Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (50 page)

McNab pounced. He asked if Breig had telephoned Arbuckle asking him to pay Rappe’s bill, with the threat that if he didn’t she would tell her tale to the district attorney. Breig denied this. He asked why she had kept her story to herself until that Monday, six and a half months after Rappe’s death. She said she wanted to avoid the notoriety and had been summoned to testify only two days prior. McNab moved to have Rappe’s deathbed accusation, as told by Breig, stricken from the record as hearsay. Motion denied.

Maude Delmont was in Chicago, where she said that the depositions taken there “trying to blacken Virginia Rappe’s character” were false. She was accompanied by an Illinois assistant state’s attorney representing Brady. She said of the trials, “A great opportunity was lost in making a wonderful example of Arbuckle’s case. It’s not the first time he had done a thing like this, either. It makes me boil to see these attempts to defame Virginia’s character and none whatever of Arbuckle’s past brought up.”

When the much-anticipated defamation of Rappe’s character arrived, it was less than advertised. The defense did, however, win early headlines when Chicago nurse Virginia Warren stated that Rappe prematurely birthed a baby during bladder trauma in 1910. However, Warren stumbled under cross-examination when her nursing credentials were challenged. Also, like so many in this case, Warren had adopted a different name, and when pressed by the prosecution, she wasn’t even certain of her real name. Most of one day was taken up with reading the depositions of Chicago medical personnel regarding the young Rappe’s bladder
and abdominal pains. The state later succeeded in getting one of the depositions stricken from the record when the doctor was uncertain if the girl he remembered was Rappe.

But the most inflammatory deposition was that of Josephine Rafferty (a.k.a. Josephine Roth), who was most probably the “surprise witness” to whom Albert Sabath alluded when he spoke of showing “the kind of life which [Rappe] led.” Rafferty said in her deposition:

I first saw Virginia Rappe in February 1908 in my home. I had studied medicine for three years and was a midwife. At that time Virginia Rappe [then sixteen] was about to become a mother. Between that time and 1910, Virginia Rappe was about to become a mother on four other occasions. I attended her on each occasion. The first time she was very ill. On the next three occasions, I attended her six weeks each time. The first time she was ill a baby was born. Miss Rappe throughout my attendance of her was a sufferer from bladder trouble.

Because Rafferty was not called to the stand, the state could not cross-examine her, but it would take its shots in its closing statements. Friedman treated her very name with disdain, calling her “Rafferty-Roth,” and he stated that “according to her own testimony and the testimony of Mrs. Warren, [Rafferty] was conducting nothing but a house of abortion.” Abortion was then illegal in Illinois. Rafferty’s statement regarding “attending” Rappe on four occasions when she was “about to become a mother” was likely a euphemism for abortions.

Jesse Norgaard’s character, still smarting from the defense’s focus on his recent arrest, took up much of a day when a justice of the peace testified that he could speak to Norgaard’s morals but not his integrity, and thus the trial veered off into a lengthy cul-de-sac as a dozen authorities and a dictionary were quoted so the prosecution and defense could attempt to define “integrity.” Alas, integrity eluded both sides.

A screenwriter and two actors told tales of Rappe’s inability to consume alcohol without convulsing in pain and/or tearing off her clothes. And a woman named Helen Whitehurst testified that when she and
Rappe were friends in Chicago in 1913, Rappe had suffered two similar public attacks at cafés and one at a political campaign dinner. Fred Fishback could no longer recall much of anything; F
ISHBACH
[sic]
L
OSES
M
EMORY ON
S
TAND,
read a headline.
*
And two doctors explained why Rappe’s distress indicated chronic bladder problems.

Having learned from its mistakes in the second trial, the defense called Roscoe Arbuckle to the stand at 10:45 on the morning of April 5. He was smiling as he wedged into the wooden seat. With the movie star speaking under oath for only the second time, the trial was again the toughest ticket in San Francisco, though the female audience was described as “less enthusiastic” than that at the first trial.

Arbuckle retold the tale of finding Rappe in 1219’s bathroom and helping her. Asked if Rappe said anything to him, he replied, “Miss Rappe never said a word while I was in the room. She moaned and groaned.” He admitted having known Rappe for years, but said he knew none of the other guests at the Labor Day party. As for Jesse Norgaard, he claimed to have never made his acquaintance. He denied having placed ice upon Rappe, and he denied having placed his hand over Rappe’s on 1219’s door. “I was not near that door for the whole time I was in the hotel except when Miss Rappe was carried from the room,” he said, referring to his later carrying her part of the way to room 1227. Arbuckle’s purple bathrobe, which the defense sarcastically referred to as “wicked”—a word stricken after the state’s objection—was placed into evidence by the defense.

In its rebuttal, the state brought forth a doctor who testified that bladders could not spontaneously rupture, as well as people who claimed Rappe was healthy during various stages of her life: friends in Chicago, the Hollywood Hotel manager, a chauffeur she had employed. Kate Hardebeck said her “niece” was mostly in great health, though the state likely regretted calling her when she said Rappe had been treated for an unnamed ailment in 1921 and the doctor advised her to get an operation.
To Hardebeck’s knowledge, Rappe was never pregnant. Again enacting a favorite strategy, Brady ordered Virginia Warren and Helen Whitehurst before a grand jury for perjuring themselves, under the presumption that others had effectively invalidated their testimony.

In surrebuttal, the defense called Rappe’s former boyfriend Harry Barker, who repeated his tale of seeing Rappe pained and tearing off clothes in Chicago. A doctor, Charles Barnes, told how he operated on Rappe in Chicago in 1909 for a bladder abscess. A woman claimed to overhear Hardebeck saying Rappe had been ill, and two chauffeurs said Rappe’s former driver told them Rappe had had an attack in his car.

Henry Lehrman was supposedly in San Francisco meeting with the prosecution and would perhaps take the stand to defend the honor of his “fiancée,” but he never appeared in the courtroom as a witness or as a spectator. Three days before the trial ended, thirty-five-year-old Lehrman, the grieving “fiancé,” announced his engagement to a nineteen-year-old Ziegfeld Follies dancer. Seventeen days later, they wed. After twenty volatile months, they divorced. It was his only marriage.
*

“And that night Belshazzar, the king, was slain and the Medes and the Persians took possession of the kingdom and divided it. Roscoe Arbuckle’s kingdom is ended! He has been weighed in the balances and found wanting! God has finished his kingdom!” This was not the sermon of some barnstorming preacher. It was the climactic erudition of Assistant DA Milton U’Ren in his closing statement, which was otherwise much more professorial than evangelical. U’Ren mostly focused on inconsistencies in Arbuckle’s story, arguing for the unlikeliness of events behind
the locked door of 1219 happening as Arbuckle said, and pointing out that the movie star’s story was kept secret until the first trial and then seemingly tailored to counter the state’s witnesses. U’Ren highlighted how Rappe appeared hearty before spending time in room 1219 with Arbuckle, and he returned again to the “ice episode.” “Oh, if the mothers of the children of America could have seen Roscoe Arbuckle making such sport of the poor, sick, senseless body of Virginia Rappe! The moral leper make the world laugh? Thank God, he will never make it laugh again!”

Again avoiding the errors of the second trial, the defense opted to deliver its own closing statement. First, Nat Schmulowitz reiterated at length Rappe’s history of bladder illness, and he highlighted the medical testimony about bladder ruptures. Then came the emotional speech of Gavin McNab. When not quoting scripture, he reinflated the previously punctured reputations of defense witnesses and denigrated the expertise and impartiality of prosecution witnesses. Receiving the worst of it was Wakefield secretary Virginia Breig. He pointed out the absurdity of Rappe sharing her deathbed accusation with “the sordid bill collector” only to have such an accusation remain unrepeated until a third trial. Further, he accused Breig, “this creature,” of trying unsuccessfully to extort the defense and then selling out to the prosecution for the cost of a hospital bill.

Blake and Prevost were “the private prison witnesses,” with the former “seized and placed in a corral like a beast.” In conclusion, McNab widened his argument beyond the freedom of his client: “If, through the extraordinary attention to his case, the vile, hideous, and barbarous practices that have prevailed in criminal processes in San Francisco, unknown to the public, are no longer possible, and unfortunates, that are being railroaded to the penitentiary without offense against the law, will have fair trials hereafter, then this persecution will have served a good purpose and Arbuckle will be repaid.”

Countering for the state, Friedman said near the start of his statement, “Mr. McNab, who is so quick to invoke the scriptures, who so gladly calls down the Ten Commandments to his aid, forgets that there is one which
reads, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ He also beautifully eulogizes womanhood, then blasts and damns every woman appearing in this case, including his own witnesses.” Friedman deflected the contention that the state had coached Blake and Prevost, and he belittled much of the medical testimony, saying it made no difference why Rappe’s bladder was distended. He argued that Rappe was too young for multiple pregnancies in and before 1908.
*
And he spelled out again the state’s version of what happened in room 1219 and why it was the only logical explanation. Arbuckle, he said, forced Rappe onto the bed, “threw his weight upon her, her bladder ruptured, and she passed into a state of unconsciousness…. We do not claim—with all the talk of disarranging clothes—we do not claim that he consummated his purpose. We claim that he attempted to accomplish a purpose, to fulfill a desire, and that his attempt resulted in the death of this girl.”