“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)

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[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.