Authors: Jerry Stahl
The night I achieved the miracle of coitus with Minta stone cold sober, the mailman had brought a note from the government. More good news! The IRS had hit me with another 100 G's in back taxes.
It was my lucky day. "I don't know what else can they can do," I told Minta. "I feel like Job!" She was in her nightie, and I was resting my head in her lap. Minta shifted a little and repositioned herself. "Well, I bet I know what kept Job going," she giggled. The joy in that
giggle.
How long had it been since I'd felt joy? Then she batted her lashes in a way she hadn't done since our early days on the Long Beach Pier, outside the Bide-A-Wee.
We had just retired to the bedroom. After dark we always went upstairs, since reporters would sneak right up to the first-floor windows and try to peek in or take pictures. At least upstairs you could hear the ladders hit the house, if they were trying to get a shot of you—or just shoot you. Minta's room still had a plush Persian carpet on the floor. Luke had ripped a hole in it, so it wasn't worth much.
There we were, on the floor, my head on her little thigh. When suddenly, like I'd gotten a shot of he-man serum, I found myself wanting her like I'd never wanted anything. Even lunch. It was almost frightening. I was scared to do anything—how could she possibly want me? How could anybody? Then, in spite of myself, I kissed her. To my surprise Minta kissed me back. Pretty soon she was ripping her unmentionables off. Even then, I couldn't help but think to myself:
Thank God she's not screaming and bleeding!
Couldn't help but remember Virginia peeling off
her
chemise like it was made of burning rags.
As Minta and I kissed, a rock smashed the gable window of her bedroom. The hole in the glass let the voices outside rush in even louder. Cries of "Satan!" "Jew-lover!" and "Rapist!" echoed from the mob. But what should have distressed me somehow goaded me on instead. At last—with "Fatty, you monster, you deserve to die" ringing in my ears—I began to experience that mystery known to most but, up till then, more or less foreign to me.
And after that—I will go into no detail, except to say, when it was over, Minta and I were at last man and wife. I was careful to settle my bulk alongside, as opposed to on top of, her. (I could already imagine
that
headline: FATTY ARBUCKLE BREAKS WIFE'S RIBS IN LUST-CRAZED FRENZY!) It still warms me to recall how Minta snuggled her tiny body into mine under our old Navajo blanket.
McNab to the Rescue
A couple of weeks before going back to court, Joe Schenck dropped by to say Zukor was kicking in 50 grand to hire another lawyer. "It's only because you got some films in the can," Schenck confided, shaking his head over the lox and bagels he brought. Schenck preferred to eat when he talked. And I was happy for the food. "The good news is you're back on the payroll," Joe said, licking a shmear of cream cheese off his pinky.
I nearly spit my lox out on the card table. "You mean I can work again?"
"Not exactly," Joe sighed. "You're on the payroll so he can garnish your pay and use it toward the legal bills. That way it's a tax writeoff."
I nearly smiled. Leave it to Adolph to find a way to help you and screw you at the same time.
Schenck also wanted to let me know how he'd tried to get Clarence Darrow to defend me. He was proud about that one. But Darrow was busy defending himself against charges of jury tampering. So instead Joe roped in Gavin McNab, the sheister who smoothed out Mary Pickford's divorce from Owen Moore so she could marry Douglas Fairbanks. McNab hailed from Frisco. He had friends there—a big help defusing the San Francisco-Los Angeles hate party now raging full-tilt. Dominguez, whose say-nothing strategy blew up, had fired himself.
The first thing McNab and his team did was start digging up the real Virginia. Not that anybody was surprised to find out she wasn't a choir girl. Choir girls didn't usually require fumigation. But the facts McNab's man unearthed in Chicago, her hometown, were as sad as they were shocking. My alleged victim had endured a handful of abortions, along with a battery of treatments for chronic cystitis, all due to her penchant for copious intercourse. A nice lady who ran a home for unwed mothers confirmed that Miss Rappe had been a frequent visitor—dropping by five times for treatment of venereal warts alone. Which, as McNab described it in his first phone call, put her in line for some kind of Venereal Wart Olympic record. Where was Guinness when you needed him?
But there's more. While nude modeling, Virginia met a sculptor by the name of Sample who proposed to her, then threw himself off his roof a week later and died. After that she moved in with a one-armed dress manufacturer named Robert Muscovitz. Poor Muscovitz "fell" in front of a trolley car and expired shortly thereafter, in the Granada Sanitarium.
Then Virginia turned 18.
If her juvenile résume wasn't damning enough, there was some scuttlebutt that, prior to her illustrious career as bit player in Henry Lehrman epics, she'd worked for her family's business in Los Angeles—as a prostitute in a whorehouse run by her mother.
When Minta heard all this she said she felt sorry for the girl. I'm generally inclined to compassion myself, but in Virginia's case I found it tough sledding. Did I mention that her funeral, at St. Stephen's Episcopalian in East Hollywood, attracted 8,000 panting strangers? Unknown in life, Virginia attained a brief spate of stardom after her demise. Ever noble, the studios made sure the three or four movies in which Miss Rappe's sloe-eyed gaze graced the screen were rereleased. Maybe, I told Buster, if all else fails, I could arrange for agents to pay me to look suspicious when a client dies. Anybody the public thinks I killed was bound to be box office gold.
Slander
While McNab and company were busy digging up dirt on dead Virginia, Maude, Rumwell, and the rest of them, Brady pressed his compadres to the south to clamp down in Los Angeles. Arrests for lewd and immoral behavior, and prostitution in particular, suddenly skyrocketed. And I was to blame. The degenerate reputation of my hometown was surely as big a factor in my trial as the doctored photos Randolph Hearst had begun to run. The most appalling of these depicted your friend Fatty, looking lewd and greasy-lipped, guzzling a bottle of bug juice over the nightie-clad, pure-as-the-driven-snow figure of the virgin Virginia. If one reader in the country still had doubts, that picture would convince them I'd done what they said I'd done—and probably worse.
I've saved this happy concoction from Page One of the
Examiner,
which just happened to hit the stands the day of Virginia's funeral. I keep it folded in my wallet. Fake calfskin, thanks for asking. Somehow, until I read this I really didn't know what I was up against. Somehow, in spite of myself, I could not stop believing that the truth still meant something. I know, I'm an idiot. But I saw the paper and my pants went damp. Listen:
"Would not this dead girl now, whose every impulse is said to have been wholesome and kindly, whose life is said to have been given to defend her honor, would she not feel that her life and death had not been in vain if those who read her story would be influenced to saner, simpler living, would see as she saw at the end how futile it is to seek gaiety and pleasure which are not 'within the law'?"
Be still my heart. The sheer size of the lie was staggering. But no lie was too big for Randolph Hearst! That was the secret of his success. The truth was, McNab had proof that Rumwell had left a nurse's finding of "severe alcoholic poisoning" off his death report. But, just to really help me sleep at night, my lawyer let slip that they—as in Zukor and Lasky—did not want to press the good doctor too hard on this point, on account of he'd done some "work" for Paramount.
"What kind of work?" your friendly bumpkin asked.
"What kind do you think?" McNab snapped. "Rumwell performed abortions on a couple of stars, and the last thing the studio needs is him blabbing about it. The public's already itching to dig a big pit, throw Hollywood in, and burn it till there's nothing left but false teeth and mascara ash." McNab was a colorful man with a phrase.
Of course, if Rumwell
did
list alcohol poisoning as a contributing factor, that raised another hoary beast. Who supplied the hooch? Fischbach, now playing teetotaler, wanted the authorities to know that the illegal drinks were Mr. Arbuckle's idea. McNab spotted my reaction to that whopper. After some prodding, I admitted that it was Fischbach who provided the antifreeze—but under no circumstances was I going to rat him out. The way I looked at it, if Fred cooked up that story, it's because he had to. This may sound simpy after what he did to me, but deep down I knew Fred wasn't a bad guy. He just had gambling debts.
"Yeah, I know all about those
debts,"
McNab scoffed. He always liked to let you know he was two steps ahead of you. "Lehrman paid them off."
That
was news. Turns out Fishbach had lost a bundle at the track, and Lehrman offered to pay him if he'd take a trip to San Francisco and "check up" on Virginia. Apparently Henry'd met a rich debutante at the Waldorf he wanted to marry, but he had to make sure Miss Rappe was sufficiently blotto she wouldn't remember that he'd asked
her
to marry him first—and make a stink before Henry could get the deb to the altar. Fred was supposed to spy on Virginia and report back, but after he spent a little time with her, he came up with a different plan. Virginia had poor Fred's nose wide open. Or, as the ever highbrow Mack Sennett liked to say, "she gave him a midget leg."
So much info! So many backstories! Trying to follow it was like trying to juggle clawhammers and do geometry at the same time. All I knew, I told McNab, was that Fred Fischbach said he was coming to San Francisco to scout locations. "He wanted to find some seal pelt or something."
McNab gave a snort. "The only pelt he laid eyes on was Virginia's—right before she got delirious. Oh, and Fred didn't just say the liquor was your idea—he told the feds you supplied it, Tiny."
I didn't see how that mattered much, considering the rest of my calamities. In the grand scheme of personal betrayals, this one hardly registered. But it made the government perk right up.
Around lunchtime, October 7, the federales showed up again. Where's Pancho Villa when you need him? Minta and I were just walking in the Japanese garden when three agents in matching fedoras introduced themselves from behind a bamboo thicket. "Roscoe Arbuckle, we're here to inform you that you have been found to be in violation of the Volstead Act." Then they asked for $500, bail money, and I called Gavin McNab to see about getting it. He showed up in 40 minutes with Joe Schenck, who brought a bag of deli. After the feds left with half a grand, Joe, Gavin, and I sat down to smoked whitefish.
"Not good," Joe sighed, pulling bones out of his teeth. "Jury thinks you're a bootlegger on top of a rapist and murderer. Not good at all."
McNab picked at his fish like it had scabies. "You already owe 100 grand in back taxes. Violating the 18th Amendment is going to cost you another 50 long. And, just for the record, your friend Fred fingered you good." He showed me the transcript, obliging me to put down my kosher nourishment and read. Sure enough, Fred had declared that, being a law-abiding nonimbiber himself, he was shocked at the ease with which I had procured demon beverages. He even hinted that I was part of an underworld combine that shunted booze up from Tijuana to Frisco, along with bales of Mexican marijuana and "foreign painkillers."
"At least he left out white slavery," I quipped, to no one's amusement but my own.
Hearst kept expanding on the pills-and-maryjane angle. The
Examiner
even ran a "Police Insider" on the subject of my status as Drug Kingpin, fat-ass pasha of a ring that polluted the youth of California—
"quite possibly paving a path to prostitution and debauchery and death for angels like Virginia Rappe."
That same afternoon I read a story in the
Times
describing the late Miss Rappe as "a descendant of Belgian royalty." Hearst had a genius for juicy libel, but his fake praise was just as amazing.
Either way, it no longer seemed strange to be sitting at a card table in an empty living room, kicking around the subject of my future on a municpal farm. When I said I still wouldn't fink on Fred, Joe waggled a pickle in my face and shouted, "Roscoe, you putz! You may be the nicest white man I ever met—but you're also the stupidest!"
Then Gavin clapped me on the back, hard enough to let me know he'd have liked to have hit me harder. "Use your thinker, buddy boy. Lehrman used Fischbach to set you up. Fischbach used you to keep Lehrman from knowing he gave Virginia a doggy bath. Maude Delmont's gonna get rich helping Diamond Matt Brady use you to get his butt in the governor's chair—
and you're telling me you won't say who gave you the damn booze?"
McNab slammed the table for emphasis, then changed gears and rocked back on his chair. I was too frazzled to say anything—no doubt the exact effect my attorney wanted. Having achieved it, he smiled crookedly. "Speaking of damned booze . . ."
McNab mimed smacking his thin lips, and I explained that the feds had absconded with my liquor cabinet. He'd have to settle for ginger ale. "Just as well," he said, with no sincerity whatsoever. "We have more work to do."
As Gavin and Schenck were leaving—having started to school me on matters of strategy, defense, and how not to look like a slob on the stand—Gavin turned and announced that I wasn't the only one with troubles. "This might cheer you up," he chirped from the doorway. By now I'd gotten used to standing to one side when the door was opened, to dodge photographers. "Your pal Lehrman's in a little hot water, too. He sent $1,100 worth of flowers to be placed on Virginia's casket. Now he's being sued by the florist for nonpayment. They won't find him, though."
Gavin liked to brag about dabbling in vaudeville as a youth, so I played straight man. "Why won't they find him, Mister?"