The Day the Laughter Stopped, page 31
Roscoe’s attorneys were ‘a million-dollar array of counsel’. Roscoe himself was ‘a moral leper’.
‘Oh, if the children of America could have seen Roscoe Arbuckle put ice in the private parts of Virginia Rappe, how they and their mothers would have laughed with glee! Oh, my friends, this man who makes the world laugh – who makes the world laugh. Thank God, he will never make the world laugh again.’
U’Ren quoted Pudd’nhead Wilson, the ‘fingerprint expert’ in Mark Twain’s novel, in support of the state’s expert, Heinrich. Clearly the state believed that the fingerprints on the doorknob in the St Francis hotel room represented the writing on the wall for Roscoe.
‘And as I studied those fingerprints, I thought again of the feast of Belshazzar. You remember that in the Fifth Book of Daniel is recorded the story of the feast of Belshazzar, the Babylonian king, how he sat in his palace surrounded by his lords, and as I thought of that story I thought of the words that “God moves in a mysterious manner [sic], His wonders to perform.” And I believe, as I stand here, that God was instrumental in some way in placing those finger marks upon that door, so that the guilt of Roscoe Arbuckle would be established beyond any and all reasonable doubt.’ Milton U’Ren then read from the Fifth Book of Daniel, concluding, ‘And that night Belshazzar the king was slain, and the Medes and Persians took possession of his kingdom and divided it; and that night Roscoe Arbuckle’s kingdom, as the king of humour, fun, was ended. He has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. God has remembered his kingdom and finished it. And his kingdom and he no longer reigns [sic], he no longer reigns, thank God.’
A few moments later he closed with these words:
We ask you to do your duty as men and women of San Francisco. We ask you to do your duty so that when you meet your fellow men, you can look them in the eye.
We ask you to do your duty so that when you return to your families, you can take them to your breasts; and we ask you to do your duty so that when you take your little children upon your knees that you will know that you have done what you could to protect them from this defendant and from all the other Arbuckles in the world, now existing, and yet to come.
And we ask you to do your duty so that this man, and all the Arbuckles of the world, will know that the womanhood of America is not their play thing.
After Judge Louderback explained the legal position on points raised in evidence the jury retired to consider its verdict on Friday afternoon, 2 December, at 4.15 p.m. The courtroom and the corridors of the Hall of Justice remained packed.
What happens in the confines of the jury room is theoretically sacrosanct, but during my three years’ research into Roscoe Arbuckle’s life I discovered what happened that weekend in December, when the jury deliberated about Roscoe’s guilt or innocence.
A number of ballots were taken, showing a nine to three majority for acquittal. It became apparent that the majority favoured acquittal, two were undecided, and one woman, Mrs Helen Hubbard, was convinced of Arbuckle’s guilt.
Not only was Mrs Hubbard convinced of his guilt, but she refused to discuss the evidence and told the others that she intended to vote guilty ‘until hell freezes over’. When August Fritze, the foreman of the jury, and the others began to discuss the case, she put her hands to her ears, to avoid hearing the discussion.
Eventually the vote became eleven to one for acquittal. At 11.05 p.m., having reached no verdict, the jury members were locked up in their respective bedrooms for the night.
On Saturday, 3 December, the jury reconvened. A year earlier to the day Roscoe Arbuckle had arrived in Paris to a hero’s welcome. Now one woman was determined that no-one should consider him a hero again.
In another part of the Hall of Justice, Maude Delmont had been arrested and charged with bigamy. About the Arbuckle trial she said, ‘I have lost all interest in the verdict.’
In the jury room, pressure mounted. One juror, Mrs Winterbur, told the others, ‘I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I think he is guilty and sometimes I think he is innocent. If only I knew more about the dead girl’s character, then I might be able to decide more clearly.’
So much for unwritten rules about attacking a dead woman’s character.
Mrs Hubbard told her colleagues, ‘I believe Arbuckle is guilty. I believe those fingerprints on the door were accurate, and it is my opinion that when Arbuckle held Virginia Rappe against the door her bladder ruptured. Right there is where I think it all happened, I don’t believe his story; I think it is entire fabrication.’
Foreman Fritze called her ‘a stubborn woman’. Turning her back on the jurors, she replied, ‘I’ve made up my mind and intend to stick to it if we are here for a thousand years.’
She refused to look at the exhibits. She refused to read the trial transcript.
The jury room had been bugged. The news reached DA Brady that Mrs Hubbard was the lone holdout. Fearing that she might be persuaded to change her mind, he asked the judge to dismiss the jury. The judge declined; he wanted to give them more time.
Somehow, while this exchange took place, Roscoe found himself locked out of the courtroom. He banged on the door.
A voice from within asked, ‘Are you attached to this court?’
Roscoe replied, ‘Not very deeply.’
In the jury room, nothing changed. Ballot after ballot, the vote was eleven to one for acquittal. Mrs Hubbard was as immoveable as the Rock of Gibraltar. On Sunday, 4 December, another round of balloting showed no change in her vote.
At noon, having been out forty-four hours, the jurors returned to the courtroom. They told Judge Louderback that they were hopelessly deadlocked. Their final vote had been ten to two for acquittal, one of the men having decided to keep Mrs Hubbard company. The jury was discharged.
DA Brady announced that there would be a second trial as soon as possible. The whole process would have to be gone through again.
One woman had prevented a verdict of acquittal. Why?
In this book, the photograph of the first jury clearly shows all of the facts but one. The woman hiding her face from the camera is Mrs Hubbard. From the moment she was sworn in, everything that followed – testimony from sixty witnesses – was as naught.
Mrs Hubbard’s mother-in-law, Sarah Hubbard, was the first California Regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Mrs Hubbard’s husband was an attorney who had business connections with the DA’s office. Gavin McNab had realized early in the trial that he had let a vigilante (in spirit if not in fact) slip through in jury selection, and he warned his client about it. After the non-verdict, McNab said:
From the time she was sworn in as a juror, it was the unanimous opinion of the defence that the expression on her face was that of intense hostility and prejudice toward every defence witness and defence action.
We concluded that, regardless of any juror, or all the other jurors, she would hang the jury and produce a mistrial, and we so advised the defendant.
Although it is a mystery how the diligent defence team allowed Mrs Hubbard on the jury, there was nothing mysterious about the effect. In Hollywood the news of the hung jury was greeted with stunned disbelief. The film colony had followed the trial closely and had been confident that Roscoe would be acquitted. Reaction to the surprising turn of events foreshadowed what would happen in Hollywood years later, with the ‘Hollywood Ten’. King Vidor was one of many members of the film colony who recalled for me the effect of the jury’s decision:
There was panic like you have never seen in your life. The only comparable thing to it that I can recall was the hysteria that followed Pearl Harbor. The snowball effect of Roscoe’s case in terms of nationwide reaction was incredible. The movie bosses just didn’t know which way to turn. There were meetings in New York. Meetings in Los Angeles. Meetings in Boston. Louis B. Mayer said to me, ‘If this pressure keeps up, there won’t be any more film business.’ It wasn’t a case of moving to Florida or New York. The moguls firmly believed they faced a total, complete, and permanent closure. The order of the day was to stem the tide of comment, criticism and general indictment of the industry.
Jackie Coogan, then a child star, also recalled that time: ‘The whole motion picture industry was in that dock with Roscoe. Hollywood front offices decided to go moral. Guys were told to cut themselves down to two or three mistresses. Zukor, Lasky and Schenck would go which way the dollar pointed.’
And the dollar pointed directly at respectability.
Bootlegging had operated successfully behind a front of drycleaning establishments – why couldn’t the movies? What the moguls needed was a respectable manager to run the shop at the front while they got on with their business. They took their cue from organized baseball. A year before, to change its public image after a scandal involving the Black Sox and a World Series ‘fix’, the association of baseball owners had hired Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as ‘tsar’ of baseball to publicly erase the image of corruption in the sport.
Roscoe’s trial ended on 4 December, when the jury returned to the courtroom. Four days later the Hollywood moguls made a decision, the effects of which are still with us. To ward off the external censorship which they had fought against for years, the moguls decided to appoint their own tsar: Postmaster General William Hays.
Hays, a forty-one-year-old pillar of Presbyterian respectability and chairman of the Republican National Committee, was largely credited with President Harding’s victory at the polls in 1920. Harding had achieved a stunning success and had rewarded Hays with a seat on his Cabinet. The film magnates were impressed. Joe Schenck suggested that a man who could persuade the majority of the people in the country to elect Harding to the Presidency would make an ideal front man for the film industry.
While Roscoe’s trial drew to a close, Hollywood took out insurance in the form of a letter to Hays signed by twelve of the most powerful men in the business, including Zukor, Fox, Goldwyn and Lewis J. Selznick. The letter was to be delivered only if Roscoe were found guilty, but when the news reached them of the hung jury, they waited no longer. A hung jury, even one that had voted ten to two for acquittal, was bad news.
On 8 December, Selznick and Saul Rogers, attorney for the Fox Film Corporation, delivered the letter to Hays personally. The signatories, ‘striving to have the industry accorded the consideration and dignity to which it is justly entitled’, realized that in order to achieve their aims it would ‘be necessary to obtain the services of one who had already, by his outstanding achievements, won the confidence of the people of this country’.
In Hollywood, everything has a price. The price the letter-writers put on the realization of their ideals was ‘One hundred thousand dollars a year under a commitment satisfactory to you for a period of three years’.
The ‘three years’ would become three decades. Hays accepted their offer in mid-January and remained as ‘tsar of films’ until 1950. Variety hailed his appointment as ‘the biggest thing that has happened in the screen world since the close-up was first evolved’.
Although Hays didn’t officially take up his position as front man to the industry until March 1922 – in 1922 the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America, MPPDA, was created and came to be known as ‘the Hays Office’ – his effect was felt in Hollywood in early January of that year. Attendance at filmland’s churches swelled; the projection rooms at various studios were packed, too, by order of the studio executives. King Vidor described one of those projection-room meetings:
I remember that all the directors were called into the projection room. Louis Mayer was there. Suddenly he said, ‘Right, roll.’ Up on the screen came a number of clips; they were all from the latest movies that we had made that were just about to be released. When they’d all been run through, Mayer turned to us and said, ‘I’ve had all those scenes cut from your movies. Those are some of the reasons that we’ve brought Hays into the industry.’
Now, believe me, they were so panicky that they had cut anything and everything that anyone could conceivably take offence to and a good deal more besides.
It wasn’t until 1930, with the creation of the Motion Picture Production Code, that the industry began formally to regulate itself. For the time being, Hays’ most important role was to create good public relations for the industry and in this capacity he may have been effective. Creation of the Hays office did seem to head off the censorship movement.
Ironically, while Hays was selected to rescue Hollywood from its most serious scandal so far because of his ultra respectability, his former employer, President Harding, would be remembered in history for scandals of his own, especially for the oil fields at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. While Roscoe was being tried for manslaughter – but really for a wrongful life in general – the man in the White House was having an extramarital affair with Nan Britton that would eventually result in the birth of a baby girl.
Meanwhile, the President was fascinated with the Arbuckle case and would follow it every day on the radio, sometimes interrupting Cabinet meetings to hear the latest developments. (Perhaps it was from those radio accounts that he learned of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, where Virginia Rappe had been staying when she was invited to Roscoe’s party – and where the President was to die in 1923.)
While President Harding maintained a mistress in the White House (and while Hearst maintained one in San Simeon), the DA of San Francisco prepared for the second trial of America’s ‘looseness of morals’.
After the first trial had resulted in a hung jury, Brady and his staff made a song and dance about jury-tampering – alleged attempts to persuade Mrs Hubbard to change her vote. Brady called for a grand jury hearing into the matter. He did not do as much for August Fritze, the jury foreman, whose life had been threatened. In fact he called the foreman ‘a blackguard’. This may have been in response to Fritze’s saying that the prosecution’s case was ‘an insult to the intelligence of the jury. They asked us to substitute conjecture for facts. Human liberty and American rights should depend, not upon guesses of anybody, but upon evidence.’
Not every official in San Francisco thought justice was being served by a second trial. Even Leo Friedman, who was one of Roscoe’s principal prosecutors, was later to say, ‘The case should never have been brought in the first place.’
Not only was much of the DA’s case based on conjecture, but a number of people had come to the conclusion that Arbuckle was innocent, among them Chief of Police Daniel O’Brien, who said privately to Minta Durfee and to Jackie Coogan’s family (it would have been impolitic to say so publicly), ‘Roscoe Arbuckle is innocent of everything. He should never have been put in prison. He should never have been charged with anything.’
The Women’s Vigilant Committee was less reticent and took a different view, which the press picked up: ‘This committee recommends that the vigilants express their appreciation and thanks to Mrs Hubbard for her courage and conviction and fearless stand in this case.’ The club women said that Roscoe ‘should have shown more humility at the end of the trial’; they attacked the defence attorneys and criticized the other eleven jurors for not ‘joining in praise of Mrs Hubbard’. They praised the judge for ‘keeping the trial clean’, and congratulated the prosecution. When their remarks drew criticism, they insisted that ‘we are not biased in any way’.
Roscoe Arbuckle’s second trial began on 11 January 1922, the day Hays’s appointment as industry watchdog was officially announced. Arbuckle was protected by his family, friends and lawyers from the curious public, but those close to him saw that this was not the same old Roscoe Arbuckle. Reporter Ed Gleeson and writer Guvernor Morris were both outraged at Roscoe’s treatment since his arrest.
Ed Gleeson told me, ‘By the second trial Roscoe was almost in a comatose state. I have never seen a man so changed in such a short space of time. I had met him a number of times before the whole affair at the St Francis. He was such a funny man. His comedy was so inventive. Off screen, he was a prince, a wonderful person, the best-natured man I ever met. But by the time the second trial began, he was totally shattered.’
Selecting the jury for the second trial took even longer than the first time, because it was so hard to find twelve men and women who had not read or discussed the case, and had not formed definite opinions. After seventy-nine people had been questioned, and sixty-seven rejected, a jury was sworn in and the trial could begin.
Judge Louderback, who had presided over the first trial, also presided over the second. Much of the evidence was simply a repeat of the first trial, but there were some notable differences. Alice Blake’s memory failed her on the crucial evidence that she had given against Roscoe in the first trial.
Zey Prevon went further than ‘I don’t remember’. Under cross-examination, she broke down and told the story of how the evidence had been forced out of her and Alice Blake. Despite protests from Brady, U’Ren and Friedman, she told the whole story. The DA tried to have his ‘star witness’ labelled hostile. The judge ruled against him.
At the first trial, when the defence had tried to establish that the fingerprints ‘Sherlock’ Heinrich and Salome ‘Watson’ had discovered were forgeries, the defence witness’s testimony had been discounted on the ground that he was not an ‘expert’. This time the defence produced two men whose expertise was beyond question. The first of them, Milton Carlson, declared categorically that the fingerprints were fakes, and swore that they had been placed there after the doors had been moved to Heinrich’s laboratory in Oakland. Carlson demonstrated not only that there were no similarities between the prints on the door and Virginia’s and Roscoe’s, but that there were a number of similarities between the prints on the door and those of E. O. Heinrich.
