Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [39]
As well as torturing him professionally, Arbuckle’s size made him insecure in more private ways. His success invited the attentions of the usual gaggle of ambitious young ladies, but Arbuckle was afraid that they would find him wanting sexually. His wife, the comic actress Minta Durfee (from whom he was living separately by 1920), said that “He was smart enough to know that women weren’t attracted to him because of his good looks or his physical beauty. Sometimes women on the lot in the powder room would whisper intimate questions about Roscoe: Is he big all over . . . ? Does he crush you when . . . ? Does he hurt you when . . .? How often . . . ? But I never answered them.”
Minta said that, perhaps because of his size, Arbuckle was frequently impotent. He was also a heavy drinker and a regular user of morphine, which he had begun taking following an inflamed and infected mosquito bite which had nearly lost him his leg. Drugs were a constant theme in these years. The California State Board of Pharmacy listed five hundred actors as drug addicts. Morphine was freely prescribed without proper consideration of its side-effects because it was the only effective painkiller of the day. In 1923 Wallace Reid, a dazzlingly handsome, well-respected, happily married matinee idol, died aged thirty-one following an illness caused by his drug addiction. It emerged that his studio had essentially created his dependence by giving him morphine injections following an injury sustained during filming so that they could continue with their tight shooting schedule.
In early September 1921, Arbuckle had gone to San Francisco for a long weekend with two male friends. On their arrival at the St Francis Hotel, they had ordered buckets of ice and ginger ale to be sent up to their suite to accompany their bootleg gin and whisky, and invited over some friends who happened to be in San Francisco at the same time. The actors’ agent Al Semnacher came up to the suite at about half past ten on the morning of Monday 5 September with Maude Delmont, a model, and her friend Virginia Rappe.
Throughout the day everyone except Arbuckle danced to the records played on the portable phonograph; he sat beside it, watching the others, clad only in pajama bottoms. By the afternoon the girls were very drunk and Virginia, complaining of being unable to breathe, began to take off her clothes. She went into the bathroom adjoining Arbuckle’s bedroom and he followed her in. They were alone for about fifteen minutes and then Arbuckle came out of his room to report that a semi-clad, semi-conscious Rappe was writhing in pain on his bed. The hotel doctor examined her and said that her symptoms were caused by intoxication; the party broke up and Rappe was left to sleep off her hangover in another room.
Two days later, after Arbuckle had returned to Los Angeles, Maude Delmont came back to the hotel to see her friend and found her still in great pain and calling out for Arbuckle. On Thursday Virginia was taken to a hospital where she was diagnosed as having alcohol poisoning, a relatively common complaint in the days of contaminated bootleg liquor. She died there the following day; the cause of death was given as peritonitis resulting from a ruptured bladder apparently brought on by “external force,” and bruises and finger marks were found on her body. Delmont said Rappe had told her that Arbuckle had raped and beaten her. He was charged with her murder.
What had really happened is unclear. Arbuckle always insisted that he had found Virginia unconscious in his bathroom and simply carried her to the bed (thus causing her bruises). Delmont, whose reliability was later called into question when she was found to be a bigamist, testified that she had heard Arbuckle say to Rappe, “I’ve been