The Day the Laughter Stopped, page 18
The crowd of reporters in the corridor grew thicker. The longer Roscoe refused to answer screaming accusations, the more enraged became the two assistant district attorneys. If the Arbuckle party at the St Francis had at times resembled a madhouse, so now did Room 17 of the Hall of Justice. Detectives rushed in and out; the two attorneys argued with each other and with the detectives. Orders were given, then countermanded, then given again. Throughout, Roscoe quietly declined to answer any questions.
Furious, Assistant DA U’Ren had Maude Delmont pulled out of her bed. If the movie comedian was proving uncooperative, Miss Delmont more than made amends.
Roscoe was advised that unless he answered all their questions they would charge him with murder – Maude Delmont was ready and very willing to swear out a murder complaint against the star. By now Roscoe could not have answered any questions if he wanted to. Stunned by the turn of events, he didn’t even complain that for over three hours he had been kept in this room. Finally, at 11.45 p.m., he was allowed to go out into the corridor. As he moved towards Frank Dominguez, his lawyer put a finger to his lips, again counselling silence.
As Roscoe wearily slumped on to a bench, U’Ren burst from the room and shouted, ‘You are under arrest on a charge of murder.’
The excitement before this announcement had been intense; now it was explosive. Reporters shouted questions at everyone, some in the excitement of the moment even interviewing each other. Magnesium flares flashed continually, recording for the nation the moment when its most famous comedian was charged with the most serious crime a man could commit.
U’Ren discovered he was the centre of attention. The press clamoured for a statement, and the assistant district attorney gave them one: ‘Roscoe Arbuckle has been charged under that section of the penal code that provides that a life taken in rape or attempted rape is considered murder.’
Standing beside U’Ren was Captain of Detectives Duncan Matheson. Directing his words at Arbuckle, who was standing a few feet away, Matheson said, ‘Neither I nor Mr U’Ren nor Chief of Police O’Brien feel that any man, whether he be Fatty Arbuckle or anyone else, can come into this city and commit that kind of offence. The evidence shows that an attack was made on the girl.’
Arbuckle was taken to the fifth floor and formally charged with murder. He was officially photographed and described for the police record. Height: five feet ten inches. Weight: 266 pounds. Age: thirty-four years. Profession: actor. Hair: medium chestnut. Complexion: ruddy. Eyes: blue.
His valuables were stripped from him and handed to his attorneys. Then he was locked up in Cell 12.
Front pages all over the country were scrapped and reset. The Los Angeles Examiner of Sunday, I I September, was typical, with three-inch headlines announcing the most sensational news of the day: ‘ARBUCKLE HELD FOR MURDER!’ Beneath, in print a third the size, it told its – readers that 250 people were feared dead in San Antonio floods.
Other American newspapers, including the Examiner’s sister paper in San Francisco, reported that Virginia Rappe had, with her dying words, accused Roscoe of being responsible. This report, inspired by a statement from Nurse Jameson, would subsequently prove to be totally without foundation; but the man who owned both newspapers and many more besides did not deal in truth.
His name was William Randolph Hearst; he was later to be immortalized in Orson Welles’s brilliant movie, Citizen Kane.
The Hearst press adopted an attitude towards the Arbuckle case that was criminally irresponsible. Feature articles, news stories and editorials in Hearst’s newspapers had but one aim: to boost circulation. In the event, the policy was successful beyond Hearst’s wildest dreams. He was later able to boast that he sold more newspapers reporting the Arbuckle case than he had since America entered the First World War (or as Buster Keaton overheard him say, since the Lusitania went down). His ruthlessness in boosting circulation was to have a significant effect on Arbuckle’s fate, so it is worth pausing here to describe the man behind the press.
Born to massive wealth, Hearst decided, after being expelled from Harvard, that the world of newspapers needed his talents. Among his father’s many possessions was the San Francisco Examiner, described by John Winkler in his official biography of Hearst as ‘a sleazy little sheet’. Having persuaded his father to give him the newspaper, Hearst took it over in March 1887, the month that Roscoe was born. In a few years he had transformed the sleazy little sheet into a sleazy big sheet. His style of journalism was influenced heavily by Joseph Pulitzer, who had revived the 1830 penny-dreadful style of journalism. With an astute mixture of sex, scandal and sensationalism, Hearst achieved both success and – what was more frightening – power.
A well-known incident in 1897 illustrates the kind of power he was beginning to wield. That year he dispatched artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to draw sketches of alleged Spanish cruelty. Hearst had decided that he did not like the idea of a Spanish-dominated community so close to the shores of his beloved country. Remington appraised the situation in Cuba and cabled Hearst: ‘EVERYTHING IS QUIET. THERE IS NO TROUBLE HERE. THERE WILL BE NO WAR. I WISH TO RETURN. REMINGTON.’
The reply came swiftly: ‘PLEASE REMAIN. YOU FURNISH THE PICTURES AND I’LL FURNISH THE WAR. W. R. HEARST.’
Fifteen months later, after Hearst had waged a tremendous anti-Spanish propaganda campaign in his newspapers, the United States and Spain were at war over the issue of Cuba.
Hearst’s xenophobia was almost paranoid; anti-British, anti-Japanese, anti-Spanish, he was against everything that did not fit in with his conception of what was best for America. Even the Hearst-sponsored biography by John Winkler admitted, after his death, that ‘He never permitted himself to doubt his own infallibility. Politically he was so far to the right that by comparison men like Barry Goldwater and Spiro Agnew appear highly enlightened, reasonable men.’
Hearst once said, ‘I determined to restore democracy in the United States.’ Hearst had his own peculiar idea of what democracy was, though. What he tried to create through the tabloid press was a higher authority than the Supreme Court: trial by press. (And Roscoe Arbuckle would come to know what that meant.)
His brand of yellow journalism didn’t meet with total approval. When he died in 1951, the Manchester Guardian wrote this epitaph: ‘No man has ever done so much to debase the standards of journalism.’ In September 1906, Wallace Irwin observed in Collier’s Weekly:
When he saw that puddles were the topics of the hour
Willie got a muck rake of a hundred-donkey power,
Started up a geyser, shrilly shrieking all the time:
‘Don’t you touch my mud! I’ve got a scoop on this here slime!’
Frantic Willie, antic Willie, always on the jump,
Willie found the muck rake slow and so he bought a pump.
What Willie bought was newspaper after newspaper; he built up the largest publishing empire in the world. At his peak he owned nearly fifty newspapers, periodicals and magazines, and countless radio stations. His net annual profit was over thirty million dollars. And he gave real meaning to the phrase ‘battle for circulation’.
In 1918, for example, he bought the Chicago Record-Herald and merged it with a paper he already owned to create the Herald & Examiner. He appointed Dion O’Banion as circulation manager. O’Banion, a devout Catholic and a gangster, gathered a team of ‘persuaders’ whose sole function was to ‘persuade’ newsagents to take the Hearst paper and not its rival Tribune. Persuasion took the form of bombings, beatings and murder. O’Banion was murdered by the Capone gang in 1924. (Hearst wasn’t alone in using force to boost sales; on 6 September 1921, the Los Angeles Examiner carried a story about a man beaten unconscious by a newsboy after he bought a paper from a rival newsstand and refused to buy one from him.)
In California, Hearst built a ‘castle’, San Simeon, a monument to bad taste, blending many different styles of architecture and filled with art ‘treasures’ from all over Europe. There he invited people like George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill, as well as royalty – such was the power of Hearst that although he could hire thugs like O’Banion, he was also the confidant of the rich and the powerful. He could make or break people, and he did.
But above all, he was interested in good copy – anything that would sell papers. Many of the people I interviewed who knew Hearst personally said he published without fear or favour. For example, Ben Lyon recalls, ‘If you were his guest at San Simeon, even if you were a close, intimate friend, if you did anything newsworthy you would find yourself on the front page whether you liked it or not. News was news to W. R.’
Unless it was about Hearst himself. The Hearst papers were never to print stories about his liaison with Marion Davies. Although Hearst had a wife and five sons in New York, he installed Marion Davies at San Simeon. A former Ziegfeld Follies girl, she became his mistress in 1916 and maintained the relationship until his death in 1951. Through his film company, Cosmopolitan, Hearst tried to make her a big film star, but despite massive publicity for each of her films in the Hearst press, most of her films were disasters, both artistically and financially.
In August 1924, lawyer William J. Fallon would find himself on trial accused of jury bribing, a trial resulting from a sustained campaign in the Hearst press. Fighting fire with fire, Fallon would try to show the court that he had been brought to trial because he had information that Hearst was determined to suppress, documentary proof that a liaison Hearst had with ‘a certain actress’ had produced a number of illegitimate children. While every non-Hearst newspaper in the country carried front-page stories on the case, Hearst readers had to content themselves with headlines like ‘HOTTEST DAY KILLS FIVE’; the Fallon trial was buried on an inside page, and all mention of Hearst deleted. Fortunately, the jury would not have to rely on Hearst’s papers for information, and Fallon would be acquitted.
In later years, Hearst’s affair with Marion Davies would become public knowledge. Asked about having both a wife and mistress, he would publicly admit, ‘If the object is to decide who is the son of a bitch in this case, then I plead guilty.’ I asked one reporter who knew Hearst well what he knew about the man’s private life, and he quickly responded, ‘My God, did he have a private life as well?’
But in 1921, at least, Hearst’s private life was sacrosanct, although everybody else’s was good copy. At the time of Virginia Rappe’s death, Hearst’s love affair was still a closely-guarded secret from the American public, though by then a number of rival papers had heard rumours of the liaison and had started digging. So for Hearst, the ‘Arbuckle orgy’, as his papers were quick to dub it, was a gift from heaven. By deflecting the unwelcome attentions of curious reporters from his private life, Hearst obtained breathing space for himself. While the champagne flowed freely at Hearst Castle, his papers raged against men like Arbuckle, who broke Prohibition law.
If the Arbuckle story gave him a personal out at the same time that it sold millions of papers, Hearst had yet another reason for the zest with which he attacked Arbuckle. Chauvinistic about his country, he was even more so about the city by the sea. If he loved anything in his life, Hearst loved San Francisco – and he wasn’t about to have a film star come to his beloved city and mess it up.
Hearst was not alone in his civic pride. It was one of the things the prosecuting attorneys would appeal to when they made their pleas to the jury in the Arbuckle trials. Out of a long and curiously heartfelt rivalry between Los Angeles and San Francisco arose the question: how dare a movie star from Los Angeles use our fine city as a playground for immoral activities? Hearst and San Francisco were putting Hollywood on trial – and defending their own virtue.
While Roscoe Arbuckle sat in jail, newspaper readers were not only lapping up details about the fabulous Arbuckle party, they were also reading about Virginia Rappe, whom the Hearst papers represented as an amalgam of ‘the girl next door’, St Bernadette and Little Nell. (Hearst fed the prosecution strategy, which would be to present Virginia as a virtuous, healthy, even athletic girl. Defence strategy would be to present her as a diseased woman.)
Readers of the Hearst newspapers learned not only of Virginia’s moral virtue, but of another American virtue: private wealth. According to one report, the late starlet had ‘independent wealth as the result of oil investments’. According to another, she owned a great deal of property in and around Los Angeles. In fact, she lived in a rented bungalow, and her total assets at the time of her death were $134.
The Hearst press had no monopoly on nonsense. Newspapers from Los Angeles to New York printed one inaccurate story after another, and before anyone had set a foot in court, the nation rushed to judgement.
By Sunday, 11 September, the story was front-page news in Alaska, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo, South America – all over the world.
Nowhere was Roscoe more the subject of discussion than in Hollywood. The news of his arrest on the charge of murder was greeted by those who knew him with stunned disbelief. To his fellow actors, Roscoe as a raping Bacchus was a case of serious miscasting. They felt the whole affair was a ghastly mistake that would soon be rectified.
Though Zukor, Lasky and the other Hollywood moguls shared the actors’ stunned disbelief, they also experienced blind panic. Film historian Terry Ramsaye describes their reaction in A Million and One Nights: ‘The smouldering gossip of corruption in the films broke into flame. New York film offices were stricken with terror. There were endless conferences. Lawyers scurried about. Press agents tore at their hair and typewriters. Statements flew and the wires to San Francisco were overloaded.’
Zukor and his colleagues at Paramount were not panicked by the thought that Roscoe was being propelled towards San Quentin’s gas chamber. They were concerned about the three unreleased films Roscoe had just completed, which were expected to bring in a net profit of at least three million dollars and possibly as much as ten million dollars. At this time, in the US alone, thirty-five million people a week went to the cinema. Paramount’s chiefs quickly realized that not only Roscoe but Paramount and the entire film industry were in grave danger. Every time an actor was involved in a scandal, the movement for censorship of the movies was strengthened; then as now, there was a strong tendency to judge a film star’s acting by his private life, and it mattered little that an Arbuckle film was the epitome of innocent fun.
Sid Grauman, a friend of Roscoe’s since his boyhood days in San Jose, was the first cinema owner to show the industry what the Arbuckle case was all about. Roscoe’s feature film Gasoline Gus had been showing all week to record business. Grauman advertised it as ‘positively the funniest comedy ever filmed’. After reading the Sunday papers, twelve hours after his friend had been charged with murder, Grauman withdrew the film without comment or announcement, proving, as Adela Rogers St Johns was to tell me much later, that ‘Sid Grauman was not capable of being anybody’s friend at any time’.
Coming as it did from a man everyone assumed to be close to Roscoe, the withdrawal of the film appeared significant: if anybody knew the truth, Sid did; Roscoe must have told him what really happened. In fact, since his return from San Francisco, Roscoe had not spoken to him. Sid Grauman had been home in bed at the time that Arbuckle had waited in his office for his attorney Dominguez, and at that time, in any case, Arbuckle had had no more idea of the circumstances surrounding Virginia’s death than the press had. Now, however, the news of Grauman’s action flashed to San Francisco, and at an emergency midnight meeting the owners of San Francisco’s theatres decided to ban all Arbuckle pictures.
Although time and again the industry and the press leaped on statements damaging to Roscoe Arbuckle’s case, they seemed indifferent to statements of support, no matter how important the source. At the time of Roscoe’s arrest, Charles Chaplin was in London, making his first trip home since he had become world-famous. The press recorded his views on everything, so when news of Roscoe reached London, reporters rushed to Chaplin for a statement. He told them that the murder charge was ‘preposterous’.
‘I know Roscoe to be a genial, easygoing type who would not hurt a fly,’ Chaplin said, and added more in a similar vein. Not a word of his opinion was printed. His views on a friend facing a murder charge, the views of the world’s top comedian on his only serious rival for the crown, did not merit a line. One wonders what the press reaction would have been had his opinion been critical of Arbuckle.
In the meantime, back in the United States, there was fierce competition for newspaper coverage among several people: Maude Delmont, who added to her story daily; Henry ‘Pathé’ Lehrman, the late starlet’s director-sweetheart; District Attorney Matthew Brady of San Francisco, who seemed to realize early on that as Roscoe’s fortunes declined, his would rise; and Captain of Detectives Duncan Matheson. They were joined in their quest for publicity by America’s club women and ministers, who were indulging in a national orgy of moral outrage.
Virginia Rappe’s fiance got massive coverage in the papers. Lehrman had been in New York at the time of the St Francis party. He was still there when news of Virginia’s death reached him. Although he had no firsthand knowledge, he rapidly formed an opinion based on the press reports and a long-distance telephone call to Sidi Spreckles, who hadn’t been at the party, but had been with Virginia when she died. He called a press conference at his hotel. To his surprise, Lehrman, who had faded into relative obscurity after his Keystone days, found himself playing host to over thirty reporters.
