The Sewing Circle by Axel Madsen

Author:Axel Madsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504008525
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

Chapter 13

Sodom-on-the-Pacific

Minta Durfee Arbuckle was a slim, elegant lady who had survived them all and was usually seated at the head of the table when, in the early 1970s, survivors of the silent era met younger cinémanes eager to hear firsthand reports from the Paleolithic age before sound. Her recollection of the William Desmond Taylor murder were no less vivid than the scandal that destroyed her husband’s career. The decades, and perhaps the fact that both took place less than six months apart, evened up the two in her mind. Both cases blew sky-high. Arbuckle was heterosexual and the press played up the sensational case. Taylor was not, and stayed buried for sixty years.

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was a grossly fat man weighing over three hundred pounds. What made him a star of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops two-reelers was that he was fantastically coordinated and light on his feet, an unlikely combination that served as a basis for much of his comedy. The public adored him. After being successfully teamed with Chaplin, Mabel Normand, and Buster Keaton in movie shorts, he was a $7,000-a-week Paramount player beginning to direct and star in feature-length pictures. Roscoe and Minta Arbuckle bought a Tudor mansion on West Adams Boulevard for $250,000. The garage housed their Cadillac, Renault, and Rolls-Royce, and a $25,000 Pierce-Arrow.

Over the 1921 Labor Day weekend, Arbuckle threw a party at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Virginia Rappe was a twenty-five-year-old bit player whom Arbuckle’s friend Buster Keaton would later describe as being “about as virtuous as most of the untalented other young women knocking around in Hollywood for years.” She had one orange blossom too many, fell ill, and began tearing off her clothes—a habit of hers when she had too many cocktails. Partygoers would disagree on what happened next.

Friendly testimony would allege that Arbuckle, in the presence of other women, viewed the prostrate Virginia on his bed, tested to see if she was faking by holding a piece of ice against her thigh, then helped carry the nude girl to a bathtub to try to revive her while somebody called the house physician. Less friendly witnesses would tell of screams from behind the locked door, of Fatty emerging, his pajamas dripping under a dry bathrobe, and the girl on the bed moaning, “I’m dying. He broke me inside. I’m dying.” She was taken to the exclusive Pine Street hospital. Her bladder had been ruptured by some form of violence. Four days later she died of peritonitis.

Minta was in New York with her mother when it happened. She rushed to her husband’s side, stood by him during the trial for manslaughter, and lost her savings on lawyers. Minta had been Chaplin’s costar at Keystone and knew Rappe as a sweet fellow actress, and more recently as the girlfriend of Henry “Pathé” Lehrman.

The Arbuckle case inflamed public opinion. Ever mindful of the healthy effect of scandal on circulation, the press whipped up the sex-orgy-with-murder investigation. The Arbuckle scandal came on

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