I, Fatty

by Jerry Stahl

  It's hard to march out a bunch of niggling doubts about a man's veracity when he's fondling your palm. Especially if the man is the most powerful studio head in Hollywood.

  "Roscoe, one little thing . . ." Palm squeeze. He's selling me something. "You do understand that Comique will have to fold. Go the way of the Mohicans."

  "You said that, but—"

  What's he doing with his other hand? No! He's going to sandwich me. Now he's got my one hand in two of his.

  "All your pictures will be produced under Famous Players-Lasky."

  So, I'm still wondering, Is this good? Is this bad? Generally, I'd hire a guy to tell me what a contract meant, then I'd have to hire another guy to tell me what the first one said. But I'm out here on the Zukor yacht. Mano a mano. A captive on the high seas.

  Zukor gave me a day to "roll the offer around in my brainpan and see how it feels." While I was deciding whether to hop on the Famous Players train or not, Mabel told me that Zukor, the sneaky Semite, had signed up another jumbo comedian. A human tuba named Walter Hiers. In other words, Zukor already had a Plan B.

  So I guess you could say half of me finally went with Famous Players 'cause the idea of features was thrilling. Half because the idea of being unemployed still scared the rind off my bologna. And another half cause the idea of having to go through the nightmare of contracting with another company was too much. That's three halves, but I'm a big man.

  I figured hiring Hiers was Adolph's way of saying "Everyone's expendable." It was an open secret that all producers thought actors were idiots. The only bigger idiots, of course, were the public, who were stupid enough to believe we were what the mags and studios said we were. If it weren't for the public wanting to see a few particular idiots in their movies, the studio heads would have probably used each actor once, then shot him, ground him up, and fed him to the next expendable thespian. Thespy Chow. Come and get it!

  Going Continental

  My living room at West Adams sat 24, but more than that squeezed in for my bon-voyage party. Lou Anger had the bright idea we should do a little continental touring at the end of 1919. So, before heading for New York, from where we would sail to London, I invited over a few of my closest reprobates. (Another Schenck word, the man was a dictionary of 25-cent jawbreakers.) All I really wanted was a chance to rest. But somehow it didn't work out that way. In Manhattan, I kipped at Minta's for a few days. Funny how much I missed her, until we were under one roof again, and then I missed myself. The boat wasn't much more relaxing. Every 20 feet some pipsqueak with a rich Mommy and Daddy would ask me to do a somersault. So of course I'd have to.

  Once we hit London, though, I thought I'd expired and gone to heaven. If heaven was a place where hordes of fish-and-chips eaters followed you around like Moses' flock. In Piccadilly Circus, when word spread I was waddling around playing tourist, a spontaneous cheer went up on the street. Hip hip hooray! It startled me so badly I dropped the Guinness I'd hid under my coat. Ker-splat! My nerves still felt stripped raw from the heroin withdrawal. That gave the alcohol a much bigger job to do.

  How popular was I? Claridges had to hire extra doormen and a gaggle of press agents. Ever try to nosh with a mob of strangers smashing their faces to the window, itching for a glimpse of you chewing your dinner roll? After a couple of days I began to feel lonely when a few hundred people weren't shouting my name.

  France was even louder. A pack of wined-up Pierres decided to sneak up behind me on the Champs-Elysees and swoop me into the air. I guess that's a thing they do there. Probably started with Napoleon. But a couple of kids could've tossed Pee-Wee Bonaparte up and down. The merry monsieurs who tried to hike my thighs skyward made it about five feet, then buckled. I cracked the sidewalk and my shoulder at the same time.

  Ever since the leg thing, my pain tolerance was pretty low. So the rest of the trip, along with icing the bruise, Anger kept me supplied with morphine. The bad part was, the French don't believe the mouth is the place to administer medicine. They weren't big on needles, either. They have their own peculiar notions. A key one, I soon learned, involved something called a suppository. Bottoms up!

  The rest of the Paris trip, I am embarrassed to say, was spent keeping my cakes clenched, trying to stop those little butt-bullets of painkiller from leaking out. On what should have been one of the greatest days of my life, when I was bending to place a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, all I could think was, Please, God, don't let that morphine shoot out of my caboose. For the occasion I was wearing white ducks.

  Still, nobody had ever shown me that kind of respect before. I was honored. Some general shook my hand and they played their national anthem. "The Mayonnaise." Then every man in the crowd saluted me. What do you think about that? This was a situation of the gravest dignity, and I was truly touched. I didn't pretend to fall down until five minutes after the ceremony, when I had the driver step on the gas right before I got in the car. We did that three or four times. I'd open the Renault door, take a step, then the coupe would lurch forward and I'd fall on my face. It sent the frogs into a frenzy. As a race, when they laughed they snorted.

  It's one thing to know people like your films, but when they treat you like the King of Hollywood, you come back home thinking, Yeah, maybe I am royalty! Until, say, you have lunch with Schenck and he calls you "Bubby" and stiffs you for the check. But, even though I wasn't away long, something else had changed while I was gone. Something I couldn't quite put my finger on—until it laid a finger on me.

  PART 5

  Cleaning Up the Business

  I'D NEVER heard a word about "reformers" before I went abroad. I hadn't heard the word "normalcy" at all. But by the time I came home from Europe it's all anybody was talking about. President Harding—a fellow fat man—peppered every speech with calls for a "return to normalcy." Whatever that was. But everywhere you looked things kept getting less normal.

  A lot of it kicked off with the Black Sox Scandal. The World Series—fixed? Kiddies' baseball heroes really a bunch of grif-ters? You can't imagine what that did to this country.

  You could not pick up a paper or ride an elevator without some pasty-face yammering about moral decline. Then, thanks to Billy Sunday, a screaming evangelist, and the schoolmarms in the Women's Temperance Society, Congress voted in the 18th Amendment. Prohibition. And don't think half of them weren't snockered at the time! An Irish bootlegger friend of mine, Joe Kennedy, told me the Senate was full of lushes—all sipping bourbon and branch water. He knew 'cause he's the guy what sol'em the bourbon. I can hear Billy Sunday yowling now, "Once the demon Alcohol is banished, all men will walk upright. Hell will be forever to rent . . ."

  But banning alcohol wasn't enough. Once they got a taste for outlawing bad behavior, the reformers themselves were like drunks on a bender. They couldn't find enough things to object to. Once, when Luke the Dog crapped on the dining-room rug, I caught the headline on the paper I was crumpling to whack him with: AMERICAN SOCIETY OF DANCE TEACHERS DECRIES BALLROOM DANCING. There was a picture of a woman who might have been my twin sister. She was that kind of plump, with troubled puppy eyes and pursed pink lips. Underneath her beauteous mug ran the story of her crusade: "Organization President Dot LeMay Says 'Jazz Music Impels Degenerate, Degrading Movement . . . ' " I laughed so hard Luke got away without a well-deserved snout swat for soiling another Persian.

  What wasn't funny was, every newspaper or magazine article, every crackpot pamphlet, ended the same way. With a call for government censors to oversee moving pictures. Filthy things that they were.

  Paramount's very own Rudolph Valentino was held responsible for much of this moral turpitude. Ads for The Sheik were so racy some citizens' groups threatened boycotts. "See the auction of beautiful girls to the lords of Algerian harems . . . See the heroine, disguised, invade the Bedouin's secret slave rites . . . See Sheik Ahmed raid her caravan and carry her off to his tent . . ."

  Arbuckle asks you, what happened to decency?

 
Well, Arbuckle's had a lot of time to think about this. And Arbuckle will tell you.

  You see, the War To End All Wars gave a lot of gals jobs, and when it was over a lot of 'em didn't want to go back to darning socks for Daddy. In my world I was used to independent women. Actresses worked to eat, just like actors. But out there in Hamhock City and Back Porchville, the "authorities" wanted the fair sex to forget they ever went to work in factories, to toddle on home and back to sock darning.

  Too late, Gramps. Modern girls didn't want to be like Mother. They wanted to be like movie stars. Like Colleen Moore, the original flapper, who clipped her hair, shortened her dresses, and tossed her corset in the trash. But that's not all. Colleen was so shameful she sucked cigarettes in public, dabbed on makeup, and—get the kids out of the room—rolled her stockings up.

  This is when the police, at the behest of said reformers, started arresting bathing beauties. Some towns equipped the officers with rulers, to check on the offending temptress's hem. If her dress was too short, it was off to the slammer. Other cities were more inclined to jail lady smokers. Mind you, if the cops had done that in the Keystone days, there wouldn't have been a female left on the lot. The clams Mack hired showed a lot of thigh and smoked like steam trains. Otherwise they wouldn't get the job.

  Before the Reform Movement, managers like Anger or Joe Schenck would encourage successful actors and actresses to buy as much crap as they could: fancy cars, grander mansions, more of everything, as long as it was expensive and wild. Now the talk was about "toning things down." Six million people were unemployed. Striking coal miners were being shot. The Red Scare was on. The folks in charge needed somebody to blame. Why not some movie-star type with a snifter of cocaine and a 40-grand solid-gold bathtub? As long as they could point the finger at us Hollywood types, politicians did not have to defend their own lavish appointments. Nobody seemed inclined to point out that movie actors were not to blame for the policies that put honest workadaddies out of work. The politicos were. But who wanted to fuss with niggling details?

  All of a sudden, America saw sin everywhere. And Hollywood was Sin City. Even God was mad at us. I heard a preacher on a soapbox in Santa Monica rant about "the demonic hand at work in the immoral drama and motion-picture industry." And all Reverend Soapy was doing was parroting the message government and religious types were belting out on pulpits everywhere. No wonder I was tired. It was hard work corrupting the minds of Christian youth.

  Just kidding! I, Fatty, remained a paragon of all that was good and decent in the entertainment industry. I had no choice—Jesse Lasky picked the scripts. He'd promised me artistic control, but that particular pledge never exactly panned out. What could I do? Sue? They'd have had me branded Red so fast I'd be playing canasta with Sacco and Vanzetti.

  Not that Lasky didn't have an eye for what worked, movie-wise. By way of "classing" me up a tad, buying respectability for the studio, and—most important—hedging their bets by using material already beloved by the public, I was handed The Round-Up. A nice enough bit of fluff, Round-Up started out life as a popular Broadway play. And ended up as my first full-length movie vehicle.

  In Round-Up I play Sheriff Slim Hoover. As a gag, Keaton, who had his own company by now, showed up to play an Injun. For my second epic, Lasky snapped up another popular fave, The Life of the Party, an award-winning Saturday Evening Post story. What I liked about both films—okay if I take myself serious here?—is that they gave me as much chance for characterization as slapstick. I was trying to be funny without being fat funny. They both turned out to be hits. But Adolph and Jesse seemed more glad that they were both wholesome.

  A rash of scandals had been plaguing the movie business, beginning with Charlie Chaplin's marriage to his child bride, the pregnant and 16-year-old Mildred Harris. Then Mary Pickford divorced her movie-star hubby, Owen Moore, and married Doug Fairbanks five minutes later. AMERICA'S SWEETHEART A HUSSY, the headlines screamed.

  Meanwhile, at Famous Players-Lasky, Mary's baby brother, Jack, was implicated when his lovely wife, Olive Thomas, swallowed arsenic and killed herself. Unable, according to rumors, to tolerate another day of her husband's out-of-control cocaine addiction. To make matters worse for the Lasky lot, the police arrested the notorious "Captain Spaulding, Drug Dispenser to the Stars." The Captain, no fool, threatened to name names if charges weren't dropped. Nobody questioned that Zukor himself had shelled out half a million in hush money to keep his studio's reputation from sinking even further.

  The door, of course, swung both ways. When a motorcycle cop caught Bebe Daniels blasting 72 miles an hour through Santa Ana—with Jack Dempsey and her mother in the car—the judge threw her in jail for days. Instead of hushing it up, Paramount spreads the word around, alerts the papers. And before you know it, the big department store up there, Barker Brothers, is furnishing her cell with carpets, divan, and curtains. Restaurants are competing to see who can provide her meals. And somebody shells out for Abe Lyman and his Orchestra to bus up from Los Angeles and serenade her on the prison lawn.

  And how did the moral giants at Paramount respond to Bebe's misbehavior? They cranked out a fly speck of a film called Speedgirl. And starred her in it.

  Paragon of All That's Good

  Somehow, in the midst of this "Epidemic Immorality," this "lecherous lair of debauchery," as the tabloids loved to call my hometown, I managed to maintain a sterling reputation. Lovable Fatty drew kudos from the very publications who were railing the loudest against the evils of moviedom.

  Not to toot my own horn—it doesn't really toot anymore—but listen to this, from a humble exhibitor in Billings, Montana, after The Life of the Party knocked 'em dead up there. "How do you spell family entertainment? A-R-B-U-C-K-L-E, that's how. At a time when so many movies glorify lust, adultery and drugs, luring countless young Americans into the gutter, we wish more Hollywood actors made good, clean fun-for-the-kids photoplays like The Life of the Party."

  Would I be shoving this at you if what happened later hadn't happened? Of course not. I wouldn't have bothered to save this scrapbook. The second Party wrapped, I got going on The Traveling Salesman. I finished that on a Tuesday morning in July and started Brewster's Millions that afternoon. By then the public couldn't get enough, and I couldn't see straight.

  Trust me on this, making movies wears you out. Which didn't stop Lasky and Zukor from cracking the whip. With my contract inching to a close, these two slave drivers decided I could make three pictures at the same time. So, in January 1921, before I even had my Brewster pants off, I jumped straight into Gasoline Gus, Leap Year, and Freight. By the end of the summer, all three were completed.

  In Leap Year, I played an innocent, rich little rollo who just can't shake the passel of females who want to get their clutches on him. At one point these women crowd into my house, all but smothering me with love. Needless to say, they never released it. Considering what transpired, the subject matter might have seemed a little—let's just say "ill-conceived."

  I'd worked 15 hours a day, pretty much seven days a week, since signing with Famous Players. When Lasky had the moneysaving notion of having me shoot three movies simultaneously, I went along. I need a nap just thinking about it.

  A Dream Ride to Frisco

  In September, on the last afternoon of shooting the last picture, Freight Prepaid, the Pierce-Arrow folks showed up with the $25,000 extra-large custom convertible I'd ordered. It had a flush toilet and a full cocktail bar. I don't think I've loved a person as much as I loved that car. I immediately took it for a spin, inspired to go on a buying spree, and returned home with a pocketful of diamonds, cases of perfume, and imported shoes. That's the strangest thing about having big money: when you can finally afford to pay cash on the table for everything, everybody wants to give you credit.

  All I wanted to do was drive that car, and the only time I could do it was Labor Day weekend. That's how I came up with the idea of San Francisco. Ever since my Portola days—and my gratitude over not
getting pancaked in the quake—I've had a soft spot for the place. A lot of us did. Hollywood loved San Francisco, even if Frisco didn't exactly return the affection. I even had an editorial from the Chronicle framed and mounted in my guest toilet. To our northern cousins, we were "Rogues and Ruffians from Hollywood . . . children who had not yet experienced the back hand of a parent," et cetera . . . But what the heck. Outside of the Chronicle's city desk, the rest of the town was happy to take our money. And we were happy to give it. Frisco liquor made our L.A. swill taste like cat drip.

  Buster and I'd been up north a million times, and I was hoping he'd come along for the Labor Day jaunt. But Buster'd become a fishing nut. He and the missus were boating to Catalina to do some angling. They invited me to sail along, but I declined. Then the brass got involved. Still battling to make the film business look wholesome, Zukor and Lasky had organized something called Paramount Week. During P Week, stars were ordered to show up and entertain the folks, to show what a happy, wholesome, just-like-the-family-back-in-Wichita batch of Joes and Josephines we really were.

  That's what these dog-and-pony shows were all about. Book the studio movies into some showplace theater, then have some muttonhead actor give a speech on what a fine, moral place Hollywood, California, was. Tickets were free with purchase of laundry detergent or cold cream.

  Giving the audience a free peek at their big names, Zukor banked on buying goodwill in hopes that Mr. and Mrs. Normal would stop their nasty boycotts and see how decent we showbiz types could be. That was a big thing with Zukor—maybe because so many of the scandals that made people think Hollywood was Sodom and Gomorrah happened at his studio. He was always having us do stuff to make the magazines think we were basically outsized Boy Scouts. Three weeks before I packed the Pierce-Arrow and headed north, Adolph made me sit down with Adela Rogers St. John for Photoplay.