Fatty Arbuckle and the Birth of the Celebrity Scandal

A 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Everybody knew Fatty. Even his pit bull terrier was famous: Luke, his co-star in “Fatty’s Faithful Fido.”

In San Francisco, Arbuckle checked into the St. Francis, a grand European-style hotel with its own orchestra and Turkish baths. He and his entourage fanned out into three adjoining rooms on the top floor. 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. 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. In the Palace lobby, he spotted another group from Los Angeles and asked a bellboy about the chic young woman with dark hair. 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.

Rappe arrived at around noon. A onetime fashion model and designer, she wore a jade skirt and blouse, with a panama hat trimmed with matching ribbon. “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. Up in Room 1220, Arbuckle was wearing pajamas and a purple bathrobe, holding court with a small crowd of wingmen and showgirls. They ordered up a Victrola and danced to “Ain’t We Got Fun?” More booze came from Gobey’s. Rappe, whose friends had joined the party, drank Orange Blossoms and chatted with Arbuckle. At some point, she went to use the bathroom in Room 1221, but Delmont was in there with Arbuckle’s actor friend Lowell Sherman. So she crossed into Arbuckle’s room, 1219. Just before three o’clock, Arbuckle went in, too, and locked the door.

What happened next was pored over by three juries, a scandal-mad public, and a century’s worth of amateur criminologists. In one version of the story, Arbuckle threw Rappe onto the bed and mortally crushed her with his bulk. In another, he found her ill and tended to her like a gentleman. They were alone together for either ten minutes or an hour, depending on whom you believe. Delmont said that she grew so worried about Rappe that she kicked the door and called her name. Arbuckle said that he opened it unprovoked. Either way, when the other partyers got into Room 1219 they found Rappe barely conscious, tearing at her clothes in agony and complaining of a fierce pain in her abdomen. They put her in a cold bath, and then moved her to another room, down the hall, where a hotel doctor determined that she’d simply had too much to drink. The party continued. Rappe spent three days in the hotel room, her pain dulled with morphine, before she was finally transferred to a sanatorium. Why she wasn’t moved sooner is an infuriating mystery. The next day, Friday, September 9th, she died. On Saturday, Arbuckle was arrested for murder.

The Arbuckle affair was the most notorious in a string of Hollywood scandals that threatened to kill off the movie industry in its adolescence. Decades before Twitter or TMZ, it set the template for the celebrity scandal: the way we gawk at, adjudicate, and mythologize tales of high-flying people brought low, whatever the facts may be. Arbuckle’s deadly pajama party came to epitomize the loosening morals that followed the First World War, and his downfall became a wedge in a culture war. As Greg Merritt writes in his forensic 2013 account, “Room 1219,” “The defenders of tradition were pitted against the purveyors of modernity. On one side, the Victorian era. On the other, the Jazz Age.” But, as much as the scandal evokes old Hollywood, its modern resonances are uncanny: a famous actor accused of sexual assault, a media apparatus eager to capitalize on every salacious twist, and an industry grappling with how to dispose of a once profitable star turned pariah. Ultimately, Hollywood dealt with its first big P.R. disaster by regulating itself so that no one else could, making the Arbuckle scandal an unlikely parable of corporate self-preservation.

Arbuckle’s fall was so novel in part because he represented a new kind of fame. He was born in 1887, in a farmhouse in Kansas. The nickname Fatty was a childhood taunt. Even after embracing it, as the star of “Fatty’s Day Off” and “Fatty’s Magic Pants,” Arbuckle was reluctant to use his weight as comic fodder. “I refuse to try to make people laugh at my bulk,” he said in 1917. “Personally, I cannot believe that a battleship is a bit funnier than a canoe, but some people do not feel that way about it.” He began performing when he was eight, after the family moved to Santa Ana, California, and a theatrical troupe passing through town needed a replacement for a child actor. Arbuckle went onstage—in blackface. (Since he was barefoot, his feet had to be darkened as well.) His mother died when he was twelve, and he was sent north to live with his father, who had abandoned the family and supposedly owned a hotel in the town of Watsonville. By the time Roscoe arrived, alone, his father had sold the hotel and left town. The boy sat sobbing until some locals took him in, and he earned his keep by doing chores and singing for the hotel guests.

Eventually, his father materialized. He would thrash Roscoe in alcoholic rages; his stepmother recalled once rescuing him when his father was “choking him and beating his head against a tree.” The boy had a bell-like voice and sang in vaudeville houses, performing “illustrated songs”—a forerunner of music videos, in which popular tunes were accompanied by slide shows. As a teen-ager, he escaped his father by touring on the Pantages theatre circuit. In 1908, he met Minta Durfee, who was performing on the same bill in Long Beach, and they married on the stage of the Byde-A-Wyle Theatre.

In 1913, Arbuckle showed up at Keystone Studios, a comedy lot known as the Fun Factory and the home of the bumbling Keystone Kops. Its impresario, Mack Sennett, hired him for three dollars a day. That first year, he acted in no fewer than thirty-six shorts, many of them opposite Keystone’s leading lady (and Sennett’s lover), Mabel Normand. The next year, Charlie Chaplin, still developing his Little Tramp persona, joined the studio, and he and Arbuckle acted together in seven films. Along with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, they were part of the first wave of movie stars to live like—and be covered by the media as—American royalty. By 1915, the fan magazine Photoplay was breathlessly detailing Arbuckle’s ideal dinner, a menu that included crabmeat cocktail, a dozen raw oysters, fried salmon steak, roast turkey, Hungarian goulash, Roquefort cheese with crackers, and cold artichokes with mayonnaise.

The following year, Paramount poached Arbuckle by offering him his own production company, Comique Film Corporation, and a base salary seven times what he made at Keystone. This required him to renege on a smaller deal that would have included his wife, and Durfee was so upset with his maneuvering that the couple drifted into an unpublicized separation. Paramount sent its new prize on a twenty-three-stop publicity tour. As the director of his own pictures, Arbuckle brought on the younger comedian Buster Keaton, who became his frequent co-star and lifelong defender.

The rapid rise of movie stars shook up the balance of power in Hollywood, especially when Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks teamed up with D. W. Griffith to form their own collective, United Artists, circumventing the studios. Amid rumors that Arbuckle might join them, Paramount showered him with cash, in a deal that paid three million dollars in the course of three years. The record payday made headlines, and Arbuckle embraced a life style to match. He bought the mansion, the cars, and, briefly, a baseball team, the Pacific Coast League’s Vernon Tigers, paving the way for celebrity team owners like Jay-Z. Fans mobbed him. He hosted a dog wedding. (Luke was the “best man.”) By Labor Day, 1921, he had seven films playing in theatres, with two more wrapped.

Less is known about the life of Virginia Rappe. Born in 1891, in Chicago, she began modelling at sixteen, appearing in fashion shows at department stores. She changed her name from Rapp to give it a more exotic pronunciation—“Rapp-ay.” Showing a proto-feminist streak of independence, she advised young women in 1913, “Be original—every girl can be that.” She began marketing her own designs, including hats shaped like spiderwebs, submarines, and dove wings (her “peace hat”). As Merritt observes, “If she were designing fashions today, she would surely be a maven of social media.” In other words, an influencer.

She moved to Los Angeles in 1916, one of a sea of ingénues hoping to become the next Mary Pickford. She had a vampy role in “Paradise Garden” (now lost) and a two-and-a-half-year relationship with the director Henry Lehrman, who cast her in several pictures before his production company went under. By the summer of 1921, Rappe was thirty but shaving years off her age, and her multiple careers had ebbed. It was only after her death, as Arbuckle’s movies were being ripped from projectors, that her name became a marquee attraction.

Shortly after she died, a doctor, William Ophüls, examined her body and recorded several bruises on her right arm and her thighs, but no evidence of sexual assault. He cut open her abdomen, and found a hole in the outer wall of her bladder an eighth of an inch wide. Cause of death: rupture of the bladder, owing in part to acute peritonitis. A Dr. Shelby Strange performed a second autopsy that evening, and agreed that the bladder had killed her. But what had ruptured it? Dr. Strange suspected “some external force.”

Arbuckle had already taken a steamship home to L.A. when a reporter informed him that Rappe had died. That night, he attended a midnight meeting at Sid Grauman’s Million Dollar Theatre, along with his Labor Day hotel companions (and soon-to-be witnesses) and, more curiously, Rappe’s friend Al Semnacher. What, exactly, was discussed is unknown, but it’s possible that they were getting their stories straight. In Arbuckle’s initial statements, he insisted that he was never alone with Rappe, which was a lie. Then, on the advice of his attorney, he shut his trap.

San Francisco theatres immediately banned Arbuckle’s films, and Sid Grauman pulled his new picture, “Gasoline Gus,” from the Million Dollar Theatre. Within a week, his movies had vanished nationwide. In one Wyoming theatre, it was reported that a mob of cowboys shot up his image on the screen. (It turned out that the theatre owner had concocted the story for publicity.) Paramount stopped paying its top star eleven days after his arrest, on the ground that he was locked in a San Francisco jail and unable to report to work. The next day, Universal wrote a morality clause into its contracts, mandating nonpayment to performers who “forfeit the respect of the public,” and other studios followed. (Morality clauses have made a comeback in recent years.) The new strictures could have horrendous consequences for the stars; when Gloria Swanson became pregnant by a man who wasn’t yet her husband, she was so afraid of being ostracized that she got a botched abortion that nearly killed her.

The scandal was a media bonanza. Without real competition yet from radio or newsweekly magazines, newspapers were the only game in town, often publishing multiple editions a day. The Los Angeles Times: “PLAN TO SEND ARBUCKLE TO DEATH ON GALLOWS.” The San Francisco Call and Post: “ARBUCKLE DANCES WHILE GIRL IS DYING, JOYOUS FROLIC AMID DEATH TRAGEDY.” The Oxnard Daily Courier: “ARBUCKLE, THE BEAST.” Many outlets used the word “orgy” to describe the Labor Day party. William Randolph Hearst’s papers, which helped pioneer yellow journalism and anticipated the likes of the National Enquirer and the Daily Mail, were particularly sensational. On September 13th alone, Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner ran seventeen stories about the scandal—a harbinger of the twenty-four-hour gossip industry that runs on Schadenfreude. As Swanson wrote in her autobiography, “The newspapers had proved in less than a week that the public got a much greater thrill out of watching stars fall than out of watching them shine.”

Readers soon got to know a colorful group of personalities, such as the wrong-place-wrong-time witnesses Zey Prevost and Alice Blake, two showgirls who had attended the party, and Matthew Brady, the San Francisco district attorney, who was thought to covet the mayor’s office or even the governor’s mansion. His star witness appeared to be Maude Delmont, who claimed that Arbuckle had “dragged” Rappe into Room 1219, hollering, “I have been trying to get you for five years.” In her affidavit, Delmont recalled hearing the brutalized Rappe scream, “He did it. I know he did it. I have been hurt. I am dying.”

Overnight, Rappe and Arbuckle became characters in a mass-marketed morality play: the pure young beauty ravaged by the beast. It didn’t help that the name Virginia Rappe so closely resembled “virgin rape,” or that Arbuckle’s appetites had been so widely publicized. “Filled up with liquor,” the Dayton Daily News declared, “his low bestiality asserts itself in treating a woman like a grizzly bear would a calf.” On Sundays, ministers across the country denounced Arbuckle as a symbol of Hollywood sin. “He has betrayed the thousands of little children who laughed at his antics,” one preached. “He has defied chastity and mocked virtue.” The moral outrage likely scared Paramount more than the box-office hiccup did. In the wake of the Eighteenth Amendment, the religious reformers and women’s clubs that had successfully pushed for Prohibition were now eying the movies as America’s chief corrupting influence. Censorship laws were creeping into statehouses, and studios dreaded federal regulation. Arbuckle gave the vice squad all the ammunition it needed to target Hollywood the way it had saloons.

“Hollywood” has often stood in for anxieties about changing mores. The lurid fantasies about the Labor Day “orgy” aren’t so far from QAnon conspiracy theories about Tom Hanks and pedophilia rings. In 1921, movie stardom had upended the traditional social hierarchy, and Arbuckle’s celebrated spending turned into a cautionary tale of nouveau-riche decadence. As Henry Lehrman, who had been Rappe’s boyfriend and also Arbuckle’s director, told the press, “That’s what comes of taking vulgarians from the gutter and giving them enormous salaries and making idols of them.”

Matthew Brady understood that he was prosecuting not just Arbuckle but the film industry. Unfortunately for him, his case was hitting some snags. At the coroner’s inquest, the complaining witness, Maude Delmont—the press dubbed her “the avenger”—admitted to drinking “eight or ten” whiskeys at the party, and parts of her story proved flimsy. It was discovered that she had married one husband without divorcing another, and she was later arrested for bigamy. Knowing that her credibility would likely fall apart under cross-examination, Brady never even put her on the stand.

His new star witnesses were Zey Prevost and Alice Blake, but neither was a silver bullet. After Blake told detectives that she’d heard Rappe say “He killed me,” she denied it before the grand jury. Both women settled on the less damning “He hurt me.” Nevertheless, Brady was determined to press forward with a rape and murder charge. At the preliminary hearings, packed with concerned members of the Women’s Vigilant Committee, Al Semnacher, Rappe’s friend, dropped a bombshell. The day after the party, he testified, Arbuckle told him that he had applied a piece of ice to Rappe’s body. Pressed on where, Semnacher was too embarrassed to say out loud, so he whispered it to a court reporter, who wrote it down on a slip of paper. The word was “snatch.” Newspapers couldn’t print such a thing, so they ran headlines like “WITNESS TESTIFIES ARBUCKLE CONFESSED HE TORTURED ACTRESS.”

The defense undercut Semnacher by suggesting that he had conspired to extort Arbuckle, and got him to hedge over whether the ice was put “in” or “on” Rappe’s genitalia. (Prevost remembered Arbuckle putting ice on her “abdominal region,” to help revive her.) But the story was too salacious to ignore, and it morphed into the unkillable myth that Arbuckle, possibly owing to impotence, had violated Rappe with a bottle. The judge, deeming the ice anecdote unseemly but irrelevant, ruled that Arbuckle be tried for the lesser charge of manslaughter. Many of the spectators cheered—apparently, there were fans mixed in with the vigilantes. One teary woman admitted, “I’ve only seen him on the screen and I wanted to see him in real life.”

The trial began on November 18th. Arbuckle had hired a raft of star attorneys. His estranged wife, Minta Durfee, sat behind the defendant with her mother, and the press, playing to a rapt female readership, ran daily reports on her outfits. The state called a hotel maid who claimed to have heard Rappe screaming, “No, no! Oh, my God!” A criminologist testified that both Arbuckle’s and Rappe’s fingerprints were found on the door, suggesting that he had pressed his hand against hers as she tried to escape. The defense’s witnesses included doctors who testified that a distended bladder could have ruptured spontaneously, and people who had seen Rappe tear at her clothes over the years, especially when drunk. At one point, a deputy coroner brought in a jar containing the ruptured bladder. A panel of court-appointed medical experts found that it showed evidence of cystitis. But the main event was Arbuckle’s testimony, in which he maintained that he had found Rappe vomiting in his bathroom and assisted her. As for the ice, he said that Delmont had already put it on Rappe’s body, and that he picked it up out of curiosity.

In closing arguments, the defense lawyer Gavin McNab painted Arbuckle as a martyr who had “sweetened human existence by the laughter of millions and millions of innocent children.” The prosecution countered by calling him a “modern Belshazzar” who would “never make the world laugh again.” After two days of deliberation, the jury came back deadlocked, ten to two for acquittal. One of the holdouts, Helen Hubbard, said that the male jurists had berated her. “There is no place for the woman on the jury,” she warned. Much of the press echoed the sentiment, arguing that women are too frail or too biased to judge men accused of mistreating the fairer sex.

Abandoned by his studio and much of his public, Arbuckle had plenty to say about his state of affairs. “I have suffered,” he told reporters. “All I ask in repayment of the wrong done me is that the world which once loved me now withhold its judgment and give me a chance to prove before another jury that I am innocent.” The retrial began in January, 1922, dragging the saga into its fifth month. Zey Prevost backtracked her previous recollection of Rappe’s saying “He hurt me,” claiming that the prosecution had intimidated her. Alice Blake was also shakier her second time on the stand. The defense was so confident that it declined to make a closing argument—a major miscalculation. The second jury was the inverse of the first, deadlocked ten to two in favor of conviction. Anticipating yet another trial, the exhausted Prevost went into hiding in New Orleans, temporarily evading the police by climbing down a rope from her hotel window.

At the third trial, the defense tried to impeach Rappe’s character, deposing a former midwife who claimed to have “attended” to Rappe during multiple pregnancies. (The woman was never called to the stand, but during the trial it became clear that this was a euphemism for abortions.) On April 12th, the third jury went into deliberation at 5:10 P.M. and returned five minutes later with a verdict: not guilty. More than that, the jurors released a statement that would have been difficult to compose so quickly—they might have had help from Arbuckle’s lawyers—beginning, “Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him.”

Arbuckle crowed, “I believe I am due for a comeback.” Paramount tested the waters by allowing his shelved films to be screened. Nevertheless, six days after his acquittal Arbuckle was cancelled all over again. The reason was that Hollywood had decided to police itself before Washington could.

With the public’s taste whetted for gossip about the private lives of celebrities, tales of Hollywood depravity were coming down in a torrent. While Arbuckle’s second jury was deliberating, the director William Desmond Taylor was found murdered, and investigators turned up a sordid backstory that included a deserted wife, secret love letters, and an embezzling valet. Months later, the Paramount heartthrob Wallace Reid was admitted to a sanatorium for morphine addiction and died soon afterward. All the drugs, sex, and murder confirmed Hollywood’s image as a modern Gomorrah, and the threat of government intervention turned existential. But the studio chiefs had found a solution: hire their own referee.

As Warren G. Harding’s campaign manager, Will H. Hays had helped Republicans take the White House in 1920 and was rewarded with the job of Postmaster General. A Presbyterian elder from Indiana, Hays had a clean-cut image that, as Merritt writes, “contrasted with the major film studio heads, all of whom were Jewish and most of whom were immigrants—facts not lost on Hollywood’s critics, many of whom espoused anti-Semitism and nativism.” In December, 1921, as the Arbuckle saga dominated the headlines, a dozen studio chiefs signed a letter to Hays, offering him a hundred-thousand-dollar salary to head a new organization called the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. The idea was modelled on major-league baseball, which had brought on its first commissioner after the fixed World Series of 1919. Hays’s first major act as “czar of the movies”: banning Arbuckle from the screen.

In his autobiography, Hays said that the decision came on request from Paramount’s president, Adolph Zukor, who wanted to “sacrifice” Arbuckle without the ban’s being traced back to the studio. Although the “Hays Office” became synonymous with censorship, Hays’s real job was to put a wholesome face on the industry in order to forestall censorship from the outside. But the long-term effects of his installment were seismic. In 1927, he issued a list of what became known as “Don’ts and Be Carefuls,” which barred movies from showing sex, profanity, “ridicule of the clergy,” and other vices. Still, the rules were lazily enforced. It wasn’t until 1934, after talkies presented new avenues for obscenity, that the Hays Office formed the Production Code Administration, which kept the movies buttoned-up and puritanical—homosexuality, miscegenation, and moral ambiguity were all but absent from the screen—all the way into the late sixties.

If there’s a modern analogue to the creation of the Hays Office, it may not be in Hollywood but in Silicon Valley. Social media is roughly as old as the film industry was then, and is also on the receiving end of a public backlash. Facebook and Twitter are our Paramount and M-G-M, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey our Adolph Zukor and Louis B. Mayer. As with Hollywood in the twenties, the honeymoon between tech and Washington has soured, and the sins of Big Tech—spreading dangerous disinformation, collecting and exploiting personal data—have placed its moguls under scrutiny. The image of a blank-eyed Zuckerberg testifying before Congress has eclipsed that of the boy genius in a hoodie. You could see Facebook’s “supreme court,” which was formed last year to rule on ethical quandaries, as tech’s answer to the Hays Office: a semi-autonomous, self-regulating body meant to project integrity and stanch a bleeding P.R. wound.

Donald Trump gave the tech industry an unavoidable stress test, and, when Twitter and Facebook suspended him, earlier this year, they had a high-profile scalp to hold up, as if to say, “Trust us! We’re the good guys!” Hays, acting as the studios’ lackey, took the same tack by cutting off Arbuckle following the trials. But it was impossible to curb the opprobrium. Not long after the Arbuckle ban, Senator Henry Lee Myers, of Montana, took to the Senate floor to blast all of Hollywood as “a colony of these people, where debauchery, riotous living, drunkenness, ribaldry, dissipation, free love, seem to be conspicuous.” Others felt that Arbuckle was being scapegoated. Days before Christmas, 1922, Hays, in the spirit of “American fair play” and “Christian charity,” lifted the ban after only eight months. Then as now, cancellation has a half life.

Arbuckle was elated, but not for long. Outraged telegrams poured into Hays’s office. The San Francisco Federation of Women’s Clubs implored him to make an example “of those who brazenly violate the moral code of a Christian nation.” Local movie boards maintained the ban on Arbuckle films of their own accord, in Minnesota, in Detroit, in Walla Walla, Washington, and then most everywhere. Even the warden at Sing Sing instituted an Arbuckle ban. The court of public opinion was rendering its own verdict. Hays refused to reverse course again, but he’d made a tactical error: by banning Arbuckle after his acquittal, Hays had pronounced him guilty of something. So why was he now being absolved?

“He was very bitter over what he believed was injustice, which financially and professionally ruined him,” one reporter recalled of the exiled Arbuckle. “I had never seen a more hopeless man.” He drank. Legal fees had left him in debt. He went back on the vaudeville circuit, though his appearances sometimes drew protests. In 1924, Buster Keaton brought him on as a co-director for the film “Sherlock Jr.,” but he was so irritable that Keaton fired him after three weeks. Over time, however, Arbuckle built a steady career directing under his father’s first and middle names, William Goodrich. (Keaton joked that his pseudonym should be Will B. Good.)

In the late twenties, Arbuckle bought a night club in Culver City, the unfortunately named Plantation Café, and for a time it became a hangout for his celebrity friends who wanted to show their support. But it went under after the stock-market crash. The rise of talkies brought more work for “William Goodrich,” but he wasn’t satisfied. “I want to go back to the screen,” he told Photoplay in 1931. He got his chance the next year, when Warner Bros. hired him to star in a trio of comedy shorts, after an eleven-year exile. They were uncontroversial enough that the studio planned eight more Fatty shorts, and even considered a feature. In June, 1933, Arbuckle and his third wife were in Manhattan, toasting their anniversary and his imminent comeback. He went to bed that night at the Park Central Hotel, and died in his sleep, of a heart attack, at the age of forty-six.

In death, Arbuckle was the star of an evolving Hollywood legend—actually, two conflicting legends. In one, he was a symbol of Jazz Age depravity. In the other, he was an innocent man who, as Frank Capra put it in his 1971 autobiography, “had been brutally sacrificed on the altar of hate.” Through the decades, both versions were larded with fabrications. Kenneth Anger’s seamy “Hollywood Babylon,” which first appeared in English in 1965, codified a lewd myth by insinuating that Arbuckle was “haunted by bottles” after his notorious “bottle party.” Rappe’s reputation, meanwhile, toggled between that of virgin and whore. Late in life, Arbuckle’s first wife, Minta Durfee, repeated the preposterous tale that Rappe had spread so much venereal disease at Keystone that Mack Sennett had to fumigate the studio. David Yallop’s 1976 book, “The Day the Laughter Stopped,” which stands firmly on the side of Arbuckle’s innocence, floats the bizarre theory that Rappe was pregnant at the Labor Day party and begged the star for abortion money—and that the doctors discarded her uterus in a coverup.

The #MeToo movement inspired fresh looks at the saga, with a more respectful eye toward Rappe. Karina Longworth’s entrancing Hollywood-history podcast, “You Must Remember This,” devoted an episode to the incident in 2018, when it was difficult not to see history repeating itself in the shape of the Harvey Weinstein case and many other accusations. Longworth rightly rejected “the simplistic version of the story that contends that the dead woman and the female witnesses who testified against Arbuckle were telling lies in order to bring down a powerful man.” But the ambiguities of the case don’t make for easy revisionism. The closer you look, the more you become entangled in the minutiae of medical confusion and the wavering recollections of this or that hotel maid. By some accounts, Rappe herself didn’t know what happened to her. One nurse recalled, “She frequently asked me, ‘What could have broken inside of me?’ She asked me several times to determine if she had been assaulted.” Merritt concludes that Rappe was likely injured “in the throes of passion,” introducing a very twenty-first-century conundrum: the boundaries of consent.

A century later, it’s harder to judge Arbuckle’s culpability than it is to trace the life of his legend. From the moment he was arrested, he was a movie screen onto which people could project their fears and fantasies, and his case reveals more about American spectacle than it does about a man and a woman in a hotel room. As jurors in the court of public opinion, we’re still deliberating on an endless stream of cases, often with uneven facts, weighing, like Solomon assessing a baby, the fates of disgraced men. The dispiriting truth is that the banishment of Roscoe Arbuckle did nothing to prevent a culture of sexual coercion from taking hold in Hollywood. The industry may have removed sex from the screen to protect its own image, but sexual abuse went on in executive suites and on casting couches, behind closed doors, until, nearly ten decades later, it burst into the public eye all over again. ♦