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

by Greg Merritt

  Further, the state pointed out that Arbuckle did in fact speak on the evening of September 9 soon after learning of Rappe’s death, and he gave a story very different from the one he later told under oath. Over the telephone, he told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter “there were no closed or locked doors [to 1219],” and “Virginia Rappe threw her fit in the presence of everyone, and that it was after she had thrown her fit she was taken into the other room and disrobed.” That corresponds to what he told the Los Angeles Times that same evening, and it was his story for the next approximately twenty-four hours. Before he came to San Francisco, he gave a telephone statement to the San Francisco police: “We sat around and had some drinks and pretty soon Miss Rappe became hysterical and complained she could not breathe and began to tear her clothes off…. At no time was I alone with Miss Rappe. There were half a dozen people in the room all the time.” This also matches the statement he released to the press upon arriving in San Francisco on the evening of September 10.

  Analysis: Arbuckle’s delay in telling his second version of events may have been a strategy to concoct an appropriate tale for the criminal trial, but he may also have wanted to tell the authorities and preliminary juries about his assisting an ill Rappe but been cautioned not to by his counsel, since it was a tale fraught with more land mines than his original never-alone-with-her deflection. Either way, he was exercising his right to remain silent, as instructed by his first defense attorney, Frank Dominguez, and his silence should not weigh on opinions of his truthfulness.

  It’s much more significant that his second version of events (the only one told under oath) does not resemble his first and that the first version is patently false. These are major strikes against Arbuckle’s credibility. The initial lies of September 9 and 10 may have simply been the quickest way he could think of to hopefully dodge bad publicity, and thus they do not necessarily negate his later, more complicated, and much different version of events. Still, since he was lying from the start, it leads one to wonder when, if ever, he was telling the truth.

  After, Part 1

  Accounts of what occurred after Arbuckle opened the locked door to 1219 begin with a key disagreement.

  State

  Delmont, Prevost, and Blake stated that Arbuckle only opened the door after Delmont kicked it repeatedly.

  Defense

  Arbuckle insisted he opened the door without provocation in order to find Delmont, who was not located right away.

  Analysis

  As Delmont never testified in the criminal trials and many questions were raised about Prevost and Blake’s multiple statements, it is difficult to determine the truth. Certainly, Arbuckle had a greater motivation to lie than Prevost or Blake. However, he and Rappe had been behind a locked door a relatively short period of time (despite Delmont first claiming an “hour,” as if to motivate her actions), and no cries or other noises were heard from Rappe to provoke Delmont’s alleged door-kicking. Still, Delmont may have been influenced by her own drunkenness (she admitted to drinking “eight or ten” whiskeys), and she may have lost track of time while in 1221’s bathroom with Sherman. The kicking story is likely more truthful, but it remains in doubt.

  After, Part 2

  Next, Delmont, Prevost, and Blake entered 1219 to find Rappe on the double bed in great pain and barely conscious. The events that immediately followed are only partly agreed upon.

  Consensus

  The women moved Rappe from the double bed to the single bed because the double bed was wet, and when Rappe began tearing at her clothes, they helped her remove them. Arbuckle reentered the room, followed by Fred Fishback, who had just returned to the hotel. Arbuckle helped Rappe remove her arm from a sleeve of her dress because she was tearing at it. He left the room again.

  With assistance from Prevost and Delmont, Fishback carried the naked Rappe into the bathroom for a cold bath, meant to comfort her pains. Afterward, he carried Rappe back to the single bed. (In some versions, he holds her upside down by her feet.) What occurred next is disputed.

  State

  When Arbuckle reentered 1219, the moaning Rappe supposedly said, “He hurt me,” to which Arbuckle said, “Aw, shut up. I’ll throw her out the window if she doesn’t stop yelling.” When ice was used by Delmont to comfort the naked Rappe, Arbuckle inserted an ice cube into Rappe’s vagina, saying, “That will make her come to.”

  Defense

  When Arbuckle reentered 1219, Delmont was rubbing the naked Rappe with ice. There was a piece of ice on or near Rappe’s vagina. He picked it up and asked, “What’s this doing here?” “Leave it here. I know how to take care of Virginia,” Delmont answered. He put it back and started to cover Miss Rappe with a sheet. Delmont told him to leave, and Arbuckle told her, “Shut up, or I’ll throw you out the window.” Then he left.

  Analysis

  Here we have two of the most notorious features of the case, the ice incident and the “Throw her out the window” comment. Neither version reflects particularly well on Arbuckle, but as witnesses attesting to the state’s version included Al Semnacher, who heard Arbuckle commenting about the ice in a crude manner the next day, it seems most likely the state’s version is truer. Whether Arbuckle placed the ice in, on, or near Rappe’s vagina remains in doubt, but the defense tacitly accepted that their client initiated the “icing” in the first trial as they dismissed it as a “collateral incident.” In addition, such an act fit with Arbuckle’s sense of humor, which could be much coarser than what viewers saw in his movies.

  It is true that a wanton disrespect for Rappe’s body could be consistent with a sexual predator. However, if he had injured Rappe while initiating a sexual assault, it seems unlikely he would soon thereafter have demonstrated to witnesses such disrespect for her body. Ultimately, it was indeed a collateral incident, indicating something about Arbuckle’s character but nothing about his guilt or innocence. Similarly, the “Throw her out the window” comment could highlight a disregard for the pained Rappe, but it might also be the sort of crass comment—whether directed at Rappe or Delmont—a man concealing his guilt would not make.

  After, Part 3

  The two sides largely agreed on what transpired after the “icing.”

  Consensus

  Arbuckle and Delmont put a bathrobe on Rappe. Mae Taube had arrived. She called the front desk, and assistant manager Harry Boyle came up to the suite. From Boyle, Arbuckle secured another room, 1227, just down the hall, and he carried Rappe most of the way there before handing her to Boyle, who carried her the remainder of the way to 1227’s bed. Boyle called the hotel doctor, Dr. Kaarboe, who attended to Rappe in 1227 and diagnosed that she had drunk too much alcohol and merely needed to sleep it off.

  Down the hall in 1220, the party continued. There Boyle told Arbuckle the doctor had seen Rappe and concluded nothing was wrong. Boyle left. Arbuckle took Taube for the long-promised ride in his Pierce-Arrow. Others came to the party. Delmont and the hotel detective finished off the gin and orange juice. Arbuckle returned to the party and that evening went out for dinner and dancing. He didn’t check on Rappe or inquire about her. The next he heard of her, four days later, she was dead.

  Analysis

  The state portrayed Arbuckle’s partying while Rappe lay dying as criminal callousness, but if he assumed, as an innocent man would and as he had been told, that Rappe was sleeping off her alcohol, his actions were not inappropriate. A guilty man might be more concerned about Rappe’s health and what she might be saying to others about what occurred in 1219, but by outward appearances she slipped from Arbuckle’s mind.*

  Conclusion

  Ultimately, the state’s version of events seems more likely than the defense’s, and yet it fails to hold up on the crucial question of Arbuckle’s criminality. What is most curious is that Rappe lived for four days after Labor Day, and yet she never implicated Arbuckle in the sort of assault the state alleged. She never said she tried to escape out 1219’s other door, where the handprints were supp
osedly so damning. She was never heard to scream or shout for help while in there either. Even Virginia Breig, the Wakefield secretary, who only came forward at the third trial, did not claim to have heard Rappe say in the hours before her death that Arbuckle acted without consent. “Arbuckle took me by the arm and threw me on the bed and put his weight on me, and after that I do not know what happened,” Rappe allegedly told Breig. Was it an act of violence or an act of mutual passion? Maid Josephine Keza claimed to overhear a female in 1219 saying “No, no, oh my God” and a man telling her to “shut up.” But even if true, this did not necessarily indicate a crime. The judge at the preliminary hearing suggested these words might instead indicate the shifting boundaries of passion.

  Over the two days that Rappe lay in a bed in room 1227, she was treated by three nurses: Jean Jameson, Vera Cumberland, and Martha Hamilton. Here we have witnesses, sober professionals, with whom Rappe, after sustaining her injury, may have been inclined to talk candidly. They had no known biases toward either the state or the defense. Hamilton testified to hearing nothing specific about the cause of the injury. Jameson and Cumberland testified at the coroner’s inquest, there providing the most reliable accounts of Virginia Rappe’s “testimony.” (As their accounts differed from both the state’s and the defense’s contentions about what occurred in 1219, neither side called them to testify at the three criminal trials. Furthermore, their coroner’s inquest testimony was never highlighted in the press.)

  According to Jameson, “Miss Rappe told me that relations with her sweetheart were responsible for the ailment from which she had been suffering. She was very anxious that the party and what had occurred there be kept from Henry Lehrman, who she said was her sweetheart. As she expressed it, he would throw her down if he found out. She said she had been suffering for six weeks from internal trouble. She frequently asked me, ‘What could have broken inside of me?’ She asked me several times to determine if she had been assaulted. She said she was unconscious.”

  Said Cumberland, “The patient admitted to me that her relations with Arbuckle in the room had not been proper. She did not say whether her actions had been voluntary or involuntary. She said that she had been living with Henry Lehrman for some time and that several months ago she and Lehrman had had a quarrel and that he had gone to New York. She was very anxious that what happened be kept from him.”

  It is unclear what Rappe could have meant in Jameson’s account when she brought up “relations with her sweetheart.” But she likely thought her pain was emanating from her vagina, and thus she may have believed it was caused by previous sexual relations with Lehrman, or she may have wanted the nurse to think that. The “internal trouble” was likely her cystitis. Cumberland’s account is more telling, as Rappe admitted she and Arbuckle had improper relations, likely meaning kissing and caressing. The fact that she did not say such relations were involuntary means they were more likely consensual. Interestingly, both accounts emphasize her being “very anxious” about keeping her behavior at the party from the volatile Lehrman.

  This is likely what occurred between Roscoe Arbuckle and Virginia Rappe on Labor Day of 1921. They had been seated together and talking in room 1220, he in his pajamas and purple robe, she in her jade skirt and blouse. They were flirting. When she couldn’t get into the bathroom in 1221, he watched her enter 1219, the bedroom he shared with Fishback. He followed her in there and locked the door. She had not yet entered 1219’s bathroom, or she had just entered and she exited when Arbuckle made his presence known. They began to kiss. They may have pressed against the hallway door, leaving handprints there. Passions inflamed. Kissing, embracing, he guided her to the double bed and shoved her onto it, and he fell on top of her. Then, when his weight came down on her abdomen—or soon thereafter when, in the throes of passion, he elbowed or kneed her in the abdomen—her distended bladder ruptured.

  And she blacked out. Her loss of consciousness, mentioned in one way or another by virtually everyone who spoke to her subsequently, may seem an unlikely and convenient coincidence, but as the state correctly pointed out, loss of consciousness immediately after the rupture of a distended bladder is a common occurrence, because of the resulting drop in blood pressure.

  Arbuckle used water (frozen or not) in an attempt to revive her. She came to, groggy and pained. And, whether or not it was being kicked, he opened the locked door. Having blacked out moments after her bladder ruptured, Rappe was uncertain what had happened to her. She would naturally question whether something had been done to her while she was unconscious to cause her subsequent pains. “She asked me several times to determine if she had been assaulted.” Further, the actions she could remember were ones she did not want to be known beyond the nurses in whom she confided. She especially did not want them known by Lehrman. “The patient admitted to me that her relations with Arbuckle in the room had not been proper.”

  After Rappe’s death when the press and police were enquiring, Arbuckle feared that the truth was a slippery slope. Would they believe that his interaction with Rappe was consensual? What would the movie-going public think of this still-married man engaging in boozy foreplay with a starlet in a hotel room? He must have even wondered how she could have been terminally injured and why she had blacked out. There had to be some other explanation. And so he first lied that he had never been alone with her. Later, when it fit the testimony of the state’s witnesses, there came another explanation, a more elaborate lie—the story of Arbuckle aiding the nauseous Rappe.

  The preceding scenario would not fit the definition of involuntary manslaughter—homicide committed without malice but in the perpetration of an unlawful act. That was the charge ultimately leveled against Arbuckle when the murder charge didn’t stand. The unlawful act in the state’s allegation was a sexual assault that was halted by Rappe’s injury and resulting loss of consciousness, but the state produced no evidence, not the bruises nor the handprints nor the ruptured bladder, directly tying Arbuckle to such an assault. Other witness accounts of what Rappe allegedly said, such as “He hurt me,” did not preclude that their interaction was consensual.

  That’s not to say he was entirely blameless. He was guilty of perjury for his concocted Good Samaritan story. He may have been worthy of some condemnation for his alcohol-fueled (Prohibition-era) pajama party with showgirls, and he certainly was for the ice incident if, as seems most likely, he made inappropriate contact as a joke. Indeed, he may have been guilty of all the state charged. Or something less. The interactions of Arbuckle and Rappe may have been consensual until the final moments, and then signals may have been misinterpreted or disregarded. The “assault” may have started and ended with a fall on a bed.

  In any case, based on what the prosecution knew and did not know, Roscoe Arbuckle should never have been tried for manslaughter and certainly never branded a murderer and a rapist. Further, he should never have been painted as a monster by the press and blacklisted by the film industry.

  There were but two people in that room, and neither of them knew that one of them had suffered a bladder tear until after she was dead. We can never know for certain what happened behind the locked door of 1219 on Labor Day of 1921, other than the fact that one person endured an injury there that resulted four days later in the loss of her life and eventually led to the destruction of her reputation. The other person suffered horribly for that death, perhaps justly, perhaps even escaping true justice, but most likely unjustly. Most likely, in the scope of society’s condemnation, it is one of the greatest injustices to a career and a reputation ever perpetrated.

  * He had previously joked about jumping out one of those windows.

  * In contrast, when “Roscoe Arbuckle Tells His Own Story” was published a month later, Rappe’s apparent pain when she was in the bathroom and when she was between the beds were described in the same terms, making it seem more likely she was injured in the bathroom.

  * Arbuckle made this point in his initial statement to the Los Angeles Times th
e day Rappe died: “To show how serious we thought it was, I and the other men danced in the hotel that night.”

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  DENOUEMENT: 1932-33

  ARBTJCKLE FILM BRINGS ARREST

  The board of motion-picture censors of Portland [Oregon] today ordered the arrest of Andrew Saso, manager of a theater, on the ground that he had shown a motion-picture featuring Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle. Films featuring Arbuckle have been barred by city ordinance since October 15, 1924.

  —Los ANGELES TIMES, DECEMBER 14, 1932, FRONT PAGE

  Arbuckle had enjoyed an accomplished and lengthy career onstage, first singing and later telling jokes. His rich voice would have been ideal for radio, if anyone had dared to give him such a chance, but most of his American fans never heard him utter a word before his initial sound film was released in November 1932. Hey, Pop! was his first starring movie role in over eleven years. Warner Bros. had been especially careful, returning him to his customary on-screen getup (oversized pants, undersized bowler) and frequent secondary costume (a dress) and a slapstick plot and gags reminiscent of his two-reelers from the 1910s. The only addition was dialogue, which Arbuckle handled admirably.

  Shorts like Hey, Pop! ran before feature attractions and typically weren’t advertised on marquees or in newspapers. Thus, Arbuckle’s comeback film created little controversy, garnering some positive reviews but mostly screening unnoticed. There was by now a new generation of movie stars and movie fans. The transition from silence to sound had marked a gaping demarcation, marginalizing silent comedians and their sight gags.*