The Day the Laughter Stopped, page 14
Roscoe put his foot down hard on the gas pedal and roared on to San Francisco. He was on the road to whoopee … and a whole lot more.
PART TWO
DURING THE PARTY AND THE TRIALS
It was late afternoon when they reached San Francisco, and they headed for the best hotel in town, the St Francis. At that time, the St Francis was to San Francisco what the Savoy once was to London. Visiting royalty, presidents, people like Melba and Paderewski stayed there. Among its more eccentric guests had been vaudeville’s Anne Held – wife of Flo Ziegfeld and creator of the ‘beauty spot’ and the ‘red carpet’ – who insisted on bathing daily in thirty gallons of milk. It was from a bed in the St Francis that actor John Barrymore tumbled on the morning of the earthquake. Now the hotel, which had survived the earthquake and the fire, was about to be shaken to its foundations.
Tired after their five-hundred-mile drive, Roscoe, Fred Fischbach and Lowell Sherman had an early dinner and retired for the night.
Prohibition did not keep Roscoe or most of his countrymen from drinking. Liquor was more freely available in San Francisco during Prohibiton than before or afterwards. It was known as an open town; many of its bars never closed a single day during the entire Prohibition period. Because of his star status, Arbuckle had no need to go to a club for a drink. It came to him. He phoned a nightclub called Gobey’s on the morning of Sunday, 4 September. Twenty minutes later a bootlegger by the name of Jack Lawrence tapped gently on one of the doors of Roscoe’s twelfth-floor suite. The management of the St Francis later claimed no knowledge of liquor being taken up to Arbuckle, but Jack Lawrence had come in through the main hotel door on Union Square. (The hotel staff who helped Lawrence carry the crates of excellent whisky and gin to the suite doubtless thought that if Anna Held could take her daily bath in thirty gallons of milk, then Roscoe could take his in thirty gallons of whisky.)
Roscoe had a great deal to be happy about. Not only had he finished three feature films simultaneously – an astonishing feat – but also Sunday, 4 September, marked the commencement of the Fourth Annual Paramount Week. By 1921, this Zukor-inspired promotion had become international and very profitable. Backed up by massive studio publicity, cinemas throughout the world showed Paramount films exclusively; in the United States, seventy-five per cent of the cinemas showed Paramount movies. Arbuckle was one of Paramount’s most popular stars. He had six different feature films running in Los Angeles that week, and in New York he had six feature films and twenty-seven two-reel films showing.
The LA newspapers that weekend were full of details of the Paramount week. The junketing was to start on Monday afternoon with a parade of the stars through the city, headed by Roscoe Arbuckle in his ‘twenty-five-thousand-dollar gasoline palace’. In the event, the parade went on without Roscoe, who was having fun of a more private nature in the St Francis.
The same newspapers also devoted space to the film censorship issue. An editorial in the Los Angeles Examiner attacked the city council, which was proposing to introduce film censorship in the city. The editors argued that ‘No person on earth is intelligent enough, cultured enough or equipped with the technical ability to pass on the whole output of the world’s films. The very suggestion is ridiculous on its face. It is a dangerous folly.’
Within months, certain events, with Roscoe at the centre of them, would ensure film censorship – not by the city council, but by the film industry itself.
The only visitor to the Arbuckle suite on Sunday afternoon was Mae Taube; their mutual friend, Bebe Daniels, had urged Mae to take a ride in Roscoe’s gasoline palace. Mae Taube’s presence in the liquor-stocked Arbuckle suite was not without irony; she was the daughter-in-law of Billy Sunday, and if any one man was responsible for Prohibition, it was he. The hell-fire evangelist had stumped the country for many years, declaiming the evils of liquor.
The main excitement around the St Francis that Sunday afternoon was provided by a motorcyclist and his female pillion rider. Blindfolded, the motorcyclist had ridden across a wire suspended from the top of the St Francis to an adjoining building. As a publicity stunt, it misfired. Hearing the noise, Roscoe and Mae Taube popped their heads out of a twelfth-floor window. In the days that followed, there were plenty of pictures of Roscoe and ‘the mysterious girl’ in the papers, but hardly any of the poor aerial motorcyclist.
On Sunday evening, while Roscoe and his entourage enjoyed themselves in a club called Tait’s Café, three people booked into the nearby Palace Hotel: screen actress Virginia Rappe; her manager, Al Semnacher; and a friend of Semnacher’s, Maude Delmont. The three planned to spend just one night in the City before returning to Los Angeles. At that time neither group knew of the other’s presence in the city.
Also staying at the Palace Hotel was a gown salesman named Ira Fortlouis. A mutual friend advised him that Fred Fischbach was in town, so Fortlouis phoned Fischbach on Monday morning and arranged to see him at about 11.00 a.m. Fortlouis unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that would end in the death of Virginia Rappe and the destruction of Roscoe Arbuckle.
In the months that followed there were varying accounts of what happened that Labor Day weekend. Many details were in conflict, and many were hushed up for one reason or another. Over a three-year period, I have interviewed many of the people who were involved, including some jury members and some of the people who observed the legal proceedings that followed. I have read thousands of pages of transcripts from six proceedings (a coroner’s inquest, a grand jury hearing, a police court hearing, and three trials). Some of these transcripts had never before been made public, and all were believed to have been officially destroyed in the early 1930s, ten years after the final verdict. What follows, based on the transcripts I subsequently uncovered (which are now in my possession) and on the testimony of both prosecution and defence witnesses and others intimately involved with the case, is my reconstruction of what happened that hot September day in 1921. It is fascinating as a prelude to the real story – about justice and injustice in and out of the courtroom.
It began simply enough. The plan was for Fortlouis to have breakfast with Fischbach. At 10.45 a.m., as Fortlouis was leaving the Palace Hotel, he chanced to see Virginia Rappe, Maude Delmont and Al Semnacher on their way to the lounge for breakfast. Virginia was an attractive girl by 1921 standards, and a very sharp dresser. Fortlouis, always on the lookout for girls to model his dresses, asked a bellboy who she was, and was told, ‘Virginia Rappe, the movie actress’. Suitably impressed, Fortlouis left the hotel and a short while later was in the Arbuckle suite. Roscoe, emerging from his morning bath, was introduced to the gown salesman by Fischbach. Together with Lowell Sherman, they sat and chatted for a while.
During the course of the conversation Fortlouis mentioned seeing Virginia Rappe in the foyer of his hotel, and asked if any of them knew the young lady. All three men did. Fischbach felt that his friend must have made a mistake, that Virginia was down in Los Angeles. The question was resolved when Fischbach phoned the Palace and had Virginia Rappe paged; a few moments later she was on the phone. Fischbach invited her to join him and the others, and she accepted. A brief confusion almost kept Virginia away. She thought Roscoe and his friends were staying at the Palace, but when she asked for their room number at the Palace reception desk, she learned they weren’t. The desk suggested she try the St Francis; Arbuckle was unlikely to be staying anywhere else. She reached Fischbach and got the room number. Then, at 11.50 a.m., she, Maude Delmont and Al Semnacher drove out of the Palace parking area.
They arrived at the St Francis just before noon. Virginia and Maude got out of Semnacher’s car. As they turned to enter the St Francis, Virginia spoke to Al. ‘I’ll take Mrs Delmont with me, and you can come for us in about twenty or thirty minutes, and if we don’t like the party, we’ll return to Los Angeles immediately.’ Al nodded and drove off into the busy Labor Day traffic.
In the foyer of the St Francis, Virginia hesitated for a moment. Arbuckle and his friends didn’t know Maude Delmont, and Virginia was reluctant to appear with an unknown and uninvited guest. She told Maude to wait in the foyer until she was paged. After taking the elevator to the twelfth floor, Virginia walked along the corridor to Room 1220 and knocked. Fred Fischbach let her in.
Roscoe, Fischbach and Sherman knew that Virginia Rappe had played small parts in a few movies; that she lived with Henry Pathé Lehrman, the man who had tangled with Charles Chaplin at Keystone; and that the young actress was a woman of easy virtue.
There was a great deal more they didn’t know – that very few people knew.
Virginia Rappe was born in New York in 1894. Her mother, Mabel Rapp, was a part-time chorus girl and possibly a prostitute as well. Her father may have been a well-known Chicago banker or a member of the House of Lords, among others – her paternity was uncertain. Whoever he was, he did not feel inclined to marry Mabel. And Virginia’s mother died in New York in January 1905, leaving her 11-year-old illegitimate daughter an orphan.
A grandmother in Chicago took the young girl under her wing, but her supervision was clearly far from perfect. Between 1908, when she was fourteen, and 1910, when she was sixteen, Virginia appears to have had a total of five abortions. Then in 1910 she gave birth to a baby girl, which her grandmother placed in a foster home. In November, 1911, Virginia’s grandmother died and Virginia went to live with a family friend, Mrs J. Hardebach. By 1913 she was a successful commercial model working in various Chicago stores. That year the Chicago Examiner interviewed Virginia Rappe (she had added the ‘e’) for a story they called ‘New Ideas for Girls to Earn Their Living’. Among her suggestions: to become a shopper for a rich family, or to work in a wealthy home ‘counting the silver, sending it to the repairer and reporting to the mistress’.
After the article came out, she went to Europe with a friend, Helen Patterson. On the return voyage the girls created a sensation on the steamer Baltic by dancing the tango in their nighties. It turned out they were fully dressed beneath the nighties, but the male passengers were unaccustomed to seeing anything but a rare glimpse of feminine ankle. When the boat docked, the girls were surrounded by reporters, one of whom asked Virginia to display a harem trouser undergarment. She replied, ‘Oh dear! I must refuse to show them except at the shoe tops.’
By the time of the San Francisco Exposition in 1915 she had acquired a reputation as a fashion expert and was being introduced to San Francisco high society by her friend Sidi Spreckles. Press accounts of her engagement to a visiting member of the Argentine Commission refer to her fiance as ‘dashing Alberto M. D’Alkaine’. Presumably he carried on dashing until he was back in South America. He never married Virginia.
In 1916 she moved to Los Angeles, where she met Henry Pathé Lehrman. He told her, ‘I can get you into the movies.’ They became lovers and shortly afterwards Virginia was working as a three-dollar-a-day extra at Keystone.
It was common knowledge at Keystone that Virginia and Lehrman were having an affair – he was her ‘fiancé’, though he clearly had no intention of marrying her – and it was soon common knowledge that they both had a venereal disease. Mabel Normand at first thought, naively, that it was something like typhoid. Mack Sennett’s reaction when he heard about it was to ban Virginia from the lot and have the area where she worked fumigated.
By 1918 Virginia was considered ‘one of the best dressed girls in the movies’, although ‘best-undressed’ might also have applied. (It was said that Virginia tended to strip at a party after she had had something to drink. There seemed to be a connection between this and a chronic bladder infection.)
Virginia graduated from crowd scenes when Lehrman gave her roles in some of his productions. Two of the films she was featured in were Twilight Baby and The Punch of the Irish. She photographed well, but was hardly a serious rival to Sarah Bernhardt. At the time of Roscoe’s party in 1921 she hadn’t worked for nearly two years, and was being kept by Henry Lehrman.
Very little of this was known to Roscoe and his friends that Labor Day weekend. All that concerned them was that Virginia was ‘good fun’.
By 12.30 p.m., Maude Delmont had also joined the party. Breakfast was ordered, the bootleg liquor opened, and everyone was having a good time. Roscoe was in superb form. He repeated the story his friend Bebe Daniels had told him about her recent arrest and imprisonment for speeding. More people showed up, including two showgirls who would find it a particularly memorable party: Alice Blake came at 1.30, and Zey Prevon at 1.45. Alice had been invited by Lowell Sherman, and had taken it upon herself to invite Zey, who also answered to the names Zey Preven, Zeb Provost, Zeh Pryvon, Zey Pryvon and Sadie Reiss.
Roscoe and Lowell had both been in pyjamas when people started dropping in. Lowell got dressed, but Roscoe remained in pyjamas and a bathrobe. On the last day of shooting in Hollywood he had backed into a hot stove and burned his backside, so pyjamas were preferable to a tight-fitting suit. Before any women arrived, Roscoe had asked if it would be proper to receive them so casually, and Fred Fischbach had assured him it would be OK.
Virginia, in the party spirit after three glasses of ‘orange blossom’ (gin and orange juice), felt like dancing. Roscoe phoned the management for a Victrola, and soon they were playing the popular songs of the day: ‘Secondhand Rose’, ‘Three O’Clock in the Morning’, ‘On the Gin Gin Ginny Shore’ and others.
Just before 2.00 p.m. Al Semnacher came to collect Maude and Virginia. Neither was in a mood to leave, and Al resigned himself to the fact that he would not be seeing Los Angeles that day. He drove Alice Blake over to Tait’s Café for an afternoon rehearsal, then returned.
It was later said that no-one else came to this party. In fact, at least another seven people came whose names have never been made public before this: Mabel Pearson, May Fellows, Effie McMorrine, Maud Parsons, Dollie and Gaston Glass, and Minnie Edwards. They and some prominent San Francisco citizens who also attended were successful in covering their tracks. Showgirls Betty Campbell and Dollie Clark joined the party later. Jack Lawrence brought more bootleg liquor from Gobey’s Café; Victor, the hotel’s famed chef, put in an appearance; and at least five waiters and numerous bellboys were in and out all day, the bellboys rewarded with dollar bills from Roscoe. There were endless orders for crushed ice and orange juice, essential for the bootleg gin. The phone was in constant use.
Fred Fischbach took off in Roscoe’s car just before 2.00 p.m. He drove to the beach to look at some seals he was thinking of using in his next movie.
Roscoe’s suite consisted basically of three rooms. Room 1220 was the reception room of the suite and therefore where the partygoers tended to gather. On one side of it was Room 1219, a bedroom shared by Fred Fischbach and Roscoe. On the other was Room 1221, Lowell Sherman’s bedroom. Both bedrooms had bathrooms attached. With so much alcohol being consumed, both bathrooms had constant visitors, a fact that was to prove important later.
At 2.30 p.m. Alice Blake returned; her rehearsal had been cancelled. Then Mae Taube arrived. She had arranged to go for a drive with Roscoe at 3.00 p.m., but Fred Fischbach had not yet returned with the Pierce Arrow. Assuring Mae that his friend would not be long, Roscoe returned to his role as life of the party, assisted by Maude Delmont, who in two hours had drunk ten double Scotches. Mae Taube left, after promising to return at about 3.15.
The liquor was having an effect on Virginia, too. She began to tell her troubles to Roscoe. She complained that Henry Lehrman, the impetuous lover, was proving a rather reluctant husband. Despite her constant pleas for marriage, he refused to legalize their relationship. She told Roscoe that she was broke, that she hadn’t worked for nearly two years, that the only things she owned were the clothes she was standing in. Roscoe knew this was leading up to the inevitable touch for a loan, and he assured her that he would give her some money before she left the party. Then she dropped a bombshell: it wasn’t just a few dollars she needed; it was a great deal of money. She was pregnant, and she was sick. She needed money to have an abortion, and she wanted to have the abortion as soon as possible.
Roscoe was shocked. He tried to persuade her to have the baby and, if she did not want to keep it, to have the child adopted. Virginia was adamant. She wanted an abortion. Roscoe suggested that she talk it over with Henry Lehrman – surely he would be delighted at the prospect of becoming a father? Wasn’t this, perhaps, the way to get that wedding ring on her finger? But whoever the father of the child was, and Virginia was not divulging that, she paled at the thought of telling her fiancé: if he learned the truth, her hopes of marriage would be finished. ‘Don’t tell Henry,’ she pleaded. ‘He must never find out. I just want to quietly have an abortion while he’s in New York. By the time he comes back, it will be all over, then perhaps I can get him to marry me.’
It was obvious that Virginia had made up her mind to have the abortion performed in San Francisco as soon as possible. Illegal abortions, even in an open city like San Francisco, were expensive in 1921, over $2,000 at least. Roscoe told her that he did not carry that kind of cash around with him, but that if she contacted him at the studios in Los Angeles during the coming week, he would see what he could do. Whether Roscoe intended to give her the money or was just playing for time, nobody will ever know. Events were about to take the problem out of his hands.
The party was in full swing by now, with dancing, giggling, and shouting. Roscoe acted out some of the comedy routines from his three latest movies. The man who was paid millions to make the masses laugh entertained a privileged few for nothing.
At about 2.45 p.m. Zey and Alice saw Virginia weave her way through the dancing bodies toward Room 1221, and Lowell Sherman’s bathroom. Maude Delmont and Lowell Sherman were in the bathroom together and refused to open the door. Virginia knocked on it, and said, ‘Open the door, Maudie. Let me in.’ Maude replied, ‘Go to the other bathroom. I am changing my dress.’ It was getting hot at the party – too hot for Maude Delmont, who took off her dress and put on a pair of Lowell Sherman’s pyjamas. Virginia gave up, and came back through the reception room on her way towards Roscoe’s bedroom.
