Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (66 page)

And she blacked out. Her loss of consciousness, mentioned in one way or another by virtually everyone who spoke to her subsequently, may seem an unlikely and convenient coincidence, but as the state correctly pointed out, loss of consciousness immediately after the rupture of a distended bladder is a common occurrence, because of the resulting drop in blood pressure.

Arbuckle used water (frozen or not) in an attempt to revive her. She came to, groggy and pained. And, whether or not it was being kicked, he opened the locked door. Having blacked out moments after her bladder ruptured, Rappe was uncertain what had happened to her. She would naturally question whether something had been done to her while she was unconscious to cause her subsequent pains.
“She asked me several times to determine if she had been assaulted.”
Further, the actions she could remember were ones she did not want to be known beyond the nurses in whom she confided. She especially did not want them known by Lehrman. “
The patient admitted to me that her relations with Arbuckle in the room had not been proper.”

After Rappe’s death when the press and police were enquiring, Arbuckle feared that the truth was a slippery slope. Would they believe that his interaction with Rappe was consensual? What would the movie-going public think of this still-married man engaging in boozy foreplay with a starlet in a hotel room? He must have even wondered how she could have been terminally injured and why she had blacked out. There had to be some other explanation. And so he first lied that he had never been alone with her. Later, when it fit the testimony of the state’s witnesses, there came another explanation, a more elaborate lie—the story of Arbuckle aiding the nauseous Rappe.

The preceding scenario would not fit the definition of involuntary manslaughter—homicide committed without malice but in the perpetration of an unlawful act. That was the charge ultimately leveled against Arbuckle when the murder charge didn’t stand. The unlawful act in the state’s allegation was a sexual assault that was halted by Rappe’s injury and resulting loss of consciousness, but the state produced no evidence, not the bruises nor the handprints nor the ruptured bladder, directly tying Arbuckle to such an assault. Other witness accounts of what Rappe allegedly said, such as “He hurt me,” did not preclude that their interaction was consensual.

That’s not to say he was entirely blameless. He was guilty of perjury for his concocted Good Samaritan story. He may have been worthy of some condemnation for his alcohol-fueled (Prohibition-era) pajama
party with showgirls, and he certainly was for the ice incident if, as seems most likely, he made inappropriate contact as a joke. Indeed, he may have been guilty of all the state charged. Or something less. The interactions of Arbuckle and Rappe may have been consensual until the final moments, and then signals may have been misinterpreted or disregarded. The “assault” may have started and ended with a fall on a bed.

In any case, based on what the prosecution knew and did not know, Roscoe Arbuckle should never have been tried for manslaughter and certainly never branded a murderer and a rapist. Further, he should never have been painted as a monster by the press and blacklisted by the film industry.

There were but two people in that room, and neither of them knew that one of them had suffered a bladder tear until after she was dead. We can never know for certain what happened behind the locked door of 1219 on Labor Day of 1921, other than the fact that one person endured an injury there that resulted four days later in the loss of her life and eventually led to the destruction of her reputation. The other person suffered horribly for that death, perhaps justly, perhaps even escaping true justice, but most likely unjustly. Most likely, in the scope of society’s condemnation, it is one of the greatest injustices to a career and a reputation ever perpetrated.

*
He had previously joked about jumping out one of those windows.

*
In contrast, when “Roscoe Arbuckle Tells His Own Story” was published a month later, Rappe’s apparent pain when she was in the bathroom and when she was between the beds were described in the same terms, making it seem more likely she was injured in the bathroom.

*
Arbuckle made this point in his initial statement to the
Los Angeles Times
the day Rappe died: “To show how serious we thought it was, I and the other men danced in the hotel that night.”

A
RBTJCKLE
F
ILM
B
RINGS
A
RREST

The board of motion-picture censors of Portland [Oregon] today ordered the arrest of Andrew Saso, manager of a theater, on the ground that he had shown a motion-picture featuring Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle. Films featuring Arbuckle have been barred by city ordinance since October 15, 1924.

—L
os A
NGELES
T
IMES,
D
ECEMBER
14, 1932,
FRONT
PAGE

A
rbuckle had enjoyed an accomplished and lengthy career onstage, first singing and later telling jokes. His rich voice would have been ideal for radio, if anyone had dared to give him such a chance, but most of his American fans never heard him utter a word before his initial sound film was released in November 1932.
Hey, Pop!
was his first starring movie role in over eleven years. Warner Bros. had been especially careful, returning him to his customary on-screen getup (oversized pants, undersized bowler) and frequent secondary costume (a dress) and a slapstick plot and gags reminiscent of his two-reelers from the 1910s. The only addition was dialogue, which Arbuckle handled admirably.

Shorts like
Hey, Pop!
ran before feature attractions and typically weren’t advertised on marquees or in newspapers. Thus, Arbuckle’s comeback film created little controversy, garnering some positive reviews but mostly screening unnoticed. There was by now a new generation of movie
stars and movie fans. The transition from silence to sound had marked a gaping demarcation, marginalizing silent comedians and their sight gags.
*

Arbuckle made three comedy shorts for Warner Bros. in the final five months of 1932, each shot in less than a week at Brooklyn’s Vitaphone studio (the old Vitagraph studio where teenage Mabel Normand acted). The second of these,
Buzzin’ Around,
featured Al St. John and a swarm of animated bees.
^†
It was the final of sixty-three films known to include the uncle and nephew. The third short,
How’ve You Bean?,
paired Arbuckle with the smaller, blank-eyed Fritz Hubert to form a new comedy duo, with the latter serving mostly as straight man to the former’s shenanigans. (Destined for a brief career, twenty-four-year-old Hubert had only just debuted with a small role in
Hey, Pop!)
The pair mishandle Mexican jumping beans; as with the bees in
Buzzin’ Around,
the beans are animated to good effect. This heralded a change, because with the rise of Mickey Mouse, short comedy was increasingly an animated medium. And slapstick, which had gone from vaudeville to silent films to sound films during Arbuckle’s lifetime, was finding a new and lasting home in cartoons.

A New York gossip column item in October 1932 read, “Quite the most man-about-town-ish man-about-town at the moment is Fatty Arbuckle who, liberated from an old stigma, seems to be having the time of his life. He appears in all the night spots, invariably accompanied by his attractive wife.” The party continued for Arbuckle, who had first been a regular at Manhattan nightclubs with Keaton fifteen years prior. But, now-middle-aged, he had shed the all-male entourage to spend time with his new wife. He and McPhail danced at such legendary joints as the Cotton Club, the Onyx Club, and Roseland Ballroom.

A suite at Manhattan’s elegant Park Central Hotel was the home for Arbuckle, McPhail, McPhail’s then-eight-year-old daughter, Marilyn, and their African American maid. Arbuckle never had a child of his own, but he loved playing with kids, and kids quickly warmed to him. For the first time since he lived with Durfee’s family in the early 1910s, there was a child in his home. He doted on Marilyn.

In early 1933 the family of three returned to Los Angeles on a vacation. Afterward, when they boarded a train and headed east again, it was the last time Arbuckle, who called himself a “100% Californian,” saw the Golden State. During Mardi Gras week in March 1933, he played a weeklong vaudeville engagement to packed houses in New Orleans, assisted by McPhail. Also that month, a newspaper item read, “Roscoe Arbuckle has given up dieting. He says he’s not going to starve himself to death just for the sake of living a few years longer.”

In April he was back at the Vitaphone studio, starring in the comedy short
Close Relations,
which featured Shemp Howard of Three Stooges fame. Then he was again paired with Fritz Hubert in
Tomalio
and
In the Dough.
Arbuckle had no love interest in his six comeback movies, thus avoiding any association with the scandal of 1921. Instead,
In the Dough,
his final film, recalls more innocent times. Its relentless pie fight is reminiscent of Arbuckle’s Keystone days, when every scene was a potential custard eruption and Fatty’s fame was climbing weekly. Production began on June 22 and wrapped on the afternoon of June 28.

On the evening of June 28, Arbuckle and McPhail belatedly celebrated their one-year wedding anniversary at Billy La Hiff’s Tavern, a popular hangout for Broadway and film notables in midtown Manhattan. Alcohol was served at La Hiff’s with a wink at Prohibition, which was by that summer evening crawling feebly toward its official demise on December 5. Arbuckle and McPhail ate and drank. She played backgammon. He talked with friends, including former world boxing champ Johnny Dundee. Arbuckle had tickets to the world heavyweight championship fight the following evening at the Madison Square Garden Bowl, a seventy-two-thousand-seat outdoor arena in Queens. Arbuckle and his agent, Joe Rivkin, discussed his Midwest vaudeville tour scheduled
to begin in four days and the fact that Warner Bros. was exercising its option to produce eight additional sound Fatty shorts. A feature film was a possibility. It’s appropriate that the final full day in the life of Roscoe Arbuckle was spent acting in a film and then out on the town, eating, drinking, and socializing with friends—for those were the things that made him happiest.

“I’ve made my comeback,” Arbuckle said. “There are lots of stars not doing as well as I am right now.”

Arbuckle and his wife had planned to go to a nightclub, but he was more tired than usual. It was the rare time he turned down an opportunity to keep the party going. At around 11:30
PM,
he and McPhail took a cab the seven blocks to their home at the Park Central Hotel. He was in bed by 12:30 on the morning of June 29, 1933. Between then and 2:15, Roscoe Arbuckle died peacefully of a heart attack at age forty-six.

Dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, and a dark bow tie, Arbuckle’s body was laid in a gray casket in the ornate Gold Room of Frank E. Campbell’s Funeral Church on Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As many as a thousand mourners and curious onlookers paid their final respects to him on June 29 and 30.