Virginia Rappe was a successful Hollywood actress when she passed away from a mysterious internal injury days after attending a party with actor Fatty Arbuckle in 1921.
Wikimedia CommonsVirginia Rappe, a successful Hollywood actress in the 1910s and 1920s.
Virginia Rappe was an up-and-coming actress and fashion designer when she died suddenly at the age of 30 after attending a party. The events leading up to her death stirred up a media frenzy in early 1920s Hollywood.
An autopsy revealed her cause of death to be a ruptured bladder and peritonitis. At the time, the public theorized that Rappe was the victim of a violent sexual assault from Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, a prominent actor who attended the party. A trial would later acquit him of all charges.
Even today, over 100 years after the event, the public is still discussing what truly happened to Virginia Rappe. Did she die of natural causes, or did Fatty Arbuckle play a role in her death? The truth lies in the details.
The Early Life And Career Of Starlet Virginia Rappe
Virginia Rappe was born on July 7, 1891 in Chicago. Her mother passed away when she was only 11 years old, leaving her to the care of her grandmother.
At the age of 16, Rappe began working as a model and found enough success to move to San Francisco in 1916. By this point in her modeling career, Rappe was making roughly $4,000 a year ($100,000 in today’s currency). In San Francisco, she developed her career further and even had a short affair with dress designer Robert Moscovitz.
Then, in 1917, Rappe moved to Los Angeles to work for film director Fred Balshofer. She appeared in her first film Paradise Garden that same year.
Virginia Rappe in Paradise Garden (1917).
For the next four years, Rappe appeared in both lead and small roles in at least 13 Hollywood films. By 1919, Rappe began a relationship with director Henry Lehrman and was engaged to him at the time of her death.
Throughout her career, Rappe made headlines for spearheading feminist causes, including financial autonomy from men and self-employment.
And while Rappe’s acting career took off, she also dipped her toes in fashion design. According to the book Room 1219 by Greg Merritt, Rappe began her design career in 1914 and even had some of her creations exhibited at the 1915 World’s Fair.
A newspaper article detailed how Rappe was “a young woman who has lifted fashion designing to the plane of fine art.” Unfortunately, Rappe succumbed to an early and painful death that cut both her acting and fashion design career short and left the public with more questions than answers.
The Ill-Fated Party At Fatty Arbuckle’s Home
Wikimedia CommonsActor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle
In 1921, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was the highest-paid actor in the world. He had recently signed a deal with Paramount Pictures for a whopping $1 million (about $13 million today), an unheard-of sum at the time. Posters for his movies billed the 266-pound comedian as “worth his weight in laughs.”
But before the year was out, he was accused of a crime so monstrous that he would never appear onscreen again.
The conflicting accounts, tabloid exaggerations, and general furor surrounding the crime that ended Arbuckle’s acting career make it difficult to determine what actually happened that fateful day.
Even today, publications re-examining the scandal often come to completely different conclusions regarding Fatty Arbuckle’s guilt or innocence.
Virtually the only indisputable facts seem to be that on September 5, 1921, there was a party at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco where alcohol was in abundance (despite Prohibition laws) and that both Arbuckle, then age 33, and 30-year-old Virginia Rappe were in attendance. Then, at some point during the revelry, Arbuckle and Rappe were briefly in the same hotel room together. But when Arbuckle left the room, Rappe remained lying on the bed “writhing in pain.”
Whatever happened that night, Virginia Rappe’s condition had still not improved three days afterward. It was then that she was taken to a hospital where doctors originally thought she had alcohol poisoning from the bootleg liquor. But as it turned out, she had peritonitis resulting from a ruptured bladder. These ailments ultimately killed her the next day, Sept. 9. 1921.
Party Goers’ Accounts Mount Suspicions Against Arbuckle
Los Angeles Public LibraryWorkers transport Rappe’s body for burial.
What fueled the scandal at the time and what has remained a mystery ever since is just what role, if any, Arbuckle played in Rappe’s death.
First, a partygoer accused Fatty Arbuckle of raping and killing Rappe.
Virginia Rappe had a reputation as something of a party girl. During the party, witnesses recalled that an intoxicated Rappe “complained she could not breathe and then started to tear off her clothes.” And this was not the first instance of Virginia Rappe stripping while intoxicated. One newspaper even dubbed her an “amateur call-girl…who used to get drunk at parties and start to tear her clothes off.”
Rappe’s detractors used this as evidence of her wild ways, while her defenders pointed out that she had a bladder condition that was exacerbated by alcohol and used to cause her such discomfort that she would drunkenly take off her clothes in an attempt to alleviate her condition.
Wikimedia CommonsOne of the rooms occupied by Arbuckle and his guests in the days after the infamous party.
As for the events of September 5, 1921, the accounts of the night vary wildly.
According to party guest Maude Delmont, after a few drinks, Arbuckle strong-armed Virginia Rappe into his room with the sinister utterance “I’ve waited for you five years, and now I’ve got you.” After 30 minutes or so, Delmont became concerned upon hearing screams from behind the closed door of Arbuckle’s room and started knocking.
Los Angeles Public LibraryMaude Delmont, the key witness accusing Arbuckle of raping Virginia Rappe.
Arbuckle answered the door wearing his “foolish screen smile” and Virginia Rappe was on the bed, naked and moaning in pain. Delmont claims that Rappe managed to gasp “Arbuckle did it” before she was taken away into a different hotel room.
Arbuckle however, testified that he had gone into his bathroom and found Rappe already there on the floor, vomiting. After helping her onto the bed, he and several other guests summoned the hotel doctor, who determined that Rappe was just heavily intoxicated and took her into another hotel room to sleep it off.
But at the hospital, Delmont told police that Rappe had been raped by Arbuckle at the party, and on September 11, 1921, the comedian was arrested.
The Trial Of Arbuckle And Its Aftermath
Los Angeles Public LibraryFatty Arbuckle in a San Francisco courtroom.
Newspapers across the country went wild. Some claimed that the overweight Arbuckle had damaged Rappe’s liver by crushing her while trying to have sex with her, while others offered up increasingly outrageous stories consisting of various depravities supposedly carried out by the actor.
Both Fatty Arbuckle and Virginia Rappe’s names were dragged through the mud in the competition to print the most salacious rumors. Publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst gleefully noted that the scandal had “sold more papers than the sinking of the Lusitania.” By the time Arbuckle went to trial for manslaughter, his public reputation was already ruined.
Delmont was never actually called to the stand because prosecutors knew her testimony would never hold up in court due to her ever-changing stories. Nicknamed “Madame Black,” Delmont already had a reputation for procuring girls for Hollywood parties, using those girls to instigate scandalous acts, and then blackmailing celebrities anxious to keep those acts quiet. It also didn’t help Delmont’s credibility that she’d sent telegrams to attorneys saying “WE HAVE ROSCOE ARBUCKLE IN A HOLE HERE CHANCE TO MAKE SOME MONEY OUT OF HIM.”
Meanwhile, although Arbuckle’s lawyers showed that the autopsy had concluded that there “were no marks of violence on the body, no signs that the girl had been attacked in any way” and various witnesses corroborated the actor’s version of events, it took three trials before Arbuckle was acquitted after the first ended with hung juries.
But by this time, the scandal had so devastated Arbuckle’s career that the jury who acquitted him felt obliged to read an apologetic statement that concluded with “We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and women that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.”
But it was already too late.
Hollywood’s highest-paid star was now box office poison: his movies were pulled from cinemas and he never worked onscreen again. Arbuckle was able to stay in film by doing some directing, but even behind the camera, his career didn’t have a chance of finding its footing. He died of a heart attack in 1933 at age 46, having never fully restored his reputation.
As for what really happened to Virginia Rappe, the modern consensus is that her preexisting condition likely took her life on September 9th, ending what would have been a fruitful and impactful career.
After this look at Fatty Arbuckle and the Virginia Rappe case, read up on other old Hollywood scandals including the murder of William Desmond Taylor and the tragic downfall of Frances Farmer.
