Sidi Wirt Spreckels

The Celtic prose poem: Gavin McNab’s argument for the defendant

/ The Authors / Leave a comment

A new version of the arguments is being drafted (as I write) delivered before the jury near the end of the first Arbuckle trial of November–December 1921. The first draft had been based on very detailed reportage. The trial transcripts, however, differ markedly from the paraphrased versions in published in newspapers.

Roscoe Arbuckle with his female interest throwing herself in front of him. (He wears one of his capacious bathrobes, perhaps even the one worn at his Labor Day Party. As a further aside, the more militant feminists who panned Gavin McNab’s bible readings were far outnumbered in court by young women who, not unlike this one, stood up for the comedian.)

What follows is the end of the section devoted to Gavin McNab’s defense of “Fatty” Arbuckle.[1] Its title is derived from the Rev. James Gordon, the same Rev. Gordon whom Sidi Spreckels called to Virginia Rappe’s bedside. The clergyman, writing in his new column, described McNab’s speech as a “Celtic prose poem” after McNab’s rich Highland accent, which made him sound as much like a Presbyterian divine as a lawyer.[2] The man who followed McNab, with closing argument for the People, Milton U’Ren, was not as sanguine. To him the Good Samaritan described below was a “moral leper” and inspired another kind of outburst of faith: “Thank God, he will never make the world laugh again.”[3]

Had it not been for Maude Delmont being an unreliable witness, there would be no reliance on Zey Prevost or Alice Blake. All three women, for men who remembered the Preparedness Day bombing, always posed the risk of blowing up the People’s case. Every one of the district attorneys had a hand in planting those bombs in their own case, most of all Isadore Golden, who had come up with the compromise “hurt.” Still, that is what those showgirls undersigned. And, lest anyone forget, the “unfortunate circumstances,” the “wine party” as McNab put it, that event still resulted in murder to the prosecutors. They just needed to bide their time for a little longer and weather the dated lawyerly magniloquence of the 1800s autodidact showing off for the jury.

McNab’s had a working lunch. He met with his colleagues to discuss his performance and to go over the record and what had not been covered. There had been no mention of Jesse Norgaard, whose testimony suggested that Arbuckle had been obsessed with Virginia and that he disrespected her as well, and women in general, given whatever joke he intended to play.

Nat Schmulowitz surely and tactfully expressed a concern for the way medical evidence had not been exploited thoroughly. McNab had only burnished the reputations of Dr. Shiels and Collins brighter. And he had yet to draw on the Chicago affidavits, Albert Sabath’s contributions. One had been read into the record—and three doctors the day before certified that Miss Rappe was diseased. She had cystitis, which, to these conferees who had been holding back on leaving her reputation alone, was virtually a junior venereal disease in keeping with the late junior vamp.

And so, when the trial resumed at 1:45 p.m., McNab linked the medical commission’s report to “the testimony of Dr. Rosenberg of Chicago.” This evidence revealed that the defense had been right in contending that the young woman’s bladder had “defects,” that it was not the “perfect organ” the prosecution contended. Even that realization elicited another opportunity to preach to the jury as if it were the choir. “It would be an assurance trespassing on the domain of Divine Providence for any lawyer to intrude into the mysteries of nature and say what caused that rupture,” McNab intoned.

But the disease for which we have contended had been established. Whether that contributed materially to the disorder, we do now know, nor have any of the medical men on either side who have appeared before you pretended to tell you what did. All they could say to you was that many things might have done so. This leaves it with you of any direct testimony, outside of the medical and of the surgical demonstrations, to determine what probably brought about this young woman’s demise.

McNab, of course, did not want jurors to glance knowingly at Arbuckle’s girth—the District Attorney’s murder weapon that had been turned against the comedian. And so jurors who had already made up their minds, the reporters, as well as Arbuckle and Minta who knew better, now heard McNab deliver a paean, a panegyric devoted to the exercise of impartial judgement. “We do not ask you to give him any consideration because he is a great artist,” McNab said, without being ironic again, “or because he had brought joy into the world, or because he has made a success of his life. [. . .] This man without any disfigurement in this case, because there was not the slightest testimony reflecting on his character.”

The prosecution’s case, McNab reasoned, was based entirely on “conjecture.” As for the Arbuckle’s version of events, in response to all that had been made up about him, McNab made it a special point that his side made no objections during “two hours and twenty minutes of crucial cross-examination.” That was unheard of. That only proved Arbuckle’s candidness before the people of San Francisco and the nation. Then McNab waxed into a Cross of Gold speech made of diamonds.

That is the story. And you heard the story in its simplicity of how he tried to help this woman in the distress that had come upon her, and which was a common experience in her life, as is established without a contradiction, and how actuated by the spirit of mercy, you see this picture of this man crucified before you as a wicked character, in speech but not in evidence, carrying the limp body of this injured girl down the corridor of the hotel, staggering with her weight. Was this an unkind man? Doesn’t that tell the story, open for the world there to look at what went on behind the closed but not locked doors? [. . .] And he has told you in simple words what happened, and it exactly corresponds with this great, big, warm-hearted man, this rough diamond, perhaps, but still a diamond, carrying that injured girl down thru the hall; a more pathetic and a more beautiful picture than he ever put on the screen.

“There is to my mind a beautiful thought in connection with this thought,” McNab said in afterthought, that counsel had “not asked about the pictures that this man produced, but has anybody ever suggested that anybody ever saw an unclean picture of Roscoe Arbuckle? I think sometimes that the instincts of childhood is the most accurate of all instincts of the human race.” And yes, McNab really did impress upon the jurors the notion that Arbuckle himself was a juvenile. That gave his lawyer a fitting way to end of his Celtic sermon. “I always am impressed,” McNab said sagaciously,

with that beautiful spiritual suggestion of the Savior, “Suffer little children to come unto me.” And the childhood of the world, the instinct of childhood, had been accurate from that day to this, and this man who has sweetened human existence by the laughter of millions and millions of innocent children comes before you with a story of a frank, open-heated, big American, and submits the facts of this case in your hands.

To this a bored Leo Friedman, speaking for the People, asked McNab if he were done.

[1] People vs. Arbuckle, First Trial, “Argument of Mr. McNab, on Behalf of the Defendant,” 2188ff.

[2] James Gordon, “Minister Tells Highlights in ‘Fatty’ Case,” Los Angeles Evening Herald, December 1, 1921.

[3] People vs. Arbuckle, “First Trial, Closing Argument for the People, by Mr. U’Ren,” 2269ff.

Maude Delmont’s unrealized disambiguation

/ The Authors / Leave a comment

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.

screen-shot-2020-02-17-at-9.53.28-am

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.”

mauds-kansas-city-show

[*] 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.

100 Years Later: Considering the missing doctor

/ The Authors / 1 Comment

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)