I poured over the detailed reporting in the papers of what happened in the courts, all of which suggests that he may or may not have had any sort of sexual encounter with Virginia Rappe, but that the death itself was unequivocally not his fault. Her pre-existing condition was what lead to her death.

Classic Hollywood makes irrational decisions regarding race, ethnicity, and nationality that WE SIMPLY CANNOT UNDERSTAND.

GIRL COULD GET IT

Oh wow I love this question. I think it was, in some ways, the same as today, insofar as studios expected EVERYONE to go to films that were masculine (Westerns, Gangster films, etc.) but marketed melodramas (often called "weepies") to women so they could have their "wet, wasted afternoons" of crying.

Fatty Arbuckle really takes the cake here. He became the fall-man for the entire industry — a symbol for the "clean-up" of the "den of iniquity" — even though he was ACQUITTED. FORCEFULLY. OF ALL CHARGES. But that's not what people wanted to believe, and as I talk about in the book, that interpretation was not one…

They do PR that turns their stars into, well, stars — in most part so that they can sell DVDs. But talking about those stars' scandals doesn't serve that end, so usually it's just straight up hagiography.

BuzzFeed is my full-time gig and it is awesome and I get to write about anything and everything. My next book is going to be on "icons" of the present and their pre-digital counterpart — so someone like "the tortured genius" trope (Kanye West) but compared with the pre-digital version of the same (Michael Jackson).…

I'd say it was about 85% pure publicity and 15% the magazines sorta-kinda stirring the pot, usually at the hands of a loose canon columnist or someone writing under a pseudonym. I always point to this amazing Photoplay piece called "Hollywood's Unmarried Husbands and Wives" that ran in the late '30s and essentially…

Oh my god amazing question.

EXCELLENT QUESTION. My initial table of contents for the book had about double the stars. I actually really wanted to include Anna May Wong, which is why I made her story into my BONUS CHAPTER (which you can read here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpeter…). I also wanted to do both Joan Crawford and Bette Davis,…

Joan Crawford. And Clark Gable! I also love that those two had a torrid on- and off-again affair with EACH OTHER, which is like the two kids who get around the most realizing that they'd met their match in the other.

He *totally* had that asshole masculinity thing DOWN (which is the same thing that Harrison Ford has as Han Solo).

I think it's pretty clear that Errol Flynn was a true and total cad. I've written a ton about it here: http://thehairpin.com/2013/02/scanda…

When I was writing my dissertation on the history of gossip, this was a REAL PROBLEM. I bought so many old copies off of eBay, and my apartment really smelled like Granddad basement. But now there's this INCREDIBLE resource called the Media History Digital Library, which has digitized/made PDF searchable all of the…