Greg Merritt, in Room 1219, was the first to publish Virginia Rappe’s correct birth date, July 7, 1891, based on a live birthrecorded for one Mabel Rapp in Chicago. During the Arbuckle case and ever since, Virginia Rappe is given credit for changing her own name. In reality, it was her mother who changed the family name to Rappe.
A color facsimile of Mabel’s 1905 New York City death certificate clearly indicates the deceased’s surname as Rappé. The accent was probably inserted by the attending physician to indicate the preferred pronunciation—or how he heard it from Mabel’s survivors, Virginia Rappe and her putative grandmother, who also went by Virginia Rappe.
The death certificate has handwritten entries and when it was transcribed by the New York City Health Department, the typist interpreted the é as a lowercase, dotted letter i.
For this reason, such genealogical sites as Ancestry.com and FamilyResearch.com repeat the mistake, identifying the deceased as “Mabel Rappi.” This surname is very rare and required some more due diligence. We requested the source document, which also has more information about what killed Virginia Rappe’s mother when she and her family lived in Hell’s Kitchen between 1900 and 1905.
Rappe likely served as Mabel’s professional name as an entertainer and to obscure the notoriety “Mabel Rapp” had in Chicago and New York in 1899, when she was identified in many newspapers as the moll of a Chicago-based check forgery ring.
(This entry is the first in a series of briefs about peripheral though significant figures in the Rappe–Arbuckle case.)
During the first week after Virginia Rappe’s death on September 9, 1921, members of the “film colony” in Hollywood—actors, actresses, directors, and the like—spoke out in support of Arbuckle. Mabel Normand said that her former Keystone costar was a gentleman and incapable of intentionally hurting a woman let alone kill her. For a short time, many film colonists also came out in support of Virginia Rappe, even though more than a few didn’t know her. Helen Hansen was an exception. She was called an “intimate friend” of Rappe. She lived only a few blocks away, on N. Oxford St., from Rappe’s house on N. Wilton St. in the Melrose neighborhood of Los Angeles. Hansen was said to be an actress. Some of the newspaper accounts of Hansen were accompanied by a publicity photograph of her wearing a long strand of artificial pearls. What she said about Rappe fed into the public’s image of Rappe as “Virginia, the Girl Victim,” as one headline read in the Los Angeles Record.
Hansen describe Rappe as a quiet, reserved young woman—presumably like herself—who didn’t go in for Hollywood parties, that is, the kind given by Roscoe Arbuckle and his companions. Her meaning was clear to the newspaper readers of the early 1920s—Rappe wouldn’t attend a gathering where she was expected to drink and engage in sex. Hansen said that Rappe showed little interest in other men. She remained loyal to comedy director Henry Lehrman and she was waiting for him to return from New York City. Hansen’s meaning was clear here as well: Rappe was keeping herself for the man she loved. Much of what Hansen said was anodyne and, perhaps, for that reason she goes unmentioned in previous texts about the Arbuckle case.
There is a takeaway from Helen Hansen that we think shouldn’t be overlooked though. But first, who is she? A filmgoer in the 1920s would have been hard pressed to think of a motion picture featuring Helen Hansen. None of the news stories in which she was quoted mentioned her being associated with any studio. One reason was that she withheld her screen name, Patricia Crawford, from reporters. While even that name likely meant little to the contemporary reader/filmgoer, it was apparent that Helen Hansen wanted to protect her brand, a name and image she had been gradually cultivating since her arrival in Hollywood just before 1920.
Her real name was Helen Grace Crawford. She was allegedly born in Scotland and lived with her parents in Vancouver, British Columbia, until 1918, when she, at the age of sixteen, married a telephone company clerk named Harold B. Hansen in Tacoma. Soon after, the couple moved to San Francisco, where she modeled clothes. Then Helen left Harold for Hollywood (as if inspired by headlines in fan magazines).
Camera!, a motion picture industry magazine, provided a clue to Hansen’s identity. A “Helen Hansen” was cast in a Dorothea Wolbert vehicle for Universal Pictures, Nearly a Lady (1920). Not long after this film was released in the autumn of 1920, a press release, undoubtedly written by Hansen’s press agent, identified her as the beautiful—and likely uncredited—Patricia Crawford who appeared in the finished two-reel comedy. Three other uncredited roles were also mentioned, as though she had been a supporting actress to Viola Dana in Cinderella’s Twin (1920), Anita Stewart in Sowing the Wind (1921), and Dorothy Phillips in Man–Woman–Marriage (1921). Such exaggeration shouldn’t cast doubt on the veracity of what Hansen said about Rappe. But we have to consider that she had abandoned her husband for Hollywood, didn’t correct reporters who called her “Miss Hansen” in their copy, and avoided mentioning her screen career.
Such problems are common when parsing the lives of actors from a hundred years ago and reconciling them with their real selves. That said, how was Helen Hansen irrefutably linked with the uncredited Patricia Crawford? In 1923, in a San Francisco courtroom, a Grace Crawford Hansen sought to have her marriage annulled from a Harold B. Hansen. That same year, a Patricia Crawford of Vancouver, B.C., married the actor Eddie Phillips. She was still married to him in the 1930 census, where her given name was Helen Phillips and her true age, thirty, which was certainly not rounded to the nearest 10.
And the “takeaway”? Helen Hansen told reporters that the publicity man, press agent, talent scout, and Rappe’s alleged “manager,” Al Semnacher, had asked Hansen to accompany him and Rappe on that long Labor Day weekend. Despite Rappe’s insistence that a friend and fellow actress come, Hansen ultimately refused to go. She told reporters that she had suffered a recent “break down.” Hansen said, too, that Rappe wouldn’t have gone alone with Semnacher, a married man in the midst of divorce proceedings. By Hansen’s estimation, Rappe only went along because Semnacher found a willing party in Maude Delmont.
At this writing, we can only ask questions. But the inclusion of Helen Hansen in the traveling party certainly could change the accepted notion that the trip was intended as nothing more than a day trip to Selma, California, which got extended by chance to include a visit to San Francisco. The fact that Al Semnacher paid for the lodging and meals of his traveling companions at a not inexpensive hotel suggests the purpose of the trip was business rather than pleasure or a mix of the two.
When the first Arbuckle trial opened in the third week of November 1921, another press release about Patricia Crawford appeared in small-town newspapers from Ohio to Mississippi to Kansas. It featured a photograph and no dots connect the person in the image to the Helen Hansen who spoke for Virginia Rappe, even though Crawford and Hansen are the same, as are the string of pearls they clutch.
The three faces of Helen: from left to right, Helen Hansen, Patricia Crawford, and Helen Crawford Hansen (Newspapers.com)
Although Hansen never appeared in any subsequent film as Patricia Crawford, she did take the stand for the prosecution at the second Arbuckle trial on January 23, 1922. If she said anything about Rappe wanting her to come to San Francisco, it wasn’t reported. She only stated that she had never seen Rappe ill, which, by the second trial, was the focal point. Indeed, Rappe’s health was on trial as much as Arbuckle was for fatally injuring her.
The Wikipedia entry for Virginia Rappe suffers from inaccuracies but doesn’t take sides per se. What we have found out is that her traveling companion at Roscoe Arbuckle’s Labor Day party of September 5, 1921, Maude Delmont, is not the infamous figure, who “had a police record for extortion, prostitution and blackmail.” This assertion has been made over and over again without any evidence to support it. None was offered during the three Arbuckle trials and nothing was made of the fact that she was on a first-name basis with “Roscoe” and quite familiar with him as well as one of the doctors who treated Rappe and requested her autopsy. We are developing a more sympathetic picture of this woman.
This note, however, deals with another revision that should be less contentious: adding a final film to Virginia Rappe’s thin filmography.
Before it was considered indecent and unseemly to show the dead actress in American movie theaters, A Misfit Pair(1921) began its run during the week following her death on September 9. The one-reel comedy, made by a small production unit for Universal Pictures’ Century Comedies, was intended for a package called “Romance Week”—to compete with Paramount Week—and first mentioned in the June 3, 1921, issue of Universal Weekly.[1]
A Czech film scholar found a very brief synopsis that lacked a cast list. But the main gag was a grocery store clerk who, after a number of hijinks, finds himself trying to save a man dangling from a building and a man drowning in a pond at the same time. They are the “misfit pair” of the title as well as the clerk’s rival for the attentions of a young lady. But nothing is known about that episode in the comedy.
As it turned out, Rappe’s death and the charge of murder being brought against Arbuckle by Maude Delmont and San Francisco District Attorney Matthew Brady, offered theater managers the opportunity to fill seats with those curious to see Virginia Rappe on screen. Across a broad swath of the country’s midsection, from St. Louis to Salt Lake City, Rappe’s name appeared prominently in newspaper advertisements. In St. Louis, the Royal Theatre not only listed A Misfit Pair as an “Extra Added Attraction” starring Virginia Rappe, but added that Lloyd Hamilton, Rappe’s co-star in Henry Lehrman’s A Twilight Baby (1919), starred as well as —impossibly? in cameo?—Buster Keaton.[2]
Hamilton, undoubtedly, really was in this comedy. It was his vehicle and apparently funny enough to enjoy a revival in 1927. But why A Misfit Pair was never advertised as such in 1921 makes it curious. Hamilton was a prominent screen comedian— usually playing an oblivious type not far from what Arbuckle and Keaton covered but didn’t cost a $1 million a year. We can only guess that Hamilton wasn’t under contract with Universal and that it was side work.
A Virginia Rappe “exploitation” ad in the St. Louis Star and Times of September 18, 1921 (Newspapers.com)
Rappe’s part in A Misfit Pair was likely restricted to a few scenes that became, in 1921, a voyeuristic “glance” in a motion picture lasting no longer than a cartoon. Nevertheless, our curiosity goes in a different direction. We see, or better, triangulate another significance of this short—and lost—comedy’s existence. It is threefold. A Misfit Pair suggests (1) that Rappe wanted to be a “photoplayer” after several years of testing the waters, mostly under the aegis of her putative boyfriend, the comedy director, Henry Lehrman. It also (2) lends credence to the director Fred Fishback’s possible intercession in her career after Lehrman. He was head of Century Comedies and rumored to be working with Rappe in the earliest reportage in the Los Angeles Times on the day after her death. Lastly, it was Fishback who took advantage of the “accident” of Rappe’s presence in San Francisco on Labor Day morning. He telephoned her at the Palace Hotel, as she sat having breakfast in the Garden Court, a setting that still exists, to invite her to Arbuckle’s suite in the St. Francis Hotel. Fishback relied on “intelligence” (these scare quotes are necessary) from a friend, the gown salesman Ira Fortlouis. Both knew Rappe’s manager, Al Semnacher, who drove her and Delmont from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
The Garden Court of the Palace Hotel, San Francisco, ca. 1920 (Library of Congress)
We have read reportage in which District Attorney Brady suspected that Rappe had been lured to Arbuckle’s party with the promise of future film roles. But Brady and his assistants never built a case on those suspicions. In our book, we want to shine a light on the people and reasons that fed his suspicions and that one of these men, Fred Fishback, was in a position to help her career, as a fellow protégé of Henry Lehrman, and had already done so directly or indirectly.
Was the chance adventure to the St. Francis really part of an intended venture?
[1] “Your Universal Ready to Help You,” Universal Weekly, June 3, 1921, 8.
[2] “Movie Directory,” St. Louis Star and Times, 18 September 1921, B7.
(Periodically, we will report about where we are in the manuscript or discuss research that deserves mention, especially when it forces a revision or judicious speculation in response to those made by previous writers on this subject.)
Our book is divided into four parts named for the major cities in Rappe’s life—Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—and an epilogue. Over the past week, while adding to the Los Angeles section, where the text moves from 1920 to Rappe’s final year, we briefly introduced a new name that is peripheral to her life but contributory to what lies in store or wait: Dorothy Wallace. Shortly before Arbuckle sailed for Europe in late November 1920, ostensively for a long-deserved vacation, an “eastern publication” allegedly published a rumor that Arbuckle intended to marry the young actress in New York. Supposedly, however, the marriage was called off due to a “quarrel.”
The rumor of an impending Arbuckle marriage came back to life upon his and Wallace’s return to Los Angeles just before the Christmas holiday. The woman in question was in her late twentiesand her early life and career has some parallels to Virginia Rappe’s save that Wallace was from a wealthy San Francisco family. Wallace was said to be a globe trotter, having traveled with her parents all over the world. Once she met an Indian prince who fell violently in love with her. Her parents had to leave Istanbul to escape the “ardent attentions of Turkish royalty.” Like Rappe, Wallace was entrepreneurial, having owned a millinery shop in San Francisco. This she gave up to pursue a modeling career in New York City, including posing for a poster series by James Montgomery Flagg. The celebrated illustrator also picked her for a one-reel silent biopic, The Art Bug (1918), in which she played herself, a Greenwich Village art student.
In 1918, Wallace arrived in Los Angeles and began to appear in supporting roles alongside Gloria Swanson in The Secret Code (1918) and Olive Thomas in The Spite Bride (1919). Because of her performance alongside Dustin Farnum in A Man’s Fight (1919), she was publicized as the love interest in his next vehicle, The Harvest of Shame, playing a New York society girl. But the project was shelved and her debut as a leading lady went unrealized.
Dorothy Wallace as one of the “Girls You Should Know” of 1918 (Lantern)
Wallace, in 1919, allegedly owned a wardrobe variously valued at $10,000 and $500,000—which would rival that of established actresses—and was seemingly on the upswing of a promising career in motion pictures. Nevertheless, her name and the marriage rumor appear in no Arbuckle biography. The omission seems strange in that a biography is where falsehoods and factoids are dealt with along with establishing the the true person.
While there was no corresponding rumor to suggest Wallace set sail as well to Europe with Arbuckle in a shipboard reconciliation, which, like Pullman sleepers, was a common way of indulging in an assignation, the two surely met and socialized at the Sunset Inn overlooking the Santa Monica beach. Both were habitués as was Virginia Rappe, who won dance contests there.
The Sunset’s proximity to the studios on the west side of Hollywood as well as its distance made it a convenient gathering place for the film colony during the teens and twenties. Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, and their entourages often came to dine, drink, dance, and flirt.
The Sunset Inn, early 1920s (Calisphere)
The Wallace–Arbuckle rumor persisted in two newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald throughout December 1920. There was news of an engagement, of a broken engagement, of a quarrel, and even a New Year’s Eve engagement party. When Arbuckle’s manager Lou Anger denied the engagement party, he didn’t deny the engagement.
Minta Durfee, a native of Long Beach, California, undoubtedly found the rumor troubling, especially since her family read those newspapers. It took another month for a minor syndicated movie column to remind the public that such a marriage between Wallace and Arbuckle was “impossible” since he was still married to Durfee. Despite such reminders, Arbuckle, for his part, behaved like a bachelor all the more, an eligible bachelor.
The marriage rumor persisted until April 1921, where it appeared again in Motion Picture Magazine. While it would be easy to pass on such biographical chaff, we see it as possible evidence, to which we can add more, that Arbuckle was casting about for a new, younger, and prettier Mrs. Arbuckle for much 1920 and into 1921. (This is true even if Arbuckle was the victim of a joke.) Until the death of Virginia Rappe in September 1921, Minta Durfee had to know that sooner rather than later her husband would want a divorce that wouldn’t be as remunerative as their separation. Instead, the advantage went to her. Rather than serve her with papers, so to speak, Arbuckle’s lawyers ensured that Minta Durfee would appear prominently at his side when his courtroom ordeal began.
The winner of what may have been a long and ongoing beauty contest wasn’t Virginia Rappe, of course, but rather a young ingenue whom Arbuckle met aboard the SS Harvardwhen he sailed from San Francisco the day after Labor Day, 1920.
It was another chance meeting in San Francisco, too, like that between him and Rappe the day before.
J. Barney Sherry, Lois Wilson, Dustin Farnum, and Dorothy Wallace in A Man’s Fight (1919) (IMDb.com)
This entry is for journalists researching feature articles to mark the centenary of the Arbuckle case. But it is also for , historians, cinéastes, and simply the curious who wish to survey any new discoveries on the subject. There is much that has emerged over the intervening years and much of that has gone unquestioned and unrevised with only a few exceptions in print and online. That in itself should pique the readers’ curiosity about what really happened or what could have in a way that departs from previous theories and speculation.
One myth we saw in researching this book is the role of the press in 1921. Did newspaper publishers and editors try to shape public opinion against Arbuckle? Transform him from lovable man-child screen comedian into a drunk and rapist? Body-shame away any doubt that his belly burst Virginia Rappe’s bladder and so cause her death? The basic scenario seemed to speak against him. The Labor Day party, the liquor, the married men inviting unmarried women to their rooms—and Arbuckle himself following Rappe into his bedroom and locking the door. When he opened it, a young actress was laying on his wet bed going in and out of shock and aware that she had been gravely injured.
Publishers and editors reflexively knew that, since Arbuckle was a screen comedian and a living caricature of himself, he should be presented as a figure of fun even in a murder case. They also knew that public sympathy flowed in Rappe’s direction as the victim of this other Arbuckle, this real Arbuckle. For a while, the press stuck to the narrative that Arbuckle was an out-of-control malfeasant, a sociopath (a word still uncommon in American criminology of the 1920s) and Rappe, the silenced innocent, would never experience a full life: getting married to her fiancé, being a mother, serving a slice of apple pie, never see her family, and never get her seat on the lifeboat. She was, almost as long as Arbuckle was figure of fun and immorality, this sentimental image that should bring tears to reader’ eyes. To more serious-minded women, feminists and those who fought for suffrage and prohibition, Rappe was a victim of that deadly combination of male violence against women and alcohol. Her death made for a test case.
Page A-4 of the Los Angeles Herald on September 12, 1921, as the Arbuckle case began to unfold in one Hearst newspaper. (California Digital Newspaper Collection)
Much has been made of the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst’s responsibility for “framing” Arbuckle as a murderer. The British crime historian, David Yallop, the author of The Day the Laughter Stopped: The True Story of Fatty Arbuckle(1976), is one if not the source for blaming Hearst for intentionally ruining Arbuckle’s flourishing film career in order to sell newspapers across his vast press empire.
The Hearst press adopted an attitude towards the Arbuckle case that was criminally irresponsible. Feature articles, news stories and editorials in Hearst’s newspapers had but one aim: to boost circulation. In the event, the policy was successful beyond Hearst’s wildest dreams. [. . .] His ruthlessness in boosting circulation was to have a significant effect on Arbuckle’s fate, so it is worth pausing here to describe the man behind the press.
Yallop’s obsessive allusions to the film Citizen Kane (1941) suggest he was more intent on shoring up Orson Wells’ fictional version of Hearst and grinding his ax in a book that was long accepted as a definitive account when under close scrutiny appears to be more and more a work of fiction, an often titillating tale, a book expected to be a bestseller among movie-mad readers. If Yallop’s estate should ever release his alleged though never-revealed primary documents, such as the original trial transcripts and taped and transcribed interviews with people who knew every record spun on the phonograph that blared during Arbuckle’s Labor Day party, we might never question this sensational account again. That said, the Hearst theory in Yallop is only one example that just seems to be, well, Fleet Street, tabloid fare. A deliberate spin to create a sinister portrait of those who stood to gain from Arbuckle’s downfall.
In our research, a cursory look at the headlines and reportage in the Hearst chain’s flagship San Francisco Examiner, the Los Angeles Herald, and the Washington Timesreveals that the Hearst newsrooms had their own comedians, so to speak, who didn’t follow any directive or template issued by their publisher. What stands out is how mercilessly they made fun of Arbuckle’s woes during the first week after Rappe’s death, as though he had made the ultimate stage fall, as though their readers might not apprehend this were it not a tragedy that a woman died and a beloved screen comedian had seemingly brought himself so low. The Times, for example, had a field day with the assumption that the obese actor’s weight was the likely cause of Rappe’s death, and reprinted a heretofore innocent publicity photograph of Arbuckle. The image was of the comedian, dressed in a white shirt, trousers, and shoes, sprawled with bottle in hand under the caption “How ‘Fatty’ Looks on Morning After the Wild Night Before.”
The journalistic slapstick had its day and if the Hearst papers can be faulted for anything, their newsrooms excelled. What made it problematic for Arbuckle and those who set out to rehabilitate him was the amount of ink and flattering photographs that elicited sympathy for Virginia Rappe. We see this coverage as more compelling, for it acknowledged women both as substantial segment of the readership and as a political force to be reckoned with, having recently won two significant legislative victories: prohibition of alcohol sales, for reasons including male violence against women, and the women’s right to vote, both ratified in 1920. Rappe was almost a martyr in this respect. (Her presence in San Francisco a year earlier, during the climactic final days of the Democratic Convention of 1920, placed her at the epicenter for the last great demonstration for the ratification of the 19th Amendment. We have many thoughts about this in the work-in-progress.)
Gradually, in the first week after Rappe’s death, the tone of the press coverage sobered as Arbuckle’s journey through the justice system began. First, Arbuckle’s legal team began giving press conferences and taking reporters aside, reminding the public that their client, regardless of his stature or what his conduct looked like, was “innocent until proven guilty.” Such damage control had the effect of blunting the sympathy for the “poor girl.” Then, Rappe’s liminal presence was eclipsed as Arbuckle’s estranged wife, Minta Durfee, quickly inserted herself. (Despite having lived years apart, Durfee had been capitalizing on his name, branding herself as Roscoe Arbuckle’s wife” in her solo career and screen comeback., so justice for Rappe was an existential threat.)
The Hearst papers took notice of her early on and did so with as much respect for her station as that given to the victim. The first big headlines devoted to the Arbuckle case in the Washington Times devoted its largest typeface to read “ARBUCKLE’S WIFE RUSHES TO AID.”[1] And, as she made her way West, the tenor of the coverage began to change, as did the quality of the reporting. The Examiner assigned Oscar H. Fernbach, its criminal case correspondent at San Francisco’s Hall of Justice. The Chronicle put its most prominent female reporter on the case, Marjorie C. Driscoll. The national press featured such bylined reporters as M. D. Tracy of the United Press and Frieda Blum of the Universal Service. They among others began to turn out stories that were balanced, inquiring, objective, and factual whenever possible.
If Arbuckle was “framed,” it would have been only in the initial days when competing newspapers rushed to create narratives. As conflicting details surfaced many readers quickly switched sides, even among the women who crowded the pretrial court proceedings where San Francisco District Attorney Matthew Brady was forced to reduce a first-degree murder charge to manslaughter. That these men doggedly prosecuted Arbuckle for months with no real chance of a conviction is one of the most curious aspects of the Arbuckle case given that victim, with no aggrieved family pressing the case, was now a ghost fading from view, virtually forgotten. Was Brady’s pursuit of the case politically motivated or was it a more personal crusade, an orphic quest?
The Hearst chain as well as other newspapers took a few last jabs at Arbuckle when, at last, his conduct wasn’t the source of any amusement. During a pretrial investigatory proceeding in the Women’s Court* in late September 1921, Rappe’s manager was compelled by a judge to repeat a story that Arbuckle told his male friends the day after her crisis in his bedroom. The comedian made a joke of inserting a piece of ice into her vagina. (After this revelation, Arbuckle’s chief consul, the Los Angeles-based criminal defense lawyer, Frank Dominguez, said that inserting ice in this manner was a tried-and-true method of bringing an unresponsive female back to consciousness.) Ironically, however, the moral outrage of such an act didn’t have the impact the prosecution hoped for. A judge decided that Arbuckle could only be tried for manslaughter, not murder. And the women who crowded the courtroom to hear the witnesses’ accusations and hopefully see Arbuckle himself take the stand? After Arbuckle paid his bail, he and Minta Durfee were mobbed by well-wishers and most were women. Crowds of women even met the comedian at the train station when he, his lawyers, and Durfee left for Los Angeles.
Because Hearst had his own upstart studio, Cosmopolitan Productions, in partnership with Adolph Zukor and Paramount, he had no apparent reason to personally demonize Arbuckle and the motion picture industry. There is also little evidence to support the notion that Hearst had a vendetta against Hollywood for the treatment of his mistress, Marion Davies who not only wasn’t an opera singer as portrayed in Citizen Kane, but proved to be a capable comic actor. Hearst was grooming her for a career that would require goodwill from the studio moguls. That Arbuckle later directed her in a film shouldn’t be seen as an anomaly.
Indeed, all the newspapers at the time piled on the Arbuckle case and Hearst hardly led the charge. At least there is no extant evidence of that, no memos, no memoirs in which Hearst discusses any intentions toward Arbuckle or his employers. That kind of direction from the top was more in keeping with Hearst’s focus on bigger issues such as the danger a revived Ku Klux Klan posed for the nation. Arbuckle was only a diversion, a clown, albeit a sad and rich one who was not too big to fall.
The front page of the Los Angeles Evening Herald after Arbuckle escaped the initial charge of first-degree murder. By the end of September 1921, Arbuckle began to enjoy some good press, even across the Hearst chain. He is shown with his estranged wife Minta Durfee and her mother. Notice, however, the juxtaposition of lower headline, which refers to another story. One last jab? (California Digital Newspaper Collection)
*A special women’s venue of the Police Court that restricted the number of men, especially when female witnesses were being called and when the crime had involved a woman as perpetrator or victim.
This blog is a work-in-progress about a work-in-progress: a reconsideration of the Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle case and its principals, Virginia Rappe and Arbuckle himself, and what took place at a Labor Day party in San Francisco on September 5, 1921 in the St. Francis Hotel. The book we propose is provisionally titled Spite Work: The Trials of Fatty Arbuckle and Virginia Rappe. “Spite” for what may have been the motivation of one or more individuals and “trials” because more than just one person was judged. Indeed, both the dead actress and the living comedian were on trial for their lives—and still on trial after the San Francisco courtroom drama took place a century ago. In acquitting Arbuckle of manslaughter with the spectre of a murder charge in the background, Virginia Rappe had to be misrepresented in court such that the victim was a victim of herself, of her own body, of her imperfections. One need only go, like a middle school student, to the Wikipedia entry for Virginia Rappe for a briefing on the litany of mistakes that have come to represent her, beginning with the year of her birth.
A photograph of Virginia Rappe taken on the set of The Punch of the Irish (1920). The “Dead” stamp doesn’t refer to the deceased but to the news story no longer being current. Note the curious typographical error or Freudian slip of “whose” in the body copy.
Rappe’s life story will receive an overdue remediation if not rehabilitation. We wanted to know the person who died on September 9, why she had no family, why thousands who never knew her came to see her buried, as well as Mildred Harris, the estranged wife of Charlie Chaplin, who provided the gown Rappe was buried in. Conversely, we don’t believe Arbuckle was a criminal or sociopath. Nor do we believe he was framed and entirely innocent, at the least his acquiescence to the defamation of Rappe’s character during his trials while pragmatic was morally craven. After all, he knew her. He knew her well.
Though Arbuckle was considered one of the two leading comedian–directors of the silent era in 1921, Chaplin being the other, he was still an employee and a valued brand of Paramount Pictures and its uncompromising chief, Adolph Zukor. Millions of dollars were at stake, and in an era when the film industry was feeling an encroaching threat of censorship. Indeed, the Arbuckle case proved to be the catalyst for the so-called “Hays office” and Motion Picture Production Code. He was too big to fall and yet he still fell. There was no justice for Rappe in that, just further infamy.
That feature of the Arbuckle case first attracted one of us in the late 1970s after discovering Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon in the library of a college friend. In that notorious book, there is one of the first, and most salacious, attempts to tell the story of what happened in room 1219 of the St. Francis Hotel. It gives ink to such myths as Rappe being penetrated with a Coca-Cola bottle and the trashed hotel room photograph, erroneously said to be the scene of the crime, that continues to be re-used as a shorthand emblem of the scandal. Nevertheless, Anger imparts the pathos of the story, that something unfair happened to Rappe. If nothing else, the man who made Scorpio Rising, by his sloppy research, presented us with the orphic challenge of bringing the dead actress to the surface to give her due The book will also serve to illuminate how history is often written, when facts are missing and unreliable witnesses (and authors) have been used as principal sources.
Coming from the vantage point of Rappe, from her victimology, allowed us to wade through the reams of Arbuckliana that is factual, factoidal, and fabricated in the tradition of Clifford Irving’s fictional “autobiography” of Howard Hughes. We saw problems in reporting, much of it due to a lack of proper legwork, even when there is some intellectual honesty. When confronted by the learning and research curve in writing about the Arbuckle case, with such challenges as the make-believe of Hollywood that permeates its real lives, the passage of time, hostile witnesses, missing court transcripts, the journalism that was lost until the invention of OCR technology, and the many voids in documentation, we found that the most often cited authors seem to have made up facts rather than be stymied by a gap in their narratives. Their self-interest rivals that of the many reluctant witnesses who testified against Arbuckle, knowing that their careers, too, were on the line. And then there are those writers who simply accepted the fixed narratives and agendas set by their predecessors, that Rappe was a diseased tramp, Delmont was a swindler, and Arbuckle was robbed of his career.
Arbuckle was a gifted physical comedian and the talented director of many wonderful comedies but it’s important that the artist and the real person are recognized as discrete entities. Nevertheless, the well-intentioned efforts of others to restore his name and reputation have been invariably made at the expense of a woman, who in the kindest versions is dismissed as a “bit player” in a handful of mediocre silent movies. Nor was Rappe a vector of sexually transmitted disease and promiscuous as declared by Arbuckle’s first wife, Minta Durfee, who seems to have set that persona in cement in interviews with authors conducted decades later. Nor should Rappe be seen as an accessory to an extortion ring. Nor should she be reduced to a female bladder in a specimen jar.
We shall undo many of these received notions, including the one that would seem the least likely to be challenged, that she was just another ambitious young woman struggling to make it in Hollywood. Virginia Rappe emerges here as a person of interest in her own right, no longer lost in an echo chamber of libelous claims passed down as facts..
Another irony to consider is that in unearthing what is known about Virginia Rappe, she would have been not unlike the reluctant witnesses who testified in the trials. By nature, she wouldn’t have faulted Arbuckle in court but rather addressed him in person, as a personal matter between two friends. If Rappe had been deposed, she likely would have abided by the kind of omertà observed by the other witnesses who attended the Labor Day party. Despite the constant pain, Rappe wasn’t seeking vengeance against Arbuckle, instead her expectations were little more than a show of sympathy from him and that he pay her modest hospital bill of $60—an incredible bargain given what Arbuckle later incurred in legal fees and the enormous setback to his career in a peculiar form of American excommunication or shunning that we see now in the so-called “cancel culture.”
Books that see “Fatty framed” and the like often interweave the text with an early specious biography of Arbuckle where Rappe is presented as a femme fatale, a “juvenile vamp” as she was once called, who picks Arbuckle’s bedroom as a place to die. We don’t believe Rappe’s presence at the St. Francis Hotel was a coincidence but rather closer to matchmaking, even an assignation. Arbuckle was shopping for the next Mrs. Arbuckle even before he had asked his estranged wife for a divorce.
The Labor Day incident should be seen as a personal tragedy and that is the real reason for not making this revisionary view of the Arbuckle case simply about him. We understand that what happened behind closed doors can only be conjectured. But something did happen to Rappe in that room that had the traumatic force of a motorcycle accident. Because of Arbuckle’s silence on possible causes one cannot disregard the possibility that he was involved somehow. We also recognize that Rappe was not quite the “healthy, normal girl” portrayed by Arbuckle’s prosecutors. She was an analysand, not the Freudian or Jungian kind, but rather by a “metaphysician,” a term still used by holistic life coaches and the like.
Rappe and Arbuckle were tête-à-tête during the first hour of the Labor Day party, inseparable. If we reconsider where that rapport came from, we can begin to see something other and larger than what a jury turned into a nonevent with Arbuckle’s acquittal coming in three minutes. We also see why the prosecutors spent so much time and effort on a hopeless case, an exercise in vanity or . . . spite. The facts don’t support the long-held belief that District Attorney Matthew Brady was angling to become the next Democratic governor of the state of California—given that Arbuckle’s lawyer Gavin McNab was known as a kingmaker in the state and was opposing Brady in the most high profile case of their careers. Brady’s idea of ambition was along the lines of undoing the miscarriage of justice in the case of labor activist Tom Mooney. Brady perhaps saw the outrage of Arbuckle’s Labor Day party and the expensive legal counsel to defend him to be in the same league as the fraudulent conviction of Mooney who was serving a life sentence in San Quentin State Prison.
Brady also surely apprehended that Arbuckle’s Labor Day party was important to women after they had earned the right to vote. The militancy of the Suffragist Movement was being channeled into the criminal justice system—and the women who attended Arbuckle’s party and testified gave it a certain democracy. They sat at the same table and spoke familiarly and informally to Arbuckle. They included a former Mack Sennett bathing beauty; a San Francisco nightclub entertainer and single mother; a bigamous mule trader’s wife who was intimate with A-list Hollywood actresses; Virginia Rappe, of course, with as many films to her credit as could be counted on one hand; and her companion, Maude Delmont, an erstwhile couturier now selling ads for a farm labor journal. Delmont signed the murder complaint against Arbuckle and was considered Rappe’s “Avenger.” As with Rappe, much of what has been previously written about Delmont—that she was an extortionist, a divorce correspondent, a groomer of white slaves—is also a myth that has lingered for a century.
This “democracy” in our book makes Arbuckle less a central figure and, at times, peripheral. Nevertheless, he is a presence and we mark his progress the way one might revisit the iceberg approaching the Titanic. (The Arbuckle case, incidentally, does have an encounter with ice.)
Spite Work: The Trials of Virginia Rappe and Fatty Arbuckle 