Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (52 page)

This decision had its most profound effect on ambitious rookie filmmaker Robert Goldstein, who made
The Spirit of ‘76,
a Revolutionary War epic. It premiered shortly after America entered World War I and
was confiscated by the Chicago censorship board for potentially creating hostility toward Great Britain, then America’s ally. Goldstein trimmed offending scenes, but after reinstating them for a Los Angeles run, he was tried and convicted under the Espionage Act. He served three years of a ten-year sentence before his time was commuted by President Woodrow Wilson. Ironically, his plight resulted from making a patriotic film about the American Revolution.

In 1916 the studios formed the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry, which lobbied for Constitutional and legal protections for movies. In March 1921 it issued “Thirteen Points” that the industry promised to avoid, including “suggestive bedroom and bathroom scenes” and scenes “that tend to weaken the authority of the law.” NAMPI’s efforts at averting film censorship were mostly unsuccessful. Meanwhile, the theater owners’ NBRMP lost influence as critics accused it of whitewashing objectionable content.

After a torrent of news coverage and a protracted but ultimately failed effort by the movie industry to prevent it, on May 14, 1921, a fifth state established a censorship board—the most populous one, New York. Governor Nathan Miller said he signed the bill because “it was the only way to remedy what everyone conceded had grown to be a very great evil.” Legislatures in other states introduced similar measures.

The fervor against unregulated motion pictures had been building—and then it exploded. In the days after Roscoe Arbuckle’s arrest on September 10,
all
his films were pulled from
every
theater nationwide. As the parent of the sometimes rebellious film industry, Los Angeles’ instinct was to protect its child, though, occasionally, when movies brought shame, it felt impelled to instill punishment. Numerous censorship ordinances were passed in Los Angeles but wielded lightly. On September 14, 1921, the city council held a “public welfare” meeting to discuss ratcheting up the regulation of films. In a discussion that grew contentious, Protestant ministers spoke in favor of censorship, and—four and
a half months before his murder—the president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, William Desmond Taylor, testified for the status quo: “I have listened with amazement to the charges of these ministers that we are debauching the morals of the youth of this city. I know that the great majority of directors are building plays that are clean…. We have pledged ourselves not to put anything into pictures that will hurt the morals of any youth.”

Afterward, Taylor issued a one-thousand-word, widely distributed statement entitled “The Nonsense of Censorship,” which began:

Censorship of motion pictures is a menace to the very principles of the Constitution of these United States of America. How strong a grasp it has obtained over the constitutional rights of America may be seen in the fact that nearly one-third of the total population of this country may now see only such motion pictures as some commission has decided they may see.

Fought at city council meetings and on editorial pages, the battle progressed in fits and starts for over a month before Los Angeles’ latest censorship attempt was defeated on October 21. Numerous states also repudiated motion picture censoring measures in 1921, including California, Illinois, and Connecticut.

From the movie industry’s perspective, however, the problem was larger than the prospect that a council that might ban a single title from its community or demand a scene be excised. It was the overall effect on ticket sales caused by focusing on the alleged evils of motion pictures. That’s why the studios’ greatest concern after September 10, 1921, was not censors; it was the perception—fueled by preachers, pundits, and politicians—that the industry was
uncensored,
that it followed no rules but merely the pursuit of wealth and pleasure, that it failed to heed the constraints of common decency. With the relentless press coverage in the weeks following Arbuckle’s arrest, the opinion grew that Hollywood was the nexus of Jazz Age immorality and was capable, via both its easily
transmitted products and the status of its worshipped stars, of infecting this virus throughout America. The studios had to act swiftly and decisively to show they shared the public’s concern.

William Harrison Hays was born on November 5, 1879, in the farming town of Sullivan in southwestern Indiana. His father was a lawyer, a Republican, and a Presbyterian elder, and the junior Hays followed the same path, joining Dad’s law firm after college, representing railroads, coal companies, and other corporations. A skilled orator with a passion for politics, he rose through the party ranks to become Indiana’s Republican chairman, even as he continued to live in Sullivan with his wife and—a new addition in 1915—their son.

With elephantine ears, teeth like mixed nuts, and a nose that resembled the beak on a fruit-eating bird, Hays had—to put it kindly—a memorable face, one that would later bring much joy to editorial cartoonists. He was short and exceedingly thin, and thus whereas Arbuckle claimed to be too fat for soldiering in World War I, Hays was reportedly too frail. By then he was chairman of the Republican National Committee, a position to which the Progressive wing of the GOP elevated him in February 1918. In an era in which candidates were handpicked in smoky backrooms, party chairman was seen as a short step to a Senate seat or a governor’s mansion. Hays coveted the latter as he slept in train cars and hotel rooms, traversing the country, working to elect Republicans.

He was expert at building alliances, but even if he had been lousy he would have been a success, for he had the great fortune to be Republican national chairman in 1918, when his party regained the Senate and House from the Democrats thanks to an unpopular war, and during a Depression in 1920, when his candidate, Warren G. Harding, triumphed in a landslide. Subsequently, Hays accepted the cabinet position of postmaster general in Harding’s administration. From the days of America’s first postmaster general, Benjamin Franklin, until the postal service was reformed in 1970, it was a powerful political job. In addition to overseeing mail delivery, the postmaster wielded much of his party’s patronage,
appointing supporters to postal service management positions. Though Hays moved to Washington, DC, his wife, who suffered from “lifelong frailty,” and son stayed in Sullivan.

After eight years of a Democratic administration, Republican Hays came to his job with a number of postal service reforms. In a luncheon speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, he proclaimed, “First, it is no part of the primary business of the Post Office Department to act as a censor of the press. This should not and will not be.” One month later, he granted second-class mail status to a socialist magazine, stating that Wilson’s administration had relegated it to a more expensive status as a form of censorship. It was the first of several radical publications to which he bestowed mail status previously denied.

Hays was perceived as a political mastermind—an organizer, deal-maker, and publicist par excellence. He had built connections in small towns and large cities nationwide, the same communities that were now launching film censorship boards. Possible federal film censorship also loomed, and Hays was the premier power broker in the Republican Party, which now controlled Congress and the White House. He was a teetotaler and a Presbyterian elder from rural Indiana with long Dutch Irish roots into America’s heartland. His background contrasted with the major film studio heads, all of whom were Jewish and most of whom were immigrants—facts not lost on Hollywood’s critics, many of whom espoused anti-Semitism and nativism. And so when the movie industry was struck by a catastrophe after Labor Day 1921, it turned to Will H. Hays.

A letter was drafted to enlist Hays to the cause of minimizing the catastrophe’s repercussions. It was signed by a dozen studio executives, including Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky, and hand-delivered to him on December 8. When word leaked, he denied accepting the offer for another month, until January 14, 1922, just before testimony began in the second Arbuckle trial. The announcement was front-page news, christening Hays “the Judge Landis of movies,” in reference to the first commissioner of major league baseball, appointed in November 1920 to resuscitate the national pastime’s image after 1919’s Black Sox scandal.

But why would a forty-two-year-old longtime political operative with his own aspirations for higher office give up a plum cabinet position after one year to embroil himself in censorship fights, the Arbuckle trials, and an industry reeling from tales of drug-fueled orgies? The answer had six digits: $100,000—the annual salary, not including other financial incentives. His postmaster general salary was $12,000. The president made $75,000.

Hays stayed on as postmaster general until March 4. By the time he assumed his position as head of the new Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (which replaced the old NAMPI) in uptown Manhattan, there had been a second film scandal, the murder of William Desmond Taylor. After devoting a month to studying the movie industry, Hays outlined how he hoped to modernize it and polish its tarnished image. “As to censorship I think that will be the least of our troubles,” he said. “We hope that our pictures will eliminate all causes for censorship…. The matter of censorship will take care of itself when our objects as to the pictures are accomplished.” Let the self-censorship begin.

In the midst of the third Arbuckle trial, District Attorney Matthew Brady spoke about the reforms Hays needed to impart: “The public is tired of seeing some morally rotten but highly paid actor or actress glorified and held up as an idol. The public is tired of having sex flung in their faces. People who live decent lives, the mothers and fathers with families that they are trying to raise to be upright and decent, are tired of seeing film after film picturing infidelity and red love. They are tired of seeing the other man as a permanent fixture in the home—according to the movies. They are giving the producers their chance to reform from within. If they don’t, public opinion won’t do any reforming at all. It will simply annihilate the motion picture industry altogether, just as it did the saloon.”

In April the Christian group Lord’s Day Alliance won headlines throughout the country for publicly calling for Will Hays to “use your authority to intervene and prevent the outrage to the moral sensibilities
of the citizens of this country threatened in the proposal to again exhibit any Arbuckle films.”