The Vamp: Theda Bara at her most darkly seductive as Cleopatra (1917). Al Capone had a photograph of Bara in his office.
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NEITHER POLA NEGRI NOR GLORIA SWANSON COULD CLAIM to be the first true screen siren; that prize is reserved for Al Capone’s favorite actress, Theda Bara, who became a star uttering the immortal words, “Kiss me, my fool.” Bara’s nickname, the Vamp, came from her role in A Fool There Was as a vampire who uses her sexuality to enslave and devour respectable middle-aged men. The publicity photographs for the film, released in 1915, show her posed above the discarded skeletons of her victims.
Promotional photos for her other movies (only six of the forty she made between 1914 and 1926 survive) are equally suggestive: Bara was always shown in the most fiercely come-hither of poses and the most darkly revealing of outfits. Her studio let it be known that she came from Arabia and was escorted everywhere by Nubian footmen. But this exotic, man-eating image was entirely fabricated—in fact the happily married Theda came from Cincinnati, Ohio, and no whiff of scandal was ever attached to her private life. Although she came to resent being typecast, for over a decade Bara thrilled audiences as Cleopatra and Salome and in titles like The Serpent, The Vixen and The She-Devil.
By glamorizing seduction and excitement, stars like Bara, Swanson and Negri helped change public views on morality. Mary Pickford might have been horrified at the thought of her fans seeing her as a divorcee, but the 1924 movie Alimony was promoted with irresistible images of “brilliant men, beautiful jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn, all ending in one terrific climax that makes you gasp.” Scriptwriter and director Elinor Glyn said that the aim of her movies was “to spread the ideals and the atmosphere of romance and glamour into the humblest home”; it was she who taught the heart-throb Rudolph Valentino to kiss not the back, but the palm of a lady’s hand.
No wonder that half of the older girls at Middletown High School, tutored by weekly movies, told the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd that “nine out of every ten boys and girls of high school age have ‘petting parties.’” In 1933, a University of Chicago survey studied the effects of movies on teenage girls and found that 40 percent wanted a man to make love to them after seeing a romantic film—and that 14 percent were inspired by the movies to become “gold-diggers.”
In an increasingly secular age, movie theaters had become the focus of an almost spiritual yearning for beauty and glamour and people flocked to them as they had once flocked to the austere clapboard churches of New England. Lavishly comfortable, exotically decorated as Egyptian temples or rococo palaces, often air-conditioned, in 1925 there were 20,000 cinemas across the United States, selling 100 million tickets a week. The Lynds estimated that the 35,000 inhabitants of Middletown went to one of its nine theaters on average more than once a week.
The fact that the same films were shown across the country at roughly the same time had a powerfully unifying impact on American society: popular films became shared and defining American experiences. But while movies, like radio and national newspapers and magazines, brought the United States together as a cohesive cultural whole, their practical effect on family values (moral content aside) was subversive. Families seldom attended a movie together, as they would once have gone ice-skating or to a church picnic. More often teenagers went with friends or on dates, generally driving themselves in cars they had borrowed from their parents, free from the chaperones who would once have been observing and monitoring their behavior.
Investment in films soared from $78 million in 1921 to $850 million in 1930 and huge advances were made in film technology during this period leading up to the development of cartoons and the tentative introduction of sound in The Jazz Singer of 1927. Cutting, editing, music recording and sound mixing and dubbing became increasingly sophisticated. Different studios honed their specialties: between 1912 and 1917 the Keystone Film Company under Mack Sennett produced slapstick comedy; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made spectacular musicals from its foundation in 1924; Warner Brothers, established in 1918, was celebrated for its thrillers. Profit was always the bottom line. Hollywood was, as John Dos Passos put it, a “bargain sale of five and ten cent lusts and dreams.” The British novelist J. B. Priestley, writing for the movies in the 1930s, quipped that Hollywood was “run by businessmen pretending to be artists and artists pretending to be businessmen.”
Like its sister industry, advertising, Hollywood drew customers in by persuading them that their normal lives were bereft of value. “All the adventure, all the romance, all the excitement you lack in your daily life are in—Pictures,” declared one mid- 1920s advertisement. “They take you completely out of yourself into a wonderful new world…Out of the cage of everyday existence! If only for an afternoon or an evening—escape!” A film like The Sheik set an entire generation of young men pomading their hair and learning to tango in the hope of capturing some of Valentino’s allure.
A new type of journalism sprang up to feed the public’s hunger for information about movies and their stars. The first tabloid, the New York Daily News, came out in 1919; William Randolph Hearst’s even more lurid Daily Mirror followed it on to the newsstands five years later. These papers pioneered “keyhole journalism”—intrusive, usually sensationalized (and often entirely fabricated) accounts of celebrity lives. Well aware of how tabloid exposés fueled public interest in their stars, studios encouraged an almost parasitical relationship between actors and gossip columnists.
Gloria Swanson listed the inane questions reporters fired at her: “They wanted to know whether I liked tall men or short men, how often I ate dessert, what my favorite breed of dog was, if I dyed my hair, what my favorite color was, if I got depressed on rainy days, what my favorite flower was, if I considered myself stuck-up, if I thought So-and-so was a nice dresser, if I ever obeyed silly impulses.”
In 1924 the starlet Ruby Miller “sensationally” revealed to the Los Angeles Times, her tongue firmly in her cheek, how she made her love scenes so convincing. “I must have time to know my hero and always insist that my love scenes come last of all…I’m always a sympathetic listener. He . . . thinks me brilliant when I permit him to explain, by the hour, how he would have ‘holed’ in two if only that d—caddie had kept his eye on the ball…Then dawns the day of the big love scenes. I appear in a beautiful gown. By this time the hero is so crazy to kiss me that it requires no effort upon my part. His natural fervor awakening my own—and hence the perfect love scene. I am told that my method is very dangerous and liable to wreck the homes of my heroes. My reply is, ‘I am first, last and all time an artist—and if my love scenes are destined to thrill millions, why worry about wrecking a few thousand homes?’”
Contemporary moralists were concerned that the movies’ obsession with sex appeal was destroying traditional American values, but in an essay of 1927 John Peale Bishop argued that, on the contrary, the most popular and enduring actors were innocent rather than sexualized. No other stars were adored like Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, whose appeal lay in their childlike naïveté rather than in high-voltage glamour.
Directors didn’t need to be sophisticated to appeal to moviegoers, either. D.W. Griffith’s views on race, sex and morality were reactionary in their simplicity. Although Cecil B. deMille admired the Flapper as a “maligned and plucky little person. Youth always revolts; it wouldn’t be worth its salt if it didn’t,” he described himself as essentially conservative. Even when film heroines dressed provocatively, drank cocktails or allowed themselves to be kissed, most still viewed love and marriage as their ultimate aim. America may have been spellbound by “sex, sin and sensation,” but it was not ready to abandon its values altogether.
In many ways, what the movie industry was apotheosizing was not a new and debauched code of ethics, but the glamorous background against which the debate over those ethics was played out. Both on screen and off, Hollywood fetishized conspicuous consumption, reflecting back to this most materialistic of ages its own aspirational image of itself. Beautiful women, elegant clothes, fabulous houses, custom-built cars: in a movie theater, Hollywood promised its eager audiences: all this could be yours.
Although Mary Pickford played ingénue roles, as perhaps the most commercially minded actor of her generation she was acutely aware of how closely her fans identified with her and how passionately they wanted to feel they knew her. Like many of them—and like many of her fellow actors—she had come from a desperately poor immigrant background. As she told Anita Loos, one of her favorite scriptwriters, her family was “shanty Irish”: “Ma looked like a washerwoman.” Hard work and determination, as much as looks or talent, had raised her out of the circumstances into which she was born.
Her alcoholic father had abandoned the family (then living in Toronto) when Mary, the eldest, was three and to support her children their mother worked as a seamstress and took in boarders. It was through one of them that Mary got her first acting job, and that inspired the entire family—Mary, her mother and her younger brother and sister—to seek their fortunes on the stage. For six years they toured the United States by rail, working in shabby melodramas. Finally they reached Broadway where in 1909 Mary was given a screen test by D.W. Griffith. Griffith was so impressed by what a later reviewer called her “luminous tenderness in a steel band of gutter ferocity’ that he promised to pay her double the usual rate for movie actors, $10 a day. By 1913, Mary had moved into feature films and was earning $500 a week. Two years later she was on $2,000 a week, plus half the profits of her films. “I hated being poor,” she told Motion Picture Magazine in 1920.
She also hated not being in charge. In 1916, aged twenty-four, Pickford asked for and received permission from her studio, Adrian Zukor’s Famous Players, to form her own production unit, the Pickford Film Corporation. Although she was not Hollywood’s first female film producer, she was its first female mogul, using her company to ensure control over her roles, directors, scripts and finances (she installed her mother as the Pickford Film Corporation’s treasurer). Mary oversaw every detail of the films her company made, from hiring the crews, to editing the scripts, to shooting, to final release and promotion. In the Pickford Film Corporation’s first two years she earned a guaranteed million-dollar salary.
When Pickford, Griffith, Fairbanks and Chaplin founded United Artists in 1919, Hollywood studios were vertically integrated, owning the movie theaters as well as producing the movies they showed in them. United Artists was different because it was solely a distribution company—and therefore the producers and actors it used were, for the first time, independent from “the bankers, the distributors and the sales executives.” From 1920, Pickford and Fairbanks made their own films at their shared studio on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Mary described her career as “planned, painful, purposeful” and her extraordinary achievements attest to that. The most important element of her success was her dedication to what her fans wanted of her. “We love Mary Pickford because she loves us,” said Motion Picture Magazine in 1918. As her worries over her divorce and remarriage show, Pickford knew that her off-screen life was just as important to her public persona as her on-screen roles and she deliberately cultivated a dignified, almost matronly image. The Fairbanks’s Beverly Hills mansion, Pickfair, was as sumptuously decorated as her fans might have hoped, with the first private swimming pool in Los Angeles, but the atmosphere was relatively staid for Hollywood in the 1920s.
Before dinners at Pickfair, Fairbanks would take their male guests for a Turkish bath at the studio. Evening entertainment was often a movie; Douglas’s little mongrel might perform tricks. Despite its extravagance—Pickfair introduced Hollywood to “a land of vintage wine and caviar in iced swan boats, glittering jewels and French chefs, aviaries and peacocks in formal gardens”—there was very little drinking and no “jazzing.” “You couldn’t take off your shoes and dance” there, said one friend. Mary herself danced sedately only with her husband who was notoriously jealous. After their marriage he said firmly that, from now on, America’s Sweetheart would just be his sweetheart.
Douglas Fairbanks was unusual in Hollywood in that his family background was middle-class although, like Mary, his father had abandoned his mother when he was a small child. After more than a decade acting on Broadway Fairbanks moved to Hollywood in 1915 where, working with the writer-director team of Anita Loos and her future husband John Emerson, he quickly became a star. Like Pickford he was an astute operator, making it his business to understand movies inside out. On screen Fairbanks gave off an almost tangible physical radiance that was a projection more of his genuine exuberance and virility than of any acquired acting skills. Tall, strong, athletic, darkly tanned, glowing with health, Fairbanks always appeared decent and honorable, and never took himself too seriously.
United, Pickford and Fairbanks were an even bigger draw than they had been as individual stars. When they traveled to New York and Europe in the months following their wedding, vast and uncontrollable crowds formed at their public appearances. In Paris, two butchers saved Pickford from being crushed by the mob at the market of Les Halles by locking her into a meat cage until the gendarmerie arrived to escort her to safety. Even English aristocrats were in thrall to their glamour: the leaders of the rich bohemian set, the Earl and Countess of Milford Haven and their younger brother and sister-in-law, Lord and Lady Louis Mountbatten, who honeymooned at Pickfair, wooed the Fairbankses on their visits to London. Their friend Charlie Chaplin said their manner with the “exalted” was wonderful.
In Hollywood their status was assured: Mary and Douglas were “Hollywood royalty.” People instinctively stood up when Pickford entered the room. As the film actress Joan Crawford put it, although the newspaper magnate W. R. Hearst was richer than the Fairbankses and his California estate, San Simeon, far larger and more opulent than Pickfair, Marion Davies (Hearst’s mistress) “was always just one of the gals, and Hearst put the catsup bottle on the table, but Mary was a queen and everyone knew it.”
But despite the majestic image she projected, the reality of Mary Pickford’s life was far from serene. Her mother had a decided weakness for whisky; her sister Lottie (whose great friend was Dutch Talmadge) was a party girl who dabbled in cocaine and eventually married four times; her brother Jack was a charming boozer. Once her marriage with Fairbanks broke down in the early 1930s, following revelations of his affair with a British model and actress, Sylvia Ashley, Mary finally surrendered to her genetic inheritance; she would struggle with alcoholism for the rest of her life. This contrast between a carefully controlled public image and a chaotic private life was far from rare in twenties Hollywood.
Behind the Zenith-like façade of respectability cultivated by Pickford and Fairbanks, Hollywood was alive with easy money, sex, bootleg liquor and drugs. In many ways Los Angeles was still a frontier town. Charlie Chaplin remembered hearing coyotes howl at night in Beverly Hills when he first arrived there in the mid- 1910s. Violence was commonplace. Screenwriter Elinor Glyn was shocked to hear isolated shots and cries ringing out in the balmy night air. After dinners at Pickfair (in the wilds of Beverly Hills) a second car would follow hers back to her hotel in case she was held up en route.
Far more than New York or Chicago, Los Angeles was a modern Babylon, an explosive concentration of new wealth, ambition and the easy accessibility of anything one could dream of. “Money was abundant,” remembered Lillian Gish. “Luxury was everywhere. Shoeshine boys and cab drivers played the stock market . . . indigent young actors were getting used to traveling in limousines.”
But as the Photoplay columnist Adela Rogers said, “Low education and high income don’t mix.” Most Hollywood actors in the early 1920s came from poverty to find themselves lavished with popular adoration and, at relatively young ages, with more money than they had ever imagined. Few had stable family backgrounds or much education. It was hardly surprising that they spent their silly money like water, had affairs with everyone they could, drank heavily and took drugs.
This was one aspect of what Elinor Glyn described as the “Hollywood disease”—to which she confessed she also succumbed, although (in her sixties) perhaps not to the same extremes as some. It started almost on one’s arrival, Glyn wrote, producing “a sense of exaggerated self-importance and self-centeredness, which naturally alienates all old friends. Next comes a great desire for and belief in the importance of money above all else, a loss of the normal sense of humor and of proportion, and finally, in extreme cases, the abandonment of all previous standards of moral value.”
The one star more beloved than Mary Pickford was Charlie Chaplin, who had come to Hollywood in late 1913 from the English music-hall stage, after three years touring America in vaudeville shows. Like Pickford, his youth in and out of work-houses and paupers’ schools in south London had been marked by desperate poverty and deprivation. Chaplin never forgot the fear and isolation of his childhood, and even—or perhaps especially—his most comedic work was indelibly marked by his early experiences. As a friend said, he was “one of the loneliest souls that ever walked this earth.”
Chaplin described finding New York a frightening and unfriendly place when he arrived there in 1910 at the age of twenty-one. While others swaggered on the streets Charlie looked and felt “lone and isolated.” These feelings never left him. Three years later, with his first decent paycheck in his pocket, Chaplin booked himself into an expensive hotel for the first time. He said he wanted to weep when he saw his well-appointed room and sat by the bath turning the hot and cold taps off and on, thinking, “How bountiful and reassuring is luxury!” Years later he would say that the saddest thing he could “imagine is to get used to luxury.”
It was in his third film for Keystone, released in February 1914, that Chaplin introduced the Tramp. His defining character came into being almost by accident. “On the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering [Mack] Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage [set] he was fully born.”
“You know this fellow is many-sided, a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure,” said Chaplin elsewhere. “He would have you believe he is a scientist, a musician, a duke, a polo player. However, he is not above picking up cigarette butts or robbing a baby of its candy. And, of course, if the situation warrants it, he will kick a lady in the rear—but only in extreme anger.”
As the humble, noble, hopeful Tramp, in film after film, Chaplin had found a way of communicating the naïve bewilderment felt by modern man as he confronted a world which seemed determined to rob him of his dignity. His own experiences were a fundamental part of his astonishing appeal; as he said, the Tramp was never a character constructed to appeal to audiences, but “myself . . . something within me that I must express.” “There is no tragedy of life’s seamy side which Charlie Chaplin does not know,” wrote the journalist Beverly Nichols, “not only because he has a great heart, but because he has shared the tragedy himself.”
This intense vulnerability was the secret of Chaplin’s universal appeal. He encapsulated the nameless sense of longing felt by so many Americans during this period, from Zelda Fitzgerald to the compulsive womanizer President Harding. Even Sinclair Lewis’s fictional George Babbitt, the Midwestern estate agent whose name became a synonym for middle-class conformity and complacency, was not immune to these yearnings. Lewis describes his most unromantic of heroes tucked up in his sleeping-porch (the dernier cri of modern suburban house design) but “restless again, discontented about nothing and everything, ashamed of his discontentment” and dreaming of a “fairy girl” who waited for him in mysterious, magical groves. Only Charlie Chaplin could have understood this side of George Babbitt. As the critic Gilbert Seldes said, Chaplin corresponded to all “our secret desires.”
Charlie existed outside space and time, wrote Seldes, in a world that he had created and where he became an “eternal figure of lightness and of the wisdom which knows that the earth was made to dance on. It was a green earth, excited by its own abundance and fruitfulness, and he possessed it entirely . . . As it spins under his feet he dances silently and with infinite grace upon it.”
By the late 1910s and throughout the 1920s, critics like Seldes were competing to see who could praise Chaplin the most highly. Harper’s decided his vulgarity was an essential element of his art, in the tradition of Aristophanes, Cervantes and Swift; the New Republic praised the democratic breadth of his appeal. Chaplin was all things to all men: the social commentator Waldo Frank commended him for creating “a viable alternative to the materialism of American culture” while the literary critic Edmund Wilson marveled at his reactions, “as fresh, as authentically personal, as those of a poet.”
The Gold Rush, Chaplin’s masterpiece, was released in 1925. It grossed over $4 million dollars, earning United Artists $1 million and its star $2 million. The cartoonist and comic writer Robert Sherwood (who himself sported a Chaplinesque moustache) summarized what he called Chaplin’s “symbolical autobiography” for Vanity Fair: “It is the story of a stampede in the Klondike, with an enormous mob of eager prospectors storming the heights of Chinook Pass in a wild scramble for gold. With the procession, and yet utterly detached from it, is a lonely figure in a derby hat and a burlap Inverness cape, who carries a bamboo cane to aid him in his perilous climb up the icy slopes. He would like to mix with the others, but they will have none of him; they are too busy, too anxious to get down to business to bother with him. So he must go his way alone. He finds the gold, but the dance-hall girl of his heart jilts him—and he is compelled to return home with nothing but vast wealth to show for his efforts.”
Chaplin’s gold-mine was the movie industry and, like the Tramp, although he found immense wealth there true love was more elusive. Comedy was his only release, the only way he could stop being overwhelmed, as he put it, “by the apparent seriousness of life.” “Charlie Chaplin’s secret is that he has created for himself a mask in which all this gamut [from comedian to sensualist, from sentimentalist to ironist] lives,” wrote Waldo Frank in an early edition of the New Yorker the year The Gold Rush came out. “What a strange mask it is: a bit of a moustache, a bit of a cane, baggy trousers, flapping shoes. Yet it has satisfied the world, from China to Paris. It has failed him in but a single way—a cruel one: for it has failed to satisfy its maker.”
In 1920, Chaplin had spotted a young extra named Lillita MacMurray while directing The Kid. Struck by the twelve-yearold’s precocious allure, he asked her to play the provocative angel-temptress in the film’s dream sequence. Four years later (having not seen her in the interim) he cast her as the Tramp’s love interest in The Gold Rush, but by the time filming had started several months later Lita Grey (the stage-name Chaplin had chosen for her) was pregnant. Her role was filled by another actress and, because she was still only sixteen and refused to have an abortion, she and Chaplin were secretly married in Mexico.
Although she and Chaplin had two sons in the next two years, the marriage was miserable from the start. In December 1926 Grey left Chaplin and filed for divorce, accusing him of neglect and cruelty and demanding $1.25 million in alimony. Hollywood may have turned a blind eye to Chaplin’s taste for young girls, but the nation was aghast at the revelations of the Little Tramp’s “immorality” and “degeneracy.” The exposure of his marriage to a minor and his negligent and abusive treatment of her nearly destroyed him. Grey’s suit included claims that Chaplin had tried to force her to abort both of her babies, demanded oral sex (considered utterly reprehensible at the time) and asked other women to join them in bed, and she threatened to name five prominent women with whom Chaplin was said to have been involved during their marriage. Across the country appalled wives and mothers formed groups petitioning for Chaplin’s films to be banned and raising money to help feed his abandoned children.
The divorce, which awarded Grey over $600,000 (the largest settlement made up to that time) and each of her sons trusts of $100,000, and cost Chaplin almost a million dollars in legal fees, was finalized in August 1927. But somehow Chaplin’s appeal was undimmed. Out of a series of scandals that shook Hollywood to its foundations during the 1920s, he was the only survivor.
One evening in the mid-1920s Chaplin, Elinor Glyn and Marion Davies saw a murder being committed outside the door of Glyn’s suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. When Glyn enquired what had happened, the following day, the hotel denied all knowledge of a crime; only the much-scrubbed bloodstain on the carpet remained as evidence of what Glyn and her friends had witnessed. This was Hollywood’s initial approach to the scandals that threatened to destroy it: if the evidence could be concealed, then no one would be the wiser. The real problems started when the scandals happened so regularly that the truth could no longer be suppressed.
In September 1920, Mary Pickford’s appealing but wayward brother Jack and his exquisite starlet wife, Olive Thomas, returned to the Ritz in Paris after an evening slumming at a seedy Montmartre bar, Le Café du Rat Mort. As the Pickfords went through the lobby witnesses observed that they looked “unsteady, but not drunk.” That night Olive took mercury tablets and died after five days of excruciating suffering. Despite the verdict of accidental death it is unclear whether she took the pills by accident, thinking they were sleeping pills, or whether she intended to kill herself perhaps because of her husband’s infidelities and the syphilis he had given her, or because of her own addiction to morphine or cocaine.
A year later, the comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was charged with the murder of a young actress named Virginia Rappe. Arbuckle was a brilliant physical comedian who was the first actor to be contracted for a million dollars a year. Banners advertising his movies read, “He’s worth his weight in laughs”; reviewers hailed his success as proof “that everybody loves a fat comedian.” But Arbuckle resented being called Fatty and hated the fact that his stardom was linked to his size. In 1917 he complained to Photoplay that “if Joe Schenck [his producer] didn’t harbor the hallucination that fat is my fortune, I’d be a contender for Doug Fairbanks’s athletic honors in the movies. [But] my fat is my fortune.” Arbuckle feared that his bulk prevented him from being taken seriously as an actor and looked jealously on as his contemporaries—Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks—attracted critical acclaim on top of popular applause and huge salaries.
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 trying to get you for five years,” before locking the bedroom door behind them. One theory was that Arbuckle had crushed Rappe while making love to her or, frustrated at his impotence, had damaged her internally by penetrating her with a bottle. Another girl who was present in the suite at first backed up Delmont’s accusations but later insisted that Rappe had gone into Arbuckle’s bedroom “because she wanted to.”
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 Hearst, who “spent millions as nonchalantly as though it were weekly pocket money.” Hearst lived in extravagant style at his ranch in San Simeon, where the dining room was a replica of the nave of Westminster Abbey and the indoor swimming pool was lined with 10-carat-gold mosaic tiles imported from Venice.
Hearst had wooed Marion Davies, then a Ziegfeld girl, by pressing diamond wrist-watches into her hands when they met. Despite succumbing to this method of courtship, Davies was utterly unpretentious, funny, warm and generous—the kind of woman whose diamond-and-onyx cigarette case was held together by a rubber band. Hearst, who was becoming obsessed by the movies, fell in love with her and insisted on promoting her film career even though she protested, stuttering charmingly, that she had no talent for acting; in fact she was a gifted comedienne. Hearst’s Catholic wife would not agree to a divorce, but Davies didn’t mind not being able to marry WR, or Pops, as she called him. “Love doesn’t need a wedding ring . . . Why should I run after a streetcar when I was already aboard?” She would prove her devotion to Hearst by saving him from financial ruin in the late 1930s.
Weekend house parties at San Simeon were as famous as dinners at Pickfair. As many as fifty guests spent their days playing tennis, swimming, riding around the estate or admiring WR’s private zoo. Hearst was an old-fashioned host. When Jean Harlow came down to dinner in a dress Hearst considered too revealing, he asked Marion to tell her to change. Harlow returned to the dining room pointedly wearing her coat.
As a teetotaler, Hearst frowned on excessive drinking. The first cocktails of the day were served at 6 p.m., and although Marion gathered friends in her rooms for surreptitious drinks, people who made the mistake of bringing their own flasks would find them emptied by the butler who unpacked their bags. Each guest at San Simeon was permitted two cocktails, no more.
For all his stuffiness, Hearst could be endearingly childlike. One night his feelings were hurt because he hadn’t been included in a game of charades. “Well,” said the actor Jack Gilbert, “we’ll play a charade on our own, and act out the word ‘pill-box’—I’ll be the box and you can be the pill.” WR rushed out of the room, slamming the door: “I don’t want to play your old charades.” On other, happier occasions he would get up and tap-dance with the most “charming gaucheness.”
Hearst was powerful enough—and his friends were loyal enough—to suppress the Ince affair when news of his death became public. Some years later Elinor Glyn insisted that all the rumors were lies, and that Ince had left the boat and died of heart problems following acute indigestion which he had refused to have treated because he was a Christian Scientist. Chaplin said that he had not attended the boating party at which the death was alleged to have occurred, but that Glyn had told him Ince had died of a heart attack. To this day no one knows what really happened because the only witness who might have spoken out, the gossip columnist Louella Parsons, accepted a lucrative job from Hearst when she stepped ashore and never spoke of the incident again. The matter was not investigated by the police.
At last even Washington found it impossible to ignore scandals of this magnitude. Fears about Hollywood’s corruption of America and American values were compounded by the knowledge that the film industry was created and run principally by ambitious, innovative Jewish and Catholic immigrants including (to name producers and directors alone) the Polish Warner brothers, Louis Mayer, Irving Thalberg, Adrian Zukor and Sam Goldwyn. In this xenophobic era, nothing could have made Hollywood seem more threatening.
In 1922 the U.S. president Warren Harding’s staunchly Presbyterian former campaign manager, Will Hays, was created first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (at an annual salary of $100,000) and charged with imposing codes of morality both on movies that were made and on the stars performing in them. His recommendations, designed to safeguard “American” family values and the sanctity of marriage and the home, were approved in 1930 and enforced from 1934. The first dictate read, “No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it.” Heated love scenes—like those for which Pola Negri had been celebrated—and references to “impure love” were banned, in case they aroused improper passions; virtue and morality were to triumph by decree; the clergy were not to be ridiculed and gangsters were not to be portrayed as sympathetic. But, for Hollywood hotshots as for Washington politicians, the appearance of morality remained far more important than the practice of it.