The doctors offered her no treatment other than a warm compress and some opium for the pain. There was no need to take her to the hospital, they assured Maude Delmont, because there was little to be done for alcohol poisoning. The stylish brunette’s body twisted as Delmont relayed the story.
Rappe had been one of the leading ladies at a bash in the suite next door, a drama starring five men with ties to Hollywood and four showgirls who were colored in heavy makeup. They were all there to celebrate one of the most affluent, influential Hollywood actors in the early 1920s—Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.
Fatty (who hated that nickname) was larger than life. In fact, he was larger than most actors, weighing more than 250 pounds. Arbuckle’s cherubic face grew full when he laughed, round and bright with a double chin and red cheeks.
Born in 1887 in Smith Center, Kansas, Roscoe Arbuckle struggled right from the start. He was a large baby, and because the rest of his family had slim builds, his father assumed that he was not biologically his child. Roscoe’s father came around, but he never let his son forget the doubts about his paternity. After a few years, the Arbuckles moved to Santa Ana, California, where Roscoe developed his singing voice, eventually finding his way to the stage and in films after his mother died when he was twelve. He was hilarious, a brilliant comic and actor who grew more famous with each performance.
As the most popular silent film star in 1921, Fatty Arbuckle commanded respect and reverence, despite his proclivity for playing buffoons on-screen. Audiences lined up to see his comedies so often that Paramount Pictures signed the thirty-four-year-old to an unprecedented $3 million contract to star in eighteen silent films over three years, an incredible fee for a comedian who often played a naïve hayseed.
Arbuckle was a kingmaker, of sorts. He had discovered Buster Keaton and Bob Hope—he even mentored Charlie Chaplin. Arbuckle had been married for thirteen years, but he and his wife, actress Minta Durfee, had recently separated. Arbuckle enjoyed a hectic shooting schedule, one befitting a power player in Hollywood.
His latest film, Crazy to Marry, had been released a week earlier and was playing in theaters across the country, so his friends insisted on throwing him a party in San Francisco, a shindig at an exclusive hotel on Union Square that seemed pulled right from a glamorous film set.
Built in 1904, the St. Francis was the hot spot for celebrities and literati of the Jazz Age to socialize, a prime location for an elegant soiree featuring luminaries like Chaplin and Sinclair Lewis. Styled after Europe’s most glamorous hotels, with intricate wainscoting and detailed trim, a room at the St. Francis would have been the perfect respite for a peaceful evening—but it was a dreadful place to die.
Virginia Rappe was a former fashion model, a minor actress, and an accomplished clothing designer whose career seemed to be sliding to a stop. She was also a party girl, a regular at Tinseltown affairs who was popular for her blatant flirting and stunning looks. Rappe enjoyed drinking with celebrities, including Arbuckle. The cigarette smoke from the party had faded days earlier, though, and now Rappe was suffering in a dark room, surrounded by a trio of nurses who all blamed liquor.
Rappe was moved that afternoon to a nearby medical facility, examined by more doctors, and given a new diagnosis: peritonitis. Her abdominal lining and cavity were severely inflamed from an infection. Physicians would later discover that she was afflicted with chronic cystitis, a recurring bladder infection made worse by large amounts of alcohol. But that’s not what would kill her. Her bladder had ruptured, they determined, because of “some external force.” As she lay dying, Virginia Rappe offered her final words.
“Oh, to think I led such a quiet life,” she cried. “And to think I would get into such a party.”
She died the afternoon of September 9, 1921—a starlet with so much potential who would soon monopolize newspaper headlines for a horrible reason. After her death, the police were called. Detectives began interviewing witnesses, gathering information about exactly what happened on the twelfth floor of the St. Francis Hotel. There were other showgirls at the celebration in addition to Maude Delmont—women with bit parts in life who were now feeling the glare of a very uncomfortable spotlight. Alice Blake recounted her version of the party to both investigators and the district attorney, a murky story about a drunken silent film star who couldn’t control his lust. Newspaper reporters, tipped off about a potential star-studded scandal, called Fatty Arbuckle at his Tudor-style mansion in Los Angeles even before detectives arrived. He recounted a candid story about a woman who suddenly snapped.
“Miss Rappe had one or two drinks,” Arbuckle explained. “She went into the other room of the apartment and began tearing her clothes from her body, and screaming.”
She complained of breathing problems, so two women in the suite lowered Rappe into a tub of cold water while Arbuckle secured another room. After she calmed down, Arbuckle and another party guest, actor and director Lowell Sherman, moved her there and phoned a hotel doctor.
“After he reported that she had quieted down, Sherman and I went down into the dining room and danced the rest of the evening,” said Arbuckle.
The actor had no idea that her illness was serious; otherwise he would have stayed, he assured detectives. The investigators glanced at each other and began asking more pointed questions about their relationship—how long they might have been alone in the room together.
Arbuckle grew quiet and then concerned. Modern filmmaking in Hollywood, according to some Americans in 1921, was the devil’s work. Movie scenes were becoming uncomfortably risqué; women wore less clothing while men used curse words and sexually suggestive language. In 1919, director Cecil B. DeMille presented Male and Female, a controversial film that explored gender relations and social class—and infuriated conservatives. The morals of the country seemed irrevocably bound to Hollywood, and that was dire news, according to many.
The details of Fatty Arbuckle’s party, rumored to be fueled by sex and gin, seduced the American press, to the delight of religious leaders. William Hearst’s newspapers declared that Hollywood was a modern-day Gomorrah, temporarily transplanted to San Francisco for one evening. Reporters fixated on Virginia Rappe’s character, harping on her multiple broken marriage engagements. They dissected her outfit that night, her hairstyle, and even her voice. And Fatty Arbuckle’s supposed voracious sexual appetite was detailed in print. Soon many moviegoers would begin to mistrust the country’s favorite on-screen comedian, a box office draw like no other actor—a legend at age thirty-four. The comedian was transposed from a lovable media darling to a murderous sexual predator in less than a week. Rigidly moralistic community leaders who had fiercely protested the vices of Hollywood now demanded the noose once they read accounts from women at the party.
“I am dying! I am dying!” witnesses said Rappe cried that night.
“We heard Miss Rappe moaning,” said showgirl Alice Blake, “and Arbuckle came out of the room.”
That night Fatty Arbuckle was ordered to San Francisco for a talk with police.
* * *
—
Showgirl Zey Prevon surveyed the gentlemen in the room. She always felt skittish near police, so she was frazzled for much of the day as she awaited this interview about her role in Fatty Arbuckle’s now notorious party.
Prevon’s real name was Sadie Reiss, but she used a variety of stage names to garner attention from film producers. This was not the audience she had hoped to attract that night. It was a worrisome mess for a volatile woman who was prone to histrionics and craved the spotlight. Soon she would receive loads of attention—none of it good.
Prevon explained that she had arrived to the suite in the St. Francis Hotel on Monday, September 5, at about one thirty p.m. after leaving her roommate in the lobby. Arbuckle and Lowell Sherman, the director, were both dressed in robes and pajamas. And soon Arbuckle and Virginia Rappe disappeared into his private room, suite 1
219.
“How long did they remain in there?” asked Assistant District Attorney Milton U’Ren.
“A good long while,” replied Prevon. “I went over and banged three or four times on the door.”
Prevon and Maude Delmont pressed their ears against the thick wooden double doors, straining to hear anything, but there were no screams, no raised voices. The showgirls frantically knocked, demanding that Arbuckle let them inside to check on Rappe. The pair had been sequestered in his bedroom for around an hour, Prevon guessed. Arbuckle slowly opened the door and reluctantly allowed the women inside, fixing his bathrobe as they pushed past. They stared down at Rappe as she clutched her stomach.
“She was lying on the bed. Her hair was all down and she was moaning,” said Prevon. “‘Oh, I am dying.’”
The actress was fully dressed, according to Prevon. As Fatty Arbuckle watched Rappe writhe on the bed, he glared at the showgirl and snapped.
“Get her out of here,” Maude said he yelled. “‘She’s making too much noise.’”
Prevon was stunned and then concerned. She told police that when Rappe began screaming and pulling off her own clothing, Arbuckle tried to remove them for her.
“I said, ‘Don’t do that, Roscoe,’” testified Prevon. “I said, ‘She is sick.’ He said, ‘Oh, she’s just putting on.’”
Prevon said that Alice Blake and Maude Delmont stood by the bed and tried to calm Rappe by offering her warm water and bicarbonate of soda to settle her stomach; soon they slid her into a cold bath, like Arbuckle said. Prevon tried to ring the hotel doctor, but someone in the suite snatched the phone.
“They couldn’t afford the notoriety,” she explained.
Arbuckle seemed agitated as Rappe’s screams grew louder; his attitude vexed Prevon, so she confronted him.
“Oh, if she makes one more yell I will take her and throw her out of the window,” barked Arbuckle.
“Did she accuse him of anything?” asked Milton U’Ren.
“She was just yelling, ‘I am dying; I am dying,’” recalled Prevon. “‘You hurt me.’”
The gentlemen in the police interview room grew silent. That was a severe accusation, one that could result in a murder charge. Prevon leaned over the typed document on the desk and added her signature. Detectives warned her against talking to anyone—she would be called to testify against Arbuckle.
“We don’t want people running to you and all that kind of thing to have you change your story,” cautioned Captain Duncan Matheson. “They will.”
“Well, I won’t,” she replied.
* * *
—
Fatty Arbuckle arrived at San Francisco’s Hall of Justice after the women left the police station on Saturday night, September 10. He sat in a wooden chair and listened closely. The assistant district attorney tried to question him, but on the advice of his attorney, the actor refused to respond. Arbuckle’s silence infuriated the captain of detectives, and he vowed to uncover what really happened in suite 1219.
“Neither I nor Mr. U’Ren nor Chief of Police O’Brien feel that any man, whether he be Fatty Arbuckle or anyone else, can come into this city and commit that kind of an offense,” said Duncan Matheson. “The evidence showed that there was an attack made on the girl.”
The district attorney accused the actor of sexually assaulting Virginia Rappe and then accidentally crushing her under his 266-pound frame. Police arrested him, charging him with murder.
Newspaper reporters were thrilled with a new tabloid story, a horrible death starring an iconic entertainer. Arbuckle’s arrest would be the opening salvo to a media circus never before seen in Hollywood. And soon Oscar Heinrich would be at the center of the movie industry’s first major scandal, a case that would forever reshape his reputation—and not for the better.
* * *
—
David “Kid” Bender eyed his new neighbor as the man paced his six-foot-square room, Cell No. 12 on “Felon’s Row” in the city jail in San Francisco. The new inmate had been there just seven hours, but Bender could tell that he was already miserable. At seven the steel doors swung open, and Bender wandered into the narrow hallway that separated the two rows of cells made from solid steel walls. There were eighty other prisoners, and almost all of them were whispering about the new tenant in the cell adjoining Bender’s room—Fatty Arbuckle. The cop killer strolled over to the cell’s opening and stood nearby as Arbuckle walked out.
“Has anyone any soap?” Arbuckle called out. “And a towel and a comb? I haven’t anything. Not a thing. Nothing.”
Bender watched as the actor turned out his empty pockets. The twenty-three-year-old offered to loan Arbuckle the supplies as they shook hands and smiled. It was ironic, of course. Just one week earlier, the actor had been chatting with wealthy movie executives, plotting his next career move. This morning he was surrounded by violent felons and chatting with an escaped murderer from Maryland who had never even watched one of his films.
“They don’t show many pictures where I have been for the past six years,” Bender joked to Arbuckle.
But Bender and Arbuckle did manage to find some common ground: they were both charming, both intelligent, and both misunderstood (they believed). And there was one other thing.
“We ought to be friends,” Bender said with a smile. “One of the girls in your party has been living at the apartment where I stayed.”
Arbuckle’s face fell. He groused quietly. Unfortunately, the actor did know David Bender’s roommate—it was Zey Prevon, the woman who had knocked on the door as Virginia Rappe lay dying. Arbuckle felt helpless. A small chorus of showgirls was each lining up to testify against him—three women who had convinced the prosecutor to charge the actor with murder. It was such a peculiar, intimate world when criminals and celebrities mingled in San Francisco in the 1920s.
“I’m through with the booze,” Arbuckle bellowed on Felon’s Row.
* * *
—
On September 16, Oscar Heinrich listened as his secretary greeted a caller, San Francisco’s assistant district attorney Milton U’Ren. Despite being inundated with evidence from the Father Heslin case, which was running concurrently, the forensic scientist was excited about this new investigation. Oscar would be the state’s lead criminalist in the case against Fatty Arbuckle—no more playing second fiddle to arrogant handwriting experts. The next morning Oscar reported to the Hall of Justice to meet with District Attorney Matthew Brady; it quickly became clear that this case would be knotty. Brady advised him to keep a low profile.
“I went to work this morning—incog[nito]—on the Arbuckle case,” Oscar told John Boynton Kaiser, cryptically. “Am living at the St. Francis for a few days. As long as I dare, will give you some details.”
On Friday, September 16, Oscar and his assistant Salome Boyle greeted the police officers at the St. Francis Hotel around one in the afternoon. They hauled along loads of equipment: small bags for collecting evidence, tweezers, microscopes, a magnifying glass, and drills for removing doors. Boyle lugged along a high-powered light. It was five days after prosecutors had charged Fatty Arbuckle with murder, and this was Oscar’s first day of exploring the now-notorious suite 1219 and its adjoining suite 1220. He would return three more times before declaring the clue-gathering phase complete. Just a few hours earlier, U’Ren gave him specific instructions.
“Make scientific and microscopic examination of marks on door between 1219 & 1220,” he wrote in his field journal, “particularly of inside of 1220.”
Oscar faithfully, meticulously filled out several pages of his large field journals every day of the week, even on the weekends and holidays. He chronicled specific times for every appointment, phone call, or scientific test and noted the case involved in the margins. He required that his secretaries and assistants do the same and, if they refused, he fired them. Oscar always noted when he awoke
in the morning, when he fell asleep, and when he required his afternoon naps (almost daily). He even journaled when he journaled, the mark of a fastidious, rigid man: “8pm–10pm, journalizing,” he wrote in one entry.
At the St. Francis, Oscar locked the doors behind him and asked his secretary to plug in the portable light. He surveyed the doors first, squinting at each mark and impression.
“Found marks on door between 1219 and 1220 on 1220 side together with footmark showing door had recently been kicked by woman’s foot,” he wrote. “Reason—varnish dust from abrasion fresh in color; door had not been wiped since struck.”
He loved being at the site of the “action” (as he called it)—in the field and exploring a crime scene. He squatted on the ground and began harvesting the rooms for clues. Oscar used thin metal tweezers and carefully collected two hairpins, a difficult task because the carpet was a tightly woven, dark material with a busy pattern. In the glare of his laboratory light, tiny strands glowed. There were dozens of hairs, some pubic, which required hours to collect. He later gently taped them to a sheet of paper and then used his ruler to record their measurements. He typed out notes about everything: measurements of the room, sizes of the furniture, even the coordinates of the locations of evidence in relation to the opening of the doorway: “1. Ordinate 41 inches, Abscissa 56½ inches, Long reddish or golden hued woman’s hair.”
There seemed to be dust everywhere, as if the rooms had been neglected for several weeks. Oscar ordered the suite to be sealed, a tardy response to prevent a long-ago compromised crime scene. The criminalist worked slowly, making a grid search of both suites. He placed markers on the floor where evidence had been discovered. The pattern of the clues told him a story, a clear narrative about Virginia Rappe’s night with Fatty Arbuckle.
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