by Greg Merritt
By 1921, San Francisco’s businesses still readily accommodated society’s high and low visitors, but sentiments there had chilled toward Los Angeles since its recent population explosion; the 1920 census was the first in which the population of Los Angeles exceeded that of San Francisco (577,000 to 507,000). Northern California’s elite looked down on the rubes to their south, mostly transplants from small towns in the heartland, and they also resented the nouveau riche celebrities of the moving pictures treating their city as the Las Vegas of the day.
When nightlife was on the agenda, Arbuckle was almost always accompanied by an entourage. He was the headliner; they were his supporting cast. He called the shots, he attracted the greatest attention, and he picked up the tabs. Keaton and other usual members of that group were not accompanying Arbuckle as he journeyed north, but he wasn’t about to go to San Francisco alone. The two men riding with him, Lowell Sherman and Fred Fishback, were not close friends of his, but they were the type who expanded his clique on late nights in Los Angeles. They knew that the best parties always seemed to follow Fatty.
The handsome Sherman, thirty-two years old, was a dramatic film actor. He played mostly dashing playboys, dastardly knaves, or a combination of the two, and he had only recently begun to distinguish himself, most prominently as a cad in Way Down East, the smash of 1920. A note in a newspaper column on that fateful Labor Day read, “Lowell Sherman is the name of a gentleman who is being styled as ‘the screen’s most polished villain.’”
Twenty-seven-year-old Fishback was born in Bucharest, Romania. Formerly a minor film actor and then Arbuckle’s assistant director, by September 1921 he was under contract at Universal Pictures and a prolific director and writer of comedies.
The three men, each of whom was married, set out early on September 3, 1921. Filling stations, general stores, and roadside cafés were rare but welcome sights, and when the Pierce-Arrow parked it likely stirred up some commotion.
Those general stores were probably selling the latest issue of the celebrity magazine Photoplay. Inside was an article attributed to Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, salaciously entitled “Love Confessions of a Fat Man,” in which he stated, “I am convinced that the fat man as a lover is going to be the best seller on the market for the next few years. He is coming into his kingdom at last. He may never ring as high prices or display as fancy goods as these he-vamps and cavemen and Don Juans, but as a good, reliable, all the year around line of goods, he’s going to have it on them all.” Maybe the three Hollywood men laughed about the jibes at the likes of “Don Juan” Douglas Fairbanks and the new superstar, “he-vamp” Rudolph Valentino. Maybe this part struck them as ironic: “Nothing is so humiliating to an efficient woman these days as an unfaithful husband. Fat men tend to be faithful.” Or this: “A man’s ideal is most of the things most men want to come home to—slippers, drawn curtains, a bright fire, peace, praise, comfort, and a good, hot dinner.” So said the fat man, long estranged from his wife, who was journeying to party in San Francisco. The article also included a peculiar musing from Arbuckle: “It is very hard to murder or be murdered by a fat man.”
As the ride progressed, Arbuckle, an avid baseball fan, may have chatted about Babe Ruth, for if baseball came up, Ruth surely did. He was in the midst of the best year of his vaunted career. Alcohol may have been consumed during the lengthy trip. The basement of Arbuckle’s Los Angeles mansion was stocked with the finest liquors, and twenty bottles were along for the ride. More could be purchased in San Francisco—despite the fact that Prohibition was the law of the land.
The Eighteenth Amendment had been in effect for nearly twenty months, so buying, transporting, or selling any drink with more than a tinge of alcohol could earn you a stiff fine or six months in a brick room. But for the wealthy, like Roscoe Arbuckle and the planets that revolved around him, the main effect was to impart drinking with a sheen of outlaw glamour. There were passwords and secret knocks, private shindigs and underworld connections. Drinking was a pursuit worthy of a 350-mile excursion, and though the charms of illegal imbibing were bringing more and more women into nightclubs, such an excursion was cause to leave the wives at home. After all, there were women in San Francisco.
Along with Tijuana, where alcohol was still legal, San Francisco was a common weekend destination for Roscoe Arbuckle. He had lived there in his teenage years, employed as a singing waiter at an exclusive café. In April 1915 he directed and, with frequent comedic foil Mabel Normand, costarred in a nine-minute film, Mabel and Fatty Viewing the World’s Fair at San Francisco, Cal. It featured the rotund star clowning with San Francisco mayor (and California’s future governor) James Rolph, and it presented “the Grand Dame of Union Square.” Intertitle: “HOTEL ST. FRANCIS, ONE OF THE LARGEST HOTELS ON THE WEST COAST.” An establishing shot presented Union Square with its ninety-seven-foot-tall Dewey Monument, and then the camera panned up and rightward to take in the great height and breadth of the hotel, as wide as a city block.
The St. Francis was not merely one of but the largest hotel on the West Coast—and, with the nearby Palace Hotel, one of the two most prestigious lodging destinations west of the Mississippi River. The 450-room St. Francis was modeled after the great hotels of Europe, and after two years of construction at a cost of $2.5 million, it was an immediate sensation when it opened in 1904. Construction of a third wing began soon thereafter to meet the demand for rooms. The fire following the 1906 earthquake decimated the hotel’s interior, but the building suffered no structural damage, and the Grand Dame of Union Square reopened twenty months later. (In contrast, the older Palace Hotel had to be torn down and rebuilt.) In 1913 a fourth wing upped the room total to 629.
The St. Francis featured pneumatic tubes by which rooms could exchange messages with the front desk. Rooms also had their own telephones, a rare high-tech luxury for travelers then. Engines in the basement fed vacuum outlets in each room, replacing the hotel’s air with fresh air every eight minutes. The hotel had its own orchestra, which played on the mezzanine; its own school for young guests; its own Turkish baths with heated saltwater pumped in from the bay. Its most distinctive feature was the ten-foot-tall Magneta grandfather clock from Vienna, which controlled all other clocks in the hotel. When the St. Francis became the place in San Francisco to be seen, the clock’s location in the resplendent rococo lobby was a popular meeting place, celebrated in lore.
The Hotel St. Francis was also the place to eat. From 1904 to 1926, Victor Hirtzler was the head chef.* His menu was noted for its encyclopedic variety: traditional French dishes, American favorites, and local foods like bay oysters, artichokes, and avocados. Breakfast options included 203 egg dishes, among them “eggs Moscow” (poached eggs stuffed with caviar). By publishing cookbooks, naming dishes like “celery Victor” after himself, and scoring publicity for greeting celebrity guests, Hirtzler became the most famous chef in America during his twenty-two years at the St. Francis. He was the Wolfgang Puck of the Progressive Era.
As the St. Francis was celebrated for its grandeur, unique luxuries, and cuisine, it attracted the rich, famous, and powerful. The list of those who stayed there before September 1921 includes Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, and Woodrow Wilson and such Hollywood celebrities as Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, John Barrymore (who tumbled out of a bed during the 1906 earthquake), and Cecil B. DeMille. The hotel’s brochure in the early 1920s listed three famous guests, likely chosen to represent the variety of mega-celebrities who slept and ate there: World War I commander General John Pershing; Billy Sunday, the most celebrated evangelical preacher of the era; and Roscoe Arbuckle.
In the late afternoon of Saturday, September 3, Arbuckle’s “gasoline palace” pulled up beside the four granite pillars that marked the entryway to the Hotel St. Francis. Arbuckle’s live-in secretary had reserved three adjoining rooms in the south wing of the hotel’s uppermost floor, its twelfth:
1219, a rectangular room with one window facing south, a
bathroom, and a closet
1220, a larger, squarish room with one window facing south and one facing east (toward Union Square and, a mile away, the bay), and a fireplace but no bathroom or closet
1221, another rectangular room, with two windows facing east and one facing north (toward the center wing), and a bathroom but no closet
Each room had a door connecting it to the hallway, and doors connected 1219 to 1220 and 1220 to 1221. Room 1220 was typically used as a second bedroom for either 1219 or 1221, thus the absence of a bathroom, but on this weekend it also lacked a bed. Instead, a single bed for Fishback was added to 1219, while Arbuckle slept in the room’s double bed. Sherman slept in a double bed in 1221. Room 1220 was their lounge, with furnishings including a couch and a love seat.
That Saturday evening, a deliveryman carried four bottles of gin and Scotch from nearby Gobey’s Grill into the St. Francis and up to the three rooms on the southeast corner of the top floor. If the hotel staff noticed, nothing was said, for alcohol was a common commodity there. One unpublicized feature of the hotel was a fully stocked speakeasy in the basement.
On Sunday, after an afternoon of sightseeing in Arbuckle’s Pierce-Arrow and visiting with Bay Area friends, Arbuckle and his two movie industry companions dined and danced at the Tait-Zinkand Cafe, located just one block from their hotel. Along with the restaurant in the Hotel St. Francis, Tait’s was one of the two most prestigious dining destinations in the city. The café also had a cabaret show, and alcohol was served to discreet customers. The three patrons from Los Angeles stayed late.
Lowell Sherman invited one of Tait’s chorus girls, Alice Blake,* to come to the top floor of the St. Francis for drinks the next day. Twenty-six-year-old Blake was the daughter of a prominent Oakland flour-mill magnate. At age seventeen in 1912, she made the news for her elopement and, at her father’s behest, the marriage’s prompt annulment. She had high aspirations for a dancing and acting career and, in accepting Sherman’s invitation, probably envisioned the hotel social affair as a Hollywood networking opportunity. She had a dancing rehearsal the next afternoon but agreed to stop by the hotel suite beforehand.
That same Sunday evening, three other visitors from Los Angeles checked in to the nearby Palace Hotel: small-time film publicist Alfred Semnacher, his friend Maude Delmont, and film actress Virginia Rappe. The German-born Semnacher was forty-three years old and had been estranged from his wife for nearly a year; he had filed for divorce because of her “undue attentions” to another man, and the hearing was scheduled for a Los Angeles courtroom on September 15. Semnacher had known Delmont for years and ran into her a few days earlier leaving the Pig’n Whistle restaurant in Hollywood. She was either thirty-eight or thirty-nine. She admired his car, and he suggested a trip. Semnacher also invited his friend Rappe to ride along and stay a week in San Francisco. Rappe, who turned thirty that summer, had been spending too much time alone. A vacation in her former home of San Francisco sounded invigorating. Maybe she could catch up with old friends; maybe she could foster new friendships. Semnacher introduced her and Delmont just before the trio headed north.
Also staying at the Palace Hotel was Ira Fortlouis—an unlikely catalyst for Hollywood’s greatest scandal. He was a thirty-four-year-old salesman from the Northwest. He formerly sold hardware and sewing machines but was now focused on women’s clothing. And he knew Fred Fishback.
On Monday morning, Labor Day, Fortlouis was just about to leave the Palace for an 11 AM meeting with Fishback when he saw Semnacher, Delmont, and Rappe in the lobby. Forever on the lookout for women to model the gowns he sold, he asked a bellboy about the dark-haired and stylish beauty in the striking green outfit and was told she was “Virginia Rappe, the movie actress.”
At the Hotel St. Francis, Fred Fishback invited Fortlouis into the twelfth-floor suite. Fishback was fully dressed, but Sherman and Arbuckle were still in pajamas and robes. The four men chatted, and Fortlouis asked if they knew an actress he had just seen in the Palace lobby: Virginia Rappe. All did, having encountered her on a studio set or at a Hollywood party. Fishback phoned the Palace and had an attendant hand Rappe a note, inviting her over to 1220. Rappe told Semnacher and Delmont, “I’ll go up there, and if the party is a bloomer I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
Around noon, Rappe entered the suite. A former model and fashion designer, she wore the same self-made clothes she had at the Palace: a jade skirt and jade sleeveless blouse over a white silk shirt adorned with a string of ivory beads. Her hair was up and under a white Panama hat trimmed with a thin ribbon of jade.
Twenty minutes later, Rappe spoke to Delmont by telephone. It wasn’t yet much of a party, but there was plenty of alcohol. At her invitation, Delmont came up. Shortly thereafter, another guest arrived: Alice Blake, the chorus girl Lowell Sherman had invited the night before. Blake was followed twenty minutes later by her friend Zey Prevost, also a chorus girl, a brunette in her midtwenties, and an aspiring actress.* Unlike Blake, however, Prevost came from modest means; she was a child of Portugese immigrants. At the time of the 1920 census, she lived in a hotel and worked in a cafeteria pantry.
“Let’s have some music, a piano or something,” Rappe suggested.
“Who can play a piano?” Arbuckle asked.
No one. And so Arbuckle ordered a Victrola, which the hotel staff delivered with some 78 RPM records. From the phonograph’s brass horn wailed the tinny clamor of popular songs like “St. Louis Blues” by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra’s “Everybody Step,” and “Ain’t We Got Fun?” as sung by Van and Schenck. This last song, released in April, was quickly becoming the devil-may-care anthem of the Jazz Age. “Times are bad and getting badder, still we have fun.” They drank. They danced.
Around 1:30 PM, Fishback left. He took Arbuckle’s Pierce-Arrow to a nearby beach to observe seals he was considering shooting for an upcoming movie. There were then four women and three men in 1220. Arbuckle asked Sherman to tell one of those men, Fishback’s acquaintance Ira Fortlouis, to leave. The traveling salesman had overstayed his welcome. He departed.
Shortly after Fishback took the car, a friend of Arbuckle’s named Mae Taube arrived at the party. Taube was the wife of a cattle buyer and the daughter-in-law of popular evangelist Billy Sunday, who was a vocal proponent of Prohibition. The day before, Taube had stopped by the suite and Arbuckle had invited her to take a ride in his Pierce-Arrow that Labor Day. Arbuckle later described her as “peeved” to find a party in full swing.
“Who are all these people?” she asked.
“Search me. I don’t know them,” Arbuckle replied.
But he did introduce Taube to Rappe. Not wanting to join the drinking, Taube agreed to return later for the promised ride. Meanwhile, Al Semnacher appeared with the intention of picking up Rappe and Delmont, but both women were having too much fun to leave; Rappe was drinking orange blossoms (Arbuckle’s favorite cocktail), and Delmont was wearing a pair of Sherman’s pajamas and downing a great many double scotches. Instead, Semnacher drove Alice Blake the one block to her dance rehearsal at Tait’s. Upon discovering the rehearsal was canceled, Blake returned to the party a short time afterward.
Blake’s need to attend a rehearsal was probably the initial reason for the Labor Day gathering’s early launch, and the gathering was likely intended as a pre-party get-together. Arbuckle had planned to spend the early afternoon taking Mae Taube for a ride, and most invited guests were scheduled to arrive at the suite later in the day. But as the afternoon wore on and the drinking continued, the prelude became the main event. Present then were Arbuckle, his suitemate Lowell Sherman, chorus girls Alice Blake and Zey Prevost, and Virginia Rappe and her traveling companion Maude Delmont. Ice, orange juice, and food were brought in. The deliveryman from Gobey’s Grill returned to drop off twelve additional bottles of booze—most from Canada, some moonshine.
Arbuckle remained clothed in pajamas and a plush purple bathrobe. His attire would later be used to pai
nt him as sort of a Jazz Age Hugh Hefner, a circumventor of society’s norms. Perhaps the pajamas did signify that he hoped to be out of them and into bed with one of the women. With Delmont putting on a pair of Sherman’s pajamas, supposedly because she was hot, and Sherman presumably still in pajamas himself, it had become a sort of pajama party. Still, Arbuckle wore a thick brocade robe over silk sleepware: a long-sleeve shirt and long pants. The robe reached his ankles. It would have revealed no more flesh than a suit and tie.
In one-on-one conversations, Arbuckle was prone to shyness, but he came alive when performing before a group—whether in a vaudeville theater, on a movie set, or at a party. He knew how to command an audience, regaling all with humorous showbiz tales, clowning about with a drink in one hand and cigarette in the other, and fox-trotting to jazz records on the Victrola. “Roscoe liked nothing better than playing host to all comers,” Buster Keaton recalled.
Arbuckle jokingly announced he would leap out of one of 1220’s two windows if anyone there would join him. “If I would jump out of the twelfth-story window, they would talk about me today, and tomorrow they would go to see the ball game. So what is in life after all?”
Ain’t we got fun?
At some point, Arbuckle and Rappe sat together on a sofa. They likely talked about the movie industry. His acting career was now soaring, while after some initial promise, hers was sputtering. They had moved in the same Hollywood circles. They knew some of the same people—especially movie director Henry Lehrman. He had been Rappe’s boyfriend for two and a half years. The relationship had halted with an argument that spring, but emotions were still simmering. Early in his film career, Arbuckle had been directed by Lehrman many times. Rappe may have thought getting to know Arbuckle better could boost her career, as had her relationship with Lehrman. Movie industry success was often launched via personal connections.