‍Actress Virginia Rappe: Cried for help

‍WHEN filmmakers began arriving in Los Angeles around 1910, there were already public campaigns and local newspaper scandals of women being forced to exchange sex for stardom but the case of one actor blew the camera bulbs on the world scene.

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‍The man at the centre of The Casting Couch explosion was comedian and director Fatty Arbuckle, born fat, (a 13lb bundle of joy) who became enormously rich, second in the pay stakes only to Charlie Chaplin.

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‍He also became all powerful in the entertainment capital of the world, known as the City of Angels, when he produced his own movies. But Arbuckle was no angel — or was he?

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‍What happened during a wild party on America’s Labor Day of 1921, became Hollywood’s biggest newspaper scandal of the decade.

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‍Arbuckle’s friend Fred Fischbach planned to throw the party to end all parties at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The guest of honour was Arbuckle, whose latest film, “Crazy to Marry,” was a national hit.

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‍Fischbach rented three rooms (No’s. 1219, 1220, and 1221), all connecting to one another. He brought along a hefty supply of bootlegged booze (this was still the era of Prohibition), lots of eager starlets and music.

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‍Among the showbiz women invited to the party was a 25-year-old aspiring actress named Virginia Rappe.

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‍According to a guest Arbuckle and Virginia downed three or more gin and orange wine drinks together before he pulled her into one of the adjoining rooms. Arbuckle, who had a crush on the actress, reportedly said: “I’ve waited for you five years, and now I’ve got you.”

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‍Within an hour, guests claimed to hear screaming and tried to enter the room, but Arbuckle had locked it shut. Eventually, he opened the door, clad in pyjamas, wearing Virginia’s hat and smiling.

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‍Inside the room, Virginia was on the bed in pain, yelling, “I’m dying, I’m dying. He did it.”

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‍The hotel doctor and nurse were called, and they moved her to another room to rest for a few days until finally being taken to a hospital where she died, on September 9, of a ruptured bladder.

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‍One of the guests told newspapers that Arbuckle had raped the starlet and that the impact of his weight (more than 19 stone) ruptured her bladder during lovemaking. Later, Virginia’s agent, Al Semnacker, made the story worse by claiming that Arbuckle used a piece of ice to rape her—a story that quickly morphed into the obscene use of a Coca-Cola or wine bottle.

‍Other witnesses testified that Arbuckle had used the ice to rub on her stomach as a means of relieving her belly pain.

‍Fatty Arbuckle with his pet dog on the beach

‍William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper chain had a field day reporting Arbuckle’s alleged sexual depravity. Both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton meanwhile gave interviews telling of his good nature and innocence, but the film star’s reputation was shredded in the popular press. And Chaplin had only just evaded a rape charge himself.

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‍Arbuckle turned himself into the San Francisco police on Sept. 10. He was charged with manslaughter and his mugshot made front-page news across the nation and in the UK.

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‍He claimed that the drunken Virginia became so hysterical that she tore off her clothes. Complaining of shortness of breath, Arbuckle said, she began vomiting, which he thought was the result of drinking too much liquor. He tried to calm her down by putting her in a chilled bathtub and called for the hotel doctor.

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‍At the trial that followed, there were conflicting testimonies and lots of drama, including the claim that Virginia’s fingerprints on the doorknobs suggested she tried to escape the room.

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‍Hearsay claims included the story that Virginia was already suffering severe abdominal pain for over six weeks, which she blamed on a sexual relationship with another man. Rumours were that she may have suffered from the effects of a botched abortion. She was known to be promiscuous.

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‍Arbuckle went through three trials, which all ended in a deadlocked jury. He was finally released but the motion picture industry banned him from appearing on screen. His career was ruined. The ban was lifted eight months later but no one wanted to see him.

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‍Buster Keaton helped him financially and he got a job on a Los Angeles production unit. But in 1933, he signed a contract with Warner Brothers for a full-length motion picture. He was on top of the world about it.

‍Celebrating with his friends that evening, Arbuckle declared, “This is the best day of my life.” Later that night, he died in his sleep of a heart attack. He was 46.

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‍NEWSPAPER THAT GAVE TOMMIES A BUNDLE OF

‍LAUGHS IN THE DARK DAYS OF THE TRENCHES

‍WHEN a British Army patrol, covered in mud and grime in the bogs of the Western Front in 1916, came across a derelict building in the bombed-out city of Ypres, they would never have believed that they were about to herald the birth of one of the most popular newspapers of the First World War.

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‍In the corner of a battered barn was an old printing press and metal type, enough to produce a newspaper of their own, with a voice that would laugh back at death in the trenches, drawing on the combined strengths of British humour and comradeship to raise morale.

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‍And that’s just what that small band of men from the 12th (Pioneer) Battalion, The Sherwood Foresters, did. They went on to produce The Wipers Times. Wipers was the Tommies’ slang for Ypres, because they never could pronounce it.

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‍One of the sergeants in the battalion, Sergeant George Turner had been a printer in civilian life and was able to get the equipment working again. What they produced still brings laughter today.

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‍The parody paper featured news, poetry, letters, advertisements, entertainment sections, and even serial stories — all highlighting the ironies of life at The Front.

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‍One of my favourites was a send up of Conan Doyle’s iconic Sherlock Holmes, The Mysteries of Herlock Sholmes, a trench copper addicted not to morphine but to Vermorel Spray, the chemical used by Tommies to combat chlorine gas attacks.

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‍He and his assistant, named Hotsam, feature in absurd dramas set in no-man’s-land, at times accompanied by glamorous women, as they attempt to solve mysteries such as cases involving soldiers’ missing bottles of whisky and rum. There is even a spy called Sandy Sam, a sandbag merchant.

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‍One Sholmes’ anecdote mocks the tendency of nervous soldiers on the frontlines shooting at friend and foe alike: “Hurriedly tearing open and reading the dispatch, Sholmes seizes his Vermorel sprayer and rapidly squirts an enormous dose onto his forearm. Just then the voice of the faithful Hotsam was heard calling, “Where are you, Sholmes?”

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‍“Here,” replied the great detective, rapidly emptying his revolver at the approaching figure.

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‍“Thank goodness I found you at last, but you nearly got me that time,” said Hotsam admiringly.

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‍“Never mind, better luck next time,” said Sholmes, sotto voice…”

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‍A “sports” section often included dark fighting humour, such as: “There is some good shooting to be had in Railway Wood, but game is getting wilder.” Railway Wood in Ypres was a key battlefield where British soldiers dug underground tunnels to pop up behind enemy lines and shoot Germans.

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‍Mine explosions in the fields of poppies were described as “an uplifting experience”.

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‍The paper was also rich with fake advertisements regarding wartime conditions in the area. Medical vehicles were advertised as “taxis” and spoof seasonal sales ads hawked “second-hand furniture,  slightly damaged”.

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‍Barbed wire was offered at a knock down prices and there was fashion column in trench clothing. One ad offered trench duckboards, used as wooden planks for walking over mud, specially cut to pop up unexpectedly and smack commanding officers in the face.

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‍The paper proved so popular that its appeal outlasted the war. It was published in the form of collected editions in 1918 and 1930.

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‍The story of The Wipers Times was also the subject of a 2013 BBC drama of the same name, starring Michael Palin of Monty Python.

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‍TROOPER’S PIPE SMOKING WIFE HUFFED

‍AND PUFFED … AND BLEW THE TOWN UP

‍At lunchtime on June, 24 1809 a newspaper reporter was having a quiet beer in the Union Tavern in Portsmouth, while writing his story about the second battalion of the 8th Regiment of Foot, preparing to sail out at the end of the week.

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‍Suddenly there was an enormous explosion on Point Beach where galleons were arriving to transport the men overseas. The tavern windows were shattered; drinkers threw themselves to the floor and women screamed in the street running for their lives.

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‍The reporter for the Caledonian Mercury ran outside and found bodies wreckage and chaos. This is what he wrote: “The effect was most dreadful. About 20 men, women and children were literally blown to atoms, and the remains of their bodies, limbs and heads were strewn in all directions.

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‍“One poor fellow was blown over the whole of the buildings in Point Street; another against the wall of the tavern, as high as the garret window; the thigh of a third was hurled into Broad Street Point.

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‍“I have seen numbers of legs, arms etc taken from the top of houses and shops were blazing. The whole presents a scene shocking beyond description.”

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‍He reported that all the houses below Broad Street had their sashes blown out, and the Star and Garter pub as well as the Union Tavern, had its windows demolished.

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‍The reporter added that a single barrel of powder had exploded in a tier with 16 others, which for several hours were expected to ignite as smoking fragments were blown over them.

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‍But a company of the Worcester militia, with some gutsy sailors at their head, risked their lives clearing the burning fragments from the remaining barrels which were part of the arms supply to sail with the troops.

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‍When another reporter arrived later from the Hampshire Chronicle, he reported three soldiers who were bystanders, were killed, four were badly injured and five suffered injuries. Several of the soldiers’ wives and children also lost their lives.

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‍What caused such a tragedy?

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‍The next edition of the Chronicle claimed it was the wife of one of the troopers. She was doing some washing on the beach near the ammunition dump and smoking a clay pipe.

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‍Another soldier’s wife asked if she could have a puff, and she let her. But the pipe seemed to go out. So, she tapped it on some stones, and a few embers fell out setting fire to a few grains of powder that quickly sped in a line to the ammunition dump and … BANG!!!

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‍Seventeen people died that day but there was no Court Martial. The Admiralty just apologised to the mayor.

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‍ODE TO OUR RIVER OF DEATH

‍DID YOU KNOW? That in the 17th century Jonathan Swift, the man who gave us Gulliver’s Travels, wrote a poem about the River Fleet’s journey past Fleet Street that carried the sewage of such local luminaries as Samuel Pepys and Isaac Newton? If you read it, you’ll get an idea to what life was like in our Street at a time when latrines overhung its polluted waters.

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‍Called Describing a City Shower he reflects on how rain could bring out the colours and smell of the river.

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‍Filth of all hues and odours seem to tell

‍What street they sail’d from, by their sight and smell.

‍They, as each torrent drives with rapid force,

‍From Smithfield or St Pulchre’s shape their course,

‍And in huge cofluent join’d at Snow Hill ridge,

‍Fall from the Conduit prone to a Holborn bridge.

‍Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts and blood,

‍Drown’d puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,

‍Dead cats, and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍24 November 2025

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