Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (8 page)

B
ACK TO
Q
UAKERLAND!
“Nix O
F
L
OUNGE
L
IZARDS AND
J
AZZ
B
ABIES,”
S
AYS
V
IRGINIA
R
APPE,
P
RAISING “LESS
S
OCIETY”
M
ANORS
Communities Seeking To Put A Sensible Damper On Midnight Larks, “Seven-Dates-A-Week” And Other Health-Robbers Of Young Girls Have A Hearty Endorsement From Virginia Rappe, Plucked From Dazzling California Society By Henry Lehrman And Who Will Be Seen In “A Twilight Baby,” One Of The 3 Ring Jazzy Circus Features At The Dome Theater. She Has A Way Of Curtailing Mothers’ Fears.

The worldly Rappe offered cautions about Jazz Age partying and concluded, “Maybe it wouldn’t hurt any of us to be more Quakerfied.
”
Whether any Quakers attended
A Twilight Baby
is unknown. Rappe, though, certainly enjoyed Jazz Age dancing; she won prizes for such at a Santa Monica resort popular with the Hollywood crowd. Trial testimony later placed her at several Hollywood parties during this time.

Invoices drowned Henry Lehrman Productions before it was truly established, and Lloyd Hamilton fled the sinking ship. Rappe acted in two more Lehrman productions without him,
The Punch of the Irish
and the unfortunately titled
A Game Lady.
But by the time the latter film was released, less than two months before Labor Day 1921, Lehrman had lost his studio and his house. Debts would burden him for years. Perhaps coincidentally, his two-and-a-half-year relationship with Rappe
also faltered. He signed on to direct four films in Fort Lee, New Jersey, moving, alone, to New York City in the spring of 1921.

Rappe moved back in with the Hardebecks, and she paid Kate Hardebeck twenty-five dollars weekly for housekeeping duties (or perhaps not, for Hardebeck later made a claim against Rappe’s estate for over $1,000 in unpaid labor). She probably hoped to rekindle the romance with Lehrman eventually. She seldom went out socializing. “Her chief delight was in tramping over the hills around Hollywood with her dog,” Hardebeck stated.

On July 7, 1921, Rappe turned thirty, a pivotal age, especially for a model/actress cognizant of the relentless march of time.
*
Billie Ritchie, who acted in at least sixty motion pictures, all of them for Lehrman, including
A Twilight Baby,
died the day before and was buried the day after, likely clouding Rappe’s birthday with a melancholy pall.
^†

She had other reasons for glum introspection. Her designing and modeling careers were stalled, and after a promising film debut in 1917, four years later she had failed to establish herself as a marketable movie star. Judging only by the scant evidence that survives, she was not a particularly gifted screen performer, and her acting reputation within the industry may have been harmed by her relationship with Lehrman and the resultant perception that she was not earning her plum roles via talent. After at least three engagements and one lengthy cohabiting relationship, she remained unmarried. The great financial success she sought, which friends like the upwardly mobile Sidi Spreckels and celebrated screen vamp Louise Glaum enjoyed, had eluded her. Perhaps as she treked over the Hollywood hills, alone with her dog and her thoughts, this innovator who preached “be original” was planning the next phase of her life.

As August came to a close, a low-level movie publicist named Alfred Semnacher, whose marriage was ending, asked Rappe if she wanted to ride with him to her former home of San Francisco. (Semnacher would later claim he had known Rappe for “about five years” but only well for the previous six weeks, during which time he had tried to place her in one movie role.) Rappe said yes. Like Semnacher, she was in need of a vacation. A woman named Maude Delmont, whom Rappe had never met, would be joining them.

They left early on Saturday, September 3, traveling in Semnacher’s automobile on the future Highway 99 up through Bakersfield, passing herds of sheep and cattle, orange groves and lettuce farms. They had sandwiches and coffee in vacuum bottles, packed by Kate Hardebeck. Delmont later claimed she brought a pint of whiskey along for the trip and had six drinks on the way; her two travelmates did not partake.

They stopped in the town of Selma, south of Fresno, where Delmont solicited subscriptions for a labor journal, her current job, and they spent the night at a ranch where a friend of Delmont’s lived. Rappe sent a card to Hardebeck, saying she was having a “very pleasant time.” At 1:30
PM
the next day, the trio from Los Angeles headed to San Francisco. They checked into the Palace Hotel at 9:30
PM
the evening before Labor Day.

At 11:30 the following morning, while eating breakfast with the others in the hotel restaurant, Rappe was paged and received a message from Fred Fishback, a movie director she knew. He was at the nearby Hotel St. Francis with actor Lowell Sherman and the man who made the whole world laugh, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. The three men had a suite of interconnected rooms on the top floor, including a room for lounging and drinking and dancing. Would she care to join them?

*
It was later claimed that Rappe’s father was an English nobleman visiting Chicago for the World’s Fair—an assertion disproved by the fact that Virginia was conceived more than two years before the 1893 exposition opened.

*
Even at seventeen she was shaving two years off her age. By twenty-four, four years were subtracted, and at twenty-eight it was seven.

*
Stage actress Gladys Sykes had recently divorced Arthur Greiner, a race car driver remembered for a horrific crash in the inaugural Indianapolis 500 in 1911. The first to break her vow, she agreed to remarry him a year later.

*
If the nickname was derisive, Lehrman rolled with the punch. When he moonlighted for another company in 1912, he directed under the name “Henry Pathé.”

*
When the press mistakenly called the studio a Lehrman-Arbuckle partnership, Lehrman released a terse statement saying Arbuckle had merely leased space to make movies. Later, when the two were decidedly not friends, Arbuckle said his renting from Lehrman “was the only way I could get back money he owed me.”

*
It’s almost certain Rappe did not celebrate the date as the big three-oh. She may not have known her true age.

†
His
Variety
obituary perpetuated the myth that Richie died due to lingering injuries after being attacked by ostriches while filming a “Suicide” Lehrman production, but his death certificate lists the cause as stomach cancer.

San Francisco can support both comic and tragic conclusions because the city is geographically
in extremis,
a metaphor for the farthest-flung possibility, a metaphor for the end of the line.

—R
ICHARD
R
ODRIGUEZ, “LATE
V
ICTORIANS”

W
hen the morphine wore off around midnight the morning after Labor Day, Virginia Rappe awoke in the dark, screaming in agony again. A light came on, illuminating that woman again, Semnacher’s friend Maude Delmont. Rappe lay in a single bed in room 1227 of the Hotel St. Francis. She did not know where she was or why that woman was near. There was only the pain, relentless, merciless, like a sword run through her abdomen. Doubled over, writhing in the sweaty sheets, she wailed.

The groggy Delmont summoned the hotel’s house physician, Dr. Arthur Beardslee, to return to room 1227. He was the second doctor to examine Rappe, and as he had five hours earlier, he injected Rappe with morphine and again she fell quiet. Her pupils constricted, and her eyelids grew heavy. He checked her pulse and examined her body. Her abdomen was sensitive to his touch. The doctor left. The room was again quiet and dark.

Again, at five o’clock in the morning, the morphine wore off and Rappe was screaming. Again that woman was near. Again the doctor was
summoned. Again a shot of morphine was administered. Delmont told Beardslee that Rappe had last urinated fifteen hours prior, so the doctor catheterized his patient, producing a small amount of urine, tinged with dark blood—the color indicating it was older and not from an open wound. He believed the catheterization would remedy Rappe’s ailment and she would recover with sufficient rest. He left.

Frustrated with the house doctor, Delmont telephoned a physician she knew with the literary name of Dr. Melville Rumwell, and he agreed to take over the patient’s care after Beardslee was discharged. In addition to his private practice, Melville was then an assistant professor of surgery at Stanford University’s medical school and head of Stanford’s outpatient clinic. Arriving just before nine o’clock on Tuesday morning, September 6, he examined Rappe and found no visible signs of injury, despite the sordid story Delmont told. Rappe said she did not recollect anything that had happened. She had lost consciousness while in 1219 with Arbuckle, and when she woke she was in agony. She continued to feel pain from her lower abdomen to her chest. Rumwell’s diagnosis was alcoholism (in this case, meaning poisoning by alcohol), and he left without administering any more treatment than hot compresses on her midsection. In his professional opinion, she did not seem in dire health.

The morning of Tuesday, September 6, Arbuckle spoke with Al Semnacher, and both men surmised that Virginia Rappe was merely ill from downing too much alcohol. After noon, Arbuckle picked up the $611.13 tab for all three interconnected rooms and room 1227, where Rappe then lay. Then he, Fishback, and Sherman checked out of the St. Francis.

Arbuckle drove Fishback and Sherman to pier 7 on San Francisco Bay, and the three men boarded the steamship
Harvard.
The vessel, after being employed for troop transport during World War I, had just completed its first month of West Coast service, traveling two round-trips weekly between Los Angeles and San Francisco, alternating with its sister ship, the
Yale.
Arbuckle’s Pierce-Arrow was also on board for the fourteen-hour journey. The white steamer set off at 4:00 P
M.

On board, Fishback spotted a friend, who introduced him and Arbuckle to a young woman and her mother. Twenty-one-year-old Doris Deane was just beginning an acting career. That evening, at Arbuckle’s invitation, she and her mother joined the Hollywood men for dinner in the stateroom. Doris was charmed by the famous Fatty, thirteen years her elder. He was enamored with the young brunette. Before the ship docked in the port of Los Angeles the following morning, they made arrangements to go out together on Saturday evening. It was a date Roscoe Arbuckle would not keep.