Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood Read Online Free

Semnacher introduced her and Delmont just before the trio headed north.
    Also staying at the Palace Hotel was Ira Fortlouis—an unlikely catalyst for Hollywood’s greatest scandal. He was a thirty-four-year-old salesman from the Northwest. He formerly sold hardware and sewing machines but was now focused on women’s clothing. And he knew Fred Fishback.
    On Monday morning, Labor Day, Fortlouis was just about to leave the Palace for an 11 AM meeting with Fishback when he saw Semnacher, Delmont, and Rappe in the lobby. Forever on the lookout for women to model the gowns he sold, he asked a bellboy about the dark-haired and stylish beauty in the striking green outfit and was told she was “Virginia Rappe, the movie actress.”
    At the Hotel St. Francis, Fred Fishback invited Fortlouis into the twelfth-floor suite. Fishback was fully dressed, but Sherman and Arbuckle were still in pajamas and robes. The four men chatted, and Fortlouis askedif they knew an actress he had just seen in the Palace lobby: Virginia Rappe. All did, having encountered her on a studio set or at a Hollywood party. Fishback phoned the Palace and had an attendant hand Rappe a note, inviting her over to 1220. Rappe told Semnacher and Delmont, “I’ll go up there, and if the party is a bloomer I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
    Around noon, Rappe entered the suite. A former model and fashion designer, she wore the same self-made clothes she had at the Palace: a jade skirt and jade sleeveless blouse over a white silk shirt adorned with a string of ivory beads. Her hair was up and under a white Panama hat trimmed with a thin ribbon of jade.
    Twenty minutes later, Rappe spoke to Delmont by telephone. It wasn’t yet much of a party, but there was plenty of alcohol. At her invitation, Delmont came up. Shortly thereafter, another guest arrived: Alice Blake, the chorus girl Lowell Sherman had invited the night before. Blake was followed twenty minutes later by her friend Zey Prevost, also a chorus girl, a brunette in her midtwenties, and an aspiring actress. * Unlike Blake, however, Prevost came from modest means; she was a child of Portugese immigrants. At the time of the 1920 census, she lived in a hotel and worked in a cafeteria pantry.
    “Let’s have some music, a piano or something,” Rappe suggested.
    “Who can play a piano?” Arbuckle asked.
    No one. And so Arbuckle ordered a Victrola, which the hotel staff delivered with some 78 RPM records. From the phonograph’s brass horn wailed the tinny clamor of popular songs like “St. Louis Blues” by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra’s “Everybody Step,” and “Ain’t We Got Fun?” as sung by Van and Schenck. This last song, released in April, was quickly becoming the devil-may-care anthem of the Jazz Age.
“Times are bad and getting badder, still we have fun.”
They drank. They danced.
    Around 1:30 PM, Fishback left. He took Arbuckle’s Pierce-Arrow to a nearby beach to observe seals he was considering shooting for an upcoming movie. There were then four women and three men in 1220.Arbuckle asked Sherman to tell one of those men, Fishback’s acquaintance Ira Fortlouis, to leave. The traveling salesman had overstayed his welcome. He departed.
    Shortly after Fishback took the car, a friend of Arbuckle’s named Mae Taube arrived at the party. Taube was the wife of a cattle buyer and the daughter-in-law of popular evangelist Billy Sunday, who was a vocal proponent of Prohibition. The day before, Taube had stopped by the suite and Arbuckle had invited her to take a ride in his Pierce-Arrow that Labor Day. Arbuckle later described her as “peeved” to find a party in full swing.
    “Who are all these people?” she asked.
    “Search me. I don’t know them,” Arbuckle replied.
    But he did introduce Taube to Rappe. Not wanting to join the drinking, Taube agreed to return later for the promised ride. Meanwhile, Al Semnacher appeared with the intention of picking