Melville Rumwell

“Bad People”: Did an eminent San Francisco physician have a book in mind?

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Slipped between the pages of the Arbuckle trial transcripts are some folded sheets of papers. One letter caught my eye. The letter writer seemed like a very serios fellow given his strong opinions on the Arbuckle case. Miley B. Wesson (1881–1981) was a pioneering urologist, especially new field of urologic roentgenology in the treatment of cancer during the 1920s and ’30s. He also received a Carnegie Hero award in 1932 for saving a woman’s life during an operation. She had grabbed hold of a copper wire attached to an X-ray machine with current of 30,000 volts. Dr. Wesson managed to knock it out of her hands. He not only electrocuted himself. He stood up and finished the operation. By then he was already an author of many articles on urology, including rupture of the human bladder. Indeed, Dr. Wesson would have made a perfect medical expert for the Arbuckle trials, namely for Nat Schmulowitz, the defense lawyer who specialized in examining and cross-examining the physicians who took the stand—and the recipient of Dr. Wesson’s letter of December 3, 1953.

Nat Schmulowitz and friend, Phyllis Diller[1] (Courtesy of the San Francisco Library)

Dr. Wesson was hardly ambiguous about which side he took. “Your understanding of the medical side of the case is most interesting,” he wrote. This is true. Even the prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Milton T. U’Ren, whose sarcasm in the transcripts is hard not to miss, admitted that Schmulowitz had virtually become a medical expert himself in defending Arbuckle. And Wesson’s next sentence could almost have been directed at U’Ren himself, who, in kind, became something of an expert in dactylology, given how much faith he had in H. O. Heinrich in identifying the Arbuckle’s fingerprints superimposed over those of Virginia Rappe, suggesting that she had struggled with him as she tried to leave his bedroom in the St. Francis Hotel through hall door.

“The criminologist, Heinrich, I believe,” Wesson continued, “was a big faker. I have been interested in two cases in which he testified at great length and was 100% wrong in all ways.”

So much for the “American Sherlock.” I have written Heinrich’s biographer. Perhaps she can shed some light on this controversial man. My book, of course, sees him as a very serious man—and one would think that Dr. Wesson, too, is a very serious fellow.

What caused me to take pause—and, perhaps, Nat Schmulowitz over seventy years ago—was the paragraph that follows his remarks about Heinrich. I have read a lot of nineteenth-century medical literature on ruptures of the human bladder, especially in the rare instances when a woman suffered this injury that in the past always resulted in peritonitis and death. The cases that stood out were those caused by falling over a footboard or the edge of a washtub. Arbuckle’s bedroom in the St. Francis, room 1219, had such rocks and hard places, made of brass rails and cast iron, respectively.

What follows suggests that Wesson was intimate with the physicians who not only treated Rappe (Arthur Beardslee and Rumwell), but conducted her autopsy (Dr. William Ophuls). I can almost see them getting together, no longer beholden to a criminal trial and the rules of evidence. But Wesson gets two names wrong. Rappe was never diagnosed with the clap.

Mel Rummell [sic] gave me his notes of the case, and I discussed it with Drs. Ophuls and Beardsley [sic]. I have reported this case on two occasions without mentioning any names. The girl had a urethral discharge, and the doctors jumped at the conclusion that she had gonorrhea. She was catheterize when first seen, and her bladder contained 6 ounces of urine. For that reason the doctors and pathologists were amazed when they found that there was a hole in the bladder. It was a pinpoint opening in the dome of the bladder which had been sealed by a tag of omentum. Dr. Ophuls said that he caught the partially filled bladder in his hands and squeezed it as you would a rubber bulb, and the tag separated form the bladder, and there was a pinpoint stream of urine ejected.

The omentum refers to a fold of peritoneum, that tissue that protects the internal organs, which is attached to the bladder. Presumably, the pathologist, Dr. Ophuls, had already removed the bladder and a piece or “tag” of this tissue. Dr. Wesson makes it sound rather playful as to what happened next, as if Dr. Ophuls was squirting the dead woman’s pee from a defective water balloon.

Dr. Ophuls never described such conduct on the stand. The pinhole, in testimony, was a tear that allowed Rappe’s urine gush inside the peritoneum, where it caused the massive infection that killed her.

The urine, according to the physician who catheterized her, Dr. Beardslee, was described as “scant.”

Of course, Milton U’Ren—the irony of that name!—could have “encouraged” Drs. Ophuls and Beardslee to be cooperative state’s witnesses in ways we will never know. (Rumwell testified for the defense.) I do consider U’Ren’s highhandedness in my book. But both physicians agreed that a very real insult to Miss Rappe’s bladder had taken place. Dr. Wesson doesn’t get into that. He goes on to blame the tumblers the St. Francis Hotel provided in keeping with Prohibition and in lieu of glassware for cocktails—and Rappe herself.

The girl had drunk 3 pint glasses of equal parts of gin and orange juice without going to the bathroom. She was thought to have fallen on the side of the tub. A sudden jar will rupture a bladder. A slow steady pressure will not. This woman had lived an active sexual life for many years. For that reason it was stupid to talk about Fatty Arbuckle hurting her with intercourse. She came to San Francisco with her gigolo. He left a bill of about $150.00 for flowers, and she bought him a pair of cuff links which were not paid for. They were bad people.

Dr. Wesson, a urologist, should not be unfamiliar with the undulating motion of coitus and the effort of a man, Arbuckle, who suffered from episodes of ED. Had he been a veterinarian, he would know that many a cow and ewe suffer ruptured bladders due to the animal exertions of their partners. Something like this, purely a misadventure, between humans—albeit very rare—is what animated Mr. U’Ren and the other prosecutors.

The “bad people” he means here, in addition to Rappe, include Al Semnacher, a booking and talent agent, who could be seen as a pimp if he had steered one of his actresses into a situation where she needed to “close her eyes” and think of anything-but-Central-Casting. The flowers and cufflinks refer to another man, Rappe’s boyfriend, the comedy director Henry Lehrman. It is true that Lehrman didn’t pay for the many tiger lilies that served as a drape over her coffin and grave. As for the cufflinks that were gifted to Lehrman, Rappe paid for those with her own money.

I have to wonder if Dr. Wesson wanted to write about the Arbuckle case. He had traveled to Los Angeles to ask people about Arbuckle. There someone told him that Arbuckle had been “ruined by this trial and ended as barker in a midway in one of the nearby towns,” which is in keeping with other legends (such as the one Randall Jarrell invented for his famous poem “The Player Piano,” in which Jarrell imagines Arbuckle having once “drove the El Molino bus” up and down Pasadena.) Schmulowitz’s annotations are “Not true” in regard to the comedian’s sideshow career and “True” in regard to his being ruined. Yet how does this explain the 1923 Mercer belonging to Jay Leno that once belonged to Arbuckle? 

I wonder if Schmulowitz considered Dr. Wesson just another crank, the kind who will never make that uphill climb of the learning curve that is the Arbuckle case. Inideed, a postscript suggests something personal about his animus toward Rappe. Wesson had lost a bitter alimony suit between him and the first Mrs. Wesson. Despite documenting his wife’s drinking, he still had to pay her.

P.S. Fatty Arbuckle and Bill Hart were probably two of the cleanest movie actors ever in Hollywood, and both ruined by mercenary lying women.

[1] Ms. Diller was a gracious contributor to my biography of the poet Weldon Kees, Vanished Act (University of Nebraska Press, 2003).

100 Years Ago This Week: November 14–18, 1921

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One hundred years ago Roscoe Arbuckle’s trial for manslaughter in the death of Virginia Rappe began. Most of that first week was taken up by jury selection. Although Arbuckle’s chief defense lawyer, Gavin McNab was reportedly against including women on the jury, he and prosecutor Matthew Brady settled on five women and eight men, including one alternate.

Although the procedure of accepting and rejecting jurors is tedious, we devote some attention to this deliberate process because it reveals much of the trial strategies of both the prosecution and defense.

For those of you who have followed this blog, we discussed the possible testimony of George Glennon, the St. Francis Hotel detective (see George Glennon, the muted witness). His midnight interview with Virginia Rappe on September 5, 1921—conducted hours after she had been found in Arbuckle’s bedroom variously in a state of shock and hysteria, tearing at her clothes—was intended to be used by the defense to quickly end the trial in an acquittal. If a jury had heard that Rappe had absolved Arbuckle of injuring her, the case in all likelihood would be over. No matter how much circumstantial evidence there was in room 1219, her words would underscore Arbuckle’s professions of innocence. He only need take the stand and provide an anodyne account that that would make him out to be nothing less than a decent, caring gentleman.

However District Attorney Matthew Brady and his deputies challenged Glennon’s simple question-and-answer statement as hearsay and managed to keep it out of the record. Accusations of witness tampering were being made against both sides so the objection may have been borne of that suspicion.

Similarly, McNab and his colleagues intended to get the doctors who attended Rappe to “speak” for Arbuckle. Here Maude Delmont factored. She had, as Rappe’s companion at the Labor Day party, looked after Rappe and taken charge as her ersatz medical power-of-attorney. She spoke with some authority, despite being inebriated, and was the person the attending physicians consulted about what was wrong with Ms. Rappe. But the Prosecution saw to it that Delmont’s comments to the physicians were also barred from the record.

At the end of the second week of the trial, one of these doctors, Melville Rumwell, was called to the stand as a defense witness. He, too, like Glennon, had spoken with Rappe in the hotel about her condition. Again, the answers Rappe gave Rumwell were believed to have exonerated Arbuckle. These too were stricken as hearsay.

This defense strategy is intriguing on several levels, given the prosecution’s determined effort to prevent a jury from hearing a narrative that included the words of Rappe and Delmont. While it seems counterintuitive to silence the victim and the accuser, we think we understand Prosecutor Brady’s motivation. At the time Rappe’s injury occurred, Delmont’s initial statements might have intentionally downplayed Arbuckle’s involvement without really knowing what the truth was. She didn’t want to be at the center of a sex scandal. Rappe, too, may have been likeminded. They didn’t, like other guests, see any gain in getting Arbuckle in trouble, whether he did something injurious behind the door of room 1219, something desperate to save his reputation, or something that, as he made it out to be, the Good Samaritan redux.

In other words, Brady and his deputies were building their case on the belief that Arbuckle had injured Rappe in a clumsy attempt at rape or possibly rough consensual sex and they couldn’t afford to let anything Rappe or Delmont had said that evening stop them.

Roscoe Arbuckle and costar Alice Lake in The Rough House (1919) (Private collection)

100 Years Later: Considering the missing doctor

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This piece is an open editorial to ourselves. Any serious work about Virginia Rappe and the Arbuckle case must include a medical history and that medical history was on trial in 1921–’22 and still on trial today. Unfortunately, there is not enough surviving evidence or documentation about Rappe’s medical condition and history to write authoritatively and whatever sounds good, even ex cathedra, is from the armchair. Still, the well-intentioned writer can posit what is known about Rappe’s health and medical treatment and make at least one conclusion: more than one person was responsible for her death, in which she, too, may have had a hand, albeit a small hand.

If Arbuckle wasn’t culpable for the death of Virginia Rappe, he certainly would have benefited from her going away quietly. For a moment, he had his way. Rappe, though in agony, was removed to room 1227 of the St. Francis Hotel—not the St. Francis Hospital a few blocks away. This move happened not long after the event occurred and the party then continued. A certain hubris took over any thought about her, one of “out of sight, out of mind,” and it is unlikely that any attendees seriously thought her condition was as grave as it proved to be.

The doctors who saw Rappe facilitated this hubris by acquiescing to the requests of party attendees that she be treated in a hotel room rather than be taken to a hospital. Rappe was on her own with no family members or guardian angels demanding that something be done immediately. That delay exacerbated the problem.

Arbuckle was not alone in wanting Rappe’s problem to go away. Al Semnacher and Maude Delmont remained at the party in room 1220. Though Delmont, still drinking, took the time to check on Rappe in room 1227.

The one physician who suspected a bladder rupture, Dr. Arthur Beardslee, was somewhat cowed by Delmont’s take-charge attitude. His suggestions that Rappe be taken to a proper hospital were rejected. Delmont took her directions from the people in room 1220, she was the self-assigned go-between. Rappe’s stay in Room 1227 lasted beyond the time that the party had broken up and the attendees including Arbuckle had left the city. So Delmont and Rappe were left behind in a hotel room with no means to pay. That is possibly the turn of events that triggered Delmont’s willingness to sign a murder charge. But while the party was going on, Delmont was still on the team so to speak, she still saw herself as a privileged insider, someone who could call Arbuckle “Roscoe” (she claimed to have been at Keystone in the early days), and as such reached out to an old friend, Dr. Melville Erskine Rumwell, a physician she believed would determine that Rappe’s condition wasn’t so dire.

Dr. Rumwell dialed back Rappe’s condition to “alcoholism,” which, in 1921, was approximately what alcoholic poisoning means today. He wasn’t a stupid man. This apparent misdiagnosis suggests he didn’t take much time examining her and wanted as little direct involvement as possible. As a member of San Francisco society, Dr. Rumwell was conscious of his reputation. Whatever Delmont’s friendship meant to him personally was now complicated by another woman, Virginia Rappe, and all seemed intent on wishing away the potential seriousness of the situation to avoid “notoriety.”

Whether Rumwell examined Rappe in room 1227 is moot. He did arrange for nursing care to relieve the burden on Delmont. That suggests Rappe’s care was elevated to something more than alcoholism.

When Rappe was finally transported from the St. Francis to the Wakefield Sanitarium, a private hospital, she would live for less than forty-eight hours. Rappe’s nurses were probably instrumental in convincing Delmont to allow for an ambulance. Her confidence, too, in her friend Dr. Rumwell—she called him “Rummie”—might have been shaken. But only a little. When she called two of his colleagues at Stanford’s medical school, they probably told her she was in good hands. He had assisted both men in surgeries and it’s unlikely they would have said anything to disparage his skills or diagnosis.

But Rappe’s nurses didn’t trust him anymore. The night nurse, Vera Cumberland, suspected neglect on the part of Rumwell, who had taken a break to attend a party as Rappe’s condition worsened.

Had he made a proper diagnosis the night he first saw Rappe, Rumwell could have ordered emergency surgery and she might have survived. She actually had a robust constitution. But by the time Rappe got to Wakefield, Rumwell might have realized it was too late to save her. He apparently didn’t put up a good show of bedside manners and one might speculate he was distancing himself to blur his responsibility in the matter.

According to Delmont, one of the last conscious requests that Rappe made was to summon her one known friend in San Francisco, Sidi Wirt Spreckels. Visiting Ms. Spreckels may have been a reason for Rappe’s presence in San Francisco in the first place. Newspapers reported that Spreckels was just back from France. She was also recently widowed and in a legal battle over her late husband’s estate with his first wife (now “Mrs. Wakefield”). Spreckels had also suffered the indignity of a sheriff’s auction of her furs, a pending lawsuit filed by Tiffany’s over an unpaid diamond necklace, and other woes that made headlines of their own. (Eventually, the estate lawyer, James McNab, the brother of Arbuckle lawyer Gavin McNab, informed Spreckels that her late husband was bankrupt.)

Despite the risk of additional “notoriety”, Spreckels came to see Rappe on the morning of September 9, 1921. What she saw was appalling, such that she returned to her apartment at the Palace Hotel and communicated with Rappe’s former fiance Henry Lehrman about the situation. He may have suggested or seconded Spreckel’s decision to bring her own doctor back to the Wakefield.

That Spreckels reached out to Dr. H. Edward Castle, another physician high in S.F. society, for a “second opinion” indicated the doubts she had in Rumwell’s judgment.

Dr. Castle noted the bruising on Rappe’s body but could do nothing for her. She may have already died or did so in his presence (the reporting on his first Arbuckle trial testimony is scant).

The only thing that plagued Dr. Rumwell’s conscience was the matter of an autopsy. Spreckels and Delmont urged him on and he eventually relented. But until Rappe was dead, the only care she received was palliative. In effect Dr. Rumwell was a hospice physician.

His virtual hands-off treatment played well into the hands of Gavin McNab during the three Arbuckle trials.

As far as Rumwell’s own career went after the trials, his volunteer work, and his exploits on the handball court of the Athletic Club disappeared. Indeed, his career grew strangely quiet.

Sidi Wirt Spreckels and her stepson (Newspapers.com)

100 Years Ago Today: Virginia Rappe’s last bad day, September 8, 1921

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Virginia Rappe was finally taken by ambulance to the Wakefield Sanitarium at 1065 Sutter Street in San Francisco on Wednesday, September 7, 1921. Her presence in the small private hospital was quickly noticed by the nursing staff.

The Wakefield Sanitarium, also known as the Wakefield Hospital, wasn’t an institution that specialized in high-risk pregnancies—and abortions for its wealthy clientele, as it has been described by others looking to dish some dirt. It admitted men, women, and children, especially accident victims who required surgery. The hospital was private though and intended for patients who wanted to avoid the populations—and diseases—of general and charity hospitals. It was staffed by top-tier doctors, and patients were often referred there by doctors who taught at Stanford University’s medical school, including Virginia Rappe’s doctor, Melville Rumwell.

Rumwell specialized in taking female surgical patients. Early in his career, he made a real name for himself in saving the life of a mother and child in a difficult birth. The mother honored him by naming her newborn son “Melville.” But Dr. Rumwell had also earned the opprobrium of tent-city dwellers in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, especially that of the women, when he served as a city medical officer in charge of homeless people. He was seen as uncaring and unmindful of their plight. In Rappe’s case, he dialed back the nature of her illness to alcoholism, at the time the term would have been closer to a diagnosis of alcohol abuse disorder today. That is, Rappe was still being seen as suffering from having had too much to drink—even two days later!

Rumwell had taken Rappe’s case as a favor to Maude Delmont, a former patient and Rappe’s voluntary guardian for the past three days. Apparently, when it came to his fee—as well as the cost of two private nurses and a private room at Wakefield—he had been told that someone else would cover the cost, that someone being Roscoe Arbuckle. Delmont probably didn’t reach out to the comedian about Rappe’s medical costs. She was also expecting Al Semnacher to return to San Francisco to drive her and Rappe back home and deal with the medical costs later.

Even though the St. Francis Hotel’s doctor, Arthur Beardslee, suspected a grave internal injury, indeed, a ruptured bladder, he testified that he didn’t share his suspicions or the results of his catheterization, which revealed bleeding, with Dr. Rumwell. If he had, Rumwell would have done two things in 1921: he would have attempted “heroic measures,” that is, a high-risk surgery to clean out the massive infection and close the tear in Rappe’s bladder; or palliative care since a bladder rupture, if not operated on immediately, meant certain death from peritonitis and septic shock.

The second option turned out to be deliberate or a fait accompli if Dr. Rumwell took a passive course and simply neglected his patient, knowing she was going to die anyway. In that case, any optimism he expressed was pro-forma for the sake of Delmont and Rappe’s nurses, especially the two who had grown close to her over the past two days.

Delmont may have come around to the idea that surgery was needed since Rappe’s condition only deteriorated. She called one of Rumwell’s colleagues at Stanford to get a second opinion. But she never lost faith in the doctor whom she referred to affectionately as “Rummie.” As Rappe slipped into a coma, Delmont likely interpreted this as a relief since she was no longer in distress.

Meanwhile, on the evening of September 8, Rappe’s night nurse, Vera Victoria Cumberland, had gone back on duty. Before doing so, however, Cumberland learned from Rappe’s day nurse, Jean Jameson, that the latter believed Rappe was suffering from an infection and that “microscopic tests” were in order.”[1]

But “Dr. Rumwell failed to do this,” Cumberland said during a coroner’s inquest, “and I thought his attitude of enough importance that I left the case. I told Mrs. Delmont I thought this ought to be done and she said, ‘Oh, Rummy can’t be bothered, he had a party on tonight.’”

That Rappe’s case had “been handled negligently” wasn’t the only reason that Cumberland resigned.[2] Her other rationale was more personal and might explain why she stood up to the physician. She believed herself to be a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, her namesake, and a countess, and, if true, had a reputation at stake.

“When I realized the circumstances of the case,” she said to the press after Rappe’s death, “I had visions of juries, judges, investigators, and policemen. It was disgusting. Finally, I determined that the fair name of Cumberland should not be dragged into the filth of actors’ misdoings, so I requested my release.”[3]

Naturally incredulous, a reporter consulted Debrett’s Peerage and discovered that Vera Cumberland wasn’t among the issue of either Queen Victoria or her German cousin, the Duke of Brunswick, who currently held title of Duke of Cumberland.

Vera Cumberland (Calisphere)

[1] Associated Press, “Arbuckle Indicted: Manslaughter Grand Jury Says,” Des Moines Register, 14 September 1921, 1, 2; and “The Grand Jury: Evidence Submitted by Witnesses to Arbuckle’s Wild Party and Those Who Attended Stricken Girl,” Des Moines Tribune, 14 September 1921, 1.

[2] “Words of Girl on Death Bed Stir Audience . . .,” San Francisco Chronicle, 14 September 1921, 7.

[3] Nurse Reveals Dying Confidences,” Los Angeles Evening Post-Record, 12 September 1921, 6.

100 Years Ago Today: Dismissing Dr. Beardslee, September 6, 1921

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Perhaps the worst decision made by Roscoe Arbuckle and whoever had his ear was to let Maude Delmont stay with Virginia Rappe in room 1227 of the St. Francis Hotel.

Although she didn’t pretend to be a real nurse, she assumed the authority of one. (Delmont’s  younger sister, with whom she lived from time to time, was indeed a registered nurse.)

When the second hotel physician, Dr. Arthur Beardslee, came to see Rappe, he realized that this wasn’t the usual patient with a stomach ache from overindulging on rich food from the hotel kitchen or alcoholic beverages—as Delmont said. What he saw was a young woman he believed needed to be taken to a hospital for immediate surgery. But Dr. Beardslee erred on the side of hospitality, being a hotel doctor, and gave Rappe morphine injections to keep her quiet.

Meanwhile, Delmont had been going back and forth between room 1227 and the reception room of Arbuckle’s suite, room 1220.

The people in that room decided against sending Rappe to the nearby St. Francis Hospital, where Dr. Beardslee was a resident. That risked “notoriety.”

Dr. Arthur Beardslee (FamilySearch.com)

Delmont never disputed this decision. She returned to room 1227 and was satisfied with the effects of the morphine. She also convinced Dr. Beardslee that the only thing wrong with Rappe was gas. She suggested having an enema bag and Dr. Beardslee ordered one.

When he was gone, Delmont gave Rappe the enema, apparently with expertise and little mess. But undoubtedly the experience for Rappe was no less excruciating than her ruptured bladder.

Only Dr. Beardslee suspected the true nature of the injury. On his last visit, in the wee hours of Tuesday, September 6, he catheterized Rappe and extracted a little urine and clotted blood. The results alarmed him but he suppressed any expression of urgency given, perhaps, the inconvenient hour.

Still deferential to Delmont, Dr. Beardslee could only advise that his patient—whose name he incredibly failed to learn—be taken by ambulance to the hospital. Delmont, exercising a kind of medical power-of-attorney before there was ever such a thing, elected not to do so. Rappe would be treated in her hotel room.

Later that Tuesday morning, Dr. Beardslee was informed by Maude Delmont that her personal friend, a famous San Francisco surgeon who had performed an operation on her in the past, Dr. Melville Rumwell, would take over the case.