Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (54 page)

In the wake of the Arbuckle trials, the public became increasingly interested in the private lives of Hollywood celebrities, and movie star coverage grew more intrusive. Gossip columns, filled with even the most pedestrian trivia, occupied a full page of many local newspapers.
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In addition to savoring tales of glamour and just-like-us banalities, readers were curious about the private foibles of actors—the whisperings about what went on at parties and in bedrooms.

A book published in May 1922 entitled
The Sins of Hollywood: An Expose of Movie Vice
was authored by “a Hollywood Newspaper Man,” who was revealed, by a counterattacking movie industry, to be Ed Roberts, a former editor at
Photoplay. The Sins of Hollywood
was ruled “too scurrilous” to be sent through the mail, which only aided its legend. Proving you can judge a book by its cover, this one is adorned with an illustration of a Hollywood starlet, a movie camera, and Satan. Inside, actors and actresses are bestowed barely disguised pseudonyms, though their phony names often are accompanied by actual photographs, just so there’s no confusion.

Rudolph Valentino is “Adolpho,” alleged to be a former gigolo. Mabel Normand is “Molly” and Mack Sennett is “Jack,” and one chapter relates how their relationship reached its violent end with help from Mae Busch (merely called Mae). (Normand’s drug use is also alluded to in the chapter “Dope!”) And then there is “Rostrand,” a certain movie star recently tried three times for manslaughter, who is featured in the must-read chapter “Making Sodom Look Sick.” In his introduction, Roberts explained why he collected the book’s “true stories”:

To the boys and girls of the land these mock heroes and heroines have been pictured and painted, for box office purposes, as the living symbols of all the virtues. An avalanche of propaganda by screen and press has imbued them with every ennobling trait. Privately they have lived, and are still living, lives of wild debauchery…. Unfaithful and cruelly indifferent to the worship of the youth of the land, they have led or are leading such lives as may, any day, precipitate yet another nation-wide scandal and again shatter the ideals, the dreams, the castles, the faith of our boys and girls.

And so to protect the ideals, dreams, castles, and faith of children, Roberts sought to make certain Rostrand was never again seen as the symbol of any virtue by recounting this tale of dogs gone wild:

Rostrand, a famous comedian, decided to stage another of his unusual affairs. He rented ten rooms on the top floor of a large
exclusive hotel and only guests who had the proper invitations were admitted. After all of the guests—male and female—were seated, a female dog was led out into the middle of the largest room. Then a male dog was brought in. A dignified man in clerical garb stepped forward and with all due solemnity performed a marriage ceremony for the dogs. It was a decided hit. The guests laughed and applauded heartily and the comedian was called a genius. Which fact pleased him immensely. But the “best” was yet to come. The dogs were unleashed. There before the assembled and unblushing young girls and their male escorts was enacted an unspeakable scene. Even truth cannot justify the publication of such details.

In newspapers, there had been previous mentions of a dog wedding at Arbuckle’s house, but the preceding “unspeakable scene” seems to have been, at the least, a public consummation of canine nuptials. It furthered the image of Arbuckle living a life free of any moral restraints—precisely the sort of “mock hero” to keep off movie screens, separate from impressionable youth.

Fatty Arbuckle says he is broke, that it took all his fortune to see him through the three trials. Perhaps he may be forced to go to work for a while.

—A
N
U
NSIGNED
E
DITORIAL
C
OMMENT IN A
S
MALL-TOWN
W
ASHINGTON
N
EWSPAPER,
J
UNE
23, 1922

Roscoe Arbuckle declined offers to appear on vaudeville stages and instead tried to return to films. He wrote a short comedy script, “The Vision,” for Buster Keaton and sold it to Joseph Schenck; Arbuckle was also set to direct. The movie was never made. When
Photoplay
editor James Quirk wrote him a letter of encouragement, Arbuckle wrote back, again stating his case but also strategizing: “You can be of real service to me by writing Mr. Hays, asking him to lift [the] ban and telling him that my innocence of the charges placed against me in San Francisco justifies
your request.” Not just Quirk but also representatives of the country’s theater owners lobbied Hays for Arbuckle’s reinstatement. Meanwhile, some felt Hays had not done enough. Senator Henry Lee Myers denounced Arbuckle on the floor of the US Senate in an argument for film censorship, stating, “At Hollywood, California, is a colony of these people, where debauchery, riotous living, drunkenness, ribaldry, dissipation, free love, seem to be conspicuous.”

In June Minta Durfee left that colony and journeyed to New York City to live with her sister. Arbuckle denied that his wife had deserted him and claimed she would return when he could support himself again. He lived in the West Adams mansion with Lou Anger and Anger’s wife, who were now renting it from Schenck.
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He spent too much time at home, feeling sorry for himself. Al St. John later remembered his uncle sitting alone for hours in a car in the garage of the house he no longer owned, shifting gears but never moving. At Keaton’s insistence, Arbuckle sometimes visited Comique and assisted his friend on his latest comedy short. But there were too many hours in a day to fill. The man who in September had sworn off booze forever was drinking again. (By this point, raucous hotel parties were known as “Arbuckle parties” and orange blossoms were called “Arbuckle cocktails.”)

Arbuckle remained generous with money even when he owed more than he had. Besides Keaton, his closest friend was the suave matinee idol and notorious womanizer Lew Cody, who recalled, “Once when we were both pretty broke, I had a chance to go to New York to work. I managed to borrow enough to buy a ticket. Just before the train pulled out, Roscoe came aboard and after he’d said goodbye he handed me an envelope. ‘Don’t open this until after the train starts,’ he said. ‘It’s just a letter telling you what a lousy actor I think you are.’ When I opened the envelope, two $1000 bills dropped out. He’d borrowed the money here, there, and everywhere. That’s the kind of a pal Fatty was.”

He also found the money for a trout-fishing vacation in Vancouver, British Columbia, and in August, he sailed from San Francisco for the Orient
he had visited ten years before. Among those accompanying him was his attorney, Milton Cohen. “I need a rest and intend to take it easy and, at the same time, see some other parts of the world,” he told reporters in San Francisco before departing. “I’ll come back to the United States in due time and then will be my opportunity to decide what I’m going to do. It’s entirely up to the people—the people who see the movies and who used to be—and I think, again will be—my friends, whether I return to the screen or not. Maybe I’ll get back to making comedies, but I don’t know. San Francisco doesn’t make me feel very funny and I can’t say right now.”

He planned to visit the Middle East and Europe, but after slipping down steps and cutting a finger on the initial sea voyage, he made it no further than Japan. An infection set in, requiring surgery in Tokyo and generating a flurry of front-page stories.
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Though he was greeted warmly in Japan, the injury had soured his mood, so he halted the trip and journeyed back across the Pacific. He said his time in the Orient had convinced him California was a good place to live.

“Fatty” Arbuckle was a movie “goat.” While he escaped conviction in court he was crucified by public sentiment which demanded that somebody be made to pay for the loose lives of too many of the movie stars. It was just Arbuckle’s misfortune that the choice fell upon him. It might have been anyone of a number of others no better than he. A little more than usual vulgarity and an accident directed selection of Arbuckle. So he is paying for all.

—F
ROM AN
EDITORIAL IN A
SMALL-TOWN
W
ISCONSIN
N
EWSPAPER,
N
OVEMBER
22, 1922

A malaise had clouded Hollywood during Arbuckle’s trials and the investigation into William Taylor’s murder, and it was felt most acutely at Paramount,
where Arbuckle had been the top actor and Taylor one of the top directors. Then came a third blow. After Arbuckle’s arrest, Wallace Reid stepped in as the studio’s biggest star. His six-foot-one, athletic physique and dashing good looks had elevated him to leading roles. While in Oregon in 1919, starring in a film, Reid was injured, and Jesse Lasky sent a company doctor north. The movie star was soon addicted to morphine.

Strung out, he worked at a breakneck pace, headlining in physically demanding roles for Paramount, seven each year in the first three years of the 1920s. Alcohol was another addiction. Sometimes the crew had to literally prop him up to capture shots, and his habits were well known in Hollywood and to those who got their hands on
The Sins of Hollywood,
in which “handsome Walter” is sort of patient zero in the “Dope!” chapter, supposedly hooking many of his fellow actors on cocaine and opium at his “dope parties.”

On September 19, 1922, Reid’s wife admitted him to a Hollywood sanitarium for treatment. And nine days before Christmas, Hollywood’s worst-kept secret broke on front pages. W
ALLACE
R
EID
C
RITICALLY
I
LL, “DOPE”
B
LAMED,
screamed the
Chicago Tribune.
In Los Angeles to meet with studio executives, Will Hays visited Reid on December 19 in a padded room in the sanitarium. Hays said the cinematic heartthrob, then weighing a decimated 130 pounds, was recovering, but Reid would die a month later, on January 18, 1923.

The morning after visiting Reid, before he boarded a train with his wife and son heading to Sullivan, Indiana, for Christmas, Hays issued a statement on another matter.