Known for his larger-than-life comic roles in early Keystone movies, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was—quite literally—one of the silent era’s biggest stars.
At one point, the comically rotund actor was commanding a fee of $1,000 per day, and in 1918 he signed an unprecedented $3 million multi-picture contract with Paramount Studios (equivalent to more than twelve times that amount today). But all of that came to an end in 1921.
On September 5, Arbuckle took a break from his grueling filming schedule and, with two friends, booked a series of suites at the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco.
After an evening of drinking and partying, several women were invited back to the hotel, where Arbuckle planned to host a lavish party. There, one of the women, Virginia Rappe, took severely ill. Four days later, she died in hospital—and two days after that; Arbuckle was arrested for her murder.
Arbuckle denied all wrongdoing, and many of his co-stars and other Hollywood heavyweights—who knew him as nothing more than a friendly, gentle giant of a man—quickly jumped to his defense. In the press, however, Rappe was portrayed as an innocent victim, while Arbuckle was depicted as a predatory murderer who—according to one of Hollywood’s most vicious rumors—had inadvertently crushed Rappe to death while the pair were lying together in bed.
No less than three arduous court trials followed, during which Arbuckle’s name was dragged through the press daily. As the trials continued, however, the facts of the case began to tell a vastly different story.
Rappe was a heavy drinker, who had continued to drink despite suffering regular bouts of peritonitis and cystitis that were often so debilitating she would end up screaming and tearing at her clothes. An accusation that she had been assaulted by Arbuckle was found to have been concocted by one of her friends, in little more than an attempt to extort money from his attorneys.
Rappe’s death may have been a scandal, it seemed, but it was certainly not murder. After several months Arbuckle was finally acquitted. But by then, the damage had been done.
His career was ruined, and now in poor health himself, Arbuckle never recovered from the ignominy of the case and died in 1933 at the age of 46. It’s not exactly rare for a Hollywood star to suffer a fall from grace, but few stars suffered as devastating a fall as he did.