Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (7 page)

Taking her own advice to be original, in early 1914 Rappe began designing her own line of clothing. She subsequently relocated to San Francisco, in part to market her fashions at the World’s Fair, which launched on February 20, 1915. There she befriended a dancer who had married a millionaire, Sidi Spreckels, who ushered Rappe into high society.

Rappe the entrepreneur continued to use the press regularly for publicity. If she were designing fashions today, she would surely be a maven of social media. Then, she supplied a steady stream of stories about her designs to the papers. In May 1915 alone, there were four syndicated newspaper articles about her latest clothing creations, each with a photograph. In one, she is smiling in a gossamer hat of discoid lines: “The hat of the moment is the spider-web hat, and it’s the creation of Miss Virginia Rappe, a young woman who has lifted fashion designing to the plane of fine art.” A similar story showcases her ridiculous “monoplane hat,” shaped like its namesake by “aviation enthusiast” Rappe. (She made a submarine hat too, as U-boats were much in the news.) Another features her “summer muff” and says her “artistic conceptions of fashion have made her famous as a creator of original style.” Women’s high fashion was adventerous then, but Rappe was exploring new territories, and the gambit kept her in the news.

The fourth story that May was headed “Here’s the Tuxedo Girl, How Do You Like Her?” and in a photo Rappe wears a black tuxedo coat and skirt and white hat, smiling with hands upon her hips, as if confidently asserting women’s liberation. The article states:

Equal clothes rights with men!

That’s the important plank in the summer girl’s clothes policy and she’s already putting it in practice—behold the Tuxedo coat!

It was Miss Virginia Rappe of Paris and Chicago, an artist whose medium is clothes, not paint nor oils nor clay—who first invaded the masculine wardrobe, carried off the Tuxedo coat idea and immediately converted it into a chic little street suit, attractive enough to wear to a tea, and practical enough for a shopping tour or an out-of-town journey.

“Personality is the secret of dress,” says Miss Rappe. “If women would study their individual style and their temperament as well, and dress to suit their personality American women would be the best dressed women in the world.”

The next month, her “peace hat,” shaped like two dove wings, scored publicity. A month earlier, a German U-boat had sunk the British steamship
Lusitania,
and among the 1,198 deaths were 128 Americans. The cry among many Americans to join the Great War was thunderous when Rappe publicly cast her lot with the pacifists:

“The women of America want world peace,” said Miss Rappe today. “We should express our peace sentiments in our clothes. If we believe in peace why wear military jackets and soldier caps. Clothes influence our minds. I believe that if we wear the dove of peace and the beautiful American colors have a place in our scheme of dress we will soon create a strong sentiment for peace.”

Here, then, is the reality of Virginia Rappe, who at twenty-four years old established herself as an entrepreneur, demonstrated creative acumen and political independence (feminism, pacifism), adeptly utilized the press, and provided career advice to her fellow women. It contrasts sharply with the jaundiced view of her that was born in the courtroom in 1921 and only grew in the decades that followed.

Though Rappe never married, she repeatedly broke her pact to never become engaged. She committed to marry at least three men, and perhaps two more. In 1910 in Chicago, she met Harry Barker, a real estate
developer from Gary, Indiana. After Rappe’s death, he denied having been engaged to her. However, she did wear “a man’s diamond ring of his,” and another witness testified that she broke off their engagement.

Her first confirmed engagement was to forty-year-old sculptor John Sample, who reportedly broke up with her. In July 1915 it was Argentine diplomat Alberto d’Aklaine, described as a “member of an old aristocratic family of Argentina.” Rappe told friends he was “nice but old enough to be my grandfather.” He was followed by dress designer Robert Moscovitz, who died in San Francisco in a trolley car accident.

The d’Aklaine engagement, especially, indicates that social climbing affected some of her romantic choices. At that time in San Francisco, her best friend was Sidi Spreckels, who was notorious for marrying up. As we shall see, a final Rappe engagement was claimed by one more powerful man, and if true, it was severed only by her death.

Robert Moscovitz’s tragic death may have contributed to Rappe’s decision to move to Los Angeles in the spring of 1916, but she was likely motivated chiefly by the same magnet that pulled thousands of beautiful young women to Hollywood annually. So-called “movie-struck girls,” most still in their teens, poured into Los Angeles from all over America, seeking the sudden fame and fortune of Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish. Each may have been the cutest girl in her high school and star of the drama club too, so of course she figured the studios would leap at the chance to make her a star. All but a few were destined for an endless stampede of disheartening cattle calls. Many faced poverty and hunger. In a sense, they were following Rappe’s advice to “be original,” but the migration inspired alarmed editorializing in the small towns those daughters left behind. Some such editorials painted the movie community as a den of prostitution, venereal disease, and drugs.

Rappe took up residence in the Hollywood Hotel, a palatial resort in the heart of Hollywood that was home and office to actors, producers, directors, and writers—the famous, the soon-to-be, and the never-to-be. She later moved in with her “adopted aunt” Kate Hardebeck and Hardebeck’s husband, Joseph, who at this point lived just off the southeastern edge of Hollywood. Prolific film star Louise Glaum was a friend.

There were likely days when Rappe felt that big-screen stardom would remain as elusive for her as it was for thousands of other movie-struck girls, most of whom were years younger than her and many of whom had acted onstage. However, because the films of the era were silent and thus void of spoken dialogue, acting acumen was of lesser importance in many roles than it would be when sound was married to pictures. Physical appearance and personal connections could be the deciding factors in casting.

Rappe’s fashion design career had sputtered, but she continued to model and travel. She struck poses in an Atlanta department store in the spring of 1917. The same year, she scored her big break when she won a lead role in the feature film
Paradise Garden.
The picture is now lost, but the
Variety
review states:

“Paradise Garden,” a seven-part Metro featuring Harold Lockwood, contains numerous twists away from the conventional “vamp” ideas…. Virginia Rappae [sic] as Marcia Van Wyck and Vera Lisson as Una Habberton were opposite Lockwood, the former a mild “vamp” and hardly doing justice to a number of closeups. She possesses a dreamy pair of eyes, with the black hair of this type. It will take a number of like roles before she reaches a number of other established “vamps.”

It’s ironic that her first and juiciest role was that of vamp, then a new and trendy word (derived from “vampire”) for a woman who uses her sex appeal to entrap and exploit men. Furthering this irony is the fact that Lockwood’s character is initially infatuated with her but upon discerning her promiscuous nature grows violent and “tears her dress in the rear, leaving her practically nude down to the waist.”

The following year,
Paradise Garden’s
director cast Rappe again, this time in the anti-German World War I film
Over the Rhine.
But with the signing of an armistice between Germany and the Allies on November 11, 1918, the movie was shelved. Two years later, it would be recut and released as
An Adventuress
but barely make a blip. Another two years
would expire before, in 1922, it was recut again and released as
The Isle of Love
in an effort to take advantage of the recent fame of two previously unknown actors: Rudolph Valentino and the late Virginia Rappe.

Only this version survives, and it is an incoherent mess, often reaching the status of “so bad it’s good”: an amalgamation of bathing beauties at a beach, biplanes, a cross-dresser, a lengthy fistfight in the back of a speeding convertible, and a convoluted, contradictory plot about schemers taking over an island of pleasure that inexplicably harbors German soldiers. Cuts are jarring. Intertitles seem stolen from another awful movie. The movie does live up to its title in featuring some surprisingly risqué content, including topless women in a stage show entering and exiting a pool.

Rappe is nearly as revealing when she steps out of the same pool dressed only in a sheer, sleeveless gown. Her role as Valentino’s love interest is stretched out via repeating shots of them together in an automobile. Introduced with “Just about the neatest of all the fair femininity on the Isle is V
ANETTE,”
Rappe is first seen lounging on a sofa with one leg up, dressed elaborately, smiling slyly, and casually smoking—the very vision of emancipated womanhood, including a flapper’s hairstyle.

The factor that most impacted Rappe’s acting career was her relationship with director Henry Lehrman. Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1881, Lehrman had immigrated to America from Vienna in the final days of 1906, and in 1909 he began working at the Biograph movie studio in New York City. According to legend, the thickly accented immigrant told pioneering director D. W. Griffith he was an agent with France’s Pathé, then the world’s largest film production company, and when the ruse was debunked, Lehrman was christened “Pathe.”
*
He appeared as a bit player in Griffith’s films before collaborating on Biograph comedies with actor/writer/director Mack Sennett. When Sennett
left Biograph in 1912 to form Keystone Studios in Los Angeles, Lehrman joined him.

Comedy movies then were one reel, lasting ten to twelve minutes, and they were churned out with great rapidity. Lehrman directed at least twenty-eight in 1913, overseeing such greats as Mabel Normand, Ford Sterling, Charlie Chaplin, and Roscoe Arbuckle, and he earned a second nickname, “Suicide,” for pushing actors to do dangerous stunts. He formed his own production company, L-KO (Lehrman-KnockOut) and made better-than-average comedy shorts, then moved over to the Fox Film Corporation to head up its comedy division. Off the lot, he spent lavishly on luxury automobiles, and the dapper bachelor was a regular fixture in nightclubs.

In late 1918 Rappe began a romantic relationship with Lehrman. By January 1920 she was listed as “boarder” at his Hollywood residence, along with a twenty-four-year old maid. (Rappe’s occupation was “actress.” Her mother was from her namesake state of Virginia; father from New York. Benjamin Button—style, her age was twenty-two.) She was by then living the high life in Hollywood, complete with her own limousine driver and personal trainer. Dating the head of a production company had another perk. Lehrman cast Rappe in at least four films, all comedy shorts. The first, the 1919 Fox production
His Musical Sneeze,
starred Lloyd “Ham” Hamilton, then a comedic star on the rise.

After more than two years with Fox, Lehrman struck out on his own again in early 1919, forming Henry Lehrman Productions and constructing his own $200,000 studio near Hollywood. His old friend Roscoe Arbuckle rented space there to film.
*
In a peculiar newspaper article from September 1919, the company announced the signing of Rappe, labeling her “one of the wealthiest and most beautiful young women of western America” and the “richest girl of stage or screen.” The announcement
identified her as both an “heiress” and “the owner of more than 800 acres of the richest oil lands of Texas,” with her “wealth computed in the millions.” The story was bunk, likely devised by Rappe or Lehrman to garner publicity, but the fiction points to Rappe’s high aspirations.

Henry Lehrman Productions’ first movie, 1920’s
A Twilight Baby,
again starred Lloyd Hamilton and featured Rappe in a supporting role. Publicizing it, Rappe returned to her advice formula, this time serving up old-fashioned moralizing delivered while she was living out of wedlock with her employer. This lengthy headline and subhead screamed from a newspaper on March 4, 1920: