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mined that she’d simply had too much
to drink. The party continued. Rappe
spent three days in the hotel room, her
pain dulled with morphine, before she
was finally transferred to a sanatorium.
Why she wasn’t moved sooner is an in-
furiating mystery. The next day, Friday,
September 9th, she died. On Saturday,
Arbuckle was arrested for murder.
T
he Arbuckle affair was the most
notorious in a string of Hollywood
scandals that threatened to kill off the
movie industry in its adolescence. De-
cades before Twitter or TMZ, it set the
template for the celebrity scandal: the
way we gawk at, adjudicate, and my-
thologize tales of high-f lying people
brought low, whatever the facts may be.
Arbuckle’s deadly pajama party came
to epitomize the loosening morals that
followed the First World War, and his
downfall became a wedge in a culture
war. As Greg Merritt writes in his fo-
rensic 2013 account, “Room 1219,” “The
defenders of tradition were pitted against
the purveyors of modernity. On one side,
the Victorian era. On the other, the Jazz
Age.” But, as much as the scandal evokes
old Hollywood, its modern resonances
are uncanny: a famous actor accused of
sexual assault, a media apparatus eager
to capitalize on every salacious twist,
and an industry grappling with how to
dispose of a once profitable star turned
pariah. Ultimately, Hollywood dealt with
its first big P.R. disaster by regulating
itself so that no one else could, making
the Arbuckle scandal an unlikely para-
ble of corporate self-preservation.
Arbuckle’s fall was so novel in part
because he represented a new kind of
fame. He was born in 1887, in a farm-
house in Kansas. The nickname Fatty
was a childhood taunt. Even after em-
bracing it, as the star of “Fatty’s Day
Off ” and “Fatty’s Magic Pants,” Ar-
buckle was reluctant to use his weight
as comic fodder. “I refuse to try to make
people laugh at my bulk,” he said in 1917.
“Personally, I cannot believe that a bat-
tleship is a bit funnier than a canoe, but
some people do not feel that way about
it.” He began performing when he was
eight, after the family moved to Santa
Ana, California, and a theatrical troupe
passing through town needed a replace-
ment for a child actor. Arbuckle went
onstage—in blackface. (Since he was
barefoot, his feet had to be darkened as
well.) His mother died when he was
twelve, and he was sent north to live
with his father, who had abandoned the
family and supposedly owned a hotel
in the town of Watsonville. By the time
Roscoe arrived, alone, his father had
sold the hotel and left town. The boy
sat sobbing until some locals took him
in, and he earned his keep by doing
chores and singing for the hotel guests.
Eventually, his father materialized.
He would thrash Roscoe in alcoholic
rages; his stepmother recalled once res-
cuing him when his father was “chok-
ing him and beating his head against a
tree.” The boy had a bell-like voice and
sang in vaudeville houses, performing
“illustrated songs”—a forerunner of
music videos, in which popular tunes
were accompanied by slide shows. As a
teen-ager, he escaped his father by tour-
ing on the Pantages theatre circuit. In
1908, he met Minta Durfee, who was
performing on the same bill in Long
Beach, and they married on the stage
of the Byde-A-Wyle Theatre.
In 1913, Arbuckle showed up at Key-
stone Studios, a comedy lot known as
the Fun Factory and the home of the
bumbling Keystone Kops. Its impresa-
rio, Mack Sennett, hired him for three
dollars a day. That first year, he acted in
no fewer than thirty-six shorts, many of
them opposite Keystone’s leading lady
(and Sennett’s lover), Mabel Normand.
The next year, Charlie Chaplin, still de-
veloping his Little Tramp persona, joined
the studio, and he and Arbuckle acted
together in seven films. Along with Mary
Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, they
were part of the first wave of movie stars
to live like—and be covered by the media
as—American royalty. By 1915, the fan
magazine Photoplay was breathlessly de-
tailing Arbuckle’s ideal dinner, a menu
that included crabmeat cocktail, a dozen
raw oysters, fried salmon steak, roast
turkey, Hungarian goulash, Roquefort
cheese with crackers, and cold artichokes
with mayonnaise.
The following year, Paramount
poached Arbuckle by offering him his
own production company, Comique
Film Corporation, and a base salary
seven times what he made at Keystone.
This required him to renege on a smaller
deal that would have included his wife,
and Durfee was so upset with his ma-neuvering that the couple drifted into
an unpublicized separation. Paramount
sent its new prize on a twenty-three-
stop publicity tour. As the director of
his own pictures, Arbuckle brought on
the younger comedian Buster Keaton,
who became his frequent co-star and
lifelong defender.
The rapid rise of movie stars shook
up the balance of power in Hollywood,
especially when Chaplin, Pickford, and
Fairbanks teamed up with D. W. Grif-
fith to form their own collective, United
Artists, circumventing the studios. Amid
rumors that Arbuckle might join them,
Paramount showered him with cash, in
a deal that paid three million dollars in
the course of three years. The record
payday made headlines, and Arbuckle
embraced a life style to match. He bought
the mansion, the cars, and, briefly, a base-
ball team, the Pacific Coast League’s
Vernon Tigers, paving the way for ce-
lebrity team owners like Jay-Z. Fans
mobbed him. He hosted a dog wedding.
(Luke was the “best man.”) By Labor
Day, 1921, he had seven films playing in
theatres, with two more wrapped.L
ess is known about the life of Vir-
ginia Rappe. Born in 1891, in Chi-
cago, she began modelling at sixteen,
appearing in fashion shows at depart-
ment stores. She changed her name from
Rapp to give it a more exotic pronun-
ciation—“Rapp-ay.” Showing a proto-
feminist streak of independence, she
advised young women in 1913, “Be orig-
inal—every girl can be that.” She began
marketing her own designs, includ-
ing hats shaped like spiderwebs, sub-
marines, and dove wings (her “peace
hat”). As Merritt observes, “If she were
designing fashions today, she would
surely be a maven of social media.” In
other words, an influencer.
She moved to Los Angeles in 1916,
one of a sea of ingénues hoping to be-
come the next Mary Pickford. She had
a vampy role in “Paradise Garden” (now
lost) and a two-and-a-half-year relation-
ship with the director Henry Lehrman,
who cast her in several pictures before
his production company went under. By
the summer of 1921, Rappe was thirty
but shaving years off her age, and her
multiple careers had ebbed. It was only
after her death, as Arbuckle’s movies
were being ripped from projectors, that