Authors: Jerry Stahl
"The thing's been snuffed," I replied, without thinking. "Snuffed as surely as the demon child Virginia was carrying after the butchers at Wakefield Sanitarium got to it."
I occasionally get dramatic when nervous, and this was one of those times. A doughy vein in the Warden's temple swelled up so fast I thought he was going to have a stroke. "That is beneath despicable," he hissed at me. "To slander a dead girl that way!" Which half-convinced me Dominguez was right about not announcing the event to a jury. But only half.
On account of my wrists were too thick for regular handcuffs, I was late getting to the arraignment on September 16. When Police Chief O'Brien apprised Brady of the situation, Brady was livid. He screamed through the telephone that he wanted "that bastard restrained" if they had to hogtie me and roll me up the courthouse steps in a wheelbarrow.
By the time I picked a pair of leg shackles off the table and snapped them on my own wrists—"Anything else I can do to help, fellas? You want me to drive?"—the forces of good were already marshaled at Superior Court.
Members of the frothy-lipped San Francisco Women's Vigilante Group crowded the sidewalk. None of the 250 females on hand were shy about expressing their desire that I pay with my wretched life for my treachery. Thanks to Zukor and Lasky's order that no one from the studio show any public support for me whatsoever, no pro-Arbuckle brigade was there to counter my henhouse of detractors. I was alone.
Trials and Permutations
On the suggestion of my second attorney, Milton Cohen—again supplied by the studio on condition they not be linked—Minta was induced to brave the pack of reporters camped outside her apartment and make her way to Grand Central for the train to Frisco. Importing Minta was a gamble. Her presence at my side would look good to a jury of married people. But it would be disastrous if some roving reporter had the chance to ask why she kept a residence in Manhattan while her husband resided in California.
The sea of hateful ladies reserved their special wrath for Minta. This was painful to observe. One young harridan pulled out a harmonica, accompanying a scarecrow I presume was her mother through "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny." The other women picked up the tune. I wanted to die for my poor wife. She bore herself with stoic dignity as the police parted the crush of females before us like Moses dividing the Red Sea. But I knew enough about Minta's face to know the set of her jaw meant she was squeezing back tears, fighting them off with every shred of strength she had.
Inside the court, I felt my mind careen in and out of awareness. One second I was watching Matthew Brady preen with his thumbs tucked in his vest like a bantam rooster, the next I was back in Kansas, jerking awake when Daddy urinated on my head, as he was wont to do when the amount of beer he'd gulped caught up to the amount of hate available for release. I juked back to consciousness when Holy Ladies began standing on their chairs and chanting "KILLER! KILLER! KILLER!" I turned around to see how Minta was taking this. Oddly, she looked almost happy. She said she was glad I needed her.
Judge Shortfall banged his gavel and declared that the trial would commence in November. Then I tapped Dominguez on the arm. What was I being tried for? The attorney just mopped a handkerchief across his brow and shook his head.
"I asked to dismiss all the charges, Roscoe, but two old ladies wanted you hung. Rape and murder have been dropped down to manslaughter."
It's hard to fathom a planet where being wrongly accused of manslaughter is cause for celebration. And yet I seemed to be living on one.
For this break—and please forgive the digression—I always meant to thank Jim Richardson, a newshound with the
Evening Herald.
Richardson, with a judicious combination of skill and martinis, had gotten Maude Delmont to brag that not only did she plan on changing her testimony, but, and I quote, "it's going to help the prosecution, you can be sure of that!" This was pretty much gold for the defense. Brady declared a conspiracy by the studios—which, as it turned out, could have been my defense. As if anything the studios did could explain Maude Delmont. The jurors all wanted to let me go, except, as mentioned, for the two church secretaries who wouldn't sleep again until I was neutered.
For $5,000 in bail—which Schenck produced on condition it not be announced that Paramount contributed in any way—I was free until the start of the trial in November.
Manslaughtered
If I had any doubts left as to why I'd become a prize pariah, the first paper I bought back in Union Station helped remind me. I tipped the newsie a five-spot and he looked at me like the world had gone purple.
The screaming headline said it all: FLESHPOTS OF BABYLON! Then came the good word from Reverend Bob Shuler of Trinity Methodist Church in downtown Los Angeles. Reverend Bob declared "the death of poor Virginia was God's way of waking America up!" The Almighty was saying that it was high time to end the moral decay of show business. Here's the line burned into my brain for all time: "Movies, dancing, jazz, evolution, Jews and Catholics are all destroying this fine nation."
The article left no doubt that movies and Jews were the worst. And I was but their monstrous tool. I, Roscoe Arbuckle, had gone from humble slap-and-tumble man to Tool of the Hebrews.
Los Angeles Greeting
The longest minutes of my life were spent wading through those legions of God's Army assembled outside the train station to shout my damnation. It was one thing in San Francisco, where hatred of all things Los Angeles is the perpetual
plat de jour.
But in my own town! Even though I'd seen the headlines I hadn't expected it. Somehow—and I know how nuts this must sound—the headlines seemed like props. No more real than a breakaway dinner chair. But that sensation was shattered fast. There was no escaping the massed wrath of the folks who turned out to curse me. Not when they were staring me in the face, screaming that I should die, waving banners calling for this portly lad from Kansas to be lynched, axed, castrated, or gassed. Maybe all at once.
More of these hate fans were lined up on Adams Boulevard, outside my house. A curious thing—at first glance they bore no discernible difference from the devoted who once showed up because they loved me. The reason they looked the same, it finally occurred to me, is that they were. Their expressions were different—rageful instead of delighted—but that was all. "The sad part is," Minta remarked, when Okie had to step out of the Pierce-Arrow and clear them bodily off the driveway, "if they hadn't loved you so much before, they wouldn't hate you so much now."
No time to mull on love gone wrong, though. We'd arrived right in time to meet a phalanx of deputies from the L.A. Sheriff's Department. Call me sentimental, I was beginning to feel lonely without men in uniform around. The burly sheriffs were doing double duty as furniture removers. A line of them were busy removing couches, tables, chairs, doilies, and anything else not nailed down and worth more than a nickel from inside my house. Or what I, nostalgically, continued to refer to as my house.
My mug must have looked particularly hangdog when the policeman-in-chief approached me with a bill of lading. "Sorry, Fatty, says here you owe the, uh, California Furniture Company $6,500." A Boggsy loveseat happened by us at that moment, followed by a satin couch and a pair of lounge chairs. "That's all right, Officer," I managed to chuckle, "all the stuff gives me backaches anyway."
"You got heart, I'll give you that," the top cop said to me. This may have been my proudest moment. If Daddy was watching from purgatory, at least he couldn't say I whined.
The next weeks were spent consolidating whatever assets I had, scraping up money to wage a legal defense, and trying not to think of what would happen if the trial went on more than a week and a half. After that, I'd have to find lawyers who didn't mind being paid in old suits and shoes.
Right off I cashed in my shares of Comique. Keaton's Metro shorts were produced there, so that brought some moola. Then I unloaded the Vernon Tigers. They'd been on a losing streak, anyway.
Domestic Derangements
Besides finances, there remained a more delicate matter: Minta. She and I had not lived together in a while—yet here we were, man and wife, reunited under one roof. We decided on separate bedrooms without really discussing it. I appreciated her coming back, but at the same time the way she kept talking to me—"I don't care what you did to me, I forgive you"—made me almost wish I'd taken my chances going solo. She was happy to be needed, like she said. That, or she was anxious not to pass up a chance to rub my nose in what a "bottom-heavy bastard" (her words) I was for ending our marriage. For banishing a selfless specimen like her to Manhattan while I sashayed around neck-deep in debt and splendor on West Adams.
Oddly, Minta never asked me if I did the deed with Miss Rappe. A state of affairs I found alternately gratifying and eerie. Mind you, I still loved the woman. (Minta, not Virginia.) Even now, I have nothing bad to say about the Durfees' baby daughter. These were just stranger-than-strange times, so the usual strains were, you might say, amplified.
Sometimes, when Buster, Bebe Daniels, or Mabel dropped by—they were the only ones uncowed by Zukor's keep-away commandment—we'd find the most horrific headlines and read them out loud. Buster's favorite was a Hearst sidebar in the
Examiner
claiming that I had actually held "dog weddings" on my property. The tone of the piece lent the whole activity an unsavory implication, as if, somehow, dog nuptials were one rung up the Heinous Behavior Ladder from bestiality. A fact duly noted by Buster. "You don't read too careful, devil-boy, they make it sound like you're bangin' poodles."
Once my blood was in the water, tabloid-wise, no evidence of my depravity was too far-fetched. Four-legged romance was the least of it. In truth, the dog-wedding gag had its origin in some two-reeler I can't even remember. Luke took a bride, a saucy little schnauzer, which made for a moment or two of comic business. Maybe we rehearsed it a couple of times at a party. Did that make me a pagan?
"Caninus Foulupalus Disgustus Nono,"
Buster intoned dolorously. Translating, in his trademark deadpan mode: "There is none more foul than he who stages dog weddings in his driveway." It was funny, but the laughter always rang a bit hollow during these visits. It was like trying to enjoy the coffee cake at a wake. You can't really savor a single bite, because someone has died.
Not even madcap Mabel could counter the air of doom. Gone were the days of fun and frolic. On her last visit, the once-vivacious beauty was so toasted on coke that all she did was babble about some one-legged jockey she claimed was her latest paramour. Pretty soon her babbling turned manic. She began laughing and sobbing at the same time. We had to hold her down and ply her with brandy. I still had a stash in the trunk of my Model T, the one car the feds hadn't towed. Nothing else could stop her from chatting to the shrubs all night. With all those reporters staked out, there's no telling what Hearst would have made of Mabel's rantings.
Most evenings, during that pretrial madness, it was just Minta and me. After another day of scrambling for cash to cover my legal bills, we'd have some newspapers delivered and size up the day's damage. Leaving the house, by now, was out of the question. Holding each other on my bed—hers we hocked, along with everything else—we'd take turns perusing the newest twist in my public dismemberment. Minta tried to act like we were generals manning strategy as the battle waged, but that never lasted. We were both so scared I think we had no choice but to hold on to each other. I was in this alone, and she had chosen to come to me, at considerable cost to her own career on the New York stage—and, let's face it, to her reputation.
People threw stones at the house at all hours. When we did have to go somewhere, getting from driveway to street involved a gauntlet of screaming, hate-crazed lunatics convinced that I was the source of evil, lust, and ungodly behavior in Christian America. At first I would just stare straight ahead. Once the abuse became routine, I took to finding the most livid maniac and staring at them full-on—a move which, for reasons I myself am helpless to explain, would silence even the most shrill and violent.
What I'm about to tell you sounds straight out of a two-reeler in Hades. You see, only in this crisis, gripped by the most hopeless, incomprehensible despair you can imagine, when our future together seemed so bleak Minta and I felt like trench-bound soldiers, blinking out at No-Man's-Land as the haze of gas drifts slowly towards them . . . only when we both felt absolutely
doomed,
was I finally able to perform.
To be a husband.
Imagine! What if you knew, every morning of your life, that something horrible was going to happen that day? Or no—that something horrible had already happened, and it was only going to get worse?
This was a perfect description of my post-Virginia existence. Yet this is when "it" happened. Slandered daily in the press, attacked in public, shunned by friends, drummed out of the profession I loved, and awaiting a future so tainted it promised to be worse than today—which is saying something—only in the midst of this nightmare was I able to accomplish, with Minta, what I never could when life was a dream.
Strange but true, ladies and jugglers. In the good times, the act was like trying to push linguine through a keyhole. Success gave me plenty. But ruin left us with something those drunk and famous days had denied us. Each other.
Purgatory
S
ORRY IF I 'M getting windy here, but I feel—how can I say this?—
immodest
even talking about these things. Only I have to, darn it! Because this is what saved my life. Temporarily, at least. See, it took falling through the trap door—from legend to leper—to let me be a man. If Freud's couch was wide enough, I'd have liked to hop on and hear what the old coker had to say on the subject. Call it the silver lining. Sort of. All that public humiliation made fears of any private humiliation downright niggling. Which meant I could finally relax. From abjection, erection. Once in a while, anyway. I didn't have to be anything for anybody. That was over. The Fatty star had fallen out of the firmanent, hauled off with the other props of a show that closed fast in the middle of a good run. All that was left now was me. A stripped-down, ham-cheeked, got-nothin', got-nothin'-comin' hoo-boy any woman would have to be crazy—or crazy in love—to be with.