Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (32 page)

The drunken orgy at the St. Francis will be probed as thoroughly as was that in the Howard Street shack…. It was the merest chance that the Howard Street girls escaped with their lives, but had they died as a result of their ordeal their murderers would still have been less fiendish than the monster that perpetrated the foul crime in the St. Francis Hotel…. From the details at hand, the attack appears to have been savage without qualification. A veritable giant, one that has been described as a mountain of lecherous flesh, hurled himself upon a frail woman and fought with her after the manner of a mad elephant. But for that final avalanche of lard, the woman might have saved at least her life, for she seems to have struggled until the last vestige of her clothing had been torn to tatters….

We know that a fiendish crime has been committed and that one of the principals in that crime is a man suddenly raised from obscurity and a difficulty in earning his living into the spotlight of the world and an affluence greater than many kings. Petted by the public and showered with riches, he lost all sense of decency and came to the belief that he was above the moral code and could write whatever code he chose. He lived a law unto himself, flaunting his new found wealth and spending it with all recklessness of immoral and bestial ignorance. Like the most brutal of the feudal barons, he believed that he could command whatever was necessary to satisfy his savage passions.

Women began showing up at the Hall of Justice at 8 A
M,
for a preliminary hearing that was not set to begin for another five hours. Said the
Los Angeles Times
of the gathering storm, “Men are being excluded everywhere, shoved forcibly out through thick ranks of women, laughed at, snickered at, jeered at. It is a ‘no man’s land.’” Hundreds of women, many dressed in their Sunday best and fortified with box lunches, crowded
hallways and stairways outside the women’s court of Judge Sylvain Lazarus—the same room and judge as at the arraignment one week prior.

A phalanx of policemen cleared the courtroom at noon, much to the consternation of those seated. They reopened the doors a half hour later. As the DA instructed, eighteen seats in the front row were occupied by members of the Women’s Vigilant Committee. After all the courtroom seats filled up, five hundred women remained in the hall. With great difficulty, policemen parted that sea of womanhood to make way for the defendant, his wife, his mother-in-law, and his defense team.

Judge Lazarus would decide whether the murder charge could proceed. Before he ruled, both the prosecution and the defense could call witnesses, introduce physical evidence, and cross-examine. With Assistant DA U’Ren questioning, the prosecution called three witnesses the first day: Dr. Shelby Strange, Dr. William Ophüls, and nurse Grace Halston. They testified to the ruptured bladder, the newness of the injury, and the injury’s probable cause (Ophüls: “some force from outside”). Photographs of bruises on Rappe’s limbs were placed into evidence. Dominguez offered no cross-examination.

The next day, Al Semnacher was the only witness. It was up to him to tell the tale of the Labor Day party, but he relinquished details of drinking and cavorting so reluctantly the prosecution declared him a hostile witness. The session finished after three contentious hours, with Semnacher still on the stand and yet to explode his bombshell. It went off the following day. That’s when the crowded courtroom of mostly concerned mothers heard more than they bargained for, and all the vague stories about ice or a foreign substance forcibly applied suddenly came into focus.

Assistant DA Golden asked Semnacher about what he had heard the morning after the party: “Did Arbuckle say anything at that time about a piece of ice?”

“He did,” Semnacher replied.

“What did he say?”

“He told us that he had placed a piece of ice on Miss Rappe.”

“On?” Golden asked.

”No,” said Semnacher.

“Well?”

Semnacher’s response was not printed in newspapers. He said Arbuckle claimed to have placed the ice
in
Virginia Rappe. A collective gasp rose in the courtroom as the meaning was inferred. Red-faced Arbuckle stared at his fidgeting fingers. Behind him, Durfee also looked downward, fussing with a long stream of amber beads draped about her neck. She summoned strength and patted her husband on his shoulder with her tan-gloved hand.

Golden pressed on: “Exactly what did Arbuckle say?”

Semnacher glanced about the room of mostly women staring back at him. “I don’t want to say his words.”

“I insist,” said Golden. “They are important.”

When Semnacher hesitated again, Golden told him to whisper it to the court reporter. He did. This was then written on a note, which was passed to the prosecution and defense.

Arbuckle allegedly said he had placed the ice in Rappe’s “snatch”—her vagina.

Semnacher conveyed the word only to the stenographer and never again uttered it in court. However, Golden had no such compunctions about saying “snatch” in mixed company, again and again, wielding it like a knife, stabbing it at his hostile witness, slashing it at Arbuckle’s reputation, as if to say any man who could cavalierly use such a crude profanity about a woman as she lay dying in a room nearby was capable of anything—including rape and murder.

The United Press correspondent described the testimony as follows, and his version was syndicated widely: “[Arbuckle’s] time in court today was only ninety minutes, but he heard Al Semnacher, his friend, and Miss Rappe’s former manager, charge that when Virginia was lying nude on one of Arbuckle’s twin beds, the big baby-faced comedian had tortured her indescribably.” Semnacher was not Arbuckle’s friend and not really Rappe’s manager; more important, the ice incident was presented in court not as torture but as a very coarse joke by a heartless celebrity. Under Golden’s questioning, Semnacher indicated that Arbuckle made
no explanation for inserting ice into Rappe’s vagina, but that when he mentioned it at least some of the listeners laughed. (Semnacher refused to pinpoint any man in particular as having done so, however, including himself.) But the United Press account of his testimony spawned frontpage headlines such as W
ITNESS
T
ESTIFIES
A
RBUCKLE
C
ONFESSED
H
E
T
ORTURED
A
CTRESS.

When Golden finished his questioning, Dominguez got Semnacher to admit he had never witnessed any improper conduct by Arbuckle toward any of the women present at the Labor Day party. Semnacher agreed that Arbuckle acted as a gentleman on that day, at which point Golden interjected, questioning whether the “snatch” remark was gentlemanly. Dominguez strenuously objected—sustained—but the damage was done, and calling the defendant a gentleman would not undo it. Undoing it required a charge capable of equal or greater destruction.

Dominguez’s attack began at the next court session. First, he livened up what should have been the pedestrian questioning of hotel doctor Arthur Beardslee by asking him if on his visits to room 1227, where Rappe lay ill and Maude Delmont watched over her, Delmont was “under the influence of alcohol or morphine” or if he ever saw her “taking a white powder.” Objections thundered.

It was merely a warm-up for the full frontal assault on Semnacher, who was called back to the stand that afternoon. Dominguez succeeded in establishing that Semnacher was not Rappe’s manager, despite that occupation being his synonym in the press (he claimed he had been misquoted) and that he had known her well for only six weeks. More important, Dominguez got him to admit Arbuckle may have said he placed the ice “on” Rappe’s “snatch” and not “in” it. Dominguez was less successful in establishing anything untoward about Semnacher occupying a Palace Hotel room connected to the room of Delmont and Rappe.

And then the defense attorney got down to business, first with a few minor shots at Delmont’s character that Semnacher successfully volleyed, then with the introduction of a new name: Earl Lynn, a minor movie actor. Delmont had supposedly tried to extort money from Lynn’s father in exchange for her keeping private her sexual relationship
with Lynn and her resulting pregnancy. Golden objected, and Judge Lazarus ruled that the defense should not go beyond the murder case at hand.

Dominguez explained the relevance: “If we can, we will show that Semnacher, in conversation with Mrs. Delmont and someone else, plotted that Virginia Rappe’s torn clothing should be taken to Los Angeles, there to extort blackmail from Arbuckle. If we can show that Semnacher was aware of circumstances that we expect to show connecting Mrs. Delmont and Earl Lynn, of Los Angeles, we will then establish the intimate relations existing between Semnacher and Mrs. Delmont. We will show, moreover, that Earl Lynn is not the only individual to be mentioned in this connection.”

Judge Lazarus declared, “I am not going to try the character of every witness appearing here.”

But it was too late for Al Semnacher. At his own request, the question of his conspiring to blackmail Arbuckle was promptly brought before the grand jury. He testified as the only witness. The grand jury took no action. Afterward, Semnacher told reporters he was bringing a civil suit against Dominguez for defamation of character.

The question of why Rappe’s torn shirt and undergarments were found in the possession of Semnacher has never been satisfactorily answered.
Car dusting?
At the preliminary hearing, he said his original intent was “joshing” Rappe but he later kept them to clean his car. (He never used them for this purpose.) It is possible that after Rappe’s injury, Semnacher and Delmont (who had Rappe’s outer clothing) saw the possibility of enlisting Rappe in a conspiracy to blackmail Arbuckle with the promise they would keep events out of the press and unreported to the police. The clothes could have been used as possible evidence of an assault. If this was a scheme, it collapsed with Rappe’s death and the resulting criminal investigation.

Bambina Maude Delmont’s role as countervailing force to Roscoe Arbuckle was then coming into focus—avenging angel if one presumed
his guilt, conspiring con artist if one presumed he was wrongly accused. This is what is known about her life before September 1921.

She was born in New Mexico in 1882, to Mr. and Mrs. Winfield Scott, both from Indiana. She had a younger sister. At some point prior to 1910, she got married to a man named Delmont. But by the time of the 1910 census, she was divorced and a guest at a New York City hotel; no occupation was given.

On November 27, 1912, she remarried in Los Angeles. The groom was John C. Hopper, a Canadian farmer and ex-soldier. They separated on March 1, 1914, and Delmont was granted an interlocutory divorce decree on grounds of nonsupport.

Reporters in September 1921 dug for dirt about her past but found little. A wire story stated that she lived for a time in Wichita, Kansas, under an assumed name. The
Los Angeles Times
reported that in 1919, authorities asked her to leave Catalina Island: “She conducted a beauty parlor in the dance pavilion. She left without contesting the official warning. Her baggage was held some time on the island until certain debts were paid, island officials say.”

The 1920 census had found her renting a home in Los Angeles with her sister, a nurse. She reported her occupation as “corsetier.” Presumably, she co-owned a corset-making business with her next-door neighbor, a divorced forty-one-year-old mother who shared the same unusual occupation.

On February 26, 1921, she married again, wedding Cassius Clay Woods, a publicist, in Madera, California. Both were thirty-eight and residents of Los Angeles. Both were listed as divorced.