Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (6 page)

“I don’t know what got into me,” the woman later recalled. “Actually, I was attracted to him, but I couldn’t let myself be picked up, could I?” Of his appearance, she remembered: “He was heavy but handsome. Oh, God, he looked like he had been scrubbed to death. He had a complexion any woman in the world would die to have. His hair was so blond. And he was dressed meticulously, white trousers, white shoes, blue coat, and a straw hat.” Self-conscious about his excess weight, Arbuckle remained a meticulous dresser throughout his life.

The young woman was Minta Durfee. Her family, living near downtown Los Angeles, was representative of the city’s working class. Just before the movies came, Los Angeles was a city of manufacturing and oil production, an “open shop” enclave as envisioned by a few business titans. Charles “Buck” Durfee was a railroad brakeman. His wife, Flora, was a seamstress. They had six children, the fourth of whom, Araminta, was born October 1, 1889. Known as Minta, she was seventeen and the stagestruck veteran of only school theater productions when a family friend put her in the chorus of a play at Los Angeles’ Burbank Theatre. Afterward, she secured a chorus job with the Elwood Company in a new show at the Byde-A-Wyle. On a June day, preparing to stay in the Virginia Hotel with the rest of the company, she and her bulging suitcase boarded an electric train headed south to her new job in Long Beach. On the way, she deflected the attentions of the blond fat man.

Durfee saw Arbuckle again at the first rehearsal, but when he laughed at her outrage after being called a “dame” by her employer, he only validated her initial reservations. It was during the show’s first performance, when Arbuckle’s baritone voice and soft-shoe dancing enchanted the crowd, that he began to enchant her too.

The show ran twice daily. After each second show, some company members drank or danced, but Arbuckle and Durfee strolled the boardwalk beside the beach. Enamored of his singing, she encouraged him to try for bigger billings and venues. He had his own suggestion—that they sing a duet in the Byde-A-Wyle program. Holding hands at center stage, the round young man with the mellifluous voice and the waif beside him sang “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” to each other.

Fifty years later, Durfee wrote:

His ability to do everything naturally, humorously, artistically, and with ease, made me realize he was a genius. His [effect] on audiences, his poise, lack of vanity and jealousy amazed me. I was overwhelmed by his personality and talent. He was all artist on stage, but off the stage he was the big boy who played leapfrog on the beach, swam like a champion, shot billiards to perfection, and while he did so, drank huge pitchers of cold buttermilk.

The show folded at the end of July, and Durfee planned to spend time with her family in Los Angeles before returning to chorus lines. After the final performance, Arbuckle and Durfee walked to the end of a pier, standing hand in hand, the inky waves shimmering with moonlight. He professed his love; she professed hers. It was the first romantic relationship for either of them.

To Arbuckle, if two people were in love they should wed. “Will you marry me?” he asked.

When she was noncommittal, he scooped her up and dangled her over the dark Pacific, threatening to cast her in if she said no. It was the gesture of a child, bullying playfully to hide his insecurities. She said yes. He subsequently asked her father for her hand in marriage.

Six weeks after meeting, on August 5, 1908, the couple married in the Byde-A-Wyle. Their union was turned into a for-profit, “special, once-in-a-lifetime” attraction by the theater company. Accompanied by a twelve-piece orchestra, Arbuckle sang “An Old Sweetheart of Mine” while a picture of him and his bride was projected onto a screen. The audience applauded him for five minutes. It may have seemed fantastical to twenty-one-year-old Arbuckle: marrying an eighteen-year-old girl he barely knew onstage before a paying audience, but by then the often-awkward young man was most comfortable bathed in klieg lights with all eyes upon him. Perhaps to him, turning his own wedding into another performance was a means of making such an extraordinary event feel more ordinary and not less.

Their scheduled honeymoon was replaced by a one-month run with a show in the farm town of San Bernardino, sixty miles east of Los Angeles. Durfee was bedridden with pleurisy. Arbuckle sang illustrated songs. As the newlyweds lived together in close quarters, Durfee (who kept her maiden name for stage purposes) was still getting to know the man she had married so soon after meeting him. Privately, he was sometimes shy and sometimes brooding but other times romantic or playful. He could be racked by insecurities and doubt, and yet he was supremely confident when singing. Onstage or off, he was happiest when he was performing.

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It’s likely he was named after Republican senator Roscoe Conkling (1829-88).

*
There were no saloons. In 1881 Kansas became the first state to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages.

*
The Unique has a unique history. Sophie Tucker and Al Jolson performed there, and it screened the West Coast premiere of
The Great Train Robbery
(1903). The 1906 earthquake destroyed it, but for two years until they opened another theater, the Graumans screened movies in a tent in the lot where the Unique had stood.

*
After a lengthy run with the Ziegfeld Follies, Errol achieved moderate fame as a comedic film actor, appearing in more than 160 mostly short movies from 1921 to his death in 1951.

Because the truth about art
is
the company it keeps with the slightly askew, and the real stunt of the beautiful is not to be
too
beautiful.

—S
TANLEY
E
LKIN,
“S
OME
O
VERRATED
M
ASTERPIECES”

T
hen as now the fashion and film industries worshipped at the altar of youth, so it was common for models and actresses to shave years off their ages. Today virtually every source, including her tombstone, lists her birth year as 1895, and it is commonly believed she was born in New York City, but Virginia Caroline Rapp entered this world on July 7, 1891, in Chicago.

Decimated by the great fire of 1871, Chicago rebuilt itself as a metropolis of wood and masonry but also metal. Steel skyscrapers reached ever higher beside Lake Michigan. Between the inferno and 1900, the city hosted a World’s Fair, and its population exploded from 300,000 to 1.7 million, landing it second in the nation, behind only New York City. It was America’s industrial heart, pulling in materials, pumping out goods. Waves of immigrants arrived from Eastern Europe, and after the Civil War a steady torrent of rural Americans migrated north in search of manufacturing, construction, and meat-packing jobs. Away from the towers of State Street, the mansions of Lake Shore Drive, and the monuments of the World’s Fair, the city was a patchwork of ethnic enclaves, row after row of bleak tenement houses, brown and gray boxes squeezed together.

It is likely Virginia Rappe grew up in just such a brown or gray box. The only child of Mabel Rapp, Virginia was born out of wedlock when Mabel was either seventeen or eighteen. Virginia never knew her father,
*
and she initially believed her mother was her sister and that an older woman who answered to the name Caroline Rapp was her mother. Later, she believed Caroline was her grandmother. She was not—and was probably no relation.

Two days before Christmas 1892, mother Mabel made the newspapers, described as “a pretty girl of nineteen,” after being locked in Chicago’s Veteran’s Building by a janitor. She was in the news again in 1898 when she was arrested for passing bad checks in association with “the most dangerous gang of forgers the police have dealt with for years.” Mabel was a part-time chorus girl and sometimes model. For some time between 1900 and 1905, she and her daughter lived in New York City. Mabel Rapp died before her thirtieth birthday.

An orphan at eleven, Virginia lived in the Chicago household of her “grandmother,” Caroline Rapp, and was also looked after by Kate Hardebeck, who would later call herself Rappe’s “adopted aunt” and state that it was Mabel Rapp’s deathbed wish that “auntie” look after Virginia. Friends would describe Rappe in childhood as a “rollicking schoolgirl, addicted to roller skates, short skirts, bobbed hair and athletic sports of all kinds.” In addition to her athletics, she took dancing lessons, perhaps hoping to follow her late mother into choruses onstage.

In 1907, the year she turned sixteen, Virginia began her modeling career, changing her name from the pedestrian Rapp to the more exotic Rappe (pronounced “Rap-pay”). The five-foot-five teenager was entering an infant industry. London designer Lady Duff Gordon is credited with training the first couture models in 1894 and staging the first runway show in 1904. Then and until World War II, Paris and, to a lesser degree, London dominated high fashion. When Rappe first
struck a pose, American women were only beginning to earn a steady income modeling dresses and hats at live shows, mostly in department stores, and in newspapers and magazines. Like the earliest motion picture actors, models were widely perceived as déclassé and were virtually all anonymous.

However, from nearly the start of her career, the ambitious Rappe sought publicity. A 1908 article in the
Chicago Tribune
asked in a bold headline, A
RE THE
A
RTISTS’
M
ODELS OF
C
HICAGO
M
ORE
B
EAUTIFUL
T
HAN THE
F
AMOUS
M
ODELS OF
P
ARIS?
and featured two photo illustrations of Rappe. The piece, written by a man, paints the seventeen-year-old girl as both ingenuous and manipulative:

It is predicted by the artists of the city that Virginia Rappe will be one of the world’s famous models after the years have mellowed her and taken from her posing the slight touch of childish gaucherie which still remains. She is unreservedly beautiful and, young as she is, shows remarkable understanding of and sympathy for the subjects she represents.

She is a simple little girl of 15 years
*
who looks out on the world with the clear, dewy eyes of a child just awakened from sleep. She lives at home, where she is the pet of the family, and she poses because she is extremely pretty and she “wants to.” What Miss Rappe has wanted to do she generally has done. She is not spoiled; she has merely a happy faculty for making others see things in the same light in which they appear to her.

For a year beginning in September 1911, she worked at the mammoth Mandel Brothers department store in downtown Chicago, sometimes as a model but mostly as a sales clerk. Also in 1911 she entered into a pact with sisters Gladys and Ethel Sykes, each promising to never
accept a marriage proposal.
*
In October 1912, the three Chicagoans were living in New York City, where their beauty was “attracting considerable attention in the theaters and restaurants of the Longacre Square district” in midtown Manhattan. By then Rappe was likely a full-time model—and one of the first Americans who could state modeling as her occupation. She traveled extensively. When she appeared at fashion shows in the largest department store in Omaha, Nebraska, in September 1913, a newspaper interview noted, “Miss Rappe spends most of her time in New York when she is not touring the country to appear at style shows in big stores.”

Published in newspapers throughout the country in 1913 was an article focused on Rappe’s advice to young women. The suggestion of “Virginia Rappe, who as a commercial model travels over the United States and Europe at a salary of $4000” was that women avoid being stenographers (“too many of those”) or waiting in line for poor-paying jobs and instead think outside the box. Specifically, she advocated working for wealthy families, doing tasks such as shopping or caring for silverware—the sort of jobs employers may not have known they could hire someone to do. “Be original—every girl can be that,” Rappe concluded. Today the prospect of domestic work as a novel solution to unemployment seems quaint at best, but at a time when only 18 percent of American women were employed for wages, and when their most common jobs were seamstress, teacher, nanny, or maid, the idea of women creating their own positions and approaching employers rich enough to necessitate such positions was presumed a newsworthy strategy. Rappe followed her own advice by networking with people much wealthier than herself. It’s also notable that at a time when the average annual salary for employed men and women was $1,296, Rappe claimed to make $4,000 (more than $90,000 in today’s dollars).

She traveled abroad in a manner mostly reserved for the moneyed class. A front-page news story early in 1914 focused on her and a female friend returning to New York City from Europe on an ocean liner: “Girls in Pink Bloomers Mystify Ship’s Passengers.” Staking out the cutting edge of fashion, the pair (smiling in a photo, bloomers covered) stirred up some TMZ-style publicity for their underwear—though seen only via the “pink puffs” at their ankles.