Intermezzo: Enter Minta

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[The following is an extract from our work-in-progress—one in a series of short features or en·tr’actes that allow the authors and readers to take pause. Almost all Arbuckle case narratives share DNA from Minta Durfee’s sometimes cynical memories, which are largely responsible for how the story has long been framed.]

Minta Durfee made a career out of being Mrs. Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. It was a saleable commodity for her, and if you don’t believe me check her contracts filed at the [Academy’s] Herrick Library. She was lying relentlessly and grandiosely, of course . . .

Joan Myers [1]

Minta said she was asked often about having sex with a fat man. She said “I wasn’t going to answer a question like that. Besides I knew Roscoe wasn’t capable of anything beyond simple petting.”

Timothy Dean Lefler [2]

Toward the end of her long life—long for a Silent Era actor—Minta Durfee shared a memory of her former husband Roscoe Arbuckle and his frequent costar, the comedienne Mabel Normand. “They were such water dogs,” Durfee recalled, “they loved the water, they did everything under the sun in the water.”[3]

Durfee’s memory was a happy one, of the house Arbuckle rented on Venice Beach in 1915 and ’16. The weather was often warm, even at night, so they slept on a screened in porch and woke to breakfast served by a Japanese servant, hired with the modest but adequate income each made at Keystone Studios.

On Sundays in the summer, Normand was a frequent guest. She was an excellent swimmer as was Arbuckle, whom she nicknamed “Big Otto,” after a zoo elephant in nearby Lincoln Park. While Durfee watched from shore—she didn’t like to swim—Normand and Arbuckle swam from the front of the house south toward the Venice Pier. The pair’s long swims became a routine for a time and sometimes included a third member, a dolphin, that swam alongside Normand. As much a fearless person in real life as she was on camera, Normand would put her arm around the animal’s back and let it pull her along.

Durfee wasn’t always alone on the beach waiting, the odd woman out. Sometimes a crowd formed, from anonymous onlookers to friends who came to see Normand, Arbuckle, and the tame dolphin “perform,” before they emerged from the water dripping wet, toweling themselves off. Durfee’s embroidered memory captured this innocent moment in the lives of these two actors who died young. Another who died young, Virginia Rappe, was denied such innocent anecdotes but hardly the emobroidery.

“I knew her well,” Durfee said.

Mabel Normand and Roscoe Arbuckle, Catalina I., 1914 (Private collection)

Minta Durfee may have known what Virginia Rappe faced behind the closed door of room 1219. In a series of taped interviews for Robert Young Jr.’s “bio-bibliography” of Roscoe Arbuckle, Durfee described intimate details about what it was like sleeping with her husband far removed from the screened-in porch on Venice Beach.[4] In March 1917, not long after Arbuckle had been feted in Boston after signing his contract with Paramount Pictures and Famous Players-Lasky, he and Durfee returned to New York and the Cumberland Hotel at 54th and Broadway. During the early morning after their first night there, Arbuckle tried to have intercourse with Durfee. The way it is described suggests that such intimate relations may have been performed in the bathroom, perhaps in the shower, perhaps over the bathroom sink for support. Arbuckle, however, failed to maintain an erection. Frustrated, he wrapped a towel around his waist and began to tear the room apart. “His color was almost purple,” Minta recalled in 1958, “and he went through the dresser drawers and emptied them. Threw everything in the air—drawers which didn’t come out so easily he yanked out completely and threw them around the room.” Despite her best attempts to calm him down and reassure him, Durfee watched in terror. Arbuckle had been drinking. He was addicted to his painkillers—morphine and heroin—and he had been partying for days. He had been traveling for weeks. He had also changed toward her.

“To hell with you,” Durfee remembered her husband saying as he rampaged tearfully about their hotel room. “To hell with the apartment, to hell with my clothes, to hell with everybody in the world! I’m a star! I was told I’m a star and I shouldn’t be tied down! I shouldn’t have a wife because they always do this to you!”

When Durfee attempted to call the desk for the hotel doctor, Arbuckle screamed, “Don’t you dare touch that! I’ll do all the telephoning that’s going to be done in this little place.” With that Arbuckle yanked the telephone off the wall.

“Nothing I said had any effect. Every once in a while he would stand in the middle of the room like a little child and jump up and down with rage as sweat poured off him. ‘I won’t have it! I won’t have it!’ he yelled. ‘I’m a star! I’m not supposed to be married! I can’t be hampered by a wife!’ I never heard a man cry so hard in my life. It was terrible.”

Hotel Cumberland, Broadway and 54th Street, New York City (NYPL)

After her husband left Keystone for Paramount, Durfee’s film career suffered a hiatus. Although she enjoyed financial rewards of being married to one of the most popular movie stars in the world, she had to stand by and watch as her husband was transformed into a virtual bachelor and she was forgotten. She also had to give up her role as the maternal influence that Arbuckle depended on until his vast wealth convinced him he no longer needed it. She was jealous of the power his new manager, Lou Anger, had over him. That Arbuckle had parroted Anger’s views on stardom on that fateful morning in the Cumberland Hotel may have been the most grating thing of all to Durfee along with Arbuckle’s growing coterie of male friends, many of whom she saw, rather unselfconsciously, as parasites.

Durfee accepted what was essentially a quasi-salary to be Arbuckle’s faithful wife, should he need to reference her as such. This was also hush money, since her silence and cooperation in the arrangement were necessary. With this arrangement, Arbuckle was given existential elbowroom, a freedom to roam.

The perquisites for being invisible and the silent woman included a luxurious apartment on Riverside Drive with her mother and sister. Although a native of Southern California, Durfee acclimated to her life as a Manhattan socialite and returned to making movies in 1920. She still had Mabel Normand as a nearby friend. Normand had grown up on Staten Island started her career as an artist model and actress in Manhattan, and now divided her time between the West and East coasts.

It was through Normand that Durfee learned of Arbuckle’s troubles in San Francisco when Normand tried to reach Durfee by telephone and got Durfee’s sister Marie instead. The latter promptly wired Durfee, who was vacationing with their mother on Martha’s Vineyard. Durfee was on the green of an ocean-side golf course when she received the telegram and undoubtedly understood the likely impact on her own lifestyle and tenuous career.

When reporters located her, Durfee was back in the spotlight for the first time in years and played her role as Mrs. Arbuckle in a way far different from that of being in her husband’s shadow at Keystone. She relished the attention and assumed a kind of maternal authority over her long wayward husband, making it known that she and Arbuckle’s mother-in-law would depart for San Francisco without delay.

“I have not been reading the newspapers,” Durfee told a reporter while packing a suitcase in their apartment at W. 97th Street and Riverside Drive. But she certainly knew more than she let on. Sticking to the faithful wife script, Durfee continued. “Roscoe Arbuckle is just a big, lovable pleasure loving, over grown boy, whose success and prosperity have been a little too much for him, but he is not guilty of the hideous charge made against him in San Francisco.”

Durfee had nothing to say about Rappe, at least nothing that was or could be printed. She also didn’t let on that she had been in communication—not with Arbuckle himself—but with his lawyers, Milton Cohen and Frank Dominguez, and, perhaps, with Lou Anger and others about shoring up Arbuckle’s deteriorating public image. This wouldn’t be a passive role for her. Whether at her suggestion or another’s, Durfee pledged to gather information on Rappe’s earlier life during the layover in Chicago.

“I felt intuitively that my husband was not guilty of murder—anyone who knows him will tell you that,” Durfee continued, still in her apartment living room. “Why, already I’ve received many letters and telegrams from friends in the theatrical world, each expressing that he could not be guilty of the impossible charges.”

There was only one point where Durfee didn’t censor herself, recalling the low company Arbuckle kept, which was, apparently, a sore point with her. “My husband has hundreds—thousands of friends. Some of the messages I’ve received came from gangsters and ‘roughnecks,’ who worked with him in pictures, but most of them were well-known actors and actresses.” Of these, only Mabel Normand was mentioned by name.

When asked about her living so far from Arbuckle, Durfee attributed it to their having married young. “Five years ago,” Durfee said of their estrangement, “we agreed to disagree.”

Minta Durfee and Roscoe Arbuckle tête-à-tête in September 1921 (San Francisco Library)

Before dismissing the press, Minta Durfee also commended Arbuckle for the recent gift of a new town car and the generous monthly allowance he gave her, which freed her from having to find work. That’s not to suggest she was content not working. In 1920 and ’21, she appeared in five two-reelers for Rialto Productions with their now ironic titles—Wives’ Union; He, She and It; When You Are Dry; Whose Wife?; and That Quiet Night—shot in nearby Providence, Rhode Island. Prominently billed in trade magazines as the “Minta Durfee Series,” the comedies were advertised with “Mrs. Roscoe Arbuckle.” Meanwhile, gossip columnists, who rarely mentioned her being Mrs. Arbuckle over the previous three years, began refreshing the public’s memory of her status in early 1921. One of the more waggish made light of their living arrangement as “fashionable.”

On Wednesday evening, September 14, Durfee and her mother boarded the New York Central’s Twentieth Century Limited, at Grand Central Station. Mabel Normand was there to see them off and seconded Durfee’s assertion that Arbuckle was innocent. The next morning, Durfee stepped off the train in Gary, Indiana, where she and her mother were whisked away by “detectives” and driven into Chicago. These men were likely private investigators working for Albert Sabath, a Chicago attorney who had been engaged by Milton Cohen and who was a close friend of Rappe’s former boyfriend, Harry Barker. Durfee spent the next ten hours “interviewing acquaintances” and “calling on friends of Miss Rappe.” How Durfee found these friends is a mystery. But she likely had help from Sabath, who knew a lot about Rappe through Barker.

Durfee made good use of her Chicago layover. But it has received scant attention in Arbuckle case narratives even though it suggests that she took an active role “to clear Roscoe’s name,” actively defaming Rappe rather than just passively being there for Arbuckle as his suffering wife. She had reason to topple Rappe from the pedestal of victimhood. Not only was the monthly income that supported her, her mother, and her sister threatened, so was her career. That Arbuckle’s films were being pulled from theaters all over the country had to have shaken Durfee. His fall could certainly take her down. Some theaters were showing her new comedies and still billing her as “Mrs. Roscoe Arbuckle.” Durfee knew that the public’s imagination would draw a triangle between Arbuckle, Virginia Rappe, and herself.

Durfee spoke to reporters again in Chicago, just before she boarded the Union Pacific’s Overland Limited to San Francisco. “Our marriage wasn’t wrecked,” she said, using words that likely had been peppered at her by the press, “only warped. Eight years of togetherness is bound to put a blight on any union, no matter how ideal to begin with. We never really were angry with each other—we just each got on the other fellow’s nerves.”—yet another vague canned expression.

To some, Durfee’s explanation of her marriage rang hollow. “It took a booze party and a murder charge to get Mrs. Arbuckle, staged as ‘Minta Durfee,’ to realize that she ought to be near her husband,” wrote one small-town editorialist. “Mrs. Arbuckle has set an example which all boozily inclined movie people ought to follow. Let the old man drink and skylark as much as he likes till he gets in trouble, then go to his assistance when he is arrested. No press agent could possibly offer such a good chance for notoriety as this.”

Reno depot (Private collection)

Minta Durfee received a telegram when her train arrived late into Reno, a layover that had a certain poignancy given Nevada’s liberal divorce laws and the recent case of Mary Pickford. (Her botched divorce from the actor Owen Moore to marry Douglas Fairbanks almost resulted in “America’s Sweetheart” facing a charge of bigamy.) The telegram likely alerted her not to speak about the Arbuckle case and to get off the train one stop early, as she had on the Chicago leg of her journey. As the Overland crossed the state line between Nevada and California, Durfee and her mother locked themselves in their state room to avoid the reporters that boarded at Roseville, California, one stop before Sacramento.

The Durfee party was subsequently intercepted by Milton Cohen and Arbuckle’s San Francisco-based attorney, Charles Brennan, so as to prevent reporters from having any access to their client’s wife. Instead, they drove her and her mother into San Francisco in the backseat of Arbuckle’s Pierce-Arrow. This allowed Cohen and Brennan to discuss Durfee’s role in the narrative, groom her for the sake of public relations, and debrief her of what she had learned about Rappe while in Chicago.

Early Sunday morning, September 18, Durfee arrived in San Francisco. Before being reunited with her husband—whom she had not seen since the autumn of 1919, she issued a prepared statement. Once more she spoke of her husband’s innocence and asked that he get a “square deal” in court.

[1] Qtd. in Andre Soares, “Fatty Arbuckle Virginia Rappe Trial: Researcher Joan Myers Discusses Scandal,” Alt Film Guide, 2009, https://www.altfg.com/film/fatty-arbuckle-virginia-rappe/.

[2] Facebook message with author, 22 January 2021.

[3] This passage is based on Minta Durfee to Don Schneider and Stephen Normand, Excerpts of an Interview with Minta Durfee,” 21 July 1974, https://www.angelfire.com/mn/hp/minta1.html; Robert Young Jr., Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle: A Bio-Bibliography (Greenwich, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994); Betty Harper Fussell, Mabel: Hollywood’s First Don’t Care Girl (Ticknor & Fields, 1982), 135; “Mrs. Arbuckle Defends Actor,” San Francisco Chronicle, 14 September 1921, 1, 6; “Arbuckle’s Wife Gathers Evidence for Him in Chicago,” San Francisco Examiner, 16 September 1921, 1. “Good Press Agent Stunt,” Hanford (California) Sentinel, 17 September 1921, 2, and other corroborative sources.

[4] See Robert Young Jr., Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), 55.

Bit Player #4: Nurse Jean Jameson

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Nurses are a factor throughout the case of People vs. Arbuckle.  Some testify for the prosecution, some for the defense.  All claimed to have known Virginia Rappe at different times in her life. But only two definitely spoke to her and they only testified before a grand jury and a coroner’s inquest. They also spoke to the press within 72 hours of Rappe’s death. Jean Jameson, the day nurse at the Wakefield Hospital, spent the most time with Rappe and had the most credibility. The night nurse, Vera Cumberland, who also claimed to be a granddaughter of the late Queen Victoria, had less. However neither took the stand at Roscoe Arbuckle’s three trials. Both nurses knew each other and cooperated in caring for Rappe, though Cumberland asked to be relieved from her shift on what turned out to be Rappe’s final night. She likely feared that the doctor’s decision to leave the hospital to attend a party was negligent and blame might fall on her should Rappe take a turn for the worse. .

Source: Los Angeles Record, 14 September 1921 (Newspapers.com)

Jean Jameson, in her pince-nez, with her flinty, no-nonsense expression, made several poignant statements during the first week following Rappe’s death on September 9, 1921. “I am used to seeing people die,” she said. “That is my business. I see them die all the time.” Jameson was present when Rappe accused Arbuckle of causing her injury and insisting he should pay for her hospital stay. Jameson, too, had been one of Rappe’s duty nurses when she died.

She didn’t want me out of her sight for a moment. From the time I took the case to the instant of her death she was continually calling me to listen to what she had to say. And all her talk was about “Roscoe,” as she

called him, and the injury he had done to her. The things I have told the police in my statement were said by the girl at the times when she was apparently in full control of her mind. At other times she rambled. She was in great pain throughout. When her condition was at its worst, she made statements more extreme than the things she said when she was quieter. I shall tell those latter statements only at the trial, if there is one, and under the qualification that they were made in delirium. But the things I have told so far were said when her mind, as far as I could judge, was clear. She wanted to get in touch with Arbuckle so that he would pay the expenses of her illness The girl was far more worried over the money side of her plight than over other aspects. She said:

“It wouldn’t be right for me to have to pay for all this, when it’s Roscoe’s fault.”

When she said, “Get Roscoe,” I understood her to mean: “Get him and make him pay the bills.” The thing that worried her most, apart from the money, was the wrong done to her fiancé, Henry Lehrman, Los Angeles motion picture director.

“I don’t want publicity about this, because I don’t want Henry to know of it,” she said repeatedly. “If he knows of it, he will throw me down.”

The thought that hurt her most of all, perhaps, was that Lehrman and Arbuckle had been fast friends for years, but that Arbuckle had treated her wrongly despite his friendship for her fiancé.

“It wasn’t right for him to act this way toward me, when Henry was so fond of him and trusted him so,” the girl said.

She repeated this in various ways. “What kind of way was that for him to treat a girl that was engaged to his best friend?” she said.

As to the exact way in which she got her fatal injury, the girl’s mind was a blank. I think she had been too intoxicated to remember it. At any rate she never described clearly what happened in her room. But she did say:

“He crushed me and broke something inside me.”[1]

A few days after Jameson repeated what she had told the authorities, she testified at a juried coroner’s inquest intended to ascertain whether Rappe’s death, from a medical standpoint, was a criminal matter.  “She never thought she was going to die,” Jameson said as she repeated, expanded, and clarified much of what she had already stated. “She had been on a party with Fatty Arbuckle and the others that she named,” the nurse recalled. “She said they were all drunk.”

Jameson, too, gave her professional opinion of her patient after her initial conversations. “Miss Rappe was still somewhat hysterical and my diagnosis was that she was hysterical after a drunken party.” Rappe, the nurse observed, was “in a good deal of pain, particularly in the region of her abdomen.” Speaking freely and answering questions, Rappe told Jameson

that she had had three drinks and the three drinks made her helpless. At one time she would say she could not remember whether Arbuckle had dragged her or pulled her into the bedroom, and at other times, she said definitely that he had done so. She frequently asked me, “What could be broken inside of me?” She asked me several times whether I would examine her to see whether Arbuckle had assaulted her. She made many statements about “getting Arbuckle.” So far as I could learn she had money in New York City, which she said Henry Lehrman gave to her. She said, however, that if it were to be a long case [hospital stay], she must get the money from Arbuckle or Lehrman would turn her down. She had very little money with her at the St. Francis. I asked her for some money to buy her a night gown as she did not have a stitch of clothing after I got her in bed. She did not seem much concerned and told me that lots of times she did not sleep in a night gown.

Though Rappe appeared to speak candidly with Jameson, the nurse said Rappe had been reluctant to talk “about a certain phase of her condition.” We can suppose this meant she didn’t want to be on record for accusing Arbuckle of anything specific. “Miss Rappe,” Jameson continued,

was very anxious that the party and what took place there be kept from Lehrman for fear, as she expressed it, that he would throw her down. “Will you be my witness if I sue Arbuckle for the money it is going to take?” she said to me at one time. “I am going to make Arbuckle pay for this as it is all his fault.”[2]

Ironically, following Jameson’s testimony, one of Arbuckle’s lawyers was heard to say “Our case is won.” Despite how damning the nurse made it sound for Arbuckle, Jameson had let on that Rappe had a preexisting condition for six weeks, an illness that could be attributed to the comedy director Henry Lehrman, Rappe’s mostly-vacant boyfriend, who made a show of savaging and threatening Arbuckle in the press for having killed his beloved “Virginia.” Incidentally Lehrman, living across the country in New York, had already moved on to a new girlfriend, a Ziegfeld Follies dancer.

An even greater and sadder irony to consider is that Rappe feared Lehrman learning about her and Arbuckle together, consensual or otherwise—possibly more than death itself.

[1] “Girl Rational When She Named Actor, Says Nurse,” San Francisco Examiner, 11 September 1921, 1, 3.

[2] Associated Press, “Arbuckle Indicted: Manslaughter Grand Jury Says,” Des Moines Register, 14 September 1921, 1, 2.

Bit Player #3: Ira Fortlouis, the gown salesman

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Ira Gustav Fortlouis saw Virginia Rappe for the first time in the Palace Hotel on Labor Day morning, September 5, 1921. According to the accepted story, he later mentioned this sighting in the presence of Roscoe Arbuckle and his companions, film director Fred Fishback and actor Lowell Sherman. Thereupon, a telephone call was placed to Rappe and she was invited to Arbuckle’s suite. Her afternoon in San Francisco, for which she had made no other known plans, was set

Fortlouis’s sighting of her has long been regarded as a “meaningful coincidence,” to use Carl Jung’s phrase. The first of a sequence of coincidences that suggest a pattern but may have been nothing more than chance. The first is that Fortlouis happened to cross paths with Rappe at the Palace Hotel; the second is that he happened to know the director Fred Fishback personally and knew he was in town; the third is that he got to know Rappe’s manager Al Semnacher well enough to accompany him on some business on Bush Street during the course of the party; and finally that on the day Rappe died, he, until that week unknown to Maude Delmont, was beckoned by her for an evening tête-à-tête.

This last coincidence is the most curious. Fortlouis would seem an unlikely choice to be comforting Delmont. But though they had only recently become acquainted, Delmont had been with Fortlouis at the party at the time of the incident (perhaps, locked in the bathroom of room 1221 when Rappe wanted to use it and was denied entry by Delmont—one of those details an editor would have censored at the time). So rather than a conversation with a friend, the late night meeting might have been an effort by either Delmont or Fortlouis to discuss what they remembered of the event in case they were subpoenaed. This sounds speculative until one learns that Fortlouis later made a statement to District Attorney Brady claiming Delmont couldn’t have heard Rappe screaming because he was with her in Room 1221 at the time and heard nothing. It was a statement that would jeopardize Delmont’s credibility and the foundations of the charges.

Save for an appearance before a grand jury and a coroner’s inquest, Fortlouis never took the stand—no doubt a relief to him as this wasn’t the first sex scandal in which he was associated. (In a January 1914 trial in Portland, Oregon, Fortlouis had to admit to having intimate relations with a married woman in shared staterooms aboard steamships plying up and down the Pacific Northwest coast.) Instead, he was left alone to watch the Arbuckle trials as a spectator, Zelig-like, the silent witness who innocently set the tragic event in motion. He was even interviewed at one point and said that his motivation for getting Rappe to Arbuckle’s suite was that he could see she needed work, that she was down on her luck.]

Guest Tells Police Party Was ‘Noisy’

Ira G. Fortlouis, Traveling Salesman, “Heard No Screaming” and “Knew of No Injuries”

Here is the statement of Ira G. Fortlouis, traveling salesman, as made to Detective Sergeant John Dolan and Detective Thomas F. Reagan at the Hall of Justice yesterday [September 10, 1921]:

I got in town Sunday, September 4, 1921. Somebody told me that Fischbach was in town. I called him up at the St. Francis and left word for him to call me. He did not call me up and I called him up Monday at 8:30 a.m. He told me to come and say “Hello.”

I was walking out of the Palace Hotel about 11 a.m. and saw a very stylish girl. I asked somebody who was standing there who she was. He said she was Miss Rappe, the moving picture actress.

I went up to the St. Francis and called up Freddy Fishbach [sic] and he introduced me to Arbuckle and Sherman.

We sat there and talked for a long time and in the course of the conversation I mentioned the fact that I had just seen Miss Rappe and asked the boys if they knew her. Someone of the party said he knew her and asked when I had seen her. I told them I had seen her in the lobby of the Palace Hotel.

Someone in the party phoned to Miss Rappe.

Miss Rappe phoned a little later and asked for the room number. She thought they were stopped at the Palace Hotel [my italics]. Miss Rappe came up to the room some time in the afternoon. I think this was about 12:30 p.m. This was Monday, September 5, 1921.

I was introduced to her and Sherman was introduced. There were four of us in the room at the time—Fischbach, Arbuckle, Sherman and myself.

Shortly afterward Mrs. Delmont came in the room. Miss Rappe introduced her to everybody. We had lunch and drinks were served. I had Scotch highballs. Miss Rappe had nothing to drink at that time that I remember of. Mrs. Delmont had a drink at the same time. The women ate none of the lunch.

I know of no injury that occurred to Miss Rappe while I was in the room and the first I heard of her injuries was the following day.

I could not say that Miss Rappe and Arbuckle were in the room all the time I was present.

Fischbach left about 2:30 p.m. I asked him if I would see him again and he said he would be back in about an hour.

They all had drinks and someone telephoned downstairs to send up a phonograph. the phonograph came up. I went into the bathroom in Sherman’s room and Sherman came in the bathroom and pounded on the door and told me to hurry up and get out of the room, as reporters were coming up to interview Arbuckle.

I wanted to go into the other room. They told me to go through the hallway, and in going through the hallway I asked where Fred Fischbach was. He came to the door and I told him I was going down to the club and would meet him down there. I didn’t understand the object in rushing me out that way. I judge the time I left the room between 2:30 and 4 p.m.

While I was in the room, Arbuckle and Miss Rappe were sitting near each other and kidding one another. Miss Rappe was drinking gin and orange juice. The party was drinking considerable liquor. There was considerable noise, but I heard no screaming.

I phoned from my room to Miss Rappe, having heard that the party ended disastrously and she was ill in her room at the Palace Hotel and was informed that she had left the hotel. This was the next day. Then I phoned the St. Francis and got Mrs. Delmont on the phone and she told me that Miss Rappe was injured internally and was very sick.

Last night [September 9] I was in the St. Francis Hotel. Somebody said the girl had died. I heard that there was something wrong as regards her death. Mrs. Delmont said that.

During the time I was in the room Arbuckle was dressing. He was wearing pyjamas, and when the girls came in he put on a dressing robe.

When I got back to the Palace Hotel last night there was a phone call from room 1227, St. Francis Hotel, and I called up and Mrs. Delmont answered. She asked me what I thought of the affair, what a terrible thing it was, and I asked her if there was anything I could do for her. She said a couple of the young ladies were with her. She asked me to come up and see her, as she could not sleep. She wanted me to sit up with her until they came back. I said I would not come up alone, but if allowed to bring a friend I would come. I brought a friend and went there and sat there waiting for her friends to come back. I advised her to get a nurse. I made arrangements at the hotel office for a nurse and when she arrived, I left.

I make this statement freely and voluntarily; no threats or promises were made to induce me to give and sign this statement.

(signed) IRA G. FORTLOUIS

Source: San Francisco Examiner, 11 September 1921, p. 3.

“Jeff,” Virginia Rappe’s brindle bull terrier pup, and Rappe wearing an outfit similar to the one she wore on September 5, 1921 (Library of Congress)

Did Virginia Rappe sit for Harrison Fisher?

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Routinely, we search newspaper archives for anything related to Virginia Rappe’s past, a past Roscoe Arbuckle’s lawyers made out to be sordid. They turned up individuals who described knowing her in Chicago when she was younger. These witnesses asserted that the adolescent Rappe had undergone abortions, given birth to illegitimate babies, and contracted the diseases that usually came with a promiscuous lifestyle. These witnesses were intended to counter the character witnesses found by the prosecuting attorneys. Despite Arbuckle’s earlier request to his counsel that Rappe’s past not be used in his defense, it is not known whether he objected as this strategy was played out.

On the flip side, a woman the prosecutors could have called to the witness stand but didn’t was Helen Jackson Banghart, a fifty-one-year-old nurse from Portland, Oregon, who was president of that city’s Mayflower Club and “active in Catholic circle,” according to the Oregon Daily Journal. Mrs. Banghart also knew Virginia Rappe when both were in Chicago in earlier days and her memories were of an altogether different tone:

The family spelled their name Rapp in those days and Virginia was known to every one as “Tootie.” She was left an orphan when 5 or 6 years of age and came to live with her grandmother, who resided in a rooming house opposite the boarding house where I lived. The grandmother was subject to mental lapses, so Tootie was a sort of general charge. Miss Catherine Nelson, who lived in the same house that I did, and a personal friend of mine, befriended the child on many occasions.

I remember that she took her downtown one fall and outfitted her from her skin out and from head to foot. The child almost burst with pride over her new red coat and her red hat with black ribbon streamers. Catherine would often hand me 50 cents or a dollar and say, “If Tootie comes over, ask her if she is hungry, and if she is, get her something to eat,” which I always did.

Tootie was an unusually pretty child, agreeable, appreciative of all that was done for her and withal a very ladylike little miss. Her eyes were a deep hazel; at night they were almost brown. When you looked at her you looked again and then you kept on looking.

At the age of 15 years she posed for Harrison Fisher and his picture of her showed her with her little fox terrier. This picture was later reproduced on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. I moved from that neighborhood about that time and so lost track of her, but have always read with interest concerning her theatrical work.

I must confess that the tears came to my eyes when I read of her tragic end. Her early life was so hard. She scarcely knew a mother and then to think that she should meet death in such a terrible way. It seems that she had more than her share of the seamy side of life.[1]

Rappe’s unusual pet name was corroborated by a pillow of small roses, labeled “Tootie”, that was among the flower arrangements at her funeral.

Typically, for girls in the 1890s, “Tootie” was short for Gertrude. If looked at as a word describing a person’s appearance and conduct, as Nurse Jackson did, toot as slang has among its various meanings “to stand out,” “to be noticed.” (Ironically, another slang meaning that gained more currency in the 1890s and endured meant “to go on a drinking spree.”)

But was Virginia Rappe a model for Harrison Fisher? The one Saturday Evening Post cover, for August 28, 1909, that meets Mrs. Banghart’s criteria is shown below. But capitalist realism artists such as Fisher rarely individualized their models. They share the phenotypes of an idealized everywoman, for they were meant as commodities and not people to be recognized on the street.

You be judge. But this lady is blonde and has blue eyes. She lacks that juvenile vamp quality that Rappe had.

Virginia Rappe and friend, 1909? (Flickr)
Rappe and friend baring their teeth, 1907 (Chicago Tribune)

[1] “Miss Rappe’s Early Life Hard, Says Portland Woman,” Oregon Daily Journal, 14 September 1921, 2.

The voyage out

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[There are few points during the Arbuckle case that could serve as a set piece. The backstories, sideshows, and the Labor Day party and everything that flowed from it undulated in the press, in the American conscience, and the San Francisco courts for months. Aside from the brief time when Arbuckle and Rappe were alone in Room 1219 where what transpired remains a mystery, there are few logical places in the story where, say, a filmmaker might find a poignant event that encapsulates the whole. If there was such an episode in the case, it might be one that centered on Arbuckle after he left the St. Francis and left Virginia Rappe, alone and dying in room 1227. That event was Arbuckle’s night voyage back to Los Angeles on September 6, 1921. The following text is taken from our manuscript with only minor emendations for clarity.]

Roscoe Arbuckle, when he took the stand at his first trial in November 1921, claimed that he had booked passage aboard the SS Harvard in advance. The assertion was likely made to dissuade anyone from thinking that he had left San Francisco with a less than clear conscience about his Labor Day party and Virginia Rappe. He kept to this story and only diverged once, toward the end of his third trial in April 1922, when he explained that he came to San Francisco two days before the party for pleasure according to an AP wire story. “I had a new car to try,” he said, even though he had had his 1919 purple Pierce-Arrow for over a year. “Later I was going to the golf tournament at Del Monte.”[1] The coincidence that Al Semnacher had wanted to take Virginia Rappe to Del Monte the day before seems to have gone unnoticed until now.

Arbuckle and his entourage were indeed expected aboard the Harvard and delaying his travel during Paramount Week, an important publicity event, would have risked disappointing and insulting those who could cause trouble, among them Paramount chief Adolph Zukor.

The SS Harvard (r) and the SS Yale (l), San Pedro Harbor (Calisphere)

The Harvard, along with its sister ship, the Yale, provided daily passenger service between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and was scheduled to depart for Los Angeles at 4:00 p.m. For this particular voyage, Los Angeles restaurateur, Al Levy, owner of the famed Oyster Bar and Levy’s Cafe, was personally in charge of catering the trip—and Arbuckle, a regular at Levy’s, surely availed himself of what promised to be a sumptuous spread. There were also a number of important film people sailing to Los Angeles for Paramount Week, among them Sanford L. Walter, the San Francisco manager of the Paramount Film Exchange, and, perhaps, other familiar faces who happened to be in San Francisco for the holiday.

There was little chance that Arbuckle could leave town without being noticed. He had to be at pier 7 in time to have his Pierce-Arrow lifted by crane and lowered onto the rear deck of the Harvard, where it attracted attention throughout the voyage. A brief article in the San Francisco Chronicle poked fun at his person, calling him “considerable cargo.”[2]

“Elaborate arrangements,” it was reported, had been “made by Al Levy to provide a mirthful voyage, with “Fatty” as jester”—which suggests Arbuckle was expected along with his entourage. If the arrangements were as much business as travel, perhaps the comedian’s presence aboard the Harvard was the real purpose behind his brief stay in San Francisco, to position him for his on-board appearance.

This is the kind of information that Al Semnacher could have taken note of weeks beforehand and might have shared with Rappe. By this point though, Semnacher himself, was well on his way back to Los Angeles, driving his Stutz and without his two female passengers. Unlike Arbuckle or his companions, Fred Fishback and Lowell Sherman, Semnacher took the time to visit Rappe in Room 1227 on Tuesday morning. He spoke to Maude Delmont—but made no mention of Dr. Rumwell—and departed unworried for the time being. Delmont asked him to tell Rappe’s people—meaning the Hardebecks—that their adopted niece wasn’t coming home any time soon.

Semnacher had also gone to her room to retrieve her damaged garments and cheap jewelry to bring home. His explanation for doing so would become one of the mysteries of the Arbuckle case. Semnacher, also didn’t leave any money for the two women or, at least, not enough worth mentioning.

Doris Deane and Roscoe Arbuckle and their marriage license, May 1925 (Calisphere)

The sailing time from San Francisco to Los Angeles was eighteen hours with no ports of call in between. A troopship during the war, the Harvard had been fully restored into a luxury liner with luxurious staterooms and a new army of stewards, stewardesses, pages, and bellboys to serve her passengers. The brilliantly lit Veranda-Café Ballroom featured an orchestra and all-night dancing. On the port side of the ship, passengers could watch the California coast slip by and, if Arbuckle cared to notice the beautiful scenery lit by the setting sun followed by the twinkling lights on shore, it surely helped him to leave what happened on Labor Day behind. Another thing that helped him to forget was meeting a young woman to whom Fred Fishback had arranged an introduction, another striking dark-haired actress, Doris Deane. Fishback had some advance knowledge that she would be aboard the Harvard in the company of her mother.[3]

If Fishback was informally acting as Arbuckle’s wingman, arranging for him to meet eligible and attractive women, he had come through—perhaps for the second time in twenty-four hours. Arbuckle had a chance to see Deane on boarding and was immediately smitten. He invited both her and her mother to his stateroom after the Harvard unberthed. Later Deane sat with Arbuckle at the captain’s table. When he wasn’t playing “Fatty” for the other guests, he spoke with her with the same enthusiasm that he did with Rappe the day before.

Barely twenty years old, Deane had made her debut as representing the city of Los Angeles at the Pershing Victory Ball in January 1920. She was a skilled dancer and had already appeared in a few films, including Mabel Normand’s forthcoming Head over Heels (1922). Hired by Universal, she starred in the new South Seas romance, The Shark Master (1921), which had opened the first week of September. But she had left Universal and was looking for new prospects. Arbuckle, who was always on the lookout for new leading ladies, could hardly resist the opportunity to woo Miss Deane over to comedy. That evening, according to her, he was charming. He purchased her a box of Melachrino cigarettes—which featured cork or straw tips so as not to stain one’s fingers—and they talked of music, theatre, and books.

Melachrino cigarettes (Etsy)

Uninhibited by the thought of his estranged wife Minta Durfee thousands of miles away in New York City, Arbuckle asked Deane out for Saturday performance of a new stage comedy, The Ruined Lady (for which the young Humphrey Bogart was road manager) at the Majestic Theater. But Arbuckle and Deane didn’t go on their date. Instead, he made an unscheduled appearance at the Grauman’s Million Dollar Theater, which was showing his film Gasoline Gus for Paramount Week. From that day on, Deane would have to wait before she could safely appear in Arbuckle’s company again.

[1] Associated Press, “Arbuckle, Denying Evil Intent, Lays His Troubles to an Act of Mercy,” Minneapolis Morning Tribune, 6 April 1922, 18.

[2] “Arbuckle on Harvard,” San Francisco Chronicle, 7 September 1921, 18.

[3] Deane herself is the source for her first encounter with Arbuckle. See Yallop.

Document Dump #5: Al Semnacher’s deposition of September 12, 1921

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Alfred Semnacher was called Virginia Rappe’s manager during the Arbuckle case, but it was a hat he wore reluctantly. His testimony, too, came reluctantly. Imagine the frustrated press agent Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success. If a motion picture had been made of the Arbuckle case in the late 1950s or early 1960s, when the Code was giving way and introspective Hollywood films had become a genre, Burt Lancaster would have looked the part of Virginia Rappe’s so-called manager, the “gray man” as one newspaper reporter called him.

Alfred Louis Semnacher was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1878 to musical parents. His German father, William Magnus Semnacher, had been living and working in New York City since 1865, where he had been a piano teacher for young women from well-to-do families. In the late 1860s, he founded his own school, the National Institute of Music, which was typically his residence. In the 1870s, he married Alfred’s mother, Louise Walter, who was much younger and likely one of the elder Semnacher’s students.

William Semnacher was a great believer in phrenology, a pseudoscience that advanced the premise that a person’s mental traits, aptitudes, personality, and future could be predicted by the careful measurements of bumps and depressions occurring on their subject’s heads and correlating them with regions of the human brain. Those findings would be compared to various charts—and specially numbered busts of human heads (that are still in production though mostly used as nostalgic pieces by interior decorators these days)—to assess “propensities,” such as causality, cautiousness, combativeness, concentrativeness, secretiveness, and so on. “Sentiments” such as self-esteem and truthfulness, and various intellectual and reflecting “faculties,” were also mapped.

The elder Semnacher had his head read by prominent American phrenologist, Orson Fowler in 1866 and placed so much faith in phrenology that he required that his students receive phrenological readings, among them the concert pianist and ethnomusicologist Natalie Curtis Burlin.

The younger Semnacher married one of his father’s students, a southern belle named Lucille Nowland and they eventually settled in Los Angeles in 1909. There Semnacher served as secretary to the utopian socialist Alfred Dolge, who pioneered social security and profit sharing for the workers at his factory in Dolgeville, NY. By 1919, Semnacher worked for the John Lancaster talent and publicity agency before going out on his own in 1921.

Semnacher was also separated from his wife that year. It wasn’t the first time the couple had separated, having already been divorced and reconciled. But in 1920 he had to endure living alongside her lover as a permanent house guest, a man who eventually usurped Semnacher in the husband’s role. To add to the humiliation, this unhappy arrangement was witnessed by Semnacher’s three sons.

A month before his second and final divorce proceeding, he drove Virginia Rappe and Maude Delmont from Los Angeles to San Francisco—and ultimately to the entrance of the St. Francis Hotel on September 5, 1921 – the focal point of our work-in-progress. Rappe had accepted an invitation from Roscoe Arbuckle to attend an informal Labor Day party there .

In the following deposition, it’s clear that the district attorneys had asked Semnacher to help them establish a timeframe (interpolated in bold below) for what happened to Rappe. Fortunately for them, he was mindful of the time as a businessman and, perhaps, as an impatient man as well.

Al Semnacher, ca. 1919 (Calisphere)

Al Semnacher, 2001 Pinehurst Road, Los Angeles, manager for motion-picture stars, who attended the party given by Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle in his apartments at the Hotel St. Francis last Monday afternoon, yesterday, in a deposition before Assistant District Attorney Milton U’Ren, disclosed what he knew of the alleged assault by Arbuckle upon Miss Virginia Rappe. He deposed:

About 11:30 a.m. on the 5th day of September, 1921, Miss Rappe received a telephone message from someone [i.e., Fred Fishback] at the St. Francis Hotel, the person who telephoned saying that Roscoe Arbuckle was going to have a party there and inviting her to come up; that Miss Rappe then said for me to drive her and Mrs. Delmont up there and that I could wait outside and that maybe they would only stay in there a few minutes, if the party did not suit them [my italics]; that I drove them up there to the St. Francis hotel [after 12 noon]; then parked my car and visited with friends until about 2 p.m. when I returned to the hotel and ‘phoned up; that when I did phone up Mr. Fishbeck [sic] told me to come up and join the party.

That when I went upstairs to room 1220; that there were about four tables filled with food; that Arbuckle was sitting at the end of the table in a big chair; that Miss Rappe was sitting on a couch about one foot from him. Miss Rappe was fully dressed. Mrs. Delmont was standing in a doorway between rooms 1220 and 1221. Other persons in the room were Ira Fortlouis, Fred Fishbeck, Miss Alice Blake and a girl named “Zey” [i.e., Zey Pryvon, whose real name is Sadie Reiss] and one or two other girls [i.e., May Taube], also Lowell Sherman. All the men, with the exception of Sherman and Arbuckle, had on their street clothes. All the women, with the exception of Mrs. Delmont, had on their street clothes. I stayed there about a half an hour and then with Miss Blake left for a rehearsal [after 2:30 p.m.].

I then returned to the St. Francis hotel [i.e., he leaves Alice Blake at Taits and returns after 3:15 p.m.]. I then stayed there about a half hour; immediately thereafter I drove to No. 846 Bush street with Ira Fortlouis [my italics] to locate friends [after 3:45 p.m.]. I returned again to the St. Francis hotel [i.e., after 4:30 p.m., which would allow for Rappe’s crisis in room 1219 to take place at or just after 4:00 p.m. The same people were in the room together with two other ladies, one of whom was Miss Jeanne Clark, but the name of the other lady I do not know [i.e., May Taube]. At this particular time [about 4:45 p.m.], though, Miss Rappe was not in the room. About ten or fifteen minutes later two of the girls went to the bathroom of No. 1219, and said the girl, “Miss Rappe,” was very sick [before 5:00 p.m.].

That this statement was made after the girls had returned from the bathroom; that as soon as the girls made that remark we all went in there where Miss Rappe was, and saw her lying on the bed in the room and heard her moaning; that Roscoe Arbuckle was in the room I was in when the girls went into the room where Miss Rappe was lying on the bed; that I did not hear Roscoe Arbuckle say to the girls, “Go in and attend to her”; that when the girls came out and said that Miss Rappe was so ill we all went in the room that Miss Rappe was in; that there was a great deal of confusion there; that it seemed that everybody there seemed to want to wait on her at the same time; that there must have been about a dozen people there.

That then Mrs. Delmont took charge of Miss Rappe and had several of the girls there help her lift Miss Rappe into the bathtub in an endeavor to revive her; that Roscoe Arbuckle was in the room where I was and all the other people were. When the girls returned to the room that Miss Rappe was in and announced that she was sick, Roscoe Arbuckle said, “Get a doctor”; that Roscoe Arbuckle was in the room with all of us where Miss Rappe was lying on the bed and did not do anything for Miss Rappe; that all the men left the room in which Miss Rappe was, leaving the women.

When Mrs. Delmont put Miss Rappe into the bath tub Miss Rappe was unconscious; that then when they took her from the tub they wrapped up her clothes and put her into another bed. When they put her into the bed she began vomiting.

When she began vomiting Roscoe Arbuckle said that another room had better be secured for Miss Rappe. I do not know who phoned for this room. Mr. Boyle, who is connected with the St. Francis hotel, came up and said she could be taken to room 1227. I do not know who it was that carried her out. I went into room 1227 about twenty-five minutes later to see how Miss Rappe was getting along. I then found Mrs. Delmont with her. There was no nurse with her at this time. About two hours later I went to this room again and saw a doctor there. I saw this doctor give Miss Rappe a hypodermic injection of something. I do know the name of this doctor.

That on my second visit to the room to see how she was, she was moaning and did not want anyone to even touch the bed upon which she was laying and was saying, “I am going to die. I am going to die.” She also said she had pains and that her chest hurt her. I remained in the room altogether during these visits about fifteen or thirty minutes. I did hear her mention Roscoe Arbuckle’s name, and she said, “Roscoe hurt me”; that after she was given this opiate, or whatever it was, she slept for a few hours; and when she awoke she recognized me. I told her she was in no condition to go to Los Angeles then, but that she might be well enough to leave for Los Angeles the next morning; and if she was we would leave at 9:30 o’clock. Virginia Rappe said that would be all right.

The last time I saw Virginia Rappe was about 1 o’clock Tuesday afternoon, September 6, 1921. I left San Francisco for Los Angeles at about 1:30 or 2 o’clock p.m., Tuesday, September 6, 1921. It was after she was given this opiate and slept for about two or three hours that I had the talk with her about our returning to Los Angeles. Fishbeck was to return with Miss Rappe, Mrs. Delmont and myself [our italics].

Bit Players #2: Dashiell Hammett

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In 1932, Dashiell Hammett, enjoying the success of The Maltese Falcon, which had been made into a vehicle for Bebe Daniels that year—before the later Bogart version– recalled his time as a Pinkerton detective in San Francisco in 1921.The “funniest case I ever worked on,” he told the New York Herald-Tribune, was the detail assigned to protect Arbuckle during first trial in November 1921. “In trying to convict him everybody framed everybody else.”[1]

There are many instances in print and online where this comment is taken to mean, according to a Guardian blogger, “Hammett came to believe that the rotund comedian was being framed for rape and murder by a District Attorney,” and assume that he really had “investigated the famous – and horrible – case of Fatty Arbuckle and Virginia Rappe.”[1]

Hammett was echoing something he had written six years earlier in a collection of brief autobiographical notes that have come to be referred to as “Seven Pages” by Hammett scholars. Hammett, again channeling the voice of Sam Spade or the Continental Op, glibly wrote “That whole thing was a frame-up, arranged by some of the corrupt local newspaper boys. Arbuckle was good copy, so they set him up for a fall.”[2] This pronouncement is often taken to suggest that Hammett knew Arbuckle was innocent and that the press, especially the Hearst chain, had it in for him. Hammett, for this reason, is often quoted as a sage in his biographies and Arbuckle narratives, as an authority even though he was speaking off-the-cuff, sounding smart, which is good enough for some editors.

Hammett’s brief insight was apparently persuasive enough to have inspired a West End play, Fatty (1988), by Scottish playwright Patrick Prior in which Sam Spade was reimagined trying to clear Arbuckle’s “good name,” and more recently a novel, The Devil’s Garden (2009) by Ace Atkins, which expanded the same concept. While such exploitation of a good quip is marginally entertaining, it provides another example of misinformation gaining traction.

One might think that Hammett, as one with personal involvement, could have written a first-rate fiction or nonfiction book about Arbuckle’s Labor Day party and the subsequent trials.. The names of the investigating police detectives alone – Kennedy, Griffin, Reagan, Duffy, Dolan, McGrath – evoke the characters in his pulp stories. Though while Hammett did have familiarity with San Francisco’s detectives, district attorneys, and like denizens of the city’s Hall of Justice it likely was not because he was an insider. Except for his claim there is no other record that Pinkerton’s was involved with the Arbuckle case. The body of Hammett’s knowledge was more likely a construction derived from San Francisco’s newspapers, hearsay, and his imagination. The few sentences included in “Seven Pages” (1926) were as far as he got in telling the story. But the encounter with Arbuckle that he describes has troubled some Hammett biographers for various reasons. Chief among them the date and where Hammett was known to be at that time, which was mostly bedridden with tuberculosis. He claimed he had encountered Arbuckle in the St. Francis Hotel on Monday, January 16, 1922, in the course of gathering evidence for the second trial. Ignoring that Arbuckle was allegedly banned from the hotel, it’s hard to imagine that he would dare to be seen there while he was out on bail. By Hammett’s account, he had quit Pinkertons by that time and was working as a freelance detective for Arbuckle’s lawyers. Hammett biographers and scholars, who otherwise accept his word as truth, see this chance meeting with Arbuckle as “apocryphal.”

For our narrative, however, it is Hammett’s lack of sympathy for Arbuckle that stands out, his intuition that there is something suspicious about the comedian. But what is left to the imagination. In Hammett’s parlance, perhaps the simplest explanation is that a thin man was giving the “stink eye” to a fat man — or, the cynical detective, surviving on disability pay and part-time gumshoe work, regarded the extravagantly-rewarded Arbuckle as a class enemy.

It was the day before the opening of the second absurd attempt to convict Roscoe Arbuckle of something. He came into the lobby. He looked at me and I at him. His eyes were the eyes of a man who expected to be regarded as a monster but was not yet inured to it. I made my gaze as contemptuous as I could. He glared at me, went on the elevator still glaring. It was amusing. I was working for his attorneys at the time.[3]

Hammett’s claim of “frame-up” is more about a systemic problem, the way justice works, the way people behave when their lives and livelihood are on the line. That his sweeping accusation included Arbuckle among the dirty players is hardly a nuanced reading. The master of detective fiction wasn’t taking sides.

Dashiell Hammett (Library of Congress)

[1] Sam Jordison, “Reading group: Dashiell Hammett, the dean of hard-boiled detective fiction,” Guardian, 16 December 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/dec/16/reading-group-dashiell-hammett-maltese-falcon.

[2] Qtd. in New York Herald Tribune, 12 November 1932.

[3] Qtd. in William F. Nolan, A Life at the Edge (New York: Congdon & Weed, 1983), 18.

[4] Qtd. in William Marling, American Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 98–99.

“ . . . if the party is a bloomer”

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Few Arbuckle case accounts discuss Virginia Rappe’s personality. Presumably she wrote letters and postcards to her guardians and friends. But despite becoming a household name in 1921, no one has shared such writings that might reveal something about her character. What little of Rappe there is on screen—all comedies—has been used to disparage her acting abilities. That she never appeared in a dramatic role suggested to some that Rappe was not a serious person. Even as a vamp, she was termed a “junior vamp,” that is, a femme fatale who isn’t all that fatal.

Virginia Rappe in a scene from Over the Rhine (1918), recut as The Isle of Love (1922) (Archive.org)

In writing about Virginia Rappe, we do look for Rappe, frame by frame in some cases, to find the real person. We also look at minute details that would otherwise seem irrelevant.

Much can be learned about a person by her choice of words and the context.

Around noon, on September 5, 1921, Rappe’s manager, Al Semnacher, drove Rappe and Virginia Rappe to the entrance of the St. Francis Hotel. While only Rappe had been invited to Arbuckle’s Labor Day party, the invitation would eventually be extended to her two companions, Semnacher and Delmont. But there is little doubt that Rappe had the privileged status of being the one invited.

During his court appearances, Semnacher testified that he left Rappe and Delmont off in front of the hotel and didn’t wait to see them enter the building. Semnacher, however, included some details, probably given during his grand jury appearance, that suggest Rappe’s interest in attending the party was tenuous, halfhearted. She had an exit strategy in mind that amounted to a graceful excuse to Arbuckle, which, unfortunately, she didn’t exercise.

Rappe asked Semnacher to wait outside. If “the party didn’t suit them”—meaning her and Delmont—she would leave.[1] “I’ll go up there,” she said, according to Semnacher, “and if the party is a bloomer I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”[2]

This quote is consistent with her utterances in the Atlanta Constitution in September and October 1913, when she was modeling the “tango dress.” She and her fellow models thought Atlanta was charming but too southern, gentlemanly, too inhibited, strait-laced. This, of course, calls attention to what she had expected to find. A town with more fun? That was a little more risqué like her native Chicago?

Although a close reading of an archaic slang word like “bloomer” risks overshooting the mark. She could have said “a bust,” a “waste of time”—whether for business or pleasure or both. For an actress who had worked hard to get her figure back after months of dieting and exercise, to spend several hours after a late breakfast watching Arbuckle and his friends eat and drink early in the afternoon might have seemed to be worth little more than a quick hello. To only give him twenty minutes suggests a preconceived notion of the host and of the kind of gatherings he hosted. As it turned out, Arbuckle held her rapt attention.

There is, however, another meaning that Rappe could have intended. A “bloomer” in the early twentieth century also meant a fraud, a prank, or a joke played on someone, as in “to pull a bloomer.” Here, Rappe might have wanted Semnacher ready to leave if Arbuckle’s party didn’t seem to be on the level.

[1] Al Semnacher, “Member of Arbuckle Party in Hotel Makes Full Statement: Al Semnacher, Manager for Film Stars, Gives the District Attorney Deposition,” San Francisco Chronicle, 12 September 1921, 4.

[2] Earnest J. Hopkins (Universal Service), “Film Star Who Makes Many Millions Laugh Gets First Taste of Life Behind Bars,” Shreveport Times, 12 September 1921, 2.

Document Dump #4: The Zey Prevost statement

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Note: One of the chief witnesses for the prosecution, Sadie Reiss, was a former Sennett Bathing Beauty at Keystone Studios. At Roscoe Arbuckle’s Labor Day party of September 5, 1921, and for a short time afterward she was still known by various manglings of her professional name, e.g., Zey Pryvon, Pyrvon, and Pyvron). Soon after she settled on Zey Prevost despite the surname being used by another former Sennett Bathing Beauty, Marie Prevost (whose lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to no avail). Zey Prevost wanted to retract certain damning passages made in her initial statement, on Saturday, September 10, 1921 (one day after Rappe’s death), that described what she saw after Arbuckle opened the connecting door between rooms 1219 and 1220 of the St. Francis Hotel. As told to Assistant District Attorney Milton U’Ren, Captain of Detectives Duncan Matheson, Detective Henry McGrath, and Howard Vernon, a shorthand reporter, Prevost’s described what the authorities wanted to hear: Arbuckle could be tried for murder. After Prevost refused to go before a grand jury to repeat what she had stated, and thinking he had a tampered witness, District Attorney Matthew Brady released the following initial statement to the press. Prevost, unlike his other chief witness, Maude Delmont, was sober at the party and seemingly unattached to any man (or woman) at the time of the event. She was, in effect, its “transparent eyeball”. Prevost, however, as the case proceeded in the courts, undid much of the damage she had inflicted on Arbuckle’s claims of innocence during his ill-fated party. If she had hoped to get something for her seeming “loyalty,” she did not. Her new vaudeville act in the spring of 1922 was short-lived and her career in show business was soon over. (The footnotes below are our own annotations.)

Q: What time did you arrive at the St. Francis?

A: About 1:30, between 1 and 1:30.

Q: Who did you go with?

A: Alone.

Q: How did you happen to go?

A: Alice Blake called me up and said—well, I got a call the day before the party [Sunday, September 4]. I got a call that “Fatty” was in town, to come down, they were going to have a party. I never went down that day. I stayed over with Alice all night that night and left word at the St. Francis to call me at her place.[1] Instead of staying with her all night I went home. She called me the next day and said to come over, they were going to have dinner at Fatty’s place. I said, “I’m kind of tired. I think I’ll stay in bed.”[2]

Finally, I said, “All right, I’ll come down.” I was supposed to go to her [Blake’s] hotel,[3] and I told her, “Wait for me there.” Then she (Alice Blake) told me that she had a rehearsal. She works. She got tired waiting because I live so far out and went on over to the St. Francis. When I got to her hotel, I found out she had gone. Then I went to the St. Francis alone.

(From the time of the Prevost girl’s arrival at Arbuckle’s, she related the following story.)

They were all sitting around eating. They asked me to have something to eat. I said, “No, thanks, I have had my breakfast.”

Q: Who was in the room when you arrived there?

A: Fatty Arbuckle, Virginia Rappe, Lowell Sherman, Mrs. [Maude] Delmont, Mr. [Al] Semnacher and Alice Blake.[4]

Q: Was Mr. Fishbeck [i.e., Fred Fishback] there?

A: Mr. Fishbeck was downstairs and he came right up after. He said, “Hello Zey.” I responded, “Hello.”[5] They asked me to have something to eat. I didn’t eat.

Q: How was Arbuckle dressed when you went into the room?

A: I was surprised myself. We were sitting at the table. Everybody was dressed except Mr. Sherman and him. They both had on bathrobes, slippers, and pajamas.

Zey Prevost in witness chair, September 1921 (Calisphere)

Q: How was Mrs. Delmont dressed?

A: She was dressed in street clothes.

Q: When you went into the room?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: When did she (meaning Mrs. Delmont) change into pajamas?

A: I don’t know anything about that. I don’t remember.

Q: She was in her pajamas later on?

A: I don’t drink.[6]

Q: You kept your head?

A: They all know I don’t drink because they were kidding me about it.

Q: When did you notice Mrs. Delmont in pajamas?

A: She kept saying, “Oh, it’s warm in here. I feel awfully warm. It is close.” Mr. Sherman then said to her, “Put on a pair of pajamas; that will be all right.”

Q: What time was that?

A: As soon as they cleared the table away—a few minutes after they all fixed a drink and sat around and talked.

Q: Did she go into another room to change her dress for pajamas?

A: She went into the bathroom.

Q: Which bathroom?

A: Off Lowell Sherman’s room. Then she came out and they all started to laugh, and she said, “I feel comfortable now.” She sat down and nothing more was said about it.

Q: Then what happened?

A: There were several people came into the room. The [man, i.e., Semnacher] who left for Los Angeles [our italics]—

Q: Who was he, and what was his name?

A: I have forgotten his name. There was [sic] several people came in there [our italics].[7]

Q: What time did Mr. Semnacher come in?

A: He was in there when I arrived.[8] I was the last one to arrive there.

Q: You are positive it couldn’t have been after 2 o’clock when you arrived?

A: No, because Miss Blake had a rehearsal at 2 and she went over to rehearse.[9]

Q: Who took her over to rehearse?

A: I don’t remember. But I do remember that she said, “I think I’ll come back after rehearsal.” I said, “I may be gone then.” She came right back. She said, “There is no rehearsal. There is nobody over there.”

Q: She came back to the room all alone?

A: Yes, sir.[10]

Q: When did Miss Rappe leave the room?

A: Alice Blake and I went into the other room [i.e. 1221]. You know, I took my purse and was going to put some powder on. We were going into the bathroom of 1221. We were gone just a second, went back into the bathroom and we came back, and Virginia and Roscoe Arbuckle had gone. I said, “Where is Virginia and Roscoe? Lowell Sherman said, “Oh, they are in there.”

Q: Indicating what room?

A: Indicating Roscoe Arbuckle’s room.

Q: How long did they remain in there?

A: A good long while, and I said to Mrs. Delmont, “You better try to call Virginia,” and she called and called, and I said, “Kick on the door,” and I went over and banged three or four times on the door.[11] I said, “Go on kicking. Kick hard; make him open the door for you.” She then kicked three of four times. She rapped. She said, “I just want to speak to Virginia. I just want to talk to her.” She said, “Open the door.” So finally he opened the door.

Q: Who?

A: Roscoe Arbuckle and we went in. She was lying on the bed. Her hair was all down and she was moaning. I said, “What is the matter with you?” She didn’t drink [our italics].[12] I then said, “Maybe she has got gas on her stomach.” Then she started to pull her clothes off.[13]

Q: When you went into the room who did you enter with?

A: With Alice—Alice Blake and I went into the room.

Q: Where was she (Miss Rappe) when you went into the room—what part of the room—on the bed?

A: There were two little beds. She was on the bed near the door.

Q: How was she dressed?

A: She had on a little—she was all dressed. All her clothes were on her. Her hair was all hanging down. I said, “My God, what is the matter with her?”

Q: What did Arbuckle say?

A: Oh, he said, “Get her out of there. She is making too much noise,” or something, and she started to pull the clothes off and scream and holler, and when she was pulling her clothing off I said, “Stop that.” Then Arbuckle came over and started to pull the clothes off her [our italics]. I shoved his hands away. I said, “Don’t do that, Roscoe.” I said, “She is sick.” He said, “Oh, she is putting on.”

Q: Before you started to kick on the door didn’t you hear her scream?

A: No; there were two doors. You couldn’t hear anything. There was one door leading into the sitting room and one into the bedroom. There are two doors right together [our italics].[14]

Q: How did you happen to kick on the door?

A: She was in their such a long time.

Q: You say “a long time”? How long?

A: Over—it seemed like an hour.

Q: When you went in, she was lying on one of the beds. Where was Arbuckle?

A: He opened the door.

Q: Did he follow back with you?

A: He went in. He took off his bathrobe. I said to Alice, “Let’s get her over to the other bed.” We lifted her over to the other bed and gave her some bicarbonate of soda and hot water, and she threw that all up. Her eyes started to roll in her head. I said, “You had better call a doctor.” Then Mrs. Delmont was in the room and they put her in a cold bath. I said then: You had better take her out. She has been in there too long.” I went to the phone to call a doctor, but somebody grabbed it from my hand. They couldn’t afford the notoriety [our italics]. I said: “Get Mr. Boyle or somebody.”

Q: What happened then?

A: Some girl came in and her name was Mae [Taube]. I don’t remember her last name. She said to Roscoe: “You had better get your robe on.” This girl and I recognized each other, as we had met once before. She said to Arbuckle: “Can I speak to you a minute?” And he said: “Yes.” They went into the other room [1220] to speak. She left right after that. In the meantime, they were getting another room for this girl—to put her in [i.e., 1227]. Then I went into the other room [1227] with Alice. She [Rappe] was lying on the bed. I asked her if I could do anything for her. She said, “No.”

Q: She was then conscious?

A: Yes, sir, in the other room she was conscious. Mrs. Delmont was lying on the bed. She was sleeping [our italics].[15] I guess she was exhausted.

Q: Did Arbuckle have pajamas or a bathrobe on when you went into Room 1219—after you kicked the door and he opened the door?

A: He had his bathrobe on. He was fixing it.

Q: Then what did he do?

A: He went into the other room and sat down. Then Mr. Fishbeck came in. He helped us revive her.

Q: What did Arbuckle say in addition to “get this girl out, she is making too much noise?” Did he say anything else regarding her?

A: He just said—I don’t remember what he did say, he said so much.

Q: Did he talk a good deal?”

A: Yes, he did talk a good deal.

Q: And that is all you can remember that he said?

A: Oh, he stood there and stared—was very sore, and I said, “What are you sore for?” He said, “Oh, if she makes one more yell, I will throw her out the window [our italics].”

Q: What was his condition as to being intoxicated or sober?

A: He was intoxicated. He had been drinking.

Q: Did you see him drinking that afternoon?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: How much?

A: I don’t know.

Q: Approximately how many drinks did he take?

A: There was plenty of liquor there.

Q: How much liquor?

A: Enough to make him stewed.

Q: What did you see him drink?

A: He was drinking whisky and White Rock. He asked me to fix a drink. I put some orange juice in it. He said he didn’t want it. He wanted whisky and White Rock.

Q: How was his speech? Coherent—or—?

A: The party was perfectly nice. They never used any vulgar language in the party.

Q: I mean was his speech coherent?

A: He was talking about jumping out of the twelfth-story window [our italics]. He said, “Oh what is in life after all?” Really, it did sound funny. We were all sitting by the window. He said: I will jump out of the window with anybody who wants to jump out.[16]

Q: Did anybody volunteer to go with him?

A: No, nobody. We all looked at him. He said something: If I would jump out of this twelfth-story window, they wouldn’t talk about me today and tomorrow. They would go to see the ball game instead. So, what is life after all?”

Q: Did you see Miss Rappe after she was nude?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: Did you notice her body as to being bruised?

A: She had a bruise on her leg and arm. I said, “What are all those black and blue spots?”

Q: What was said?

A: There was nothing at all said. There was so much excitement about it—trying to get her to come to.

Q: Was Semnacher there when you asked the question?

A: I don’t remember if he was there at all.

Q: Which arm was bruised., her right or her left?

A: I never noticed that. I noticed her leg was bruised.

Q: Which leg?

A: I think the right leg.

Q: Do you remember whether the bruise was near her knee?

A: Yes, sir, around there. It was pretty black. I said: “Look at the bruise, Alice, on her leg and arm.”

Q: Did Alice examine the bruises?

A: Alice lifted her over on the bed. She fell on top of Alice. Just then Mr. Fishbeck came in and I said to him: “Help me get her off Alice.” She couldn’t move. She was unconscious by that time. She did start to yell after that. The pain was so terrible. Her eyes were rolling in her head. She didn’t drink anything [our italics].

Q: She didn’t drink at all?

A: I didn’t see her drink at all. I saw her eating something. I wasn’t there long enough to tell you the truth. They were just eating—

Q: How long were you there altogether before you knocked and kicked on the door?

A: I don’t know when it happened even; I never thought of talking the time.

Q: It was such a lively party that you didn’t take any time at all, is that it?

A: No.

Q: Was Semnacher there all the time you were there?

A: Yes; Semnacher—well, I went down to the Palace hotel with Semnacher to get the clothes of Miss Rappe and Mrs. Delmont.

Q: That was after she was removed from the room [i.e., 1219]?

A: Yes. I went to the Palace hotel to get the clothes.

Q: Prior to that time was he in the room [1220] all the time?

A: Not all the time.

Q: How many times did he leave?

A: About two or three times.

Q: Where did he say he was going?

A: I have forgotten. I don’t know exactly but he came in and said, “What is the matter? What is the matter?[17]

Q: When you went into the room [1219] did you hear any conversation between Miss Rappe and Arbuckle?

A: No, no conversation.

Q: Did she accuse him of anything?

A: You mean after we got into Room 1219?

Q: In Arbuckle’s presence in the room?

A: She was just yelling, “I am dying, I am dying. You hurt me.”

Q: Did she say, “You hurt me?”

A: Yes, sir. “He hurt me, he hurt me. I am dying. I am dying. I am dying.”

Q: Was he present when she said that?

A: They were all present, I think.

Q: Absolutely, that conversation was loud enough for him to hear it?

A: Sure. Alice was right there with me.

Q: You heard it? She screamed this, did she?

A: She screamed it. Absolutely screamed it. That is why he got sore, because she was yelling so.

Q: Where do you live?

A: I don’t want to say where I live. I live with my folks.[18]

Q: You realize this is a very important matter?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: How can we find you?

A: I will not give my mother’s number. Please don’t ask me that.

Captain Matheson: There will be people come to you and tell you to keep your mouth shut.

A: They have already. (Laughs.)

Q: Who spoke to you already about it?

A: I don’t know.

Q: Well, somebody did, didn’t they?

A: No. (Laughs.)

Captain Matheson: Let’s set ourselves right on this matter so we will now exactly where we are at. [To someone U’Ren:] This young lady is going to be a witness.

A: I don’t want my mother implicated in it.

Q: We don’t want people running to you and all that kind of thing to have you change your story. They will.

A: Well, I won’t.

[1] See note 2. Zey means that she left her contact information for the person who invited her in the first place.

[2] She doesn’t identify who called her and invited her for the Sunday gathering, which took place with Mae Taube being the only identifiable and known female guest. This means that Zey already knew Fishback, Sherman, or even Arbuckle himself. Notice, too, that the Labor Day gathering was only to be a kind of late breakfast, i.e., brunch, to use our portmanteau.

[3] The Woodrow Hotel at 364 O’Farrell Street.

[4] Here she excludes the presence of Fred Fishback and Ira Fortlouis.

[5] This would indicate that Fishback undoubtedly knew Prevost beforehand.

[6] There seems to be something missing here. Or Zey is reacting to U’Ren’s nonverbal cue that conveyed incredulity.

[7] Zey’s statement is the only one that mentions this mystery man. The others may have been hotel staff and whoever was catering the food and illegal liquor.

[8] In his statement, Semnacher did not come up until Fishback invited him up at about 2 p.m.. So, his presence beforehand is the anomaly that U’Ren is trying to identify—these were maddening for the prosecution and no less so for anyone writing about this affair.

[9] For the dance revue that entertained diners at Tait’s restaurant and theater on O’Farrell Street. Arbuckle’s entourage had been there the night before.

[10] This assertion puts in doubt Semnacher’s claim of having escorted Blake to the abortive rehearsal.

[11] This is the one time that Zey Prevost mentions that she initiated kicking and knocking on Arbuckle’s room. Delmont claims that only she kicked and pounded on the door.

[12] This is important Typically, Rappe is said to have had gin and orange juice.

[13] This behavior may have another explanation beside hysteria. One of the symptoms of shock are “changes in mental status or behavior, such as anxiousness or agitation.” Indeed, one of the actions taken when a person is going into shock is to loosen restrictive clothing. But what if tearing at one’s clothes is a natural response to the onset of shock. I see Rappe’s clothes tearing as a symptom of dysesthesia or allodynia associated with panic disorder, in which she was unable to endure the touch of her own clothes. It could also be something far more deep set, like self-directed violence of psychological trauma. To be continued . . .

[14] This important detail is routinely left out of accounts. These would be fire-rated wooden or even steel doors

[15] Delmont drank “ten scotches” during the course of the party. She allegedly had a leading role in the immediate response to Rappe’s crisis. But notice in Prevost’s testimony that this is not the case. That Delmont was sleeping next to Rappe was observed by the first doctor who came to see her late in the afternoon

[16] Regard Arbuckle’s “death instinct” in the context of defenestrating Rappe or Delmont in other testimony.

[17] She is going back to after she, Blake, and Delmont had gained entry to room 1219.

[18] 636 Bush Street.

Document Dump #3: The morals of the movies

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A Review of the Arbuckle Case

The following reprint of an editorial from “the British Communist” appeared in The Young Worker of March–April 1922, the official organ of the Young Workers League, published by the Young Workers League in Chicago. The text reflects the general view of both American and international communist organizations about the connection between the cases of Tom Mooney and Roscoe Arbuckle. The so-called “Frame-up Ring” in San Francisco’s Hall of Justice was likely not an organized shakedown ring as imagined by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the British Communist but rather a systemic bias that moneyed interests had against organized labor. What is more true is that labor activists had reason to feel betrayed by District Attorney Matthew Brady who had been elected in 1920 as a reform candidate with their support. Labor leaders on the eve of the first Arbuckle trial were expressing their impatience with Brady for his hesitation in reconsidering Mooney’s conviction for having been responsible for the Preparedness Day Bombing of 1916. Although Brady showed boldness, almost recklessness, in prosecuting Arbuckle, he didn’t benefit from it with his communist–labor constituency.

Front cover of The Young Worker March-April 1922 (Archive.org)

Moving pictures are one of the most powerful propaganda forces wielded by the capitalist class. To the millions of people who daily go to the picture shows is doled out the “virtues” of capitalism. The master class does not overlook any opportunity to slander organized labor through the use of pictures.  And the philosophy that is disseminated by use of the serene (sugar-coated with humor) is calculated to “appease” the hungry and to feed the unemployed with hope.

Because of their plastic minds, the young are especially apt to derive “instruction” from the pictures. The children and young people of this country attend the picture shows more frequently than do the adults. Hence the propaganda reaches them and to a greater degree. The morals of capitalism, as portrayed by such actors as “Fatty” Arbuckle and the countless number of his type who have not had the misfortune to have committed so slight an error as murder, are set up as examples to the future generation.

Accidents will happen; and once in a generation a cog will slip in the well-regulated machine and we get a glimpse of the true character of these teachers of morality.

But the capitalists will not desert so “valuable” a man as “Fatty”, and they begin to pull the strings to acquit him. Incidentally, the impartiality of our justice-dispensing machinery is revealed in all its hideousness.

It is easier to observe the actions of others. And the following interesting analysis of the Arbuckle Case and justice in the United States gives us a picture of a phase of American Capitalism as seen by our English comrades.

From the British Communist

So Roscoe—“Fatty”—Arbuckle is to come to trial again. Arbuckle was not always a rich man, he was once a “saloon bum,” a down and out hanger-on of pubs. As a chucker-out and as a potboy he once earned a more or less honest living, until he struck lucky on the films, but even in his time of great wealth he retained the manners, and habits of his pub-crawling days. He is, or was, at least, before this action began, a millionaire, and behind him are many of the most important cinema firms of the U.S.A., who have some miles of Arbuckle film which they dare not release till the fat comedian is acquitted.

District Attorney Brady, of California, prosecuting him, exclaimed aloud in court to a reporter:

“Can you tell me how I can join a bomb-throwing organisation? I mean an organisation more violent than the I.W.W. I believe in dynamiting when I see such efforts to pervert justice!”

District Attorney Brady is not a strong man. He is a weak and uncertain man, but he was put into office largely by a Labor vote, to perform one definite duty—to dislocate the whole operation of the “Frame-up” ring of California. This Ring originally worked through Brady’s predecessor, [Charles] Fickert. It used him to jail for life a San Francisco Labor leader, Tom Mooney, on a false charge of dynamiting. It produced forged evidence and suppressed real evidence. Witness after witness was brought forward and torn to pieces, and their places at once cynically taken by other hired agents. Eventually Mooney was condemned to death, but the grossness of the fraud was such that the sentence was changed to imprisonment for life—and he is still in jail.

For capitalist justice in California has gone one step further than it has here. There it is completely corrupt and completely at the direct service of a financial ring who own all the judges, can interfere in the selection of jurors, and have a regular service of false witnesses for use in almost any case. The utter filthiness of this whole gang was bound to provoke a reaction, and when Fickert was found to be having dealings with the Germans an opportunity arose for the election of a substitute—Brady—who was pledged to their destruction.

The Frame-up Ring has now been called in to defend Arbuckle, and it is defeating Brady. It has been called in because Arbuckle is essential to the Californian anti-union forces. He is the biggest propagandist inside the cinema trade for the “open shop” campaign which is now being pressed hard. A strong and partly successful attempt has been made to smash unionism in the film trade (an “open shop” is a non-union shop) and cut wages. The twelve firms involved in this drive are :

Christie Film Co., Thos. H. Ince Productions, Hal E. Roach Studios, Brunton Studios Inc., Buster Keaton Comedies, Lasky-Famous Players Co., Metro Pictures Corp., William Fox Studios, Goldwyn Pictures Corp., Realart Pictures Corp., Universal Film Company.

Fatty Arbuckle, their star scab actor, was also their best asset in this campaign. And then he gets himself arrested for rape and murder. Still, money can do most things. and the Frame-up Ring got busy. First of all Judge Lazarus was made to reduce the charge from one of murder by rape to manslaughter. It will be remembered that Arbuckle carried the girl Virginia Rappe out of the room at a drunken party in his hotel, saying, “I’ve waited for you five years”; that a chambermaid passing by the bedroom door heard the girl’s screams and struggles; that the guests who entered the room later found her naked and in agony, crying, “He hurt me!” while Arbuckle, dressed in the girl’s picture hat, stood by saying. “If she screams again, I’ll throw her out of the window.” Virginia Rappe died of the injuries he had inflicted.

At the trial the Frame-up Ring got hold of one witness after another and “persuaded” them that they had perjured themselves. It went far afield to search out means of throwing mud at the dead girl’s character. It saw to it that Judge Lazarus summed up as heavily as he could against the prosecution, describing the chambermaid as “hysterical,” and laying the greatest stress upon the points put forward by the more-than-shady witnesses for the defence. And the papers were able to announce that Fatty was “morally acquitted” because the jury was 10 to 2 for acquittal [at the end of the first trial in December 1921].

But the California bosses don’t leave such things as juror’s votes to the chances of evidence. The jury was selected in advance, at least in the majority, and its foreman, Fritze, was a well-known agent of the ring. The juror who stood out for conviction, Mrs. Helen Hubbard, now publicly swears that Fritze and others threats of violence and intimidation, also third-degree methods, to force her to agree to acquittal. Fritze used to her the words, “I’ll knock your — —— block off!” Her husband, T. W. Hubbard, was approached by one of the ring (a minor member, Oliva) demanding that he instruct his wife to vote for acquittal. Oliva further said that he (Oliva) would pass the note through to the jury, and that if Hubbard refused he would be ruined.

That is trial by jury in California.

But the Frame-up Ring goes deeper in the mire than that. How did an honest woman, Mrs. Helen Hubbard, find herself on that jury? The Frame-up Ring had “double-crossed” Fatty. It knew he could be bled for more money. and intended that he should have to stand a second trial.

That is United States’ justice. It was that same Frame-up Ring which condemned Tom Mooney to imprisonment for life on an utterly false charge five years ago-and he is still in jail. It is that same system of justice which has now forged a whole case against two Italian-American active trade unionists—Sacco and Vanzetti—and condemned them to death on an equally false charge.

Tom Mooney’s Monthly writes:

“Fatty” Arbuckle and motion pictures are inseparable—the Frameup Ring knows this and it is bent on a rich harvest. It knew in advance just what the verdict would be in the Arbuckle trial. Vincent Riccardi exposed this feature of the Frameup Ring‘s work last year when he showed beyond any doubt the methods of control and the uses to which the Ring put this so-called machinery of justice for its own enrichment. Riccardi showed that it was the sworn policy of the Ring to have disagreements where its victim (the defendant) had not been shaken down for all of his money. If the Ring knew he had more money or opportunities of obtaining it. it would split the Jury by placing upon it those who it knew in advance would vote not to agree on a verdict. Some regular acquitters and some regular convicters—thus does it produce a mistrial and open up another avenue to the pockets of ‘‘Fatty’’ and his rich friends.

Now, should “Fatty” and his rich friends in the scab, open-shop, 100 Per Cent “American” plan, motion picture enterprises come clean with enough coin of the realm between now and the time tor the next trial, he will never be brought to trial; the case will be dismissed} “for lack of sufficient evidence to convict.” If he fails to dig up the “dough” in large sums, the Frameup Ring will hold the club of another trial over his head and make him across with many dollars or the big gates of San Quentin prison will await him. In fact, it would not surprise us to see a. second disagreement It would mean more thousands of dollars in the coffers of the Ring.

Most times we think very little of the pious resolutions and hardly annuals which are passed regularly by Labor Party and Trades Union Congresses. But we do think this time that it would be a crime to fail to make at least a verbal protest. The friends who are defending Sacco and Vanzetti, the friends who are still seeking the release of Mooney, specifically ask for protest by the British workers, believing that over there these will have some effect. We must not refuse them.

As for Fatty, we can do little to express our contempt of him and his defenders. “Union Labor is through with Fatty’s pictures,” says Tom Mooney’s Monthly, from America: we suppose, too, that it will be long before a decent working man, or his wife or kids wastes another ninepence over here on the fat beast.

roscoe-arbuckle

Roscoe Arbuckle aboard the RMS Aquitania, 1920 (Library of Congress)