Authors: Jerry Stahl
McNab beamed and rushed the punch line like an amateur. "Because—he's on his honeymoon!"
As a comedian he was a great lawyer.
Jury Performance
Being on trial for murder is just like appearing onstage—except that if the audience hates you, they don't throw tomatoes, they kill you. The IRS had already garnished the Pierce-Arrow, and my Model T was riding on axles, so I hitched a lift to Frisco with McNab. On the ride up he explained how he and Brady had already pored through 207 potential jurors to settle on 12. He said he was pretty happy about all of them. But when we stopped for coffee and sinkers at a Barstow diner, he dunked his cruller and confessed that he still had his doubts about one Mrs. Hubbard, a feisty old haybag he was certain had secret links to the DA.
I put down my milk shake, not sure I'd heard right. "Secret
links?
Then why let her on the jury?"
"Because!"
Then McNab shut up and—I'll never forget—swung his coffee-logged cruller from his cup to his mouth without losing a drop. I almost clapped. Whenever I tried that, I got a lapful of mush, and had to walk around with a sugar-glazed crotch till I could change pants.
"Because what?" I asked when he was done dunking.
"Because maybe we got a few ringers of our own the DA doesn't know about."
I could tell this was supposed to make him sound cagey. But all it did was make me more nervous than I was already. I was so upset I could barely finish my third milk shake.
Round Two
The first day of the retrial, on November 22, my attorney braced me on the way into the courtroom and said he had two words of advice:
Don't fiddle.
He looked so solemn when he said this I tried to look solemn back. "Don't fiddle," I repeated, nodding my head. "I'm not sure I—"
"Fiddle, fidget, fuss!"
McNab hissed, wiggling his fingers and darting his eyes around to show what he meant. "Remember, no matter who's on the stand, the jury's going to be staring at you. And if there's one principle of criminal law that's proved consistently true, it's this: juries respond unfavorably to fiddling. Death Row's full of fiddlers."
Before I could respond to this bit of wisdom, the courtroom doors swung open. I was flanked by two large uniforms, billy clubs at the ready, as though poised to protect the women of the jury in case I was feeling rapey.
An hour into the trial, I was no longer worried about fiddling. I worried about staying awake. The courtroom was hot and stuffy. It felt just like being in grade school in Santa Ana, except the boys all shaved. And I couldn't drop out.
The Assistant DA, a handsome fellow named Friedman, started his opening arguments by talking about Virginia's bladder. Then everybody started talking about it. In fact, for the first three days the attorneys did nothing
but
tangle over Virginia's bladder. Both sides trotted out a string of medicos like show ponies. Doctors Rumwell and Beardslee, Nurse Jamison, some other bonebreakers I forget. Each M.D. or doctor's helper was asked whether, in their professional opinion, the late Miss Rappe's pee pump was already badly damaged or it was Roscoe Arbuckle's savagery that so badly damaged it.
The day after the final bladderfest, Zey Prevon and Alice Blake were marched in to support Maude's story that I'd viciously attacked Virginia in a fit of drunken lust. Both starlets looked so stricken, even though what they were saying could have killed me, I found myself feeling terrible for them. Terrible that on account of me coming to San Francisco in the first place, they'd been made to show up looking hollow-eyed and telling lies.
Miss Delmont herself would not be present to testify. Brady wanted her story. He just didn't want her to tell it. So the DA kept Maude in jail on an old bigamy charge for the entire trial. Though that would not come out till later.
"Imagine a sweating beast," Friedman implored the jury, glaring my way with righteous disgust. He turned to aim a dewy-eyed photo of Virginia looking nunly at the jury, then pointed a well-manicured forefinger back again in my direction. "Imagine
this
enormous, sweating beast, in all his nakedness, throwing himself atop the innocent and fragile victim you see here. Imagine this outsized
actor
slaking his massive appetites on her tender frame."
After five minutes of this, I was almost ready to hang me myself. But it got worse. Guided by the swarthy Friedman, Zey recited the by-now-famous scenario: hearing screams in room 1219, she and Maude Delmont rushed in to find Virginia sprawled on the bed, "panting that she was dying, and pointing to HIM . . ."
With that damning word—that "HIM"—every head in the courtroom swiveled my way. I could feel their eyes on me like leeches, as Zey mimicked Virginia's dramatic moan.
"He hurt me! He hurt me inside!"
Poor Zey, normally a sprightly girl, shook so much during her interrogation I thought springs were going to fly out of her ears. When Gavin grilled her, it became clear why. Under questioning she broke right down and admitted that she'd been held captive, a veritable prisoner, by the DA's staff. She'd been reprimanded, over and over, until she got her story straight. "What story would that be?" McNab wondered aloud. Shoulders heaving with sobs, Zey replied in a tiny voice,
"The one Mr. Brady wanted me to tell . .
."
Well, you could have tossed mice in all the open mouths Zey's revelation inspired. When Alice Blake was called, McNab got her to admit that she, too, had been held against her will. And people's mouseholes fell open all over again.
Having dragged these admissions out of the prosecution's key witnesses, McNab puffed himself up. He addressed the jury with respect, but conviviality. Like you would a stranger you've said hello to at the bus stop for 20 years. "Personally, folks, I gotta tell you, I
like
the district attorney. I even
admire
him. And yet, as good citizens we have to ask, has Matthew Brady the right to take away the liberty of two girls that they might swear with him to take away the liberty of an innocent man?" Here he paused dramatically, as though overcome, then bravely soldiered on. "Is this not why we sent two million good men overseas, to put an end to this sort of thing?"
I'd been tutored for my own time on the stand, but after McNab's stellar performance I thought the prosecution was just going to give up. So when Friedman started to cross examine me, his spewing tone and vile implications rattled me down to my curled toes. "Mr.
Arbuckle
—" he even made my name sound vaguely unsavory—"did you at any time hear Miss Rappe say, 'You hurt me'? Did you hear her say, 'Please stop!'? Were you in any condition to have heard her if she did say these things?"
"No—yes . . . no," I sputtered, not sure which question I was answering. Then I repeated the version of events that I'd worked out with McNab and Dominguez before him—which happened to be the truth. "Miss Rappe was sitting up and tearing at her clothes. She was frothing at the mouth. I saw her tear her waist. She had one sleeve almost off. She was prone to fits!"
Friedman stepped so close I could see the pores on his forehead. He wrinkled his nose, as though my nearness sickened him, and I could see the Black Forest in his nostrils. "Mr. Arbuckle," he sneered, "the fairy tale you just told the Court, would it surprise you to know that I have seven versions of the story, told to different people by you?"
"That's the true story," I said as calmly as I could. Busily not fiddling with every muscle in my body.
For a long time, Friedman stared at the ceiling. He made a show of straightening his tie, pursing his lips, placing his hands together briefly at his chest—no doubt to let us all know he was a praying man. I knew a thing or two about stage business, and had to grudgingly admit he was a master. When the prosecutor whipped himself back in my direction, he lashed out with such ferocity I jerked backward in my chair, nearly toppling it. His words hit me like spume.
"Virginia Rappe had a few drinks and you lusted after her. You pulled her into the bedroom, locked the door, threw her on the bed despite her protestations. You tore her clothes off and practiced Lord knows what manner of perversions on a helpless girl. You tore her inside out and she screamed for mercy."
Would someone please tell me the right expression to wear on your face when a man is calling you a rapist in front of your wife? In front of God? In front of a roomful of angry females whose hate for you is like a
smell}
A fly buzzed continually around my head, and I dared not swat it, for fear of appearing violent. The airless tang of perspiration, stale perfume, and floor wax made it hard to breathe. I felt myself flush up. My knee hurt and my thighs itched. More than anything I had to fight back the urge to cry.
In his closing argument, Friedman harangued the jury to render a guilty verdict—
"To show the Arbuckles of the world that American womanhood is not their plaything!"
In spite of being disemboweled in cross-examination, I was optimistic. McNab had so thoroughly exposed the prosecution witnesses as frauds and weaklings, nothing he had to say would matter anyway. Or so it seemed to me. The galoot's galoot.
We thought the jury would make up their mind fast. For two or three hours I felt almost cocky. Even called Buster and told him to round up the boys when I came back. Call me naive. In my mind, once 12 reasonable humans come back with a Not Guilty, I'd be able to hop back on the movie train and toddle on like nothing happened. Isn't that the way things happen in a just world?
After 10 hours, my mouth was so dry I was spitting feathers. By 24 I was seeing spots. The walls in the Hall of Justice lobby started to look wet,
spongy,
like the whole place was made of dingy angel's food cake. Maybe I was just hungry. The whole night ended up like one long smoking and pie-eating contest. And I was the only contestant. I even paid the men's room Negro to go out and scare up some firewater. "What kind?" he wanted to know.
I liked the way he folded my 10 spot and tucked it in a slot on the inside of his red attendant's jacket in one clean move.
"The kind that works," I said, without thinking about it.
The attendant nodded and stuck out his hand again. "For that, gonna be another 10, boss." So I gave him my Paramount watch, the one inscribed, TO ROSCOE—ONE OF THE TEAM, FROM YOUR FRIEND ADOLPH.
"What's 'at writin' say?" the Negro asked.
"'Hello, Sucker,'" I told him.
The thought of what might happen—and the realization that it actually could—unnerved me so much I had to eat, pace, or roll cigarettes to keep from running out in front of a train. Don't forget, I'd been inside already. Before you go to jail, you think it's going to be like in the movies, full of crusty-but-lovable old cons and gangsters with good teeth. But now I'd been there. I
knew.
How could you not get plastered knowing that one wrong move, one slip-up, and you'd spend the rest of your life in a circus full of vicious pea-brains who'd kill you for your comb?
It took the jury 41 hours and 22 ballots before it finally gave up. The foreman, pink-eyed with fatigue, blinked into the lights and announced that one juror had declined to consider any evidence, had declared that she knew a guilty fat man when she saw one. Said juror, skip the drumroll, was Mother Hubbard, the ringer McNab had spotted right off.
A screaming mob surrounded our car and started rocking it until a policeman cleared a path. For one bad moment I wondered if jail might have been the safer bet, until the driver gave it the gas and got us away from the courthouse.
The trip back to Hollywood is kind of patchy. But I had the biggest crying jag of my adult life the second Minta and I made it past the bottle-wielding mob at Union Station. When I remarked that all the bottles were Coca-Cola, Minta looked pained. I'd stopped reading the papers halfway through the trial. The headlines ruined my digestion. Now here were these red-faced queen bees, waving Coke bottles and screaming "Die Fatty Die!" I got the screaming—what else was new?—but the empty Coca Colas had me stumped.
I wish I'd never lived to see the sad wonder on Minta's face as she tried to explain. "It's that Hearst, honey. He says that you, um, you used a bottle—either Coca-Cola or champagne—to, you know, to penetrate Virginia."
When Minta couldn't look at me anymore, she reached in her wallet. She unfolded the actual article she'd neatly clipped from the paper, and began to read. "
'My manly equipment would not do my bidding,' Arbuckle cracked to guests, 'so I did what I always do, I grabbed a bottle.'
"
That was as far as she got before I started crying.
Why?
Why do you think? Because worse than the lies in the paper were the accidental truths. Imagine being accused of something, and in the process of proving that you didn't do it, you have to parade all the secret, shameful things you actually
did.
Not crimes, exactly. Just . . .
behavior.
Details you wouldn't want to read about yourself—or your manly equipment—on the front page of the
Los Angeles Examiner.
The shame was like a knife that cut deeper the more you tried to pull it out. But bad as it was for me, what I was really bawling about was how this must be for Minta. What was it like to be the monster's better half?
"Abandoned then reunited with the man she loves only because he's been charged with a sex murder."
Hearst again. To have to not just read these lies—but
live
with them. Because of me, Minta had to suffer the soul-killing scrutiny. Because of me, she was the subject of the lowest jokes. Because of me. That was the awful truth. It wasn't Virginia Rappe I ripped apart, it was my own wife. Because one day I got snockered with the wrong bunch of degenerates.
Like the man said, inside every fat man is a really fat one who's stuck.
The red-faced truth: I'd pressed a cold bottle to the dying girl's pudendum to wake her up, not get inside her. But I was too uncomfortable to relate such facts to my own wife, let alone an entire courtroom. To say I tried to save a girl by icing her privates is to admit her privates were there in front of me to be iced. Guilty by virtue of innocence. Or vicey versey. What a gag.