5 Infamous Moments From the St. Francis Hotel’s 120-Year History

There was nothing low key about the opening of the St. Francis Hotel in March 1904. Built directly overlooking San Francisco’s Union Square, the hotel cost $2.5 million to construct (that’s $87 million in 2024 money) and $400,000 to furnish (nearly $14 million now).

That year, The San Francisco Call and Post raved: “Its construction has been so designed that all the suites are light and airy and its interior domestic arrangements are unrivaled in the West.” The hotel celebrated its opening night with a glitzy party for 600 of the most fashionable people in the city, who spent the evening sipping on Moet & Chandon White Seal champagne.

Since then, the St. Francis has been so married to keeping up appearances that in 1934, it even started washing the coins that passed through its coffers, lest staff and guests get their white gloves sullied. That kind of attention to detail has attracted famous and distinguished guests ever since — including Charlie Chaplin and Queen Elizabeth II. But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

Here are five infamous incidents from the St. Francis Hotel’s long history.

The Fatty Arbuckle scandal

Easily the most notorious thing to happen at the St. Francis Hotel transpired on Sept. 5, 1921. During a Labor Day party thrown by movie star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, a young actress named Virginia Rappe suffered a ruptured bladder and died shortly afterwards. Arbuckle was accused of sexual assault and manslaughter, prompting both the rumor mill and Prohibition-era morality police to kick into high gear. His two first trials resulted in hung juries. Arbuckle was found not guilty after a third round in court, but by then his reputation lay in ruins.

Arbuckle had rented adjoining rooms 1219, 1220 and 1221 on Labor Day and there were people moving between all of them. The enduring mystery around what happened to Rappe in room 1219 was caused by a combination of conflicting accounts from witnesses, two different versions of events from Arbuckle himself (he was married at the time), as well as confusion on the part of a gravely ill Rappe. The most detailed and painstakingly analyzed summary can be found in Greg Merritt’s book, Room 1219. In it, Merritt concludes that Rappe’s bladder injury probably resulted from a combination of preexisting conditions (she lived with chronic cystitis) and an act of intimacy between Arbuckle and Rappe that started consensually.

In the four days between the incident and Rappe’s death, Rappe told her nurses that she had already been “suffering for six weeks from internal trouble” at the time of her encounter with Arbuckle and that her pain was the result of “relations with her sweetheart,” Henry Lehrman. Rappe told one nurse that her contact with Arbuckle had been consensual, but she also asked that the nurse determine whether or not she’d been assaulted while unconscious.

In the end, Arbuckle’s final jury concluded:

Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him. We feel also that it was only our plain duty to give him this exoneration, under the evidence, for there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime.

Though blacklisted for years, Arbuckle’s career recovered somewhat in the early 1930s. He didn’t live long enough to enjoy it though. He died of a heart attack, aged 46, in 1933. His last breath was taken inside a room at New York’s Park Central Hotel.

Al Jolson’s death in Arbuckle’s suite

Nearly 30 years after Arbuckle made those three adjoining rooms on the 12th floor famous, Al Jolson — a singer best known today for his performances in blackface — got into trouble in the same suite. On Oct. 17, 1950, after an evening spent dining at Tarantino’s in Fisherman’s Wharf, Jolson and two friends returned to his rooms to play cards.

Midway through a game of gin rummy in the parlor (1220), Jolson complained of chest pains and put himself to bed in 1221. Minutes later, he called to his friends with the words “Boys, this is it.” When a nurse arrived to check on Jolson, she found him fumbling and moaning. He apparently joked with her, “I must be dead — I can’t find a pulse.” By the time two doctors arrived, Jolson truly was at death’s door. His last words were, “Well boys, I’m going.”

Louis Sobol, Jolson’s cousin-in-law, published a column in the San Francisco Examiner a week after the 67-year-old’s death, stating that Jolson had been dealing with heart issues recently, but was optimistic about the future. That positivity may have been spurred by his 27-year-old wife, Erle.

Sobol wrote that after a recent doctor’s visit: “[Jolson] proudly boasted to pals at the Hillcrest Country Club: ‘Doc examining me said I’ll live to be 90 … I told him I was going to be the first guy in show business to live to be 100.’”

The death of Henry S. Crocker

Long before Rappe and Jolson’s final stays, the first major death to happen at the St. Francis came on July 18, 1904, just four months after the hotel opened. Prominent printing and stationery businessman Henry Crocker was the younger brother of railroad magnate Charles Crocker, whose heirs built the St. Francis.

Henry, his wife and son were some of the first permanent residents at the St. Francis and it’s there that Henry died, aged 72, after a short illness. His will and the distribution of his large estate dominated newspapers for weeks after his death.

Gerald Ford’s almost-assassination

On Sept. 22, 1975, Gerald Ford finished a TV interview in the hotel’s MacArthur Suite, made his way six floors down with Secret Service agents and his advisor (Donald Rumsfeld!), and exited onto Post Street. Approximately 40 feet away, Sara Jane Moore was waiting for the president in a crowd of onlookers.

That morning, Moore had purchased a brand new .38 pistol; police confiscated her own revolver the day before. It was 17 days after Manson Family member Squeaky Fromme attempted to kill Ford in Sacramento, and Moore, driven by radical political views and a belief in violent revolution, was determined to get the job done. Moore fired two shots at the president, the first of which narrowly missed his head. The second — fired as a bystander dived on Moore to stop her — hit a 42-year-old taxi driver named John Ludwig, who survived.

At her trial, Judge Samuel Conti made it clear that only the gun’s inaccurate sight prevented the 45-year-old from actually shooting the president. Moore stated in court that her actions were “a correct expression of my anger.” She went on to serve 32 years at Dublin’s women’s prison before she was released in 2007, a year after Ford’s death. On her release, Moore said she was glad she hadn’t succeeded in killing him.

The fire

On April 18, 1906, the St. Francis survived San Francisco’s 5:12 a.m. earthquake just fine. So much so that opera star Enrico Caruso was served breakfast at the hotel later that morning. (After experiencing that day, Caruso swore he’d never come back to the city again — and he didn’t.)

That morning calm didn’t last, however. The hotel — along with its third tower, not long under construction — was soon engulfed in flames. But in many ways, the St. Francis became a symbol of the city’s tenacious rebuilding efforts. Just three months after the destruction, the annual dinner of the Merchants’ Association was given in the hotel’s banquet hall, even though it remained in terrible, charred shape and was surrounded by rubble.

The St. Francis also carried the distinction of giving San Francisco its very own rebuilding mascot — a fox terrier that belonged to wine cellar manager James Hall. The dog was locked in the cellar when fire overtook the building, and it took five days for the hotel to stop smoldering enough for Hall to find out his pet’s fate.

“One of the first things to greet his startled gaze,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported on May 27, 1906, “was the little fox terrier crouched beneath some machinery. The heat in the wine cellar must have been intense, but the little animal had managed to escape the flames and come out of the ordeal unsinged, although nearly dead from thirst and hunger. With tender care, Hall nursed the dog back to good health and spirits and not many days after his rescue, he was as cheerful and lively as before the fire.”

The dog’s survival gave a boost to beleaguered San Franciscans; he was renamed “Francis” in honor of the hotel that trapped yet saved him. Francis remains a fixture — in spirit at least — in the hotel today.

As part of its 120th anniversary, the Westin St. Francis Hotel is opening a new museum on March 22, 2024, featuring memorabilia, artifacts and the coin-washing machine.

Hotel historian Howard Mutz leads free tours of the hotel every Saturday, starting under the clock of the Tower Lobby at 11 a.m.