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)
. . . is no less a work-in-progress for Spite Work. Procuring rare contemporary photographs of the various personages in the case of Virginia Rappe and Roscoe Arbuckle requires constant vigilance, especially now as we prepare a manuscript for potential publishers. That said, we still hope to find the impossible, such as illustration art for which Rappe modeled.
We also search for rarer images of Rappe’s mother, Mabel Rapp.
We know that she posed for the Chicago photographer Matthew “Commodore” Steffens during the 1890s, especially around the time of the Columbian Exposition of 1893. He used her cabinet cards, 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, too, will be an anonymous Chicago beauty in a similar pose and found with a Steffens stamp.Rappesque? An unidentified “mother and child” looking at other cabinet cards.
More recent acquisitions are rare too, especially for minor and peripheral figures in the Arbuckle case. But news photos always have the identity and caption supplied on the reverse. The only doubt is whether to use them or another.
Minnie Neighbors, a witness for the defense. She claimed to have discovered Rappe in a way curiously not unlike Arbuckle did in his trial testimony. 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 found herself arrested for 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.”
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 his way of injecting comedy into 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. Although Lazarus had yet to install a photograph in his court room, he did so in January 1922, while the second Arbuckle trial was in session. Perhaps some of its 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.
This is a relatively new image of Arbuckle’s lead counsel Gavin McNab during the three trials. This one betrays his height, dignity, and rather menacing demeanor 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 are both receptive and grateful.
What was always difficult to reconcile about Zukor in his lifelong quest for greatness was his intractable moral authority, which he evidently identified with the genteel, and his lust for power, which was anything but genteel.
—Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
When I see myself on film, I can’t laugh from the heart. There is always too much that’s disturbing [. . .]
—Roscoe Arbuckle, “Fatty über sich selbst,” Kino-Journal, 1923
In the wake of Arbuckle’s acquittal for having caused the death of Virginia Rappe on April 12, 1922, the press began to quote Zukor and Arbuckle’s manager, Joseph Schenck, that the three Arbuckle films that had been withdrawn when the scandal erupted in September 1921 would soon be released to American theaters. In the case of the New Garrick Theater in Los Angeles, posters were ready to go up overnight.
But within days, that decision was reversed. A permanent ban was announced by Will H. Hays, the new chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. It was done at the behest of Zukor, according to Hays’ autobiography, and it was a business decision that Zukor made without much resistance from his partner Jesse Lasky and other stakeholders in the comedian. To abandon three completed films ready for release at a time when Arbuckle films were earning millions at the box office sounds counterintuitive, but as it will become clear, Zukor was no fool.
One of these films, Gasoline Gus, was to usher in Paramount Week on September 4, a week of major new releases that began at the start of the Labor Day weekend. Zukor, as president of the studio, counted on actors and actresses, especially those in California and New York City, to make themselves available for personal appearances.
Arbuckle, possibly feeling he had earned a reprieve from the publicity campaign, didn’t appear at Grauman’s Million Dollar Theater in downtown Los Angeles for the world premiere of Gasoline Gus. Instead, he hosted two private partiesin his San Francisco hotel suite. The first was on Sunday, September 4, a more sedate affair, and the next day, Labor Day, September 5, an all-day affair that promised food, alcoholic beverages, and young showgirls from San Francisco’s demimonde.
Arbuckle had arrived in San Francisco on September 3 and, given his testimony from his first and third manslaughter trials, he had a purpose in mind. The first was to test out a new car on a long-distance journey. But his famous Pierce-Arrow was hardly new. He had taken delivery of it a year earlier. He changed his story. He was in San Francisco to meet up with a catered dinner cruise aboard the SS Harvard on its voyage to Los Angeles, a cruise that was loosely tied to Paramount Week. Arbuckle claimed he purchased his tickets soon after he took his rooms at the St. Francis Hotel. But in a cross-examination, he had yet another itinerary. Arbuckle wanted to drive on from San Francisco on September 6 to attend the California State Golf Championship, which began that week in Del Monte.
Had Virginia Rappe not fallen ill at his Labor Day party, she would have been in Del Monte a day ahead of him. But Arbuckle did sail on the SS Harvard along with his automobile prominently parked on the promenade deck. He made no public appearances in Los Angeles during the rest of the week. However he did make it to Grauman’s theater by Friday night, September 9, for an emergency meeting in Sid Grauman’s office. The news had broken that morning that Rappe had died and there was a need to meet with his lawyer and the other men who attended the ill-fated party to decide how to approach the matter.
The Arbuckle case soon began to make headlines and Gasoline Gus was withdrawn as were Freight Prepaid and Leap Year, which still had working titles and release dates in the future. All three were longer, romantic comedies and, for Arbuckle, a departure from his energetic “Fatty” character. There would still be a fat man, still be some physical comedy. But now the comedy was built on gags related to a philandering man and his pursuit of young women. Naturally, he would eventually marry the girl. This had been a common theme of his comedies from 1920, after he parted ways with Buster Keaton.
Meanwhile, the September 1921 issue of Photoplay hit the stands. One of the feature articles took on a whole new meaning. Adela Rogers St. John and Arbuckle collaborated on an interview, “Love Confessions of a Fat Man,” a publicity piece to display his intelligence and sophistication which we featured in an earlier blog post). The photograph that went with this piece, which was published in depicted Arbuckle with his hair combed over, looking up, as though into a woman’s eyes, as though he might present her with an engagement ring. Another photograph, that was published in trade magazines aimed at motion picture distributors and theater owners, showed Arbuckle surrounded by young women, not as a clownish innocent but as a ladies’ man.
Roscoe Arbuckle’s rakish image in “Love Confessions of a Fat Man” (Lantern)Arbuckle in his element? (Lantern)
We looked at this new, carefully crafted, image that was folded into the real person accused of murder at an “orgy” in the St. Francis Hotel, whose indiscretions threatened an entire industry. The sudden change of Arbuckle’s public persona from light to dark is the one obvious reason for Adolph Zukor to withdraw his motion pictures and disassociate Arbuckle from Paramount entirely. Though the comedian had been handed an unprecedented apology from the jurors for what the prosecutors had done to his reputation, the gesture was wasted on Zukor.
This brings us back to Will Hays. Zukor and his peers felt it was necessary that Hays be seen as an authority to be feared. Hays was to police the content of movies as well as the personal lives of actors. That he was essentially an employee of Adolph Zukor didn’t mean that he was subservient. Zukor delegated responsibility and Hays provided the proper image and insight to not only manage the morality of Hollywood but promote its image among the various women’s clubs and religious communities across the country. He was a church deacon from Indiana and , as such, he was the antidote for any blatant (or latent) antisemitism that might be felt toward the men who ran the studios.
The timing of Arbuckle’s trials couldn’t have been worse. Hollywood scandals in one form or another had been mounting and concerns were growing among politicians and investors that it was an industry getting out of hand. The need for a powerful spokesperson had become obvious. So when Hays was hired, he needed to set an example and Arbuckle served that purpose. Hays knew that a large contingent of American pastors and clubwomen weren’t happy with the acquittal. They had to be appeased—but it wasn’t to honor the memory of Virginia Rappe. Though she was the victim, she was also seen as a symbol of Hollywood’s immorality. The prosecutors didn’t succeed in their effort to present her as a sympathetic and innocent victim. As one doctor said, she had the sexual organs of a “married woman”—a euphemism meaning she wasn’t a virgin.
In Arbuckle’s eyes, Rappe was the antithesis to the roles played by his recent co-stars, like Lila Lee and Mary Thurman. Rappe, like the other women at the Labor Day party, was attainable, consumable, and off-screen, where making eyes, honeymoons, flirting, and a little spooning wasn’t consummation, but rather coitus. Rappe may not have realized that her status changed the moment she walked into the Arbuckle suite. She was undoubtedly there to get back on-screen. But off-, she was a creature of other possibilities not limited to talking and dancing with her host, possibilities the other young women at the party were expected to service. Rappe also had to know she had as good a chance as any of being Arbuckle’s girlfriend, with all its rewards, even being the next Mrs. Arbuckle, since his publicity as this eligible bachelor might need to be grounded in fact one day.
While his career may have required that he stick with the body-shaming moniker “Fatty,” Arbuckle had contemplated losing weight. He was also no longer directing his own films. His past specialty, the frenetic succession of dazzling, often acrobatic, sight gags, appealed to all ages. But audiences were becoming more sophisticated and wanted to see longer films, five to six reels, and the sweet, naïve, fat boy character was aging well enough, the boy had to grow up and Arbuckle knew it. Scripts and direction were being handed specialists, like the seasoned director James Cruze, whose work on the latest Arbuckle vehicles was intended to keep the comedian a close second to Charlie Chaplin, whose latest film, The Kid (1921), was the bar to meet, and ahead of Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and other rivals.
Then there was the growing perception that Arbuckle’s work in 1921 suffered from uneven quality. This had to trouble Paramount’s executives, all the way up to Adolph Zukor in his Manhattan skyscraper. In speculating what Arbuckle and Rappe might have talked about if they talked shop during the early afternoon of September 5, she had to be aware of the comedian’s immediate situation. She had a good source of information: her manager, Al Semnacher, who drove her to San Francisco. He was a veteran press agent and knew Arbuckle was getting panned on a regular basis. The Dollar a Year Man (1921) was called a “dismal effort,” “hokum,” “weak humor,” and so on in Motion Picture News for weeks in the spring. Theater owners said it fell short of fans’ expectations. Ticket sales were off. The Traveling Salesman (1921), which didn’t have the slapstick and chase scenes, made up for this lapse. But Arbuckle, in Crazy to Marry (1921), according to Wid’sDaily in early August, opined that he “seemed to be getting away from the sort of stories necessary to make his five-reel comedy offerings go over the way they should.” There wasn’t “sufficient genuine comedy” to make the laughs consistent or frequent enough. Such an overview cast a pall on everything. It didn’t bode well for the future, when his contract came up for review.
Arbuckle’s next film, had the Labor Day party not ended the way it did, was to have been Thirty Days, after a popular 1915 Broadway play. This was Jesse Lasky’s project, to be directed by Cruze. Arbuckle would have played a character in keeping with the new image, this composite of on- and off-screen—a wealthy, young society lion. But, in Thirty Days, his philandering becomes the central plot driver. The thirty days was a probation period requested by his fiancé, to be played by Wanda Hawley, in which Arbuckle’s character would work alongside her in a settlement house. The role might have opened opportunities for dramatic roles. Unfortunately, his ongoing trials forced Lasky to cast Wallace Reid, a true dramatic lead with an athletic build. Reid managed to play the comedic role but without Arbuckle’s deft touch. Thirty Days (1922) would be his last film, but not because it was panned. Reid had a morphine addiction that resulted in his death in January 1923—yet another problem for Paramount to contend with.
That same month, songwriter and theater owner Arthur Hammerstein offered a million dollars for the last three completed Arbuckle films—Gasoline Gus, Freight Prepaid, and Leap Year—but Zukor refused. Gasoline Gus had proved itself during its aborted run in late August/early September 1921 and for a brief run in April 1922. In the January 1922 issue of Paramount Pep, a special west coast representative M. H. Lewis reported screening Freight Prepaid. He called it Arbuckle’s “best picture since Brewster’s Millions.” But he cautioned that this would be the case “under ordinary circumstances.” He noted it would be a “knockout” in event of an acquittal. A film about Arbuckle and Lila Lee as newlyweds on a boxcar honeymoon was, to the Paramount stringer, a “great comedy” and “absolutely clean [. . .] Mr. Lasky deserves great credit for uniform high-quality present and future releases.”
Despite the glowing endorsement from inside Paramount, Freight Prepaid (1922) was only released in 1923 in France, Germany, and other European countries. The titles, unlike the intended American releases, almost always included the inescapable “Fatty.” A handful of other Arbuckle vehicles, both released or unreleased, were also exported. So, if Americans traveling in Europe during the Roaring Twenties weren’t discomfited by, say, the German, they could have seen Gasoline Gus as Der Benzinkönig. But comedy aside, part of the experience of seeing these films was what Hays and Zukor didn’t want: to feed a kind of morbid fascination in a man’s downfall. Hays was there for the moral argument and Zukor the law of diminishing returns, for a large proportion of Arbuckle’s audience would walk away once they had enough of his train wreck.
To the Weimar film journalist Egon Jacobsohn, writing in his aptly titled magazine Filmhölle (Film Hell) after the second trial’s hung jury of ten to two for conviction in February 1922, the lust murder dynamic of Arbuckle’s case was a given. Rappe was perceived as the victim of a rape (“Notzucht”), a sex killer (“Lustmörder”) by the lack of proof itself that by the same token made him an innocent bystander, a victim of circumstances.
“Fatty is already finished,” Jacobsohn observed from Berlin. “American motion picture audiences are shouting we don’t want to have to watch a murderer! Every comedy in which Fatty appears lies unexploited, like garbage. Even if he is acquitted, if his innocence is proven: Fatty, the beloved movie star, is dead, remains dead!” Zukor didn’t need this prophetic pronouncement from abroad. He could be on the same page of Filmhölle—which he could read in the original—the moment Arbuckle turned himself into police. Other stakeholders held out hope and a lot of money was spent to defend the comedian.
French and German posters for the export version of Fast Freight (1922), which didn’t need a train wreck scene but it did need a scarlet lady.
Nothing would shake Zukor from sitting on Arbuckle’s films. Even the classic Keystone shorts with Mabel Normand, which still got laughs in 10-cent movie houses, were pulled from distribution after a few trial runs. In December 1922, Hays lifted the ban to at least allow Arbuckle the opportunity to work behind the camera rather than in front of it. But the films remained in their cans.
So, was this a marketing decision on Zukor’s part? Milton U’Ren grandstanded repeatedly during jury selection that Arbuckle was washed up in November 1921. Since assistant district attorneys aren’t film critics but rather the “bad cops” of their high-toned district attorneys—we had to consider whether U’Ren had evidence of his claim, that Arbuckle’s popularity was declining. Was he just predisposing the jury to view Arbuckle as a decadent entitled has-been? U’Ren’s animus toward Arbuckle probably began the night Arbuckle turned himself into police. Arbuckle was evasive in answering his questions and finally assented to his lawyer’s request that he say nothing more. U’Ren visibly scoffed during Arbuckle’s courtroom testimony.
Adolph Zukor trusted his instincts for making financial decisions but he also had accountants who could reassure him he was doing the right thing. Arbuckle’s salary was in the stratosphere and though he had earned his employers exponentially more he had the potential for trouble. He had a drinking problem and was a womanizer. He was also rumored to have a drug addiction.
Zukor, going by his balance sheets, knew that if the law in San Francisco didn’t catch up with Arbuckle’s indiscretions, the law of diminishing returns could. As gifted as Arbuckle was, would a character actor with limited range survive as a leading man in feature films? Would he be able to keep up with audience tastes? Zukor wasn’t ignorant of the risks Arbuckle posed and he wasn’t sentimental about the salad days of the past.
Although Arbuckle wasn’t directly involved in the 1917 Mishawum Manor scandal. It was, to use a contemporary phrase, a “girl-and-wine” afterparty that followed a formal dinner given in a Boston hotel in honor of Arbuckle. He had just joined Paramount. Zukor and his top brass spent the night in a brothel and the underage girls who entertained the men talked. This led to hush money, a corrupt prosecutor, a trial, and years later, just weeks before the Labor Day party, it finally surfaced in the press. Zukor, a man who had been meticulous about his public reputation for propriety, was embarrassed by the attention he was getting. The Mishawum scandal sent a message of caution to everyone at Paramount. Everyone save Arbuckle. So when he flaunted his entitlement as one of Paramount’s moneymakers by hosting an afternoon party with booze and showgirls, just weeks after Zukor’s public shaming, he crossed a line.
Virginia Rappe just wanted her hospital bills paid. There was pathos in that. Would a little kindness and what was probably a $75 hospital bill have saved Arbuckle’s career? By the time of the trials, all the world had discovered that Arbuckle still had a wife, Minta Durfee. Durfee would stand by him throughout the trials and until the Hays ban at which point she promptly returned to New York City. Durfee didn’t leave him because they had another falling out or because he could no longer be the highly-paid star he had been. She was under no delusions about the state of their relationship, though she continued to defend Arbuckle for attention in her dotage. As for Arbuckle, upon Durfee’s departure, he picked up where he left off with Doris Deane, the young actress he had met aboard the Harvard twenty-four hours after he had been seen tête-à-tête with Rappe.
Just prior to the Labor Day party, Zukor and Paramount had agreed to a multimillion dollar multiyear contract with Arbuckle and cancelling it after Arbuckle had been acquitted would pose legal problems. Yet Zukor, who had felt squeezed by Arbuckle’s lawyers during the contract negotiations, had had enough. He needed to cut his losses and protect the Paramount brand. Hays was well aware of this contract and 10,000 others with companies and individuals who had a stake in making good on the banned motion pictures. He mentioned this sacrifice when he made the ban public one week after Arbuckle was acquitted.
Will Hays’ press release of April 19, 1922 (Margaret Herrick Library)
Paramount, the biggest studio at the time, had scores of actors and actresses under contract and all posed an existential threat to his company. What better way to get their attention than to erase one of them off the books with a mysterious, indefinable, legally defensible blackballing—where the economic rationale could be concealed behind the moralistic kabuki of Will Hays. And was there a moral or sentimental one on the part of Zukor that made it difficult for him to square Arbuckle? Perhaps. Zukor had a daughter. She was the mogul’s favorite.
P.S. Zukor’s problem with Arbuckle does have its book. But the problem isn’t quite the one imagined in Andy Edmond’s 1991 tell-all, Frame Up! That book is unsourced and what is quoted in her text has a lot of fairy dust and special sauce that makes it yet another “good read,” which it is. There is a lot about Zukor’s motivations, a lot of his wires and letters, but without sources—sources that we have to think are factoids at best—Edmonds is a dead end for us, a bad influence like many good reads on the Arbuckle shelf.
The following is a working draft of the epilogue to our work-in-progress, a medley of fates that came together and parted ways with the end of the Arbuckle trials in 1922.
Fatty suffered enough while he was alive. I guess that was what he had in mind.
Lew Cody to Hubbard Keavy, 1933
What has become of Fatty Arbuckle?
King Alphonse XIII of Spain to Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, 1924
Hundreds of people were directly affected by Virginia Rappe’s abbreviated time on earth over a century ago and by the Arbuckle trials.[*] Several of the fates are poignant enough to make one reconsider what happened before and after Labor Day 1921. Others are remain little more than postscripts due to the limited amount of investigation into the personal lives of Rappe, Arbuckle, and their friends, and the real Labor Day party itself, rather than the fictions that have been handed down.
Let’s start with Dr. Charles Barnes, whom Minta Durfee commended before she left Omaha en route to San Francisco to be by her estranged husband’s side. In August 1925, Dr. Barnes was arrested in the company of Andrew Durant, an actor and female impersonator. Police believed that he was “the head of an immense dope ring” that supplied morphine to scores of addicts. His bond was set at $10,000—the maximum—and ultimately faced thirty-one counts of violating the Narcotics Act, for which he could receive five years for each, 155 years in prison.
Incredibly, while under indictment for the narcotics violations in federal court, Barnes was arrested again in January 1927 and charged with first degree murder for the death of a Sunday school teacher with the unfortunate name of Wealthy Timpe Nelson. According to newspaper accounts, she was married on her deathbed as she bled out from a botched abortion for which her fiancé paid Dr. Barnes $125. But Dr. Barnes would serve no time for any of his crimes. A diabetic, he died, at the age of 46, on May 20, 1927, after a short illness attributed to his preexisting condition.
Two more defense witnesses who figured in the third trial also found themselves in trouble. Virginia Warren returned to Chicago and continued to work as a midwife and nurse, leading what appeared to be an unremarkable life until she was arrested and convicted in 1941 for assisting in an abortion. Mrs. Warren, 74 at the time, was given probation due to her age.
A year later, in 1942, Helen Whitehurst, served a five-month jail sentence for embezzling money intended for her two nephews as well as creditors from the estate of the late Paul Hershman, the Armour chemist and her boarder, for which she was the administratrix.
Mrs. Whitehurst also figured as a rebuttal defense witness in the 1931 murder trial of gangster Leo V. “Buster” Brothers for the assassination of Jake Lingle, a Chicago Tribune crime reporter believed to be on the payroll of the Chicago Outfit headed by Al Capone. Despite the apparent risk of crossing Capone, Whitehurst testified that she had seen another man, not the accused, escape from the crime scene. But under cross-examination, her credibility unraveled when it was revealed she had once approached Patrick Roche, the police detective who led the investigation into Lingle’s murder, and demanded that he investigate the death by fire of her “cousin,” whom she believed had been murdered for his estate of $300,000. Roche didn’t believe her story and refused her request.
Of the prosecution witnesses, only Grace Halston is known to have had later trouble with the law. She was accused of bigamy in August 1922. Authorities had accepted her word that her first husband was dead and she had a letter, sent from Norway by her former mother-in-law, stating as much. Although the charges were dropped, Lieutenant Halston was very much alive so Grace had to get a real divorce in order to remarry her second husband a second time.
Dr. Barnes’ antagonist at the Arbuckle trial, Catherine Fox, returned to Chicago. She didn’t win her late husband’s stake for a cemetery tract in Queens. But she apparently settled for a handsome sum and lived until 1964, when she died at the age of eighty-six.
There’s no record of Mrs. Fox ever speaking of the trial in public again. Nor did Rappe’s other “musketeers.”
In the years after the third trial, Winifred Burkholder lived in Pasadena, California. Although that city’s directory listed her as a housekeeper, she was once again referred to as a resident of New York and a designer of gowns in the social page of the San Anselmo Herald on the occasion of a “bridge tea” in 1926, when she was feted as a guest of Jeanette Rubel and Helen Wintermute, who managed a popular resort at Stinson Beach.
In the following year, Burkholder’s son George was killed while wiring a fuse box in the Southern California Edison plant in Long Beach, this just two weeks after his marriage. Winifred herself died in 1955.
After the trial, Kate Hardebeck moved with her husband Joseph to 5519½ Virginia Avenue in Hollywood. In May 1923, after an evening of entertaining guests, “Uncle Joe” locked himself in the bathroom and shot himself in the head and in the abdomen with a .32 caliber automatic pistol. Although he left no note, Hollywood police believed he had staged the party as his farewell and attributed his suicide to financial difficulties and failing health.
Following her husband’s death, Aunt Kate lived in Los Angeles for the next two decades, making her living as a seamstress. She died in 1944—and if she had kept anything that belonged to Virginia Rappe—fashion drawings, letters, clothes, photographs, etc.—they were lost.
On March 9, 1923, Al Semnacher suffered a fatal heart attack. Although he was said to have managed several movie stars, the only name that reporters could connect him with was Virginia Rappe. A small-town newspaper in Pennsylvania, however, headlined news of his death as “Movie Industry Loses a Great Man.”
His friend and the other traveling companion to Selma and San Francisco, Maude Delmont, remained in Chicago until Saturday, March 25, 1922, when she boarded a train to Cleveland, in order “to visit friends and to get a rest.”
Delmont had been in a Chicago hospital for a week, during the course of the third Arbuckle trial. There she met with Frank Peska, the Illinois Assistant State Attorney, who represented District Attorney of San Francisco Matthew Brady.
Before boarding her train, she spoke to a reporter for the Chicago Tribune:
Every one of the depositions trying to blacken Virginia Rappe’s character was false. A great opportunity was lost in making a wonderful example of Arbuckle’s case. It’s not the first time he had done a thing like this, either. It makes me boil to see these attempts to defame Virginia’s character and none whatever of Arbuckle’s past brought up.
With that, Delmont was never heard from again. She may have reverted to her maiden name and, according to the census of 1950, a Maude B. Scott—born in New Mexico, sixty-seven years old, and divorced—lived in Riverside, a suburb of Los Angeles.
The lawyer who intimated in court that Al Semnacher and Maude Delmont were extortionists, Frank Dominguez, continued to practice law in Los Angeles. After the death of his wife, however, in 1924, his health precipitously declined and he died a year later. If Roscoe Arbuckle really told him the truth about what happened at the party—the planned pleasure drive with Mrs. Taube, finding Virginia Rappe on the bathroom floor of room 1219, and so on—Dominguez never shared his opinion. Nor did he publicly admit that counseling Arbuckle to remain silent at that first meeting with Assistant District Attorney Milton U’Ren was a mistake.
As to the lawyer who succeeded him, Gavin McNab went on to represent another motion picture comedian, Charlie Chaplin, in his contentious divorce from actress Lita Grey, his leading lady in The Kid (1921). A few months after the divorce was final, McNab died in his office in December 1927.
Nat Schmulowitz, having been promoted to senior partner by the time of McNab’s death, took over the firm and had a long and distinguished career. His death in 1966 left Judge Leo Friedman as the last surviving principal in the Arbuckle case. Others, such as Isadore Golden, Milton U’Ren, Milton Cohen, and Charles Brennan had passed away in prior decades.
The trials made the news again in 1927, when the San Francisco Bar Association conducted an investigation into the money that Mrs. Emma Duffy was paid for the room and board of Zey Prevost and Alice Blake for seventy-five days. She insisted she only received $200 of the $250 that District Attorney Matthew Brady had promised. Brady had billed the city $844 and his adversaries saw possible embezzlement but political blood. Disbarment would have ended his career. But Brady produced evidence that Mrs. Duffy had indeed been paid $250 and that the difference covered meals downtown and movie and theater tickets. Known affectionately by the people of San Francisco as “Uncle Matt,” Brady remained in office for two more decades until he was defeated in his 1943 reelection bid by Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown in his second attempt to unseat the long-serving district attorney. Brady died in 1954 at the age of seventy-six.
These men took any secrets of the Arbuckle case to their grave—including Albert Sabath, who certainly had taken no pleasure in coaxing his friend Harry Barker to testify “against” Virginia Rappe. As to Barker, he relocated to Los Angeles and lived a quiet life and died sometime in the early 1970s.
Although Mae Taube (nee Saunders) was sometimes referred to as an actress from New York, there is no evidence of that. By 1923, she had left Gus Taube and relocated to Los Angeles where she rose to become a prominent socialite in the film colony and a “friend” to many actors. Taube was what Virginia Rappe strived to become and may have been a rival for Arbuckle’s attention.
In 1927, Taube undertook a reinvention, at the time going by her maiden name Saunders, she married Billy Sunday Jr. in Tijuana. In an era when bigamy seemed to be somewhat commonplace, the younger Sunday was no exception and he had to back up and divorce his first wife, actress Millicent Wood-Sunday, before going back to the altar a second time with Mae in April 1928 in Yuma, Arizona. Billy Jr. was wealthy, having made a fortune in Southern California real estate. He was also an alcoholic and a womanizer, and an embarrassment to his evangelist father. The legitimized couple, however, only lasted a year.
As Mae Sunday, she remained a close companion of Bebe Daniels and Gloria Swanson—and “famous” for her pink picture hat and being “Hollywood’s favorite guest” as well as hostess. Her name appeared in movie gossip magazines and columns during the 1930s and ’40. Following her divorce from Billy Sunday Jr., she was able to afford ta spacious Spanish Mission mansion at 509 N. Hillcrest Road in Beverley Hills for over a decade. There she lived with her boyfriends, including the Hollywood lawyer Wallace Davis and the restaurateur and oil millionaire David A. Harris.
As noted earlier in this book, Mae Sunday was considered a source of Hollywood gossip and a gatekeeper to its secrets. Her value as an advisor to Arbuckle as the crisis in room 1219 unfolded was incalculable. But Mrs. Sunday is rarely mentioned in Hollywood memoirs. No investigative reporter, author, or film historian is known to have interviewed her about the party or her friendship with Arbuckle despite her prominence in Hollywood society during both the Silent Era and the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Sometime after 1947 Mae Sunday downsized to an apartment in the Piazza del Sol at 8439 W. Sunset Boulevard, married Harris, and retreated into private life that lasted nearly four decades. She passed away in Palm Springs in 1984 at the age of eighty-eight.
Another Labor Day guest, Zey Prevost, also married and retreated into private life though in quite different circumstances. At first, she attempted to capitalize on being the irascible star witness for the state. Two weeks after Arbuckle’s acquittal, Variety reported that she had made an application with Harry Weber, a New York booking agent, for a vaudeville tour with the wife of Wally Schang, the catcher for the New York Yankees. The announcement of the pairing was more likely a trial balloon than a reality however. Marie Schang wasn’t a showgirl and Prevost’s waning celebrity status wasn’t much of a draw. Around 1930, she married an oil field “roughneck” and became Mrs. Dale Manning, a housewife in Long Beach.
Unlike Prevost, Alice Blake was able to resume her career as a café entertainer and continued at that until January 1940, when she was killed in a car accident. She was forty-four at the time and a passenger in a car driven by her companion, the stage and radio singer Henry Starr, who worked with her at the El Cerrito nightclub. Starr was speeding and lost control of the car on Eastshore Highway at Ashby Avenue in Berkeley and hit a light pole. Described as a “Negro entertainer,” Starr was initially charged with negligent homicide, though the charge was likely dropped.
Blake’s companion at the Labor Day party, Lowell Sherman, lived a charmed life compared the other revelers at the party. His motion picture career was only disrupted briefly and he continued to be cast as the rake throughout the Silent Era and into the early years of sound.
During the last two years of his life, Sherman directed six films, including Becky Sharp (1934), an early technicolor film. He died of pneumonia in December 1934.
As for Arbuckle’s other companion for the Labor Day holiday, Fred Fishback, the remainder of his career was bittersweet. Working under the name “Fred Hibbard,” Fishback directed a number of comedy shorts for Educational Films, including several featuring Lloyd Hamilton, Virginia Rappe’s one-time leading man. In late 1923, at the height of this “second life,” Fishback, who neither drank nor smoked, was diagnosed with oral cancer. Although he underwent immediate surgery, the cancer returned and his condition worsened during the spring of 1924. Seeking a miracle, He read a profile in the Los Angeles Record about a woman, Mae Sheridan, who had cured the fight promoter Al Lippe with a “poultice” for which she charged nothing. Without delay, Fishback took a train to New York City in May 1924 and met Lippe, who informed Fishback that the healer lived in Los Angeles.
Too weak and sick to return home, Fishback paid to have Mrs. Sheridan brought to New York. There she treated him with a drug that had allegedly been used by her family for over 200 years. While Al Lippe had recovered and continued to manage boxers into the 1930s, Fishback’s condition worsened. Unable to talk or direct by October, he died at home in early January 1925.
As for Fishback’s friend, Ira Fortlouis, the Zelig-like outsider who assumed some of the blame for getting Virginia Rappe invited to the Labor Day party, he continued to sell clothes up and down the Pacific coast, while living in hotel rooms and boarding houses. He married for a second time two months after the last Arbuckle trial but eventually that marriage also failed.
Fortlouis was jailed by the City of San Bernardino in 1939 for an old speeding violation, an occupational hazard for a travelling salesman. In late May 1941, he was again on the road and had to check into Sacred Heart Hospital in Medford, Oregon for a medical emergency. There he was diagnosed with advanced cardiorenal disease and died on June 8, 1941, at the age of fifty-four while still in the employ of the Phil Walters Coat Company. His brother-in-law signed his death certificate.
Henry Lehrman, who played no real part in the Arbuckle trials beyond his sound and fury, must have regretted losing Virginia Rappe in the two years that followed his marriage to Jocelyn Leigh. As the former Ziegfeld Follies dancer dreamed of becoming a movie star began to fade in 1922 and ‘23, she became a liability while Lehrman himself continued to have trouble with creditors, cash flow, and finding opportunities to direct. To obtain her generous alimony and a $2,000 Chrysler from him, she went to great lengths to embarrass Lehrman in public and private, threatening a scandal such that he would do anything to be rid of her. They were divorced in December 1924.
For the next two decades, Lehrman saw his career dwindle to nothing as he failed to impress such studios as Warner Brothers and Fox. He was one of the few directors who couldn’t make the transition to sound. Perhaps feeling sorry for the veteran comedy director Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox kept Lehrman on, albeit barely tolerated, letting him evaluate story treatments and write memos that were often ignored. By 1941, Lehrman declared bankruptcy for the last time and, in 1945, was a victim of a wave of studio layoffs following the end of the Second World War.
In comparison, Roscoe Arbuckle had it better. He was initially allowed to return to movie-making by Will H. Hays in December 1922. Hays saw it as a kind of an early Christmas present. But soon after the protests began again. Despite editorials extolling the virtues of the jury system—that Arbuckle had been acquitted by his peers—such voices were drowned out. American clubwomen, clergy, and organizations such as the Women’s Club of Hollywood, the National Committee for Better Films and the National Federation of Women’s Clubs—even lobbied to keep the ban on Arbuckle’s movies in place and that he never again appear as an actor. This extreme retribution wasn’t out of character for the heavy-handed moralism of the era. In 1921 the Black Sox scandal had resulted in lifetime bans for eight baseball players and in 1920 the national ban on alcohol sales and consumption became law.
With a sharper eye on the business end than Hays, Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky shelved the three unreleased Arbuckle feature-length films as well as his previous work. This came after Zukor refused a generous offer from the songwriter and impresario Arthur Hammerstein to buy all three for $1,000,000 and present them in his theaters, even in cities that were the most antagonistic to the comedian’s comeback.
Because Arbuckle had been blacklisted as a film comedian in the United States—other talented, rotund actors filled those roles, such as Kewpie Morgan and Oliver “Babe” Hardy. Famous Players-Lasky promoted Walter Hiers as its logical successor to Arbuckle. But Hiers demurred. As he pointed out, he had come up the ranks in polite comedy and children would be better off enjoying “legitimate farce” over “slapstick and hokum.”
Meanwhile, as the Arbuckle ban became an issue again in the winter–spring of 1923, The Isle of Love, the chaotic recut of Over the Rhine, starring Rudolph Valentino and now-uncredited Rappe was released in theaters. If one recognized her, if one was reminded of what happened to her on Labor Day 1921, it would remain a personal impression, private. But the way to deal with the Arbuckle problem, too, was for his name to disappear.
In April 1923, Hays took back Arbuckle’s permission to appear in movies and was praised by the activists who wanted him punished. The film ban would remain in place, but Arbuckle was permitted to work behind the scenes. Although it wasn’t a stipulation, to prevent further public outcry he would remainuncredited.
In January 1925 Minta Durfee agreed to divorce Arbuckle on the grounds of desertion—dating back to September 1917 when he had, in her filing, “given her the air.” At the time Durfee saved face by saying there was no “other woman” though Arbuckle would marry Doris Deane in May that same year. She also said that the Rappe “tragedy” had nothing to do with the divorce—only that Arbuckle had failed to provide her with support.
Durfee was nearly broke and interest in a possible return to the stage didn’t pan out. Pilgrim Pictures still had five “Mrs. Roscoe Arbuckle” shorts and few distributors—and no one was going to back her in any more motion pictures. Save for a summer variety show in Atlantic City, Durfee had no other takers.
Meanwhile, Arbuckle managed to cope with his money troubles with support from his longtime producer, Joseph Schenck, who had purchased the West Adams mansion, rented it to Lou Anger, who, in turn, made Arbuckle his permanent guest. Side work had been assigned to Arbuckle whenever he could do it—he was drinking again. And he had made a temporary foray into stage comedy, beginning in Chicago. But the “three-a-day” vaudeville circuit was a lot of work for less money. And people noticed that he wasn’t as funny as he used to be and the women’s clubs protested his appearances, wanting to ban him from the stage as well.
While Arbuckle enjoyed the company of a pretty young woman, Doris Deane, like many in Hollywood the relationship had a quid pro quo. For Deane—and perhaps for Rappe earlier—Arbuckle provided access to the center of power in Hollywood, access to men like Buster Keaton, who had stuck with Arbuckle through his troubles and had been best man at their wedding. Keaton gave Deane a small role in his movie Seven Chances. She also managed to get a few supporting roles in the shorts that Arbuckle directed for his nephew Al St. John though that was the extent of her movie career.
In 1924, Arbuckle directed St. John in a comedy and had a brief stint directing Keaton in Sherlock Jr. though a clash of egos ended that particular collaboration and the film is credited to Keaton alone. An ironic twist is that this film was rumored to have been inspired by Edward O. Heinrich, the forensic criminologist hired by Matthew Brady to examine Room 1219 for evidence of an assault. Heinrich himself investigated as many as 2,000 cases throughout his career and died in September 1953 not only with his career intact but deserving of the title many gave him: “America’s Sherlock Holmes.”
The oft-repeated anecdote that Keaton suggested Arbuckle direct films under the name Will B. Good was almost certainly a joke among friends. Instead Arbuckle began using the more prosaic “William Goodrich,” based on his father’s first and middle names.
Arbuckle made his directorial leap from two-reelers to a feature film in 1926 when he directed Marion Davies as a Dutch girl in The Red Mill. Unfortunately, this light, romantic comedy, in which Miss Davies could display one of her talents, figure skating, failed at the box office.
Though William Randolph Hearst, as the producer, and Miss Davies both blamed Arbuckle for the film’s flopping, he continued to direct, including a comedy for Paramount, Special Delivery (1927), starring newcomer Eddie Cantor, and fans might have spotted him in occasional uncredited cameos. He also made a triumphant return to Paris in the spring of 1928, and he moved back into the Hollywood Hotel, where he had first noticed Virginia Rappe.
Arbuckle, Lou Anger, and other investors opened the Plantation Café in Culver City in 1928 and it became a popular roadhouse and supper club that, according to its original prospectus, “embodied all of the features of the old Southern regime.” There Arbuckle was often the master of ceremonies, dressed to the nines or in overalls and derby—even in blackface—mingling with the crowd.
The Plantation promised plenty of “whoopie” The clientele naturally included Arbuckle’s milieu. They came all the way out to the end of Washington Boulevard to drink and be entertained by big bands, banjo players, toe dancers, the Plantation’s All-Star Revue, and the likes of Al Jolson, who performed songs from The Jazz Singer, which had been made the year. In 1929, however, Culver City, which was a growing suburb of bungalows and young families, had had enough of the film colony and the trouble it attracted, the gangsters, the fights, and the illicit serving of alcoholic beverages. Arbuckle and Anger sold their interest in September and purchased the old Eads Castle Inn on La Brea Avenue and renamed it “Roscoe’s,” with a decidedly more family-friendly atmosphere.
Despite his troubles, Arbuckle retained his stature among his friends in the movie colony and appeared to be happy and jovial in group photographs—and no one was fooled by the name William Goodrich. He spread bonhomie among almost everyone who mattered in his life. And there were no hard feelings about how he had triggered the creation of the Hays Office. That unpleasant business and inconvenience had blown over and the stifling Production Code was yet to come.
But there was another side to Arbuckle according to Doris Deane, who described “vicious, cruel, morose, and nagging” behavior in the divorce complaint she filed in August 1928. At a beach party, she claimed Arbuckle threw a woman to the dance floor and caressed her. As the woman called for help, Deane rushed to her defense. Thereupon, Arbuckle landed a punch on her nose.
“I wish I had knocked your brains out,” he was heard saying to Deane afterward. She said Arbuckle continued to argue and insult her and drove recklessly on the way home. Her complaint also cited numerous instances of his being intoxicated. The tone of news reports about the charges indicate that this behavior wouldn’t have been much of a surprise to readers.
Nearly four years passed before Arbuckle’s second divorce was decreed and he could marry a new girlfriend. Addie McPhail, another brunette, actress, and vocalist still married to her accompanist, songwriter Lindsay McPhail. Her divorce took time, complicated by the need to find a state that would overlook the residency requirement. Thus, Arbuckle’s third marriage began in June 1932 in Erie, Pennsylvania, while Arbuckle toured the east, performing shows in sold-out appearances that many believed foreshadowed his return to motion pictures. They were right. His ban wasn’t a legal decree but a business decision enforced by the Hollywood cartel and the times had changed.
With McPhail, Arbuckle proved he had the charisma, the success, and the energy to satisfy a considerably younger woman, said to be twenty-four. McPhail also seemed to be evidence that he wasn’t the cad projected by his past with Doris Deane, Minta Durfee, or even Virginia Rappe. He was well-liked and had steadily rebuilt his reputation despite his ban from acting. By 1932 “William Goodrich” had directed over forty films. In May of that year, Columbia began negotiating with Arbuckle’s new producer Leo Morrison and manager Joseph Rivkin for a possible return to the screen. In June it was Educational Pictures and finally Warner Brothers signed him to do six two-reelers at its Vitaphone Studios in Brooklyn. The first, Hey Pop! (1932), was ready for the Christmas holiday. Three more followed in the first half of 1933.
Traveling periodically to New York City by rail, with his wife, her maid, and a line of Pullman trunks, Arbuckle spent two or three weeks at Vitagraph’s plant in Astoria filming. He made public appearances, did radio spots, and enjoyed Manhattan’s night life. His schedule was punishing and he had to work hard. Warner Brothers was taking a risk in rehabilitating Arbuckle—and he needed the money.
Physicians who listened to Arbuckle’s broad chest warned him that heart disease was a certainty. At forty-six, he was noticeably less physical. However, at a relatively trim 240 pounds, he could still get up and down off the ground, throw a punch, run after mules, and reprise many of the antics of his country bumpkin character with the too-small derby and oversized pants.
Those who saw him on the set thought he was a little nervous and tentative. But after a few takes, the old slapstick gags and “hokum” seemed to translate well enough in sound and anyone seeing these old films now might think he could have joined the ranks of W. C. Fields, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and the Three Stooges. (Shemp Howard, the original “third stooge,” was one of Arbuckle’s costars). The only thing wrong was the comedian’s voice. There was nothing special about it. In some scenes, he sounded jaded and in others he came off as a bully. The innocence was gone.
In June 1933, Addie and Roscoe Arbuckle returned to New York to film the last of the six shorts, Tomalio (1933), which pitted his character against a stereotypical Mexican general. That he hadn’t felt good for the past two weeks wasn’t apparent on screen.
Arbuckle was also in New York to ink a contract for the first “Fatty” Arbuckle feature-length talkie, a remake of Brewster’s Millions. After a hot day at work, he returned to his room at the Park Central Hotel in midtown, bathed, and dressed in formal attire. Then he and his wife went out to dinner at the Tavern on W. 48th Street to celebrate a belated first anniversary. After eating, Arbuckle and Addie went to the apartment of the Tavern’s owner, William Lahiff, where a party was given in their honor. Among the guests were lightweight champion Johnny Dundee, actor Johnnie Walker—who was directing Mr. Broadway (1933) with Ed Sullivan in his first film, and his manager Joseph Rivkin.
That evening, Arbuckle smoked cigarette after cigarette and drank freely for Prohibition was in the process of being repealed and no one cared anymore. He waxed on his new contract and was obviously enjoying the moment. He played backgammon. He boasted of his tickets for the heavyweight rematch between Jack Sharkey Primo Carnera on Friday night at Madison Square Gardens. He leaned over at one point and told Rivkin, “This is the happiest day of my life” though he was known for exaggerated pronouncements.
But he also complained of feeling tired. Toward midnight, the Arbuckles returned to Park Central. Then they undressed and, well, who knows what they did at the end of this auspicious day. But they slept in adjoining rooms.
Just after 2:00 in the morning, McPhail woke and went to the bathroom for a glass of water. Then, hearing only silence, she called out, “How are you? Are you sleeping all right?”
When he didn’t answer, she called the desk for a physician.
Much like what happened in the St. Francis Hotel, McPhail’s memory for details changed over time. In another account, she said she woke on hearing him groan in pain. In another, he had just gone into the bedroom and when she called to him a few minutes later, got no answer.
When the hotel doctor failed to revive Arbuckle, other physicians were summoned. They determined that Arbuckle had died in his sleep of a fatal heart attack—angina pectoris according to the death certificate—soon after the couple retired for the night.
The next day, his body lay in state at the Campbell Funeral Church at Broadway and 66th Street on Saturday, July 1. Thousands were said to have marched past.
That Arbuckle didn’t suffer was interpreted by some as a karmic sign of his innocence. That he was struck down in the last stretch of his redemption was also seen as a cruel irony.
Despite Lou Anger’s advice to the contrary, Arbuckle had been no less careless with his money at the end than he had been in his heyday. His will, in a Los Angeles bank, stipulated that Joseph Schenck would inherit a $100,000 upon his death. That money didn’t exist, but it was the thought that counted.
* * *
As for Virginia Rappe? The grass grew on her grave in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, while her remains were joined by those of her contemporaries as they died young and old over time. Conspicuously missing was Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. His ashes had been scattered over the Pacific Ocean. Aside from Henry Lehrman, who would be buried by her side, following his death in 1946, Rudolph Valentino, her early co-star and whom H. L. Mencken once described as “catnip to women,” would also be buried nearby after his untimely death in 1926.
Valentino died of peritonitis as well, following an operation for gastric ulcers. And like Rappe, he had died too young to plan ahead. He was buried in a crypt originally intended for another man, much as her grave was intended for someone else. Henry Lehrman, to his credit, had done the right thing. He provided one of a pair cemetery plots, that he had purchased to share with a future wife, to be used instead for the eternal rest of Virginia Rappe and there he joined her twenty years later.
The honorary pallbearers for Arbuckle’s casket included Bert Lahr, in the middle position. (Newspapers.com)
[*] pp. 000–000: Newspapers.com, California Digital Newspaper Collection, Lantern (Media History Digital Library of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research), and Ancestry.com.
The following is an interpolation from our work-in-progress that allows for a segue between the second and first Arbuckle trials.
The day after second Arbuckle trial ended in a hung jury, the San Francisco’s newspaper announced the possible engagements of the two women who were present when Virginia Rappe passed away in September.[*]
Sidi Spreckels, the widow of the late John Spreckels Jr., had been linked to Art Hickman, the musician, composer, and leader of what is now considered the first real big band: the orchestra at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. But until recently, he had been the house bandleader at the St. Francis.
“Well,” said Hickman when approached by reporters, “we are great friends and have been for a long time. Many people have asked me about this rumored engagement. I cannot say a thing.”
Three days later, her attorney, Gavin McNab’s brother John, issued a terse denial that read in part that Mrs. Spreckels “isn’t contemplating matrimony at this time” and that “her rumored engagement is only gossip.” Maude Delmont’s rumored engagement was of a longer duration and contingent on her willingness to walk on stage.
On February 1, Bambina Maude Delmont became front-page news in Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska. Newspapers in those cities profiled her and with whatever scant information she gave them, tried to make up for what little was known of her—that she grew up in Lincoln and spent two years running a beauty shop in Omaha. But when the local reporters and editors tried to search their files for anything about her, they came up empty handed. This allowed Delmont to fill a void of two decades after she arrived in Lincoln on January 31 and registered at a downtown hotel under the name “Mrs. J. C. Hopper.”
But the presence of the “Avenger” was no secret. Reporters were waiting for her when she got off her train as it arrived from Los Angeles at 1:20 on Tuesday afternoon. The young woman who had left twenty years ago on a career that was no less an adventure in fiction—the kind Willa Cather could not have experienced or written—had come home a celebrity. But just what kind eluded the press. They called her an actress, but she had only performed at Keystone Studio but had nothing to share about working with “Fatty” or the “Little Tramp.” She only mentioned that she had appeared with Minta Durfee, whom, despite everything, was “right charming” years ago—and she wasn’t “permanently reconciled” with her husband. But Delmont did want to talk about him and the role “money and influence” had played in his troubles.
“I’d might glad if Fatty could convince me personally that he is innocent,” she said. “But I was the first one to enter the room where Miss Rappe lay ill, and Fatty, I’m afraid, never could clear himself in my eyes.” As to what happened on Labor Day 1921, Arbuckle’s predicament had temporarily drawn her to his side.
When the asked if she believed Arbuckle would be acquitted, Delmont said she was certain that he would. What made her so certain? With an ironic smile, Delmont shrugged her shoulders and simply answered, “Money.”
Her impromptu press conference continued. Delmont described meeting met Rappe (“I fell in love with the girl at first sight.”) just two days before the party in Arbuckle’s suite at the St. Francis Hotel. She mentioned the 500-mile drive from Los Angeles with Semnacher and other incidents at the party.
Delmont enjoyed the attention she got—of being the person her high school teachers called “Maudie”—just as Rappe had been allowed to call her. On her first day in Lincoln, she was recognized by one admirer after another, including Robert Druesedow, a state representative, who saw her in the hotel dining room.
“I knew her when she was a girl,” he said of Delmont, whose hair was now described as totally gray. Other diners also recognized her as well as she spoke to a reporter from the Omaha Daily Bee. “Arbuckle could never convince me of his innocence,” she said. “I was the one who told the truth at the trial. Highly paid lawyers tried to sacrifice my reputation in an effort to protect their client, Arbuckle. I am trying to forget the tragic death of my friend, Virginia.”
Delmont also intimated that she would soon stop in Omaha and continue on to New York City. She also openly discussed being a convicted “bigamist.”
That, she said, was a technical charge that cost her a total of two weeks in jail. But how she left California without violating her probation was something that she didn’t have to explain. She was in Lincoln on legal business. She had come as a representative of her mother, sister, and herself “to dispose of some modest real estate holdings” that belonged to her grandmother, a Mrs. Catherine Stone. That Delmont had no such blood relative wasn’t explained either—but there was a deceased person with that name, the widow of a small-town clothier, who had passed away on January 28 in nearby Central City, Nebraska. Her obituary had appeared in the newspapers of that city, Grand Island, and elsewhere—making it easy to borrow the late Mrs. Stone to make a better story for Delmont’s real purpose in Lincoln: her deliberate rendezvous with an old boyfriend, Lawrence T. Johnston.
Lawrence T. Johnston, late 1910s (Ancestry.com)
The son of a prominent Nebraska lawyer, Johnston had served as a bailiff in Lincoln n the 1890s and early 1900s and later as a judge in Idaho. His real ambition, however, was in vaudeville. He studied ventriloquism and by 1920 had performed all over the United States and as far away as Australia. When he and Delmont were reunited, he was still an itinerant judge in Idaho as well as the “King of Ventriloquists,” who boasted a dummy that cried “real” tears.
Delmont and Johnston had been engaged several times before in their youth. “The last time,” however, he said, “she married a Cincinnati millionaire.” But after hearing about the death of Delmont’s grandmother and her coming to Lincoln, Johnston claimed that he left an engagement in Sioux City, Iowa to be reunited with his old flame—and to make her a star. He told the press that he was now vice president of a motion picture corporation and that his company intended soon to star Delmont. “We feel that she will be a great asset to us,” Johnston said. In the interim, however, he convinced Delmont to cash in on her notoriety.
The couple left Lincoln on Friday, February 3—the day the second Arbuckle trial ended in a hung jury—for Kansas City, Missouri. There Johnston was to appear at the Globe Theater and Delmont intended to rest due to ill health.
Once more she was met by newspapermen—but this time they wanted her reaction to the majority vote for conviction. “Politics,” Delmont said, “is playing a part in the handling of the case. I am very much surprised that the second jury stood ten for conviction and two for acquittal—surprised that the prosecution did that well.”
“Why, nobody ever thought it would be that strong,” she continued. “Everyone on the coast expected an acquittal when I left there. Arbuckle is being tried on the murder complaint to which I swore—and yet my testimony is not good enough to be introduced into the trial. They wanted to get me out of the way and they succeeded.”
Delmont also spoke of the “intrigue” that was woven throughout the affair, apparently in reference to Zey Prevost and Alice Blake, who had eclipsed her as a witness.
“Yes,” she said, “I received an offer or was ‘approached’ in connection with my testimony of the death of Miss Rappe.”
Delmont refused to answer any more questions about who had tried to get her to change or withhold her statement to San Francisco’s district attorney. But she had a reason to withhold such details, for she had been approached in another way, perhaps en route by a theater promoter, to give a lecture during the couple’s layover in Kansas City. Regarding this new opportunity, Delmont could only say that she wanted to discuss “the woman’s side of the affair”—and that many young girls who went to Hollywood so as to “get into the movies” were exploited.
Delmont’s lecture was announced in the Saturday morning Kansas City Times of February 4. The venue was Kansas City’s Empress Theater on McGee Street. Although no times were given, the tickets for her “$5,000 act” would be “at pre-war prices,” that is, ten, twenty—and thirty cents for balcony and front-row seats. The advertisement promised that Maud “Bambina” Delmont would appear as “Herself / The Woman Who Signed the Murder Charge Against Arbuckle / The Most Sensational Act on the American Stage.”
Presumably in character as the “Complaining Witness in the Arbuckle Trial,” Delmont was to “tell of the famous Arbuckle-Rappe murder case” and “rip wide the screen which hides Hollywood and the movie colony. Hers is a story for Every Father and Mother, every Young Man and Young Woman in Kansas City.”
But if she ever took the stage was left in doubt. The San Francisco Call reprinted the lone Kansas City advertisement ten days later and could only speculate that Delmont’s run at the Empress had been abortive, based on a letter that she had written to a friend in San Francisco.
Mrs. Delmont’s gray negligee with henna trimming and black hair streaked with gray, minus the usual henna trimming, is making the same hit in Kansas City that it did here when first she received representatives of the press and gave her version of the fatal party. But evidently the stage is not making much of a hit with her—or else she is not making much of a hit on the stage—for she expects to sign a contract in Chicago to appear before the women’s clubs of that country.
What is known is that Delmont had a falling out with Lawrence Johnston and the couple parted ways. Delmont traveled on to Chicago and Johnston returned to the vaudeville circuit, realizing, perhaps, that it was easier to make money with his dummy doing the talking than Maude Delmont, who turned out to be a source of disappointment for him once more. Months later, Johnston emphatically told a stage gossip columnist in Portland, Oregon, that when he reached Lincoln, he had “something to say in the matter” and that he and Maude “never were, are not and never will be married.”
[*] pp. 000–000: “Mrs. Spreckels to Wed Again?” San Francisco Examiner, 4 February 1922, 5; “Engagement Denied by Mrs. Spreckels,” San Francisco Examiner, 7 February 1922, 11; “Bambina Delmont Returns to Lincoln in Estate Case,” Morning World-Herald, 1 February 1922, 1; “Mrs. Maude Delmont Arrives in Lincoln,” Lincoln Journal Star, 1 February 1922, 4; “Longtime Romance Buds: Mrs. Delmont and Lawrence Johnston Engaged,” Nebraska State Journal, 3 February 1922, 1; “Arbuckle Witness Coming to Omaha,” Omaha Daily Bee, 2 February 1922, 2; United Press, “10 to 2 Jury Surpise to Maude Delmont,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 5, 1922, 8; “Politics Playing Part in Arbuckle Case, Woman Says: Bambina Delmont Hints at Deep-laid Intrigue,” Springfield Leader and Press, 5 February 1922, 1; “Arbuckle’s Accuser is Here Mrs. Delmont,” Kansas City Star, 5 February 1922, 10; E.C.B., “Stage Gossip and Film News,” Oregon Daily Journal, 18 September 1922, 8; “Mrs. Delmont Plays in 10-20-30s; Also in Return Engagement with Ex-Fiancé,” San Francisco Call, 13 February 1922, 3.
To our knowledge, the Arbuckle trials saw no courtroom artists as we have come to know their work, which often captures some compelling moment in a jury trial of public interest. During the second Arbuckle trial, however, the San Francisco Call enlisted the well-known American engraver and Western artist Fred Grayson Sayre to draw Roscoe Arbuckle and others. The Chronicle followed with several vignettes by an in-house sketch artist.
The defendant Rosce Arbuckle surrounded (clockwise) by profiles of his attorney, Gavin McNab; the prosecutor, San Francisco District Attorney Matthew Brady; his sister-in-law, Marie Durfee; and his wife, the motion picture actress Minta Durfee, San Francisco Call, January 12, 1922, p. 2 (Newspapers.com)
From left to right beginning with the top row: Marie Durfee and her sister, Minta, Arbuckle’s wife; prospective jurors (only one woman sat on the second trial’s jury); an unidentified courtroom attaché, Assistant District Attorney Milton U’Ren, and Judge Harold Louderback, San Francisco Chronicle, January 14, 1922, p. 13 (Newspapers.com).
The day before the second Arbuckle trial began with jury selection, two young women waited outside the offices of San Francisco District Attorney Matthew Brady. Alice Blake and Zey Prevost, two unemployed “showgirls”—a term that doesn’t do them justice—wanted to be paid “witness fees” for their testimony at the first Arbuckle trial. A trial that ended in a hung jury in early December 1921. Rather than meet with these women, who were expected to testify again at the second trial, Brady and his chief assistant on the Arbuckle case, Milton U’Ren, avoided them. The matter went unresolved.[1]
A week later, Blake and Prevost took the stand and both seemed to have forgotten much of their previous testimony, forcing Assistant District Attorney Leo Friedman to read portions. In their cross-examinations, Arbuckle’s lead counsel Gavin McNab questioned them in such a way that ensured the jury understood that their initial statements and testimony, following Virginia Rappe’s death on September 9, 1921, had been coerced by overzealous prosecutors and that both women had been sequestered by the District Attorney against their will.
In an editorial that followed the testimony of Blake and Prevost at the second trial, written by Edgar T. Gleeson, who covered the Arbuckle trials for the San Francisco Call, the reporter took the side of the defense and condemned Matthew Brady. Our commentary appears at the end. Brady’s response will appear in our next posting.
SHOW GIRLS EXPOSE ARBUCKLE EVIDENCE AS A FABRICATION[2]
The sensational developments in the Arbuckle case—the changed testimony of Zey Prevost—the girl’s insinuations that the district attorney’s office had dictated her testimony in the first trial of the film comedian, and District Attorney Brady’s last vainly despairing attempt to have her, one of his two principal witnesses, declared a hostile witness and subjected to cross examination—all these developments have thrown a new and astounding light on a trial that has held the public attention for more than three months. They indicated to The Call yesterday that the trial of Roscoe Arbuckle was merely another miscarriage of justice.
Today The Call is able to give to its readers detailed and convincing testimony on how the district attorney of San Francisco worked up his case against Roscoe Arbuckle. Edgar T. Gleeson has secured the facts from Miss Zey Prevost of how she and Miss Alice Blake were persuaded, threatened and almost compelled to take the stand and give perjured testimony against Roscoe Arbuckle.
FACTS ARE BARED
Here are the facts: It is in some respects another Mooney case—and the only reason Roscoe Arbuckle is not over in San Quentin at this moment, convicted of the death of Miss Rappe. is that another Oxman[3] did not happen to stroll on the scene at the proper moment. That, and that alone, saved Arbuckle.
The Call has no purpose in this exposure than to show how easy it is for men to make grave mistakes in the judgment of other men and how difficult it is for them to stand firm in the face of an inflamed and belligerent public opinion. It is not The Call’s intention to convince its readers that District Attorney Brady and his associates were prejudiced beforehand against Roscoe Arbuckle or that they are exceptionally weak or ruthless. It is the intention, however, to show that men who are very kindly and tolerant in their private lives can and do become both brutal and merciless under the pressure of public office.
BRADY SINCERE
Remember that Matthew Brady opened the case of Roscoe Arbuckle with a firmly sincere declaration that he would do his duty. The Howard street gangster cases were still in the public mind, and men remembered how punctual the district attorney had been in the prosecution of those men of little wealth and little influence.[4]
Matthew Brady announced that the power, the wealth and the popularity of Roscoe Arbuckle would not keep him from receiving as stern a trial as a “Spud” Murphy had received.[5]
So far, so good. But the district attorney did not stop there. Having pledged himself to try Arbuckle he came to believe that he had pledged himself to secure a conviction. Hence the invention of false testimony, the seclusion of witnesses and the stimulation of perjury on the part of a public official who is sworn to enforce and to protect the dignity of the law.
It is an astounding story and at the same time a very natural story—the story of how sincere and kindly men, living under pressure, can become involved in a situation that forces them to accomplish great injustices.
By EDGAR T. GLEESON
The story of how the prosecution in the Arbuckle case, driven to desperate lengths by the threatened collapse of Mrs. Bambina Maude Delmont, its capital witness, deliberately set about the business of manufacturing evidence to the end that the moving picture actor might be convicted on a charge of murder, has now been bared for the first time. Miss Zey Prevost. former moving picture girl and a guest at the Arbuckle party, finally admitted, although reluctantly, that the part of her testimony in which Miss Virginia Rappe was represented as having accused Arbuckle of hurting her, was fabricated.
Miss Prevost is one of the two witnesses whom the district attorney seized upon when his case began to teeter and after investigation had failed to yield any corroboration of Mrs. Delmont’s story.
CREATES SENSATION
The facts as revealed on the stand yesterday (January 19, 1922), and as hinted at on the preceding day by Miss Alice Blake, show that the two girls consented to testify that Miss Rappe had said “I’m dying. I’m dying; he hurt me,” only after efforts had been made by the district attorney to force them into testifying that the girl had accused Arbuckle in the stronger words, “I’m dying, I’m dying; he KILLED me.”
The extraordinary declaration of Zey Prevost that she had testified falsely in the first Arbuckle trial under fear of the district attorney’s office has, of course, created a sensation. Everywhere men ask, how can such things be? Surely a district attorney does not deliberately set out to violate justice!
A review of the immediate events following the death of Miss Rappe will help one to understand something of how such an amazing situation can come about. And this review will show the district attorney’s office, first misled by the now thoroughly discredited story of Mrs. Delmont, and then persisting in a theory of the case built up on the exploded story of Mrs. Delmont who, herself, was so impossible that she was never called as a witness in the case.[6]
When the authorities first learned of the circumstances surrounding the death of Miss Rappe on September 9, of last year, four days after the party in Arbuckle’s rooms at the Hotel St. Francis, an effort was made to secure statements from all of the participants.
One of the first persons visited was Mrs. Delmont, who was then in a state bordering on collapse at the Hotel St. Francis. The Rappe girl, her friend of a week, and companion on the trip from Los Angeles, had died suddenly and under conditions that were as terrifying as they were mysterious. Mrs. Delmont had come to one conclusion about the whole affair. She was not in Miss Rappe’s company when the girl left room 1219, nor did she see Arbuckle accompany her into that ill-fated chamber.
IN OTHER ROOM
The facts are that Mrs. Delmont had partaken of some of the liquor and was in room 1221 with another member of the party.[7] The door was locked between 1221 and 1220. Mrs. Delmont couldn’t possibly nave seen what transpired in or near the door of 1219.
Yet, in her grief and hysteria, following the tragedy she insisted on describing a struggle at the entrance to room 1219. She told of Arbuckle clutching Virginia Rappe by the arm and saying “I’ve waited five years to get you.”
Thereupon, she said, Arbuckle pulled the girl back into 1219 and locked the door behind them. Mrs. Delmont depicted a struggle between the girl and the actor. She said that in this struggle Miss Rappe cried out, again and again for help, and that she, Mrs. Delmont, rushed to the locked door, to beat upon it and cry out that Arbuckle open the door and release Virginia.
When the door, after remaining locked an hour, was finally opened, Arbuckle was alleged to have rushed out, a terrified object. He was said to be perspiring as though from a long struggle while Miss Rappe lay dying upon the bed, naked and in a state of unconsciousness. Mrs. Delmont said that Miss Rappe had fought off Arbuckle’s advances as long as her strength and senses remained and that then she was criminally assaulted.
TOLD OF SCREAMS
She said further that Arbuckle had stripped the clothes from Miss Rappe during the fight and that they were scattered about the floor in ribbons; that when she and other members of the party came upon the girl, Miss Rappe was crying out. “I’m dying, I’m dying, Roscoe killed me.”
Mrs. Delmont took charge of Miss Rappe when the girl was removed to another room that afternoon. She was lying alongside the bed, intoxicated, when Dr. Olaf Kaarboe called to attend Miss Rappe.[8] The doctor detected the odor of liquor upon Miss Rappe’s breath and concluded that there was nothing serious the matter with her.[9]
When Dr. Arthur Beardslee, house physician of the St. Francis, visited Miss Rappe later in the evening, he found her conscious and complaining of a pain in her abdomen. He made an examination and endeavored to get at a history of the case.
DENIED STATEMENT
Mrs. Delmont started to tell the doctor of the Arbuckle party and mentioned that Arbuckle hurt her. Miss Rappe, who overheard the statement, denied this to Dr. Beardslee. This evidence is known to the prosecution, but it will not be admitted as part of the present case because it comes under the heading of hearsay.[10]
To Detective George Glennon, the St. Francis Hotel detective, Miss Rappe likewise denied the accusation against Arbuckle. She said she did not know what happened to her.[11]
Both District Attorney Matthew Brady and his assistant, I. M. Golden, were in Mendocino County investigating some features of the Woodcock case when Arbuckle drove up from Los Angeles to give his story of what happened at the party.[12] Arbuckle was accompanied by his attorney, Frank Dominguez, and some of the other men who were present in his rooms on Labor Day. He went to the office of Captain of Detectives Duncan Matheson, where Milton U’Ren, representing the district attorney, joined the actor and the detective chief.
QUIZZED BY MATHESON
After some brief discussion Captain Matheson began to interrogate Arbuckle along the lines of Mrs. Delmont’s statement. Arbuckle denied some of the accusations. Third degree methods were then attempted, according to Dominguez, and he gave Arbuckle instructions not to answer some of the interrogations unless by the consent of his counsel.
This, according to both Dominguez and Arbuckle, angered the captain of detectives and Milton U’Ren. The attorney said afterward that the threat was then made to lock Arbuckle up on a charge of murder unless he gave kind of a statement the officials wanted. Dominguez told Arbuckle not to answer, and that Matheson and U’Ren carried out the threat.
CHARGED WITH MURDER
The charge on which Arbuckle was booked was murder, sworn to by the police. Later a formal charge was placed against him in Police Judge Daniel O’Brien’s court, when Mrs. Delmont appeared as the complaining witness.
Although discrepancies were found in Mrs. Delmont’s story, the district attorney’s office set about trying to verify her statements through others who were present at the party.
Brady and Golden returned to San Francisco to find the prosecution of Arbuckle for murder well under way. When Golden saw and talked with Mrs. Delmont and had a chance to study her testimony, he began to have misgivings. The same with Al Semnacher’s testimony.
PRESSURE USED
The feeling began to grow that if the prosecution was to uphold its charge it had better go about getting other props for the structure. That is when the pressure began to be exerted upon Miss Alice Blake, former entertainer at Tait’s, and Miss Prevost.
At the time the coroner’s inquest was held, an effort was made to subpoena Miss Blake and Miss Prevost, but the district attorney’s office refused to surrender the witnesses. It didn’t know at that time just how it was going to have them testify, and for that reason wasn’t prepared to have them give contradictory testimony.
Alice Blake was seen at Tait’s immediately after the death of Miss Rappe. She told what she knew of the facts to Detective Griffith Kennedy and in the presence of George Hyde and Les Gillen, two reporters on a morning newspaper.[13] Miss Blake knew nothing of a struggle or criminal assault in Arbuckle’s room. She said she thought Miss Rappe was intoxicated at the time and that there was nothing of a fatal nature in her illness. She said she didn’t hear Miss Rappe say Arbuckle killed or hurt her. She said all the girl cried was, “I’m dying. I’m dying; I know I’m going to die.”
Mrs. Delmont said Arbuckle and Miss Rappe were in room 1219 an hour. Alice Blake said, and has since been supported by other testimony, that she went from the Arbuckle rooms to Tait’s for a rehearsal at 2 o’clock on the day of the party; that she returned at 2:30 or 2:45, and that the party was still in progress, with all persons present.
IN ROOM TEN MINUTES
It was about 3 o’clock, ten or fifteen minutes later, that the Rappe girl was stricken. She did not leave room 1220 until after Miss Blake’s return. The best recollection of Fred Fishback who helped Miss Blake carry Miss Rappe to the cold bath, is that he returned to the hotel at 3 o’clock. The testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses allows Arbuckle only ten minutes alone in the room with the girl.
When the grand jury investigation was launched the district attorney sought to get new statements from Miss Blake and Miss Prevost. The latter had been dragged down to police headquarters by George Duffy of the district attorney’s office and an attempt was made to get a statement supporting Mrs. Delmont from her. It failed and the next day Miss Prevost was asked by Milton U’Ren to sign a new statement, prepared by U’Ren, in which Miss Rappe was alleged to have cried out In Miss Prevost’s hearing, “I’m dying; I’m dying; he killed me.”
Although Miss Rappe was conscious for three days of her illness she made no accusation, no dying statement against Arbuckle.
Having first charged Arbuckle with murder, without determining whether it had a case, the district attorney’s office now sought to make a dying statement out of what Mrs. Delmont reported, namely that Miss Rappe had charged Arbuckle with killing her. The rules of evidence demand that this statement must be made in the hearing of the defendant; so Mrs. Delmont conveniently placed Arbuckle in the room when Miss Rappe was alleged to have made the accusation and had him reply: “You’re crazy; shut up, or I’ll throw you out the window.”[14]
GIRL REFUSES
Miss Prevost was asked to swear to the same set of circumstances.
“I will not,” she replied to U’Ren. “I never heard Miss Rappe say that anybody hurt her.”
When the district attorney’s office failed to get the information it sought to elicit from Miss Prevost, it had her hauled before the grand jury. It was thought that she could be broken under the continuous fire of suggestion and cross-examination. But she would not swear to the statement that Virginia Rappe had said Arbuckle killed her.
When the girl was brought back, as she now relates to the district attorney’s office, she was ready to collapse. The prosecution had harried her by asking over and over again the same question as to the Rappe girl’s accusations.
“Did you tell me, downstairs in the district attorney’s office,” U’Ren had asked “that Miss Rappe had said Arbuckle killed her? “No, I did not,“ said Miss Prevost. “I never said that Miss Rappe had made any such statement.”
Source: San Francisco Call, January 20, p. 13 (California Digital Newspaper Collection)
MOTHER THREATENED
Outside Brady’s office at 4 o’clock in the morning Miss Prevost found her mother and brother waiting for her. They had been threatened with prosecution for subornation of perjury because they warned Miss Prevost against signing any statements that she did not agree with.
“Wait until they subpoena you into court, if you don’t want to swear to those things,” the brother had advised.
Brady’s patience was exhausted by the efforts to secure the testimony of Miss Prevost and he ordered Detective Leo Bunner to take her upstairs and lock her in the city prison. Later he relented and said that if she would be at his office at 10 o’clock the next morning he would let her go home with her mother and brother.
That night Miss Prevost’s home was watched.[15] In the morning a representative of Brady’s office called and brought her to the Hall of Justice. Then ensued another long third degree with U’Ren doing the questioning. He was determined to wring from her a statement that Miss Rappe had charged Arbuckle with killing her. He had a new one prepared.
While reporters cooled their heels in the hall outside U’Ren quizzed Miss Prevost for hours without result. She would go no further than the statement that Miss Rappe had said she was dying, a fact that she, Miss Prevost, qualified with the remark, “We attached no importance to it, because we thought she was suffering from gas pains. That is why Alice Blake gave the bicarbonate of soda.”
U’REN EXASPERATED
U’Ren after a morning’s work, in an attempt to support the murder charge placed against Arbuckle, at his insistence. came out of the room exasperated. He said that he would give Miss Prevost one more chance and that if she didn’t testify to what the people wanted he would have her placed in custody.
Then Alice Blake was brought from Oakland, to which city she had fled after the first days of the tragedy She was taken to Brady’s office and the same means were employed to get the dying statement into her testimony. Miss Blake would not stand for it.
The district attorney played one girl against the other. Word was carried to Miss Prevost that Miss Blake had testified that Miss Rappe had said Arbuckle killed her. “I never heard her say it,” said Miss Prevost. “If Alice says that, then her ears hear differently than mine.”
The district attorney’s office threatened Miss Blake, it told her that it had an abundance of proof, that it knew positively that Arbuckle was guilty. Finally, Golden appealed to the heart of the woman in Miss Blake. The show girl had a tragic face and a deep emotion.
Golden pictured to her that girls like Miss Rappe were nothing but dirt under the feet of men like Arbuckle. He asked if she could question the sincerity of the district attorney’s office.
GIRL BREAKS DOWN
“Don’t you know,’’ pleaded Golden, “that we would be down here making this same kind of a fight if you were the victim?’’
Nervous and distracted, Alice Blake easily crumbled. She broke into tears. The strong appeal of Golden persuaded her. She agreed to stand for the statement that Miss Rappe had said. “I’m dying; I’m dying (she couldn’t go the full route, but she compromised); he hurt me.”
The fact was carried to Miss Prevost that Alice had “come through’’ to that extent. “I never heard Miss Rappe say it.” said Miss Provost, frightened and overcome with weariness after the third degree ordeal, “but if you want me to say it I will.”
The statement was handed her. the words “he killed me” crossed out. and Miss Prevost wrote in the words “he hurt me.”
That night the grand jury indicted Arbuckle for manslaughter. Later the police court held Arbuckle for manslaughter.
Mrs. Delmont was not called because, as Judge Brady and Isadore Golden both told me, “we cannot believe a word she says.”
The prosecution dropped Mrs. Delmont. but it saved her story for the purpose of convicting Arbuckle. Miss Prevost and Miss Blake were to take up the evidence where Mrs. Delmont left off. The two girls were then placed in Mrs. Duffy’s custody. Mrs. Duffy is the mother of George Duffy, an attaché of the district attorney s office.
Miss Blake escaped from the district attorney’s care when her mother visited Calistoga and took her away from her jailer. Miss Prevost was not delivered up until the last trial. Yesterday afternoon Miss Prevost said she would tell the whole story when she returned to the stand. And she did.
The Call was a newspaper in the Hearst chain. We have mentioned in earlier blog entries that William Randolph Hearst’s animus for Arbuckle is a myth. As a publisher, he tended not to interfere with his editors and reporters or issue memoranda on how they should cover a story. This is true of the Arbuckle case and one needs only look at the reportage in September 1921. The sensational aspect of the case—which sold Hearst newspapers—quickly evaporated. The Arbuckle case became more of a sporting event, in which the prosecution was one team and defense the other. The press sided with the perceived winner.
Gleeson, representing his newspaper, bought into the story that Blake and Prevost had been coerced due to the failure of Maude Delmont to perform as a reliable prosecution witness. This, however, was an oversimplification of what happened. All three women were being groomed as state witnesses at the same time with differing results. All three, too, had exhibited trepidation at having to relive what happened on September 5. They would bear the responsibility of violating a kind of show business omertà that extended from movie stars paid millions (Arbuckle) to a Sennett Bathing Beauty (Prevost) or a San Francisco nightclub dancer (Blake) to a film colony society girl (Rappe) to a former extra practically living in the streets of Los Angeles (Delmont). They risked losing access to the club so to speak, the demimonde-democracy in which they had status. They also risked losing access to the employment and benefits that membership entailed, even if that meant being little more than being an escort and dance partner at a Hollywood party held in San Francisco for one day without pay. They took a great risk, perhaps even to their persons, if they were complicit in sending Arbuckle, a fellow entertainer, to the gallows or a ten-year prison sentence in San Quentin. Regarding his work with the Labor Day party guests, Assistant District Attorney Isadore M. Golden said it best when he was faced with their reluctance and reservations about talking to him. “We have made out a case [. . .] through witnesses who had to have the truth dynamited out of them, witnesses who would give anything to say, ‘I was not there.’”[16] This certainly applied to Alice Blake and Zey Prevost—and Maude Delmont as well.
In the case of Prevost, she might have been too outspoken about the party, at least in the first days after Rappe’s death. She likely learned this when she was approached by one of Arbuckle’s lawyers before any charges were filed. From that point on, she began to resist the District Attorney and his assistants. But they likely did doctor her statement. District attorneys have been and still are often more tactical than criminal defense lawyers, especially when the ends justified the means. One method used by Brady’s assistants was to exploit the power of sisterhood by shaming the female witnesses into believing they would be protecting Rappe’s honor.
Blake, the rebellious daughter of a wealthy Oakland family, returned home and was likely coached in some way not to be so voluble for the DA. A former boyfriend, who played a part in keeping her on the other side of the Bay, employed Prevost’s brother—who aspired to be a motion picture cameraman and director—as an electrician in Oakland. Ultimately, it was Brady’s fear of witness tampering and the flight risk that forced him to isolate Blake and Prevost for as long as he could. But they were both free by the time of the first trial in November 1921 and their tilt toward favoring Arbuckle’s defense can be seen in their testimony given then.
Nothing they said on the stand explains their own presence at Arbuckle’s Labor Day party. They certainly weren’t total strangers. The news that “Fatty was in town” seemed to be a familiar call to action, in keeping with previous visits by Arbuckle and/or his traveling companions, director Fred Fishback and actor Lowell Sherman. They were likely of a sort in keeping with escorts, groupies, or “girls in port.” Whether they were compensated for their attentions and attendance at the Labor Day party of 1921 is unknown. But whatever they did at the party before Rappe’s crisis in room 1219 went unreported. If it came up in trial testimony, that was censored and entirely kept out of the newspapers. Reporters do mention that aspects of their testimony couldn’t be repeated. This was certainly true of Maude Delmont’s story of Arbuckle wearing Rappe’s Panama hat like a trophy, his wanting to “get” Rappe in bed for five years, and so on.
No other guest would corroborate Delmont’s story—but no one corroborated Arbuckle’s either. It was simply seen as the most probable by jurors in the first and third trials. But two words stand out as it concerns Delmont. She stated the Labor Day party was “rough” and the word “censored” was used early on in describing her initial statements. For that reason, we believe that she wasn’t allowed to testify. For one, there was probably a concern she wouldn’t self-censor herself about any sexual activities at the party, an aspect the prosecution would have been eager to suppress. Also, we think she was reluctant to testify.
Maude Delmont may not have been the one who gave a statement first. Alice Blake’s initial statement is the that got the attention of Arbuckle and his lawyers while still in Los Angeles on the night after Rappe’s death. Allegedly, Zey Prevost made her statement next followed by Delmont. This still seems counterintuitive to us. But it is possible that someone else tipped them off about the possible criminal nature of Rappe’s death. An anonymous telephone call was how the Coroner’s office learned of the first and unsanctioned autopsy performed on her body. In any event, Delmont surely stirred up things for Arbuckle.
That said, Delmont nevertheless exhibited a palpable fear of having to sign a murder complaint or face Arbuckle and his lawyers in court. In our work-in-progress we ask if this was her defense mechanism against having to testify any further? Where Blake, Prevost, and other party guests couldn’t remember or didn’t see what happened to Virginia Rappe vis-à-vis Roscoe Arbuckle, Delmont didn’t have that option. She had blurted out a story that detectives and an overworked assistant district attorney wanted to believe and she had been convinced or forced to sign the murder complaint, which Blake and Prevost would have refused to do.
Delmont, too, said things out of resentment. She said things that might also be correct but perhaps only enough to lend credence to other statements. But we must not lose sight of the fact that Delmont, despite her humble status, was chummy enough with Arbuckle to call him “Roscoe,” just like most of the women who attended the Labor Day party. If there was a kind of freemasonry to the gathering of entertainers ranging from two movie stars, a director, an actress, as well as local showgirls, Delmont belonged at the end of the line.
Before Arbuckle lawyers demonized her, Delmont felt she was doing the comedian’s bidding by taking care of the fatally injured Rappe and interacting with hotel physicians. Delmont was the intermediary between Arbuckle and the party’s inner circle until he left San Francisco. Then she, like Rappe, was cast aside. Such rejection and the consequent resentment, penury, and that Rappe was such a “good fellow” was likely used to extract her version of events—at the other end of the spectrum from Arbuckle’s (see Arbuckle’s Testimony of November 28, 1921). We think the truth lies in between.
We think—at this writing anyway—that Delmont’s loyalty to the “party” ended with Rappe’s life. Whether consciously or unconsciously, however, she became impossible to work with as a credible witness. Thus, Matthew Brady and his assistants could go with Alice Blake and Zey Prevost who, over the weekend of September 10 and 11, no longer wanted to stick to their original stories of what happened to Virginia Rappe.
[1] “Witnesses in Arbuckle Case Denied Fees,” San Francisco Chronicle, 11 September 1922, 9.
[3] Frank C. Oxman, the state’s star witness at the 1917 Preparedness Day Bombing trial who said he saw labor activist Tom Mooney and an accomplice near the site where the bomb was placed on July 22, 1916.
[4] The Howard Street Gang trial took place in early 1921.
[5] Edmund “Spud” Murphy, leader of the Howard Street Gang.
[6] Maude Delmont did, indeed, testify at the Coroner’s Court in September 1921, which was an early venue in the Arbuckle case.
[7] Gleeson fails to tell his readers that this was undoubtedly Ira Fortlouis and that both were likely in the bathroom of 1221.
[8] An internist and surgeon covering for St. Francis Hotel’s regular physician, Dr. Arthur Beardslee, during the afternoon of September 5, 1921.
[9] In Arbuckle’s testimony, she had been vomiting profusely and was given water by him. Alice Blake also tried to get Rappe to drink a glass or warm water and bicarbonate of soda. That she had no more than three gin and orange juice cocktails (“Brooklyns”) if at all suggests Dr. Kaarboe either had the olfactory senses of a canine or made his testimony up.
[10] Technically it is, hearsay, but Dr. Beardslee wasn’t allowed to discuss it at the preliminary hearing because Arbuckle’s lead counsel, Frank Dominguez, objected.
[11] Glennon’s testimony was deemed hearsay as well.
[12] In September 1921, Alice Woodcock, a school teacher, was on trial for perjury relating to the 1919 murder trial of her husband Edward Woodock.
[14] This wasn’t in any statement made by Delmont; but it was made by Prevost.
[15] Gleeson fails to tell his readers that Arbuckle’s lawyer, Charles Brennan, had approached Zey Prevost on Market Street and asked her if she needed an attorney. Was that all the said? The district attorneys were utterly paranoid about witness tampering.
[16] Edward J. Doherty, “State Springs Coup on Fatty; Defense Wild,” Chicago Tribune, 28 September 1921, 3.
The work-in-progress features a chapter on October 1921. During this time, Roscoe Arbuckle’s defense team and strategy changed. Frank Dominguez, the comedian’s lead counsel in September, allegedly resigned to pursue the interests he had in Los Angeles. But his departure had more to do with his strategy of insinuating that Maude Delmont and Al Semnacher had tried to blackmail Arbuckle with Rappe’s torn undergarments, which they had secreted away to Los Angeles.
Dominguez probably didn’t believe in such a scheme. It only served to further undermine the credibility of Maude Delmont. Once she testified at the preliminary hearing or trial, a masterful cross-examination could destroy the prosecution’s case. No jury would convict Arbuckle after this alleged extortionist, alcoholic, and drug addict was deconstructed in the witness chair.
But this strategy presupposed a crime, that Arbuckle had done something wrong, like raping Virginia Rappe or failing to report a tragic accident that might have happened in an act of consensual intercourse. Such a defense only made the problem worse for Joseph Schenk, Adolph Zukor, Jesse Lasky, and other stakeholders in Arbuckle’s career. They knew that their star comedian had to be completely innocent of any wrongdoing, “squeaky clean,” as his career and reputation were based on a wholesome (though often raffish) screen image. Thus, there had to be a kind of legal, ethical, and situational “estrangement” from the parttime actress and society girl who, until she suffered her fatal injury, was Arbuckle’s friend, “one of the gang.”
Dominguez’s partner and Arbuckle’s personal lawyer, Milton Cohen, was also part of the comedian’s defense team. Cohen authored the strategy of “deconstructing” Virginia Rappe. He had also once been her personal attorney and knew more about her than any of his colleagues. He knew that of the many performers who remade their personas, with their different names and confected backstories, Rappe’s was a nearly blank slate. If she didn’t have any skeletons in her closet, he could put them there.
Dominguez’s successor, Gavin McNab, was on board to develop this strategy with Cohen’s counterpart in Chicago, the lawyer Albert Sabath, a close friend of Rappe’s first boyfriend, Harry Barker. The strategy was simple enough: to blame the victim before Arbuckle’s manslaughter trial in November and get it into the press before jury selection.
Arbuckle’s defense team spent much of October locating witnesses who could tell tales of Rappe’s private life. They had an immense war chest and weren’t shy about intimidating the District Attorney of San Francisco with how much money they had as the postscript below the following news item makes clear.
The news item reprinted below is the capstone to a wave of such articles that DA Matthew Brady dismissed as “propaganda.” These appeared in various forms published by the Hearst syndicate’s International News Service (in contrast to the oft-mentioned animus William Randolph Hearst and his papers allegedly had toward Arbuckle and Hollywood, a meme that has been recycled in many narratives and biographies).
We devote an earlier blog entry to this topic because of the centrality of the cystitis–pregnancy strategy in finally getting Arbuckle acquitted in April 1922. Although we can’t fault the law of diminishing returns after three trials, the money spent on his defense wasn’t enough to convince the public that Arbuckle was the upright person they once had imagined.
Here, we return to the “propaganda” campaign because of the unusual features of this version from the Los Angeles Evening Herald of October 28, 1921. It gives a description of Rappe’s “daughter,” as though she were a tiny clone of the mother. This article, too, was the first to give a name to Rappe’s bladder disease.
Readers should note that premature infants were sometimes used as sideshow oddities in the early twentieth century. Nurse Roth, a self-proclaimed friend and confidante of Rappe, showed no hesitation in mentioning that her dear friend’s alleged child was used in such an exhibit.
NURSE REVEALS RAPPE GIRL’S PAST TELLS LIFE OF WOMAN IN ARBUCKLE TRAGEDY Attorneys in Chicago Hear Story of Acquaintance of Actress
By International News Service
CHICAGO, Oct. 28.—Shadowed secrets from the hidden past of Virginia Rappe, dead movie actress, were drawn to light today in an effort to clear Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle from responsibility for her death. The dead actress’ early life was revealed with many sordid details by Mrs. Josephine Roth, her lifelong friend.
The revelations included the fact that Virginia had been a mother, her child dying when 5 years old. The most startling statement made by Mrs. Roth was that the actress was in constant danger of a sudden shock.
DRAMATIC STATEMENT
“If I could tell my story to a jury of physicians, ‘Fatty’’ Arbuckle would be freed in 10 minutes,” was her dramatic statement. “Virginia could have died at any time from a sharp fall or even a sudden misstep.”
Her story was told to Assistant State’s Attorney Frank Peska, who represented District Attorney Brady of San Francisco. It was to be repeated later to Attorney Brennan of Arbuckle’s defense counsel, who arrived this afternoon.
Mrs. Roth told her story with tears, in her eyes.
“Virginia’s memory is still so tender,” she said.
CHRONIC AILMENT
She declared that Miss Rappe was a constant sufferer from systitus [sic], a chronic disease of a vital organ. Mrs. Roth, who had acted frequently as nurse to the former model, then described in detail the medical attention given the ailing woman. This treatment had been continued until 1913, when Virginia left Chicago, said Mrs. Roth.
“A baby was born here to Virginia. It was so small and frail, it was placed in an incubator and exhibited at a local amusement place,” said the former nurse.
BEAUTIFUL CHILD
“The child was very beautiful. She had Virginia’s black hair and big black eyes. She died when 5 years of age.”
Other depositions were taken during the day from Miss Virginia Warren, also a nurse; Jay Abrams and a prominent theatrical producer, whose name was withheld.
REPORT UNLMITED FUND AT DISPOSAL OF FATTY ARBUCKLE
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 28—The fight to save Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle from prison today assumed a wider scope with the circulation of the rumor that unlimited money for defense purposes has been placed at the comedian’s command. Lawyers, picked not for price but for the success they have achieved in San Francisco courts, have been engaged to conduct the defense. A nation-wide search for evidence, admittedly costing heavily, was underway today.
Gavin McNab, recently named chief counsel for Arbuckle, has frankly stated a group o{ men with investments in motion pictures have employed him. It was generally believed here that McNab’s fee went high into five figures and perhaps six.
Charles Brennan, another of Arbuckle’s lawyers, expected to reach Chicago tomorrow, in his search for evidence. Later, Brennan is expected to go to New York and Washington, where other witnesses are believed located.
Among those he will see in the east will be Lowell Sherman, Broadway favorite and picture star, who was a guest at Arbuckle’s party preceding Virginia Rappe’s death. The entire story of Virginia Rappe’s life Is being pieced together by the defense as a foundation for a theory that she died from unavoidable causes for which Arbuckle had no responsibility.
Source: Los Angeles Evening Herald, 28 October 1921, A3.
Nurse Josephine Rafferty Roth, infant, and onlooker, ca. 1910s (Private collection)
On Saturday, April 8, which was a short session for the third and final Arbuckle trial now entering its third week, Assistant District Attorney Leo Friedman called Gavin McNab, Arbuckle’s lead attorney, to take the stand. According to the Associated Press reporter, McNab “absentmindedly” did so without being sworn in.[1] More accustomed to examining witnesses rather than being questioned as one himself, McNab was asked how he obtained the deposition of Mrs. Helen Madeline Whitehurst taken by Albert Sabath, the Chicago attorney.
Earlier in the week, she had taken the stand and claimed to have seen Virginia Rappe drinking in her Chicago cafés and her own home in 1914 and 1915, becoming ill and tearing off her clothes—the behaviors that she exhibited in Arbuckle’s hotel bedroom on Labor Day 1921.
During her examination, McNab confronted her about a discrepancy found in her deposition regarding how many times she saw Rappe fall ill in her home: a “number” of times versus only two.
Whitehurst claimed her deposition had been altered and McNab then offered the deposition as an altered document. This seemingly minor detail, however, prompted the prosecution to expose the true nature of Sabath’s relationship to the defense—as a purveyor of tainted evidence and witnesses all designed to damage the reputation of Virginia Rappe.
McNab said that Sabath wasn’t a defense attorney and that his office didn’t correspond with him. If Sabath had acted as a defense attorney, McNab said, those arrangements had been made “in the east,” adding that he didn’t know who sent him the deposition, stating that it merely came to him “from the east.”
The prosecution’s strategy here was simple: to reveal that Sabath had really been in the employ of the defense during the time that he had been commissioned by the court to take depositions in Chicago. In that capacity, Sabath should have been answerable to the court and expected to be impartial. Logically, such a strategy put jury members in the strange position that if any of them voted to acquit Arbuckle, it would be with the knowledge that there might have been false testimony presented. By placing the burden of guilt on the jury, Brady and his assistants hoped to bolster their case against Arbuckle made entirely on circumstantial evidence and also parry the defense’s attacks on Rappe’s character—to restore the victim to her victim status.
McNab expressed a certain plausible deniability by stating that his colleague on Arbuckle’s so-called “million dollar” defense team, Charles H. Brennan handled the “eastern agents” of the defense. But that was as far as Friedman got before McNab’s chief assistant, Nat Schmulowitz objected—and Judge Louderback sustained. McNab left the chair and Friedman called Brennan to the stand. He testified—this time under oath—that he knew Sabath, having met him in October 1921. He also admitted that Sabath handed him the deposition in Chicago in late February but denied that Sabath worked for the defense. In contrast to the AP Night Wire, Oscar Fernbach of the San Francisco Examiner reported that Brennan said that Sabath, “in the time of procuring a statement for the defense from Mrs. Helen M. Whitehurst, was not a commissioner of the court.”[2]
A cursory look at the reportage from October 1921 and February 1922 reveals that Sabath, indeed, had been working closely with the defense. This, of course, put Judge Louderback in a more uncomfortable position than the jury. The judge could now be seen as having favored the defense. He had commissioned a lawyer who obviously worked for Arbuckle’s defense since October if not earlier—and Sabath himself wasn’t the least bit covert about it. He had offered to defend Arbuckle at the third trial in the wake of the second trial. He had personally dispatched one of his Chicago witnesses for the defense, Nurse Virginia Warren, to San Francisco so that she was well prepared to take the stand and say that Rappe gave birth to a premature infant in 1908.
This small but bold move by the prosecution ended the rebuttal phase of the third Arbuckle trial. It was followed by a brief surrebuttal, in which Harry Barker, although sick from a cold or flu, repeated his testimony from November 1921, in which he, as Rappe’s former Chicago sweetheart, suffered her hysterics vis-à-vis a drink or two. Ironically, Brady and his associates were aware that Sabath was Barker’s friend, business partner, and fellow litigant in a long-standing lawsuit that already made its way to the California Supreme Court. But they had thus far made nothing of this curious connection. Time was running out. The public was impatient. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, if one adjusts for inflation, had been spent by the state to prosecute Arbuckle.
Gavin McNab (l to r) making a point at the defense counsel table to Milton Cohen, Roscoe Arbuckle, Charles Brennan, and Joseph McInerney (Newspapers.com)
[1] Associated Press Night Wire, in various newspapers, 9 April 1922.
[2] Oscar H. Fernbach, “M’Nab Poor Witness for Prosecution,” San Francisco Examiner, 9 April 1922, 2.
The comedy director Fred Fishback[1] was one of Roscoe Arbuckle’s two traveling companions who arrived at the St. Francis Hotel on the evening of September 3, 1921. The other was one of the first Hollywood actors who specialized in “heavy” male roles, Lowell Sherman. But unlike Sherman, Fishback had testified at the previous two trials and had made himself available for Arbuckle’s defense. The resulting notoriety temporarily interrupted his work as a director and forced him to work under the name of Fred Hibbard.
A tall and athletic man—Fishback was a swimmer—who neither smoked nor drank made an unusual participant in Arbuckle’s revels as well as Arbuckle’s roommate in room 1219. He made for an even stranger roommate for Virginia Rappe’s manager, Al Semnacher, when he moved from the Palace Hotel to the St. Francis during the late afternoon–evening of September 5. Fishback and Semnacher slept on another floor.
Fishback, naturally, didn’t want to return to 1219 given what had happened there in the mid-afternoon, when Rappe was found going in and out of shock given the true nature of her injury. He was, like the women at the party, a first responder. He had handled Rappe’s body twice. The first time was corroborated by prosecution witnesses: Fishback had lifted Rappe up on one side, while Maude Delmont and Zey Prevost had taken the other arm and leg, and carried Rappe into the bathroom and placed her in a bathtub filled with cold water. The object of this treatment was to bring Rappe back to her senses so that she could explain what was wrong with her.
The second time as Fishback testified was when he took Rappe by the ankles and held her upside down vertically. To do this, he claimed to have stood on the bed so as to allow blood to flow back into her brain and thus bring her back to consciousness.
That he could hold a woman up like this wasn’t questioned. Fishback appeared to be physically capable of doing so. The more curious feat was the act of standing and balancing on a mattress that was supported only by bedsprings rather than a modern box spring mattress. Thus, we can imagine Fishback’s act of first aid akin to a trampoline gag worthy of a comedy director. Fishback, too, stated that his big hands had likely caused the bruises on Rappe’s arms, which the prosecution had to Arbuckle.
What seemed like an act of mercy, however, worked well for the defense. The jury would have to consider that Fishback might have accidentally caused her ultimately fatal bladder rupture. That and Fishback’s dogged loyalty to his friend, Arbuckle, made him an effective prosecution witness. He was unshakable on the stand. His loyalty to Arbuckle began early, when he refused to sign a statement that, ironically, quoted him accusing Lowell Sherman of trying to “upstage” when Sherman and Arbuckle conspired to to rid themselves of his company after Rappe’s crisis.
Still, the whole exercise with Rappe’s limp body seemed too opportune. And no one else witnessed such a robust display despite the other accounts of what was done to help Rappe.
Fishback also served to deflect the direction of the accusations that Rappe was said to have uttered—“I am dying” and “He hurt me”—which the prosecution contended were aimed at Arbuckle. Gavin McNab, Arbuckle’s chief counsel, said if Rappe had said anything like this, it was directed at Fishback.
Fishback previously stated and restated that he never heard Rappe say anything. But on April 1, 1922, he recalled that he only heard her say one word, “Don’t”—but who was the recipient of this simple, human request goes unmentioned in the reportage.[2]
There was also a light moment as the Saturday session came to an end, which suggests that the two prosecutors didn’t believe that Fishback had stood on the bed and held Rappe up. McNab, undoubtedly reflecting the upbeat mood at the defense table, asked Assistant District Attorney Milton U’Ren if he would like to subject himself to a demonstration. But U’Ren declined being held upside down by his ankles, saying that he did not care to be “manhandled.“
A rare photograph of the man behind the camera: Fred Fishback (l) serving Edith Roberts (c) sparkling grape juice on the set of A Baby Doll Bandit (Exhibitor’sHerald, August 2, 1919)
[1] Fishback is the conventional Americanized spelling but newspapers in 1921 and ’22 also spelled his name in keeping with his Romanian Jewish ethnicity (e.g., Fischbach or Fischback).
[2] Associated Press, “Fischbach on Stand in Arbuckle Trial,” Los Angeles Times, 2 April 1922, I:4.
Spite Work: The Trials of Virginia Rappe and Fatty Arbuckle 