Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties

Chapter 2

Prev List Next

Social anthropology, another rapidly developing discipline, provided a further incentive to rebel against the constraints of "civilized" society. In 1925 the young anthropologist Margaret Mead spent several months studying teenage girls in Samoa whom she found to be s.e.xually experimental and unrestrained by Western morals and inhibitions (her research has since been partially discredited). She believed that concepts of celibacy, monogamy and fidelity were "meaningless" to Samoans and had been largely created by modern society.

The conclusion of Mead"s best-selling book of 1928, Coming of Age in Samoa Coming of Age in Samoa, was that man is shaped more by society than by biology. Implicit in her work was a critique of the repressive tendencies of American society-against which Mead herself would struggle in order to live out the s.e.xually liberated life she desired. Contemporaries interpreted her book to mean that the troubles American teenagers endured on their path to adulthood were related to the inhibitions society inflicted upon them. Freeing oneself from civilization"s constraints was thus the route to happiness. The Flapper, with her devil-may-care att.i.tude, epitomized this defiance of convention and consequence.

Literature reinforced science"s arguments. In 1920, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay famously summed up her appet.i.te for life and adventure in "A Few Figs from Thistles": My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends- It gives a lovely light.

Millay"s hedonistic philosophy was an imperative for the young in the twenties: living in the present, as intensely as possible, was all that mattered.

Like Millay and Fitzgerald, the heroines of best-selling twenties novels were untamed and unsentimental. Yvonne, the flame-haired beauty in Kay Brush"s Glitter Glitter, says that if she were a man she would be a racing-driver and announces her intention of living-and dying-"sensationally." In The Sheik The Sheik, by Edith Hull, spoiled Diana Mayo declares with some pride that she hasn"t a heart. Their code was Zelda"s: "Not to be sorry, not to loose one cry of regret, to live according to a clear code of honor toward each other, and to seek the moment"s happiness as fervently and persistently as possible."

Partly because of Scott"s portrayals of Zelda as the 1920s ideal, being called fast became almost a compliment, rather than a slur on a girl"s character. Journalists wrote in shocked tones about the prevalence of "petting parties." It was well known that cars provided unchaperoned young couples with a boudoir on wheels. Magazines featured "s.e.x adventure stories" called "Indolent Kisses" or "Watch Your Step-Ins"; movies advertised "things you"ve always wanted to do and never DARED."

Although the Flapper was the product primarily of a youth movement, middle-aged women were also attracted by the lure of abandoned pleasure-seeking. Evalyn McLean, a generation older than Zelda, described the new morals to her friend Florence Harding, the First Lady, from a vacation in Florida in 1923. One was n.o.body there without a beau, she said: "You must never be seen with your husband, and never go to bed until morning!" According to Malcolm Cowley, the bohemian spirit of Greenwich Village had died by the late 1920s "because women smoked cigarettes on the streets of the Bronx, drank gin c.o.c.ktails in Omaha and had perfectly swell parties in Seattle and Middletown"-in other words, because every woman in America had become a Flapper.

It was not so easy for the prototype. The Fitzgeralds" friends had long predicted that disaster would be the result of their excessive lifestyle. Soon after they were married Alec McKaig lamented Zelda"s desire "to live the life of an "extravagant." No thought of what the world will think or of the future. I told them they were headed for catastrophe if they kept up at present rate." Even Fitzgerald recognized that increasingly their hedonism was just "despair turned inside out." As the years wore on, Zelda found her life with Scott frustrating and meaningless, despite the glamour she had longed for as a girl. While other women of her generation had taken real advantage of the new freedoms available to them, she felt she had never been able to create an ident.i.ty for herself as anything other than Scott"s wife-the outrageous and desirable Flapper incarnate. By her late twenties she was desperate to use her talents, to have something of her own, not to be merely what she called a "complementary intelligence." She "felt excluded by her lack of accomplishment . . . she felt she had nothing to give to the world and no way to dispose of what she took away."

Lacking the career which both advertised Scott"s worth and provided his retreat from the world, in her late twenties Zelda rejected their past intemperance and took up ballet, her childhood ambition. She became consumed by the dream of becoming a professional dancer even though, aged twenty-seven when she began, her chances of success were virtually non-existent. But she refused to be persuaded, practicing up to eight agonizing hours a day for over two years, relishing discipline for the first time in her life, pushing herself harder and harder to achieve the impossible.

Zelda"s furious obsession with ballet was not just a desire for order, it was also a futile attempt to stop time. She and Scott had always held that youth and beauty were the altars on which any considerations of the future must be sacrificed. Fear of losing the looks and att.i.tude which had set her apart haunted Zelda. Like Nicky in Noel Coward"s The Vortex The Vortex, she was straining "every nerve to keep young."

More and more in the late 1920s there was the sense with Zelda that something wasn"t right. The novelist John Dos Pa.s.sos said that looking into her eyes during this period was "like peering into a dark abyss." In the spring of 1930 Zelda had her first breakdown and that summer was inst.i.tutionalized and later diagnosed with schizophrenia.

In 1932, during a six-week period of feverish lucidity, Zelda wrote Save Me the Waltz Save Me the Waltz, a barely-fictionalized account of her relationship with Scott, her brief affair with another man and her failing struggle against mental illness set against their shared backdrop of literary life in New York and as prosperous Americans in Europe. Hardly coincidentally, much of it was similar to Tender Is the Night Tender Is the Night, the novel Scott was working on at the same time. Knowing this, Zelda deliberately provoked Scott"s fury by sending her ma.n.u.script to his editor without showing it to him first. This was her account of the shared experiences that had made them both rich, famous, envied and unhappy-her defense against being made into just another flawed character in one of her husband"s books-and she was determined to tell it to the world.

During their life together Zelda had provided Scott with inspiration and living material for his female characters-he had lifted long pa.s.sages straight from her diary for The Beautiful and d.a.m.ned- The Beautiful and d.a.m.ned-and written occasional articles and short stories which they had published either jointly or under Scott"s name. "I am so outrageously clever that I believe I could be a whole world to myself if I didn"t like living in Daddy"s better," says Zelda"s self-portrait, Alabama, to her daughter. Since Scott was the literary celebrity, it made sense to capitalize on his fame; Zelda writing alone could command a fraction of the sum a Scott Fitzgerald piece might bring in. Reading her book, it is hard not to feel that at last-and too late-Zelda had decided that her life was her own material, not her husband"s.

Zelda spent her remaining years, on and off, in asylums, still fueled by the urge to create. She had always had a striking and highly unusual visual sense, but when her schizophrenia set in it became ever more hallucinatory and intense. "There was a new significance to everything," she wrote in Save Me the Waltz Save Me the Waltz. "Stations and streets and facades of buildings-colors were infinite, part of the air, and not restricted by the lines that encompa.s.sed them and lines were free of the ma.s.ses they held." During her last years she painted these strange visions.

As a girl, Zelda had identified with the heroine of Owen Johnson"s best-selling novel and movie of the 1910s, The Salamander The Salamander, its t.i.tle taken from the lizard thought in cla.s.sical times to be able to pa.s.s untouched through fire: "I am in the world to do something unusual, extraordinary. I"m not like every other little woman." Looking back on her life, Zelda sadly acknowledged that her "story is the fault of n.o.body but me. I believed I was a Salamander and it seems I am nothing but an impediment." In 1948 a fire razed her sanatorium to the ground and she died in the blaze-no salamander, after all. She was forty-eight years old.

For most women of Zelda"s generation, being a Flapper was a stage rather than a Faustian pact. Even in literature and the movies, however wildly they danced or however many cigarettes they smoked, most Flappers ended up choosing love and conventional marriages-they wanted happy endings, not tragic ones. The heroine of The Sheik The Sheik, independent Diana Mayo, discovers that she loves the macho Bedouin who has kidnapped her and meekly submits to his will; Glitter Glitter"s glamorous but fallen heroine, Yvonne, forces herself to abandon her lover to ensure that he marries a "nice" girl; the British romantic novelist Elinor Glyn"s smoking, c.o.c.ktail-drinking Flapper insists she"s only marrying for the alimony, to cover up the shameful fact that she"s in love. The defeat of romance and morality was only ever temporary.

A more enduring social change can be seen in twenties women"s att.i.tudes to work. On one hand, the technological advances of the period freed women from heavy housework. Electric stoves, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and washing machines appeared; new houses were built with central heating, running water and modern plumbing. Clothes could be bought ready-made, laundry sent out, bread and ice-cream brought home from the shops. As standards of living rose, the time a woman needed to devote to keeping house fell.

But these modern conveniences did not come cheap, and the desire to contribute to the household income and give their family the best start in life led many women, married as well as single, to take up jobs outside the home. The twenties were a time when social and financial aspirations seemed achievable. "I"ve always wanted my girls to do something other than housework," said one working-cla.s.s Middletown mother. "I don"t want them to be house drudges like me!"

Part of this new att.i.tude was the legacy of the Great War. While men were away training or at the front, women had taken their places in offices and factories. Despite being paid dramatically lower wages than their male counterparts, many found that they did not want to give up their newly discovered salaries and independence when peace was declared.

In Middletown in 1924, 89 percent of girls in the last three years of high school said that they planned to get jobs after they graduated-although most would give them up when they married. Women may have been willing to work, but many men were ambivalent about permitting them to do so. A 1923 poll showed that 90 percent of students from Va.s.sar College were prepared to put marriage before a career. Still, by 1928, five times as many women had jobs as in 1918.

Increasingly, these jobs were white collar, rather than in factories or as domestic servants. Women became librarians, teachers, nurses, clerks, telephone operators, secretaries, stenographers, shop a.s.sistants. A few women blazed trails in areas. .h.i.therto dominated by men, as journalists, artists, advertising copywriters or scriptwriters, social workers, sociologists, photographers, doctors and lawyers.

Film was one of the first industries in which women competed on roughly equal terms with men, directing, producing and writing as well as acting. Like many best-selling authors of her day, Elinor Glyn was offered handsome terms to come to Hollywood to write and develop film scenarios. She arrived in 1920 to take up an offer of $10,000 per picture and ended up staying seven years, both writing and directing. "I wanted," she wrote later of her time in Los Angeles, "to stir up in the cold hearts of the thousands of little fluffy, gold-digging American girls a desire for greater joy in love than is to be found in candy-boxes and car rides and fur coats." Glyn named perhaps the most enduring marketing concept in movie history: "It," or s.e.x appeal, as embodied by Clara Bow in the 1926 film of the same name. When asked what "It" was, a bemused Bow is said to have replied, "I ain"t real sure."

Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was another female writer who helped shape early Hollywood. A child actor, she knew the industry inside out by the time she started writing for the director D.W. Griffith in 1912, aged twenty-four; Mary Pickford, the greatest female star of the silent movie era, starred in her first screenplay. Loos would write over two hundred movies and claimed that her scripts made Douglas Fairbanks famous. Pet.i.te, determined, talented and self-reliant, Loos was the opposite of her most famous creation, the statuesque gold-digger Lorelei Lee-although she shared with her a taste for serious frocks. "I"ve had my best times when trailing a Mainbocher evening gown across a sawdust floor," Loos once said, in true Flapper style. "I"ve always loved high style in low company."

Scott Fitzgerald"s favorite actress, the ethereal Lillian Gish, was another protegee of D.W. Griffith"s and star of the first modern blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation The Birth of a Nation of 1915. Griffith offered her the chance to direct of 1915. Griffith offered her the chance to direct Remodelling Her Husband Remodelling Her Husband in 1920, but Gish was unimpressed by the experience. She told reporters afterwards that directing was a man"s job. in 1920, but Gish was unimpressed by the experience. She told reporters afterwards that directing was a man"s job.

Gish had been introduced to Griffith by Mary Pickford. Perennially typecast as an innocent girl because of her ringlets and childlike body, she was known as America"s Sweetheart but behind the scenes wielded immense influence in 1920s Hollywood and was the first actress to earn over a million dollars a year. In 1919, she, Chaplin, her lover Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith set up United Artists, which would allow artists for the first time to produce and distribute their own work, and to be properly credited for their role in creating it. "The lunatics have taken over the asylum," quipped one of their former bosses; but their success confounded the doubters.

The gravest threat to Mary Pickford"s hold on American hearts came not from another actress, but from her personal life. Unhappily married to an alcoholic actor, Owen Moore, who was jealous of her fame, when she met swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks in 1916 the attraction between them was immediate. Fairbanks wanted to divorce his wife and marry Pickford, but she was terrified of the damage a scandal would do to her wholesome reputation and hard-won career. Being a Catholic, she was also reluctant to divorce on religious grounds.

As women became more emanc.i.p.ated, divorce became more common and more socially acceptable. There were 100,000 divorces in 1914 and 205,000 in 1929. Once they could support themselves, fewer women were willing to remain in unhappy marriages. "The reason there are more divorces is that people are demanding more of life than they used to," a female journalist from Middletown explained. A divorced woman used to be disgraced, but now, "We see that no good purpose is achieved by keeping together two people who have come to hate each other."

Fairbanks and Pickford married in March 1920-two years after his divorce and just a month after hers. At first Mary was pilloried by the scandal-sheets of the day, but public opinion swung to her defense when the abuse she had suffered at the hands of Owen Moore was revealed. The fairy-tale nature of her match with Fairbanks-America"s Sweetheart married to its most dashing screen idol-was another factor that contributed to her rehabilitation, although conservatives continued to frown upon the Pickford-Fairbanks match for making divorce acceptable for "respectable" people.

Mary Pickford knew that her plucky, childlike screen persona was the key to her success and, apart from her divorce, she was reluctant to jeopardize her image. Not until 1929 did she dare to cut off the golden curls that had made her name. "I am a servant of the public," she once said. "I"ve never forgotten that." But although she continued to make successful movies and held on tightly to her position as uncrowned queen of Hollywood, as the twenties wore on, Pickford-who was twenty-eight in 1920-was gradually eclipsed by younger and more daring actresses whose Flapperish reputations were more in keeping with the mood of the age.

For a time Zelda Fitzgerald hoped that a movie director would discover her and make her a star, but her beauty was not unusual in Hollywood and there were plenty of eager starlets hoping to embody the Flapper on the silver screen. Some had the right att.i.tude, but lacked focus. Constance Talmadge, known as Dutch, was the ultimate party girl, a "sparkling blond clown" who was always getting engaged "but never to less than two men at the same time." For Dutch, fun was the main aim in life; she looked on her film career as a means to an end-a way out of poverty. Having made her money and secured her future, she retired in 1929 aged just thirty-two.

Gloria Swanson possessed none of Talmadge"s reticence or Pickford"s innocence: she was hungry for fame and all the delights success would bring her. Her big break came in 1919 when Cecil B. deMille cast her as his heroine in Don"t Change Your Husband Don"t Change Your Husband. Soon afterwards, the twenty-year-old Gloria gave an interview to Motion Picture Magazine, Motion Picture Magazine, cementing her image as a modern sophisticate. "I not only believe in divorce, but I sometimes think I don"t believe in marriage at all," she declared, and would prove her sincerity by going on to divorce five husbands. In 1923, fearing scandal would affect her popularity, Paramount forced Swanson to settle her second divorce out of court because her estranged husband was accusing her of committing adultery with fourteen men. Her popularity was unaffected, or perhaps enhanced, by these allegations. In the same year, she was receiving ten thousand fan letters a week. cementing her image as a modern sophisticate. "I not only believe in divorce, but I sometimes think I don"t believe in marriage at all," she declared, and would prove her sincerity by going on to divorce five husbands. In 1923, fearing scandal would affect her popularity, Paramount forced Swanson to settle her second divorce out of court because her estranged husband was accusing her of committing adultery with fourteen men. Her popularity was unaffected, or perhaps enhanced, by these allegations. In the same year, she was receiving ten thousand fan letters a week.

Glamour and extravagance were essential parts of her persona. On screen, Swanson was usually shown in magnificent gowns, often with trains, wearing turbans or feathered headdresses, draped in fur and jewelry. She deliberately cultivated her image as a magnetic, mysterious star. In her hands a cigarette holder became the most dramatic of accessories. As deMille said, "She knew how to lean against a door."

Mary Pickford may have been the first woman to have made a million in Hollywood, but (so the saying went) Gloria Swanson was the first to spend it. Photoplay Photoplay reported that her annual expenditure in 1924 included nearly $10,000 on silk stockings, $6,000 on perfume, $50,000 on dresses . . . and an unspecified amount on jewels. "In those days they wanted us to live like kings and queens . . . so we did," Swanson remembered. "And why not? We were in love with life. We were making more money than we ever dreamed existed, and there was no reason to believe that it would ever stop." reported that her annual expenditure in 1924 included nearly $10,000 on silk stockings, $6,000 on perfume, $50,000 on dresses . . . and an unspecified amount on jewels. "In those days they wanted us to live like kings and queens . . . so we did," Swanson remembered. "And why not? We were in love with life. We were making more money than we ever dreamed existed, and there was no reason to believe that it would ever stop."

Like Pickford, Swanson had ambitions as a businesswoman. If she was to be packaged as a commodity, she wanted to reap the rewards herself. In early 1928, having made a disastrous attempt to set up her own production company under the aegis of United Artists, her lover Joseph Kennedy helped her form Gloria Productions (still in a.s.sociation with United Artists). Kennedy was one of the major forces behind the transition to sound in movies. Swanson was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar (her second) for her role in the first talkie they produced together, The Trespa.s.ser The Trespa.s.ser, but the end of her affair with Kennedy and the financial strain of producing her own films took their toll on her career in the 1930s.

Swanson"s great rival in the femme fatale stakes was Pola Negri, billed by her studio as a "wildcat." Negri adored the trappings of celebrity and played up to her image as an exotic bird of paradise whom men could not resist. Each day the floor of her dressing room was strewn with orchid petals. She wore only black or white, always with scarlet nails. Chinchilla was her fur of choice. She could often be seen on Sunset Boulevard taking her pet tiger for a walk, or being driven around flanked by two white wolfhounds. At the funeral of her lover, Rudolph Valentino, in 1926 Negri appeared heavily veiled and fainted several times over his coffin.

Like Swanson, Negri made a virtue out of being single. "I do not believe in marriage. It is not for me. I am selfish, no, not selfish, for I have sacrificed everything for love. I am independent. Freedom comes before anything. I am a gypsy . . ." This brand of intensely independent, highly s.e.xualized glamour looked to many women like emanc.i.p.ation. With their gaze fixed on the immense profits to be made, Hollywood studio bosses were only too glad to sell women liberation and modernity for the price of a movie ticket.

The Vamp: Theda Bara at her most darkly seductive as seductive as Cleopatra Cleopatra (1917). Al Capone (1917). Al Capone had a photograph of Bara in his office. had a photograph of Bara in his office.

"FIVE AND TEN CENT l.u.s.tS AND DREAMS"

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 A Fool There Was as a vampire who uses her s.e.xuality 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. as a vampire who uses her s.e.xuality 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 t.i.tles like The Serpent The Serpent, The Vixen The Vixen and and The She-Devil 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 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. 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 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 Pa.s.sos put it, a "bargain sale of five and ten cent l.u.s.ts 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." 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 Pa.s.sos put it, a "bargain sale of five and ten cent l.u.s.ts 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt. "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 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. 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 New York Daily News, came out in 1919; William Randolph Hearst"s even more lurid Daily Mirror 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 exposes fueled public interest in their stars, studios encouraged an almost parasitical relationship between actors and gossip columnists. 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 exposes 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, 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?"" 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.xualized. No other stars were adored like Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, whose appeal lay in their childlike naivete 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, s.e.x 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 c.o.c.ktails or allowed themselves to be kissed, most still viewed love and marriage as their ultimate aim. America may have been spellbound by "s.e.x, 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 ingenue 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 pa.s.sionately 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Motion Picture Magazine in 1920. 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 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. 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 peac.o.c.ks 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 his sweetheart. sweetheart.

Douglas Fairbanks was unusual in Hollywood in that his family background was middle-cla.s.s 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 a.s.sured: 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 facade of respectability cultivated by Pickford and Fairbanks, Hollywood was alive with easy money, s.e.x, 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 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. 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 succ.u.mbed, 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 rea.s.suring 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 b.u.t.ts 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, n.o.ble, hopeful Tramp, in film after film, Chaplin had found a way of communicating the naive 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-cla.s.s 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 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." 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Harper"s decided his vulgarity was an essential element of his art, in the tradition of Aristophanes, Cervantes and Swift; the decided his vulgarity was an essential element of his art, in the tradition of Aristophanes, Cervantes and Swift; the New Republic 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." 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 Vanity Fair: "It is the story of a stampede in the Klondike, with an enormous mob of eager prospectors storming the heights of Chinook Pa.s.s 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 New Yorker the year the year The Gold Rush 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." 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 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 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 s.e.x (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 pet.i.tioning 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 Amba.s.sador 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 Cafe 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 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. 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 s.e.xually. 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 naive, "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 n.o.body 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 h.o.m.os.e.xuality, 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 h

Prev List Next