Welcome to Callie Behind the Scenes: June!
Every last Friday of the month, I expand a bit on some of the real world events Callie has experienced, or add a bit of general behind the scenes chat on the project — if there is anything in particular you would like to read more about, please let me know.
Earlier this month, Callie met Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, the subject of one of the most notorious SA cases of the 20th century. It is a case I have a LOT of opinions about, and the reason I’ve found myself in more Twitter spats with other old Hollywood geeks than I care to recall!
This is why:
On Labor Day 1921, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle decided to celebrate signing a million-dollar contract with Paramount by driving up to San Francisco to throw a party.
The party raged over the three day weekend, with various Hollywood hangers-on drifting in and out of the suite as everybody got more wasted and wild. At some point, Roscoe and actress Virginia Rappé were alone in his hotel room. For how long and how they got there is disputed, but they were alone (by his admission), for some time, at some point.
And then Virginia began screaming in pain.
Her friends broke down the door and shoved Arbuckle out of the room.
Three days later she was dead.
Arbuckle was accused of rape or sexual assault which resulted in Virginia's death. After two hung juries, a third trial saw him acquitted for manslaughter.
Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him.
- Jury Foreman, Third Trial
That’s the version that most people, if they’ve heard of the case at all, know.
Abuckle is the ultimate #metoo cautionary tale, the victim of believing women, and innocent scapegoat of puritan efforts to clean up Hollywood’s sex, drugs and Charleston image.
Books on Hollywood history, podcasts, blogs and articles alike, all blithely refer to his innocence, and indeed victimhood, as though it is absolute fact. If I ever mention the case on Twitter, for example, I’ll immediately get a slew of responses sympathising with the “poor guy” who got a “raw deal.”
And that got me thinking.
As a huge Hollywood history geek, I had vaguely heard of the case for several years.
I’d never really looked into it in detail, so, like most people, I had taken on the accepted narrative without giving it too much thought. I thought of Arbuckle as a good guy, a tragic clown — “poor Fatty,” who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And then, whilst researching something else altogether, I stumbled across two stories about him.
(You’ll recognise these — I gave versions of them to Hildy and Callie respectively!)
The first was in The Keystone Kid: Tales of Early Hollywood, which is a fascinating memoir of a family who grew up in a little farmhouse on the edge of the Keystone lot in Edendale. The entire family ended up in pictures, starting with the eldest, Coy Watson Jr, who was a child actor, starting out at less than a year old in 1913:
I played Arbuckle’s baby in a picture called Fatty’s Gift… it turned out to be a bad experience for me.
Everything was fine until the director wanted me to cry.
”You were in a good mood and didn’t feel like crying,” Mom recalled. “I started onto the set to tell the director that if I waved goodbye to you and started to leave, you would probably cry. But, before I got to the director, that fool Fatty yelled, ‘I’ll make him cry,’ and he leaned over into the crib, yelled and growled right in your face.
I was six feet away and he even scared me!
It made me angry. You began to cry all right and you cried hard. They got their scene but you were very upset and wouldn’t stop crying.
In The Shocking Mis Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood, Frederica Sagor writes of attending a wild Hollywood party in 1926:
Fatty Arbuckle decided to pursue me, his bold, uninhibited advances indicating that he had learned little caution from his scandalous ordeal.
She describes him as an “unappealing specimen of the human race” and tells how she and her friend ended up climbing out of a second-floor window to escape.
Both of these stories, told by contemporaries who knew him personally — and neither of whom had any stake in the circus surrounding the trials — directly contradict the idea of the bumbling sweetie that’s repeated time and time again today. Sagor even describes the trials as his “ordeal,” indicating some sympathy with him — but her account undermines his defenders’ insistence that he wouldn’t say boo to a goose.
These two stories played on my mind for a while. Finally, it dawned what had never sat quite right with me about the whole case: it is just too perfect. It’s like incel fan fiction. The happy-go-lucky nice guy who wanted to make everyone happy, ruined for life by malicious women who just happened to be riddled with STDs.
Give me a break.
What it comes down to for me is: what are the chances that the only powerful man in Hollywood to have faced real and irreversible consequences after a sexual assault accusations is also an entirely innocent pet lamb?
So that’s when I started digging.
And I found that in the twenties, the general perception was that he had got away with it.
In her autobiography, Gloria Swanson stated:
Maybe three trials couldn’t prove he was guilty, but no one in town thought he was all that innocent.
I know Roscoe Arbuckle was acquitted, and I know Al Capone's only crime was tax evasion.
On April 8 1922 (about a month after his acquittal) the newly created Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (often known as the ‘Hayes office) released this statement:
After consulting at length with Mr. Joseph Schenck, Mr. Adolph Zukor and Mr. Jesse Lasky ... I will state that at my request they have cancelled all showings and all bookings of the Arbuckle films.
They do this that the whole matter may have the consideration that its importance warrants, and the action is taken notwithstanding the fact that they had nearly ten thousand contracts in force for the Arbuckle pictures.
It’s not news to anybody that Hollywood is a business and a pretty mercenary one at that.
Cancelling ten thousand contracts would have cost a pretty penny, and not one of those men was exactly known for his goodwill or his feminism. Even if we take the exact number with a grain of virtue-signalling salt, there is no question that Arbuckle was one of the most bankable stars in the industry. It just doesn’t add up that Hollywood producers, of all people, would lose significant amounts of money to blacklist an innocent man, because… what? They were so afraid of alleged madam and blackmailer Maude Delmont who had led the charge of accusations?
Really?
Several books I’ve read have insisted that he returned to San Francisco following Virginia’s death simply as a good citizen trying his best to help the police with their enquiries, only to be blindsided by the fact he was under suspicion.
Except those same books go on to state as fact that Maude Delmont went to the police with her accusations only after failing to blackmail Arbuckle.
How can both be true?
Either he went along believing he was being questioned as a witness to a tragic, accidental death OR he had rejected a blackmail attempt, in which case he knew perfectly well he was about to be accused.
The case is riddled with little discrepancies like that, that too many writers seem to just whistle by in their race to declare him hard done by.
But here is the big one:
The official cause of Virginia Rappé’s death was a ruptured bladder.
Most writers seem to take this as proof of Arbuckle’s innocence. From Anne Helen Peterson’s Scandals of Early Hollywood:
Here's what is certain: Rappé had suffered from chronic cystitis for several years. Whether or not Arbuckle did have sexual relations with her, it was her preexisting condition, not Arbuckle, that caused her death.
Except that the way you normally die from chronic cystitis is if it leads to a kidney infection and in turn sepsis. There is no suggestion that’s what happened to Virginia.
Secondly, spontaneous bladder ruptures are extremely rare:
Spontaneous rupture of the bladder is rare (<1%); the incidence is around 1 in every 126,000 people. The most common cause of bladder rupture is trauma (96%).
Again, what are the chances that Virginia was that 1 in 126,000 people whose bladder decided to rupture all on its own while she was alone in a hotel room with a drunk man with a history of being a boisterous jerk?*
*proviso that my medical knowledge comes primarily from Greys Anatomy, so if I have misunderstood anything, please correct me!
Moreover, the public tends to be fickle, and more often than not buys whatever narrative it is sold.
Later that same year, actor Wallace Reid collapsed on set due to a heroin overdose. Hayes worked with Reid’s wife, director Dorothy Davenport to turn the narrative from actor is revealed as junkie to let’s all get behind tragic Wally’s recovery. Sadly, Reid died of another overdose in 1923 — but he died beloved by his fans.
So why didn’t Hayes set out to recuperate the acquitted Arbuckle’s image in the same way?
Could it be, as Freddie Sagor suggests, that Arbuckle couldn’t be trusted?
From around the sixties onwards, the narrative of this case began to change, with writer after writer stating unequivocally that Arbuckle was innocent and frankly a bit of a saint. That is the narrative that has taken root today — but why do we take the word of those who were in nursery school when it happened over those who were there?
All that said, I’m not declaring Arbuckle guilty on all counts either.
I have no idea what happened in that hotel room in San Francisco in 1921. I wasn’t there.
But I do know that you can only believe he is an entirely innocent, pure-as-the-driven-snow wronged victim, if you also believe that both the women who accused him (and members of two separate juries) were psychopathically vindictive to no real end, AND that he had the misfortune to lock himself in a hotel room with a woman who was just about to experience a rare, spontaneous, fatal event in those exact moments.
Did he intentionally set out to kill her? I doubt it.
Did *something* happen to her in that hotel room that resulted in her tragic death?
Fuck yes.