I, Fatty

by Jerry Stahl

  Like Errol the Aussie used to say, sometimes the truth sneaks up on you and whispers. Sometimes it smacks you in the face with a catfish. This was definitely a catfish moment. For once, instead of boring myself and everybody else with my antimovie spiel, when Woodsy mentioned that the Selig-Polyscope Company was casting for some fluffball called Alas! Poor Yorick! I just thanked him for the info and shut up. When he told me the part was for an actress, I thanked him again and told him I didn't care. I couldn't afford a streetcar ride, let alone something as upscale as dignity.

  The very next day, I showed up at Selig's studio dressed like a respectable woman. It hadn't been that long ago I was sashaying across the stage for the gold-dust thugs in Boise. And I hadn't lost my feminine touch. I got the part, and appeared on screen—not for the last time—dressed as a female with an exceptionally large torso and lovely hair.

  Hands off, Cowboy!

  To keep from scratching under my wig during filming—the brute light got the studio temperature up to 110—I focused on the details of this peculiar process. How the camera had to be cranked to keep it whirring. How an actor had to exaggerate every gesture—like doing pantomime for the nearsighted. How you learned to stick out your lower lip so you could aim your breath upward, cooling your face, staving off that dread moment when the pancake starts running down your face.

  Filmmaking was an uncomfortable, impractical, and highly irritating endeavor. On the other hand, it paid well and you got to sleep in your own bed at night.

  PART 3

  Comedy Has a Special Stench

  THE FIRST thing you noticed about Mack Sennett was his breath. Mack crunched raw green onions, lettuce, and radishes for breakfast, washed down with straight whiskey. The rest of the day he skipped the rabbit food and stuck with the whiskey. The stink of those booze-and-onion fumes was legendary—a fact in which Mack, if this tells you anything, took great pride. His belches could singe your eyebrows, and he liked to aim them.

  I did not particularly want to meet Mack Sennett, and only went because Fred Mace happened to sit down next to me on the streetcar—another Red Line moment—and told me I had to. I didn't know Fred from Adam. But he was as hefty as I was, and when he saw me he told me he'd been working as an actor with this Mack Sennett character and he was getting ready to pull up stakes. It might be the perfect opportunity for a fellow fat man.

  Gumming a silver toothpick, Fred filled me in. "Mack used to work with D. W. Griffith. He's the only moviemaker who writes his own stories. Comedies only. No dialogue. How it works is, the director tells you where to stand, yells 'Action,' and then you either wing it or do whatever the hell else he tells you to do."

  "Like what?"

  "Fall off a roof. Drive over a cliff. Squirt yourself in the face with a firehose."

  "Sounds crappy."

  "It is crappy," Fred said wearily, staring out the window as we clattered past a cowfield. "But what it really is is five clams a day and lunch."

  If I had had any work coming up, or even the prospect, I would not have bothered. But I didn't, so I did. Next day I rode the streetcar to Effie and Edendale, the end of the line. Which was exactly how I felt, trudging through the dusty weeds, clutching Mace's back-of-a-matchbook map to the unmarked gate of Keystone Studios.

  Once you were inside, things weren't much better. To get to Mack's office, you had to pick your way through an obstacle course of muddy scenery, camera parts, bits of tattered-looking clothes, and the odd, unexplained mannequin with breasts and pubic hair painted on. Those mannequins gave me pause, but I pushed on.

  The Keystone grounds, if you could call them that, looked like a theatrical trash heap—a symbol I did not want to dwell on. Mace had told me to just go upstairs and introduce myself. On the top step, I checked the collars of my suit and shirt, wiped the dust off my shoes, then straightened up and knocked on the door. Nobody answered. Then I heard what sounded like splashing, and the voice of someone clearly used to barking out orders. "Get in here or get out!"

  After a minute's jittery consideration, I chose the former option. Inside, Mack Sennett reclined in a full bathtub in the middle of a private office, flanked by a giant Turk in a turban and a tired-looking accountant type. The Turk had a towel over one arm and carried a whiskey bottle in a bucket. The accountant slumped on a folding chair tapping a notepad with his pencil. The bathtub was set on a raised wooden platform, like a fruit bowl on a dinner table. It faced a window so Mack could soak away and still have a bird's-eye view of whatever went on in his domain.

  "Too neat to be funny!" Mack bellowed as soon as he saw me. Before I could protest, he raised his head and delivered a stream of tobacco juice into a spittoon 20 feet away. With a little shoe polish, his spittoon trick could have made a first-class carny act. It was impossible not to stare.

  "Still here, fat boy?" Mack stood up in full manhood and raised his freckled arms while the Turk toweled him off. "What makes you think you're chuckle-bait?" By now I was so nervous, all I could do was throw my arms up in the air and do a backflip. I bounced out of that into a forward tumble—like I was going to join Mack in the bath—and landed square on my two flat feet.

  Sennett just nodded, like fat guys were flying around his bathtub all day long. Then he kind of whistled through his teeth and jiggled his testicles. It didn't take long around Mack for the rankest behavior to seem ho-hum. That was part of his charm, if you could call it that.

  Thrusting his empty glass towards the Turk, Mack asked him with great sincerity, "What do you think, Abdul?" The swarthy character poured more whiskey and grunted. Mack then turned to the harried man with the pad and pencil. "How about you, Glassmeyer?" The fellow fiddled with his glasses and gave a weak nod of approval. I later learned that Glassmeyer was a writer, and that while Mack kept a restaurant stocked with food for actors and hands, he never let the writers eat. Mack believed if he kept writers hungry, they'd think more. That's why all the Keystone writers looked so miserable. On the other hand, they were all pretty damn trim.

  Mack was always cheap with talent—especially actors—which is why he lost them. Ford Sterling, Harold Lloyd, Chaplin . . . They all asked for more money, and they all got the ax. When Paramount made me the first actor in Hollywood to make a million a year, Sennett said it would be the end of me. So how'd he know?

  Anyway, Mack's standing up in the tub in front of me, naked as an imbecile, lifting one gam so the Turk can dab the underside of his thigh, then lifting the other. After that Abdul wrapped him in a towel, like a big hairy-legged baby in swaddling. Then Mack stepped out of the water and grabbed a Panama hat off a rack. When he put it on, his dyed black hair poked out of the top, where he'd cut the lid out.

  "Nothing beats sunlight for a healthy scalp," he declared, as if daring Glassmeyer or myself to try and tell him otherwise. Then, bare feet puddling the floor, Mack stepped out of the towel Abdul'd just wrapped him in. He padded up to me twirling his penis like a dandy with a little cane. Later he said Charlie stole his routine. I suppose he wanted to shock me. But I grew up around farm animals.

  Mack put his face close to mine and rattled off his stellar offer. "Players make five dollars a day, extras a box lunch and a buck. Be here tomorrow at eight, fat boy."

  I managed to breathe without inhaling onion gas, and smiled big.

  "Sure thing, Mr. Sennett. And nice hat."

  Keystoned

  Imagine. I'd known Mack Sennett 10 minutes and already felt a physical revulsion to the man. Even after his bath, he reeked. The poor Turk who dried him must have mastered some Muslim rite of nostril blockage.

  The whole scene distracted me so, on the way down the stairs after our "meeting" I collided with some Dapper Dan in a monocle. The man I bumped protested, in a stage-French accent, as though I'd shown him some grave offense: "I beg your pardon, sir!" Then he made a show of looking me up and down, before sniffling at me and wrinkling his nose. By now I was too frazzled for false propriety. Mack Sennett had just showed me his one-eyed mi
lkman. Was I supposed to mind my manners?

  "Frenchy," I snapped at him, "if you don't like how I smell, the guy upstairs is going to kill you."

  Henry Lehrman—the kind-of-but-not Frenchman I'd bumped—did not think this was funny. Like he did not think most of what I did was funny in years to come, when he started directing me. Sennett held Lehrman in such contempt that he called him "Pathé"— in mocking homage to the cinematic pedigree this Belgian ex-theater usher liked to claim—but he let him direct because he was adequate. And he worked cheap.

  From the second he gave me the okey-doke on the stairs, Pathé always made me uneasy. My world would explode nine ways to Sunday—in good ways and bad—before I found out why. In the meantime, I just wanted to grab the streetcar and run back to Minta, just to tell her I could pay for groceries. That I had a job. This was a night we were going to celebrate. Of course, after all the embarrassment in the Orient, I'd promised I wouldn't drink. But I easily convinced the little missus that champagne was okay, and we went dancing.

  This was the last good night for a while. My first day at Keystone Studios, Sennett stuck me in some bit of nonsense called The Gangsters, which as far as I could tell involved a bunch of misshapen miscreants running up a hill, bumping into each other, and falling down the hill. The script left a lot of room for what Sennett called "improvisilization."

  In the dressing room—the men's was side by side with the women's, leaving less privacy than Union Station at rush hour—I had to squeeze into a Keystone Kop uniform so tight it felt like an ankle-length corset. Sennett saw it and said it was perfect.

  Worse, after that fake Frog Lehrman yelled "Action!" on my virgin outing, he didn't stop yelling. "Fatty, go right! . . . Fatty, look scared! . . . Fatty, stub your toe!" You forgot to say "Simon says"! Every time Lehrman opened his mouth during shooting, I'd look over at him. And every time I did, he yelled at me not to look at him during shooting. On top of that, people in the neighborhood were hanging out their windows, waving white hankies, trying to get our attention.

  It was all so chaotic, I had to ask Edgar Kennedy, one of the other actors, what the heck was going on. Why are all those housewives surrendering? Edgar explained they weren't surrendering, they were trying to get the company to film over at their place. Everybody in the neighborhood knew Sennett paid $10 for front yards, $15 if the actors were going to run around the sides of the house. If it was hard to concentrate with the director yelling at me, the cheers and waves of the Edendale locals made it all but impossible. These people never needed to pay to go to the movies. They saw them in the raw on their front lawns. And they wanted to cash in.

  To homeowners insane enough to open their doors to the Keystone Kops, Mack would pay $25—with no responsibility for damage. But that's not the craziest. Right before quitting time my second day, a firetruck clanged by and Mack yelled for us all to follow it. A house was burning down on the corner, so we ran around like idiots while the firemen were trying to do their job. Chester Conklin grabbed a hose and tramped on it. When I picked up the nozzle to pretend to see what the problem was, Chester lifted his foot and blasted me in the face. After that I climbed on the roof to save a baby—which turned out to be a doll—and promptly fell off. The fire was actually in a barrel of rags somebody had torched in their backyard. But Mack worked with whatever came his way. If he didn't need the footage for the film we were shooting, he'd use it in another one.

  After a week, Mack said he needed to talk to me upstairs. Walking behind him up the stairs, all I hoped was that he wasn't going to run a bath. What happened was worse. Sennett told me he didn't think I had anything on-screen. My hair was too light for the camera. My eyes looked watery. But the biggest problem of all, I was stiff.

  "The gag's gotta come right after the plant. Slam-bang!" he yelled. Sennett only spoke in yells. "I don't got a yuck every 100 feet of film—every 90 seconds—I don't got a film." A week of smashed cars, dismantled kitchens, tree jumps—and all I got was I'm too stiff? My hair's too light? My anger must have shown through—or else he was afraid I was going to cry. Whatever the impulse, Sennett decided to try and let me down easy. "Look," he said, "I liked the way you fell off that roof. I'll call you as soon as more roof stuff comes up."

  Saved by the Mabel

  As luck would have it, Mabel Normand was walking into Mack's ramshackle office just as I was walking out. Mabel Normand, of course, was the big reason Keystone made nearly a million in its first eight months of existence. She was the only actor who got a private dressing room. Mabel was more than pretty. She'd been an artist's model in New York, and had these big soft eyes that made men she'd never met want to throw their lives away for the chance to take care of her. When she wanted, Mabel could look sophisticated enough to write operas in heels. But her favorite mode of attire, shockingly, was overalls and an old shirt with a straw hat on top.

  You didn't expect a woman with Mabel's class to be madcap. But prior to signing on with Keystone, she'd worked for D. W. Griffith's Biograph in New York. She made a name for herself when she spent 10 minutes on top of a box-kite plane, in mid-flight, for a daring aerial sequence. Mabel was more fearless than any man. When Mack made his parody of Griffith's last-minute-rescue films, hiring Barney Oldfield for Barney Old-field's Race for Life, Mabel agreed to an amazingly dangerous high dive. It took so long for her to hit the water Sennett had to use two cameras, which had never been done before. But she was just as comfortable in a suds fight.

  Mabel was also Sennett's girl. Why a woman like her would go near an onion-breathed, womanizing, testicle-juggling crackpot like Mack was a subject of much speculation. One wag on the lot claimed that Mabel'd sniffed so much cocaine, she was the only starlet who couldn't smell him. It was as good an explanation as any. Though the goofer dust didn't really become a problem—or at least a noticeable problem—until later, when Mabel's whole life began to unravel.

  That afternoon—which looked like my last on the lot—Mabel smiled and said, "See you tomorrow, Big Otto." I told her probably not and she stopped dead, as though completely shocked. Mabel'd been nice to me from that first day I showed up at Keystone. She dubbed me "Big Otto" because of how German I looked. We weren't close exactly, but we were friendly.

  Now here was Mabel Normand, ready to stand up to the boss to make sure I stayed at the studio. Without so much as a blink, she stomped over to Sennett and poked her finger in his chest, while I dawdled self-consciously behind her. "Keep the big kid around, Mack. He's funny even if you don't know it yet."

  Sennett, who hated conceding to any opinion but his own, stalled for time. He made a show of wiping some crumbs off his foul suit, then spat a chaw like Annie Oakley shooting a bull's eye into the corner spittoon. "You wanna keep Fat Boy, then you work with him," he finally told her. It was probably the most lucrative decision Mack Sennett ever made, even if he did it out of spite.

  All the way back to the Durfees' on the streetcar, I thought about the day's strange turn. I'd never wanted to work in the movies, but the prospect of working with the actor friends I'd already made—and the ones I knew who would end up being more than friends, like Mabel—was hard to turn away from. I even got excited at the idea of learning a little more about working for the camera. The possibilities were there—it's just that the movies were so new, there was no way to say what those possibilities were.

  Even if Minta and I didn't need the paycheck, I would have been sad to leave Keystone. Still, underneath my relief and gratitude, what stuck in my craw was the way Mack called me Fatty. I was more than used to teasing. For better or worse, Fred Mace, Charlie Murray, Edgar Kennedy, Slim Summerville, and the other Kops already had nicknames for me: My Child the Fat; Matching Saddlebags; Sir Hefty Dumpling, Esquire. Somehow those were okay. But the one that stuck—the one that always stuck— was the one that hurt the most. The one Daddy called me. Fatty.

  Fatty! What made this one different was the way Mack spat it out, just like my father. Like it was something disgusting.
Thanks to Sennett, I was listed on title cards as Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. And pretty soon most people forgot the Roscoe and just remembered Fatty. From that moment on, the joy of my accomplishments would be forever tainted by mortification over the name I accomplished them under.

  And I had not been consulted.

  The Happy Factory

  That first year at Keystone, there were 50 title cards with my name on them. Fifty. Some weeks we'd grind out three or four one-reelers. To say my life changed is like saying Vesuvius got a little hot and burped. The pace made vaudeville seem stately. On the other hand, no more sleeping in train stations and skipping meals for 50 weeks. I took a streetcar to work in the morning. Sennett supplied decent grub. (Unless, like I said, you were a writer.) And the money was good and steady.

  Let me wade into it, though. Because everything seemed to happen fast and slow at the same time. True to his word, Sennett paired me with Mabel for my second movie, Passions, He Had Three. Mack's idea was that the whole film should play out on a beach full of "bathing beauties." Mack was big on bathing beauties. That was the joke around the Happy Factory: "If she wants to be a Sennett bathing beauty, a beauty has to bathe with Sennett"

  Anyway, what happens in Passions, Harry Langdon plays the wolf and starts giving my gal Mabel looks. Naturally, I get jealous. Harry and I end up rivals for Mabel's affections. We compete like schoolboys. Not that I know too much about being a schoolboy. The school I attended, your final exam was getting hymied after a nine-show-a-day run in Bakersfield, helping the juggler pawn his Indian clubs so you can cadge a train ticket. Arbuckle, you're rambling . . . I know that.