Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood

by Greg Merritt

  At the time, Arbuckle and Minta Durfee were living with her family, and local vaudeville bookings had dried up. The newlywed husband was anxious to prove he could provide, even if it meant the star singer was reduced to doing mime work in the debased medium of flickers. At Selig, he earned the going rate of five dollars daily, a pittance when compared to future Hollywood salaries but acceptable (the equivalent of about $125 today) for what surely seemed an easy effort compared to a day of performances onstage.

  By Arbuckle’s second film, Mrs. Jones’ Birthday, he was starring. He played a husband who keeps comically breaking the presents he buys for his wife. The New York Dramatic Mirror noted, “The Jones of the picture is a fat fellow, a new face in picture pantomime, and the earnestness of his work adds greatly to its value. There are times when he plays to the camera, but there are other actors more experienced than he in this line of work who do the same thing.”

  He did not tell his wife where the daily five dollars came from, but following a tip, one morning Durfee and her mother took the next streetcar after his to find Arbuckle in a red satin shirt and a cowboy hat with a guitar, playing to a hand-cranked box camera. “My God! They’re making a motion picture!” Durfee exclaimed, as if catching her husband in flagrante delicto.

  Seeing them, a furious Arbuckle shouted, “Go home! Go home!” Later, his mother-in-law asked him why he had hidden his work, and he answered, “Because I didn’t want Minty to know or to come down there. I’m afraid they will ask her to work. They need people, but I’m not going to permit her to work there. It isn’t show business. I’m ashamed of this kind of work, but we need the money.” He later said of film acting in those early years, “Then, there was nobody breaking in. Everyone was doing as I did—sneaking in.”

  Earlier in 1909, Arbuckle had been a member of a theater troupe that staged plays based on fables and literary works at Los Angeles’ Auditorium Theater. Most of them lasted only a week, allowing him to hone his still-raw acting skills in a variety of roles. He was a singing baron in Cinderella, one of two robbers (together forming an id-like wolf) in Little Red Riding Hood, and the blackface title character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Most of his reviews were positive, though the Los Angeles Times quipped, “[He] sings much better than he acts.”

  Also in the Auditorium company with Arbuckle was Walter Reed, a veteran vaudevillian who highlighted his Irishness in his comedy. The two men decided to form a partnership. This was a second chance for Arbuckle after failing to deliver the laughs when he paired up with Pete Gerald three years prior. With more practice, he was by then growing confident in his comedy.

  In May 1909 Reed and Arbuckle were booked into the Orpheum Theater in Bisbee, Arizona (three years before statehood), just ten miles from the Mexican border. With gold, silver, and copper discovered in abundance in the Mule Mountains that surrounded it, Bisbee had blossomed into one of the liveliest of the mining boomtowns. In the early 1900s the residents numbered over twenty thousand, mostly men, and when not shoveling ore, those men wanted to forget about shoveling ore. Drinking, gambling, and whoring were the most popular pursuits. The notorious Brewery Gulch contained a sinner’s row of some fifty saloons, bordellos, and opium dens that never closed. Bisbee was the West at its wildest.

  It was no place for a lady, so Arbuckle’s wife stayed in Los Angeles. But her mother admonished her, “You wanted him, you married him, and you’ll go where he goes.” Durfee boarded a train heading east and moved into a Bisbee boarding house with her husband. She became a principal member of the Reed & Arbuckle company, acting and singing, sometimes in duets with her husband. The company changed its musical comedies every few days, staging such plays as King Slodo (described as an “Oriental burleque [sic] operetta”), A Tip on the Derby, and the minstrel Way Down South, with Arbuckle as Uncle Rastus.

  Like a Las Vegas entertainer booked at a casino for an extended run, Reed & Arbuckle made the Orpheum its venue for most of 1909. There the performers ingratiated themselves with the mining executives living up high in the exclusive “Quality Hill” houses. Arbuckle sang solo at an Elks Club funeral, he and Reed serenaded and boxed three comical rounds (declared a draw) at an Eagles Club affair, and the entire company sang at a country club “dinner and smoker.”* Other times they bonded with the miners who lived in the valley in crowded barracks. Reed was the timekeeper and Arbuckle the play-by-play announcer at an Orpheum wrestling match attended by seven hundred “enthusiastic followers of the game” in which the Swedish champ defeated California’s best, the Big Indian. Arbuckle was a fixture in Brewery Gulch saloons, much to Durfee’s consternation, and they both regularly visited the new Warren Ballpark, where the Bisbee Muckers baseball team played. Arbuckle guest umpired one game. After another game, the press noted, “Roscoe Arbuckle and the rest of the Orpheum bunch were again on hand making things lively in rooter’s row, especially the ladies. Arbuckle gave a free eccentric dance act when his hopes ran high in the seventh. None of the thespians ever miss a game and are among the loyalist [sic] of the loyal legion.”

  Other than a stint in northern Mexico performing for American miners, the Reed & Arbuckle company remained in Bisbee for eight months. After their final, standing-room-only performance on December 27, the Bisbee Daily Review wrote, “At the close of the performance, members of the entire company lined up across the stage and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as a fitting climax to their long, successful engagement here. The company left yesterday for Clifton, and Bisbee will now be a ‘sure enough’ lonesome town during the intervals between road shows.” Clifton was another mining boomtown, also in the Arizona Territory. The Reed & Arbuckle tour of the Southwest wound down.

  By the spring of 1910, Walter Reed was back in Bisbee. Arbuckle and Durfee were back in Los Angeles and living with her parents again. Arbuckle organized his own vaudeville company, writing, producing, and starring; Durfee had supporting roles. They played the Princess Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, cranking out three shows daily (3:00, 7:45, 9:15), seven days a week, changing the content weekly. The brutal schedule persisted from late April to mid-July, and the shows earned positive reviews. A newsman later recalled:

  I remember [Arbuckle] when he was a third-rate comedian playing down at a cheap little burlesque house on Main Street. He used to come climbing and blowing onto the old Main street car after the show was over. I remember how it used to embarrass him, yet sort of please his vanity, to be looked at by the people on the late car. He had about as much chance, then, of being rich and famous as he had of being turned into a little baby lamb with a pink ribbon around his neck.

  At the end of his Princess Theatre run, worn down by the manic pace of producing and performing in twenty-one vaudeville shows weekly, Arbuckle decided to focus solely on his acting. He did his fourth Selig movie in the fall of 1910, The Sanitarium, of which Variety wrote, “It may have been slammed together in the night.” And he joined the Burbank Theatre stock company, acting in dramas and musical comedies.

  At home, Arbuckle and his wife were sharing space not only with Durfee’s parents but also with her seventeen-year-old sister, Marie; her thirteen-year-old brother, Paul; and a thirty-five-year-old male lodger. But Arbuckle was content with the arrangement. He grew especially fond of his mother-in-law and brother-in-law. Flora was more fostering of him than the mother he had lost when he was twelve. Paul was the younger sibling he’d never had.

  He played baseball and tag with Paul and other kids, or they pitched corncobs at tin cans and other makeshift targets. Durfee remembered, “Roscoe’s swinging off the street car was always a ‘come on’ for the kids in the neighborhood. They would yell, run and jump on him. We always had studying for the next week’s role and song to do, but watching him tumbling on the grass, throwing a baseball or playing marbles made you know he had very little fun in childhood.” In contrast to an early life filled with abuse and neglect in which he entered the workforce young, the adult Arbuckle found the childhood he had desired: a loving mother and father,
and siblings and friends who wanted nothing more than to play with him. The man-child he was when frolicking with the neighborhood kids would have a great influence on his big-screen persona.

  Around the same time, the industry that would make Arbuckle famous was also beginning to coalesce into a now-familiar form. In 1910 the Selig Polyscope Company established the first permanent movie studio in Los Angeles. With nearly 320,000 residents, the city was then in the midst of a population explosion. Having tripled its numbers over the past decade, it would nearly double them over the next decade, and much of the growth between 1910 and 1920 would be due to the industry and glamour of film production.

  In addition to its mild weather, Southern California provided movie producers with a landscape appropriate for virtually any story: deserts, forests, mountains, lakes, and ocean, from endless vistas of undeveloped chaparral to a rapidly industrializing metropolis. Los Angeles was also a nonunion town, flush with new laborers eager for any job; the craftsmen necessary for constructing stages, sets, costumes, and, ultimately, movies, pocketed as little as half as much as they did in New York. Land, too, was cheap. Soon every American movie studio of note would establish its base in or around Los Angeles, while former East Coast giants like Edison went bust.

  After Selig, the second film company to set up a permanent base in Los Angeles was Nestor, which relocated from New Jersey in October 1911.* The studio opened up shop in a region of Los Angeles known as Hollywood. Named in 1887 in a quest to boost land sales and incorporated in 1903, Hollywood had been annexed by the city in 1910. When Nestor opened up shop there, it was a landscape of orange and lemon trees, dotted with the occasional plantation-style residence. A trolley car track traversed the middle of the dirt boulevard. No one would have suspected then that this sleepy community of citrus farmers would soon become a worldwide synonym for moviemaking.

  The launch was ominous. On the day Nestor’s studio opened, the film industry suffered its first major tragedy when over at Selig Polyscope, a caretaker burst into a meeting between William Selig and his director Francis Boggs. (Selig had only arrived from Chicago the night before.) Brandishing a revolver, the caretaker fired five times, hitting Boggs twice and Selig once. Forty-one-year-old filmmaking pioneer Francis Boggs died on his way to the hospital. Selig survived the incident. The murderer was quickly captured, but he offered no explanation then and no sensible motivation at the trial before spending his remaining twenty-six years in prison. Thus, the genesis of Arbuckle’s cinematic career is also linked to a tragic death of mysterious circumstances, this one occurring on the day Hollywood as we know it was born.

  Arbuckle and his wife joined the traveling troupe of Ferris Hartman, a veteran vaudeville performer and producer whose name was synonymous on the West Coast with first-rate revues. A new show opened every Sunday, sometimes without a rehearsal. Arbuckle won star billing, typically singing two solo songs, performing in two dance numbers, and acting in two scenes. Despite his size, he was a lithe dancer; he was the everyman with surprising talents. Advertisements for a stop in San Jose boasted, “Special Appearance of Roscoe Arbuckle, San Jose’s favorite.” It’s unknown if he visted his father while he was in the area, but the younger Arbuckle seems to have repudiated his abusive parent after leaving home at seventeen.

  On a train to Sacramento in September 1911, Durfee experienced cramps. She soon discovered she was pregnant, but her and her husband’s ecstasy was short-lived before she suffered a miscarriage. They were devastated. Arbuckle blamed himself, as he reflexively did when bad things happened to those around him. Afterward, Durfee stayed in Sacramento for a week alone to convalesce while the tour moved on to Denver. They were young. They were certain they would have other opportunities to be parents.

  When the company reached Chicago, it was the furthest east Arbuckle had ever been and his first visit to America’s second-largest market. Contrary to the legend that Chicago was Arbuckle’s Waterloo, Hartman’s troupe had a critically and commercially successful run there. Afterward, the Arbuckles returned to Los Angeles before heading to the Bay Area again for Hartman’s next production. In the summer of 1912 a review of an Oakland performance noted “a nice little chap named Roscoe Arbuckle” and effused, “He is a positive scream, one of the funniest fat farceurs that has caused chortlings for many a month.” Once again, he was being discovered—though now it was his comedy and not his singing that earned praise. After years of practicing, he was as comfortable delivering a pratfall or punch line as he was belting out songs.

  Though only twenty-five, Arbuckle had worked in theater for a decade, singing, dancing, joking, and acting for his supper, and he must have thought true fame and fortune would always elude him. Whether on the road—sleeping in hotels and rooming houses and train cars—or living in his wife’s parents’ house, employment was forever fickle, always at risk of being terminated without notice. He seemed destined to be a theatrical lifer, mostly eking by but sometimes not, and always addicted to the same bright lights and greasepaint and applause that had first hooked him when he was a boy looking for a place to belong.

  The new offer from Ferris Hartman was stunning on two accounts. First, it was an opportunity for the Arbuckles to see exotic places to which few Americans ventured. Second, Arbuckle was the headliner, and the entire Caucasian American cast would, at times, be playing Asians before Asian audiences in Asia. In fact, Hartman himself had been shocked by the offer, made by a Manila-based American tycoon, to take his company on a tour of the Orient; perpetually in debt, Hartman had to scramble to assemble the necessary cast, costumes, props, and scripts. The troupe of forty-three singer-actors, dancers, musicians, and stagehands set sail on August 12, 1912, on a Pacific Mail steamship headed west. It was a protracted voyage over seven thousand miles of ocean. One room was occupied by the Arbuckles.

  Durfee later remembered their excitement in the journey’s early days: “Roscoe and I made it a habit to stand together at the rail late at night, staring at the running sea. We were extremely close at those moments, closer perhaps than at any other times in our lives. We were happy, truly happy.”

  They docked in Honolulu. Hawaii was then a US territory with a governor and an abdicated queen. At the premiere performance, Queen Lili’uokalani—herself a songwriter, musician, and singer—was coaxed from her royal box to center stage, where she gracefully performed a native dance. During their three-week stay on Oahu, Hartman said, he and his troupe were “serenaded by bands and royally entertained.” Arbuckle, always an avid swimmer, swam in the surf, sometimes with Olympic swimming gold medalist Duke Kahanamoku.

  Hartman’s company sailed next to Japan, performing in Yokohama and then Tokyo. Though Japan was racing forward with electric streetcars and gasoline automobiles, rickshaws dominated on many streets. The Japanese often stared at Arbuckle, for a man of large girth was presumed to have equally great wealth. The company performed Hartman’s old favorite, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. The all-white cast were made up to look Japanese, with Arbuckle as the title character (mikado means “emperor”). It was a hit.

  In Shanghai, which was then the “Paris of the East” with a melange of cultures and American and British districts, members of Hartman’s company were surrounded by begging children in the street. The contrast was stark between the impoverished majority in the new Republic of China and the native and foreign aristocracy who attended the performances. Reviews complimented Arbuckle in blackface as “a quaint old negro servant” and in a love scene with his wife.

  There was more romance between the Arbuckles onstage than off. Memories of the “extremely close” moments on the voyage over had dissipated. Months living in strange cities far away from Durfee’s family had taken their toll. Frequently after a show, Arbuckle drank with others in the company, then returned intoxicated to Durfee and complained about his insufficient salary as the show’s star. He argued with her and shouted about how much better things would be had they stayed in California. If the voyage there
had been their marriage’s best of times, his drunken fits in the Far East were some of its worst.

  The tour rolled on to two westernized cities: Hong Kong and Manila. The company remained in the Philippines for six weeks, Christmas included, and Arbuckle contracted a throat infection, probably initiated by his late-night carousing. He later all but confirmed this when he blamed it on an incident in which he “barked at a dog who barked at me.” Three weeks of shows had to be canceled, causing his popularity with the company to plummet. This, in turn, compounded his insecurities and gloominess. Above all, he wanted to be liked by his coworkers, and his drinking was largely motivated by his desire to fit in with them. The final performances were in China again, Tientsin and Peking. On January 31, 1913, Hartman’s troupe boarded a ship headed east.

  When the ship docked in San Francisco twenty-five days later, the Arbuckles had been away from their home country for six months. The couple spent time sightseeing in Northern California, repairing a marriage that had been frayed by Arbuckle’s temper tantrums and brooding in China and the Philippines. Then they took a train south. Having traveled further than most Americans then or now, across the Pacific and through the Orient, they had many stories to tell, but the ride south to Los Angeles was bittersweet. Their luggage was loaded with exotic gifts for Durfee’s family, but the money for their train fare was borrowed. The Far East tour had provided an order and purpose to their careers, and Arbuckle had been the star—a role that had at times gone to his head. But they were poorer for it. And now they were unemployed.