This episode is interesting as history but it also resonates with certain, more recent events. Around 1915, wild parties were the norm. Many of the actors and actresses at the center of the social world were making money for the first time. A secondary concentric circle consisted of wannabees, including small-part actresses like the attractive Virginia Rapp, a name she pronounced "Rappé." The talking heads were were period witnesses described her as not a tramp but a girl who did what she had to do in order to become better known.
One of the most famous comedians of the time was comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. He was Chaplin's equal for a period. On a vacation in San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel, Arbuckle threw one of the parties he was famous for. He retired to his room with Virginia Rapp. She later died of a ruptured bladder. An acquaintance came forward and had Arbuckle charged. The charge was murder. The vision was that the notoriously plump Arbuckle had raped the virginal girl, stifling her screams, and had ruptured her bladder in the process. Physicians testified that there was no evidence of rape. Virginia Rapp was no virgin; she'd already had several abortions.
But it didn't matter. Rumors circulated that Arbuckle had violated her with a liquor bottle. The newspapers, particularly those of William Randolph Hearst, leaped on the story and built it into a fairy tale of unbridled lust and homicide. "Tried by the press and convicted by the public," says a contemporary. The scandal spread across the world, or at least as far as the movies reached. Arbuckle was round condemned, though the charge was reduced from murder to manslaughter. The DA was running for reelection and made the most of his opportunity to become a celebrity, as did Virginia Rapp's friend. Arbuckle became a black joke and was imprisoned.
I said that this resonates with more recent events and I'm thinking of Bill Cosby, a comedian now in his seventies, charged by dozens of women of having given them liquor and drugs thirty years ago and then raping them while they were unconscious.
As I write this, the matter is a monumental scandal, and the aging comedian is the subject of late-night talk show jokes. The editorial pages and the TV screens are filled with overwrought citizens whose assumptions now include pedophilia and, if this were twenty years ago, probably Satanism. There is no evidence that Cosby did anything that other celebrities of the period were doing with groupies and eager fans, but it doesn't matter.
