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

by Greg Merritt

  In the wake of the Arbuckle trials, the public became increasingly interested in the private lives of Hollywood celebrities, and movie star coverage grew more intrusive. Gossip columns, filled with even the most pedestrian trivia, occupied a full page of many local newspapers.* In addition to savoring tales of glamour and just-like-us banalities, readers were curious about the private foibles of actors—the whisperings about what went on at parties and in bedrooms.

  A book published in May 1922 entitled The Sins of Hollywood: An Expose of Movie Vice was authored by “a Hollywood Newspaper Man,” who was revealed, by a counterattacking movie industry, to be Ed Roberts, a former editor at Photoplay. The Sins of Hollywood was ruled “too scurrilous” to be sent through the mail, which only aided its legend. Proving you can judge a book by its cover, this one is adorned with an illustration of a Hollywood starlet, a movie camera, and Satan. Inside, actors and actresses are bestowed barely disguised pseudonyms, though their phony names often are accompanied by actual photographs, just so there’s no confusion.

  Rudolph Valentino is “Adolpho,” alleged to be a former gigolo. Mabel Normand is “Molly” and Mack Sennett is “Jack,” and one chapter relates how their relationship reached its violent end with help from Mae Busch (merely called Mae). (Normand’s drug use is also alluded to in the chapter “Dope!”) And then there is “Rostrand,” a certain movie star recently tried three times for manslaughter, who is featured in the must-read chapter “Making Sodom Look Sick.” In his introduction, Roberts explained why he collected the book’s “true stories”:

  To the boys and girls of the land these mock heroes and heroines have been pictured and painted, for box office purposes, as the living symbols of all the virtues. An avalanche of propaganda by screen and press has imbued them with every ennobling trait. Privately they have lived, and are still living, lives of wild debauchery…. Unfaithful and cruelly indifferent to the worship of the youth of the land, they have led or are leading such lives as may, any day, precipitate yet another nation-wide scandal and again shatter the ideals, the dreams, the castles, the faith of our boys and girls.

  And so to protect the ideals, dreams, castles, and faith of children, Roberts sought to make certain Rostrand was never again seen as the symbol of any virtue by recounting this tale of dogs gone wild:

  Rostrand, a famous comedian, decided to stage another of his unusual affairs. He rented ten rooms on the top floor of a large exclusive hotel and only guests who had the proper invitations were admitted. After all of the guests—male and female—were seated, a female dog was led out into the middle of the largest room. Then a male dog was brought in. A dignified man in clerical garb stepped forward and with all due solemnity performed a marriage ceremony for the dogs. It was a decided hit. The guests laughed and applauded heartily and the comedian was called a genius. Which fact pleased him immensely. But the “best” was yet to come. The dogs were unleashed. There before the assembled and unblushing young girls and their male escorts was enacted an unspeakable scene. Even truth cannot justify the publication of such details.

  In newspapers, there had been previous mentions of a dog wedding at Arbuckle’s house, but the preceding “unspeakable scene” seems to have been, at the least, a public consummation of canine nuptials. It furthered the image of Arbuckle living a life free of any moral restraints—precisely the sort of “mock hero” to keep off movie screens, separate from impressionable youth.

  Fatty Arbuckle says he is broke, that it took all his fortune to see him through the three trials. Perhaps he may be forced to go to work for a while.

  —AN UNSIGNED EDITORIAL COMMENT IN A SMALL-TOWN

  WASHINGTON NEWSPAPER, JUNE 23, 1922

  Roscoe Arbuckle declined offers to appear on vaudeville stages and instead tried to return to films. He wrote a short comedy script, “The Vision,” for Buster Keaton and sold it to Joseph Schenck; Arbuckle was also set to direct. The movie was never made. When Photoplay editor James Quirk wrote him a letter of encouragement, Arbuckle wrote back, again stating his case but also strategizing: “You can be of real service to me by writing Mr. Hays, asking him to lift [the] ban and telling him that my innocence of the charges placed against me in San Francisco justifies your request.” Not just Quirk but also representatives of the country’s theater owners lobbied Hays for Arbuckle’s reinstatement. Meanwhile, some felt Hays had not done enough. Senator Henry Lee Myers denounced Arbuckle on the floor of the US Senate in an argument for film censorship, stating, “At Hollywood, California, is a colony of these people, where debauchery, riotous living, drunkenness, ribaldry, dissipation, free love, seem to be conspicuous.”

  In June Minta Durfee left that colony and journeyed to New York City to live with her sister. Arbuckle denied that his wife had deserted him and claimed she would return when he could support himself again. He lived in the West Adams mansion with Lou Anger and Anger’s wife, who were now renting it from Schenck.* He spent too much time at home, feeling sorry for himself. Al St. John later remembered his uncle sitting alone for hours in a car in the garage of the house he no longer owned, shifting gears but never moving. At Keaton’s insistence, Arbuckle sometimes visited Comique and assisted his friend on his latest comedy short. But there were too many hours in a day to fill. The man who in September had sworn off booze forever was drinking again. (By this point, raucous hotel parties were known as “Arbuckle parties” and orange blossoms were called “Arbuckle cocktails.”)

  Arbuckle remained generous with money even when he owed more than he had. Besides Keaton, his closest friend was the suave matinee idol and notorious womanizer Lew Cody, who recalled, “Once when we were both pretty broke, I had a chance to go to New York to work. I managed to borrow enough to buy a ticket. Just before the train pulled out, Roscoe came aboard and after he’d said goodbye he handed me an envelope. ‘Don’t open this until after the train starts,’ he said. ‘It’s just a letter telling you what a lousy actor I think you are.’ When I opened the envelope, two $1000 bills dropped out. He’d borrowed the money here, there, and everywhere. That’s the kind of a pal Fatty was.”

  He also found the money for a trout-fishing vacation in Vancouver, British Columbia, and in August, he sailed from San Francisco for the Orient he had visited ten years before. Among those accompanying him was his attorney, Milton Cohen. “I need a rest and intend to take it easy and, at the same time, see some other parts of the world,” he told reporters in San Francisco before departing. “I’ll come back to the United States in due time and then will be my opportunity to decide what I’m going to do. It’s entirely up to the people—the people who see the movies and who used to be—and I think, again will be—my friends, whether I return to the screen or not. Maybe I’ll get back to making comedies, but I don’t know. San Francisco doesn’t make me feel very funny and I can’t say right now.”

  He planned to visit the Middle East and Europe, but after slipping down steps and cutting a finger on the initial sea voyage, he made it no further than Japan. An infection set in, requiring surgery in Tokyo and generating a flurry of front-page stories.* Though he was greeted warmly in Japan, the injury had soured his mood, so he halted the trip and journeyed back across the Pacific. He said his time in the Orient had convinced him California was a good place to live.

  “Fatty” Arbuckle was a movie “goat.” While he escaped conviction in court he was crucified by public sentiment which demanded that somebody be made to pay for the loose lives of too many of the movie stars. It was just Arbuckle’s misfortune that the choice fell upon him. It might have been anyone of a number of others no better than he. A little more than usual vulgarity and an accident directed selection of Arbuckle. So he is paying for all.

  —FROM AN EDITORIAL IN A SMALL-TOWN WISCONSIN

  NEWSPAPER, NOVEMBER 22, 1922

  A malaise had clouded Hollywood during Arbuckle’s trials and the investigation into William Taylor’s murder, and it was felt most acutely at Paramount, where Arbuckle had been the top acto
r and Taylor one of the top directors. Then came a third blow. After Arbuckle’s arrest, Wallace Reid stepped in as the studio’s biggest star. His six-foot-one, athletic physique and dashing good looks had elevated him to leading roles. While in Oregon in 1919, starring in a film, Reid was injured, and Jesse Lasky sent a company doctor north. The movie star was soon addicted to morphine.

  Strung out, he worked at a breakneck pace, headlining in physically demanding roles for Paramount, seven each year in the first three years of the 1920s. Alcohol was another addiction. Sometimes the crew had to literally prop him up to capture shots, and his habits were well known in Hollywood and to those who got their hands on The Sins of Hollywood, in which “handsome Walter” is sort of patient zero in the “Dope!” chapter, supposedly hooking many of his fellow actors on cocaine and opium at his “dope parties.”

  On September 19, 1922, Reid’s wife admitted him to a Hollywood sanitarium for treatment. And nine days before Christmas, Hollywood’s worst-kept secret broke on front pages. WALLACE REID CRITICALLY ILL, “DOPE” BLAMED, screamed the Chicago Tribune. In Los Angeles to meet with studio executives, Will Hays visited Reid on December 19 in a padded room in the sanitarium. Hays said the cinematic heartthrob, then weighing a decimated 130 pounds, was recovering, but Reid would die a month later, on January 18, 1923.

  The morning after visiting Reid, before he boarded a train with his wife and son heading to Sullivan, Indiana, for Christmas, Hays issued a statement on another matter.

  As surprising as it was for Hays to bar Arbuckle from movie screens, it was more shocking when he reinstated him eight months later. On December 20, 1922, Arbuckle received what the press called an early Christmas present when Hays dropped a grenade disguised as a statement:

  Every man in the right way and at the proper time is entitled to his chance to make good. It is apparent that Roscoe Arbuckle’s conduct since his trouble merits that chance. So far as I am concerned, there will be no suggestion now that he should not have his opportunity to go to work in his profession. In our effort to develop a complete co-operation and confidence within the industry, I hope we can start this New Year with no yesterdays. “Live and let live” is not enough; we will try to live and help live.

  The grenade would go off shortly thereafter.

  In his memoirs, Hays claimed he reinstated Arbuckle only after long deliberation:

  It was not my wish that he again become a movie actor, as many at the time professed to believe, nor was I exuding sentimentality for a comedian whom I had never met. I merely refused to stand in the man’s way of earning a living in the only business he knew…. It did seem to me that if work could be found for the man as a comedy director, perhaps, or as a technician, it was not my job to bar him from such a chance. In a spirit of American fair play, and I hope of Christian charity, I proposed that he be given a chance.

  In fact, the April 18 banishment had been vague, merely stating that at Hays’s request Paramount had “cancelled all showings and all bookings of the Arbuckle films.” That said, with Paramount shelving two unreleased Fatty features, the implication was clear: don’t work with Arbuckle. The December 20 “pre-Christmas pardon” was clearer: Arbuckle’s films are again welcome on-screen, and producers are free to employ him.

  Hays had received pressure to make this reversal from theater owners eager to screen Fatty films; from studios other than Paramount, worried about the precedent of the MPPDA hampering profits; from editorialists; and from letter-writing members of the public. Still, there was no major groundswell of public support. Perhaps Hays had simply heard from enough sympathetic industry people while in Los Angeles. With the trials long over and Arbuckle’s association with Paramount a faded memory, Zukor and company had gotten what they wanted from the banishment and likely had no concerns about their previous comedy superstar beginning an association with a new studio.

  Hays later professed, “It seemed a relatively commonplace decision to me, and I anticipated no such excitement as ensued…. But for the next three months it became a cause célèbre … as newspaper editorials and civic leagues presented me with every public building in the country, brick by brick.”

  Those bricks, and lots of them, would start to bombard Hays before December 20 was done, but first there was euphoria. Arbuckle rushed into Schenck’s office at 10 AM, seeking confirmation of what he had heard from reporters and so excited that he was, the Los Angeles Times reported, shaking and “stammering so badly that he had difficulty in making himself understood.” What he’d heard was true. A brief formal statement from Arbuckle was drafted and handed out to the press: “Mr. Hays has made his decision. It is my intention in every way to live up to what Mr. Hays expects of me.” A perfectly bland pronouncement, stripped of any sense of triumph, from a man who was then experiencing the heights of exuberance.

  “I cannot say just now how soon we can get a picture for him or what kind of pictures he will make,” Schenck said. “Stories do not come out of thin air, and we must have something suitable to him, something in his character. I have received many telegrams today from all parts of the country congratulating me and Arbuckle. People have been saying nice things over the phone. I believe the American public is just, and that it has come to realize that Arbuckle should be back on the screen.”

  Around the time Schenck said that, the Los Angeles Federation of Women’s Clubs held an emergency meeting and passed a motion calling for Arbuckle to never again appear on-screen. The Illinois Motion Picture Association promptly announced that Fatty movies would not play in any of its theaters. His cinematic image wasn’t welcome in Michigan’s theaters either. Or in Boston or Indianapolis. And on and on. In many cases, municipalities merely reasserted bans that had been in place since shortly after his arrest. Protesting telegrams deluged Hays—from religious groups, women’s groups, teachers’ groups.

  Two days after their hasty statement, Illinois theater owners reversed it, deciding to let Arbuckle’s films screen—if the public wanted to see them. The same “let the people decide” edict was enacted in New York and California. The Motion Picture Directors Association, which under the late William Taylor had been ardently anticensorship, held a lengthy emergency meeting and, after a contentious debate, passed a controversial resolution that did not mention Arbuckle but stated “that under no circumstance should any person or persons who by their actions have proven a menace to the well-being of our industry be tolerated or excused.” Responding to pressure from women’s clubs, the mayor of Los Angeles vowed to keep Arbuckle off his city’s screens. He telegraphed his protest to Hays, as did many other politicians. On December 23 Hays responded with telegrams of his own, claiming he was not reinstating Arbuckle but would not stand in the way of him making a living. The equivocation pleased no one.

  Arbuckle released a statement that appeared in newspapers on Christmas morning. “All I ask is the rights of an American citizen—American fair play,” it began, before rehashing his acquittal and then arguing that those “who are unjustly, untruthfully, maliciously and venomously attacking me are refusing to abide by the established law of the land” as well as “a higher law.” In regards to the latter, the previously irreligious Arbuckle (or whoever wrote his statement) had much to say, quoting scripture and accusing his ministerial critics of ignoring the spirit of the Bible. He asked what his opponents would have thought of Jesus forgiving the penitent thief: “Would not some of these persons have denounced Christ and stoned him for what he said?” Arbuckle asked if Christianity was about charity or “a thing of only teeth and claws.” In conclusion: “The sentiment of every church on Christmas Day will be ‘Peace on Earth and good will to all mankind.’ What will be the attitude the day after Christmas to me?”

  The day after the day after Christmas, the San Francisco Federation of Women’s Clubs met to urge Hays’s banishment of Arbuckle in order to make an example “of those who brazenly violate the moral code of a Christian nation.”

  Theatrical producer Arthur Ham
merstein offered Paramount $1 million for the two never-released feature films as well as the barely released Gasoline Gus. When that was refused, he offered to exhibit the features for only 10 percent of their profits, so confident was he that they would be successful. Referencing a screening of an Arbuckle movie in New York City two days earlier, Hammerstein said, “The crowd was so anxious to see him that they nearly broke down the doors. Whenever people are told they ought not to see a certain thing that’s the very thing they are most eager to see.” Paramount did not budge.

  Over the final days of 1922, Arbuckle journeyed to San Francisco. There his former defense attorney Gavin McNab and financiers organized a company with $100,000 of funding to produce Fatty movies in Los Angeles. Subsequently, Arbuckle wrote the script for a two-reel comedy, Handy Andy.

  The debate raged into the new year. Hays selected the members of an advisory group of religious and civic leaders, but he disagreed with their resolution urging him to advise producers against releasing any Fatty movies. After a long conference with the committee, Hays issued his “final statement,” saying that he was leaving it up to the public, Arbuckle’s employers, and Arbuckle himself, and that in doing so he was removing himself as judge.

  Perhaps it would have been different had Arbuckle never been banned. Perhaps he could have weathered the initial outrage regarding his return to movies, and the protesters would have grown quieter over time and silenced with the popularity of new Fatty features. Instead, he had escaped punishment from the courts only to receive it from the movie industry, and by reversing its sentence eight months later it appeared as if that industry suddenly condoned his booze-fueled “orgy.” The two decisions together could seem like a whitewash: let Arbuckle have some time off to jaunt about the world and then let him return to cinematic stardom like nothing had happened.