The spread of this conventional narrative produced a surprising turn of events. As newspapers embroidered stories from Arbuckle's alleged proclivity for outsized hedonism, the event shifted from a “gay” booze party to an “orgy” presided over by a host likened to Falstaff, one of Shakespeare's most complicated villains.33 A surrogate for disorder, crime, and license, Falstaff's corpulent form embodies the power that flows from smashing custom and convention. A dazzling Fool, he draws strength from puncturing the platitudes of his surrounding society. The “ORGY” exposed the true character of “Yesterday's Jester,” the fat jolly man who had once prompted only “childish chirps or wee anticipatory sighs.” Arbuckle stood revealed as a “thorough Bohemian” whose working-class origins and rapid success left him grossly unfit for public renown.34 “Sated with money,” his success provided the means to bathe “his decadent soul in every fountain of viciousness.” A former “PLUMBER” and “$3-a-Day-Super [stage extra],” Arbuckle had rejected his parents’ pleas to become a minister or a doctor and joined the “travelling circus as a stepping stone to the stage.”35 Once a star, this “beast from the gutter” had used his fame to entice Rappe to his party, where he declared, “I've waited for you five years and now I've got you,” before dragging her into his hotel bedroom.36
FIGURE 26. Rappe warns her sex about the dangers of “too much liberty.” Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, Sept. 14, 1921, Night Extra. Courtesy of Chronicling America, Historical Newspapers, Library of Congress.
Cast as the “Victim of [the] Orgy,” the presentation of Rappe shifted to suggest a modern woman driven by her own dangerous passions. Having fallen prey to “the fascinations of the motion picture ‘game,’ “ Rappe was “lured by stardom” and “motion picture advancement” into taking a gamble that “hundreds of thousands of girls” who “forever dream” of the screen would make.37 In short, “ambition led her to play with fire,” though she ultimately “refused to pay [the] price.” Before attending the party, she had confessed to Delmont, “He [Arbuckle] says he's got a chance to get me something better in the movies and maybe it's a chance to make a star out of me . . . but I'm afraid. I don't like that man.”38
FIGURE 27. Coverage of “movie orgies” consumed newspapers in 1921–1922. Evening World, Sept. 16, 1921, Racing Final, p. 2. Courtesy of Chronicling America, Historical Newspapers, Library of Congress.
Newspapers’ eagerness to read the event as an orgy complicated the simpler modernized melodrama of sexual danger with which most began. As the event unfolded, changes in the behavior and testimony of the women witnesses also made the earlier narrative difficult to sustain. The prosecution's “star witness,” now referred to as “Maude Bambina Delmont,” dramatically changed her description of the party before the coroner's grand jury on September 14. Gone was the tale in which Arbuckle forced Rappe into his bedroom, where she cried for help. Now she told a story in which the two, somehow, ended up in one of the suite's bedrooms, causing her to knock on the door an hour later because it “didn't look ‘nice.’ “ The two “show-girl witnesses” also altered their testimony amidst charges of blackmail and intimidation by District Attorney Brady.39 The coverage in Hearst papers, which turned to playing up the orgy angle unceasingly, included ever more inventive visual displays, such as one of “show girls” who “WALKED INTO [ARBUCKLE'S] PARLOUR” and got entangled in his “web.”40 The revelry that apparently resulted spilled just outside such pictures’ frames.
The more accounts described the party as a sensational sexual orgy, the more space opened up to see it as a bawdy, consensual revelry. “Warm with dancing” and with the ten drinks she admitted to consuming in two hours, Delmont had changed into a pair of actor Lowell Sherman's pajamas. Under oath in court, guests described a “royal good time, dancing and kidding and drinking,” with Arbuckle “at the center” of the “clowning”—until Rappe fell ill.41 The press also circulated a new history for Rappe, presenting her character as more “tragic,” “pathetic,” and, ultimately, more morally questionable.42 Her biography now described her as the illegitimate child of an actress and either a “British nobleman” or a “Chicago financier.” Her mother, a “queen of the night” who “reaped what she had sown,” reportedly died from tuberculosis, leaving the ten-year-old “an orphan cast adrift in the world.”43 After establishing herself as a model, Rappe set off in 1914 on a “pleasure jaunt” to Europe, startling passengers on the ship home with a “Nightie-Tango” performed with a girlfriend. A broken love affair led Rappe to start afresh. “I am going to California” to “ ‘make good’ in the ‘movies,’” she announced.44 Although depicting Rappe as a plucky survivor who rebounded after her tragic start, her questionable, exotic origins presented a much less innocent personality than before.
These stories made it difficult to maintain the gendered dichotomies—of passive, pure women ravaged by licentious men—that supported the moral coherency of the initial tale. A chorus of editorial comment quickly declared the evolution of this more complicated ethical landscape to be the real moral of the story. “What's Gone Wrong with [the] World Today?” asked the headline of an article by Annie Laurie, one of Hearst's most popular syndicated columnists.45 According to Laurie, the world's problems stemmed from girls’ rejection of “their right to shelter and protection” and “the old ideals” that buttressed this entitlement. “The spirit of true womanhood—the homemaking, home loving, home protecting spirit that has pulled the race up out of savagery” had become passé. The journalist expounded the point the next day, in “Old Rules for Girls Supplanted by New,” a piece one minister called “the ablest article growing out of the whole tragedy.”46 “Ten years ago, any girl who would go to a man's room in a hotel, party or no party, would have thrown away her good name the instant the fact of her visit was known,” Laurie lamented. Yet Laurie cautioned readers not to judge Rappe before they judged themselves. “Your daughter or my daughter would probably have jumped at the chance to meet this man,” now bent on using “his money and his influence and his ‘celebrity’ to hush the whole matter up.” A front-page story in the New York American offered a similar view. “Orgies in City Ready to Stage a New Tragedy,” it declared, warning that “the tragedy of Virginia Rappe just happened to be staged in San Francisco,” but could take place in any city. A statement issued by the coroner's jury on September 14 indicated that the jurors had taken the lesson to heart. After recommending an indictment of manslaughter, its members called on both federal Prohibition officers and local law enforcement to “take steps . . . so that San Francisco shall not be made the rendezvous of the debauchee and gangster.”47
By framing the “orgy” as a quotidian occurrence, not merely an incident involving the exceptional residents of the movie colony, newspapers offered a morality tale on the grandest scale. This story linked a specific example of single young women attending a hotel party without fearing for their good names, to a general assertion about the degeneration of moral standards in cities everywhere, making society the villain for allowing young women freedoms that threatened the “civilized” world.48 “At last something has shocked the very, very soul of our nation,” wrote one reader in Los Angles.49 According to an English clubwoman, “the scandal at San Francisco” sparked an international moral crusade. By inciting the United States to fight so that “good will overcome evil,” the scandal's “moral effect spread around the world,” convincing the League of Nations to adopt stricter enforcement laws against white slavery.50 Here, Hollywood—as a social environment populated by trendsetting stars—represented not a scapegoat for modernity's failures, but a symbol of the country's guilt and need for reformation. “Film characters,” an editorialist declared, were “public characters. The Los Angeles colony has been setting the style for the rest of the country. . . . Keeping up with Mary [Pickford] is as strenuous as ‘Keeping up with Lizzie [the Model T Ford].’ “ Little wonder that girls like Rappe thought it acceptable to go Hollywood, so to speak, and succumb to similar seduc
tions of “wine, women, and song.”51 The fact that Arbuckle's films had been considered morally innocuous strengthened the argument that the industry's threat lay not just with its “sex pictures” but with its celebrity culture more broadly, which glamorized modern attitudes to fans around the world.52
Yet this reassertion of a traditional melodrama of sexual danger quickly prepared the way for another one whose villain was better suited to the tastes of many: the idea that Hollywood directly bore responsibility for Rappe's death. The industry's rapidly deteriorating fortunes displayed the effects of viewing Hollywood as the scoundrel that had unleashed the evils associated with modernity. The stock of Paramount, which now handled Arbuckle, dropped from $80 to $40 a share just weeks after the news of Rappe's death hit newsstands. “It is impossible for the people now in control of pictures to borrow money or even carry on with any certainty,” a banker reported. Variety warned that “society leaders,” including Henry Ford, were hatching “schemes designed to take the business of purveying amusement to the masses . . . away from those at present in control.”53 “If this keeps up there won't be any motion picture industry,” Louis B. Mayer confided to King Vidor.54
Industry insiders and Los Angeles's city leaders and residents quickly crafted diverging counternarratives about the event's significance. On one side stood censorship advocates in Los Angeles aligned with the national forces supporting Anglo-Christian Americanism, folks who feared that Hollywood's foreign producers and lower-class celebrities had replaced respectable cultural custodians in deciding what counted as fashionable and fun.55 Readers of the Los Angeles Times wrote letters protesting how the adulation showered on Arbuckle displayed “the rewards of an undiluted democracy” conferred on “motion picture lowbrows” who transformed “liberty into libertinism.”56 Only a censorship board could preserve the influence of the city's ministers, “foster and develop Christian citizenship,” and protect “a thousand years of Anglo-Saxon development.”
Indeed, many ministers in Los Angeles viewed the event as heavensent since only days before news of Rappe's death broke, the Ministerial Union had petitioned the Los Angeles City Council (LACC) to activate a never used ordinance to create a censorship board.57 Seeking to use the scandal to propagandize their cause, the union called a meeting on “the Arbuckle case and motion pictures censorship.” There a “row” broke out when the union's president, Reverend Gustav Briegleb, charged that “the industry” was “on trial.” “The tendency of the producers is to make immoral pictures,” he asserted, adding that “85 per cent” of the industry was “controlled chiefly by the Jews and that some of the later care only for the money they make and not the moral effect of their business.” The response of Captain Edmundson, pastor of Hollywood Methodist Episcopal Church and chaplain for the state's American Legion, created a ruckus. Refusing to be ruled out of order, Edmundson protested Briegleb's “aspersions” against the industry's “Jews and actors and actresses.” The meeting then ended abruptly, amidst much hymn singing. “By innuendo and direct statements [Briegleb] attacked the Jews and I, who have many friends among the Jews, do not propose to let such attacks go unchallenged,” Edmundson later told the Times. Hollywood's pastor would not “let only one side of the censorship and motion picture industry be presented, even at a ministerial meeting,” he said, objecting to “a jury packed against me [that] should Amen and Hallelujah me down when I had the floor.” Briegleb observed that he merely stated the facts, since “gentlemen of Hebrew extraction” who “consider[ed] only box office receipts” controlled the business.58
Other voices championed the industry's lively cosmopolitan influence on Los Angeles. A letter to the Los Angeles Times dismissed the uproar as a “yowl” caused by “sordid envy” and “jealousy” toward the industry that “made Los Angeles such an interesting city.” The newspapers “reek every day with filthy, sordid divorce cases and crimes . . . in no way connected with picture folk,” another letter admonished, yet “not a word is said about the class or profession of the people who wallow in this mud.”59 Indeed, several letters wondered why the sensational, violent stories that composed so much of mass-produced popular culture escaped censure. The “righteous” who “berate the movies” loved their “evening paper which in a single issue” contained “more filth, more suggestions of indecency, more stories of illicit love, of rape, of murder, of robbery, than you would see in a picture house in a twelvemonth.” A letter to the LACC criticized the anti-Semitism that, the writer believed, explained the double standard, decrying the “sanctimonious gentlemen who worship a Jew on Sunday and spend the rest of the week maligning the Jews generally.” A petition submitted to the LACC that opposed film censorship lampooned the proposed board, demanding the creation of “a body of Censors of Oratory and Pulpits” since ministers sought “to enforce their religious beliefs, or their ideas of morals, upon all the other residents.”60 Both the Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants and Manufactures Association came out strongly against punishing the industry. In a variety of ways, the business community sought to remind residents over the following weeks that the industry was one of the “main sources of our prosperity.”61
While remaining silent on a national level, film producers defended the industry's reputation locally by prodding the business community and Chandler's Los Angeles Times for just such support. “The present moment represents a crisis in our business,” declared an open letter in the Times from the Motion Picture Producers Association (MPPA).62 The MPPA called on “the daily press,” business associations, and “open minded members of the community” “to come to our aid in crystallizing public opinion” against censorship. Such a measure, the association warned, would “impose a heavy burden” “on possibly the greatest enterprise in California.” It would also “give color to the belief in other communities that Los Angeles, known to the world as the ‘Capital of Filmdom,’ found it necessary to cast a stigma upon the picture business.” Such treatment would force the industry to leave town. Seemingly in response to the ultimatum, the coverage in the Los Angeles Times after the open letter shifted from offering readers scoops on the colony's wild ways to striking a more balanced tone than in other newspapers.63 Little more than one week after the scandal's eruption, the Times blamed the “mob spirit” against Arbuckle on other newspapers “printing every un-proven accusation” against the comedian.64 Yet the paper also recommended Arbuckle's sacrifice as Hollywood's stray “spotted sheep” to preserve the “white sheep” who predominated.65 In general, the Los Angeles Times presented Arbuckle as outside the pale of respectability while, overall, offering a wholesome picture of the city and its largest industry.66 The paper conceded that the “Arbuckle Incident” revealed that much more care was necessary to protect “girlish innocence” in Hollywood. But it also came out against censorship, cautioning the public not to confuse all picture folk with the comedian. Ultimately, it suggested the industry needed a chance to solve its own problems “honestly, enthusiastically, patriotically.”67
In general, the film industry orchestrated a hush on the topic of Arbuckle, “girlish innocence,” and all other matters pertaining to the scandal. Moving Picture World visualized the approach in “The Arbuckle Case,” a full-page notice that declared, “Enclosed in the Following Space Is Our Idea What Should Be Said by Everybody in the Moving Picture Business about the Arbuckle Case from Now Forth until the Entire Matter Is Settled.” Below, an empty box filled the entire page.68
Only one branch of the industry, the independent exhibitors allied in the Motion Picture Theatre Owners Association (MPTOA), openly discussed how to address the crisis. Martin Quigley, editor of the Exhibitors Herald, the MPTOA's trade paper, criticized the decision to hide “ostrich fashion.”69 In several articles, the Herald dissected the producers’ troubles: the U.S. Senate's call to investigate the “industry's ‘political activity’ “; the Federal Trade Commission's charge against Zukor's FPL/Paramount; and, finally, how the Arbuckle case was “seized as ammunitio
n by reformers.”70 The paper also noted exhibitors’ use of the scandal to challenge producers’ control. Just two days after news of the “death party” exploded, “Grauman's ‘Million Dollar Theater’ “ in Los Angeles yanked Arbuckle's Gasoline Gus. A cascading series of reports displayed other exhibitors’ willingness to do the same.71 Within weeks, the MPTOA ordered members to pull all of Arbuckle's and Rappe's films, contradicting the wishes of Paramount/FPL, which distributed Arbuckle's movies, and First National, which handled most of those in which Rappe appeared.72
Go West, Young Women! Page 24