The New Yorker - USA (2021-10-11)

THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 35

so irritable that Keaton fired him after
three weeks. Over time, however, Ar-
buckle built a steady career directing
under his father’s first and middle names,
William Goodrich. (Keaton joked that
his pseudonym should be Will B. Good.)
In the late twenties, Arbuckle bought
a night club in Culver City, the unfor-
tunately named Plantation Café, and
for a time it became a hangout for his
celebrity friends who wanted to show
their support. But it went under after
the stock-market crash. The rise of
talkies brought more work for “William
Goodrich,” but he wasn’t satisfied. “I
want to go back to the screen,” he told
Photoplay in 1931. He got his chance the
next year, when Warner Bros. hired him
to star in a trio of comedy shorts, after
an eleven-year exile. They were uncon-
troversial enough that the studio planned
eight more Fatty shorts, and even con-
sidered a feature. In June, 1933, Arbuckle
and his third wife were in Manhattan,
toasting their anniversary and his im-
minent comeback. He went to bed that

night at the Park Central Hotel, and

died in his sleep, of a heart attack, at the

age of forty-six.

In death, Arbuckle was the star of

an evolving Hollywood legend—actu-

ally, two conflicting legends. In one, he

was a symbol of Jazz Age depravity. In

the other, he was an innocent man who,

as Frank Capra put it in his 1971 auto-

biography, “had been brutally sacrificed

on the altar of hate.” Through the de-

cades, both versions were larded with

fabrications. Kenneth Anger’s seamy

“Hollywood Babylon,” which first ap-

peared in English in 1965, codified a

lewd myth by insinuating that Arbuckle

was “haunted by bottles” after his no-

torious “bottle party.” Rappe’s reputa-

tion, meanwhile, toggled between that

of virgin and whore. Late in life, Ar-

buckle’s first wife, Minta Durfee, re-

peated the preposterous tale that Rappe

had spread so much venereal disease at

Keystone that Mack Sennett had to fu-

migate the studio. David Yallop’s 1976

book, “The Day the Laughter Stopped,”

which stands firmly on the side of Ar-

buckle’s innocence, f loats the bizarre

theory that Rappe was pregnant at the

Labor Day party and begged the star

for abortion money—and that the doc-

tors discarded her uterus in a coverup.

The #MeToo movement inspired

fresh looks at the saga, with a more re-

spectful eye toward Rappe. Karina Long-

worth’s entrancing Hollywood-history

podcast, “You Must Remember This,”

devoted an episode to the incident in

2018, when it was difficult not to see his-

tory repeating itself in the shape of the

Harvey Weinstein case and many other

accusations. Longworth rightly rejected

“the simplistic version of the story that

contends that the dead woman and the

female witnesses who testified against

Arbuckle were telling lies in order to

bring down a powerful man.” But the

ambiguities of the case don’t make for

easy revisionism. The closer you look,

the more you become entangled in the

minutiae of medical confusion and the

wavering recollections of this or that

hotel maid. By some accounts, Rappe

herself didn’t know what happened to

her. One nurse recalled, “She frequently

asked me, ‘What could have broken in-

side of me?’ She asked me several times

to determine if she had been assaulted.”

Merritt concludes that Rappe was likely

injured “in the throes of passion,” intro-

ducing a very twenty-first-century co-

nundrum: the boundaries of consent.

A century later, it’s harder to judge

Arbuckle’s culpability than it is to trace

the life of his legend. From the moment

he was arrested, he was a movie screen

onto which people could project their

fears and fantasies, and his case reveals

more about American spectacle than it

does about a man and a woman in a hotel

room. As jurors in the court of public

opinion, we’re still deliberating on an

endless stream of cases, often with un-

even facts, weighing, like Solomon as-

sessing a baby, the fates of disgraced men.

The dispiriting truth is that the banish-

ment of Roscoe Arbuckle did nothing

to prevent a culture of sexual coercion

from taking hold in Hollywood. The in-

dustry may have removed sex from the

screen to protect its own image, but sex-

ual abuse went on in executive suites and

on casting couches, behind closed doors,

until, nearly ten decades later, it burst

into the public eye all over again. 

WITHOUT

The world will keep trudging through time without us

When we lift from the story contest to fly home

We will be as falling stars to those watching from the edge

Of grief and heartbreak

Maybe then we will see the design of the two-minded creature

And know why half the world fights righteously for greedy masters

And the other half is nailing it all back together

Through the smoke of cooking fires, lovers’ trysts, and endless

Human industry—

Maybe then, beloved rascal

We will find each other again in the timeless weave of breathing

We will sit under the trees in the shadow of earth sorrows

Watch hyenas drink rain, and laugh.

—Joy Harjo