Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (11 page)

After Selig, the second film company to set up a permanent base in Los Angeles was Nestor, which relocated from New Jersey in October 1911.
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The studio opened up shop in a region of Los Angeles known as Hollywood. Named in 1887 in a quest to boost land sales and incorporated in 1903, Hollywood had been annexed by the city in 1910. When Nestor opened up shop there, it was a landscape of orange and lemon trees, dotted with the occasional plantation-style residence. A trolley car track traversed the middle of the dirt boulevard. No one would have suspected then that this sleepy community of citrus farmers would soon become a worldwide synonym for moviemaking.

The launch was ominous. On the day Nestor’s studio opened, the film industry suffered its first major tragedy when over at Selig Polyscope, a caretaker burst into a meeting between William Selig and his director Francis Boggs. (Selig had only arrived from Chicago the night before.) Brandishing a revolver, the caretaker fired five times, hitting Boggs twice and Selig once. Forty-one-year-old filmmaking pioneer Francis Boggs died on his way to the hospital. Selig survived the incident. The murderer was quickly captured, but he offered no explanation then and no sensible motivation at the trial before spending his remaining twenty-six years in prison. Thus, the genesis of Arbuckle’s cinematic career is also linked to a tragic death of mysterious circumstances, this one occurring on the day Hollywood as we know it was born.

Arbuckle and his wife joined the traveling troupe of Ferris Hartman, a veteran vaudeville performer and producer whose name was synonymous on the West Coast with first-rate revues. A new show opened every Sunday, sometimes without a rehearsal. Arbuckle won star billing, typically singing two solo songs, performing in two dance numbers, and acting in two scenes. Despite his size, he was a lithe dancer; he was the everyman with surprising talents. Advertisements for a stop in San Jose boasted, “Special Appearance of Roscoe Arbuckle, San Jose’s favorite.” It’s unknown if he visted his father while he was in the area, but the younger Arbuckle seems to have repudiated his abusive parent after leaving home at seventeen.

On a train to Sacramento in September 1911, Durfee experienced cramps. She soon discovered she was pregnant, but her and her husband’s ecstasy was short-lived before she suffered a miscarriage. They were devastated. Arbuckle blamed himself, as he reflexively did when bad things happened to those around him. Afterward, Durfee stayed in Sacramento for a week alone to convalesce while the tour moved on to Denver. They were young. They were certain they would have other opportunities to be parents.

When the company reached Chicago, it was the furthest east Arbuckle had ever been and his first visit to America’s second-largest market. Contrary to the legend that Chicago was Arbuckle’s Waterloo, Hartman’s troupe had a critically and commercially successful run there. Afterward, the Arbuckles returned to Los Angeles before heading to the Bay Area again for Hartman’s next production. In the summer of 1912 a review of an Oakland performance noted “a nice little chap named Roscoe Arbuckle” and effused, “He is a positive scream, one of the funniest fat farceurs that has caused chortlings for many a month.” Once again, he was being discovered—though now it was his comedy and not his singing that earned praise. After years of practicing, he was as comfortable delivering a pratfall or punch line as he was belting out songs.

Though only twenty-five, Arbuckle had worked in theater for a decade, singing, dancing, joking, and acting for his supper, and he must
have thought true fame and fortune would always elude him. Whether on the road—sleeping in hotels and rooming houses and train cars—or living in his wife’s parents’ house, employment was forever fickle, always at risk of being terminated without notice. He seemed destined to be a theatrical lifer, mostly eking by but sometimes not, and always addicted to the same bright lights and greasepaint and applause that had first hooked him when he was a boy looking for a place to belong.

The new offer from Ferris Hartman was stunning on two accounts. First, it was an opportunity for the Arbuckles to see exotic places to which few Americans ventured. Second, Arbuckle was the headliner, and the entire Caucasian American cast would, at times, be playing Asians before Asian audiences in Asia. In fact, Hartman himself had been shocked by the offer, made by a Manila-based American tycoon, to take his company on a tour of the Orient; perpetually in debt, Hartman had to scramble to assemble the necessary cast, costumes, props, and scripts. The troupe of forty-three singer-actors, dancers, musicians, and stagehands set sail on August 12, 1912, on a Pacific Mail steamship headed west. It was a protracted voyage over seven thousand miles of ocean. One room was occupied by the Arbuckles.

Durfee later remembered their excitement in the journey’s early days: “Roscoe and I made it a habit to stand together at the rail late at night, staring at the running sea. We were extremely close at those moments, closer perhaps than at any other times in our lives. We were happy, truly happy.”

They docked in Honolulu. Hawaii was then a US territory with a governor and an abdicated queen. At the premiere performance, Queen Lili’uokalani—herself a songwriter, musician, and singer—was coaxed from her royal box to center stage, where she gracefully performed a native dance. During their three-week stay on Oahu, Hartman said, he and his troupe were “serenaded by bands and royally entertained.” Arbuckle, always an avid swimmer, swam in the surf, sometimes with Olympic swimming gold medalist Duke Kahanamoku.

Hartman’s company sailed next to Japan, performing in Yokohama and then Tokyo. Though Japan was racing forward with electric streetcars and gasoline automobiles, rickshaws dominated on many streets. The Japanese often stared at Arbuckle, for a man of large girth was presumed to have equally great wealth. The company performed Hartman’s old favorite, Gilbert and Sullivan’s
The Mikado.
The all-white cast were made up to look Japanese, with Arbuckle as the title character
(mikado
means “emperor”). It was a hit.

In Shanghai, which was then the “Paris of the East” with a melange of cultures and American and British districts, members of Hartman’s company were surrounded by begging children in the street. The contrast was stark between the impoverished majority in the new Republic of China and the native and foreign aristocracy who attended the performances. Reviews complimented Arbuckle in blackface as “a quaint old negro servant” and in a love scene with his wife.

There was more romance between the Arbuckles onstage than off. Memories of the “extremely close” moments on the voyage over had dissipated. Months living in strange cities far away from Durfee’s family had taken their toll. Frequently after a show, Arbuckle drank with others in the company, then returned intoxicated to Durfee and complained about his insufficient salary as the show’s star. He argued with her and shouted about how much better things would be had they stayed in California. If the voyage there had been their marriage’s best of times, his drunken fits in the Far East were some of its worst.

The tour rolled on to two westernized cities: Hong Kong and Manila. The company remained in the Philippines for six weeks, Christmas included, and Arbuckle contracted a throat infection, probably initiated by his late-night carousing. He later all but confirmed this when he blamed it on an incident in which he “barked at a dog who barked at me.” Three weeks of shows had to be canceled, causing his popularity with the company to plummet. This, in turn, compounded his insecurities and gloominess. Above all, he wanted to be liked by his coworkers, and his drinking was largely motivated by his desire to fit in with them.
The final performances were in China again, Tientsin and Peking. On January 31, 1913, Hartman’s troupe boarded a ship headed east.

When the ship docked in San Francisco twenty-five days later, the Arbuckles had been away from their home country for six months. The couple spent time sightseeing in Northern California, repairing a marriage that had been frayed by Arbuckle’s temper tantrums and brooding in China and the Philippines. Then they took a train south. Having traveled further than most Americans then or now, across the Pacific and through the Orient, they had many stories to tell, but the ride south to Los Angeles was bittersweet. Their luggage was loaded with exotic gifts for Durfee’s family, but the money for their train fare was borrowed. The Far East tour had provided an order and purpose to their careers, and Arbuckle had been the star—a role that had at times gone to his head. But they were poorer for it. And now they were unemployed.

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Ben’s Kid
is now lost, as are the five additional films Arbuckle made for Selig.

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The other entertainment that evening was for gambling purposes: a wrestling match that ended in a draw, a cane spree (one-on-one fight for a walking cane) that ended in a draw, and a duel between a dog and a badger in which the dog was victorious. If that’s the entertainment at your country club, what are your saloons like?

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Arbuckle would later act in Nestor comedies, over the course of four weeks in 1913 just before joining Keystone, but the titles of those lost films are unknown.

California State Board of Health

Bureau of Vital Statistics

Standard Certificate of Death

Wakefield Hospital

D
r. William Ophüls, the fifty-year-old, German-born and German-schooled dean of medicine at Stanford University and one of the country’s foremost experts on pathology and bacteriology, received a telephone call from his Stanford colleague Dr. Melville Rumwell with the message that a woman had just died from an apparent case of peritonitis.

Full Name:
Virginia Rappe

Female White Single

Occupation:
Motion Picture Actress

In the presence of Dr. Rumwell and nurse Grace Halston, the goateed Dr. Ophüls peered through his wire-rim glasses, examining the exterior of the corpse on a table in a white-walled operating room at Wakefield sanitarium. (The facilities did not have an autopsy room.) He checked Virgina Rappe’s face, scalp, and neck, the front and back of her torso, her arms and hands, legs and feet, her genitalia. He found no evidence of a sexual assault. He noted two bruises on her upper
right arm and two on her thighs. He poked and prodded her bloated abdomen.

Birthplace:
No Record

Name of Father:
No Record

Birthplace of Father:
No Record

Maiden Name of Mother:
No Record

Birthplace of Mother:
No Record

A block was placed under her back to raise her chest. Wielding a scalpel, the doctor or the attending nurse made a deep incision from Rappe’s pubic bone to her sternum, slicing through the abdominal wall but being careful not to incise the organs beneath. Absent blood pressure, there was little bleeding, but body fluid leaked from her open abdomen. Without an autopsy table to collect such fluid, it likely fell to the floor and into a drain there. Two further incisions, as deep as the rib cage, were made from the sternum to each shoulder, curving under her breasts. Together the three cuts formed a giant Y on the front of the dead woman’s torso.