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

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

Joan Myers [1]

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

Timothy Dean Lefler [2]

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

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

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

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

“I knew her well,” Durfee said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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