Joan Myers, as she prepared to embark on writing her own revisionist history of the Arbuckle trials, saw that the primary sources, as of 2013, would be newspaper accounts.* At the time, searchable databases provided by the Library of Congress, Newspapers.com, the California Digital Newspaper Collection, and so on were game-changers for researchers. Nevertheless, Ms. Myers warned against relying on the reportage of the early 1920s, meaning, of course, that such accounts as they related to such a controversial event as the death of the actress Virginia Rappe were often unreliable, impossible to corroborate, and biased.

Myers knew then that to write anything further, anything revisionary, required the Arbuckle trial transcripts. These were lost or destroyed by the San Francisco County. This is certain. But one author claimed to have used these documents and his claim is suspect.

In 1976, David Yallop’s The Day the Laughter Stopped: The True Story of Fatty Arbuckle was published. He insisted that he had access to the transcripts for all three trials through the official court reporter, William A. Foster, whose name appears in the acknowledgments. Yallop, however, writes as an apologist for Roscoe Arbuckle and sees the District Attorney of San Francisco and his assistants as bent on destroying one of the world‘s most beloved silent film comedian.

Based on our research, which until recently relied on voluminous newspaper accounts, Yallop undermined his agenda for the sake of being entertaining. A case in point is his recreation of the Labor Day party in the St. Francis Hotel and an imaginary conversation between Virginia Rappe and Arbuckle in which she begs him to pay for an abortion. This is really Kenneth Anger–Coke bottle stuff. And since Yallop doesn’t couch this in any trial testimony, one would have to suspect that he also imagined what little of the examinations he does quote at any length.

Yallop also claimed that Rappe had been diagnosed with gonorrhea before her death. That factoid is something that should be in the transcripts, in the medical expert testimony. Newspaper reporters and editors were writing for the delicate sensibilities of American readers in 1921. This passage from Yallop would never happen.

At 10:30 P.M. that Friday evening [i.e., September 9, 1921], Roscoe Arbuckle sat quietly studying the script for his next picture. The doorbell rang and his butler opened the door. Two dozen reporters charged past the butler, knocking him over. They poured all over the house, taking photographs, and looking for Roscoe. Surrounding him, they began to fire questions based on the statements that had already been made in San Francisco by Maude [Delmont] and Alice [Blake].

“Who else was at this orgy you gave?”

“Did you rape her or was she agreeable?”

“How much did you pay the San Francisco police to keep it hushed up.”

“Is it true that you screwed five women during the afternoon?” (132)

This is the bricolage of a “good read” for the late twentieth century. It’s filmic. It’s noir. But there was no mob of hardboiled newspapermen. There was only one reporter and he arrived in the late afternoon. Indeed, the transcripts from the second and third trials would prove that. For some time, we had to disregard Yallop and the long shelf of Arbuckle narratives that rely on him.

The irony, of course, is that this British author, the kind American readers tend trust, really did have access to the transcripts and could have provided a provenance for them decades ago. As it appears, he only used a little of the 10,000 pages bound in brown cloth, in several volumes neatly divided into all three trials, with volumes devoted to the examination of the potential jurors. This was and is a daunting largesse of proof, of authenticity. So, what we get in The Day the Laughter Stopped are a few dialogues quoted from the first trial transcripts. A side-by-side comparison bears this out. However, the better book Yallop could have written, even for a general audience meant asking his publisher for more time, for more length. And there was his agenda, which gave us a heavily curated defensio in extremis of poor “Fatty.”

We must delay submitting our work-in-progress and revise accordingly. We must pore over the records of all three trials in the San Francisco Public Library, which quietly—but not too quietly—acquired the transcripts a year ago as a donation. We will read them without a blind eye for Arbuckle, Rappe, and others. Lastly, we can now delete a nota bene, a head note at the beginning of our trial narrative. It cautioned the reader that we had to use reportage in place of the transcripts to recreate the life of the trials. That said, we shall retain some of the editorial color of the newspapermen and -women in this form, for they are still part of the real story, which started like so in a courtroom over a century ago:

“We expect to prove on the third day of Saturday, September of the present year,” Friedman began, facing the jury, a young lady named Virginia Rappe, in the prime of womanhood, of about 24 or 25 years, left the City of Los Angeles for the City of San Francisco.” He spoke matter-of-factly for the most part, which made for poor copy. Where he dryly named Rappe’s traveling companions, “one Al Semnacher and one Maude Bambina Delmont,” Oscar Fernbach inserted some drama, “a third invisible companion, the Angel of Death.” (msp. 481)