Though the following profile of Roscoe Arbuckle’s wife, Minta Durfee, reads like a “puff piece,” it was “propaganda” published just prior to the first of his trials, arranged by his lawyers and written by Alma Reed, a journalist whose career later took her to Mexico where she would champion the works of several artists including José Clemente Orozco.
Durfee’s role in the trial was staged, as historian Joan Myers said so poignantly a decade ago, but some of the thoughts Minta shared in this interview sound genuine, for instance when she mentioned that her husband was incapable of attempted rape because, in her mind, he was impotent. An astute reader might have concluded that Arbuckle had simply become bored with her as his popularity skyrocketed. Less obvious to the reader would have been why Minta stood by her estranged husband. The most significant reason is that the case against Arbuckle posed a mortal threat to the handsome stipend she received from him, so she swallowed any embarrassment and went to work shoring up his image as a good-natured (and harmless) husband. She was also enjoying the attention—pleased to be back in the limelight after years of being forgotten by the movie-going public.
Arbuckle Happy with His Wife; Awaits Trial
By Alma Reed
“I guess I’m the right girl for him, after all!”
There was a note of good-natured significance in her voice, and an expression of kindly, maternal understanding in her brown eyes, when Minta Durfee Arbuckle ventured this statement yesterday afternoon as she sat in evident domestic felicity beside her husband in their apartments at the Plaza Hotel.
And something of the old smile that won Roscoe Arbuckle world-wide fame in the silent drama flickered across his face as he held her hand and said tersely: “I’ve found that out, all right!”
This mutual admission of the success of their reconciliation after a month’s trial cannot fail to impress the most disinterested observer as the truth. For, in spite of the sinister possibilities that loom before him, in spite of the hideous accusation that attaches to his name, the corpulent screen star is frankly happy in the devotion of his pretty, talented wife.
Sincerity of Purpose
And Mrs. Arbuckle, with all the tact that a clever woman has at her command in an emergency which endangers the vital interests of her life, is resuming her duties, after five years of separation, with a sincerity of purpose and a genuine pride in her ability to meet the difficult situation.
Throughout the public frenzy surrounding her husband’s preliminary hearing there were many who, a bit reluctantly, perhaps, admired the splendid poise of Minta Durfee Arbuckle. Her dignified demeanor was a matter of popular comment at every session of the court. The same dignity, common sense and real charm of personality are standing her in good stead now, as with rare generalship she directs the uncertain affairs of the Arbuckle household.
It was between almost continuous demands made upon her time by phone messages and the greeting of visitors that Mrs. Arbuckle explained the past and expressed her hope for the future.
Arbuckle, seated in a small group of old friends, reminisced over various steps of his career. But he followed her every word, and throwing off the “incommunicado” mask imposed upon him by his attorneys since his arrest, made free and frequent comments, as she said:
I came here because I know Roscoe. Before our separation I was with him constantly for nine years. We worked in the same shows. We never had a meal apart. We were together practically every minute of that time. I know that he is incapable of doing the terrible thing that they have charged him with. I know that a great injustice is being done him, and that he is being placed in a false light before the public.
Grew Up Together
When we were married, I was only 17 and he was scarcely 21. We practically grew up together. Our one difference was just as much my fault as it was his. I had a point of view that insisted upon quiet manners and certain amount of conventionality. I had been raised that way, and the thing annoyed me was that Roscoe always acted like a big boy. When we were in the company of friends Roscoe preferred to go off and sing tenor in a quartet with the boys instead of politely remaining with the ladies. Perhaps he would take a notion to beat the drums, or do something else as foolish, for all the world like an overgrown baby. He was very bashful and I liked the social observances of life. Sometimes when we were in a restaurant he would say, “I’ll put your coat on outside. If I do it here the waiters will think I’m in love with you!” Now, of course, all that seems very silly now, and small reason why tow people who really were in love should separate. But I was much younger then and allowed the trifles of life to assume to much importance.
But Arbuckle refused to let his wife take the blame for their marital difficulties. Rushing gallantly to her defense, he declared:
It was my fault. I should have had more sense and should have realized my position. I never seemed to grow up, and I believed that I could always go on acting natural even after I became a public character. A man must finish with the “kid stuff” sometime, and I was wrong in wanting to sing in public and beat the drums, and do every sort of crazy thing that humiliated my wife. I suppose I never took myself seriously enough, and I didn’t seem changed inside, somehow, from the days when I was just a big, fat “cut-up” youngster in vaudeville.
Good Wife Best
Now I realize that the best thing is the world a man can have is a good wife—one who is proper and dignified and wants you to succeed and have the world think the best of you. A man may see the funny side when other women act boisterously or dress freakishly. But it’s a different story when his own wife does it. And the thing that a man should be most grateful for is having a wife whom he can respect and whom the world must respect.
That Mrs. Arbuckle is preeminently such a wife is the consensus of opinion among all those who have met her. Her husband’s opinion of her is borne out of her expression of her aims and interests. Of her personal tastes and ideals, she said:
I have always had one ambition, that is to improve my mind. My father always impressed my sister and myself with the truth that education is the best substitute for youth. “When you being to lose your looks,” he would say to us, “you can still be very charming women if you have used your time and your talents properly.” I have two hobbies—reading, and outdoor exercise. I love good books as I love few things in life. I study continuously, and the more I study the greater my desire to learn. My reading is of a great help to us now, when we stay indoors, as we do day after day, waiting for the trial. Roscoe is always begging me to tell him some of the stories I have read, and it gives me great pleasure to be able to interest him with all sorts of strange tales. The time I spent in our home in Los Angeles was wonderful, in spite of all the trouble. I love the garden. It is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen, all carried out in Japanese style. It is like a dream come true, for nine years ago, when Roscoe and I went to the Orient with the Ferris Hartman Company, we visited the tea houses and lovely gardens of Tokio. We promised ourselves then that when we could afford it we would have a Japanese garden all of our very own.
But, while that’s all very beautiful, the best thing is, of course, that we are together again, even if it required some terrible trouble to bring about. Perhaps we’ll have to start life all over again in a little stucco bungalow. I’ll be perfectly contented there, but I mean to have a little red lacquered bridge and an old stone lantern and a tiny lily pond somewhere in the back yard.
During the preliminary hearing, I once heard a man who was a baseball fan say about Mrs. Arbuckle:
You can’t help admiring that little woman for the plucky way she is keeping her foot on base!
And regardless of the issue of the legal proceedings which will determine the future status of Roscoe Arbuckle, it must be generally conceded that his wife is very firmly keeping her foot on base, with credit to herself and helpfulness to the man whose name she bears.
Arbuckle prepares to spin a jazz record while Minta reads him a story?
There are a plethora of revelations that will be uncovered in the work-in-progress, but this one we felt should be shared before we see her name rendered incorrectly again.
We begin with Andy Edmonds’ Frame Up! The Untold Story of Roscoe Arbuckle (1991). Edmonds cites an interview given by one Caroline Rapp, identified as Rappe’s grandmother, in the Chicago Examiner. But upon investigation, no such interview turns up. More likely, Edmonds is referring to an interview given by Chicago midwife, abortionist, and paid witness for Roscoe Arbuckle during his manslaughter trials, namely Josephine Rafferty Roth.
Mrs. Rafferty Roth began peddling the story of Rappe’s origins—almost all of it a fable—just days after her death on September 9, 1921. Edmonds probably digested the interview during her research and later misremembered the source in her finished book —spinning one fable into another.
Virginia (the elder) and Zelliene V. Rappe as listed in the 1910 U.S. Census (Ancestry.com)
The first name of her Rappe’s grandmother —and her surrogate grandmother too— was Virginia. So, in keeping with naming conventions, Virginia was the middle name given to the younger Rappe, in honor of the grandmother and for being the first granddaughter. But what was the full name?
Greg Merritt, in Room 1219 (2013), set the precedent with his revelation that “Virginia Caroline Rapp” was on her birth certificate. However no birth certificate or other document with that name from the 1890s has surfaced. That said, various writers have picked this name up and used it. It is also found in Rappe’s Wikipedia entry.
Rappe’s real name, as it turns out, was more exotic, and worthy of being a stage name in its own right. Her mother, Mabel Rapp, had her daughter christened as Zelliene Virginia, possibly adapted from and pronounced like Celine. The name is documented, too, in Rappe’s entry in the 1910 census and further corroborated with the variant “Zealine” by Rappé in September 1921. (Mabel also touched up her name as well, going by Mabel Rappé for her billing as a Broadway chorus girl.)
Variety, and a handful of newspapers that published the same story, relied on an unnamed informant who knew that Rappe lived with her grandmother and mother on W. 50th Street in Hell’s Kitchen, just off 8th Avenue, between 1900 and 1905. This person also knew that Rappe was nicknamed “Gasoline Zealine” by the neighborhood children—for Mabel Rapp had access to an automobile and her daughter—whom she called her kid sister—had the rare privilege of getting to ride in these new machines during the first years of the new century.
The unusual (and probably often misspelled) name, however, likely didn’t sit well with Rappe. She discarded it, first in favor of the stage names, Zola and Zaza, which she used during her brief sojourn into the theater and vaudeville, and later in favor of the name we know her by today which she adopted when she became a fashion model in 1912.
Newspapers.com has added several more newspapers, including two San Francisco papers, the San Francisco Bulletin, and the San Francisco Journal, which, until now, required a visit to the Library of Congress. The Bulletin provides another point of view on the case of Virginia Rappe and Roscoe Arbuckle—as well as staff artist sketches and photographs not seen in other newspapers, including one of Arbuckle poring himself a stiff drink and chomping on a cigar.
The Bulletin’s publisher, R. A. Crothers wrote what has to be the most scathing editorial that saw Arbuckle as a murderer. His piece has the tone of what so many authors have associated with the papers of Arbuckle’s bête noire, William Randolph Hearst. But Hearst had nothing on the Bulletin when it came to putting the comedian in a harsh light. It also found other editorialists—those realists among the press agents and other motion picture professionals—who rightly predicted that Arbuckle’s career was effectively over within a few days of his arrest.
So, we have to take a step back from editing our work-in-progress to pore over this and other newspaper sources that heretofore haven’t appeared in the bibliographies of previous Arbuckle case narratives.
The Bulletin probably had the most “sympathy” for Rappe as the above illustration suggests. This evening paper considered her to be a rising young comedienne who wanted to further exploit her role as a “society girl.” (Newspapers.com)Arbuckle sketched by Bulletin artist J. Rhodes. Note the cot in the background. (Newspapers.com)Maude Delmont testifying before at the San Francisco Coroner’s inquest by Dolores Waldorf. (Newspapers.com)
. . . is no less a work-in-progress for Spite Work. Photographs of the various personages in the case of Virginia Rappe and Roscoe Arbuckle are not easily had and require vigilance to locate, especially now as we prepare a manuscript for potential publishers. That said, we still hope to find the impossible, such as any of the illustration art for which Rappe modeled.
An even rarer image we have yet to obtain is that of Rappe’s mother, Mabel Rapp.
We know that she posed for the Chicago photographer Matthew “Commodore” Steffens during the 1890s, around the time of the Columbian Exposition of 1893. He used cabinet cards with her photo, which he displayed in his studio window, as samples of his talent—and her beauty.
A few possibilities have come to light, including images from the same period taken at other studios. But the detective work has to be conclusive. We only share these because Mabel (and her daughter) could have some resemblance or fit the context.
Mabel Rapp? We only know that she did similar poses for the same studio.
An unidentified “mother and child” in a cabinet card looking at other cabinet cards.
Also rare are photos of the minor and peripheral figures in the Arbuckle case. Minnie Neighbors, a witness for the defense, is an example. Mrs. Neighbors testified that she cared for Rappe after finding her doubled up in pain on a bathroom floor at Wheeler Hot Springs just weeks before the events of Labor Day 1921. Eventually, Neighbors was charged with perjury. We provide a fairly detailed
account of her sideshow in our book.
Minnie Neighbors. This news photo wasn’t used. Here she is too young and her matronly appearance, intended for a jury, just isn’t “there.” Now in Authors Collection.
Although the San Francisco District Attorney wanted Arbuckle charged with murder for the death of Virginia Rappe, he had to be satisfied with manslaughter. The judge who decided on the lesser charge was San Francisco Police Judge Sylvain Lazarus.
The photograph below is from the mid-1920s, when Judge Lazarus was seen as a real “character” for lightening the mood in his courtroom. He certainly did so in the preliminary investigation into Rappe’s death, which took place in late September 1921. The transcripts of this proceeding are the
only ones to survive. In January 1922, during the second Arbuckle trial, Lazarus had a phonograph installed in his court room. Perhaps some of the spectators could hear from afar “Hail! Hail! The Gang’s All Here” and other recordings that complemented the judge’s docket.
Sylvain Lazarus, a judge and master-of-ceremonies in one person.
Our most recent acquisition is the image below, Gavin McNab, Arbuckle’s lead counsel during the three trials. It betrays his height, dignity, and rather menacing presence that he used to his advantage when facing the comedian’s prosecutors, who were both a head shorter if not more.
The glowering Gavin McNab, who pulled Fatty out of the fire.
If any of our readers have photographs to share, we will be both receptive and grateful.
“History is written by the victors” and so is writing about Hollywood in the Silent Era. But we should probably paraphrase here, just a little, and say that “History is written by the defenders.” And if one scores by the number of defenders, then Virginia Rappe lost the contest with Roscoe Arbuckle, regardless whether she put up a fight in room 1219.
One of the earliest defenders was the Hollywood writer and memoirist Adela Rogers St. John. as mentioned in an earlier post, she interviewed Arbuckle for “Love Confessions of a Fat Man,” which was published in Photoplay during the early weeks of the Arbuckle scandal in the September 1921 issue.
Arbuckle, by hosting a party that flaunted its defiance of Prohibition laws and moral standards—it was essentially a party of married men cavorting with single showgirls—had ruined the innocence of St. John’s tongue-in-cheek portrayal of Arbuckle as a lady’s man, a virtual eligible bachelor. Her resentment eventually fell not on him but on Virginia Rappe. And St. John lived long enough to write it up in her autobiography Love, Laughter and Tears: My Hollywood Story (1978).
St. John, whose career got its start working for William Randolph Hearst—the bête noire of so many Arbuckle narratives—devotes several pages (60ff) to the Arbuckle scandal.
Perhaps St. John is less a defender and more the apologist, especially in regard to Arbuckle’s being in San Francisco in the first place.
St. John recalls a conversation with her father, Earl Rogers. Although she described him as “still the Coast’s leading criminal lawyer,” he had been in poor health since the death of his second wife in January 1919 and was more often hors de combat and no longer the feared trial lawyer who served Earle Stanley Gardner as the model for Perry Mason.
According to St. John, her father discussed why he had to refuse a request made by Arbuckle’s producer, Joseph Schenck, to represent the comedian. Although Rogers assumed Arbuckle wouldn’t be convicted, he would nevertheless be seen as a monster given his weight. His career would be ruined. “Tell Joe,” Rogers said to his daughter, “I can’t take the case; the doctors won’t let me, but to prepare Hollywood for tornadoes.”
The news would have been a disappointment, for Rogers was considered preeminent as a criminal attorney in cases that involved medical expert evidence. In his prime, he would have been perfect for the Arbuckle case given that his alleged victim had died from ruptured urinary bladder. But by early 1920, his health, mental, and legal problems had come to a head. He had assaulted a deputy sheriff sent to arrest him for making threats against members of his own family, which was attributed to “excessive use of stimulants and drugs.”
The “statement” St. John quoted in her memoir may have been paraphrased to make Arbuckle look innocent from the beginning. But her version isn’t what Arbuckle said in the Los Angeles Times the day after Rappe’s death. But let’s get back to why Earl Rogers wasn’t to be Arbuckle’s Perry Mason.
Frank Dominguez, Arbuckle’s original defense attorney, had resigned from the defense team in early October 1921, leaving Milton Cohen and the San Francisco attorney Charles Brennan shorthanded for November’s manslaughter trial. Several names appeared in the press, but not Earl Rogers. While it is true that his doctors allowed him to return to work in November and form a new practice, he restricted himself to Los Angeles and his health only deteriorated. He died in February 1922. However, one of Arbuckle’s prosecutors, Milton U’Ren, made it a point to ask prospective jurors if they knew Milton Cohen’s law partners—Frank Dominguez and Earl Rogers. If the answer was yes, presumably that talesman could be excused. Did U’Ren suspect that Rogers was giving his fellow lawyers advice? That might be a more reasonable explanation for what his daughter reimagined.
She also opined that Arbuckle, Fred Fishback, and Lowell Sherman went to San Francisco because it had “the best restaurants on the North American Continent” and
for a few days of fun probably partly on the Barbary Coast, a well-known section where night clubs and honky-tonks and cafes clustered together and produced the first-floor shows, the first new dances such as the Bunny Hug and the Turkey Trot, and much of the best music of our times. During this vacation an extra girl named Virginia Rappe got some alcohol in her system, stripped off her clothes, and plunged Fatty and Hollywood into a major scandal.
The resentment here is hard to miss. To St. John, a Hollywood insider, Virginia Rappe was a nonentity who had spoiled the much greater party that was the motion picture industry before the arrival of Will H. Hays.
“At that time,” she continues, “Miss Rappe had been living only a few blocks from me in Hollywood.” By “a few blocks” St. John means one of two places where Rappe lived—in 1920, not 1921. It is the distance to Henry Lehrman’s house, where Rappe lived for the greater part of 1920, at 6717 Franklin Ave., or 1946 Ivar Ave., which was fewer blocks away, where Rappe roomed briefly for the first two or three months of 1921. This can be documented. If we go by the 1920 federal census, St. John and her family lived miles away on Toberman St. and far from Hollywood. However, the 1921 city directory, which was compiled in the latter half of 1920, has Rappe living at the Ivar Ave. address and Adela and her husband, W. Ivan St. John, just as close as she states—to 5873 Franklin Ave.[1]
Memory can be tricky writing decades later, and if it’s a gossipy story that has been told repeatedly there’s a good chance the version that prominently places the narrator in the story will come to be accepted as true. So, we should be accepting that the St. John’s account isn’t airtight though it’s likely too odd of a coincidence to have been completely invented.
The day after Fatty had been indicted on the testimony of several girls [i.e., Zey Prevost and Alice Blake] and Virginia Rappe’s own deathbed statements, the man who did my cleaning came and told me: “I did Virginia Rappe’s cleaning. I see where one side says she was a sweet young girl and Mr. Arbuckle dragged her into the bedroom, the other witnesses say she began screaming and tearing off her clothes. Once I went in her house to hang up some cleaning, and the first thing I knew she’d torn off her dress and was running outdoors, yelling, “Save me, a man attacked me.” There I was standing in the kitchen with my hands still full of hangers with her clothes on them and she was running out hollering I’d tried to attack her. The neighbors told me whenever she got a few drinks she did that. I hated to lose a good customer, but I thought it was too dangerous so I never went back.”
I asked those neighbors and they confirmed the story. But you couldn’t put that kind of evidence into court! The girl was dead. To blacken her character would only increase public indignation against Fatty, for trying to save himself at her expense. (63–64)
St. John, ever the lawyer’s daughter, seems to suggest such evidence would have been dismissed as hearsay. But Gavin McNab, Arbuckle lead counsel through three trials, put as many witnesses on the stand as he could find to testify to Rappe’s frequent hysterics and disrobing. An example was Irene Morgan, who had served as a nurse, masseuse, and maid in the Lehrman household for several months in 1921. She was both deposed and examined on the stand by Milton Cohen at the first Arbuckle trial.
Cohen had the advantage of knowing Lehrman and Rappe—he was their personal lawyer as well as Arbuckle’s. He knew Rappe was suffering from what was described as a “nervous condition,” which, in part, had less to do with alcoholic beverages than with her self-image: she was overweight in early 1919 and losing weight was necessary to be considered for future movie roles.
She was no extra: Virginia Rappe looking like herself in 1917 swimwear. The still is from her first film, Paradise Garden (1917) (IMDb)
According to the trial reportage, Morgan described her service as it concerned Rappe, which included massages and treatments described as hydrotherapy. Morgan also knew that Rappe had been advised by a doctor to adhere to a bland diet and not drink alcoholic beverages. Morgan, however, testified that Rappe disregarded the advice. When she drank, “Miss Rappe often “tore her clothing in frenzy.” During one of these incidents, she said she ran nude from Lehrman’s house into Highland Ave. (See also our blog post about Morgan about her problematic testimony.)
Cohen did the spade work of finding and interviewing witnesses to similar episodes in Los Angeles. But there is no evidence that he met with the man who cleaned the clothes of Virginia Rappe and, coincidentally, Adela Rogers St. John. So, we have to ask, was he a real person or a strawman made up—or to be generous again, a composite—created to give St. John a role in the story. If he was real, one has to wonder how Cohen overlooked him. Perhaps the laundry man had sympathy for Rappe despite the aborted cleaning contract and chose to give no aid to the Arbuckle camp.
The story St. John tells here, of course, is one of many that turned Rappe from being “the best dressed girl in Hollywood” to the most self-undressed during the three Arbuckle trials and in much of what has been written about her ever since. Despite the bias, however, such an account reinforces just how much Rappe was resented in death and that, again, is the takeaway.
St. John mentions in passing Rappe’s former landlord, studio boss, dance partner, and boyfriend. She disparagingly refers to him as “a man named ‘Pathé’ Lehrman, claiming to be the dead girl’s sweetheart”—while knowing he wasn’t called that in the newspapers during the Arbuckle case. He was always Henry Lehrman and St. John well knew he was a key figure of early Hollywood history. Lehrman directed and mentored both Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin in their first comedies for Keystone Studios. But we mustn’t lose sight that St. John is a victor in the sense that she outlived everyone who could challenge her stories. She got to write that history and cast Lehrman as she pleased. But it is from Lehrman that we find something that suggests that St. John’s memory of “the man who did her cleaning” touched on a recurring theme, that Rappe feared being sexually assaulted.
In an interview with Louis Fehr of the New York American, Lehrman said, “I remember once when there was a terrible assault case in the newspapers. She said to me quietly: ‘Henry, if anyone tried to do a thing like that to me, he’d have to kill me.’ Well, she’s dead.”
So, perhaps St. John’s story has a grain of truth to it, that Rappe’s hysteria may have been histrionics—theater of a kind—intended as self-defense, to startle or frighten a potential rapist. We still have a possible hypothesis in our work-in-progress.
Women are still advised to disrupt the idea or fantasy of their attacker, that they should “fight like a furious cat” and “yell loudly and strongly.” Perhaps Rappe removed one facet of the male fantasy: the forcible disrobing, the tearing off the victim’s clothes, and so on. Perhaps, too, a good lawyer like Milton Cohen knew how to frame such episodes into what was needed to get Arbuckle acquitted. Maybe we can only leave that to the reader.
Adela Rogers St. John, 1966 (Library of Congress)
[1] In 1921, W. Ivan St. John served as personal secretary to the new mayor, George E. Cryer. He had been elected to on a platform to close the city’s vice dens and supported efforts to establish a censorship board. He also wholly supported the ban on Arbuckle’s films—which surely put Mr. St. John in an awkward position vis-à-vis Mrs. St. John.
One hundred and two years ago Virginia Rappe died in a private hospital in San Francisco. The following passages are from our work-in-progress to mark this occasion.
The decision to send Rappe to the Wakefield Sanitarium at 1065 Sutter Street, six blocks from the St. Francis Hotel, has long been seen as suspect in earlier narratives. David Yallop, in breathless italics, called Wakefield a “maternity hospital” to support his assertion that Rappe had come to San Francisco for an abortion and her chance meeting with Arbuckle at his Labor Day party was only an opportunity to beg money from him to pay for it. Greg Merritt has a less sensational take. In his book, the hospital’s owner and founder, Dr. W. Francis Wakefield, was a specialist in obstetrics, gynecology, and high-risk births, whose hospital was inappropriate for a case like Rappe. Most other writers either echo these assumptions or embellish them, describing the Wakefield Sanitarium as a glorified abortion clinic for wealthy society women and not even a legitimate hospital.[1]
But there is no evidence for the Wakefield being anything other than a forty-bed private general hospital as it was listed in The American Hospital Digest and Directory throughout its history. Newspaper articles, scholarly journal entries, and obituaries from the 1900s onward reveal much the same as does Dr. Wakefield’s career as a surgeon and his proprietorship of the Wakefield Sanitarium in San Francisco. Furthermore, the hospital served both male and female patients and wealth and status weren’t criteria for admission or treatment.
The Wakefield Sanitarium was originally located at 767 Sutter Street. In 1912, the hospital moved into a new building at the southeast corner of Hyde and Post streets. In 1917, Dr. Wakefield took over the Anderson Sanitarium at 1065 Sutter and relocated his hospital there. Although women certainly had caesarian operations there, such operations at the time required a longer convalescence due to the danger of infection. This was the same for any patient getting surgery prior to antibiotics and—with the advent of automobiles and the increasing number of traffic accidents, the Wakefield became the hospital for trauma patients, able to provide heroic measures in the operating room, such as emergency amputations, when necessary. The Wakefield, being a private hospital, also served a clientele who could afford a level of attention and comfort that was greater than would have been available at the larger city hospitals. Dr. Wakefield understood the value of such institutions at the time, for his patients were often among his social set.
Dr. Wakefield, a Canadian immigrant in his early fifties, had risen to prominence in San Francisco society during the 1910s and ’20s. Though he was known among the public for hosting social events with his wife, a more select group of people knew he also performed abortions. Though they were illegal, in virtually every American city, some of the most upstanding doctors provided abortions but only under the most discreet terms and calling the surgeries something else for the hospital chart. In other words, an unknown woman from Los Angeles couldn’t just check in and get a safe abortion in a San Francisco hospital and go home. Rappe’s willingness to attend Arbuckle’s party should dismiss any thought of her keeping an appointment with an abortionist.
Dr. Rumwell, the house doctor at the St. Francis Hotel, was a friend of Dr. Wakefield and had performed operations in his hospitals. Rumwell’s criteria for sending Rappe to the Wakefield Sanitarium would seem in hindsight to be in his patient’s best interests, in terms of discretion. She—and Delmont—didn’t want any publicity that might embarrass or anger Arbuckle (or Lehrman) and then refuse to foot the bill. Beat reporters frequented the public hospitals looking for the victims of accidents and crimes and they had informants in the emergency wards and staff. A private hospital, on the other hand, could protect a patient’s privacy. Out of respect for Maude Delmont’s requests, Rumwell had gone against his own judgment and allowed Rappe to lie in agony in a hotel bed for days—until her condition was so obviously life-threatening that rushing her to a hospital was the only option.
Rumwell initial diagnosis of acute alcoholism had been proven grossly inaccurate as the symptoms of a massive internal infection became obvious. His misdiagnosis and the time he spent adhering to it, foretold a grim outcome.
If there was hope, the Wakefield had two operating theaters. If anything went amiss, Rumwell himself could better keep it under wraps at the Wakefield, if for no other reason than to protect his reputation.
While the Wakefield’s patient, Rappe wasn’t given a celiotomy or any other invasive procedure that might have revealed her condition. Instead, she was given morphine, provided with a private room, and left under the care of Maude Delmont and two hired nurses.
At 7:00 p.m., Thursday evening, September 8, Nurse Cumberland relieved Nurse Jameson for what was scheduled to be a twelve-hour shift. But not long into it, Cumberland, either by telephone or in person, confronted Dr. Rumwell. She told him Rappe’s case had “been handled negligently.”
“When I realized the circumstances of the case,” she said to the press, “I had visions of juries, judges, investigators, and policemen. It was disgusting. Finally, I determined that the fair name of Cumberland should not be dragged into the filth of actors’ misdoings, so I requested my release.”
Cumberland had a high opinion of her social importance. She had made a habit of mentioning that she was a descendant of Queen Victoria. This assertion quickly disappeared from the reportage though, perhaps because reporters had consulted Debrett’s Peerage and discovered no links to either Queen Victoria or her German cousin, the Duke of Brunswick, who also held the title of Duke of Cumberland.
In any case, what Cumberland said to Dr. Rumwell about legal implications was taken to heart. Not long after she resigned, he called in two of his colleagues at Stanford to hear him out about patient Rappe and help him decide if surgery was still an option.
Dr. Emmet Rixford had been one of Rumwell’s professors at the Cooper Medical College. The fifty-six-year-old was a specialist in the surgery of the abdomen and a polymath with expertise in horticulture, wine-making, sailing, mountain-climbing, and snails.
“Surgery,” according to Rixford in a speech in support of animal experimentation, “is not perfect and no one knows its deficiencies so well as the surgeon.” The Great War had made this all the more evident with injuries resulting in gas gangrene, necrosis, sepsis, toxemia, shock, and death. Thus, he believed, “in some sense surgery may be said to be only in its infancy.” Although anti-streptococcus and anti-staphylococcus serums were available, they were experimental and did little good. Indeed, the antibiotics that could have helped Rappe were years away.
Rixford either heard or saw for himself that her abdomen was distended, which indicated that peritonitis had set in. Although that wasn’t conclusive proof of an abscess forming around her liver, it was an added complication to any invasive surgery for which the risk of failure was considerable.
Rumwell also consulted with another colleague, Dr. W. P. Read, an associate professor of surgery at Cooper. He agreed with Rixford. Rappe was likely too far gone. That said, cases of heroic surgery had been performed in the past with the presence of peritonitis. Dr. Rixford knew of a child’s burst appendix having been successfully repaired. And he and he and his colleagues should have known that the management of acute peritonitis was an established routine, one for which Dr. Wakefield’s hospital was fully equipped, with a modern operating theater, a steam autoclave, nickel-plated instruments, and clean white and green enamelware fixtures.
The surgeon and attendants would follow the Crile forceps method—with nitrous oxide anesthesia for the duration of the surgery, local anesthesia at the point of incision, a clean-cut wound for access, adequate drainage, hot flannel packs placed over the entire abdomen and along the bedline, Fowler’s position throughout, and a Murphy’s drip in the rectum to supply the body with fluids (water, sodium bicarbonate, and glucose).
The Murphy’s drip is de rigueur for treating peritonitis even before surgery. And it was used on Rappe during her final twelve hours as though surgery had been contemplated. Tragically, however, Dr. Rumwell would need to start the drip immediately once he diagnosed peritonitis and that came too late. The time it took him to disabuse himself of his original diagnosis of alcoholism would prove dire and significantly decrease Rappe’s chances of survival.
The morphine injections given to Rappe in the hospital should have slowed down the peristaltic motion of her intestines and may have limited the spread of the disease. But large doses of morphine had a deleterious effect on the patient’s respiration and ability to respond—and this also ruled out anything like the high-risk last-resort surgery that might save a life. Over the course of Thursday and into early Friday morning, Dr. Rumwell had more reasons to talk himself out of doing so.
At such a late hour, and with no one to assist in such a futile operation, the patient, “Miss Rappe” was a lost cause.
Maude Delmont faced the prospect of no money for Rappe’s hospital bill. Neither Al Semnacher nor Roscoe Arbuckle had yet to make any arrangements for paying for the doctors and nurses and Delmont’s extended stay in San Francisco. They may not have been aware of this expectation. But it wasn’t hard to intuit that Delmont was in dire straits and had been left holding the bag.
Eventually, she turned to the one person of means who might help. She telephoned Sidi Spreckels on the morning of September 9 and told her of Rappe’s suffering and how Arbuckle was the cause.
Although she acknowledged getting Rappe’s telephone call from Arbuckle’s suite, Spreckels knew getting herself involved with motion picture people risked adding to her own unwelcome notoriety. She could ill afford that. After all, she had to look upright for herself and her daughter if she expected to get anything from her late husband’s estate. (She was vying with the first Mrs. Jack Spreckels, whose current married name was, curiously, Mrs. Wakefield.)
Initially, Spreckels told reporters she only knew Virginia Rappe “casually” and through Henry Lehrman, whom she and her late husband knew better. Even so, Spreckels agreed to act as intermediary and inform Lehrman of the situation. He was the closest person to any next of kin beside the impecunious Hardebecks. She took down the message Delmont wanted convey, especially in regard to money, and wired Lehrman.
How Spreckels knew where to send her telegraph deserves an answer. It would measure at least some of the real distance between Rappe and Lehrman in September 1921. Was he still a part of her life? Was her presence in San Francisco not a surprise, her being with Arbuckle as some in the film colony believed? In any event, Delmont knew where to find Lehrman from her own source or Rappe herself.
While waiting for Lehrman to reply, Spreckels felt a “sympathetic impulse” to do more, to see Rappe, “to be bedside of a dying acquaintance [. . .] to aid a girl dying alone in a big city with but one friend beside her, devoted as she might be”—meaning Delmont rather than herself.
Spreckels arrived at the hospital around 9:30 a.m. and discussed Rappe’s condition with Delmont and Jean Jameson. Then she turned her attention to the patient and readily saw the extent of Rappe’s decline. She looked doomed to her. Rappe’s eyes were livid, as though staring into space. She seemed not to recognize her friend.
She never knew I was there, but I stayed. It was terrible—that poor girl lying there without a friend except myself. She must have read that I was in San Francisco and her poor mind flew out to the only friend she knew.
I never intended to say a word about my visit to Miss Rappe, feeling everything would be misunderstood by the unthinking and distorted by my enemies. Why is it that a woman must have enemies? Miss Rappe, as I have always said, was a good girl—a girl that always appealed to everyone as a good clean liver.
I used to say to her that she could not have the wonderful complexion she had and dissipate, and it was so. Miss Rappe never told me a thing—she could not talk. She was too far gone for that. My only regret was that she did not know me.
Rappe, however, wasn’t as mute as Spreckels let on. In the same interview, she remembered her friend expressing a certain regret over what had happened.
“Oh, to think that I had led such a quiet life,” Rappe moaned, “and to think that I should get into such a party.”
After seeing Rappe still alive, but with no attending physician present, Sidi Spreckels stayed briefly. Then she departed to call her own physician, Dr. H. Edward Castle, a surgeon, and arranged to have him meet her back at the Wakefield. She also received a wire from Henry Lehrman addressed to “Virginia” and filled with assurances of his undying devotion. Lastly, Spreckels called her minister at the First Congregationalist Church, the Rev. James L. Gordon. She asked him to hurry and pray over her.
Hurrying back to the Wakefield Clinic, Spreckels found Rappe unconscious. But this didn’t prevent her from whispering Lehrman’s endearments into her friend’s ear.
A short time later, Rappe passed away a little after 1 o’clock in the afternoon. Dr. Castle arrived a minute after she had stopped breathing. Rev. Gordon also arrived too late. Presumably, he took the opportunity to pray anyway—for Rappe’s soul.
When Dr. Rumwell found his patient dead in her room, he was confronted by Delmont and Spreckels. They demanded that an autopsy be performed on Rappe’s body to rule out foul play. At first, Rumwell resisted and attributed Rappe’s death to natural causes. He admitted Rappe’s body bore obvious bruises. But these could have been from being handled at the hotel, lifted on and off the gurney, and other easily explained reasons. An autopsy, as he knew, could invite a criminal investigation. But given that Delmont, Spreckels, and the attending nurses were saying Rappe implicated Arbuckle, not performing an autopsy would be equally hazardous.
With such leverage in his face, Rumwell relented. He telephoned the San Francisco County Coroner, Dr. Thomas B. W. Leland, who would need to approve the autopsy. Leland would also ask questions about the patient and be obligated to initiate a criminal investigation if the evidence suggested foul play. Rumwell and Leland were friendly, having volunteered together in an effort to treat the city’s drug addicts and create a special hospital for them.
But the Coroner’s office informed Rumwell that Leland was on Naval Reserve duty in Santa Cruz. Without a coroner or chief medical examiner, a legal autopsy couldn’t be performed, but Delmont and Spreckels pressured Rumwell to find an alternative. Spreckels social standing may have played a role in making this happen though it’s also possible Delmont’s relationship with Rumwell made the difference.
Rumwell decided he couldn’t accurately fill out Rappe’s death certificate without knowing how she really died yet he undoubtedly understood the risk to his career if he ignored the legal protocol. So, he telephoned another colleague at Stanford, a man with a certain eminence. enough to impress Coroner Leland, namely the Dean of the Medical College and Professor of Pathology, Dr. William Ophuls.
Dr. Ophuls, a naturalized American citizen had been born and educated in Germany. His many degrees and honors, along with his quiet German accent underscored his authority and expertise. Ophuls agreed to conduct the autopsy. As for Rumwell, he didn’t have to assist or even watch. He only needed to accept the official responsibility.
After Dr. Ophuls arrived, two Wakefield duty nurses, Grace Halston and Margaret Forte, lifted Rappe’s body from a gurney to a cast-iron enamel table in one of the operating theaters. Halston, although still a nursing student, had gained experience assisting her physician uncle at a hospital in El Paso. She remained behind to help Dr. Ophuls manipulate Rappe’s limbs and torso. There followed a standard autopsy, with a long incision beginning just under the sternum.
A copious amount of fluid gushed from Rappe’s abdomen. When the flaps of her abdomen were moved aside, a sac of pus was found that released a noticeably foul odor. The items of greatest interest, the stomach and bladder, were examined in situ and, to facilitate this, the uterus and colon were removed and preserved in sealed specimen jars. The bladder had a pronounced tear in its crown and the peritoneum was inflamed from a massive infection.
Rappe’s body had many bruises and they caught Dr. Ophuls’ attention so he made careful notes and measurements. There followed the standard procedure of packing body cavities, where organs had been removed, with thick cotton batting. Despite being a surgeon, Dr. Ophuls could dispense with his usual care and suture up the long cavity he had made with a series of crude sutures that looked like a line of X’s running from between Rappe’s breasts to just above the pubic mound.
Finally, a shroud was drawn over the corpse and Halsted & Co., a mortuary only a block west on Sutter Street, was called.
Soon after, a black hearse arrived and the mortuary assistants took Virginia Rappe’s remains away. Once there, a blank death certificate form was started. What was obvious was entered by the same hand: Female, White, Single, with her age based on an approximate birth year of 1895, that is, Abt 25. Her occupation provided no mystery: Motion Picture Actress. Then came a series of entries that read No Record for her unknown birthplace and parentage.
“Length of Residence” was not left blank. It read “4 days.”
The former Wakefield Sanitarium, which closed in the early 1970s, is now the Raphael House, a San Francisco homeless shelter.
[1] See, for example, Paul H. Henry (1994) and J. W. Henry (2017), 000n.
The following passages from our work-in-progress cover the last good morning in Virginia Rappe’s life, September 5, Labor Day 1921.
Business, Pleasure, Revenge, and Revisionary Speculations
In The Day the Laughter Stopped, David Yallop asserts that Virginia Rappe came to San Francisco to beg Arbuckle for money to pay for an abortion. Yallop further intimates that the father was Henry Lehrman. Nearly four decades later a more sober explanation came into play.
Greg Merritt, in Room 1219, has a less desperate reason for Rappe’s being in San Francisco. She, like Arbuckle, was there for recreation, but with the overriding prerequisite to establish a new direction in her life at thirty. “Her designing and modeling careers were stalled,” he writes, “and after a promising film debut in 1917, four years later she had failed to establish herself as a marketable movie star.”[1]
Merritt makes a logical assumption. Rappe signed herself into hotels as a “motion picture actress.” But unlike other actresses, she pursued her film career intermittently, with none of the dedication, which could be ruthless and soul-crushing, seen in other women. The press releases about her being a “society girl” weren’t entirely fabrications. In the film colony, she was more that than a performer. Even to say she was Henry Lehrman’s fiancé cannot be entirely accepted as fact. She may have been closer to his “boarder” as the 1920 census has it, more of a live-in escort when he needed one, arm candy.
Rappe wasn’t her mother but she had an understanding of the precarious means of Mabel Rapp’s dodgy lifestyle. Rappe avoided drugs and crime. She got by on her looks honestly. But Rappe was still a decidedly unmarried woman who depended on a man for her existential freedom and choice. Even if the dress shops of San Francisco had been open on Labor Day, even if she wanted to do a little shopping in the city, she had no money. That she was “reputed to have independent wealth as a result of oil investments,” as was said of her, wasn’t true or had already been run through.
While Lehrman was gone, he may not have been out of her life entirely or unwilling to help her—if not with his own money than with favors owed to him or that he could still wheedle. Given what happened, the greatest irony is that Lehrman could have been instrumental in Rappe going to San Francisco in the first place. After leaving for New York, he surely left her with the impression that he would return to Los Angeles. Miriam Cooper and her husband, Raoul Walsh, believed Lehrman had a hand in getting Al Semnacher and Maude Delmont—whom Cooper called a “young couple”—to take Rappe to San Francisco. To do what?
Assuage Rappe’s loneliness? To make up for being left behind to fend for herself? To let her “get back” at the man responsible? And him off the hook? And Lehrman could have had a hand in going to San Francisco without being involved at all. If Rappe had some inkling about his other woman, his Ziegfeld Follies girl, why not make him jealous with someone who really bothered him, who made him feel even broker and a bigger failure? There were people who grated on Lehrman. People good for pleasure? And business? Income was always an ever-present reason, more so than seeing Sidi Spreckels. Rappe had not only herself to support but also Aunt Kate and her husband, “Uncle” Joe Hardebeck, whose stock trading schemes were hit or miss. (Indeed, he may have lost any money Rappe made on her supposed oil wells.) So, a casual, unplanned trip to San Francisco with her agent and a stranger with no intention other to meet a friend—a wealthy widow with a young daughter—on Labor Day should still be questioned. Any knowledge that Arbuckle was in San Francisco was a prospect for both Semnacher and Rappe. The chain of supposed coincidences that drew Arbuckle and Rappe to San Francisco were almost too opportune—just enough to see there was coordination between the two groups that may have started before Rappe left Los Angeles.
Al Semnacher, as a publicity man and talent agent, knew movie and casting directors, including Fred Fishback and his assistant, Al Stein. Semnacher also knew Arbuckle. Such contacts were necessary in getting actors and actresses work and making a percentage. Ideally, photographs and previous screen credits would be enough to sell the person. But personal encounters were still necessary to earn Semnacher’s percentage and this was especially true for actresses, “good fellows.” If Virginia Rappe and Helen Hansen knew Roscoe Arbuckle and two of his friends were in San Francisco without their wives, both knew what could be expected of them. But this expectation could be mitigated if there were other local women less inclined to worry about giving in when a gathering got “rough,” whose transaction wasn’t a motion picture or an interruption to a life centered in San Francisco.
For Al Semnacher to coordinate a congenial meeting, as though by coincidence, between Rappe and Arbuckle would require a combination of intelligence. A tip from Henry Lehrman? Someone in Arbuckle’s camp? That someone would have been Fred Fishback. He knew of Rappe’s financial predicament and had a good relationship with Arbuckle. Fishback also knew that she was looking for movie roles. She had a new short for his Century Film Corporation, A Misfit Pair, that would be in theaters in a matter of days—and a rumor would soon surface in the Los Angeles Times that she was slated to be in another Century comedy.
Rappe was comfortable enough around Delmont to call her “Maudie.” No doubt both women got to know each other and share stories about their lives in Los Angeles and going back further. Perhaps Delmont told Rappe the story behind the name “Bambina,” which seemed more of title than a pet name. She may have told the story behind her millionaire’s last name, which she still proudly bore despite the two marriages that followed, assuming Delmont told her. But Rappe never called her Bambina and Delmont didn’t get to call her new friend “Tootie.” They didn’t know each other long enough. But Delmont drank for both of them and was surely incapable of being anything but unreserved. “I liked that girl,” she later said wistfully. “She was whole-souled and genuine.”
Delmont’s later utterances, of taking the blame for what transpired on Labor Day, suggested that she herself was disingenuous. She was less a companion, a “good fellow” and more the lure for some ulterior purpose. “I had taken Virginia there and was responsible for her going,” she said, meaning San Francisco and all the rest.
Al Semnacher and his female passengers arrived at the Oakland ferry terminal around 10:00 o’clock at night on Sunday, September 4. By 11:00 p.m., he had parked and checked into the Palace Hotel, where he and his party occupied a two-bedroom suite at his expense, about $8 a day compared to $12 a day for the same accommodations at the St. Francis. For the traveling and frugal businessman, however, the Palace was a fashionable choice. The rooms had connecting doors between Semnacher’s bedroom and the room shared by Rappe and Delmont—and they were only so many floors below Sidi Spreckels.
The only time Semnacher mentioned entering their bedroom was on the following morning, to ask if they wanted to have breakfast. Then, between 10:00 and 10:30 a.m., the threesome took the elevator to the lobby. If they looked in on the bar, they may have noticed Maxfield Parrish’s painting The Pied Piper over the bar, in which the piper is depicted leading Hamelin’s children to “the place of no return.”
On their way, Semnacher undoubtedly stopped at the desk to check for messages. Even if he knew he likely had none, the impression made was of an important man—with a pair of attractive women in tow. Then he, Rappe, and Delmont stepped inside the Garden Court.
The Palace’s elegant lounge and dining room on the first floor is much the same as it was a century ago. Breakfast and lunch were served daily under a vast, gilded skylight of opaque glass, which added to the soft but generous light provided by the crystal chandeliers. Large potted palms and flowering plants were placed to give the illusion one dined outdoors.
Amid the sound of muted conversations, the deferential voices of the waiters, the polite clatter of silverware and dishes—these met and maybe some ceased as Semnacher and his companions followed a waiter to a table set for four.
Rappe’s presence in the Garden Court would have been hard not to notice amid a sea of white tablecloths. She stood out in a light green ensemble in contrast to Maude Delmont’s nondescript black broadcloth dress. Numerous accounts of what Rappe wore on September 5 exist in reportage and court testimony. One of the earliest described each piece as it lay in tatters before a coroner’s jury. Nevertheless, the reporter’s description of both garments reimagines the woman who wore them in life.
Just three yards of heavy crepe of the brilliant but cool green that the Chinese call jade. A two-piece skirt gathered on a belt. A little sleeveless blouse that hung in straight lines over the skirt. The wide armholes corded and a soft collar finishing the modest cut neck. For sleeves the long white ones of an ordinary white silk shirt waist that could be bought in any shop for $5.
What a contrast to the jetted and braided and embroidered and fringed atrocities of the most expensive modiste!
The sort of frock that any girl could have—if she were as clever as Virginia Rappe.
That girl knew what was becoming to her—had a fine color sense—knew the value of accessories. Her plain white Panama hat—the hat that Mrs. Delmont says Arbuckle was “clowning” in when they broke into the room, has a narrow band of jade green ribbon around the crown.
Ivory and jade—that was the color motif—as the designers would say. Just one touch of the show girl—and that hidden away under the ivory and jade. Garters of three-inch black lace, ruffled on silk elastic with a tiny green ribbon flower at the fastening.
The Gown Salesman
In the same memoir in which Buster Keaton and his coauthor claim Virginia Rappe and Roscoe Arbuckle dated prior to Labor Day 1921.[2] They also body-shamed her posthumously as “a big-boned, husky young woman, five feet seven inches tall, who weighed 135 pounds.” They also saw her as “virtuous as most of the other untalented young women who had been knocking around Hollywood for years, picking up small parts any way they could.”
Keaton and his coauthor were, of course, writing years later and after the standards of beauty had yielded to a slenderer profile. They also give no inkling as to why she would have been a favored guest in Arbuckle’s suite. The accepted story of her presence was due to a chance encounter with a gown salesman who was on his way to the Arbuckle suite at the invitation of Fred Fishback.
Rappe had caught the roving eye of Ira Gustav Fortlouis in the Palace Hotel, which he kept as his permanent address in the city. He allegedly saw Rappe in passing and admired her clothes and the way she carried herself. As he later told Frieda Blum of the San Francisco Call, “reasoning further, she appeared to be not too expensively dressed and did not give the impression of being employed”—a woman who could use some money, some work.
Fortlouis and his intuition played an important part in the events that transpired on Labor Day 1921. Variously called a “traveling man” and “salesman” with such modifiers as “cloak,” “gown,” or “wardrobe” to impart his line of business, he was by all appearances rather nondescript. Stout and having features that provoked one of Arbuckle’s female guests to refer to him as a “Jewish gentleman”—with no trace of being disparaging, just stating a fact as facts were in 1921—Fortlouis considered himself a lady’s man. He very much enjoyed the company of attractive women, of which there were many in his field. He hired models in San Francisco and his other markets on the West Coast. Women worked in his office and wholesale warehouse at 233 Grant Street, the new sales branch of Singer Bros. & Day Co. of New York. In early 1920, this manufacturer of ladies’ “cloaks and suits,” according the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, named Fortlouis manager of its new Pacific Coast headquarters.
Fortlouis had been working his territories and living out of hotels for much of his life thus far in San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Born in 1886, the son of a hotel manager, the younger Fortlouis grew up amid the prosperous Jewish enclaves of Seattle and Portland. As a young man he graduated from clerking in cigar, hardware, and dry goods stores to a life on the road as a traveling salesman in the Pacific Northwest. While still living and working out of Portland, Fortlouis’ private life became public in the city’s newspapers for a week in January 1914, when he was called as a witness in a $50,000 breach of promise suit brought by Gertrude Gerlinger against Lloyd Frank over a broken engagement. Forced by a subpoena to testify for Frank, Fortlouis had to admit he shared a stateroom and enjoyed an assignation with Gerlinger aboard a steamer on a pleasure trip to and from Astoria, Oregon during the time she was engaged to marry Frank. Gerlinger won the suit but was awarded just $1 by the court.
If the young Fortlouis had strayed himself, he made up for it the following year when he relocated to New York City and married. In 1917, however, he returned to Portland and worked as a salesman for Singer Bros. & Day Co. Based in Manhattan’s Garment District, Singer & Day was a leading manufacturer of ready-to-wear clothes for women and his territory extended to Los Angeles. The president of the company, Saul Singer, was also vice president of the Bank of United States, an aggressively entrepreneurial bank that, through its mergers and lending, exemplified the freewheeling financial world of the 1920s that ended with the Great Depression.
Although Fortlouis main clients were department stores, the wardrobe departments of motion picture studios needed clothes. And motion picture studios had plenty of pretty extras who could serve as models as well. Such common interests, such common benefits to be sure, brought men together like Fortlouis and Fishback.
“I got in town Sunday, September 4, 1921,” Fortlouis later told detectives, having found him six days later either at the Palace Hotel or at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, where he checked in on the day after the Labor Day party. Like so many other party guests, his responses were suspiciously vague, detached. “Somebody told me that Fishback was in town. I called him up at the St. Francis and left word for him to call me.”
When Fishback hadn’t returned the call, Fortlouis, either by dint of impatience or persistence—he was a salesman—kept ringing up “Freddy.” At about at 8:30 on Monday morning, Fortlouis finally spoke to Fishback.
“I was walking out of the Palace Hotel about 11 a.m.,” Fortlouis continued, “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.”
Fortlouis then walked hurriedly to the St. Francis Hotel on Powell Street. There, he called Fishback in room 1220 to let him know he was downstairs and coming up. Why Fortlouis was granted such a privilege, particularly as an unaccompanied male, was never given save that he was Fishback’s friend and even that made little sense. If we pretend that “Fatty” Arbuckle, Lowell Sherman, and Fred Fishback make for a kind of Jazz Age “Rat Pack,” what would a portly gown salesman bring to the party? There would be no answer for this. Nevertheless, Fortlouis felt accepted.
“We sat there and talked for a long time,” he recalled, “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 at 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.”
The combination of Fortlouis being at the Palace that day, knowing Fishback, serendipitously intercepting Rappe, and his persistence in calling Fishback until he picked up, almost defy credibility. Was it the phenomenon of “meaningful coincidences,” after Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity?
An early United Press report had Fortlouis denying to authorities “any responsibility for arranging the affair.” That such a denial was necessary suggests that detectives and district attorneys weren’t convinced. They entertained their own theory, that Rappe had been intentionally enticed to come to Arbuckle’s suite and Fortlouis played a part.
After seeing her for the first time in the Palace, two stories circulated in the press as to when he saw her at the St. Francis. In one he was present in room 1220. The other was more involved for lack of a better word. Here Fortlouis met Fishback in the lobby of the St. Francis and was then introduced to Rappe there, as she entered the building.
Much to his surprise, the gown salesman saw that Fishback and Rappe were already acquainted.
Paging Miss Rappe
If Semnacher intended to return to Los Angeles in the late afternoon, it meant he and the two women at the same table had four or five hours to fill before getting back into his Stutz. What does one do in that much time? Wander Chinatown? Ride a cable car? Take in a movie? Look for a theater showing TheMisfit Pair? Meet Sidi Spreckels? Surprisingly neither Semnacher nor Delmont provided any clue as to what they would have done in San Francisco had there been no Labor Day party, as if they had traveled into the void at Rappe’s suggestion in Selma to just wait with her for her next suggestion. They didn’t wait long.
Around 11:30 a.m., as she enjoyed a late, leisurely, and presumably light breakfast, Rappe was paged, a hotel page approached and handed her a note. Delmont later testified that it read: “Come on up and say hello.” It was simply signed ARBUCKLE, lacking a full name.
A brief discussion took place. Was this Andy Arbuckle? The one who sold shoes in Texas. Whose older brother Maclyn had long been the only Arbuckle.
“It might be Roscoe Arbuckle,” Rappe pondered, “but I don’t know.”
The page also informed Rappe that she was wanted on the hotel desk’s telephone. When she returned, her Labor Day afternoon had its diversion. According to Maude Delmont, Rappe said Arbuckle and Sherman wanted her at the St. Francis. Neither had extended the invitation personally and the person who took credit for speaking to Rappe on the telephone was left a mystery for weeks—Fred Fishback. But her hunch was right.
The last thing Rappe did before leaving, according to Delmont, was telephone Sidi Spreckels upstairs in her apartment at the Plaza. Arbuckle, too, testified that Rappe made such a call in his presence. But she had used the telephone in his reception room at the St. Francis. In any case, Spreckels declined.
Around noon, Semnacher fetched his motorcar and drove Rappe and Delmont the five blocks between the Palace and the St. Francis. He testified he left them off in front of the hotel and didn’t wait to see them enter the building. Before that he said he did, in fact, wait for time because, if “the party didn’t suit them”—meaning Rappe and Delmont—there was an exit strategy.
“I’ll go up there and if the party is a bloomer, I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” Rappe promised Semnacher, giving Arbuckle and his friends about as much time as a comedy short.
Virginia Rappe, 1918, (Nelson Evans)
[1] pp. 000–000: Merritt, 39; Cooper, 179; [Warren Woolard], “Mystery Death Takes Actress,” Los Angeles Times, 10 September, II:21; Ernest J. Hopkins, “Think Third Person in Room,” Buffalo Courier, 19 September 1921, 2; “Hotels of San Francisco,” Western Fruit Jobber, November 1919,21–22; “Fate Sealed by the Dress She Made,” Los Angeles Times, 15 September 1921, 6.
[2] pp. 000–000: Keaton with Samuels, 158; Freda Blum (Universal Service), “Idle Inquire Leads to Death of Rappe Girl,” Oakland Tribune, 27 November 1921, 11; “Many New Businesses Open Here,” San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Activities 7, no. 13 (26 March 1920), 114; “Dictaphone on Light Fixture Tells Tales,” [Portland] Oregon Daily Journal, 8 January 1914, 2; “Notables at Hotels,” San Francisco Examiner, 6 September 1921, 6; “Guest Tells Police Party Was ‘Noisy,’” San Francisco Examiner, 10 September 1921, 3: United Press, “Arbuckle To Tell Police of Actress’ Death,” St. Louis Star, 11 September 1921, 2; United Press, “Arbuckle Detained in Girl’s Death, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 11 September 1921, 6.
[3] pp. 000–000: “New York to Be Submerged Today, Avers ‘Professor.’” San Francisco Chronicle, 5 September 1921. 1; “Mrs. Delmont Gives Detailed Account of Rappe Tragedy,” San Francisco Chronicle, 12 September 1921, 4: “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: A.P. Night Wire, “More Interest in Trial,” Los Angeles Times, 24 November 1921, W1; “Arbuckle to Be Held in Death Probe,” Oakland Tribune, 10 September 1921, 2; “Arbuckle to Be Held in Death Probe,” Oakland Tribune, 10 September 1921, 2; Ernestine Black, “Arbuckle Dances While Girl Is Dying: Joyous Frolic Amid Death Tragedy,” San Francisco Call, 12 September 1921, 1, 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.
[4] More applicable to Rappe and the other guests of the Labor Day party. Albeit published in out-of-town newspapers, the daily horoscope of the McClure Syndicate advised readers that the “early part of the day should be profitable for all who deal in clothing, millinery or any accessory to wearing apparel.” Furthermore, and by “a strange contradiction in psychology,” men and women “who have won fame or high place will concern themselves about their personal appearance in a way that proves how great power the stars that encourage such vanity now are.” Furthermore, Uranus had its own adverse effect for the fifth of September, being “in an aspect stimulating to intrigue and deception which will largely be practiced by women as well as men.”
The following begins another part in our biblical-length book with the appropriately apocryphal title of The Apocrypha of Maude: September 1921.
To Selma
I do not believe that Virginia Rappe was a conscious factor in any maneuver directed against Mr. Arbuckle. If there were a deliberate plot against him, I do not think that she knew anything about it. She was in Los Angeles, financially hard up, out of work and unable to get help from her friends.
Minta Durfee
When he spoke before a grand jury and testified for the first time in a courtroom, Al Semnacher casually said he had met Maude Delmont no more than three or four times since 1917.[1] Yet, when they encountered each other outside the Hollywood Pig ‘n Whistle restaurant, they were far better acquainted. He had her telephone number. Delmont knew of his youngest son by name. She spoke of little Gordon Semnacher as though she babysat for him.
Delmont had long since ceased running her salon business on Captiva. With the end of the summer season in 1919, as “Madam Delmont,” she ran a help-wanted ad in the Los Angeles Times, a business offer for an “EXPERIENCED BEAUTY PARLOUR operator” who knew “the hairdressing business and all its branches.” This “grand opportunity for the right person” meant Delmont wanted another woman to assume her lease adjacent to the Avalon Casino Ballroom. As it came out later, unpaid rent and other bills forced her creditors to seize her luggage until her debts were paid.
By the spring of 1920, Delmont lived in East Los Angeles at 725 S. Bernal Avenue. She had moved into a rented house with her younger sister Lucile, a practical nurse and divorcée.[2] The census that year lists Delmont’s occupation as a “corsetier.” But so was her neighbor, suggesting some mutual cottage industry.
A year later Delmont found a new job as an advertising and subscription collector for the Labor Journal, a Fresno-based periodical for agricultural employers and workers in the San Joaquin Valley. In this new line of work, she met her third husband, who also worked for the Labor Journal, Cassius Clay Woods, named for the abolitionist Cassius Clay—still an admired figure in the late nineteenth century.
Called a “publicity man” in newspaper accounts, Woods had been selling advertising for publishers since 1912, when he lived in Bakersfield. Like Delmont, he had territories covering the rural towns of the San Joaquin Valley, including Kern, Madera—where the couple were married—as well as Fresno and Selma. One thing the newlyweds had in common was drinking, but their marriage became a part-time affair, like their work, and they drifted apart.
For much of the spring and summer of 1921, Maude Delmont had no fixed address. She either stayed with friends in the Fresno area or with an aunt at the Windsor Apartments at 970 Orange Street in Los Angeles. She lived like a traveling saleswoman. She dressed well and occasionally supplemented her income as a gown model. To get such work at thirty-nine was unusual and more so because Delmont was an alcoholic, albeit one who could comport herself and could pretend to be “sober.”
Drinking wasn’t a pastime Delmont shared with Al Semnacher, and the real nature of their acquaintance was never disclosed. She might have been a business associate of sorts, seeking work as an extra or providing Semnacher with leads to undiscovered new, pretty faces on the sidewalks of Hollywood, an extra set of eyes at lunch counters, at train and bus stations, wherever a young, obviously out-of-town woman needed someone to show her the ropes, the same ones Delmont climbed when she arrived so long ago. We only know that Delmont made a good, quick friend for a friend in need.
Of course, Virginia Rappe was hardly an ingenue. She knew the ropes and got farther up than Maude Delmont ever did. But propriety required that Semnacher provide a chaperone in order for her to make the Labor Day trip and the gregarious “beauty specialist” fit the role.
In courtrooms, Al Semnacher and Maude Delmont told much the same story of how their chance trip came to be on or about August 31, the day Helen Hansen refused to go despite Rappe’s entreaties. Delmont had finished her breakfast in the Pig ‘n Whistle’s at 224 S. Broadway, next to City Hall. A respectable establishment, the Pig ‘n Whistle was where so many women shoppers from the nearby department stores brought their children for its ice cream, confections, and pastries.
From the window, Delmont easily recognized Semnacher and his ten-year-old son Gordon. They were in Semnacher’s Stutz Model H touring sedan, which was easy to spot as was he, wearing his houndstooth Gatsby cap and a tie knotted with a four-in-hand and pinned with an ankh symbol. She went outside to talk to him.[3] They were both on familiar terms, but much of their real conversation was lost in their signed statements.
“What are you doing?” Semnacher asked.
Delmont said she wanted to go to Fresno for the weekend, which included visiting and staying with a friend in the nearby town of Selma. She wanted to hitch a ride with someone going north, friendly people who might make for a “pleasure trip.” Semnacher offered her a ride without any quid pro quo.
“Why, I think I can drive you Saturday,” he said, meaning September 3.
The peculiar requisite for “friendly people” should have sounded suspicious to detectives and district attorneys, for the term meant people who could be trusted, complicit. Semnacher obliged.
He telephoned Delmont the next day, September 1, to tell her the trip was on with two of his clients joining.
“Certainly not,” she responded, “but bring your baby,” meaning Gordon Semnacher.
“I will if he will come,” Semnacher said.
“Who are your girlfriends,” asked Delmont, “anyone I know?”
Semnacher told her she didn’t. He “represented” them, leaving it to be understood that they were actresses.
“Are they good fellows?” Delmont inquired, using another loaded meaning: were they willing to play along, play the “game” if one was in mind. “Good fellows” also meant would the pair have no objections to an older woman in their company.
Semnacher promised both women were “the sweetest and best fellows I ever knew—perfect little ladies, and you will like both of them very much.”
Delmont agreed to the arrangements. Later in the day he telephoned again and informed her that his “baby did not want to come.” This may have come as a disappointment. But it also meant that All Semnacher wouldn’t be under any time constraints to get the boy back to his estranged wife and her boyfriend.
Outside of some mountain scenery along the way and the simple joys of picnics, barbecues, and square dances, fair booths, and rides, Fresno and nearby Selma would seem to offer little in the way of diversion. For casts and crews driving out of Los Angeles to film on location in the Sierra Nevadas and other points north, Fresno was a layover, where the entourage filled their gas tanks and had a decent breakfast.
Semnacher pulled up outside Rappe’s home at 504 N. Wilton Place early on Saturday morning, September 3, just before sunrise. Her adoptive aunt, Kate Hardebeck, expressed no concern about the absence of Helen Hansen or that her “niece” might go somewhere alone with a married man regardless of his status as her agent. But Rappe was also Aunt Kate’s employer, the “lady of the house.” So, looking the other way was part of the job. But Rappe reassured Aunt Kate that only a weekend in Selma was planned, so, no worries. And another woman would be joining them before they left Los Angeles.
What didn’t look right was the sight of Rappe packing her bags. “She, for some reason or other took an unusually large supply of clothing,” Hardebeck recalled, “a whole suitcase full.”
“Tootie” was taking far more clothes than needed for a little outing to the Fresno area, as Rappe told her. There this other woman, a Mrs. Delmont, had a home where they would stay overnight on Saturday and Sunday and return some time on Labor Day.
For the long drive, Rappe had pulled on her black boots, silk breeches, as well as the rest of her “riding habit”—which was then in fashion for active young women. Before she skipped down the sidewalk and down steps to Semnacher’s car, Aunt Kate followed with two picnic baskets. These contained thermos bottles of coffee and tea, sandwiches, and other delicacies. When these and the rest of her luggage were stowed, Rappe threw her dog “Jeff” and Aunt Kate kisses good-bye.
Minutes later, in another part of Los Angeles, Semnacher pulled up in front of Delmont’s apartment house around 7:20 in the morning “with Miss Rappe,” as she recalled. After introductions were made, the three boarded the Stutz, with the two women sitting side by side in the back seat as a matter of propriety.
There Rappe and Delmont got to know each better, their voices a little raised to hear each other above the chattering of the motor and the wind through the open sides. At some point, to be a “good fellow” herself, Delmont offered the flask she kept in her purse.
Rappe politely refused.
Semnacher’s inland route north took the recently completed California Highway 4, the precursor of U.S. Route 99 and present-day Interstate 5. By the late summer of 1921, the entire way was concrete-paved and designed for the top speeds of trucks and automobiles or 40 to 50 MPH, respectively. Compared to the slower and longer winding coastal route, Highway 4 was now the preferred way to get to San Francisco in a day.
Highway 4 burrowed through the Newhall Tunnel and then up into the mountains past old Fort Tejon and then on to the oil fields and farmland of Kern County before riding along the Castaic-Tejon Ridge then twisting down to the first major town, Bakersfield. The rest of the way to Fresno traversed the so-called “Garden of the Sun” of California’s prime, irrigated farmland, the San Joaquin Valley, where, to either side of the road, were miles and miles of croplands, producing raisins, grapes, peaches, figs, nuts, olives, oranges, and other crops. The distance between Selma and Los Angeles is a little over 200 miles or almost halfway to San Francisco. The traffic would have been light in the morning, with occasional trucks and horse-drawn wagons, which Semnacher could easily pass in his Stutz, which shared the same engine with the two-seater Bearcat. Even though the first rains of the dry California summer had recently fallen, the weekend weather was expected to be fair with temperatures in the upper 70s.
What was there to do in Selma? On Saturday evenings, the town’s band gave concerts in the park. Tonight’s rather eclectic program included the region’s anthem, the “Raisin King” march, the vocal trio from Verdi’s Attila, a “yodel” song, a scared melody, and the “National Anthem.”
Delmont, however, had a friend in Selma proper, Mrs. Anna L. Portnell. At forty, she was a society woman by Fresno County standards and a member of the Woman’s Relief Corps, a charitable organization for war veterans. She and her husband Jesse lived at 2336 Chandler Street and were negotiating for the purchase of a thirty-acre ranch outside of town. Perhaps much to Rappe’s delight, Mrs. Portnell was also a bridge player.
If Mrs. Portnell expected Delmont and her companions to arrive on Saturday, September 3, or if their visit took her by surprise, it went unreported. We only know what happened from her point of view she took the stand in Arbuckle’s defense in January. Mrs. Portnell recalled taking her visitors sight-seeing around Selma and nearby Kingsburg in her car. During this excursion, Rappe had a crisis.
“Please stop the car if you do not want me to die,” she begged. Then she got out and doubled up. Mrs. Portnell saw Rappe drink “a quantity of dark colored liquid from a gin bottle, claiming it was an herb tea.”
Mrs. Portnell kept the bottle and offered it as evidence, having kept this strange souvenir of Rappe’s visit for nearly five months. Delmont, however, recalled a different Saturday evening.
“Why, Virginia danced for an hour without stopping at my friend’s in Selma, where we spent the night on the way up,” she said in the San Francisco Call. “When the hour was over, she was as fresh as when we started.”
The next day, on Sunday morning, September 4, Semnacher and his companions departed Selma for the drive to San Francisco. He testified on more than one occasion that the trip to Selma had been the only destination and he, Rappe, and Delmont intended to return to Los Angeles. Rappe, however, suggested that they drive on to San Francisco.
Semnacher gave no reason why and various theories began to fill this void. But later, much later, after the first two Arbuckle trials, Delmont, in an interview with the Kansas City Post, said Rappe, on the spur of the moment, thought it would be splendid idea if she could visit her friend Sidi Spreckels in San Francisco. She was a young widow now and had just returned from France with their four-year-old daughter Gertrude to fight for her share of her late husband Jack’s estate. But that wasn’t the only reason that Rappe might want to give comfort to an old girlfriend. Sidi had been under a cloud that loomed over her well before Jack Spreckels died last July. When the couple had their falling out in 1920, Sidi got herself involved with an old acquaintance from her days as a cabaret artiste.
His name was William “Diamond Bill” Barrett, a notorious “soldier of fortune” known for cheating a string of jewelry stores and gullible young women. His most recent exploit, eloping with a Philadelphia heiress, Alice Gordon Drexel, however, didn’t result in any largesse. Her parents refused to underwrite their living together in Paris and forced him to foot the bills. Desperately in need of cash, he went to London and found Sidi in a troubled marriage with an absent husband.
Sidi either fell for his charms or agreed to his latest grift during their brief affair, which she said was purely social. On Barrett’s advice, she entrusted jewels to him worth $125,000 (or $2 million adjusted for inflation). He promised to have the lot appraised and insured—which may have been some sweet revenge on Jack Spreckels, for Sidi gave Barrett her engagement ring and a pearl necklace made by Tiffany’s of London, which she purchased on a line of credit extended to her father-in-law, John Spreckels Sr.
For a time, Barrett lived off selling pieces to pawn shops and second-hand jewelers, one of which tried to sell the pearl necklace back to Tiffany’s. This alerted Scotland Yard and its detectives returned the necklace and a few other pieces to Sidi. Subsequently, Barrett fled to Mexico. As for the only other wronged party, if one excludes Sidi’s late husband, Tiffany’s requested the balance due on the pearl necklace, said to be $80,000. Jack either didn’t or refused to pay for the bauble and, after his death, a suit was filed against his widow to recover the money.
With her legal woes and mounting debts, Sidi was still in the newspapers a year later, not only because she wore very stylish widow’s weeds, but to put her furs, including her precious Russian sables, up for public auction to pay her creditors and keep her penthouse in the Palace Hotel. Although such an event might have attracted Rappe—some of her designs were likely in Sidi’s closet—she could hardly afford to place a bid.
According to Delmont, Rappe dearly wanted to surprise her friend with a telephone call at least. Semnacher acquiesced to the impulsive request. But this this was a special favor. He had to drive an extra 200 miles north. He had to pay for the gasoline and any unforeseen repairs, such as blown tire. He had to travel from Oakland to San Francisco by ferry and arrive late at night—and he was either expected or had offered to cover their expenses. But it wasn’t an inconvenience as to time.
The threesome intended to stay for just one night and then leave San Francisco during the afternoon of Labor Day, returning to Los Angeles via the coastal road (later called California SR 1) through Monterey and on to Del Monte to spend the night—where one of Rappe’s friends was staying, possibly two. Vacationing at Carmel-on-the Sea was only a stone’s throw and vacationing there over the Labor Day holiday and into the following week were Grace Darmond and her lover, Jean Acker, still married to Rudolph Valentino. If Rappe knew of their itinerary, in one great arc, taking her across a broad swath of California, she may have had it mind to see three girlfriends, not one: first Sidi, then Grace and Jean.
Before leaving Selma, Rappe dropped a postcard into a mailbox addressed to Aunt Kate on Sunday morning. It read “having a lovely time” and the change of plans.
“Never having tried to curb Virginia and always trying to make things comfortable for her,” Aunt Kate said, recalling the postcard, “I didn’t feel alarmed and didn’t think it so unusual that she had decided to go to San Francisco.”
Mrs. Frances Bates served as one of Arbuckle’s defense witnesses in all three trials. Mrs. Bates, a resident of Santa Ana, California, in 1921, had been located by Arbuckle’s personal lawyer, Milton Cohen. She testified that in October 1913, while a sales clerk at Mandel Brothers Department Store in Chicago, she witnessed Virginia Rappe, working as a live model, tear up one of her gowns and going into hysterics, clutching her abdomen, weeping, and so on. She had to be treated in the store hospital.
Such episodes were intended to prove that Rappe had a history of illnesses that resembled what the defense said occurred on September 5, 1921, while she was a guest at a Labor Day party in Arbuckle’s 12th floor suite at the St. Francis Hotel. Milton U’Ren, a prosecutor, however, suspected Mrs. Bates was lying and that she had never crossed paths with Rappe. He eventually procured store records that suggested Mrs. Bates and Miss Rappe weren’t employed by Mandel Brothers at the same time.
In March 1922, at the third trial, U’Ren called William F. De Rose to the stand. He was an assistant superintendent of the department store. He took the stand and shared store records with the jury that showed that Mrs. Bates had worked at Mandel Brothers for a few months between September 1909 and January 1910 before she was let go for insufficient references.
As for Rappe, she had worked between September 1911 and September 1912.
Although Mrs. Bates claimed her signature on the employment forms wasn’t hers, a handwriting expert confirmed that the signature was hers. Her testimony wasn’t stricken from the court record, but it was certainly moot and she potentially could be charged with perjury.
Rappe, however, wasn’t alive to substantiate her employment. In fact, she was in in New York City in the autumn of 1912. But Mandel Brothers did have a significant fashion show of French gowns and Japanese-inspired kimonos to inaugurate a new wing of the store with an expanded women’s department. We wondered if there was any graphical evidence of Rappe’s modeling work. It’s hard to say, but there is one illustration that could be based on Rappe. She had a certain beauty that obviously worked well for pen-and-ink fashion illustrators of the day. But it’s all in the eye of the beholder.
Full-page ad for Mandel Brothers, September 1911 (Newspapers.com)
Our epilogue follows the lives and fates of the various “players” in the Arbuckle case. There are a few happy endings. Zey Prevost got married and lived an uneventful life. But most are rather tragic. Alice Blake died in a car wreck. Al Semnacher’s career was effectively over and he died of a heart attack a year after the trial. He was followed by Rappe’s “Uncle Joe” Hardebeck, who locked himself in his bathroom and shot himself. Maude Delmont lived as a recluse in Southern California under her maiden name. And so on.
There is almost an Arbuckle curse. But most of the epilogue is a survey of Arbuckle’s life after he was acquitted and it begins with this novel way of looking at the abortive attempt to reinstate the comedian and an “exposé” that was very much believable in regard to Arbuckle’s conduct.
Most books about the Arbuckle case—and those that devote chapters to it, like William J. Mann’s Tinseltown—seem to treat the resistance to Arbuckle’ return with disdain, as if they were nothing but “church ladies” to use Mann’s term for a very diverse group of women. Such writers assume that the majority of Americans wanted to see Arbuckle on screen again. What is more evident is that they didn’t care. They didn’t miss him. And one has to consider, in all fairness, that letting Arbuckle out of his box required real denial.
On December 20, 1922, Will H. Hays, while in Los Angeles, issued a statement in the Yuletide spirit. He intended to pardon the comedian, reinstate him as a film actor, and eventually lift the ban on his films. Arbuckle welcomed the news and expressed his gratitude. Naturally, he felt he deserved such Christian charity and, as yet, no one had noticed that for all those weeks and months since September 1921, no one observed him “darken the door” of any congregation. He had long ago maintained the separation of church and stage.
The blowback from clergymen was swift. They felt Hays should have consulted them. The Women’s Club of Hollywood, the National Committee for Better Films and the National Federation of Women’s Clubs demanded that Hays to take his Christmas gift back. The Rev. Dr. Wilbur Crafts surely knew of this outrage. But his voice was silenced by his untimely death “after a shockingly brief illness,” according to one Washington newspaper mourning his loss to the cause of the suppression of immorality.
The mayor of Los Angeles, who understood the lingering “disgust” for the debauchery revealed in People vs. Arbuckle, telegrammed Hays as he distanced himself from the controversy, en route to his home in Sullivan, Indiana. By the time he arrived, he had stacks of such wires from other mayors and every kind of prominent citizen. He now had to deal with the fact that Arbuckle’s innocence was never wholly accepted in Hollywood and his preexisting reputation never went away, even in the film colony, many of whom saw the comedian as liability.
Indeed, Hays proved to be remarkably tone-deaf to the real situation, made all the more real by the inopportune federal indictment in Los Angeles of one Ed Roberts a few days before Hays arrived on December 13, waxing with bonhomie and compassion for such artists as Wallace Reid and Roscoe Arbuckle.
Roberts, who managed such two film magazines, it and the Motion Picture Magazine of Joy, was also a spokesperson for the Affiliated Motion Picture Interests. This organization, which included the late William Desmond Taylor on its board, represented not only producers but rank-and-file actors, workers, and other employees of the motion picture industry and flourished until it ceded its mission—to disassociate its members from the industry’s black sheep—to Hays and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. Roberts was also a political activist in Los Angeles. He headed the Tenants Protective Association and sought the arrest of landlords whom he considered “rent-profiteers” and backed a citywide rent strike. He also organized the resistance to evict the so-called “squatter” families on Terminal Island and ran an unsuccessful campaign for city council on platform against blue laws and censorship. In other words, he wasn’t afraid of being controversial or contradictory.
Before the third Arbuckle trial began in March and before Hays took the reins of the MPPDA, Roberts put the finishing touches on The Sins of Hollywood, an eighty-page pamphlet published anonymously in May. In his introduction, piquantly dated April 1, 1922, Roberts stated, “Eight months before the crash that culminated in the Arbuckle cataclysm, they knew the kind of parties Roscoe was giving—and some of them were glad to participate in them—”
In October 1921, weeks before the first Arbuckle trial, Matthew Brady had come to Los Angeles on a fact-finding mission to learn first-hand about such gatherings. That he may have spoken to Roberts or those who could vouch for his veracity is unknown. But ultimately Brady agreed with Gavin McNab not to resort to such character defamation and thus tied a hand behind the prosecution’s back.
Copies of The Sins of Hollywood were scarce and it never saw anything like a national distribution. Even so, a deputy U.S. attorney in Los Angeles branded the book as “scurrilous” and the city’s chief post office inspector promised to ban the book from the mails as well as find and prosecute the author. In any event, someone with influence, someone in the motion picture industry, saw the book, saw that it sent the wrong message with Will Hays in place, and complained—perhaps all the way up to Hays himself.
Roberts was hardly graphic. But he was a good writer and knew how to be shamelessly suggestive in describing the party and sex subculture of Hollywood. His real offense was that he made it very easy to guess the names of the actors and actresses whose names he barely disguised along with their transgressions. “Jack” was Mack Sennett. “Molly” was Mabel Normand. The 1916 love triangle between her, Sennett, and Mae Busch and the “battle royale” between the two actresses wasn’t hard to miss. “Walter,” the dope fiend, was Wallace Reid. “Adolpho” was obviously Rudolph Valentino and “Rostrand” was Roscoe Arbuckle.
Recall that Virginia Rappe said, before she took the elevator up to twelfth floor of the St. Francis Hotel, that she hoped Arbuckle’s party wasn’t a “bloomer”—a disappointment. Did she expect something like the following entertainment, the arousal, the bad taste? “Not so long ago a certain popular young actress returned from a trip,” Roberts began.
She had been away for ten days. Her friends felt that their ought to be a special welcome awaiting her. Rostrand, a famous comedian; decided to stage another of his unusual affairs. He rented ten rooms on the top floor of a large exclusive hotel and only guests who had the proper invitations were admitted.
After all of the guests—male and female—were seated, a female dog was led out into the middle of the largest room. Then a male dog was brought in. A dignified man in clerical garb stepped forward and with all due solemnity performed a marriage ceremony for the dogs.
It was a decided hit. The guests laughed and applauded heartily and the comedian was called a genius. Which fact pleased him immensely. But the “best” was yet to come.
The dogs were unleashed. There before the assembled and unblushing young girls and their male escorts was enacted an unspeakable scene. Even truth cannot justify the publication of such details. (p. 74)
In late July, Hays traveled to Los Angeles and couldn’t avoid The Sins of Hollywood, with its lurid red Mephistopheles and his camera on a startled flapper and her beau. A respected Los Angeles minister handed him a copy at the behest of the author. Hays was appalled but he didn’t change his message before an enormous crowd that filled the new Hollywood Bowl. Hays had cover for the motion picture industry and declared, “The one bad influence in Hollywood is talk. And for the life of me I cannot see the horrors of Hollywood.”
In mid-December, Ed Roberts was finally identified as the author and indicted by a federal grand jury for having distributed over 10,000 copies of The Sins of Hollywood. For Hays, who only wanted to play Santa Clause for Arbuckle, an overzealous federal prosecutor had, perhaps, presented him with a very inopportune gift, ill-timed given the Arbuckle pardon. Indeed, the ministers and clubwomen who swore by Roberts would want Hays to act more like a moral policeman.
In the end, two of the latter put up the bail of $5,000—and Roberts said that he could name names and substantiate every one of his salacious claims, such that federal investigators wanted his cooperation in busting a dope ring. With the new year, Robert’ trial was postponed and eventually disappeared from the federal docket.
Notice that the girl is depicted in her undergarments (i.e., a teddy). (Internet Archive)Although Ed Roberts had no real shot at a seat on the LA City Council, the Los Angeles Record endorsed his candidacy and published this photograph in May 1921. (Newspapers.com)
Arbuckle prepares to spin a jazz record while Minta reads him a story?
Minnie Neighbors. This news photo wasn’t used. Here she is too young and her matronly appearance, intended for a jury, just isn’t “there.” Now in Authors Collection.
Although the San Francisco District Attorney wanted Arbuckle charged with murder for the death of Virginia Rappe, he had to be satisfied with manslaughter. The judge who decided on the lesser charge was San Francisco Police Judge Sylvain Lazarus.
The photograph below is from the mid-1920s, when Judge Lazarus was seen as a real “character” for lightening the mood in his courtroom. He certainly did so in the preliminary investigation into Rappe’s death, which took place in late September 1921. The transcripts of this proceeding are the
only ones to survive. In January 1922, during the second Arbuckle trial, Lazarus had a phonograph installed in his court room. Perhaps some of the spectators could hear from afar “
Sylvain Lazarus, a judge and master-of-ceremonies in one person.
Our most recent acquisition is the image below, Gavin McNab, Arbuckle’s lead counsel during the three trials. It betrays his height, dignity, and rather menacing presence that he used to his advantage when facing the comedian’s prosecutors, who were both a head shorter if not more.
Spite Work: The Trials of Virginia Rappe and Fatty Arbuckle 