles Evening Herald, 1 December 1921, 1; Oscar H. Fernbach, “Woman Votes Actor Guilty, Says Report,” San Francisco Examiner, 3 December 1921; Marjorie C. Driscoll, “Arbuckle Jury Retires at 4:10 to Deliberate,” San Francisco Chronicle, 3 December 1921, 7; ; Otis M. Wiles, “No Verdict Returned,” Los Angeles Times, 3 December 1921, I:1, I:2; and other corroborative sources.

Katherine Nelson Fox, Virginia Rappe’s guardian

December 18, 2021January 17, 2022 / The Authors / Leave a comment

The following is a passage from our work-in-progress taken from the testimony of the first Arbuckle trial on Tuesday, November 29, 1921. This was a day of rebuttal witnesses following the dramatic testimony of the previous day, in which Roscoe Arbuckle told his version of what happened at his Labor Day party (discussed in a recent entry).

The last rebuttal witness to appear was Katherine Nelson Fox, who was Virginia Rappe’s friend and mentor from about the age of eight until Rappe left Chicago for “movieland” as some reporters put it. Her testimony was needed to refute hysterical episodes from Rappe’s past to which Harry Barker, Rappe’s Chicagoland boyfriend, testified on November 25 (covered here).

Born Antoinette Catherine Nelson in 1877 to a Swedish farm family in Kinbrae, Minnesota, Fox moved from her rural hamlet to Minneapolis and then Chicago. In 1899, while living in the same boarding house, Fox befriended Virginia Rappe and her family, which then consisted of her mother, Mabel Rapp, and her putative grandmother, Virginia Rapp.

Catherine (later changed to Katherine) Fox, early 1900s (*Private collection*)

In 1900, the Rapp family moved to New York City and Fox didn’t see Virginia again until five years later, when she and her grandmother returned to Chicago’s South Side following the death of Virginia’s mother, Mabel, from tuberculosis in January 1905. By then, the family was in financial need and Fox interceded as a kind of guardian and governess for Rappe. Although it was Mabel, rather than Virginia, who first added the “e” to the family surname, it may have been used infrequently until Fox revived its use for her young protégé.

In 1908, after Fox married Albert M. Fox, a wealthy salesman for the American Window Glass Co, she had the means to do more for Rappe and likely paid for her dance lessons and pushed her into modeling and the theater—indeed, to follow her mother Mabel’s career but without the promiscuity, drug addiction, and disease that led to her short life.

Katherine Fox testified at all three Arbuckle trials and, like Rappe, faced people from her past who she asserted had fabricated stories about her. For example, at the third trial, a Chicago doctor, who claimed to have lived in the same boarding house of 1899, said that Katherine Fox went by “Dot” Nelson and had him treat a teenage Rappe for a bladder disorder in the early 1900s. (Following Arbuckle’s acquittal, the same doctor was later arrested for selling morphine prescriptions in Omaha, Nebraska—more about him later in another entry.)

As with many sections in our book, it is based on an aggregation of many newspaper accounts that we have “curated” into a detailed narrative. This is especially true of the Arbuckle trials, for which there are no extant transcripts known to exist.

N.b. We are preparing a glossary of names for referencing the many names one must bear in mind in such a complicated legal case.

Gavin McNab was surely pleased to hear that his co-counsel Charles Brennan had been successful in preventing one of the Superior Court judges from issuing a warrant for the arrest of defense witness Minnie Neighbors. All Brennan had to do was show Judges Griffin and Shorttail a note McNab had jotted down saying that the District Attorney wasn’t acting in good faith and that the defense should be heard before any warrants were issued. Since these judgeships were elected positions, McNab’s political clout probably carried some weight—as did Brennan’s height and persuasiveness.

Brady, of course, wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Perjury was a felony, and he could issue his own warrant. But now he was denied the imprimatur of the Superior Court and any arrests of a defense witness would be seen as an act of desperation as were Brady’s frequent claims of “bought” and “coached” witnesses.

Still, McNab knew the strengths and weaknesses of his witnesses. Though Arbuckle’s attorney, Milton Cohen, had vetted them, they weren’t angels and McNab knew Brady would be relentless in discrediting them. Brennan had gotten into a shouting match with Brady and now communication between the two sides was no longer collegial.

The witnesses who most concerned McNab were Virginia Rappe’s foster mothers. Her last, “Aunt Kate” Hardebeck, had proved her mettle on the stand again that morning. Her willingness to go from one judge to another to sign a complaint against Mrs. Neighbors revealed her determination to protect Rappe’s reputation. There was little doubt that Hardebeck knew Rappe as well as anybody, having retained a vestige of her role as chaperone to Rappe, even in Henry Lehrman’s house and around Hollywood, where “Aunt Kate” was often in tow.

That afternoon McNab had to contend with another foster mother, one possibly more compelling for swaying a jury than “Aunt Kate”. Mrs. Katherine Fox had come from Chicago and that alone meant she was in court to put up a fight for “her child.” Brady had been clever not to show this card until the second week of the trial—before it was known that Mrs. Fox would be Harry Barker’s rebuttal witness.

Much had changed in Katherine Fox’s life since Virginia Rappe grew up and made her own way in the world. In 1908, while still known as Catherine Nelson, she married Albert Mortimer Fox, a salesman for the American Window Glass Company. Albert Fox was nearly twenty years older than his bride and a man well established in his line of work. He had grown up in the profitable plate glass business where demand from builders was high and growing steadily as taller office buildings were being built. His family owned a glass-rolling mill in Oneida County, New York, as well as other factories, and, after his widowed mother, Kate, was widowed a second time, Albert stood to eventually inherit a considerable fortune.

As the new Mrs. Fox, Catherine began to spell her first name with a “k” like her husband’s mother. She enjoyed an upper middle-class life in Chicago as is evident in a photograph taken shortly after her marriage where she is seen in stylish clothes, furs, and a Pekingese in her arms, perhaps in lieu of children for she and her husband had none save for Virginia Rappe, who still figured in their lives until she moved to Los Angeles.

When Mrs. Fox took the stand at the first Arbuckle trial, she was a widow living in Chicago’s fashionable Hyde Park neighborhood on East 51^st Boulevard, across from the arboretum at Washington Park. Her husband Albert had died intestate in November 1917 and she inherited not only his property but a good portion of his mother’s estate in stocks, bonds, and real estate, including five islands in the St. Lawrence River.

Among the real estate holdings, apparently some of the most valuable parcels were burial plots in Maple Grove Cemetery in Kew Gardens, Queens, which her husband believed had been gifted to him. While Mrs. Fox was on a cruise of the Far East and Australia in 1918, her husband’s brother Frank disputed her claim. He died in 1919 and the last surviving brother, Floyd, took his place and the case was appealed all the way to the New York State Supreme Court.

Still in her early forties with auburn hair and a Roman nose, Mrs. Fox was a trim, handsome woman. M. D. Tracy described her as a “pleasing picture in luxurious black furs enhanced by contrast, with an ivory white throat.” Examined by Milton U’Ren, Fox spoke slowly and carefully, describing her first encounter with Virginia Rappe and her perspective on the young woman’s health in childhood and after.

“I had known Miss Rappe since she was six years old,” she began, having met the girl in 1899, when she was actually seven or eight years old. “She was living with her mother and grandmother at an exclusive boarding house.”

Fox continued, describing how the young Rappe was a normal and healthy child in every way who liked to play outside in the neighborhood, play games with her friends, skate, ride her bicycle, and the like. From 1900 to 1905, the Rapp family left Chicago for New York. When they returned, it was just Virginia and her grandmother and, for a time in 1905, Rappe came to live with Fox when she was still single and going by her maiden name of Nelson—although this last detail wasn’t given or reported.

“As a child,” Fox recalled, “Virginia was very active. She was an outdoor girl and fond of all sports.”

“Virginia studied toe-dancing and high-kicking,” she continued. “She took many dancing lessons—a great deal of exercise. She also was a roller-skater.”

From 1908 to 1911, Fox saw Rappe frequently. When her grandmother died in 1911, Rappe went to live with Mrs. Hardebeck. From 1912 to 1913, Fox recalled that Rappe was employed as a model for a woman displaying gowns” through the “Great Lakes states.” Fox knew that Rappe had been a fashion model in New York as well as Chicago—and that she had traveled to London and the Pacific Coast.

“The girl,” said Fox, “was always in perfect health and she drank very little. I have seen her at my own house refuse cocktails that were served at dinner.”

“Did you ever see her in paroxysms of pain?” U’Ren asked. “Did you ever see her tear off her clothing or her garters or stockings?”

Fox answered “no” to these questions, eliciting an image of Virginia Rappe’s early life that hardly resembled the fallen young girl that McNab’s Chicago witnesses described.

“I never saw her take a drink of intoxicants,” Fox added.

“Did you ever dine with her where intoxicants were served?”

“Yes, in my own home. But she never partook of them.”

“Did you ever see her sick or in bed?” U’Ren asked, in reference to a time in 1913 when Rappe lived in Fox’s apartment.

“No, except when she was in bed asleep.” Fox also said that she never saw Miss Rappe hysterical with pain or tearing her clothes.

Rappe had been a “daring motorist since the age of fourteen” and enjoyed “a bit of romance—but it was cut short.”

U’Ren had been slowly, painstakingly building toward this, so much so that Oscar Fernbach quipped that the prosecutor “would need eighteen years,” and the spectators could look forward to “a long and hard winter in court.”

“Do you know Harry B. Barker of Gary, Indiana?

Fox answered “yes.”

“Was he engaged to Virginia Rappe?”

“Yes, he was.”

Fox added, “I knew it because he and Virginia told me so.”

“Was the engagement broken?”

“Yes.”

“She broke it?”

“Miss Rappe did.”

“How do you know she broke the engagement?”

“I was present,” Fox replied. She heard Rappe break off the engagement one evening. “It was at the Bismarck Gardens in Chicago,” Fox recalled, “She said—” but what Rappe said “the world will never know,” observed M. D. Tracy. In his telling, it was “because a hardened district attorney unromantically flung a vigorous fist into the air and announced that such things had nothing to do with the case.” The opposite was true, however. The defense actually made the objection, calling U’Ren’s new line of questions and Mrs. Fox’s answers “collateral testimony” upon which their witness, Barker, couldn’t be impeached.

In response, U’Ren said that such testimony would establish a motive for Barker—that it was spite. Judge Louderback sustained the objection but, as Oscar Fernbach put it, what Fox did say made it look “mighty bad for Barker’s testimony.”

When Katherine Fox was turned over for cross-examination, McNab had only one question for the elegant widow who had made herself out to be Rappe’s guardian angel. He knew almost nothing about her and was waiting for Albert Sabath to find someone in Chicago with more information and that required time. So, in the interim, McNab made a move that he thought would counter Brady’s strategy of tainting the defense witnesses. McNab linked Mrs. Fox to a witness whose bias against Arbuckle was by now well established. “Were you with Maude Bambina Delmont yesterday?” he asked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Fox answered, “I was with her all afternoon.”

“That’s all,” McNab concluded.

Wire service image of Katherine Fox, November 1921 (*Newspapers.com*)

Bart Haley: Journalism the way it was at the first Arbuckle trial

December 18, 2021January 17, 2022 / The Authors / 1 Comment

Bart Haley covered the first Arbuckle trial for Philadelphia’s Evening Public Ledger, one of the few newspapers in the east to assign its own reporter. His pieces delved into the personalities of the men and women who figured in the trial.

The following piece captures the atmosphere of the San Francisco courtroom as the trial was about to go into jury deliberation.

The enmity between the defense lawyers and prosecutors is palpable. So, too, are the indirect ways that the prosecution undermined the performance of Arbuckle’s lead attorney, Gavin McNab, who used his Scottish accent and sarcasm to great effect during all three trials.

District Attorney Matthew Brady’s animosity, however, isn’t only directed at Roscoe Arbuckle. Another reason he pursued justice for Virginia Rappe was to punish the monied interest behind Arbuckle. Hence, the Arbuckle trial can be seen as an exercise in social justice, in step with the progressivism of the era. That is why we find Will Hays and the Production Code as the end result.

The Howard Street Gang rapes, referenced in the article, occurred in 1920 and the trial that followed in early 1921 became a cause célèbre for feminists and Matthew Brady, the newly elected D.A. The trial was noteworthy for the reluctance of the victims to speak out against the men who assaulted them. Their reluctance is what influenced Brady to put two of Arbuckle’s female guests, Zey Prevost and Alice Blake, in protective custody—albeit against their will. As entertainers always looking toward their next gigs, it’s presumed that if they could they would have avoided testifying against “Fatty” and, by proxy. the movie industry.

Regarding Haley, he began as an illustrator for such publications as The Saturday Evening Post. In 1919, together with another writer for the Evening Public Ledger, the humorist Christopher Morley, Haley coauthored the Prohibition Era satire In the Sweet and the Dry (1919). Haley died in 1932 at the age of fifty-one.

Arbuckle’s Fate Hinges on Report on Girl’s Health; Both Sides Anxious as to What Commission of Physicians Will Disclose; Free Gangsters If Fatty Is Cleared, Cries Brady; Comedian’s Case Expected to Be Placed in Jury’s Hands by Tomorrow

By Bart Haley

San Francisco, Dec. 1. – The case of the people of California and the pursuing fates and the Women’s Vigilant Committee of San Francisco against Fatty Arbuckle will be given into the hands of a weary jury of five women and seven men tomorrow.

Before Saturday morning Mr. Arbuckle should know whether he is to be out of the trenches by Christmas or tragically and irretrievably out of what, in the language of the superstitious, is called luck.

It is considered probably that the lawyers will struggle to the bitter end without hurling their leather-bound books at each other. But the air about the counsel tables is heavily weighted with thunders and lightnings that seem to be held in check with increasing difficulty.

Yesterday, for example, Matthew Brady, the District Attorney, uttered the bitterest comment ever heard west of the Rockies from a prosecutor in the midst of a criminal case.

“If this jury acquits Arbuckle,” he said, “I shall at once formally ask the Parole Board to release the Howard street gang. I can see no reason why the Howard streeters should stay in jail if Arbuckle is to go free.”

In San Francisco, where for a whole week the Howard street gang made headlines a foot thick and caused groans in all editorial columns, the afternoon newspapers fled gasping to press hours ahead of schedule time to give this news to the eager people. The gang to which Brady referred is generally supposed to be the toughest in the known world.

About ten of its leaders got fearfully drunk not long ago, dragged two young girls into a shack, assaulted them and turned them half dead into the street. The gang is now in San Quentin Prison, and it was Brady who put it there.

The reaction of Fatty’s lawyers to this pronouncement from the prosecution was suggestive of a cataclysm of nature. They fled into a special conference. When they emerged it was only Gavin McNab who would trust himself to speak at first. He was just in time to read the corrected version of Brady’s statement.

“The first report,” said Brady in print, “does not properly reflect what I said—”

“Aha,” murmured McNab. “He’s taking it back.”

“What I said,” proceeded the District Attorney’s revised communique, “was not that I’d free the Howard street gang if Arbuckle is turned loose. I haven’t power to free anybody. But I can ask for the release of the Howard street gang and I shall do so if there is a failure to convict in this case.

“There are many points of similarity in the crime charged against Arbuckle and that charged against the Howard street gang. Heavy drinking was the primary cause of the trouble in both cases. The Howard streeters came into court without a cent. Arbuckle arrived here with a million-dollar array of counsel.

“I’ve been around this Hall of Justice for seven or eight years and I have been forced by experience and observation to believe that it is a serious crime in this country to be poor. I want to feel that this view is not justified and that is one of the reasons why I want to see Arbuckle convicted. Convicted he will be if I can help it. Moreover, I intend to put a stop to the use of manufactured and perjured evidence in cases of this sort.”

“I shall be glad indeed,” said Mr. McNab in a low and terrible voice, “if Mr. Brady, ‘putting a stop to manufactured and perjured evidence,” begins his admirable work in his own office. He impounded Zey Prevost and Alice Blake, did he not? Yet I was unable to see that that work helped him in the least to manufacture a case against Roscoe Arbuckle.”

“I’ll tell you,” said Mr. Schmulowitz, of Fatty’s counsel, knowingly, “he’s merely trying to get black headlines in the newspapers, which the jury will be able to read at a distance when it goes to the hotel or to lunch.”

Brady, hearing of this, laughed sarcastically.

“They know what I’m trying to do,” said he. “I’m trying to put their little Mr. Arbuckle in a jail and they aren’t so sure that I’m not going to succeed.”

It is hardly fair to say that Brady is trying merely to make headlines. The lights in his office and in the offices of his assistants have been burning until 1 o’clock in the morning since the trial of Arbuckle began and his detectives have been sleeping in their clothes.

[. . .]

No one here is disposed to take “Fatty’s own story without a lot of salt. It is doubtful whether the jury’s mind is not yet wide open. Neither the District Attorney nor the defense has established what is ordinarily known as a “strong case.” The evidence against Fatty is merely circumstantial. Virginia Rappe entered one of the rooms of his suite apparently in normal health. Half an hour or an hour later Arbuckle unlocked the door of the room from the inside and admitted others of his guests, who found the girl in an agony of partial delirium and, as it proved later, fatally injured.

[. . .]

So the cause of the girl’s death is still a matter of doubt which neither the prosecution nor the defense has been able to explain or demonstrate away. In the light of all this the final report of the medical commission which is to appear today may be the deciding factor of the whole case.

Eight hours of oratory will follow the commission’s report, and then the jury will retire. It was agreed before the end of yesterday’s sessions that the defense and the prosecution shall each have four hours for the closing addresses to the jury. Mr. McNab suggested that the case be permitted to go to the jury without argument. He informed the Court that the defense was willing to enter into such an arrangement if the prosecution would agree.

“Doubtless,” said Brady, coldly, with a lift of his eloquent eyebrows toward the jury, “but the prosecution will enter into no such plan.”

“He’ll dislocate that eyebrow of his one of these days,” hissed Mr. Schmulowitz to one of his colleagues, “and then he’ll have to have it set.”

A moment later the emotional stress that prevails among all lawyers engaged in the case of Fatty was oddly revealed. There was a long interval of silence and whispered conferences. Fatty was peaceably rolling his little paper balls and appearing more lightsome than he has appeared since his travail began. Mr. Schmulowitz leaped suddenly to his feet and in a voice of great emotion asked that if it pleased the Court the District Attorney and his assistants be ordered to cease heckling the counsel for the defense.

“Heckling?” murmured Judge Louderback, staring hard at Brady’s table for signs of misbehavior.

“I desire formally to object, if it pleases the Court,” cried Schmulowitz in a voice that was like tragic music, “to the various asides indulged in by the State. I mean that there are words and gestures indulged in by the prosecution which are obviously meant to annoy counsel for the defense, and, what is more, to have an effect upon the mind of the jury.”

Mr. U’Ren, one of Brady’s assistants, rose nobly to his feet to observe in a sleety drawl that surely it was no intention of the defense to deny the right of conference to the people.

The fact is that there was something to be said on the side of Mr. Schmulowitz, but he didn’t say it. Perhaps no one could say it. The causes of his outburst are almost too subtle for analysis. Brady uses his shrugs to enormous effect. And Mr. Friedman, his youngest assistant, has a way of looking up and staring with an expression of awe and wonderment and seeming to be transfixed and diverted immeasurably at whatever lawyer of Fatty’s tried by devious methods to turn a tide of evidence of circumstance to the advantage of the accused.

So he looks at McNab and so he looks at Schmulowitz for half an hour at a time, only to turn now and then to smile at the jury as one who would let it participate in the enjoyment of a spectacle, spectacular and humorous.

Somehow or other the weight of the trouble seems to have passed mysteriously from Fatty to his lawyers. Fatty is cheerful at last. He is almost himself again. The change may be due to the succession of mysterious visitors who have been appearing in court to whisper in his ear—spatted and opulent individuals who sit and listen eagerly for a while and vanish as they appear, almost without a sound.

They come from that country from which for the time being the big comedian is exiled. Things, they think, are looking up. Yes, they represent some of the important movie people, one of them remarked. He added that for all one knew this unfortunate business might prove to be the best thing that ever happened to Arbuckle.

You see, Fatty has been getting a lot of publicity. Now, if that publicity can be turned to good account, if it can be shown that the children’s favorite comedian was a victim of most unhappy circumstances, why, this Fatty will be bigger than he ever was before. So it runs, this word from the world of Fatty’s former triumphs.

“Well,” you remark, to change the subject, “he seems to be standing it pretty well. He is far from being a wisp of himself.”

“No,” says the scout of the promoters whose money is tied up in Arbuckle pictures and Arbuckle contracts and Arbuckle plans. “He is not standing it so well as you might think. He’s nervous and wrought up. You see, he’s crazy to get back to work again. When he gets to work, he’ll be all right.”

Source: Evening Public Ledger, 1 December 1921, pp. 1, 4.

Virginia Rappe with onyx ring and oval mirror (*Private collection*)

Freda Blum’s portraits and poignancies from the Arbuckle trial

December 3, 2021January 17, 2022 / The Authors / Leave a comment

Freda Blum’s articles about the personalities of the Arbuckle case first appeared in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, where she was the film reviewer. Unfortunately, this newspaper isn’t digitized or easily accessible at this writing. But her work was syndicated through the Hearst newswire International News Service and appeared in many newspapers too small to send their own reporters to cover “the trial of the century.”

The following are anecdotes about some of the leading and minor figures of the Arbuckle trial. They included Zey Prevost and Alice Blake, Maude Delmont, Ira Fortlouis, Minta Durfee, and Arbuckle himself.

Blum’s eye for the women in the case, of course, is of special interest to our work. One can see, for example, that Arbuckle’s party guests reveal his preference for brunettes, each echoing something of Mabel Normand. Blum is also able to elicit private thoughts by building a rapport with some of her subjects, as in her interview with the Minta Durfee, where the actress drifts into a reverie about Roscoe’s future that sounds both sincere yet also theatrical.

Regarding Blum’s take on Arbuckle, it stands in contrast to the accounts of other reporters, who almost to a man—pun intended—praised unambiguously Arbuckle’s performance in the witness chair as calm and collected. Blum, however, offers something of a psychological portrait that one can read as either for or against the comedian.

Zey Prevost and Alice Blake

San Francisco, Nov. 26—Zey Prevon-Prevost and Alice Blake, the two star witnesses for the state in the Arbuckle manslaughter trial, will stand side by side forever more in the memory of the jury who heard their testimony yesterday.

The five women jurors will remember the two show girls in all their silken-feathered finery, their pale faces and frightened eyes. The men in the jury box cannot help but remember them in all their trimness of ankle, their shapely shoulders and ivory throats.

For all this was too well displayed, too obvious to let observation pass it by. So true to the type were both of them that they can be detailed together.

Both had abandoned their make-up for the showing.

Both have exquisite skin, like the complexion of white roses in bud.

They have large, dark, beautiful brown eyes and black hair. Their lips are full and red and sensual.

The two were dressed in street suits and winter hats. Both carried large beauty boxes, obviously containing the mascara, paint and powder, should it become vital to them as a last minute impulse. Their skirts were noticeably short. Zey Prevost displayed her well-formed ankles in a pair of dainty black satin slippers with sheer hosiery to match, while Alice Blake saw fit to set her costume off with grey suede oxfords and pearl-pink stockings.

Though the day was dreary and cold the two wore only the merest shadow of protection at the throat. This was, in both cases, but the flimsiest of ecru lace vestees, pinned to the coat at a very low angle and disclosing the soft contours of neck and chest.

Be it said of the women sitting in the jury box that they took no cognizance of the smile with which the girl witnesses answered to this and that. After their first official appraisals the women jurors centered their attention solely on the testimony.

One woman juror though studied the girls intently from beneath her large red hat. She had the puzzled express of doubt about her and openly showed it.

The men were curious about the testimony, too. They were attentive and extremely watchful.

But in more than appearance were the two witnesses sisters. Both were called upon to give lurid, morbid testimony, which during the preliminary hearing they had been allowed to whisper to the judge. When it came time for them to say the word, on which a courtroom hung, each in her turn cast an appealing glance all about the courtroom, sweeping the judge, the spectators, counsel and finally the jury.

They forgot they were show girls who are supposed to laugh while their hearts break.

Like the gentle rainfall just beginning to come down from the clouded heavens outside, the natural modesty of all womanhood fell upon them suddenly.

Each in her turn became ashamed, abashed.

They wanted to cry.

However, it finally came out, from both them, the word that counsel insisted upon.

“I want to go home; I want to go home,” moaned Zey when it was all over. “I want to go home to my mother.”

Even the women of the jury saw and heard it all, unmoved.

But just the same they are never going to forget the spectacle.[1]

Maude Delmont

San Francisco, Nov. 26—Bambina Maude Delmont, “the accuser,” has come to sit with the spectators in the courtroom where Arbuckle, charged by her with the manslaughter of Virginia Rappe, awaits the vote of the world. This is her first public appearance since giving her testimony at the coroner’s inquest preliminary to the trial.

The very air is charged with her presence. She sits almost in line with the witnesses and directly facing them. Her chair is immediately behind that of Mrs. Roscoe Arbuckle.

As every witness takes the stand—doctors and nurses who were in attendance while Mrs. Delmont hovered like a lioness beside the bed of the deceased girl—she listens carefully without show of emotion. She hears her own name mentioned, but gives no sign of sympathy.

Mrs. Delmont is alone and unattended. Yesterday marked her first courtroom appearance.[2]

It was she who swore to the original statement charging Arbuckle with the murder of Virginia Rappe after the party in the St. Francis rooms. And now as the law grinds its course and the trial is well under way, she has come mysteriously and unbidden out of the hazy delirium of the past to listen.

Mrs. Delmont is a tall, athletic woman and pretty with silver gray hair. Her costume yesterday was gold and brown with a spray of holiday berries pinned to the neckpiece of her coat.

All heads looked toward her and whispered.

She suffered a single dramatic incident yesterday.

That moment came when suddenly the eyes of “the accuser” and those of the accused’s wife, Minta Durfee Arbuckle met for an instant and then clashed.[3]

San Francisco, Dec. 3—Almost directly overhead the courtroom where eager throngs await the jury’s decision in the Arbuckle manslaughter case, Bambina Maude Delmont, who signed the warrant for the actor’s arrest, lies on a cot in the city prison.

She has been on a hunger strike about 14 hours. Mrs. Delmont is booked on a bigamy charge pending before R. E. Cornell, justice of the peace of Madera County.

Since the fatal party at the St. Francis hotel on Labor Day, Mrs. Delmont has been so steeped in misery and “bad luck” as she calls it, as to lose all interest in the trial she started.

“I have done my duty that is all. I am still sorry for that poor child that had the life crushed out of her by the big blubbering fat man. I do not care about the outcome of the jury’s decision.”

Mrs. Delmont when taken into custody pleaded illness. She lies now in a pink and white embroidered kimono, tossing on the prison cot, moaning and crying that she is deserted by all.

“Where are Virginia Rappe’s family? Why don’t they come to help me?” she queries.

“Oh, why didn’t they let me tell my own story on the stand. Why didn’t the district attorney let me testify?” Mrs. Delmont mutters in hysteria.

She will be taken to Madera in charge of the officers within the first few days.[4]

Minta Durfee

San Francisco, Nov. 19—What sorrows sees the heart of “Fatty” Arbuckle in the tumultuous days of his trial, is not known to any but Minta Durfee Arbuckle, his wife.

What frightful dreams harass the nights of the comedian, in fitful spasms of sleep, only Minta Durfee Arbuckle knows.

She knows of the stinging bitter thoughts that eat at the mind of the man as he daily sits in court and awaits his fate.

Each hour is intense for her, each morbid and depressing thought of his is hers to battle with and overcome; each terrifying fancy a thing to fight unto the death.

All this she told me today.

As the precious minutes of the trial move swiftly towards the end she dreams of better things.

“I never think of defeat,” she protested to me, with wistful bravado. “I am making plans.”

“What are those plans?” I asked her, conscious of her child-like confidence.

“That I will take Roscoe away from it all here, high up into the mountain air; and that our three dogs shall come along.

“Or, perhaps, that he shall go alone; if he so prefers.

“Or that we shall be on a sea voyage somewhere with the blue waters and the pale skies to help us both forget.”

Mrs. Arbuckle is a mere wisp of a girl, and dainty as Dresden china.

“You know—it may be—well, we might not be able to go at all.”

She turned a searching glance upon me here and I could see how piteously her lips quivered. I thought of a drowning person fighting for life.[5]

Ira Fortlouis

San Francisco, Nov. 25—In all the crowded courtroom and among witnesses, kin and friends of the dead Virginia Rappe, for whose death “Fatty” Arbuckle is being tried, there is none so bewildered, so conscious of being a tool in the hands of Fate, as Ira Fortlouis.

By the merest chance Ira Fortlouis happened to stray into the lobby of the Palace hotel on the morning of September 5. He had in his hands suitcases containing fashionable dress creations for women which he had come west to sell.

Chance led before his eyes the vision of Virginia Rappe, fresh from her morning’s toilette. The jade green dress she wore was very simple yet it became her elegantly. Fortlouis noticed that. He noticed carefully her graceful carriage, her tall slender figure. It forcibly occurred to him that she would make a splendid model on which to display the goods he had on hand. That would help them sell.

Reasoning further, he argued that she probably would be at leisure to accept the work form him; that she appeared to be not too expensively dressed and did not give the impression of being employed. Then he inquired and learned of her name.

Later that morning in Arbuckle’s rooms he told Fred Fischbach of the stunning girl he had seen a few hours before. Fischbach attended to the conversation listlessly. Fortlouis persisted in explaining.

“Her name is Virginia Rappe,” he said.

“Oh, that’s different,” said Fischbach, “I know her. You are quite right. We’ll have her come up here and make a party.”

Such was the prologue written before the final chapter of Virginia Rappe’s life. From such a stray thought did the whole whirlwind evolve.

Fortlouis, with the exception of testifying at the coroner’s inquest, has not, as yet, been sent to the witness chair. [6]

Roscoe Arbuckle

San Francisco, Nov. 29—When Roscoe Arbuckle took the witness platform yesterday and stood, a funny little fat man wildly gesticulating with his chubby hands the events which took place at the fateful party in the St. Francis rooms, the audience, though outwardly suppressing it, was hysterical at heart. Picture yourself a comic toy, on a string, forcing you to laugh at its grotesqueness. Then picture to yourself that toy, a human thing, begging for itself human consideration, and you see Arbuckle on the stand.

His voice is clear and as you listen, it becomes convincing. His forehead lines with wrinkles as he concentrates for a clear understanding of the cross examination. When something puzzles him, and he searches his mind for an answer, he gazes on the floor, looking at his dull leather oxfords for inspiration. His fat fingers constantly play at the single button on his jacket. He is wearing a neat blue suit, a simple black tie on his immaculate white shirt and is freshly shaven. His skin is as pink and rosy as a child’s.

As the long questions are propounded to him, Arbuckle puckers up his lips as if he had a bitter nut meat in his mouth. Then he begins to get nervous and moves about in his chair. First one arm goes over the back of his seat—then he takes it off and fumbles with a pencil and you can see his hands are slightly trembling.

He has trouble fixing his eyes where the scene will not disconcert him. He does not seem to like looking at the jury. He avoids glancing towards his counsel. When he casts his eyes among the spectators it makes him more nervous to find them staring at him, some with their mouths wide open in curiosity. He cannot look into the judge’s face because he would then have to turn his back on the jury.

The defendant knows where his wife is sitting, but dares not rest his eyes there. He has just had a glimpse of her, with her face very pale and her lips silently moving, as if in prayer. The play of expression and emotion on the actor’s face is superb.

Fatty decides finally where he will focus his attention. He shifts his chair and looks into the eye of Leo Friedman, who is conducting the cross examination. Friedman is very small, very blonde and very young.

Roscoe Arbuckle looks him fair and square in the eye. And answers up! Somehow tragedy seems to fall away when the comedian is talking. Every one grasps at straws in his testimony at which to smile. There is a slight titter when the defendant says, “search me” or “a whole lot” or makes common expressions.

Finally, finis. Roscoe Arbuckle is done with his performance. The stupendous scene had been taken and enacted with only court records to show what has been said and done. No celluloid this time. No celluloid will ever show the likes of it or scenario will be the equal of it. It is Fatty’s masterpiece. [7]

Was Arbuckle attracted to dark-haired women like Virginia Rappe? (*Private Collection*)

[1] “Sordid Details of ‘Fat’ Arbuckle Case: Girls on Stand Tell of Happenings at Disgraceful ‘Picture’ Orgy,” Hammond [Indiana] Times, 22 November 1921, 1.

[2] Actually, Delmont had been attending the trial since the first week.

[3] “Accuser of Arbuckle Trial Sits at Trial for First Time Since Case Is Begun,” San Antonio Evening News, 26 November 1921, 1.

[4] “Maude Delmont, Who Filed Warrant, Is Facing Trial on Bigamy Charge,” Tribune [Coshocton, Ohio], 4 December 1921, 1.

[5] “Fatty Arbuckle’s Sorrows Known Only to Faithful Wife as Trial Drags On,” Pittsburgh Press, 20 November 1921, Additional News Section, 12.

[6] “Idle Inquiry Leads to Death of Rappe Girl,” Oakland Tribune, 27 November 1921, 11.

[7] “Fatty, Testifying, Like Animated Comic Toy on String, Forcing You to Laugh Over Grotesqueness,” San Antonio Evening News, 29 November 1921, 3.

100 Years Ago Today: Irene Morgan, one of the sketchier defense witnesses, December 2, 1921

December 2, 2021January 17, 2022 / The Authors / 2 Comments

Roscoe Arbuckle’s personal lawyer, Milton Cohen, found a number of witnesses in Los Angeles County who could testify that Virginia Rappe routinely suffered fits of female hysteria. These bore a marked resemblance to how she was found in room 1219 of the St. Francis Hotel on Labor Day 1921. Among those witnesses was Irene Morgan. In March 1920 she had been hired by Henry Lehrman to serve as an in-home nurse, masseuse, and domestic.

Morgan was seen as a rebuttal witness to challenge Rappe’s adoptive aunt, Kate Hardebeck, who asserted that Rappe was in perfect health. The reporter Chandler Sprague billed the young woman as the star witness:

Miss Morgan has been kept “under cover” as much as possible by defense counsel, but it is understood that the district attorney’s office learned a few days ago that she would be a tremendously important cog in the defense machinery.

She is a nurse and masseuse who lived with Virginia Rappe for seven months. She will tell the jury that the dead girl suffered with chronic bladder trouble and that she was on a diet for the ailment. Miss Morgan will say also that Miss Rappe had been warned against drinking liquor and will detail several occasions on which, having disregarded that warning she became hysterical and tore off her clothes in the same fashion as at the Labor Day party in the St. Francis. The entire statement which Miss Morgan is prepared to give is said to be extremely sensational and will include allegations that certain interests have sought to prevent her testifying in Arbuckle’s favor. She will also, it is believed, make charges of brutality against a male associate of Miss Rappe.[1]

Morgan was a former Canadian Army nurse. She spoke with a pronounced lisp. Her face bore the scars of an ambulance accident suffered during the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918. Given her commendable service, she was seen as a reliable witness and took the stand on November 25 as the first of several witnesses who had seen Rappe drink, tear at her clothes, and suffer attacks. Morgan claimed to having seen five such attacks. During one of these, Rappe allegedly ran out of the house naked.

If Morgan played as well for jurors as she did for reporters, the prosecution’s case against Arbuckle was in trouble. The news stories tended to see the former nurse as convincing and the headlines now cast Virginia Rappe in a new and darker light. Even a newspaper sympathetic to Rappe, the Los Angeles Herald ran “BARE RAPPE GIRL’S PAST” in a typeface just a shy of the size used for a declaration of war.

Morgan bore up well under cross-examination and remained in San Francisco should Arbuckle’s lawyers need her to take the stand again. During the last week of November 1921, she befriended another defense witness from Los Angeles, a Miss Pearl Leushay, a former “floor women” in a department store who had also seen Rappe have a fit but never took the stand. Leushay and Morgan likely hit it off because Leushay was a Frenchwoman as well as single, or, at least single in San Francisco, for she was still Mrs. Leotta Pearl Ortega, the estranged wife of an oil field worker and, before that, a young widow, going by Leotta Pearl Wright.

On November 30, Morgan and Leushay went to the Winter Garden, a dance hall and ice rink in the Tenderloin district. There Morgan, who didn’t dance, met a man who had been following the pair in a sea-green automobile.

The next day, Morgan was found by Miss Leushay laying across her bed in an adjoining hotel room. Morgan’s clothes were ripped in the “manner in which Virginia Rappe’s clothing was torn,” according to the San Francisco Examiner on December 2. A stenographer recorded Morgan’s statement (see below) and although seemingly incoherent, bits and pieces of her real backstory emerge. Like other witnesses who saw Rappe’s histrionics, they posed problems for Arbuckle’s defense—especially if the prosecution saw such witnesses as obviously coached and parroting much the same story about the victim.

What goes unreported is that Rappe’s Aunt Kate took the stand and rebutted Morgan’s testimony in kind. Morgan had stood up and blocked Aunt Kate after she left the witness stand and began to stare the other down. But Aunt Kate sidestepped her antagonist. This event may have triggered the incident Morgan was involved in, presumably drugged or poisoned, on November 30. Another trigger, perhaps the real one, was that Morgan may have learned that the District Attorney had secured a rebuttal witness for the next day, a Captain Rayward, a decorated veteran of the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War. Whatever he might say posed the risk of a perjury charge brought against her.

Arbuckle’s lawyers stood by their “star” witness after the event and insinuated that the prosecution was behind Morgan’s “mystery man.” A doctor however determined that she had overdosed on nine aspirins and some kind of opiate.

Morgan was expected to testify again at Arbuckle’s second trial in January 1922. However, when District Attorney Matthew Brady threatened to impeach her, Morgan disappeared, reportedly abroad, to the Netherlands.

A year later Morgan reemerged on the faculty of the College of Applied Science in Los Angeles as a Doctor of Kinesiology. This new institution in January 1923 was founded by Edward Oliver Tilburne, a former minister, actor, lecturer, conman, and snake-oil salesman, self-proclaimed medical doctor, embezzler, and shady real estate broker known by a number of aliases, including “Nevada Ned” before he remade himself into a Christian psychologist. Tilburne was also the author of short story about the Jack-the-Ripper murders that speculated on “Jack” being under the control of a hypnotist.[2]

This is, of course, a tangent for others to follow. For our purposes, Morgan’s reinvention as a practitioner of alternative medicine likely began in part in 1920 when Rappe pursued both a wellness program as well as a diet and exercise regimen for her figure. Here Arbuckle’s lawyers and prosecutors alike saw her fitness program as evidence to support their opposing narratives, on one hand to show that Rappe was prone to spontaneous rupture of the bladder and conversely that she was robust and healthy at the time of the Labor Day party.

Here is the complete statement given to a stenographer yesterday afternoon [1 December 1921] by Miss Irene M. Morgan after she was found in her hotel room suffering from poison which she declares was administered to her in candy by a “mystery” man who had been following her for days:

Miss Graind and I came to the United States. I didn’t want them to know I was Dutch. I am going home in four months. I don’t want anyone to know who I am in the United States. My grandfather’s name is Bornidot. My name is Irene Morgan. My ancestors go back four or five hundred years.

Golondit Bornidot. Don’t tell the Swedish country anything about me. I worked in the United States as a servant. I love one man in the United States. I shall search from country to country, from state to state. He don’t know me, but I know him. When a lady has a title—lived with a man I love. I can’t live with a man in this country. Can I have one drink of moud?

The United States don’t know who I am. I want to go back home and no one will ever find me. Can you speak French-Danish, Spreg Deutsche. (To Doctor [Julien L. Waller]) Talk French, why yes, German, yes. Educated in five languages. I going for a ride today with the Duke from Spelice. He is coming over. Do you know what Miss Rappe said to me? If you tell on me I am going to kill you, Irene.

Mrs. Hardeback say I lie. Where is Mr. Lehrman now? Where is Miss Rappe? I never seen him, or never for a long time. (To doctor) Spreg Deutsche.

You can never learn the language. Please telephone to the Senator I came in on the steamer and my grandfather was here to meet me. My heart.

“When did you first meet this man?’ she was asked.

I don’t know.

Bobbie.

Met the man at dance. I got to go home. He gave me candy. You can’t poison me.

Mrs. Hardeback has lied and lied to me. She called the doctor and she would never let me sit in room. She shot me out and she was afraid I would tell on her.

I was subpoenaed to come to San Francisco. But did not want anyone to know. Did not want my grandfather to know. I am going back to my grandfather. He lived five miles out of Stockholm. My mother was Swedish—my father American. My mother died when I was born. The name of the town I lived in was Guttenberg. I never have been notorious. I have always tried to keep my body and my mind clean. I never have been to a public dance hall until I was in Los Angeles.

“Do you remember going to San Francisco in the Arbuckle case?” she was asked.

Yes, yes, yes. I never met the man. They tried to make me tell a lie on the witness stand. I would not lie. Mrs. Hardeback came up and lied to me and she lied and lied and I got up to hit her in the face. They said, Olga Reed Morgan, sit down, sit down. They took me to San Francisco and made me go through hell and fire.

“Who?” she was asked.

Well, I was subpoenaed in the case and when I got there, there was a man with white hair and brown eyes and he stared at me and then he said he would put it in the paper.

Some people took me down here and at San Francisco every one was so good to me.

We walked and walked and walked a long time. The man did not go with me into the drug store. He said, “I’ll wait outside.” He said, “Take some orange juice and another piece of candy. It will make you feel fine.”

I said, “Give me orange juice. Will it be good for me. I am so dizzy?”

“Did he wait outside the drug store?” she was asked.

Yes, he took me to the hotel, and he said, “I got you now. Go to hell.” I thought he was from the District Attorney’s office. I do not know. I presumed so. He looked like a man who had been around the Hall of Justice and talked to me day after day. I turned my back on him. He had been to my house several times in South Pasadena. The man with gray hair gave me candy. Let me sleep because I want to go home.

Source: “Here’s Statement of Poisoned Girl in New Arbuckle Case Sensation: Talks Incoherently of Mystery Man Who Gave Her Candy, Urged to Drink Orange Juice,” San Francisco Examiner, 2 December 1921, 4. See also, “Nurse Who Aided Arbuckle Defense Near Death from Mystery Poisoning,” San Francisco Examiner, 2 December 1921, 1, 4.

The Winter Garden was the new name of the Dreamland Rink shown here. These structures later demolished for the Dreamland/Winterland auditorium. (*Calisphere*)

[1] Chandler Sprague (Universal Service), “Sensational Testimony from L.A. and Santa Ana Nurses Is Expected at Arbuckle Trial,” [Pomona] Bulletin, 25 November 1921, 1.

[2] See Donald Hartman, Edward Oliver Tilburn (aka N. T. Oliver, Ned Oliver, Nevada Ned, and Edward Tilburne): The Profile of a Con-Artist (N.p.: Themes & Settings in Fiction Press, 2021).

What motivated DA Matthew Brady?

November 21, 2021January 17, 2022 / The Authors / Leave a comment

If one reads superannuated texts about the Arbuckle case, such as David Yallop’s The Day the Laughter Stopped (1976), Andy Edmonds’ Frame Up!: The Untold Story of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (1991), or Wolves at the Door: The Trials of Fatty Arbuckle (2010) by David Allen Kizer, and the like, the prosecutor Matthew Brady emerges as a vindictive man trying to “get” Arbuckle.

According to the jacket blurb for the Kizer book, “Roscoe was a gentle soul caught in the middle of a political and media hurricane led by Matthew Brady, the district attorney who would stop at nothing to convict him with or without real evidence.”

Some authors imagine Brady to have been motivated by political ambitions, such as becoming the next Democratic governor of California. But he never ran for an office beyond district attorney, the position to which he had been elected in 1919. The ambition for which Brady probably became best known speaks more about his zeal for fairness than an interest in a political career. Thomas Mooney, a labor leader and socialist, had been convicted in a show trial, prosecuted by the district attorney who proceeded Brady, Charles Fickert, for the bombing of a parade in San Francisco that resulted in ten deaths. Mooney was serving a life sentence in San Quentin and Brady was among those who publicly (and unsuccessfully) lobbied for a new trial for him for nearly a decade. Mooney was eventually pardoned in 1937.

_{^{Dorothea Lange photo for Tom Mooney Defense Fund, 1934.}}

What is underappreciated is that Brady rarely examined or cross-examined witnesses. One could probably count as many times on one hand. He didn’t step into the spotlight the way his adversary, Arbuckle’s lawyer Gavin McNab, did. McNab had a dominant personality in the courtroom and in California politics, sometimes called the “dictator” of Democratic party politics. Brady, in contrast, seemed disassociated from the trial and to most observers his case seemed lost by the middle of the second week. However, as in The Art of War, Brady’s relative quiet now seems to have been calculated to allow the defense to destroy itself.

The following letter was published on the editorial page of the Fort Wayne Sentinel on November 26, 1921. It sheds light on Brady’s motivations. We see a number of possibilities here, from good (a “slave revolt,” an “I am Spartacus” moment before Hollywood got there) to bad (a veiled anti-Semitism that would appeal to Indiana readers in one of the hotspots of Ku Klux Klan membership).

Unbought and Unbribed

E. V. Emrick, of this city, is a long-time friend of Matthew Brady, district attorney of San Francisco, and recently wrote him endorsing his stand in the Arbuckle case and making inquiry as to certain matters in connection therewith. The following answer has been received:

Mr. Brady is a public officer and naturally speaks with the utmost conservatism concerning a case about which public interest centers so particularly. It means much, therefore, when he alludes to the powerful influences that have been brought to bear to swerve him from his duty, and reading between the lines one can imagine just what influences there were and picture the golden lure they held out. The conscienceless and rapacious producers of California have millions of dollars wrapped up in the Arbuckle films and if it were possible for them not only to clear Arbuckle but to whitewash him at the same time, it would be to their immense financial advantage to do so.

City and County of San Francisco
District Attorney, Hall of Justice
San Francisco, Oct. 21, 1921

E. V. Emrick, Citizens Trust Bldg.
Fort Wayne, Ind.

Dear Mr. Emrick:

This is to acknowledge receipt of your courteous communication of recent date respecting the Arbuckle case.
It is most gratifying to me to receive expressions of this kind form individuals of your standing in the community; a public official in the honest discharge of his duty needs moral support of this kind and I am extremely gratified at the sentiments expressed.
Under the California law, if a death results from the commission of a felony the charge is murder. In the Arbuckle case it is alleged that either an attempt was made to commit rape or a rape was committed upon Virginia Rappe, as a result she died. Therefore, under the law, it is our contention that the crime committed was murder and not manslaughter.
The duty of a police magistrate is to inquire into the facts of the case. If reasonable and probable cause appear, it is the duty of the police magistrate to hold the defendant to answer. It has been held that even where there exists the remotest possibility of a crime having been committed, it is the duty of the magistrate to hold.
Evidence was introduced at the preliminary hearing of Roscoe Arbuckle showing reasonable and probable cause to believe him guilty of the crime of murder, as charged. At the conclusion of the hearing, the police magistrate[1] reduced the charge from murder to manslaughter, upon which charge Arbuckle was held to answer to await trial before a jury in the superior court. As district attorney, I am convinced that more than ample evidence was introduced to warrant a holding upon the murder charge. I regret deeply that the police magistrate in his judgement reduced the charge to manslaughter. Has Arbuckle been held upon the murder charge, it would then have been within the province of the jury to have rendered a verdict of manslaughter, if in their judgement mitigating circumstances were present.
Powerful influences have been brought to bear upon this office with the hope that I might be swayed from doing my full duty as district attorney, but you may rest assured that such efforts have proved of no avail, and every facility of my office will be employed in a most vigorous and earnest prosecution of this case.
Again assuring you of my sincere appreciation of the moral support you have given me through the sentiments expressed in your letter, I am

Very truly yours,
Matthew Brady
District Attorney

It is hardly to be doubted but that Mr. Brady could have gathered in at least half a million dollars had he been willing to prostitute his high office and see to it that the evidence went as these sinister and malign corrupters of the public morals desired. It is fortunate, indeed, when the people have as firm and honest a champion in public office as Matthew Brady.

Note: We’re rather disappointed to see that the New Yorker published a piece observing the centenary of the Arbuckle case and the death of Virginia Rappe and only rehashed what the author could lift from the Greg Merritt book, Room 1219, which is also superannuated.

This blog was published in time for journalists to see what is new and what other possibilities there are for revision and doing justice—especially in regard to Virginia Rappe.

This isn’t new for the magazine, since one of us (James Reidel) assisted in the writing of a similar anniversary piece observing the 1955 disappearance of Weldon Kees. It is entirely lifted from his book Vanished Act (2003), a biography of the poet and artist who disappeared from the Golden Gate Bridge in 1955.

Reidel did enjoy seeing himself called “the assiduous biographer” by Tony Lane.

[1] Brady refers to Police Judge Sylvain Lazarus, who presided over the preliminary hearing referred to here as well in late September 1921.

The Arbuckle Trial begins: A theater review of the first week

November 21, 2021January 17, 2022 / The Authors / Leave a comment

While working on the corpus of our narrative, we have neglected to add some timely sidebars to this blog. So, we shall observe the end of the first week of the first Arbuckle trial with this mock theater review by George Warren, a theater critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Unlike the Examiner and the Call, the Chronicle didn’t give the Arbuckle trial first-page coverage. The editors saw it as local news and restricted the front page to more serious stories, like the naval disarmament conference in Washington. Even this “review” didn’t appear in its pages. It was distributed by a press syndicate to newspapers such as the Salt Lake Telegram, Chattanooga News, and other out-of-town papers where it ran the week of November 20-26, 1921.

Datelined November 19, the Sunday feature is based on the initial days of jury selection. But it captures the theatrics that many observers thought characterized the defense. Here, Arbuckle played an important part that may not have been passive but well planned, like shooting a comedy. So did his estranged wife, Minta Durfee.

What Dramatic Critic Thinks of Arbuckle: Frisco Writer Sees Fatty’s Biggest Drama Being Enacted in Court

By George Warren

Life, the greatest dramatist of them all, has written a rather involved piece in that much discussed tragedy, “The Death of Virginia Rappe.”

I have seen but the prologue and find that, as usual, this master of the drama makes one wait through tedious routine in order to catch the fine climaxes and thrills. There has been more of action than of drama. For the most part, the lines run too long to sustain dramatic interest.

This may explain why, in spite of the worldwide publicity, the tragedy has received, the first-night audiences were slim. There was no rush for admission and those who attended were mostly students of life’s dramas or professionals who came in on complimentaries.

While the product was being prepared, I had heard so much of the lead character, Roscoe Arbuckle, that I was a bit disappointed at the manner in which he was shoved into the background in the earlier scenes. A newcomer had been secured,[1] almost on the eve of the first presentation, and had been given all the “fat speeches.”

He is Gavin McNab, a veteran actor who plays the role of attorney for Arbuckle. He gives a fine and finished performance. In his past roles of a political dictator, clubman, and public figure, he has handled himself almost equally well, but he is best known for the performances in which he plays the part of defense counsel.

His stage presence is perfect and he becomes at once a dominant figure. His long and sometimes tiresome lines are forgotten in his excellent facial expressions and suave command of situations.

Arbuckle is doing tremendously fine work in his unhappy role. He is presumed, in the play, to have brought about the death of a beautiful actress, Virginia Rappe, during a revel staged in a fashionable hotel suite.

Here is an actor who, a few months back, was presumed to be fit only for slapstick comedy. Never have I seen a player who so completely reversed his type. His expression is frequently that of a hurt and troubled victim of circumstances, perplexed by what is going on about him, appealing to all eyes for sympathy. Again, he is the tense observer of the figures that pass before him, as though disinterested in all else but that upon which his eye centers. It is an impressive performance, having a tendency to make one forget the lack of drama and center upon this characterization of the man who plays the “heavy.”

Quite an interesting a performance is given by Minta Durfee Arbuckle, the wife. It has been customary in drama of this sort for the accused and his wife to appear side by side, but here we have the wife in a more or less inconspicuous part of the stage. Accustomed to the ingénue, the soubrette of light opera roles, she now appears in a semi-emotional part—that of a wife helping her husband in his fight for freedom. My chief criticism would be that she overdresses a bit for the part.

The district attorney and his assistants are handled with fine restraint by Matthew Brady and Milton U’Ren. Assurance and confidence, rather than spectacular stagecraft, marks their work.

Comedy relief was furnished for the most part by several dozen men and women who had bits as prospective jurors. They acted as “feeders” for the lines of the attorney characters.

Altogether it gets away to a fair start and, as the plot later proceeds, may prove as interesting a drama of life as had been done in some years.

San Francisco Hall of Justice, the site of all three Arbuckle trials (*Calisphere*)

[1] A reference to Gavin McNab having taken over as lead defense counsel from Frank Dominguez.

100 Years Ago This Week: November 14–18, 1921

November 15, 2021November 18, 2021 / The Authors / Leave a comment

One hundred years ago Roscoe Arbuckle’s trial for manslaughter in the death of Virginia Rappe began. Most of that first week was taken up by jury selection. Although Arbuckle’s chief defense lawyer, Gavin McNab was reportedly against including women on the jury, he and prosecutor Matthew Brady settled on five women and eight men, including one alternate.

Although the procedure of accepting and rejecting jurors is tedious, we devote some attention to this deliberate process because it reveals much of the trial strategies of both the prosecution and defense.

For those of you who have followed this blog, we discussed the possible testimony of George Glennon, the St. Francis Hotel detective (see George Glennon, the muted witness). His midnight interview with Virginia Rappe on September 5, 1921—conducted hours after she had been found in Arbuckle’s bedroom variously in a state of shock and hysteria, tearing at her clothes—was intended to be used by the defense to quickly end the trial in an acquittal. If a jury had heard that Rappe had absolved Arbuckle of injuring her, the case in all likelihood would be over. No matter how much circumstantial evidence there was in room 1219, her words would underscore Arbuckle’s professions of innocence. He only need take the stand and provide an anodyne account that that would make him out to be nothing less than a decent, caring gentleman.

However District Attorney Matthew Brady and his deputies challenged Glennon’s simple question-and-answer statement as hearsay and managed to keep it out of the record. Accusations of witness tampering were being made against both sides so the objection may have been borne of that suspicion.

Similarly, McNab and his colleagues intended to get the doctors who attended Rappe to “speak” for Arbuckle. Here Maude Delmont factored. She had, as Rappe’s companion at the Labor Day party, looked after Rappe and taken charge as her ersatz medical power-of-attorney. She spoke with some authority, despite being inebriated, and was the person the attending physicians consulted about what was wrong with Ms. Rappe. But the Prosecution saw to it that Delmont’s comments to the physicians were also barred from the record.

At the end of the second week of the trial, one of these doctors, Melville Rumwell, was called to the stand as a defense witness. He, too, like Glennon, had spoken with Rappe in the hotel about her condition. Again, the answers Rappe gave Rumwell were believed to have exonerated Arbuckle. These too were stricken as hearsay.

This defense strategy is intriguing on several levels, given the prosecution’s determined effort to prevent a jury from hearing a narrative that included the words of Rappe and Delmont. While it seems counterintuitive to silence the victim and the accuser, we think we understand Prosecutor Brady’s motivation. At the time Rappe’s injury occurred, Delmont’s initial statements might have intentionally downplayed Arbuckle’s involvement without really knowing what the truth was. She didn’t want to be at the center of a sex scandal. Rappe, too, may have been likeminded. They didn’t, like other guests, see any gain in getting Arbuckle in trouble, whether he did something injurious behind the door of room 1219, something desperate to save his reputation, or something that, as he made it out to be, the Good Samaritan redux.

In other words, Brady and his deputies were building their case on the belief that Arbuckle had injured Rappe in a clumsy attempt at rape or possibly rough consensual sex and they couldn’t afford to let anything Rappe or Delmont had said that evening stop them.

Roscoe Arbuckle and costar Alice Lake in *The Rough House* (1919) (*Private collection*)

George Glennon, the muted witness

November 8, 2021November 10, 2021 / The Authors / Leave a comment

Roscoe Arbuckle’s first trial for manslaughter was to begin on Monday, November 7, 1921. But the following day was Election Day and Armistice Day would be celebrated later in the week. So, Judge Harold Louderback of the Superior Court of San Francisco County announced that he would delay the opening of the trial one week.

This gave the prosecution and defense breathing space to consolidate their strategies. Assistant District Attorney Isadore Golden had been dispatched to Chicago to get the testimony of Mrs. Katherine Fox. She had been Rappe’s mentor and virtual foster mother since 1905. Mrs. Fox had been responsible for coaxing Rappe to become a teenage art model, dancer, and stage performer. Undoubtedly, Mrs. Fox also directed Golden to other associates who might contradict the testimony of the three Chicago witnesses deposed by Arbuckle’s lawyers, Alfred Sabath and Charles Brennan.

The Chicago witnesses for the defense, especially the nurse/midwife/provider of adoption services, Josephine Rafferty Roth, would help convince a jury that Rappe’s bladder and sex organs had been ravaged by unwanted pregnancies, bouts of cystitis, and the invasive procedures the treatment of those conditions involved in the early twentieth century.

Arbuckle’s lead attorney Gavin McNab, however, had an even stronger card to play in house detective George Glennon. Glennon had initially been interviewed and dismissed by the District Attorney’s office only to be later chosen as a witness for the defense.

His testimony might have been enough to sway a jury to acquit Arbuckle of the manslaughter charge. But what he had to say was largely squelched by prosecution objections on the basis of hearsay.

Despite not being able to deliver on Arbuckle’s behalf, Glennon may have been rewarded for his willingness, having made the curious career move from hotel dick to movie theater manager, a job he held until Prohibition ended and he went back to his preferred profession of bartending.

The following draft passage is where we introduce him into our account of Labor Day, September 5, with the working title of “The Life of the Party.”

Around midnight, Virginia Rappe received a visit from George Francis Glennon, the stout, middle-aged house detective at the, St. Francis Hotel. As a defense witness during the first Arbuckle trial, Glennon said that Maude Delmont and Dr. Beardslee were in room 1227 when he arrived. Despite the late hour, he wanted to speak to Rappe.

Glennon held various jobs over the years. As a boy, he operated a freight elevator and, in later years, worked as clerk, a chauffeur, and as a bartender, a job at which he excelled. Prior to Prohibition, Glennon was described as “the best mixologist in the business” while employed at the Hotel Terminal’s bar on Market Street. We can assume he had a brutish attitude, having made the news for striking an effeminate young man who had “lisped” a request for a “beauty special,” a lavender-colored cocktail with a dash of ice cream.[1] The blow cost him a ten-dollar fine. The coming of Prohibition however forced him out of bartending altogether. – at which point he found work as a special policeman.

The special police were essentially security guards and privately paid by the businesses that hired them. Special police were employed by banks, penny arcades, movie theaters, skating rinks, and the like. They worked as night watchmen in warehouses, factories, and on San Francisco waterfront. They also worked as hotel detectives. Since they carried firearms and could arrest people, they were licensed by the San Francisco Police and were considered peace officers as well. Thus, Glennon possessed a modicum of authority if there should be trouble in the hotel in the form of an unruly guest, room thief, call girl, and any other criminal acts on the hotel’s premises.

So the Arbuckle party, despite being hosted by a frequent and famous guest, couldn’t be ignored. There was liquor in plain view in Room 1220, seen by maids, bellboys, waiters, and now an assistant manager, Harry Boyle. It had also become known that an unclothed woman at the party had been found in severe distress and had to be carried to an empty room. By the time Glennon arrived late in the evening, she had already been seen four times by the two hotel doctors.

However when Glennon was a defense witness at the first Arbuckle trial, he was prevented from discussing his brief conversation with Rappe, as the prosecution objected on the basis it was hearsay.

Glennon’s account was reported in the newspapers though and, unlike the accounts provided by Drs. Kaarboe and Beardslee who said she barely spoke, he said he found Rappe to be alert and responsive to his questions. She was no longer agitated. If Glennon indulged in any small talk with her, it went unreported. Instead, Glennon got to the point, asking a battery of questions that had nothing to do with her welfare but rather serendipitously worded as though by a lawyer to exonerate Arbuckle when the time came.

Glennon said he asked Rappe if Arbuckle had hurt her and she answered “no”. Then Glennon asked if anyone had hurt her. “I do not know,” Rappe allegedly said. “I may have been hurt by falling off the bed.”^[2]

[1] Universal News Service, “Beauty Special Was Too Much for This Bartender,” The [Pomona]Bulletin, 10 September 1919, 6.

[2] “Girl Said to Have Cleared Arbuckle: Clown’s Lawyer Has Statement from the Hotel Sleuth,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, 11 November 1921, 1.

Spite Work: The Trials of Virginia Rappe and Fatty Arbuckle

A reconsideration of the Fatty Arbuckle case of 1921-22 and the life and death of the victim, Virginia Rappe

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