Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [40]
Revelations about Virginia Rappe did not clarify the situation. It transpired that she had a bit of a reputation in Hollywood: the journalist Adela St. Johns said she was more an “amateur call-girl” and “studio hanger-on” than an aspiring actress, “who used to get drunk at parties and start to tear her clothes off” before accusing men of attacking her; she was said to have spread syphilis throughout one studio. According to some, Arbuckle had long been infatuated with Rappe after hearing stories of her exploits, and had specifically invited her to the St. Francis. It was also rumored that the reason she was in San Francisco on the weekend she died was that she had had her fifth illegal abortion the day before Arbuckle’s party—which may have accounted for her internal injuries.
Arbuckle was cleared in April 1922 after three trials. The deciding factor was the defense’s courtroom display of Virginia Rappe’s ruptured bladder in a jar, intended to prove that the damage to her internal organs was the long-standing result of numerous abortions. Despite his acquittal, Fatty’s career had been destroyed. His friends, his peers and his audience were as divided as his juries had been as to his involvement in Rappe’s death. His wife told the press that he was nothing more than “a big, overgrown baby who couldn’t handle his own success”; Charlie Chaplin believed him “a genial, easy-going type who would not harm a fly”; Adela St. Johns thought him simply naïve, “a lovable, fat innocent.” Perhaps Gloria Swanson’s skepticism was more widely spread. “Maybe three trials couldn’t prove that Arbuckle was guilty,” she said later, “but nobody in town ever thought he was all that innocent…I know Arbuckle was acquitted, and I know that Al Capone’s only crime was tax evasion.”
Although his greatest friend, Buster Keaton, tried to find writing and directing work for Arbuckle, it was not until the early 1930s that he began acting in short films again. Arbuckle died of heart failure in 1933, aged forty-six, on the evening of the day he had signed a contract with Warner Brothers to make his first feature film since his disgrace.
Another mysterious death occurred in February 1922 when the director William Desmond Taylor was found shot in his apartment. It appears likely that the mother of one of the young actresses he worked with, Mary Miles Minton, murdered him—possibly because she was infatuated with Taylor too. The investigation was never concluded but rumors of Taylor’s secret homosexuality, and ones connecting Minton and another actress friend of Taylor’s, Mabel Normand (Charlie Chaplin’s first regular co-star in the mid-1910s and a huge star in her own right), to known drug-dealers, were hard to dispel. Minton’s and Normand’s careers were ruined.
Two years later the eccentric newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst took a group of friends on a yacht trip between Los Angeles and San Diego to celebrate his sixty-first birthday. Hearst was obsessively jealous of his young mistress, Marion Davies, and with some reason. During this period she was said to have been having an affair with Charlie Chaplin, thought to have been one of the other guests on the yacht; her name was on Lita Grey’s list of Chaplin’s mistresses. Also present was the producer Thomas Ince who had pioneered the movie western. Rumor held that Ince was shot on board, either because Hearst found him embracing Davies or because he found Davies embracing Chaplin, threatened him, and Ince got in the way.
In his autobiography Chaplin said that the man who made the greatest impression on him during his early years in Hollywood was Hearst—ruthless, childish, mercurial, shrewd