Scandal In Black and White...

The Spectacular Downfall of Fatty Arbuckle

Nov 13, 2024

Scandal in Black and White

Nellskitchen is a friend and fellow writer. She and I share a fascination with the early years of Hollywood cinema.

In this article, my friend Nell has written about comedian Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle’s spectacular and dramatic fall from grace.

At the time, Arbuckle was as big as Chaplin and even co-starred with him in The Rounders.

Arbuckle also teamed up with Buster Keaton several times.

Arbuckle Below With Charlie Chaplin…

Arbuckle with Buster Keaton…

Below Nellskitchen does a fantastic job of breaking down what happened during Arbuckle’s scandal.

He was accused of luring a young woman back to his room during a party within the same hotel. He then proceeded to violently rape her while a few of her friends pounded on the door to be let in.

It was said that Rappe succumbed to the injuries Arbuckle inflicted and died, but others say she had a lethal infection from a previous illness.

Arbuckle went to trial three separate times and was finally acquitted, but the damage had been done.

It’s always the same playbook. Tell a lie often enough it becomes the truth. It works even better if it’s a BIG lie.

By NK

Scandals anyone? In color? Black and white? Pick your poison…

I love scandals, especially when they do not involve me. A story for another time; yes, I brushed up against one once. Now, I stay away.

That aside, sitting on a scandal’s sidelines is the place to be. Here, I enjoy the titillation and balance off the revulsion. Of course, most scandals—the big ones (Epstein?), never see the light of day. Maybe it is a good thing.

As I type this, ample suggestion of big-time misbehavior floats about. There is just enough to seize my inner, overly attentive adolescent self. I pretend to hide my eyes, but now and then, I catch bits of others’ misfortune and eagerly await the next headline.

Am I terrible?

More to the point, are you like me?

Get Your Copy of HOLLYWOOD BABYLON by Kenneth Anger for FREE here…

We live in the roaring twenties.

Supersized scandals are everywhere.

Leaked tapes, unnamed sources, and rat-tat-tat lawsuits shower us with white-hot meteorites mingled with falling stars.

Pictures burn into our memories and remain there—forever. If someone says O.J., we see him in stills or videos shaped for us by people we do not know.

We read the stories and search for innuendo hidden between the lines. There is never enough. Scandals are addictive.

Here at the Body House, the brilliant and mysterious Dyann Bridges reminds us that motion pictures, something we take for granted, have existed for a very long time, a century, and more. In fact, no living person remembers what life was like before film consumed the culture.

Today’s scandals happen in color, yesterday’s in black and white—for more, read on...

As of this writing, Sean ‘Diddy’s over-the-top lifestyle has taken front and center.

“White Parties,” oil bottles—hundreds, A-listers wending their way through the musical artist’s debauched underworld, freaked out women filing charge after charge—there are hundreds.

Scary images of rampaging nakedness give me pause; on my worst days, a part of me sees herself joining in. It is the tip of an iceberg.

Stay tuned because a gazillion podcasts are spreading provocative smidges—some of it is even true. Invisible film industry bigwigs leak ‘didbits’ of Diddy’s nastiness to a hungry-for-blood public, conditioning us for the inevitable avalanche of human sex machines and quid pro quo music deals traded in exchange for whatever.

Some say the big names, Jennifer, Kloe’, Leonardo, and Sarah Jessica, are already out there, but they are not.

These are offerings meant to occupy us—they do—for now. There are more, names so big we dare not think them—yet.

Though not a “scandal” in the clear sense, I fixated on the Depp-Heard defamation trial, primarily due to Amber’s whiny persona.

Because I like dashing leading men, Depp v Heard, including Amber’s thinly veiled crusade to stay relevant, gripped me.

She rightly wagered that without Johnny, Hollywood would do what it habitually does with used-up women. Of course, they dumped her.

Now, she is just another Mrs. Depp—counting the hangers-on, she is one girl among heaps. No one outside of Heard’s legal team (are they just being nice?) believes she is a real actress and that her ‘Aquaman’ box office success would have happened without big-shot Johnny’s behind-the-scenes arm-twisting.

With the iffy marriage’s demise, and just in time, the beautiful but talentless Amber defaulted to domestic abuse accusations, spilling them before time outran her.

The court courteously endured her downcast claim of liquor bottle rape, among other marriage bed depictions.

After spewing her little secrets, an unconvinced jury convinced itself to award Johnny fifteen million dollars—and Amber two.

For her, it was game over, except for one little thing: the feminist cheering section’s reaction was not what Amber expected as the ladies who daily filled the courtroom and lined the streets stepped up to support, not her, but rather their fading jolly roger hero.

Their hurrahs unnerved what was left of the pathetic Amber.

Wait…what? Feminists rooted for the liquor bottle assailant?

Amber knows it was not worth it. Somebody always gains from these things, and it was not her. It was Johnny, the pudgy shadow of a once swashbuckling buccaneer; he sailed over the horizon in the face of Amber’s futile attempt to convince women to take her side.

In the end, she walked the plank, and the mean little man fled over the horizon to play Jeff Beck accompanist to an audience primarily made up of women oozing affection. I doubt we will hear from Amber again anytime soon.

So ends our color sampler.

There is more to come, so stay tuned.

For now, let’s find the “template” for contemporary Hollywood scandals. It happened; you guessed it, in the roaring twenties!

PART II: THE FATTY ARBUCKLE AFFAIR

In scary ways, our decade feels much like a century ago. We live in overdrive, we’re neurotic, brash, and uncaring—we linger on the edge. In 1929, our forebears went over it. Will we?

Recently, the Body House boss lady suggested a name to me.

Tied to the mother of all Hollywood scandals, she simply said, “Fatty Arbuckle.” I searched around. Sure enough, he was back there—smiling.

Get Your Copy of HOLLYWOOD BABYLON by Kenneth Anger (highlighting the Arbuckle Scandal) for FREE here…

Pictures, flickering film, and newspaper headlines, a funny man’s comedy and tragedy, slumber in the past.

Strangely, I had heard the name, that Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle had once been a towering talent in the early days of cinema. What accounted for Dyann’s interest? Who was he? What became of him?

As I eyed him, our time faded from view, and slowly…slowly, flappers, gangsters, and speakeasies blinked into focus. Jovial and grinning, I found and studied the infamous comic’s grainy images.

His sweetness was everywhere; he was one of the most recognizable performers in the world. His handsome, weighty face reflects the optimism of his age, his youthful success, and his abrupt fall from grace—its heartbreak.

Weighing in at over three hundred pounds, the (literally) larger-than-life film star cut a swath of success, money, and feminine devotion through the Jazz Age.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Fatty’s talents were real. He did not need to hide behind silent film; he could sing, act individually, or join with the time’s finest jesters.

Then, at the height of what seems to have been well-deserved popularity, Fatty’s world imploded.

The papers pivoted, suddenly hating him, they nailed him to a celluloid cross as his murder case, bold and above the fold, consumed three sensational trials in six months!

The Hearst Newspaper headlines, the internet of its day, pulled the entertainer’s tangled life (much of it imagined) to pieces, reassembling it into a Frankenstein Monster for public consumption.

Of course, there was a girl, a pretty party girl, actress Virginia Rappe, who bafflingly died after an out-of-control, super-charged San Francisco booze party hosted by Fatty in 1921.

Was she the victim of gang rape?

Were there others?

Did someone fake the whole thing?

In a flash, and in very “un-Depp-like” fashion, Fatty, the jolly darling of female moviegoers everywhere, was begging to be liked, the exact opposite of Johnny Depp’s experience a century later.

Arbuckle’s courtroom mob, the progeny of pre-flapper era feminists, convinced themselves of his guilt. “Rape,” the press screeched when Virginia mysteriously died of sepsis days after the party.

There was zero evidence that Fatty had sexual relations with Virginia; he was condemned, nevertheless.

Rib-tickler Fatty Arbuckle was an American dream come true.

His story happened at the high water mark of the diminishing age of ‘flickers,’ motion pictures to which color, like sound, was little more than a barely imagined technological miracle in waiting.

There were additional scandals, of course, but the Arbuckle case topped the bill—and muffled the others just long enough for their perpetrators to skate.

No other story came close to the impact of the tragedy involving the tubby comic sensation.

Enviously, I sometimes wonder why God stuffs so much talent into so few people. Arbuckle may have been the finest of the funny men of his time, and his time was the time of Keaton and Chaplin.

Unlike so many other silent screen cohorts, Arbuckle’s uncanny comedic talent had he not run headlong into scandal, would easily have transitioned to talking pictures (1927), something few silent screen stars managed after the 1927 blockbuster release of the ‘The Jazz Singer.’

To his credit, he sang with the likes of Caruso and, despite his girth, twirled with the best stage dancers.

Constrained in a world of black-and-white film, he also toiled in the absence of sound.

This meant relying on pantomime to communicate drama and laughter to a global audience crowding Saturday afternoon matinees.

I’ve heard it said that veterinarians make the best doctors since their patients cannot talk.

Similarly, I suspect pantomimists make the best actors. Moviegoers always knew what screen actors were saying. In Fatty’s case, they adored his beefy form, oddly featherweight movements, and masterful timing.

Strangely, when the chips were down, a fickle public abandoned him.

Rumors ultimately led to formal charges that he had sexually assaulted the diminutive Virginia Rappe—resulting in her death.

The frightened entertainer endured trial after sensational murder trial. Jury number three was so aghast that anyone would think ill of Fatty that they wrote him a public apology for his trouble.

Nevertheless, Fatty’s days as a star were over; to protect themselves from taint by association, the big-wigs who created him cast him loose, sweeping his pieces from the cutting room floor.

Despite the third jury’s unprecedented show of support, American women dropped fatty in distinct contrast with Johnny Depp’s victory.

Though the adorable man’s harmlessness bled through his feature films, feminism’s sudden interest in a purer brand of virtue spelled his end.

"If they (movie stars) are flagrantly immoral, hang them; do not show their pictures,” spouted high society ‘tone-setter,’ Elinor Glyn.

Other voices followed.

Women, suddenly the nation’s newest and largest voter block, proved very different from their twenty-first-century sisters yet to be born as they recoiled from the very scent of the abuse visited upon Virginia Rappe.

Dealing with the new politics would prove tricky and continues to be.

[Photo of Virginia Rappe]

Fatty’s masterpieces of humor were banned; the studio willingly lost millions, and Arbuckle’s contract was obliterated. Booted from the film industry, he died in drunken obscurity, aged forty-six, closing out our scandal in black and white.

Through the next two generations, cinema icons acted with equal misbehavior.

However, Hollywood moguls carefully covered the tracks of their silver screen stars, buying up copies of Crawford’s pornographic film and suppressing knowledge of Errol Flynn’s statutory rapes.

In other words, while behavior hardly improved, the lengths to which the film industry shuttered scandals became elevated to the level of fine art.

It left the viewing public with a peculiar sense that Puritan values dominated Hollywood, an undercurrent that lasted through the 1950s.

I long for those days.

Fortunately, we have the Body House to remind us of their glory…oh well…NK.

Well done my dear Nell…

I hope you enjoyed this article.

Read Nellskitchen’s erotica here…