I, Fatty

by Jerry Stahl

  Minta hated going to the Sunset 'cause of the time I ran out of the bar, down to the beach, and into the Pacific fully clothed. I would have swum a few laps but I banged my knee up on a rock. Later that knee got revenge on me, but that's up the road, and the road ain't built.

  Sennett lived at the Alexandria, on Fifth and Spring, so sometimes we'd slide by for a pop at the hotel bar after work. Lots of show people stayed there. My favorite bar was Good-fellow's Grotto, on South Main Street. Goodfellow's installed a special reinforced booth in the back, extra-wide, so I didn't have to worry about getting stuck going in and out. It would have been easier sitting in a chair, but I hated eating with my back to the dining room. I could feel all those eyes on me, like spiders. Made the back of my neck rash up red as an orangutang's ascot.

  By then the world was calling Mack the King of Comedy. And Mack was calling me his right-hand man. I still remember his stellar quote from the New York Times: "Roscoe may act foolish before the camera, but he is one of the most sensible young men in pictures." Why, garsh . . .

  All the old onion-gobbler had to do was plunk a poster of me or Lady Mabel in front of a theater and the crowds poured in. It's a weird feeling to be lying on your back at three in the morning thinking, People I'll never meet pay money to laugh at me. When I was little they did it for free. I guess that's success—getting paid for the same thing that used to make you wish you were dead. I should have asked the Fat Lady if she ever thought she'd grow up and be fat for a living. Not that that's what I was doing. Why, not at all! I was fast on my feet. I could cook up a scene. And I was pretty when I was fed and watered.

  Put it this way. I didn't like what it was people liked about me. I was grateful, but I wasn't happy about it. At 26, what the newspapers called my "cherubic" and "innocent" face, my "infantile charm"—this was before they switched to "porcine," "imbecilic," and "evil"—made me popular with people who couldn't agree on anything else. Little kids and crotchety uncles. Tee-totaling blueblood spinsters and drunken micks. They all loved me. Or was it something else? Was it, maybe, that no matter how poorly any of 'em felt, they could all wake up glad they weren't me?

  I spent a lot of time whispering inside my head, I am so tired of being the Fat Guy. But of course, a diet would have ruined me.

  Trampled

  When Chaplin showed up in 1914, Lehrman was as nasty to him as he'd been to me. During their first film, Making a Living, Lehrman's veins bulged out at how long it took Charlie to work out a simple gag. Charlie was a serial rehearser. Pathé went whining to Mack, as was his wont. Even though Sennett's the one who discovered Charlie—at the Orpheum, doing a falling down act—and even though Mack knew all about Charlie's compulsive rehearsal habits, he acted shocked when Lehrman came to him and complained.

  Charlie was the slowest-working man in show business. He had to be great—because everybody else on the set hated him in five minutes. Mabel worked with him a grand total of one hour and called it quits. Though later she confessed it was due to their "animal attraction," she sure didn't say that to Mack, who put my Minta in the role and was busily contriving a way to squeak out of his contract with Charlie when he called me in.

  Shortsighted as a sewer rat, Mack just cared about getting the films shipped on time. When he came to me and said, "Big Butt, I don't think the Brit's for us," I said keep him. "The guy's a little queer," I said to Mack, "but he's funny. I'll get the GD films out on time."

  So Lehrman quit, I started directing, and Charlie stayed. For a while. Chaplin wasn't much happier than Mack was. In fact, right before we stumbled onto his Little Tramp getup, Charlie was the one ready to pack it in. I can hear him now, snotty as an earl: "Really, Roscow"—that's how he used to say my name—"the cinema's just a fad anyway. No real actor should get caught doing this."

  In case it ain't obvious, Charlie spilled that whine about an hour before me and the boys made him the gift of a lifetime. What happened is, Mack heard there was a soapbox derby going on in Venice, so naturally he wanted to jump in and film it. The caper called for Charlie to play an inept shutterbug, a real "schlemiel" (Mack's favorite wora1). It was a classic film-on-the-fly: get the footage and we'll find out what we need it for later. Mabel used to say, if Jesus Christ came back to save mankind, Mack would show up with the Keystone Kops and toss him in a jalopy.

  The problem this particular day was a fiscal one. Mack had given Charlie $25 to go out and buy shutterbug duds. And Charlie, justly famous for being so tight his keister squeaked, pocketed the money instead. Five minutes before we were supposed to leave for the ride to Venice—which, of course, Mack would also film—Charlie tore into the dressing room, where Chester Conklin, Mack Swain, and I were sharing a bit of liquid conviviality. "I'm in a bit of a spot," he said—his Yorkshire-pudding way of telling us he needed to mooch a wardrobe.

  So that's how it happened. I slipped him one of my too-tight derbies and a pair of pants that ballooned on him. Chester supplied a cutaway. Mack Swain lent him that toothbrush mustache. He still didn't have shoes, so I gave him an old pair of mine. While I watched, he put the shoes on, walked around in a circle, then took 'em off and—scratching his head for a second—put them back on the wrong feet. That's when I knew he really was a genius.

  By the end of the year, the Little Tramp was as popular as I was. The big diff: highbrows loved Charlie. I, on the other hand, was lowbrow as a beer-hall crapper. Charlie was Maine lobster to my sardines in a can. The other difference, natch, a Little Tramp stops being a tramp when the camera stops rolling. But a Fatty stays fat. Not something you probably ever thought about, but glug-glug-glug. Chaplin was always a better businessman than me. So when he announced to Mack—Charlie never asked, he announced—that he wanted $200 a week, Mack gave him the heave-ho. The Little Tramp—who would have made a world-class accountant—ambled over to the Essanay Company, who scooped him up for $1,500 a week. Not long after that he funny-walked to Mutual, where they hooked him for a mere $670,000 a year.

  But I'll tell you something about Charlie—or really, about Charlie and me—that I've never told anyone. See, everybody at the studio was always impressed how nice I was to the upstart limey. From the beginning, I made sure he didn't get fired. I gave him the "Buck up, it happens to everybody" speech when a critic called him "Chapman" in a review of His New Profession, one of his first Keystones. And not to harp, but I already told you about helping cook up the whole tramp thing. He never paid me for the pants, but never mind. Noble Roscoe never acted anything but proud when CC wiggle-waggled from mangy vaudevillian to biggest comic in the world. But here's the truth:

  I was nice to Charlie Chaplin 'cause of all the times I tried to kill him.

  Okay, I'm exaggerating. But I hurt him a little, and I can't say I lost any beauty sleep over it. Once Charlie and I were being filmed in a rowboat in Echo Park. I think it was during Pastime, but with enough tom-tom juice all those two-reelers blend into one big fall-down-and-bite-my-mother-in-the-neck car chase. I already knew Charlie hated the water. And not just 'cause he never met a bathtub he couldn't avoid. "Gamy," I do believe, is the technical term—though Mabel said that was being cruel to game. No, I knew because Chaplin didn't know how to swim. Not really. He'd been out to Casa Arbuckle, on the beach, and he wouldn't get in the ocean on a bet.

  Water-wise, I was the opposite. The happiest times of my life were in the water. Out in Santa Monica, I'd swim every day. It got so the local dolphins knew I was coming and would swim along. I learned how to jump straight out of the water, like they do, and even used it in a picture. Just don't ask me which one. I don't have wet brain, I'm just a little damp under the ear flaps. Mack was convinced the dolphins thought I was their homely pink cousin.

  Anyhooch, there we were, halfway to the middle of the Echo Park lake, when I kicked out the stopper of the rowboat with my shoe. When he saw the water gushing in, I thought Charlie's eyeballs were going to crack like eggs. He started chewing his lips. He even peed himself before the Echo Park lake m
ade the rest of him wet. But, I gotta give it to Charlie, he never stopped acting. Even when the boat was nearly under, with us in it, all he did was make sure his derby didn't float away. He kept vamping till we were up to our necks.

  And this wasn't a one-off event. Me nearly killing him, I mean. From doing odd jobs around the Durfees', I'd gotten handy with electric wiring. So, when the opportunity arose—as it did, oddly, the very week I heard Mack was going to be paying Charlie the same as I was getting—I wired the toilet so whoever who sat on it would get a jolt. This time, I told some of the guys, and we crouched in the dressing room trying not to giggle when Charlie went in. Five seconds later—"Yeeoww!" Out flies Chaplin, skivvies at half-mast, clutching his nuggins doing that herky-jerk shuffle that turned into his trademark.

  Again, part of me feels bad, another part figures, "C'mon, Roscoe, he got that funny walk out of it, so why feel guilty?" After he left Keystone, I couldn't look at a Charlie Chaplin movie and not think: What would the public do if they knew that famous walk was the product of electrified testicles? File under things the world will never know.

  Life's a pie-fight, and then you die.

  A Thought on Comedy,

  from a Tragic Perspective

  In slapstick, the hero can never relax. As soon as he thinks he's got things licked, a safe falls out the window he's strolling under and that's that. I guess you could say Mabel Normand walked under a lot of safes. And I'm not talking about in the movies.

  Even in life, Mabel was always a script that needed work. More than anyone I ever met, she had a unique way of doing things. Like, one time, tired of the Keystone Kops flirting with her, she waited till they broke for lunch, then, looking springy in her flowered dress, did cartwheels all the way across Echo Park and back right in front of them. "There," she said when she finished, "now go home and kiss your wives and think of me." Coincidentally, she'd left her panties in the dressing room. So they had plenty to think about.

  Mabel liked being known as the wildest woman in Hollywood. On another occasion, when Mack got on her about disappearing from the set in the middle of the day, she rolled her eyes at all of us, then let out a big put-upon sigh. "For gosh sakes, Mackie, even a movie star sometimes has to relieve herself. But if you don't want me to take the time to walk to the little girl's room, fine!" With that, in front of everybody, she pulled up her dress and sat on his lap. And wet all over him.

  Still, for all the cocaine and hi jinks—did I mention she had a bit of an inhalation problem?—Mabel was an old-fashioned gal. All she really wanted was some lunkhead to pop the question.

  Old Onion-Breath finally proposed in 1915—they'd only been engaged seven years—and Mabel went out driving with Minta and another actress named Anne Luther to celebrate. That's when Anne decided to let Mabel know Mack might not be the man of her dreams. At that moment, according to Minta, Anne felt compelled to tell her good friend that her future hubby was having his manly way with one Mae Busch. "Mae!" Mabel shrieked. "But she's my friend! She didn't know a soul when she came out, so I let her use my apartment."

  Poor Mabel wasn't naive about anything—except her own life. But after her chat with Anne and Minta, she dumped those gals out and drove like Barney Oldfield back to her own place. Big surprise, Mabel found Mack in her bed, clad in nothing more than a milk mustache, alongside the New York stray she'd taken in. Her good friend Mae.

  Mack insisted, and you almost have to respect him for this, that he and the actress were discussing tomorrow's script. "We're working out a gag." Before Mabel could think of a comeback for that, Mae Busch panicked and cracked a vase over Mabel's head, leaving her bloody and stunned. "I'll tell you the scary part," Mabel told me later, in one of her own more scary moments. "The movie they were about to shoot was One Night Stand! Maybe they were rehearsing." Her cackle was hellish.

  Ten days later, Mabel tied rocks to her waist and jumped off the pier in Santa Monica. If she couldn't find a safe to fall on her, she'd improvise. Fortunately, more or less, she was quickly rescued by a clammer and hospitalized for a month.

  Understandably, even after her release, Mabel stayed away from the set for a while. And Mack being Mack, when the press wanted to know why there were no Fatty-and-Mabels slated, he blamed me. Not that I knew about it. No, I knew nothing of my own heinous behavior until I opened a Photoplay, and there it was in black and white. The article was called "Why Aren't We Killed?" Mack—who wouldn't stop filming if an actor's spleen plopped onto the sidewalk—was lamenting how dangerous, how careless those doggone actors could be. Case in point, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Apparently, I was always throwing myself around and breaking things. I had, in fact, "recently nearly crushed poor Mabel in a good stunt gone bad." That's how Mack Sennett made me the heavy. The public believed that I was the cause of their favorite actress's head injury. Do I need to tell you how good this looked later? "Why, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Mister Arbuckle's irresponsibility has already been well documented."

  Funny how I'm always the last to know. About anything. I didn't even know how big I was. I'm not talking about weight, either. The studio loved to tell movie magazines I topped off at 286, when I wasn't a nosehair over 260. What I'm talking about is how much clout I really had. How much I was worth. Folks knew me most places I went. But even that doesn't give you the global perspective.

  What did give me an inkling was Luke the Dog. Willie Lucas, a Brit director, dumped this crazy pup in Minta's lap after they made Love, Speed, and Thrills. For one shot, Willie asked Minta to dangle from a tree root by a piano wire—over a 100-foot drop down the Arroyo Seco. Minta looked a little skeptical, so Willie promised her a bonus. Back then, directors were always promising bonuses if you'd stick your face in a fan or dive off a flagpole into a bucket of coleslaw. In this case, the big bonus turned out to be Luke the Dog. Who, if I do say so myself, ended up one of the most dependable stars in the Keystone kennel.

  Now back to how it started sinking in I was really a star. As a joke I asked Sennett to put the canine on the payroll. And damned if that mutt didn't start pulling down $150 a week! This was a lot more than most two-legged dogs were making. In fact, my wife's canine was making a lot more than I did for the majority of my professional life. I would have been jealous if I didn't know that she made him eat out of a bowl.

  Even more than making a bull terrier wealthy, what showed me how far things had come was New York City. In 1916, figuring to make some movies with different backdrops, Sennett dragged us back East with a full crew. We stayed six months, shooting out in Fort Lee, New Jersey—where Mack made the execrable Cohen way back when. And every day, even in sleet, you could hardly get to the set for the mob that showed up to see Fatso Me-o. The half that were press you might expect—I was their bread and butter. But the rest were regular people. Which was even stranger. "What's going on?" I asked the coffee boy, the first time I saw the throng of folks on hand at the start of He Did and He Didn't. "They givin' away hams, or is President Wilson in the neighborhood?" He thought I was kidding.

  I guess the best way to find out you're a real celebrity is when people you think are celebrities want to meet you. When Enrico Caruso showed up on the set, I nearly fell off my high chair. We had an Italo dinner together, and after we both dumped a bucket of vino down our gullets, Caruso asked me to sing. I declined, like any sane man. But after another bucket of paint peeler, I got up the nerve. I did my old vaudeville tune "Find Me a Girl Like Mother (and I'll Meet a Girl Like You)."

  When I was done, the whole restaurant applauded—Caruso the loudest. Then, taking my hand in his—if I didn't know he was a ladies' man I would have blushed—he leaned over the table, very serious, and asked me why I wanted to "put on ze clownfeet" when I could be a serious singer.

  I still couldn't tell you if this was the biggest compliment I ever got—or the worst insult. Maybe both. But it did get me thinking. Knowing the money Chaplin was making, and knowing that what Mack paid me was cashews compared to that—though we we
re equally popular—I started listening to offers. They'd been pouring in for a while. But the one I went for was Max Hart, the big-time agent. Hart not only guaranteed me 200 grand a year, he promised that wherever I went, Minta would be hired, too. Then came the real head spinner. Max told me Sennett was making $200,000 off of each movie I made for him. And that's just in the States. "You're so big in Europe, there's fistfights from Germany to England every time Mack sends over another picture, 'cause everybody wants a ticket. You're an international star, Arbuckle."

  All this was news to me. And $200,000 sounded pretty sweet after being treated like the House Negro by my good friend Sennett. Imagine not telling me I was internationally adored! So I signed. Big mistake. Or actually, it wasn't a mistake. Thinking it was a mistake was a mistake. Or—never mind. You'll see. Let's just say, before the ink was dry another show-bizzer, a guy with sweaty palms named Lou Anger, invited me to Atlantic City to meet the legendary Joe Schenck. Schenck called himself "the second most powerful man in the movie business." Joe would be there on behalf of Adolph Zukor, then head of Paramount. He didn't have to tell me that Zukor was Numero Uno to his Dos.

  We all got a little tipsy on the boardwalk, and I heard myself tell Schenck, a little slurrily, "It isn't just the money, I'm sick of making pictures I don't want to make. I wanna call the shots." Schenck excused himself to make a phone call. I stared at the Atlantic and peed. The ocean was calm. It was beautiful. But for some reason I kept thinking, That just makes it easier for the monsters.

  When he came back Schenck announced, with no fanfare, "I can get you artistic control, 1,000 bucks a day, and 25 percent of the profits." While I was trying to filter this through the alcohol in my brain, sweaty Lou Anger felt compelled to chime in. "That comes to more than a million per, Roscoe." "Izzat so?" I said. I wanted to ask if I'd heard him right, but I didn't want to look like a simp. A lot of people assume all fat people are stupid. Which we all ain't.