Quigley's actions suggested a strategy designed to ensure both exhibitors’ independence and the industry's survival. The editor argued that the public's demand for “retribution” should be directed at “persons who have become light-headed in their positions of prominence and popularity.” Although probably innocent of the “alleged crime,” Arbuckle should be sacrificed for playing “loose and wild” with “the responsibilities of prominence” and getting “plain, every-day American citizens to wonder if they should lend their support to actors and actresses who are so degraded.”73 Next the industry must silence the “brass band” about “going into politics” and use subtler means of “propaganda and solicitation” “to insure a more favorable attitude from legislators.” And, finally, members must unite in the Herald’s “Public Rights League,” which offered exhibitors—free of charge!—twelve slides for “daily screening” to teach the public about the dangers of censorship. In direct imitation of the techniques employed during the war, the Public Rights League would use the screen to convince “millions of patrons to support the industry” by turning them against “enemies of the Film Industry” like “Dr. Wilbur F. Crafts.”74 To fight evangelical fire with fire, Quigley featured the nation's most popular evangelist, Billy Sunday, in one slide declaring that censorship was “un-American and unfair.”
II
But Hearst offered readers more exciting enemies that fall than radical Christian reformers like Reverend Crafts. Hearst newspapers ran mutually reinforcing melodramas on front pages during the slower scandal-related news week between the coroner jury's verdict and the opening of Arbuckle's arraignment trial, stories that alternated discussions of Arbuckle's “orgy” with exposés about the new Ku Klux Klan. Both presented a societal siege of apocalyptic proportions. Newspapers tailored some reporting to local audiences. Chicago featured more stories about Rappe, San Francisco more on police efforts to uncover a “S.F.-HOLLYWOOD ‘BOOZE RAILROAD.’” Yet mostly the coverage offered the same fodder for discussion, including the scandal-as-orgy, the spectacle of Rappe's burial in Hollywood Cemetery, and the campaign to reveal the “SECRETS OF THE KKK,” that “Anti-Jewish, Anti-Catholic and Alien Organization.”75 The mob spirit indeed reigned on the front page of the multiple editions Hearst published, offering readers a virtual experience of its frenzied pleasures. At times the two narratives combined, as with a story about the Klan's advice to the San Francisco district attorney: “Hang Fatty Arbuckle or the KKK will hang him and you.” “COWBOYS MOB ARBUCKLE FILM,” another headline blared. The story described a celluloid lynching performed by “150 men and boys” (falsely) reported to have shot up a screen in Wyoming and then burned the comedian's film in the street.76
Little wonder that Arbuckle was reported to be in “fear of the big throng” anticipated at the arraignment trial's opening on September 22, 1921. Photographs of the day displayed police restraining several hundred women and men pressing for admittance. The crowd prompted the trial judge, Sylvain Lazarus, to bar men without official business from the proceedings.77 More than concern about possible vigilante violence prompted the ruling. Lazarus sat in Women's Court, a new division within the criminal justice system designed to treat criminal cases by and against women as moral offenses that required special considerations and protections. Many also viewed Women's Court as a means for female jurors, a recent innovation in California, to gain comfort with the judicial system.78
California clubwomen drove the creation of Women's Courts, helping to explain why the Woman's Vigilant Committee (WVC) received a level of press attention that initially allowed it to shape the next act of the scandal's drama.79 An affiliate of the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), the WVC had a membership composed of socially prominent, middle- and upper-class women from fifty-two local clubs.80 Unlike those of its parent organization, the WVC's members were of all religious faiths. Its president, Dr. Mariana Bertola, was both a past president of the California Federation of Women's Clubs (CFWC) and a practicing medical surgeon who taught at Mills College. Bertola was the daughter of Italian immigrants who moved to the Bay Area in 1852, made money in mining, and created the region's first large vineyard.81 After earning a medical degree at Stanford, Bertola became a pioneer in the fields of obstetrics and pediatrics. Her success as a surgeon and philanthropist earned her a place as the only women in San Francisco: Its Builders Past and Present (1913), a two-volume local history of more than one hundred notable figures. As the San Francisco Examiner lavished attention on the WVC, Bertola assumed the role of spokeswoman to the press.
As other papers followed the San Francisco Examiner’s lead, the WVC initially appeared as a moral center in the scandal's storm.82 Demanding justice for Virginia Rappe, Bertola appointed a committee to monitor the proceedings to prevent the city's infamous political corruption, Arbuckle's wealth, and female witnesses’ assumed timidity from influencing the proceedings. In members’ own words, the WVC aimed to ensure that sexual assault laws were treated not just as a legal “theory, but a fact.”83 In fact, the WVC sought much more than this, linking these laws’ enforcement to the preservation of respectable middle-class gender roles and sexual morality. The case illustrated the need to protect “the sanctity of the home” and “the women within them,” Bertola declared, reminding the press, “Remember, it was in one of the most respectable places in San Francisco that this outrage took place.” The WVC asked Judge Lazarus to limit attendance to “mature,” “respectable” women after a disparate crowd of female “sensation seekers” jammed the courthouse steps for admittance.84 The WVC accused these women of treating the court proceedings like a play. Such behavior illustrated how preventing “a repetition of the awful Arbuckle case” demanded teaching such sensation seekers about the “dangers confronting them” so they might “return to the cultural things of life” and embrace “the so-called ‘old-fashioned’ ideals.”85
FIGURE 28. “Arbuckle Case Rouses California’s Women Vigilants,” Evening World, Sept. 13, 1921, Racing Final, p. 2. Courtesy of Chronicling America, Historical Newspapers, Library of Congress.
An article written by Bertola referred to the local history that described the WVC’s formation, prominence, and initial influence in framing the trial’s presentation. “The Arbuckle party was nothing better than a fashionable gangster case,” Bertola asserted.86 Even though the star had staged his “outrage” in one of the city’s “most respectable” and “luxurious” hotels, he was still no better than the “Howard Street gangsters.” Bertola alluded to a series of events that had culminated in a lynching a year earlier. Early on Thanksgiving 1920, a young woman named Jean Stanley called the police to report her recent escape from a group of men who were holding a friend captive on Howard Street. When the police raided the “cottage,” they found Stanley’s friend Jessie Montgomery alone, badly beaten, and “lying nude upon the floor.”87 Seventeen-year-old Jesse Montgomery and twenty-one-year-old Jean Stanley were roommates who worked as telephone operators after having moved to San Francisco in search of jobs months earlier. Before their hospitalization, the friends told “of having been subjected to brutal attacks by eight men.” The two had met their assailants the night before at a public dance hall, they explained. After offering the girls a ride home, the men enticed them into a small building on Howard Street with the promise of ice cream. There they were beaten and sexually assaulted. A week after Stanley’s call to the police, three police officers were shot and killed in Santa Rosa while attempting to arrest three of the alleged Howard Street “gangsters.” Later that day, guards barely repulsed a crowd of two thousand men and women armed with guns and telephone poles who attempted to storm the Santa Rosa jailhouse, chanting “lynch them, lynch them.” Four days later “100 masked men” overpowered the sheriff and his deputies during the night and hanged the suspects from a nearby tree.88 Calling the event “deplorable,” the governor promised to deal “adequately with the lynching band.” No arrests were ever made and the story sank precipitously f
rom sight.89
Instead, the lynching offered a means for leading San Franciscans to demonstrate their commitment to using respectable female virtue to destroy the vestiges of the city’s rollicking, Wild West past. In the following weeks, the Examiner turned to publicizing, and in crucial respects rousing, an attack on the political corruption and customs held responsible for the events.90 Emboldened by sympathetic stories in the press, other victims stepped forward to “relate outrages” that displayed the systematic tendency of the criminal justice system to ignore sexual assaults.91 “Progressive San Francisco” must finally “sweep away traditional barriers of complacency” that many argued explained Los Angeles’s meteoric rise as the West Coast’s leading metropolis. Showing impeccable timing, clubwomen now announced the creation of their Vigilant Committee.92 “Like the Vigilant Committee of early days,” an account memorializing the group intoned, “these women were assembled with haste to protect young girls of the community” and were “led by the valiant leader, Dr. Mariana Bertola.”93 When reports foretold that defense lawyers planned to put the reputations of the “Gangster victims” on trial, the WVC announced that its members would attend all sexual assault trials to ensure a focus on the men’s present criminal actions and not a woman’s past.94 Writing in support of their efforts, Hearst columnist Annie Laurie declared, “I do not believe yet that this girl was a bad girl, but even if she was, that is no excuse for refusing her or any kind of a woman protection against such revolting cruelty.” With Laurie as their champion, the WVC articulated what later became the standard feminist analysis of rape as a crime of violence in which a woman’s sexual history and reputation bore no part.95 Such efforts displayed the WVC’s determination to use women’s new political rights to punish men who violated society’s professed moral code.96 In addition to monitoring trials involving sexual assault, members organized a recall of two more judges and led an investigation of the charge that graft explained the justice system’s routine dismissal of sexual assault claims. “There is a new story teller—the woman voter—and she knows just exactly what she wants,” Laurie exulted.97
The actions of these respectable middle-class ladies displayed how their protection of their less well-off sisters warranted their curtailment of working-class women’s independence and economic opportunities. In the name of protecting women through restoring the preeminence of the home’s influence, the WVC mobilized a campaign to purify or shutter the city’s dance halls.98 Bertola succinctly described the effort’s rationale: places of commercial entertainment threatened to turn young women into “the perverted sex type.” The owners of dance halls faced losing their licenses unless they stopped women from attending without chaperones and fired the halls’ dance “instructors.” The scare quotes indicated the presumption that such women offered more than tango lessons.99 The city’s five hundred dance hall instructors fought back against these attacks on their livelihood and moral character. Seventy-five representatives, ranging from “eighteen to thirty years old,” “stormed” the WVC’s next weekly meeting. Did the WVC have comparable “work for each of us when you close the dance halls Friday night?” asked their leader, Helen Emick. Emick protested that members “lived clean lives and were dance hall instructors because of the good wages they received.”100 Bertola’s tone-deaf response exhibited her class privilege as she advised that, “if this was the case,” the women would make “wonderful educators.” Both the city’s mayor and the police commissioner refused to meet with Emick. But the dancers persevered. The jurors who convened to consider the closings were shocked by the dancers’ ordinary appearance when they again “stormed” the grand jury the next day. Declaring that these girls could not be “classed with redlight district habitues,” the jurors called for a “thorough investigation” before any more closings took place.101 Over the following six months, the WVC, reform-minded men, and the San Francisco Examiner also used the Howard Street Gangster case to spearhead drives that removed two Police Court judges and several police officers. Sylvain Lazarus—set to preside over Arbuckle’s arraignment in Women’s Court—replaced one of the recalled judges.102
Although the Howard Street case primed the WVC, many civic leaders, and San Francisco’s newspapers to view Arbuckle’s party as another sex-specific exercise in the abuse of power, the stories that unfolded in Lazarus’s courtroom complicated reading Rappe’s death this way. At the first of Arbuckle’s three trials, the WVC argued successfully for a mixed jury of women and men at a time when women were rarely called as jurors even in states like California, one of the first to allow women to serve.103 Due to the WVC’s efforts, five women and seven men occupied the first jurors’ box. After forty-four hours of deliberation, a mistrial resulted when one male juror “chivalrously” joined one of these women—described as “a titan haired Amazon combining the exact knowledge of a housewife and a firm belief in equal rights”—to hang the jury. The confusing testimony offered by the doctors who treated Rappe failed to implicate Arbuckle or to establish why her bladder ruptured. Their jargon-heavy descriptions offered several possible causes, including an external blow, vomiting, laughing, and “spontaneous” rupture.104 Nonetheless, Hearst papers forced the testimony into a melodrama whose headline read “TWO DOCTORS SAY VIRGINIA RAPPE WAS SLAIN.” Most accounts made little of the medical evidence presented, perhaps taking a cue from the “spectators” who reportedly “seemed bored” by that day’s proceedings.105 The three other witnesses who appeared in court—the two “entertainers,” Alice Blake and Zey Prevost, and Al Semnacher, the agent who drove Rappe up the coast—drew more interest. They described a party filled with “dancing, talking, drinking,” and “plenty of noise.” At this gathering participants were “having too good a time to notice the time.” By all accounts, a drunken Delmont changed into men’s pajamas and then decided independently to demand entrance to the bedroom in which Arbuckle and Rappe had disappeared. When Arbuckle opened the door, still dressed in his pajamas, a fully clothed Rappe began to scream and tear at her clothes. “I’m dying, I’m dying,” all agreed she cried. Another female guest added that Rappe later said, “He hurt me.” Thinking her drunk, the women undressed Rappe, submerged her in a tub of cold water to revive her, and put her to bed. When Rappe started screaming again, Arbuckle entered the room, warning, “If she don’t stop her yelling I will throw her out the window.”106 Rappe stopped screaming and, a short while later, passed out.
The trial revealed the party’s atmosphere as bawdy, freewheeling, or offensive, depending on the point of view. Perhaps the most genuinely shocking courtroom revelation proved “too vulgar to be printed”—though over time the decorum that newspapers exercised encouraged even grimmer embellishments, including the rumor that Arbuckle raped Rappe with an ice chipper. Both Blake and Prevost described watching Arbuckle “place a piece of ice on Miss Rappe’s body” that, under pressure in the courtroom, they specified as her vagina.107 “That will make her come to,” Arbuckle said before Delmont “shoved his hand away.” Semnacher’s admission that Arbuckle later joked about the action to the party’s male guests attracted much of the publicity because papers refrained from explicitly describing it. “Tell us the exact language the defendant used,” the prosecutor demanded, in a quote used in virtually every account.108 “Pale as a sheet and pleading to the court that he not be forced to repeat in open court the language used by Arbuckle,” Semnacher “was made to write out the remarks for the benefit of counsel.” The court transcript revealed the note Semnacher passed to the judge read “snatch.” “Everyone laughed when Arbuckle made the statement,” the witness continued. In retrospect, Semnacher recounted “Arbuckle’s prank” with embarrassment. But during the party, it seemed the women considered Arbuckle’s behavior a stupid joke, the men a funny one.109 Arbuckle’s “ice bath” confession formed the high point of the trial’s coverage. Shortly afterward, the state rested, without ever calling Delmont, the prosecution witness, to the stand.110 In short, the testimony revealed that t
he party’s participants played by different rules than those who judged them. Semnacher emphasized this point when Arbuckle’s attorney tried to force him to admit that Delmont’s behavior was unladylike. “Well, everyone has his own ideas of a lady,” he replied.111
On September 28, less than three weeks after the scandal splashed across front pages, Judge Lazarus ruled that Arbuckle would stand trial for manslaughter—not murder, as the state had requested. After criticizing the district attorney for not putting Delmont on the stand, Lazarus noted that “there is just enough evidence here, I may say barely enough, to justify me in holding the defendant.” Judge Lazarus then offered a lengthy disquisition on the scandal’s significance. This was “an important case,” he contended. “We are not trying Roscoe Arbuckle alone. We are not trying the screen celebrity who has given joy and pleasure to all the world . . . we are trying ourselves,” he contended. Lazarus pronounced “the issue” before the court “universal,” growing from conditions that “every true lover and protector of our American institutions” should fear. What threatened the American way of life was that at “one of the largest and most pretentious hostelries of the city, in broad daylight,”
an orgy that continued many hours and resulted in the death of Miss Virginia Rappe, a moving-picture actress, was not repressed by the hotel management. It is of such common occurrence that it was not given attention until something happened, until the climax made it notorious. And the same thing happens in big cities all over the world. In this thing is a public lesson.112
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