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Fatty Arbuckle

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Anonymous

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Ok, I admit it, I read my mothers Daily Mail this week and in an article on orgies I saw the old myth/ UL repeated that Fatty Arbuckle raped Virginia Rappe with a coke bottle thereby causing her death. Now, some years back I read 'The Day the Laughter Died' (cannot think of author) and I read that he was acquitted THREE times of this rape. Miss Rappe had undergone several abortions and suffered from chronic cystitis both of which lead to her death (I believe) from blood-poisoning.

Arbuckle was a cultural scrapegoat in the same way as Derek Bentley, Edith Thompson were ie. Hollywood star in the new Babylon has to be shot down to appease societys worries about immortality.

I have always felt for the poor guy, despite being innocent his career was effectively over and he had to direct under false names.

Any thoughts as to why this myth will not go away............
 
Blueswidow said:
...shot down to appease societys worries about immortality.

Any thoughts as to why this myth will not go away............
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A surprisingly cogent mistake!

I had always heard it was a champagne bottle; how much better for it to have been a coke bottle.

I suppose the story is salacious enough to confirm our nasty fantasies about celebrities (red snapper anyone?), thus validating our need to dethrone and humiliate them periodically.

Besides, Fatty always had those beady eyes. Can't trust people with beady eyes.
 
I read that he killed her by jumping on top of her while her bladder was full , causing it to burst and therefore kill her .
 
I've never heard before that he was acquitted. 3 times? I thought US citizens could only be tried once for an offence.

I've also heard that Rappe's dying words were, 'he broke me inside....' urk.

Anyway, so what if she'd had abortions? That's nobody's business but hers.

Also, cystitis doesn't kill people. You can get a nasty kidney infection from it but you tend not go out partying at the time.
 
The point about the abortions was that they were carried out in the back-streets thereby giving the poor woman a weakened constitution which the cystitis aggrevated. The arguement in the book was that Virginia was a seriously ill woman who may or may not have been raped (she may have agreed to sex during the party) but all the evidence points to Arbuckle not being the rapist.
 
Some reading on the subject can be found here. Looks at the possibility that the ruptured bladder could have been caused by violent heaving/vomiting.
 
Why was Arbuckle victimised?
There were plenty of sleazy sods around to pick on. Charlie Chaplin for example was a famous schoolgirl-fancier who got into lots of, ahem, scrapes around underage girls, yet he wasn't disgraced.
 
But Chaplin was tried for under-age sex! And his adventures were
the subject of much gossip in the Hollywood papers. I would need
to go downstairs and disturb my guests to look up the lurid details
so I'll leave it till tomorrow.

You are right in that his career seemed to survive. On the whole,
I think they were more ruffled by his alleged Communist sympathies.
 
Well Barrymore seems to have chosen his name for its
Hollywood resonances!

A friend assures me that "Swimming at Barrymore's" is already in
circulation as a euphemism for risky sex. Meanwhile, I gather that
attempts have been made to blame the rectal thermometer used
at the hospital.

It sounds as if several people know the truth about the case and there
will be a lot of tabloid money flying around. Muddy waters indeed.

Perhaps it's too easy to lose sight of the real human tragedy at
the centre of it.
 
I've never heard of it referred to as an "anal canal" before, which for some reason conjures up an image of Manchester.

And I don't mean Sean (though it might for some).
 
I'm pretty sure...

... that I read or saw a show that said the tabloid press of the time's throwing around the "facts" of the case that seem to never have happened is what led to everybody remembering Fatty as "charged" and not innocent in 3 trials.
 
The Barrymore case is a torrid little affair. What makes me wonder, though, is how his career has lasted so long. Cos let's face it, he isn't very good. His presenting style is decidedly mediocre, his singing is cringe-making, he's not exactly the best-looking guy in showbiz, and his shows are bad even for ITV standards. Before poor Mr Luddock was found dead in his swimming pool he'd had enough scandals to make most celebrities be tucked away in deadslots (no jokes please), but yet he still ended up on teatime TV with old ladies going "oooooooh he's lovely", ignoring the fact he was well known as being the antithesis of things old ladies like.

It's beyond me.

Hopefully it'll be the end of this foul little man's career. Next on the list... Jim Davidson!

(And Dark Detective's last comment nearly made me choke on my pop!)
 
James Whitehead said:
Perhaps it's too easy to lose sight of the real human tragedy at
the centre of it.
Click to expand...
Which is:
Man well known for liking clubbing, drinking, drugtaking and partying goes to club, takes booze and drugs, goes off to a party, takes more booze and drugs, drowns in swimming pool.
As a picture of a wasted life, yes, it's a tragedy.
But the sight of those vult- sorry, grieving friends and relatives selling their stories and getting set to sue Barrymore for every last penny they can extract from him - that's a sick comedy.
 
Drifting perilously close to thread again, I think that a great deal of the aftermath in the decades after the Arbuckle case was based purely on heresay and UL, in that the original facts were obscured (according to contemporary accounts, no-one at the scene was sober enough to remember anything reliably anyway).

One story in particular has (many years later) Fatty being pulled over by the police. He allegedly threw a bottle out of the window shouting 'there goes the evidence, boys', which has rather strangely been taken as a confession of guilt.

I believe that Chaplin and Hal Roach kept him in work for many years afterwards, incommunicado, as it were. It's an unpleasant story, whatever the truth was; ain't that LA for you?

And can anyone tell me whether Kenneth Anger really did make most of Hollywood Babylon up?
 
Buster Keaton also kept Arbuckle working but he always directed under false names, I believe one was the tongue-in-cheek, Will B. Goode...(or is that a UL as well?)..

It would not surprise me if Kenneth Anger made most of Hollywood Babylon up, I've never read any of the stories in books which pre-date it.
 
MrHyde said:
One story in particular has (many years later) Fatty being pulled over by the police. He allegedly threw a bottle out of the window shouting 'there goes the evidence, boys', which has rather strangely been taken as a confession of guilt.
Click to expand...

As I understand it that's cos it was prohibition era: people could only be done however (please correct me if I'm wrong) if they were caught in possession or in a building in which alcohol was being served: by chucking the bottle from the window the ball was out of play so to speak (IIRC being drunk wasn't actually illegal: it was possession or procuerment of booze that was an offence).

Stu

PS On the Barrymore subject I agree with Annasdottir - whilst his death is sad, it's being largely overlooked that Mr Lubbock was hardly a impressionable teenager: he was a thirty-one year old father of two. That does put a different slant on it.
 
Hollywood Babylon

It sounded to me that it was built of just common ubran legends in Hollywood at the time. He may have made parts of it up, but I imagine most of it was what was being discussed behind people's back.
 
I think Anger's sources were partly hear-say - he was, after all, a
child actor - though his only major credit was as a fairy in Max
Reinhardt's Midsummer Night's Dream.

But his main sources were contemporary newspapers, gossip-columns
and scandal-sheets. Many lurid details about the stars' life-styles were
gleaned - then as now - from evidence given in court when things went
pear-shaped. And the gossip-columns evolved an elliptical way of
referring to, say, a star's sexuality, without actually libelling them.

I don't think Anger needed to make anything up. But he wasn't concerned
with painting the sunniest picture of Hollywood's failings.

As for the unfortunate Mr. Lubbock, you'll be telling me next that he was
wearing provocative clothes and was asking for it! :blah:
 
James Whitehead said:
As for the unfortunate Mr. Lubbock, you'll be telling me next that he was wearing provocative clothes and was asking for it! :blah:
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No, don't be silly. He was a fully grown man who was a heavy drinker and frequent druguser, who willingly consumed all the alcohol and stimulants offered to him that night - and he knew just what sort of company he was getting into. Nobody established just how he came by his rectal injuries.
And if he had fallen into the swimming pool of a nonentity, then he wouldn't even have rated a paragraph in the national press.
 
But would we be saying the same thing if it had been a Ms Lubbock? Wouldn't we say a woman has the right to drink and take drugs without being molested? That "no" means "no"? That a man shouldn't take advantage of a woman's drunken state? It's not black and white.
(Personally I would say these things, but I'd also say she was a silly cow, and I wouldn't have much sympathy)
 
beakboo said:
But would we be saying the same thing if it had been a Ms Lubbock? Wouldn't we say a woman has the right to drink and take drugs without being molested? That "no" means "no"? That a man shouldn't take advantage of a woman's drunken state? It's not black and white.
(Personally I would say these things, but I'd also say she was a silly cow, and I wouldn't have much sympathy)
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I repeat - nobody established how he came by his injuries. No semen was found and there apparently was a possibility that the anal tears might have occured post-mortem. So we don't know if he was molested.
But if he was I wouldn't have much sympathy anyway - like I said, he knew what sort of company he was getting into.
 
Even if someone is a bit stupid and a drug-user, they don't deserve to be buggered to death and dumped in a swimming pool [for example... no suggestion this was the case here of course, your honour - Sprout's lawyer!].

And did he know what company he was getting into? Drug-users, aye (a hell of a lot of people are these days!). Homosexuals, aye. Celebrities, aye. But none of those things suggest "if I go there tonight I will die". From the sounds of things he was star-struck and thought it would be a fun idea to follow a celebrity home and join in the party.

He didn't deserve to die, and on that basis I have sympathy for him.
 
Evilsprout said:
He didn't deserve to die, and on that basis I have sympathy for him.
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Exactly. Can anyone of us honestly say that we've never done anything stupid?

According to the C4 documentary shown tonight (19 Sept), Lubbock had injuries consistant with "something the size of a fist" rammed up his anus. Eh? Maybe I'm just being hopelessly niave (sp?) here, but that seems pretty big to me, and not something I'd like to be alive to experience.

Jane.
 
I agree that the circumstances of Mr Lubbock's death, and indeed his death itself are a tragedy for his family, and of course 'sprout is right when he says no-one expects to die of a an evening, but what I object to is the spin being put on the affair by the media, i.e. that Mr Lubbock was a totally innocent, young victim with the further implication that he was somehow forced to be at the house in the first place.

This he clearly was not. Whatever else he was, he wasn't a sexual hostage. And that's the implied media portrayal that I feel is misleading: "sinister, gay wino Barrymore and his junkie cohorts forcing coke on this poor young innocent who only expected a glass of riesling, a little light dancing and some vol-au-vents before fisting him to death and then physically drowning him" - whatever the true facts of the case, and remember the coroner recorded an open verdict, it's this tabloid version of events that will stick in the minds of many.

Exactly like it did with Fatty Arbuckle.

Stu
 
Completely agree, Stu. Anyone going to a party thrown by a famous gay celebrity who is known for drink, drug and sexual excesses should expect to be encounter some sort of sexual activity during the evening.
BTW, mejane, I believe 'fisting' is a fairly common gay male sexual practice. Though presumably, care needs to taken to avoid damage.
 
Annasdottir said:
Completely agree, Stu. Anyone going to a party thrown by a famous gay celebrity who is known for drink, drug and sexual excesses should expect to be encounter some sort of sexual activity during the evening.
Click to expand...

Very true. He should expect to see some particularly decandent sights indeeed, and he himself would perhaps be expected to take part. But he shouldn't have to expect:

a) Any forced sexual acts if he declined (although there is no evidence any of his injuries, if indeed of a sexual nature at all, were non-consentual).

b) To wind up dead.

To say:

So we don't know if he was molested. But if he was I wouldn't have much sympathy anyway - like I said, he knew what sort of company he was getting into.
Click to expand...

is perhaps a little harsh.

However I agree with yours and Stu's general point, that the image of a poor wide-eyed and innocent Mr Luddock stumbling into a den of evil and vice and a hideous death at the hands of Mr Barrymore, is a lurid tabloid invention.
 
Talking about getting oneself into risky positions, the other week I went to a night club and ended up after an evening of drinking going back to a caravan park with a group of 7 Australian stag-nighters, with a blow-up doll in tow, after a night of talking dirty and watching one of them simulating sex with said doll I said my farewells and walked home. At no point did I feel either uneasy or even unsafe. However. Now, I could kick myself for putting myself in such a stupid position, and if anything had happened, no matter how much other people would say 'no means no' it would have been my fault.
 
Of course it wouldn't have been your fault. What a ludicrous and offensive thing to say.

Most men aren't rapists, particularly of women they don't know. If you seriously want to keep yourself alive, unbattered, and un-raped, don't have relationships with men. But that would be ridiculous, as is living a grey kind of meek half life in case someone hurts you.

It's the 21st century and we're (well not me) still saying women and gay men ask for it. I just despair. May as well say in bed your whole life with the covers over your head.

No-one ever stopped a crime by making the victims behave themselves a bit better, its the perpetrators who need to change.
 
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