The Fatty Arbuckle case (1962)

Hays did a remarkable job. There were some pretty juicy cases during his reign, but none endangered the industry the way the Arbuckle case did. When Errol Flynn was accused of raping a teen-aged girl, his popularity increased. When Charles Chaplin paid off in a paternity suit, it hurt his pictures not one bit. The many divorces capped by those perennial happy-marrieds, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, did little to stop the growth of the film industry boom. But for some strange reason the Arbuckle case disturbed and inflamed the imagination of the picture-going public. Children dreamed up dirty limericks covering the sordid aspects of the affair. The riddle of whether a man could or could not kill his lover during intercourse was a parlor puzzle all over America. Everybody had an opinion as to whether Arbuckle was guilty or not. Most women voted "guilty," and many of the men voted "not guilty." In Hartford, Connecticut, an indignant women's club ripped the screen of a theatre showing an Arbuckle short An unfriendly Tokyo newspaper pointed out that in America men made love so passionately, with such vulgarity, and with so little awareness of their mates that they killed women during the act like animals. A neighbor of Arbuckle's on West Adams Boulevard built the fence between their homes three feet higher. There was a great to-do over the fact that Arbuckle's mother's grave was unmarked. It showed, said some critics of the scene, that Arbuckle was really an unfeeling brute. Then a cemetery caretaker admitted that he had been paid to care for the grave but had never gotten around to it. People who lived near 562 N. Birch Street in Santa Ana, where Arbuckle had lived as a boy, sent in a petition saying they believed Arbuckle was innocent The Arbuckle foes maintained demonstrations like these were inspired by Arbuckle's Hollywood friends. The Oregon State Teacher's Association said Arbuckle's 76