I, Fatty

by Jerry Stahl

  "Hey, Mishter, your whiskey's showing!" Mack used to shout this at himself whenever he passed a mirror. Or, on occasion, when he passed Yours Truly. The conditions under which I'm trying to rein in these memories is less than stellar. Whiskey helps. So does Aunt Hazel. The doctor said it would kill me—but he was always the optimistic type.

  So where was I? Keystone. Mabel. Passions, He Had Three. There we are. Passions was Mack's version of light romance. In the course of the seaside shenanigans, Harry pops me one in the beak and Mabel takes off in Harry's balloon. Which makes me so mad I call in the cavalry. The Keystone Kops wobble in to end things with suitable chaos and injury.

  Macking

  Sennett came up at Biograph under D. W. Griffith, whom he idolized. According to Mack his mentor had a blind spot: Griffith didn't see the point of filming "guys chasing other guys." Especially if the guys doing the chasing were policemen. That was the difference between them. Wark—I love saying Griffith's middle name; he was David Wark Griffith—wanted to make people good. Sennett wanted to make them happy—which to him meant making the cops look like morons.

  This creative difference gave Sennett his brainstorm: a studio that only made comedies. He raised the money for Keystone with a couple of bookie pals and kicked off in New York with Mabel, Ford Sterling, and Henry "Pathé" Lehrman, the fake Frenchman who hated my guts. They shot a one-reel stinker in Fort Lee, New Jersey—Cohen at Coney Island—then Mack got the California bug after his god D. W. hightailed it from East 14th Street to sunnier climes.

  In New York everything was shot indoors. In the winter, it got dark at four. If it rained or snowed the light was gone altogether. To people who started as pups filming in freezing New York studios, just the idea that you could shoot outside in December was enough to send them running. The lush scenery meant you didn't have to spend time and money building sets. The cheap labor and material were just gravy.

  After Tom Ince got rich in five minutes making his California westerns, movie people started flocking to Los Angeles like the proverbial lemmings. Some went straight over the cliff; some took a while.

  Keystone had been in business eight months by the time I rolled in. Mack and the gang worked off a simple formula: create mayhem and film it. When I first got there, I though the plots were ridiculous. Worse, actors had to improvise much of the action. And the stories made no sense. But Sennett had a different take. He loved to tick off the ingredients of a Keystone Comedy on his fingers: pace, gags, motion, and the expression on the actor's face when, just when he thinks things are going his way, they go all to hell.

  "It ain't a comedy till the wheels fall off" was another Mackism, which may as well have referred to the crates the Kops used to bang around in. Mack never minded seeing an employee get hurt. He was fine with it. As long as the camera was on and you didn't bleed in his whiskey. One time, after making me do five takes of tumbling out of a palm tree into a mud puddle, he strolled over to watch me putting ice on my jaw. "Hurts, huh, Fat Boy?" I just looked at him: this big Irish lug in a soiled suit, his face smeared with dust and that open-top Panama askew on his head.

  "What do you think?" I asked him back.

  "What I think," Mack cackled, "comedy is you fall in a ditch and die. Tragedy is I get a hangnail. It all comes down to human nature, Arbuckle. People just naturally love watching bad go to worse."

  "Worse," in the case of the Kops themselves, meant more than just a laugh. At any given time half the guys nursed broken bones. And Sennett didn't pay for their time off, either. In his mind, there were two kinds of comedians: fast or f—ed. I never liked that kind of cursing in my presence, but Mack didn't care, any more than he cared about calling me Fatty. That explained another Fun Factory fact: Keystone spent more on bandages than on makeup. We were usually shooting on some hill on Manzanita, Hyperion, or Effie, or down in Echo Park, so whoever got gandied that day would recline in the sun back at the studio, which would turn into a Red Cross center. Somebody was always hobbling around the Keystone lot on crutches or nursing a fresh bloody nose. The injured would try to lure a bathing beauty over to clean their wounds. This was as much as Mack was willing to provide in the way of balm for the wounded.

  Did I describe the Keystone stage already? The whole thing was nothing but three exterior walls with muslin slung over the top, for filtering. The worst job in the studio was moving that muslin sheet on the roof. After a rain, it stayed mildewed for weeks, and the pigeons who called the lot home liked to relieve themselves on it. Why am I telling you this? Because, if for some reason Mack wanted to shoot inside and needed to alter the light, he'd assign whoever he hated that week to Sheet Duty. My first months at Keystone, I got used to coming home with pigeon poop on my kneecaps.

  Pain Lessons

  What Sennett said over and over was that comedy was not about being funny. It was about being desperate. What, besides desperation, could make a person walk on telephone wires 30 feet off the ground, then smash through a skylight and bang off a busted-out mattress 20 feet below? They weren't doing it to be funny. They were doing it because, in the movie, they had to! You can watch that wire-to-mattress sequence in Fatty's Tintype Tangle and say "That's one brave fat man!" But maybe the fat man doesn't think it's particularly brave. Maybe he thinks that's what he has to do to keep his job.

  No matter. After 20 years of struggling, Movie World magazine called me an overnight sensation. They declared my face "more familiar than the president's!" President Who?

  Back then, Minta would always tell me that I worked like a man being chased. Sometimes she'd ask me what was chasing me. All I could think to answer was, "I won't know until it catches me. That's what scares me . . ."

  She told me to read Freud.

  Mabel-and-Fatty Magic

  Here's the funny thing. After the first three Mabel-and-Fatty pictures—Passions, For the Love of Mabel, and The Waiters' Picnic—audiences went berserk. They could not get enough of us. But even after I knew Mabel and I were making hits, I didn't know what it meant. Not really. I knew I had steady work. I knew that after six years of marriage, I was finally able to buy my wife flowers. That every morning, Minta, who'd gotten a job at Keystone thanks to Mabel, would wake up, make me a breakfast of eggs and bacon and a tureen of coffee and ride the streetcar by my side to the lot. I had a future, even if it wasn't the future I'd imagined. What did I know? I'm a fat kid from Kansas. My own good luck scared me. Life seemed unbelievably livable.

  Then the fan letters started. Every day, a limping Irish girl who called herself Harvey would bring me a stack of fan letters and I'd go around the back of the stage, sit on a barre, and try to read them. "Dear Fatty, Me and my sister think you're Tops. She's got the goiter . . ." "DEAR FATTY, I DON'T HAVE A DAD, BUT YOU WOULD BE SWELL . . ."

  One time I made the mistake of showing a note to Minta, from a Greek boy with tuberculosis. Naturally, the next day we took the train to the hospital, and when I walked in the room he had my photo in his pale little hand. I said, "How are you, scooter?" The kid just smiled. Pink lips in a little gray face. Then his mother, a nervous woman who kept wringing her apron, whispered something to the father, a big bald moussaka with arms like pylons. Dad looked at the floor and asked if I would mind touching his boy on the head. I was embarrassed.

  It was awful. Knowing this kid put so much faith in me. An actor.

  I patted his head, surprised that his hair was so damp. "Fever sweats," the doctor said. The youngster—his name, I'll never forget, was Paris Tsangaris—raised his sunken brown eyes to mine. I don't remember what I said to him. What was I supposed to say? The poor nipper was so scared he shook. I looked into his eyes and knew everything that was going on in there. That's when it hit me: this kid was scared before he got the TB. You could tell by the way his brothers and sisters cowered. The way he kept sneaking looks past me, at his silent father, as if expecting a backhand any second.

  That shook me up good. Made me remember Daddy. Waking up with his belt buckle across my
face. Once I made my way out of my own childhood, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was remember it. When magazines asked, Sennett's office passed out an official press release about my happy boyhood. Much to my surprise, "I was born in an average, middle-class family of five . . . A graduate of Santa Clara College . . . A football star and glee club feature . . ."

  Sometimes I almost believed this hogswaddle. I preferred it to the truth, which the terrified look in Paris Tsangaris's eyes made me recall all over again. I remembered what it felt like to be scared. To be Daddy's punching bag. To be told you're a piece of dogmeat so many times you're embarrassed to even look anybody in the eye, 'cause after a while you just believe it's true. I looked in that little TB boy's eyes and saw the 200-pound 12-year-old me, crying on my suitcase in the San Jose train station. What could I tell him but "Run! Gawdamighty, run, you little lunger!"}

  The second we got home from the hospital I picked up a bottle and didn't put it down till it was empty. Minta tried to comfort me and I pushed her into the wall. I shouted at her. "I'm just a comedian! I'm too fat to be Jesus!" Minta didn't understand. "But honey, don't you feel for that child?" How could I tell her where I'd been at that boy's age? I used to wish I'd come down with the croup, or something else that killed you. Even coughing myself to death seemed like a better deal than lying awake, keeping my eyes open, never knowing when Dad was going to bang in with a belt in his hand and rotgut on his breath.

  I didn't say any of this, of course. Minta came from a real family. Her Mom and Dad loved her. They loved each other. How could I begin to tell her about life in the Arbuckle asylum? The last thing I remember about that night, after the Greek TB boy visit, I picked up a vase that had been in the Durfee family in the Old Country and hurled it across the room. And the only reason I know I said that bit about Jesus is because Minta told me the morning after, when she was cleaning up the crockery.

  The next day, at Keystone, I must have still been in the mood for throwing things. We were looking for a slammer—something to break up a sequence—during A Noise from the Deep. We were shooting on the stage that day and I couldn't get anything right. I was still out of sorts. Mack asked what the problem was, and when I told him I'd skipped breakfast, he sent Harvey to the bakery. She came back with a tray full of cupcakes, turnovers, and a fresh blueberry pie—just like the one Pancho Villa and I tossed across the Rio Grande. That's when it came to me. I yelled for Mack to run camera. I whispered to Mabel what I wanted to do. As film rolled, we concocted some squabble. I was waiting to give the cue—"when I pull my ear, that means I'm going to throw the pie!"—when, Lord in a latrine, she scooped the thing up before me and threw it right in my kisser.

  I thought Mack was gonna wet his drawers! Which happened to be all he was wearing, it being bath day. He sent Harvey for more pies and by the end of the day I'd mastered the two-handed hurl, the side-arm, and the over-the-shoulder. From then on pie-throwing was de rigueur. The lucky duck who ran the bakery down the street, a Hebe named Greenberg, even developed a blueberry-and-paste pie that didn't fall apart midair. For longdistance throwing.

  Greenberg retired at 35, bought a mansion near Santa Barbara, and hung a sign over the front door that said THE HOUSE THAT PIES BUILT. All thanks to a poor little chest case who made me feel so bad I wanted to fling something at my wife. That daddy-scared boy with Greek TB.

  But look at me, I'm tearing up!

  Zipper Money

  Mabel used to toodle over to the Durfees' and visit after a day shooting in Echo Park. Then Mack gave me a raise. From $5 to $18 a week, and from there to $25. Eventually it would hit $150. Even before I got that much, I was able to buy a car. An Alco. We arrived in Echo Park homeless vagabonds and moved out in a spanking-new coupe to a beach house in Santa Monica. Praise Jesus, Hollywood be thy name.

  No more living with the in-laws, uplifting as that can be. I even suggested we get a butler. At first we had a Brit, named Mackens, but he spoke better English than I did, and I always felt like he thought I should be picking up his socks. So we found a Japanese. His name was something like Oka Lima Beana. So we called him Okie. I don't think he knew five words of English, which was fine. We communicated in pantomime. Minta bought me a pair of pants with a zipper—the new rage in men's fashion—and that's when I knew I was making money.

  I taught Minta to drive, but after two weeks there was a permanent indentation in the driver's seat—from the driver's seat—and when poor Minta sat behind the wheel, she said it was like sitting in a pothole. So I had to get her one of her own. Which I swore not to sit in and ruin.

  Across the globe, world war was breaking out. Nobody got too fussed about it in California. Mabel thought Archduke Ferdinand's wife had peculiar taste in hats, but otherwise we were a merry band—or at least a busy one—working 12 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. The biggest problem for the writers was finding new ways to keep Mabel and me in hot water in front of the camera. But it didn't seem to matter. We could make a two-reeler about doing laundry—Mabel and Fatty's Wash Day—and it would turn into gold. The trick was to keep coming up with new places for Mabel and me to mix it up. Airplanes, autos, motorcycles; opera house, outhouse, a mother-in-law's house flooded with water and floating down the street. Et cetera. And that's when I wasn't dressing up like some tarty woman and showing my knickers.

  When ideas ran low, Mack was always ready to throw us in some public event and film whatever happened. "Okay, kiddies," he'd say, with that greasy-radish grin of his, "let's go drop the piranha in the goldfish bowl."

  One time we all went down to the San Diego Exposition. Sennett pretended to set up a demonstration of how movies were made. But our cameras were empty. What Mack was really doing was filming us cut up in front of the crowds. Same thing at the World's Fair in San Francisco. The films we made from crashing parades or gallivanting through collapsed water mains were no different than the ones we shot normally. They just had different extras. At public functions—or calamities, as we used to call them—half the action was made up. More than once, we had firemen stop to wave at the camera, much to the consternation of families waiting for them to rush in and save Grandma's knitting basket. Basically you could get killed any minute.

  What started to amaze me on these outings was how many people felt the urge to approach us. How excited they were. It never stopped being a surprise, having total strangers skittle over and talk to you like you were old friends. Course, I still hated it when folks called me Fatty. If it was a little tyke, I'd grin and tell 'em my real friends call me Roscoe. If it was an adult, and I'd had a couple of nips in me, I'd say something really classy, like "How'd you like it if I called you No Neck?"

  One time we ran across a sideshow setting up in Echo Park and met the Fat Lady. She must have had 200 pounds on me, all packed in a bathing suit. Mabel said she looked like a pile of albino tires. The funny part, she kind of shimmied up behind us and yelled, "Hey, Skinny!" Me, Mabel, and Mack turned around and nearly fell over.

  That was the one time Mack was caught flat-footed. A jalopy had backed over his camera when he was taking a leak, so me, Mack, Mabel, Minta, and Lehrman were standing around waiting for somebody to show up with another one. Mack nearly died at missing a shot of me and Jumbelina. He bit through his knuckle-skin when he saw the Fat Lady wobble off. First time in my life I ever felt normal. Minta said the woman was actually quite sweet. Just a little slow. "She'd been manhandled as a child," she told us. "All that fat's just a wall between her and any man who might get ideas."

  "She'd be safe if Fatty got an idea," Lehrman cracked. "Those two couldn't mate without a crane and tweezers."

  Right away my face got red. The way it did when Daddy browbeat me. Pathé stood there, waiting to see what I'd do. When I didn't do anything, he said, "I rest my case." I can still see that self-satisfied smirk. Until Mabel opened her mouth and the smirk disappeared. "Oh, Henry," she said, in that slit-your-throat-but-make-it-sound-chipper way she had, "everybody knows the only
time you get laid is when you meet a girl dumb enough to think your accent is real. Just 'cause you smell French, honey, doesn't mean you are."

  Escaping Lehrman wasn't the only reason I decided to direct. But, like I told Minta, he was the bite in the ankle that made me run the 50-yard dash. My first two one-reelers were Barnyard Flirtations and Chicken Chaser. I got out of animal husbandry with A Bath House Beauty, my third, and hit my stride teaming up with Mabel in Where Hazel Met the Villain, which has a burglar scene in it. Nothing opens more doors for comedy than burgling. We'd write 'em, we'd shoot 'em, and then we'd write another one. Those were great days: jumping out of our chairs with comedy Eurekas, then pullin' the stunts under the sun with the camera runnin'—if that ain't heaven on earth, it sure beat shining shoes.

  Pretty soon Minta got in the act. She costarred in A Suspended Ordeal, also known as Hung by a Hook. Both titles, Minta claimed, pretty much summed up our marriage when I was on a bender. Which wasn't all the time, just almost. When I wasn't drinking to get drunk I was drinking to kill the hangover. Unfortunately, I was the only one who could tell the difference.

  Liquid Refreshment

  You could say it was the pressure that made me guzzle the hard stuff. But pressure was having no work, not working too hard. And drinking didn't make pressure go away. It only made you have to work harder walking across the room. Trying not to tip over took your mind off of whether you were breaking the gag-a-minute rule.

  Minta used to tiptoe out of bed at three a.m. and find me slumped in my easy chair, pencil in one hand, bottle in the other, and a pad on my lap. That's how I got my ideas. Stinking drunk in my easy chair. But try telling that to a sweetie who thinks a sip of gin on the Fourth of July is plenty, thanks for asking. Sadly but truly, as they used to say in the minstrel shows, I felt more pressure hunkered in our house some nights than I did at work. I just couldn't turn off the action-gland. So we started going out. Minta and me. The Sunset Inn on Ocean Boulevard was our big haunt. Later on, Buster Keaton and I hosted a party there every Saturday. We even booked the bands . . . But where was I?