32 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
her name became a marquee attraction.
Shortly after she died, a doctor, Wil-
liam Ophüls, examined her body and re-
corded several bruises on her right arm
and her thighs, but no evidence of sex-
ual assault. He cut open her abdomen,
and found a hole in the outer wall of her
bladder an eighth of an inch wide. Cause
of death: rupture of the bladder, owing
in part to acute peritonitis. A Dr. Shelby
Strange performed a second
autopsy that evening, and
agreed that the bladder had
killed her. But what had rup-
tured it? Dr. Strange sus-
pected “some external force.”
Arbuckle had already
taken a steamship home
to L.A. when a reporter in-
formed him that Rappe had
died. That night, he attended
a midnight meeting at Sid
Grauman’s Million Dollar Theatre, along
with his Labor Day hotel companions
(and soon-to-be witnesses) and, more
curiously, Rappe’s friend Al Semnacher.
What, exactly, was discussed is unknown,
but it’s possible that they were getting
their stories straight. In Arbuckle’s ini-
tial statements, he insisted that he was
never alone with Rappe, which was a lie.
Then, on the advice of his attorney, he
shut his trap.
San Francisco theatres immediately
banned Arbuckle’s films, and Sid Grau-
man pulled his new picture, “Gasoline
Gus,” from the Million Dollar Theatre.
Within a week, his movies had vanished
nationwide. In one Wyoming theatre,
it was reported that a mob of cowboys
shot up his image on the screen. (It
turned out that the theatre owner had
concocted the story for publicity.) Par-
amount stopped paying its top star eleven
days after his arrest, on the ground that
he was locked in a San Francisco jail
and unable to report to work. The next
day, Universal wrote a morality clause
into its contracts, mandating nonpay-
ment to performers who “forfeit the re-
spect of the public,” and other studios
followed. (Morality clauses have made
a comeback in recent years.) The new
strictures could have horrendous conse-
quences for the stars; when Gloria Swan-
son became pregnant by a man who
wasn’t yet her husband, she was so afraid
of being ostracized that she got a botched
abortion that nearly killed her.
The scandal was a media bonanza.
Without real competition yet from radio
or newsweekly magazines, newspapers
were the only game in town, often pub-
lishing multiple editions a day. The Los
Angeles Times: “PLAN TO SEND AR-
BUCKLE TO DEATH ON GALLOWS.”
The San Francisco Call and Post: “AR-
BUCKLE DANCES WHILE GIRL IS DYING,
JOYOUS FROLIC AMID DEATH TRAG-
EDY.” The Oxnard Daily
Courier: “ARBUCKLE, THE
BEAST.” Many outlets used
the word “orgy” to describe
the Labor Day party. Wil-
liam Randolph Hearst’s pa-
pers, which helped pioneer
yellow journalism and an-
ticipated the likes of the
National Enquirer and the
Daily Mail, were particu-
larly sensational. On Sep-
tember 13th alone, Hearst’s San Fran-
cisco Examiner ran seventeen stories
about the scandal—a harbinger of the
twenty-four-hour gossip industry that
runs on Schadenfreude. As Swanson
wrote in her autobiography, “The news-
papers had proved in less than a week
that the public got a much greater thrill
out of watching stars fall than out of
watching them shine.”
Readers soon got to know a colorful
group of personalities, such as the wrong-
place-wrong-time witnesses Zey Pre-
vost and Alice Blake, two showgirls who
had attended the party, and Matthew
Brady, the San Francisco district attor-
ney, who was thought to covet the may-
or’s office or even the governor’s man-
sion. His star witness appeared to be
Maude Delmont, who claimed that Ar-
buckle had “dragged” Rappe into Room
1219, hollering, “I have been trying to
get you for five years.” In her affidavit,
Delmont recalled hearing the brutal-
ized Rappe scream, “He did it. I know
he did it. I have been hurt. I am dying.”
Overnight, Rappe and Arbuckle be-
came characters in a mass-marketed
morality play: the pure young beauty
ravaged by the beast. It didn’t help that
the name Virginia Rappe so closely re-
sembled “virgin rape,” or that Arbuck-
le’s appetites had been so widely pub-
licized. “Filled up with liquor,” the
Dayton Daily News declared, “his low
bestiality asserts itself in treating a
woman like a grizzly bear would a calf.”On Sundays, ministers across the coun-
try denounced Arbuckle as a symbol
of Hollywood sin. “He has betrayed
the thousands of little children who
laughed at his antics,” one preached.
“He has defied chastity and mocked
virtue.” The moral outrage likely scared
Paramount more than the box-office
hiccup did. In the wake of the Eigh-
teenth Amendment, the religious re-
formers and women’s clubs that had
successfully pushed for Prohibition were
now eying the movies as America’s chief
corrupting influence. Censorship laws
were creeping into statehouses, and stu-
dios dreaded federal regulation. Ar-
buckle gave the vice squad all the am-
munition it needed to target Hollywood
the way it had saloons.“
H
ollywood” has often stood in for
anxieties about changing mores.
The lurid fantasies about the Labor
Day “orgy” aren’t so far from QAnon
conspiracy theories about Tom Hanks
and pedophilia rings. In 1921, movie
stardom had upended the traditional
social hierarchy, and Arbuckle’s cele-
brated spending turned into a caution-
ary tale of nouveau-riche decadence. As
Henry Lehrman, who had been Rappe’s
boyfriend and also Arbuckle’s director,
told the press, “That’s what comes of
taking vulgarians from the gutter and
giving them enormous salaries and mak-
ing idols of them.”
Matthew Brady understood that he
was prosecuting not just Arbuckle but
the film industry. Unfortunately for
him, his case was hitting some snags.
At the coroner’s inquest, the complain-
ing witness, Maude Delmont—the press
dubbed her “the avenger”—admitted
to drinking “eight or ten” whiskeys at
the party, and parts of her story proved
flimsy. It was discovered that she had
married one husband without divorc-
ing another, and she was later arrested
for bigamy. Knowing that her credibil-
ity would likely fall apart under cross-
examination, Brady never even put her
on the stand.
His new star witnesses were Zey Pre-
vost and Alice Blake, but neither was a
silver bullet. After Blake told detectives
that she’d heard Rappe say “He killed
me,” she denied it before the grand jury.
Both women settled on the less damn-
ing “He hurt me.” Nevertheless, Brady