Another centennial arrives: the infamous Labor Day, 1921, blow-out at the St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco; or, as New Yorker’s Michael Schulman put it, Fatty Arbuckle’s “deadly pajama party.” (“Fatty Arbuckle and the Birth of Celebrity Scandal,” October 11, 2021)
I read the article with interest, though I already “knew” of the event, having read both Arbuckle’s biography and a full book treatment of the scandal. But that was a dozen years back. I needed to be reminded of many of the details. I needed Schulman’s perspective and analysis, most of all. In particular:
David Yallop’s 1976 book, The Day the Laughter Stopped, “which stands firmly on the side of Arbuckle’s innocence, floats the bizarre theory that Rappé was pregnant at the Labor Day party and begged the star for abortion money—and that the doctors discarded her uterus in a coverup.” Yeah, I read that book. I swallowed it hook, line, and sinker (or at least the hook).
I did not have the critical ability in 2010 to spot a writer with an agenda, a conspiracy theory, even. In fact, the uterus part (I think I remember that correctly) felt odd. It’s main thesis was convincing, though. Virginia Rappé had serious health issues, possibly due to a previous botched abortion (or two?). The excessive alcohol at the party didn’t help. I know. It’s guilt by association, the classic sexist double standard, blaming the victim, and all that. I fell for it.
If I was less than a critical reader at the time, I was also a biased reader–biased, I suspect, in much the same way Yallop was: a movie fan come to the rescue of his fallen hero. I was enchanted by the slapstick innocence of the movies and thus invested in the innocence of their creator. His loss to adolescent Hollywood was a tragedy, in my mind, not a morality play. It wasn’t so much the art (such as it was, what with the pie-throwing) as the man. I felt deep affection and sympathy for this man who was so inescapably identified with his girth. It brought him laughs before it brought him fame. The title of every one of his short films shouted Fatty This and Fatty That from the marquee. But could he know for sure that audiences weren’t laughing at him as well as with him?
And what of the shocking neglect he suffered as a child, forced to make his way in the world at age twelve? Was that what bred in Arbuckle an insatiable wanting as big as his girth? Few worked harder on the set; few had as much talent in front of an audience or a camera, but no one came close to his unquenchable neediness. Buster Keaton turned down his friend’s invitation to the St. Francis blow-out and went fishing, instead. Arbuckle had long since lost the ability to enjoy such simple pleasures.
Schulman cites Karina Longworth’s treatment of the scandal more favorably than Yallop’s. I listened to that episode of her podcast You Must Remember This a couple years ago. Longworth, according to Schulman, “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.'” Longworth might have written “simplistic,” but her meaning could just as easily be taken as “discredited.” In the wake of #MeToo, male narratives had become suspect, as a matter of course.
But Longworth’s podcast did not examine the forensics in detail. For that, I would need to turn to Room 1219, by Greg Merritt, says Schulman. In fact, I had checked out this book those many years ago, after reading Yallop. But my interests moved on, and I never cracked the spine. I couldn’t justify spending time on another book on a sordid Hollywood scandal I already knew too much about. (I had already opted for Jerry Stahl’s fictionalized look at the life of Roscoe Arbuckle in I, Fatty.) According to Schulman, Merritt believed Rappé was most likely injured “in the throes of passion.” This was the very verdict I had not been willing to admit during my Arbuckle-and-Keaton days. That would have given credence to the allegation that it was his girth that killed her. (The coke bottle and the ice might have been titillating but were just as likely red herrings.) Fatty ruptured the skinny starlet’s bladder by being…well, fat. It was too much for me to accept then; it might be the most logical explanation, after all.
From Wikipedia, today:
Rappe suffered from chronic urinary tract infections,[22] a condition that liquor irritated dramatically. She developed a reputation for over-imbibing at parties and then drunkenly tearing at her clothes from the resulting physical pain[citation needed–but any of the books mentioned above will do; but, by the time of the St. Francis Hotel party, her reproductive health was a greater concern. Despite reports trying to paint her in a bad light, the autopsy revealed Rappe never had any abortion nor was pregnant.[citation needed–Yallop?]
The ruptured bladder explanation still requires the underlying conditions hypothesis be true. It also, as Schulman says, “introduc[es] a very twenty-first-century conundrum: the boundaries of consent.”
Roscoe Arbuckle wasn’t innocent, even if he was not guilty of an actual crime. Virginia Rappé wasn’t innocent, even if she was also the victim of a large man’s uncontrolled libido, which we can never confirm. (Schulman: “A century later, it’s harder to judge Arbuckle’s culpability than it is to trace the life of his legend.”) Nor do the self-righteous Americans who never forgave Fatty his “immorality” get off free from scrutiny. There’s more than enough guilt to go around.
I’ve been reading too much Milton lately, I suppose. Perhaps I need an antidote of slapstick. Tonight, I will to pull out Fatty and Mabel Adrift, pop it in the DVD player, and revisit prelapsarian Hollywood–Eden in the context of Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio, before the fall of Roscoe Arbuckle and the arrival of Original Sin in the Hays commission. While the laughter still made a claim for innocence that of course never existed.
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