by Jerry Stahl
"Not good," Joe sighed, pulling bones out of his teeth. "Jury thinks you're a bootlegger on top of a rapist and murderer. Not good at all."
McNab picked at his fish like it had scabies. "You already owe 100 grand in back taxes. Violating the 18th Amendment is going to cost you another 50 long. And, just for the record, your friend Fred fingered you good." He showed me the transcript, obliging me to put down my kosher nourishment and read. Sure enough, Fred had declared that, being a law-abiding nonimbiber himself, he was shocked at the ease with which I had procured demon beverages. He even hinted that I was part of an underworld combine that shunted booze up from Tijuana to Frisco, along with bales of Mexican marijuana and "foreign painkillers."
"At least he left out white slavery," I quipped, to no one's amusement but my own.
Hearst kept expanding on the pills-and-maryjane angle. The Examiner even ran a "Police Insider" on the subject of my status as Drug Kingpin, fat-ass pasha of a ring that polluted the youth of California—"quite possibly paving a path to prostitution and debauchery and death for angels like Virginia Rappe." That same afternoon I read a story in the Times describing the late Miss Rappe as "a descendant of Belgian royalty." Hearst had a genius for juicy libel, but his fake praise was just as amazing.
Either way, it no longer seemed strange to be sitting at a card table in an empty living room, kicking around the subject of my future on a municpal farm. When I said I still wouldn't fink on Fred, Joe waggled a pickle in my face and shouted, "Roscoe, you putz! You may be the nicest white man I ever met—but you're also the stupidest!"
Then Gavin clapped me on the back, hard enough to let me know he'd have liked to have hit me harder. "Use your thinker, buddy boy. Lehrman used Fischbach to set you up. Fischbach used you to keep Lehrman from knowing he gave Virginia a doggy bath. Maude Delmont's gonna get rich helping Diamond Matt Brady use you to get his butt in the governor's chair—and you're telling me you won't say who gave you the damn booze?"
McNab slammed the table for emphasis, then changed gears and rocked back on his chair. I was too frazzled to say anything—no doubt the exact effect my attorney wanted. Having achieved it, he smiled crookedly. "Speaking of damned booze . . ."
McNab mimed smacking his thin lips, and I explained that the feds had absconded with my liquor cabinet. He'd have to settle for ginger ale. "Just as well," he said, with no sincerity whatsoever. "We have more work to do."
As Gavin and Schenck were leaving—having started to school me on matters of strategy, defense, and how not to look like a slob on the stand—Gavin turned and announced that I wasn't the only one with troubles. "This might cheer you up," he chirped from the doorway. By now I'd gotten used to standing to one side when the door was opened, to dodge photographers. "Your pal Lehrman's in a little hot water, too. He sent $1,100 worth of flowers to be placed on Virginia's casket. Now he's being sued by the florist for nonpayment. They won't find him, though."
Gavin liked to brag about dabbling in vaudeville as a youth, so I played straight man. "Why won't they find him, Mister?"
McNab beamed and rushed the punch line like an amateur. "Because—he's on his honeymoon!"
As a comedian he was a great lawyer.
Jury Performance
Being on trial for murder is just like appearing onstage—except that if the audience hates you, they don't throw tomatoes, they kill you. The IRS had already garnished the Pierce-Arrow, and my Model T was riding on axles, so I hitched a lift to Frisco with McNab. On the ride up he explained how he and Brady had already pored through 207 potential jurors to settle on 12. He said he was pretty happy about all of them. But when we stopped for coffee and sinkers at a Barstow diner, he dunked his cruller and confessed that he still had his doubts about one Mrs. Hubbard, a feisty old haybag he was certain had secret links to the DA.
I put down my milk shake, not sure I'd heard right. "Secret links? Then why let her on the jury?"
"Because!"
Then McNab shut up and—I'll never forget—swung his coffee-logged cruller from his cup to his mouth without losing a drop. I almost clapped. Whenever I tried that, I got a lapful of mush, and had to walk around with a sugar-glazed crotch till I could change pants.
"Because what?" I asked when he was done dunking.
"Because maybe we got a few ringers of our own the DA doesn't know about."
I could tell this was supposed to make him sound cagey. But all it did was make me more nervous than I was already. I was so upset I could barely finish my third milk shake.
Round Two
The first day of the retrial, on November 22, my attorney braced me on the way into the courtroom and said he had two words of advice: Don't fiddle.
He looked so solemn when he said this I tried to look solemn back. "Don't fiddle," I repeated, nodding my head. "I'm not sure I—"
"Fiddle, fidget, fuss!" McNab hissed, wiggling his fingers and darting his eyes around to show what he meant. "Remember, no matter who's on the stand, the jury's going to be staring at you. And if there's one principle of criminal law that's proved consistently true, it's this: juries respond unfavorably to fiddling. Death Row's full of fiddlers."
Before I could respond to this bit of wisdom, the courtroom doors swung open. I was flanked by two large uniforms, billy clubs at the ready, as though poised to protect the women of the jury in case I was feeling rapey.
An hour into the trial, I was no longer worried about fiddling. I worried about staying awake. The courtroom was hot and stuffy. It felt just like being in grade school in Santa Ana, except the boys all shaved. And I couldn't drop out.
The Assistant DA, a handsome fellow named Friedman, started his opening arguments by talking about Virginia's bladder. Then everybody started talking about it. In fact, for the first three days the attorneys did nothing but tangle over Virginia's bladder. Both sides trotted out a string of medicos like show ponies. Doctors Rumwell and Beardslee, Nurse Jamison, some other bonebreakers I forget. Each M.D. or doctor's helper was asked whether, in their professional opinion, the late Miss Rappe's pee pump was already badly damaged or it was Roscoe Arbuckle's savagery that so badly damaged it.
The day after the final bladderfest, Zey Prevon and Alice Blake were marched in to support Maude's story that I'd viciously attacked Virginia in a fit of drunken lust. Both starlets looked so stricken, even though what they were saying could have killed me, I found myself feeling terrible for them. Terrible that on account of me coming to San Francisco in the first place, they'd been made to show up looking hollow-eyed and telling lies.
Miss Delmont herself would not be present to testify. Brady wanted her story. He just didn't want her to tell it. So the DA kept Maude in jail on an old bigamy charge for the entire trial. Though that would not come out till later.
"Imagine a sweating beast," Friedman implored the jury, glaring my way with righteous disgust. He turned to aim a dewy-eyed photo of Virginia looking nunly at the jury, then pointed a well-manicured forefinger back again in my direction. "Imagine this enormous, sweating beast, in all his nakedness, throwing himself atop the innocent and fragile victim you see here. Imagine this outsized actor slaking his massive appetites on her tender frame."
After five minutes of this, I was almost ready to hang me myself. But it got worse. Guided by the swarthy Friedman, Zey recited the by-now-famous scenario: hearing screams in room 1219, she and Maude Delmont rushed in to find Virginia sprawled on the bed, "panting that she was dying, and pointing to HIM . . ."
With that damning word—that "HIM"—every head in the courtroom swiveled my way. I could feel their eyes on me like leeches, as Zey mimicked Virginia's dramatic moan. "He hurt me! He hurt me inside!"
Poor Zey, normally a sprightly girl, shook so much during her interrogation I thought springs were going to fly out of her ears. When Gavin grilled her, it became clear why. Under questioning she broke right down and admitted that she'd been held captive, a veritable prisoner, by the DA's staff. She'd been reprimanded, over and o
ver, until she got her story straight. "What story would that be?" McNab wondered aloud. Shoulders heaving with sobs, Zey replied in a tiny voice, "The one Mr. Brady wanted me to tell . . ."
Well, you could have tossed mice in all the open mouths Zey's revelation inspired. When Alice Blake was called, McNab got her to admit that she, too, had been held against her will. And people's mouseholes fell open all over again.
Having dragged these admissions out of the prosecution's key witnesses, McNab puffed himself up. He addressed the jury with respect, but conviviality. Like you would a stranger you've said hello to at the bus stop for 20 years. "Personally, folks, I gotta tell you, I like the district attorney. I even admire him. And yet, as good citizens we have to ask, has Matthew Brady the right to take away the liberty of two girls that they might swear with him to take away the liberty of an innocent man?" Here he paused dramatically, as though overcome, then bravely soldiered on. "Is this not why we sent two million good men overseas, to put an end to this sort of thing?"
I'd been tutored for my own time on the stand, but after McNab's stellar performance I thought the prosecution was just going to give up. So when Friedman started to cross examine me, his spewing tone and vile implications rattled me down to my curled toes. "Mr. Arbuckle—" he even made my name sound vaguely unsavory—"did you at any time hear Miss Rappe say, 'You hurt me'? Did you hear her say, 'Please stop!'? Were you in any condition to have heard her if she did say these things?"
"No—yes . . . no," I sputtered, not sure which question I was answering. Then I repeated the version of events that I'd worked out with McNab and Dominguez before him—which happened to be the truth. "Miss Rappe was sitting up and tearing at her clothes. She was frothing at the mouth. I saw her tear her waist. She had one sleeve almost off. She was prone to fits!"
Friedman stepped so close I could see the pores on his forehead. He wrinkled his nose, as though my nearness sickened him, and I could see the Black Forest in his nostrils. "Mr. Arbuckle," he sneered, "the fairy tale you just told the Court, would it surprise you to know that I have seven versions of the story, told to different people by you?"
"That's the true story," I said as calmly as I could. Busily not fiddling with every muscle in my body.
For a long time, Friedman stared at the ceiling. He made a show of straightening his tie, pursing his lips, placing his hands together briefly at his chest—no doubt to let us all know he was a praying man. I knew a thing or two about stage business, and had to grudgingly admit he was a master. When the prosecutor whipped himself back in my direction, he lashed out with such ferocity I jerked backward in my chair, nearly toppling it. His words hit me like spume.
"Virginia Rappe had a few drinks and you lusted after her. You pulled her into the bedroom, locked the door, threw her on the bed despite her protestations. You tore her clothes off and practiced Lord knows what manner of perversions on a helpless girl. You tore her inside out and she screamed for mercy."
Would someone please tell me the right expression to wear on your face when a man is calling you a rapist in front of your wife? In front of God? In front of a roomful of angry females whose hate for you is like a smell} A fly buzzed continually around my head, and I dared not swat it, for fear of appearing violent. The airless tang of perspiration, stale perfume, and floor wax made it hard to breathe. I felt myself flush up. My knee hurt and my thighs itched. More than anything I had to fight back the urge to cry.
In his closing argument, Friedman harangued the jury to render a guilty verdict—"To show the Arbuckles of the world that American womanhood is not their plaything!"
In spite of being disemboweled in cross-examination, I was optimistic. McNab had so thoroughly exposed the prosecution witnesses as frauds and weaklings, nothing he had to say would matter anyway. Or so it seemed to me. The galoot's galoot.
We thought the jury would make up their mind fast. For two or three hours I felt almost cocky. Even called Buster and told him to round up the boys when I came back. Call me naive. In my mind, once 12 reasonable humans come back with a Not Guilty, I'd be able to hop back on the movie train and toddle on like nothing happened. Isn't that the way things happen in a just world?
After 10 hours, my mouth was so dry I was spitting feathers. By 24 I was seeing spots. The walls in the Hall of Justice lobby started to look wet, spongy, like the whole place was made of dingy angel's food cake. Maybe I was just hungry. The whole night ended up like one long smoking and pie-eating contest. And I was the only contestant. I even paid the men's room Negro to go out and scare up some firewater. "What kind?" he wanted to know.
I liked the way he folded my 10 spot and tucked it in a slot on the inside of his red attendant's jacket in one clean move.
"The kind that works," I said, without thinking about it.
The attendant nodded and stuck out his hand again. "For that, gonna be another 10, boss." So I gave him my Paramount watch, the one inscribed, TO ROSCOE—ONE OF THE TEAM, FROM YOUR FRIEND ADOLPH.
"What's 'at writin' say?" the Negro asked.
"'Hello, Sucker,'" I told him.
The thought of what might happen—and the realization that it actually could—unnerved me so much I had to eat, pace, or roll cigarettes to keep from running out in front of a train. Don't forget, I'd been inside already. Before you go to jail, you think it's going to be like in the movies, full of crusty-but-lovable old cons and gangsters with good teeth. But now I'd been there. I knew.
How could you not get plastered knowing that one wrong move, one slip-up, and you'd spend the rest of your life in a circus full of vicious pea-brains who'd kill you for your comb?
It took the jury 41 hours and 22 ballots before it finally gave up. The foreman, pink-eyed with fatigue, blinked into the lights and announced that one juror had declined to consider any evidence, had declared that she knew a guilty fat man when she saw one. Said juror, skip the drumroll, was Mother Hubbard, the ringer McNab had spotted right off.
A screaming mob surrounded our car and started rocking it until a policeman cleared a path. For one bad moment I wondered if jail might have been the safer bet, until the driver gave it the gas and got us away from the courthouse.
The trip back to Hollywood is kind of patchy. But I had the biggest crying jag of my adult life the second Minta and I made it past the bottle-wielding mob at Union Station. When I remarked that all the bottles were Coca-Cola, Minta looked pained. I'd stopped reading the papers halfway through the trial. The headlines ruined my digestion. Now here were these red-faced queen bees, waving Coke bottles and screaming "Die Fatty Die!" I got the screaming—what else was new?—but the empty Coca Colas had me stumped.
I wish I'd never lived to see the sad wonder on Minta's face as she tried to explain. "It's that Hearst, honey. He says that you, um, you used a bottle—either Coca-Cola or champagne—to, you know, to penetrate Virginia."
When Minta couldn't look at me anymore, she reached in her wallet. She unfolded the actual article she'd neatly clipped from the paper, and began to read. " 'My manly equipment would not do my bidding,' Arbuckle cracked to guests, 'so I did what I always do, I grabbed a bottle.' "
That was as far as she got before I started crying. Why? Why do you think? Because worse than the lies in the paper were the accidental truths. Imagine being accused of something, and in the process of proving that you didn't do it, you have to parade all the secret, shameful things you actually did. Not crimes, exactly. Just . . . behavior. Details you wouldn't want to read about yourself—or your manly equipment—on the front page of the Los Angeles Examiner.
The shame was like a knife that cut deeper the more you tried to pull it out. But bad as it was for me, what I was really bawling about was how this must be for Minta. What was it like to be the monster's better half?
"Abandoned then reunited with the man she loves only because he's been charged with a sex murder." Hearst again. To have to not just read these lies—but live with them. Because of me, Minta had to suffer the soul-kill
ing scrutiny. Because of me, she was the subject of the lowest jokes. Because of me. That was the awful truth. It wasn't Virginia Rappe I ripped apart, it was my own wife. Because one day I got snockered with the wrong bunch of degenerates.
Like the man said, inside every fat man is a really fat one who's stuck.
The red-faced truth: I'd pressed a cold bottle to the dying girl's pudendum to wake her up, not get inside her. But I was too uncomfortable to relate such facts to my own wife, let alone an entire courtroom. To say I tried to save a girl by icing her privates is to admit her privates were there in front of me to be iced. Guilty by virtue of innocence. Or vicey versey. What a gag.
Devastated as I was at the notion I'd stuck a bottle up Virginia Rappe, when I looked out that car window and studied the haggard faces of the women who fervently believed it, I couldn't help but observe to Minta, "These biddies are too hard up for champagne, so they're waggling Cokes."
Minta gave me a peculiar smile. "If I were a Russian revolutionary, I'd say they were really mad 'cause you had champagne and they didn't."
"Don't tell me you've gone Red," I said. Now that was funny.
She can always surprise me!
This was the last coherent thought before they scraped me off the lawn in Los Angeles and dumped me inside.
Purgatory
Brady immediately demanded a retrial, slated for January 12. I spent the intervening weeks with my friends Mr. Morphine and Monsieur Brandy, and didn't care to leave their company no matter how much Minta implored me. Whatever faith I had, not just in humanity (who thinks about humanity?) but in right and wrong, loyalty and trust, truth and fibbery, went up in flames with the empty liquor crates and unread newspapers we burned in the backyard. We had no maids now, no staff but Okie, who stayed on, without pay, not out of loyalty, I suspected, but because he had nowhere to go—and no one would hire him after they got wind he'd worked for me. He never complained about the cot he slept on in the three-car garage he'd converted to his new living quarters.