Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  The judge’s repeated use of “it” and “thing” obscured his placement of the blame on the fashion for orgies, for raucous parties that encouraged consensual sex between men and women. Thus whatever the future determined about Arbuckle’s role in Virginia Rappe’s death, Lazarus declared that society’s present attitudes had sent Rappe to her doom.

  Immediately after Lazarus’s decision, California’s clubwomen indicated their intent to use the scandal to enforce higher moral standards on the nation. But the WVC’s view only partially concurred with other reform-minded elites. While agreeing that the evidence failed to warrant an indictment of Arbuckle on capital charges, after his release on bail the WVC argued that “regardless” of whether he was “proved innocent or not of the police charges, his immoral conduct marks him as a person unfit to appear before the American public.”113 That opinion, endorsed by California’s 60,000 other clubwomen, restated what was fast becoming the conventional wisdom: Hollywood endorsed sex roles that endangered impressionable young women. But the WVC and columnists like Annie Laurie said more than this. Their insistence on the irrelevance of the sexual histories of Jean Stanley, Jesse Montgomery, and Virginia Rappe reflected a modern feminist analysis of rape. Yet their behavior also demonstrated how they envisioned using women’s new rights to empower the “right sort” of women to protect their weaker sisters. Put differently, the WVC, and many of the other clubwomen who sought control over Hollywood in the postwar era, believed in equalizing gender roles for women like themselves so they could regulate women whose age, class, ethnic identities, or behavior made them unable to take advantage of the new rights. Such vulnerable girls needed respectable ladies to perfect a modern type of state chaperonage.

  The major picture producers also released a statement that revealed not only their increasing sophistication in shaping the public debate for their own ends, but also their interest in acting the part of moral regulator. Timed to coincide with the arraignment trial’s opening, producers announced that “as a direct result of the Arbuckle case” film actors’ contracts would contain a “morality clause” that would punish those who did “anything to shock the community or outrage public morals or decency” with immediate termination.114 Newspapers praised this decision to enforce “a higher standard of morals for stage folks.”115 The morality clause also indicated producers’ acceptance of a previously disputed principle: the influence of movie stars had become so great in the postwar era that it warranted special management. Yet the morality clause also cleverly refocused the wider attacks on the industry by reducing the problem of how best to control Hollywood to a question about how to control its stars.

  The morality clause held particular implications for female players, though the damning of Arbuckle indicated that males were not exempt. Society’s still-widespread endorsement of the sexual double standard, and the interpretation of the scandal as further evidence of Hollywood’s role in cracking its edifice, meant the demand that stars behave “with due regard to public conventions” put a heavier burden on the industry’s women. The different reactions to the divorces of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford displayed the disparity. Here lay the roots of the new sexual double standard that celebrity culture developed in the 1920s. In the future, the industry would perfect its ability to trade on women’s sexuality while seeking to contain their filmic images inside a moral framework that punished protagonists who transgressed feminine norms, even as the publicity about actresses’ lives as “real women” often continued to display just such behavior.

  Survival partially precipitated the strategy, as producers absorbed two lessons: the public perceived the industry as particularly endangering young women and took as much interest in “watching stars fall” as “watching them shine.”116 So Jesse Lasky explained to Gloria Swanson in September 1922 when she told him she planned to seek a divorce from her second husband. “Impossible,” she recalled Lasky declaring with “almost paternal sincerity” one year after Rappe’s death. The producer “predicted there would be a rash of scandals because everyone was looking for them.” Lasky warned Swanson how easily her image of “love, passion, glamour,” and “the whole sophisticated atmosphere of Cecil B. DeMille and Elinor Glyn” could be turned against her. Then, perhaps she should tone down her image, Swanson proposed. “It’s too late to change that,” Lasky snapped—a statement Swanson conceded was simply “a fact.” The morality clause that gave teeth to Lasky’s bite signaled how the scandal sped the creation of constraints that producers exercised over most players in the studio era. The studio system arose as others followed the course that Lasky and Zukor laid down at FPL/Paramount, forming an era in which tighter contracts and the demise of independent production severely curtailed the mobility and power of all the industry’s workers.117 Louella Parsons, who started work for Hearst’s New York American in 1924, became one of the industry’s most effective police dogs, using her bark to make or break reputations in the name of protecting the public.

  Indeed, most scholarly discussions of what has been invariably called the “Fatty” Arbuckle scandal tie its importance to the creation of one of the studio system’s central institutions, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA, or Hays Office), the trade association of the producers who controlled the industry’s new trust.118 Chronology encourages connecting the two events. Just weeks after Arbuckle’s first jury deadlocked in December 1922, producers headed by Zukor announced that William Hays would serve as the new trade association’s president.119 A native midwesterner, a Presbyterian elder, and a leading Republican, the former Assistant Secretary of Agriculture had become postmaster general after helping Warren Harding win the presidency in 1920.120 With Harding’s blessing to take up this “public service,” Hays left Washington in 1922 to make “virtue popular.”121 Before Hays assumed the post in March, Arbuckle’s second jury deadlocked again. Two more Hollywood scandals also made headlines: the mysterious murder of director William Desmond Taylor and the charge that Pickford’s quickie Nevada divorce and immediate remarriage to Fairbanks made her a bigamist.122 Yet during 1922, Hays stabilized the industry’s political and moral capital, defeating a Massachusetts referendum on censorship and directing a savvy exercise in damage control when actor Wallace Reid overdosed on drugs in the spring.123 By the year’s end, the Hays Office also attempted to improve the respectability of what appeared on screens, establishing a Public Relations Committee (PRC) to devise a set of moral standards to guide film production. Better known as the Hays Code, these guidelines aimed to improve the morality of pictures. Clubwomen were among the PRC’s most important members. The effects of this moral reckoning were felt later that year when Elinor Glyn scripted Beyond the Rocks (1922), a vehicle designed to showcase Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino’s passionate exchanges. The director shot two versions of the love scenes: one for the U.S. market and a second for Europe.124

  Yet the continued emphasis on Hays’s hire conceals as much as it reveals by ignoring the sex-specific implications of what made Hollywood’s so-called “first canonical” sex scandal so scandalous at the time. It fails to explain why the number of states with censorship drives, and the number of articles on “motion picture morality” through 1930, peaked the year before the scandal—not after it.125 It overlooks the fact that Arbuckle’s acquittal came about only after his defense reversed its strategy and totally assassinated the moral character and professional aspirations of Virginia Rappe. The picture that Arbuckle’s lawyer, Gavin McNab, created of Rappe suggested that she was either a polluted prostitute or a fallen woman degraded by her ambition to become a star. Considered powerful enough to be included in Classics of the Bar (1922), McNab’s closing statement declared that Rappe, and the other women who attended the party, did “not belong to the wifehood, the sisterhood, the motherhood of the world.”126 According to McNab, they reminded him “of the beautiful line of Ruskin’s: ‘Wherever a true woman is home is always around her.’”

  In
other words, the scandal tells us much more about what mattered about Hollywood “in the beginning” if we spotlight its other principal character, Virginia Rappe. Placing Rappe at the center of the scandal’s production, and inside an already polarized social climate, reveals the event as an explosive round in an ongoing debate about the relationship between motion pictures and the rise of sexual modernism. Concerns about the effect of Hollywood’s birth on female morality multiplied before Arbuckle and Rappe ever set foot inside the St. Francis Hotel. Over the course of the scandal any real chance of thinking seriously about Virginia Rappe—who she was, what she wanted, or how she died—quickly vanished. The dominant narrative of the scandal that emerged by 1922 shoehorned the event into a traditional early-nineteenth-century melodrama of sexual danger, casting Rappe as the pathetic fallen woman who reaped what she had sown. A spate of popular biographies interested in clearing Arbuckle’s name carried this representation into present-day lore. Taking McNab’s assertions at the final trial for fact, they cast Rappe as at best a pathetic “starlet,” at worst a two-bit prostitute whose venereal disease caused her death. These accounts also caricature the WVC as a hysterical mob of meddling women out for Arbuckle’s blood, complete with an apocryphal story about members spitting on the comedian when he arrived in San Francisco for his arraignment. Such narrative tendencies betray how easily women’s actions along sex-partisan lines could be ridiculed in the 1920s and beyond. They also reveal a commonplace that continues to parade as analysis today: that a pretty, single, and ambitious woman who was likely far from a sexual innocent was little more than a witless whore.127

  FIGURE 29. Valentino and Swanson in Elinor Glyn’s Beyond the Rocks (1922). Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  But the industry was not yet ready to abandon spinning tales to women fans about Hollywood’s support of unconventional gender roles. If the new trusts of the picture business were to survive and prosper, a more equivocal register was needed to whisper of Hollywood’s bohemian pleasures. After all, despite Jesse Lasky’s objections, Gloria Swanson did initiate her second, messy divorce in 1922. When it was finalized, she married into the French aristocracy to great fanfare. Moreover, throughout the 1920s, Swanson continued to write, produce, and star in controversial pictures at United Artists, including Sadie Thompson (1928), her adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s story about a prostitute. Such presentations became more difficult after 1934, when producers allowed Catholic reformers to administer and enforce a revised Motion Picture Production Code at the Hays Office. Producers finally capitulated to the moral management of outsiders because of the combined pressure created by the outrage that stars like Mae West prompted among the Catholic Church hierarchy, Catholic leaders’ threat to launch a nationwide boycott of films, and the unprecedented influence that Wall Street financiers assumed when the Depression followed the industry’s expensive conversion to sound. The revised Production Code of 1934 was written by a Catholic priest and enforced by the devout Irish-Catholic layman, and anti-Semitic, Joseph Breen. Speaking to one priest, Breen called Hollywood Jews “lice,” explaining they were “a foul bunch, crazed with sex . . . and ignorant in matters having to do with sound morals.” Breen was the one man “who could cram decent ethics down the throat of the Jews,” he boasted to another priest.128 Regulating women’s independence and enforcing the sexual double standard were the particular “evils” about which Breen obsessed.129 This development helps to explain why Shirley Temple replaced West as the most popular female star after 1934. Increasingly, stories about adventurous, ambitious single girls in Los Angeles were set in a noir frame that left them dead on the side of the road, reminding us that women’s so-called liberation in the twentieth century took a crooked path marked by limitations at every step.

  CONCLUSION

  The Girl from Hollywood

  Just days before Rappe’s death, an interview with Roscoe Arbuckle appeared in Photoplay that suggested the mounting ambivalence confronting Hollywood’s girls. Adela Rodgers St. Johns, writing in her best “mother confessor” style, solicited Arbuckle’s opinion about modern women. “Are you afraid of women?” St. Johns inquired. “You bet I am,” he replied. “You just bet I am. So is everybody else that wears pants on the outside in this land of the free and home of the brave. Women are the free and we are the brave. The 19th Amendment is only the hors d’oeuvre to the amendments they will pass now they have found out they can.” Arbuckle was in the midst of making a transition from star of slapstick shorts to leading man of feature length comedies. As pre-publicity for three features that Paramount was about to release, the interview sought to broaden his appeal beyond his typical audience of children and men. Strikingly, although the article was written to attract Photoplay’s female fans to his films, a current of anxiety and anger about women’s demands crackled through the satiric piece. When asked what he thought modern women wanted, Arbuckle allegedly replied:

  Women want to smoke cigarettes, bob their hair, drink wood alcohol, have men friends, spend their own and everybody else’s money, cut their skirts off just above the knee, run their own and your business, drive automobiles, go to conventions, elect mayors and presidents and be as independent as the Kaiser thought he was.

  Their voracious appetites explained why Photoplay’s readers should prefer a “good natured fat man” like Arbuckle. Only such a “kind,” “gentle” man could tolerate their many needs, including having husbands who helped to raise the kids since wives were “going to be pretty busy and won’t have much time.”1

  Adela Rogers St. Johns’s memoir, The Honeycomb (1969), suggests that the dialogue attributed to Arbuckle captured her own unease about the consequences produced by Hollywood girls’ pursuit of their individual freedoms. To illustrate the central dilemma of her life, her memoir opens with a discussion of “an old Irish proverb” about the impossibility of a woman “driving three mules”—of simultaneously managing wifehood, motherhood, and a career. Expanding on the proverb’s significance, St. Johns recalled a 1924 debate on the question “Is Modern Woman a Failure?” that she participated in with Alice Ames Winters, “president of the all-powerful General Federation of Women’s Clubs.” Shortly after St. Johns returned to work as an investigative reporter at William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Evening Herald, her revered boss “flung me into my famous debate.” Hearst staged the public contest because he believed that women’s roles had changed too quickly. At his urging, St. Johns joined the debate, arguing the case against the modern woman. “My mother wished to give women every opportunity for bettering themselves and training their talents,” Hearst reportedly explained. “I have heard her say that this was the single most drastic move in history, that no one group, no single group had ever entered into so complete a change as the women of the twentieth century.” St. Johns bested the older, more experienced GFWC president in the debate by passionately damning her own Hollywood-styled modern life, confessing her failure at “driv[ing] her three mules.” Ironically, the woman who defended St. Johns’s right to attempt this feat was straight out of Hearst’s mother’s mold. A respectable matron, Winters lived in Pasadena, wrote under her husband’s name, and worked to better the nation, not for wages.2

  The proverb St. Johns used to frame her memoir illustrated the deepening angst she and many others experienced over embodying a modern woman in the early Hollywood mode. Had she used “careers for women” as an excuse to make herself “a big shot instead of helping [her] husband”? she wondered.3 Unhappily married to Ike St. Johns at the time of the debate, St. John’s later blamed the marriage’s demise on her greater professional success. An article her husband wrote for Photoplay, where he occasionally worked after several other careers floundered, disputed that women possessed the same artistic abilities as men. It read as an attack not just on his wife, but also on all of early Hollywood’s women.4 Adela Rogers St. Johns’s self-critique was one example of a budding genre in the 1920s:
confessions of “ex-feminists” who expressed a frustration bordering on despair over the demands that modernity placed on their role as women. Often, many wearily conceded a desire to put the genie of women’s emancipation back in the bottle.5 A backlash regarding the consequences of these experiments spread as the excitement over women’s sensational “firsts” wore off. And American society in the twenties offered no practical support to sustain women’s public roles in ways that made them compatible with family life: no day care, no takeout, no family leave, no idea that men should share in domestic chores, no acceptance that respectable wives should work at all except in cases of dire need. And this principle—that only calamity justified the wage work of married women, especially those with children—suggests why St. Johns’s greater professional success and renown created trouble for her marriage. Many women in early Hollywood said their marriages crumbled under similar pressures. However feminine they looked, these women’s individual achievements, their use of glamour to get ahead, and their new demands on their partners threatened the gender roles that traditionally sustained marriage.6 In “Hollywood: Its Manners and Morals,” Theodore Dreiser’s bid to explain the scandal, the great naturalistic writer agreed about the conflict these pressures bred between women and men. At nearly fifty, Dreiser had followed his latest lover, the twenty-year-old actress Helen Richardson, to Hollywood in 1919. In the exposé Dreiser wrote purporting to explain the scandal’s origin, he declared that most of the colony’s women were “by no means innocents,” but sophisticates who “relish, I think, the very lively war that is here between the sexes.”7