What happened next was pored over by three juries, a scandal-mad public, and a century’s worth of amateur criminologists. Just before three o’clock, Arbuckle went in, too, and locked the door. So she crossed into Arbuckle’s room, 1219. At some point, she went to use the bathroom in Room 1221, but Delmont was in there with Arbuckle’s actor friend Lowell Sherman. Rappe, whose friends had joined the party, drank Orange Blossoms and chatted with Arbuckle. They ordered up a Victrola and danced to “Ain’t We Got Fun?” More booze came from Gobey’s. Up in Room 1220, Arbuckle was wearing pajamas and a purple bathrobe, holding court with a small crowd of wingmen and showgirls. “I’ll go up there, and if the party is a bloomer I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” she had told her companions, the film publicist Alfred Semnacher and his friend Maude Delmont. A onetime fashion model and designer, she wore a jade skirt and blouse, with a panama hat trimmed with matching ribbon.
She was, the bellboy said, “Virginia Rappe, the movie actress.” Rappe was known to Arbuckle’s group, and they sent word inviting her for afternoon drinks. In the Palace lobby, he spotted another group from Los Angeles and asked a bellboy about the chic young woman with dark hair. Late Monday morning-September 5, 1921-a gown salesman named Ira Fortlouis was leaving the nearby Palace Hotel to meet one of Arbuckle’s friends. Twenty months into Prohibition, booze wasn’t hard to find, especially if you were Fatty Arbuckle, and that evening a shipment of gin and Scotch was delivered from Gobey’s Grill. He and his entourage fanned out into three adjoining rooms on the top floor. Francis, a grand European-style hotel with its own orchestra and Turkish baths. In San Francisco, Arbuckle checked into the St. Even his pit bull terrier was famous: Luke, his co-star in “Fatty’s Faithful Fido.” The Pierce-Arrow, his thirty-four-thousand-dollar “gasoline palace,” was just one of his fleet of trophy cars, and it likely drew crowds as it whizzed up the coast.
In Los Angeles, he owned a twenty-room mansion, complete with servants, Oriental rugs, gold-leaf bathtubs, and a cellar full of liquor that he broke out for jazz-fuelled soirées. By September, 1921, he had appeared in more than a hundred and fifty films, often in his trademark outfit of baggy pants, suspenders, and an undersized bowler hat he was earning a million dollars a year at Paramount.
At two hundred and sixty-six pounds, Arbuckle, known to movie audiences as Fatty, was the Chris Farley of silent cinema, beloved for his pratfalls and for his skill at throwing custard pies in people’s faces. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.Ī hundred years ago, on the Saturday before Labor Day, Roscoe Arbuckle drove his plum-colored Pierce-Arrow to San Francisco for a weekend of partying.