Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (31 page)

There was one notable exception to the homiletic assaults, and it was delivered by America’s premier Protestant preacher, Billy Sunday, whose daughter-in-law Mae Taube had been at the Labor Day party. “I feel sorry for ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle and do not see how any court in the land could convict the fallen idol for murder or manslaughter,” Sunday began. He blamed liquor for Rappe’s death and called for greater funding of Prohibition enforcement. “The girl died, but I believe her death was caused by an accident and not by Roscoe Arbuckle.” He concluded with a cautionary note, invoking an image of Babylon that would later become pervasive. In so doing, he previewed what would eventually be a key defense strategy: tarnishing the victim. “The party of Arbuckle’s was just a case of a modern Belshazzar entertaining. ‘Fatty’ fell for whiskey and wild women.”

Virginia Rappe appeared angelic, shrouded in white silk and adorned with white roses. She lay in her silver casket in the Strother and Dayton funeral parlor on Hollywood Boulevard as thousands milled past for six hours on Sunday.
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Among the assortment of bright flora was a bouquet of roses from Maude Delmont with a note that read, “To Virginia: You know I love you as though you were my sister.” As at the San Francisco visitation three days earlier, there was an overwhelming display of lilies from Henry Lehrman to his “brave sweetheart,” though, in an era before commercial airline travel, Lehrman himself remained in New York City.

On Monday morning at Rappe’s funeral, Strother and Dayton’s chapel was filled two hours early with curious strangers, mostly women. The police were enlisted to clear the pews and lock the doors. Afterward, only intimate friends of the deceased were admitted, and police kept at bay the growing throng on Hollywood Boulevard. Among those attending were actress Mildred Harris (Charlie Chaplin’s teenage ex-wife), Al Semnacher, and Rappe’s “adopted aunt and uncle,” Kate and Joseph Harde-beck. The services there and at the burial site were conducted by the rector of Hollywood’s St. Thomas Church. There was no eulogy.

The six pallbearers were a who’s who of Hollywood then and after: directors Al Herman, David Kirkland, and future Oscar winner Norman Taurog (Taurog was a friend of Lehrman’s who oversaw Lehrman’s requests for the funeral and burial); actor Frank Coleman, who performed in three movies with Rappe; comedic actor/director/writer Larry Semon, who achieved great popularity in the early 1920s; and actor Oliver Hardy, recently Semon’s villain of choice, who, with Stan Laurel, went on to form one of cinema’s most beloved comedy duos. They carried Rappe in her flower-shrouded coffin through the parted crowd and to the white hearse parked on the boulevard. Followed by a procession of automobiles, the hearse traveled only a mile to Hollywood Memorial Park (now Hollywood Forever Cemetery). Surrounding streets were clogged with Model Ts, as were lanes inside the cemetery gates. The throng that scurried over graves and clustered around the burial site was
estimated at fifteen hundred. The plot was Lehrman’s (his secretary had been buried there two years prior), and it was just four blocks from the home Rappe had shared with the Hardebecks after coming to Hollywood five years prior. There, after a brief ceremony, on the nineteenth day of September 1921, on a gentle slope beside a lily pond, Virginia Rappe was laid to rest.

Frank Dominguez was in Los Angeles as well, digging dirt on the primary prosecution witness, Maude Delmont. Delmont herself remained in San Francisco. From her bed in her room at the Plaza Hotel—where she was cared for by a nurse and guarded by a policewoman—she told the press on Monday, “I’m ready for the defense anytime. All I have to do at the trial is to tell the truth. And all the ‘Fatty’ Arbuckles and Frank Dominguezes in the world won’t be able to shake me. Virginia Rappe was a good girl. Any suggestion to the contrary is a lie and a defamation.”

In an earlier interview, she had admitted her testimony at the coroner’s inquest was weak and sometimes wrong, blaming it on illness and the medication—presumably self-administered with the “hypodermic” she referenced at the time. She said she planned to alter her testimony for the manslaughter trial to shore up her story and “greatly benefit the prosecution’s case.”

Also on Monday, Minta Durfee and her mother, Flora Durfee, arrived at the San Francisco Hall of Justice. So Arbuckle’s legal team could coach them not to speak to the press, their train had been met by Milton Cohen and Charles Brennan in Sacramento, after which a boilerplate statement from Durfee about her estranged husband’s innocence was released. In the visitor’s pen of the city jail, Arbuckle embraced his wife. With her mother and his brother Arthur, they talked for thirty minutes.

From a newspaper story on Tuesday, September 20:

Ada Gillifillian, sixteen years old, a farmer’s daughter, was found in a straw stack eighteen miles from home [in southwest Iowa]. She had been without food and water for three days.

“Fatty” Arbuckle was her film favorite and she had pictures of him in her room. She said her mother whipped her when she refused to take them down, so she ran away. When found in a semiconscious condition she had a picture of Arbuckle clasped tightly to her chest.

On Tuesday the San Francisco grand jury took up two new questions. First, was the initial autopsy of Rappe illegal? The accused, Dr. Melville Rumwell, testified. Second, did the defense tamper with a prosecution witness? This stemmed from an allegation that party guest Joyce “Dollie” Clark, fresh off her hat-pilfering conviction, had said, “There is money in this Arbuckle case, and I am going to get some of it.” She and two men (one described as a “man-about-town and sportsman,” the other “president of the Italian-American Oil Company”) allegedly plotted to collect this money from the defense by suggesting that Clark could impeach the testimony of her friend Zey Prevost. The two men had visited Milton Cohen and asked what Clark should say under oath. Cohen’s reply: “Tell the truth.” The grand jury took no action on either matter.

The following day, at DA Brady’s request, a Los Angeles grand jury questioned Al Semnacher about something he had not previously shared. Semnacher said that the morning following the Labor Day party, Arbuckle claimed he had “forcibly applied a piece of ice to Miss Rappe’s body.” Coverage of this development varied greatly. On the hysterical end was this screaming headline: D
ECLARES
A
RBUCKLE
T
OLD OF
U
SING
F
OREIGN
S
UBSTANCE IN
A
TTACK ON
M
ISS
R
APPE.
And thus a meme was born.

In San Francisco on Wednesday, Brady investigated Semnacher’s story further by questioning Fred Fishback and Ira Fortlouis. Lowell Sherman was subpoenaed while on a train bound for New York City. A process server, a detective, and reporters waited for him at Grand Central
Station only to learn he had given them the slip by exiting the train at an earlier stop and leaving in an automobile driven by a red-headed woman.
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After he was located the next day in his Manhattan apartment, he gave a statement to the New York DA regarding Rappe and the party that essentially supported the defense, and he agreed to return to San Francisco, where the preliminary hearing on Arbuckle’s murder charge was beginning. He never did. He later gave a deposition swearing that Arbuckle was never alone in a room with Rappe—a definitive (and false) declaration that ultimately clashed with the strategies both of the prosecution and the defense. Meanwhile, he acted in Broadway plays, keeping a continent between himself and the courtrooms.
^†

On Wednesday, eleven days after his arrest, Paramount invoked a nonperformance clause to halt payments to Arbuckle. The next day, Universal became the first studio to institute a morality clause in contracts, permitting the stoppage of salaries to “actors or actresses who forfeit the respect of the public.” Universal’s attorneys stated that although the studio had no relationship with the accused murderer, the clause was “a direct result of the Arbuckle case in San Francisco.”

Thursday, September 22, was the first day of the preliminary hearing, which would determine whether the state had sufficient evidence to bring Arbuckle to trial for murder. That day, an editorial in the
San Francisco Bulletin
was syndicated throughout the country. It harked back to the infamous gang rape case that gave rise to the Women’s Vigilant
Committee, and telegraphed the difficulty that lay ahead in seating an impartial jury: