by Jerry Stahl
Dominguez interrupted. "Tried to?"
I thought this was an odd time for my lawyer to speak up. And an odd thing to speak up about. I squirmed for reasons I hoped I would not have to go into. You know what I'm talking about. Then my swarthy attorney asked the DAs if we might have a moment. Muttering openly, they agreed. Dominguez led me into a corner, turned his back on U'Ren and Golden, and whispered in my ear, "Don't give 'em anything." I whispered back, "Why not?" And then, more urgently, "How can they know I'm innocent if I never tell them what happened?"
Dominguez sighed and put his hands on my shoulders like you would a 5-year-old. "Roscoe, they know you didn't murder her. If you give your story, they'll just think you're trying to snow them and think maybe you did!"
It didn't make any sense, but nothing that was happening made any sense. So I went along. What did I know?
For the next three hours, my high-powered attorney did not say boo while the two district attorneys grilled me like a salmon. Ten minutes in, they were joined by a trio of big micks in shirtsleeves: Harry McGrath, John Dolan, and Griffy Kennedy. The homicide dicks. The Fighting Irish took turns trying to trip me up. It was like trying to remember whether they said "Simon says" or not. Finally I had to go to the bathroom, and U'Ren and the Jew told me they were done anyway. A couple of peach-fuzzed deputies then led me down the hall to the Little Suspects' Room. We turned a corner and I could see the reporters pressed against the glass doors of the Homicide Office. The pack came alive when they saw me. By instinct I shot 'em a smile and wave, and the flashes popped like fireworks. Smoke leaked under the door. Then I caught Dominguez's eye, and he looked over my shoulder when he talked. "I wouldn't look too chipper, Roscoe. The last thing you want to look right now is chipper."
Ten minutes later, the DAs had two homicide bulls wrap me in handcuffs. Then they signaled for some uniformed string bean to open the doors and let the press mob in. The newshounds started barking questions. String Bean pulled out his pistol to shut them up. Then, in suitably hammy fashion, DA U'Ren began to read his official statement. "Roscoe Arbuckle, I am arresting you in the name of the State of California, County of San Francisco, City of San Francisco, on the count of Murder in the First Degree."
And that was that. It wasn't even me trudging down the stairs to processing. It was somebody I didn't know. Never met. At the same time, the fear that grabbed my throat was completely familiar. I was wet-undie scared. The way I used to be. All the time. So I did what I did when Daddy'd march me behind the shed, woken out of a dead sleep, to whip me with the rake handle. I looked at the ground. I kept my eyes down and counted spittoons. I shuffled where they pointed me, and didn't look up till we came to a high counter manned by a baldie in green eyeshades.
The baldie said, "Processing." I shrugged. He droned on about section 189 of the City Penal Code. "Life taken in rape or attempted rape is considered murder."
That damp, strangling fear was almost comforting now. Like family. Even if it was horrible, it was familiar. From the moment they dipped my thumb in ink, rolled it around on the pad, and planted it over a line below my misspelled name, "ROSCO 'FATTY' ARGUCKLE," the fear shut off my thoughts. I couldn't let myself think anything, because every thought was impossible. What was happening was impossible. I was on Pineapple Upside-Down Cake Planet. The place Buster and I pretended to send bad gags when they popped into our heads. The place where everything too wrong to happen happens. Where things that should be funny aren't, and things that shouldn't be aren't, either.
On top of all that, where the booze and narcotics had been I felt an enormous, buzzing silence, as though a phone had been left off the hook inside my skull. The stuff had provided a kind of cushion between what was happening behind my eyeballs and what was playing out in front of them. But now the buffer was gone. My nerves were stripped. My heart was naked . . .
PART 6
May You Never Have to Learn
What I Am Telling You Now
HERE'S WHAT you find out when the world turns on you. You see things differently. You take a telephone book full of people you once thought liked you, people you thought were your friends—or at least not your enemies, not out to get you—and you listen to them, one after the other, say things about you that you couldn't imagine your worst enemy even thinking, let alone voicing out loud. I'm talking about awful, hateful, personal things . . . And they're saying them to newspapers.
And as soul-crushing as the behavior of people you know is the behavior of people you don't. Characters you haven't seen for 20 years crop up to detail your monstrous qualities. A guy named Maclntyre, some dodo who used to beat me up when we were boys back in Smith Center, told the Kansas City Star, "As a child, Roscoe was prone to pick the wings off ladybugs." I could barely remember Maclntyre's face. Now he was getting back at me. But for what? And why?
Of course the fans turned, too. Suddenly, in the eyes of Bobs and Betties who used to love me, nothing but murder. Former Fatty devotees now glared at me and saw someone they didn't know. Someone they hated! Everyone, strangers and friends—by now there was no difference—they all had the same dark question in their eyes . . .
All at once, seeing the whorl of fingerprints in that dripping ink, I felt my knees go watery and my bowels begin to flood. I cracked a freezing sweat. The floor was flying toward my face. Dolan the homicide cop grabbed me in a fireman's carry and hauled me to a door marked ADMINISTRATION. Dolan turned the knob, tried jiggling it, then banged it open with the butt of his gun. The door opened on a bare, seatless toilet in a closet.
"Think you can fit in there?" Dolan asked.
Prime slapstick material. I made a note to work up a man-stuck-in-toilet gag as I squeezed past him. But I couldn't even make a joke. That scared me in a way nothing else had so far. I managed to tug down my pants and lower myself on the freezing bowl. Then I saw a soggy-old Examiner on the floor, GIRL STRICKEN IN ARBUCKLE ROOMS.
Can I talk to you about sitting alone in the can, dazed from bright lights and unending surprise, perusing a newspaper story in which you're portrayed as a raping, drug-using, virgin-crushing monster? All you're trying to do is take a crap. But that's over. No more mindless little craps for you, Roscoe. From now on, every minute, every day, you're guilty. You got that, you big fat sap? Millions of human beings you don't know now want you to die. The ones that don't want you to die want to meet you in person—so they can kill you themselves.
At that moment I could almost feel my mind go off the tracks. And yet, I'd be lying if I didn't admit to catching myself, in the high drama of my sudden, humiliating parade, thinking out loud: "If I knew I was gonna go through all this, I wish I had rolled on top of the little wench." A thought for which I am not proud, but one I confess in hopes any honest Joe who puts himself in my loafers will admit that under similar circumstances, he'd likely feel the exact same way.
Here's what I know now that I did not know then: from a certain angle, anyone looks capable of evil. (Ever been slapped by a nun?) I may not have done what they accused me of doing—but every man on the jury knew in his heart that, in similar circumstances, he could have. Unlikely maybe, but not unimaginable. To find me innocent would be to find me, somehow, better than them. And who the hell did I think I was?
The Life of the Newly Despised
By the time Dolan led me out, clinking the cuffs over the backs of my unwashed hands, another crowd had made their way inside and up the stairs of the station, MOTHERS OF INNOCENT DAUGHTERS, a hand-painted banner read. These haggard women seemed to gain color at the sight of me. It dawned on me, with terrible clarity, I've given them a reason to live. I am the thrill of true hate they will get to savor in lieu of true love. Or so it occurred to me then.
Was I that drunk for the past 10 years, not to see all this hate? That possibility was as scary as what was actually happening. You actually believed everybody liked you, Roscoe. How could I have been such a nincompoop? Success and adulation turned out to be just a vacation from the jeers and
ire I'd known before. And now I'd been brought back home. It was as if the entire world had come together to say, "Daddy was right. You ARE disgusting!"
Crowbar Hotel
Minutes after being shunted into my cell on Felony Row, I fell asleep. But I was soon awakened by a menagerie of thugs and drool cases, violent-crime types who poked at my clothes like I was a window display. I thought of Minta's wedding gown, on the mannequin in the window at Buffums for a week before the ceremony, Long Beach. Then my new pals grew bored. Perhaps sensing my condition—utter ruin—they soon left me alone, and I recollapsed. I awoke in pale light. Two words sum up what you don't know about jail until you get there: unventilated flatulence. I blinked at the gaggle of men on the damp concrete around me. Bodies were strewn about as if shot, and I suddenly knew, as surely as I knew the sky was out there even if I couldn't see it, that it no longer mattered if my hands were bloody as Cain's or clean as Moses'. How had I ever thought it did? It had taken me this long to discover what the dumbest prisoner on the block knew instinctively. Even if I was never convicted, I was already a convict.
For a Man Scared of His Own Good
Luck, Calamity Can Be Relief
Even now, I have a difficult time capturing the quality of my distress. Surprise was gone. My sadness was massive. Mostly, what roiled through me was a horrible confusion. But if I can make you feel only one sensation, it would be that of sudden, total loss. The whoosh of your own life disappearing.
I don't know how else to say it: everything goes away, and you're still there. Left behind. Daddy's never coming to the train station. Everything you took for granted—from cars to friendships—is either gone or different in a bad way. You don't know why exactly, you just know it's bad.
Imagine waking up one morning, and the life you've been living has been rolled up, the scenery taken away, and suddenly you're onstage in a new drama. In the new play, whatever used to make you lovable makes you hateful. Every line you spoke that got laughs now gets you hisses. Every word is used against you. And still, you're stuck with the old script.
Once you're condemned, there is nothing you have ever done in the past that does not make you suspicious. And nothing you can say or do in the present that does not, somehow, prove all suspicions justified.
My attorney told me I was the symbol of everything perceived as evil or depraved in Hollywood itself. I'd never thought of Hollywood as evil or depraved. Just overpaid . . . But those screaming headlines in the papers weren't just savaging Fatty Arbuckle—they were savaging the movies. Show business was being denied bail. Maybe Hollywood was so wicked, Buster wrote in a letter, it needed a 300-pound Jesus to die for its sins.
Which explains why, before the cell door was even locked, steps were being taken by my superiors 500 miles away. Afraid the lynch mob would come for them, these pillars of the industry formed their own mob and lynched me first. Just to show their hearts were in the right place. To show that, damn it, they were clean livers, too . . .
Not that I knew any of this then. Mostly, during my time in stir, what I was really trying to figure out was how I could get my hands on a drink.
Before I even picked up my state-issued towel and toothbrush, my good friend Sid Grauman pulled Gasoline Gus from his premiere venue, the Million Dollar Theatre, down on Broadway in Los Angeles. By Sunday, the "witnesses" that District Attorney Matthew Brady and his assistants had rounded up were already cooking up the stew Brady wanted.
Fred Fischbach started off by telling the DA's office he was not a drinking man. So right off, thanks to my friend Fred's testimony, I was the lawbreaker, for breaking the Volstead Act, Fred having forgotten that he's the one who knew the bootlegger's number. Then a chambermaid confessed to hearing Virginia scream "Oh God, please don't!" through the door. After the maid, Zey Prevon and Alice Blake both claimed they'd seen me take Virginia in my room, that I "had" her for a half hour or so, during which the screams were terrifying. When I emerged, the budding starlet was crushed, and I was a sweating, grunting monster.
Just talking about this makes me go clammy. Shame you feel for no reason is excruciating. Shame you feel because people are inventing reasons that don't exist—that makes "excruciating" a feeling you remember fondly. Knowing some of these are people you used to quaintly call "friends"? Forget it. Excruciation is five flights up from being accused—and knowing your near and dear believe what you're accused of. I know I've said this already, but so what? Go through what I went through and see if you don't get a little repeaty. Repeaty's the best thing you're going to get.
Pathé Cashes In
I don't think Virginia Rappe's body was cool before Henry Lehrman hit the headlines. As far as I could tell his career of late consisted of sitting at Tony Roma's on 49th and squawking about the injustice Hollywood had dealt him. A major directorial talent, bum-rushed from the industry . . .
When word got out I'd sex-murdered Virginia, Henry used the event to crawl back into the limelight. Buster, who'd actually read a book, gave me a good one from Jonathan Swift when he heard about Lehrman: "Crawling is performed in the same position as climbing." Never mind that Henry'd called his beloved a drunken nympho in front of the studio medical staff. Never mind that he dumped her and hightailed it east when he heard his betrothed had gotten pregnant. He didn't just dump her, either, according to Minta; he took all the jewels he'd given her back, and some he hadn't given her.
Now "Pathé" was playing the role of wronged romantic. His honor was at stake! From his perch in Manhattan, he used his fiancee's calamity to eviscerate me. To get even, I guess, for being shoved out of Keystone by Chaplin and me. Come to think of it, I'm surprised Henry didn't crawl out of the cobwebs to claim the 16-year-old Charlie married as his "beloved." Except, of course, it would have implied Henry'd had her when she was 15. Which might impugn—a new word I picked up in the trial coverage—his credibility. Say what you will, getting tried for murder is a real vocabulary builder. Mama taught me to look for the silver lining.
Henry's photo was now popping up in the New York Times, in what looked like rented hair. You learn to spot a toupee after 10 years in the theater. Lehrman was claiming he could not come west to view Virginia's body because he'd have to kill me! I wondered if he had trouble keeping a straight face, discussing his virginal, sweet-natured beauty. Don't get me wrong—I was sorry Virginia died. And I feel bad for her family, assuming she had any. But, come on! They should have interviewed the crabs she gave the crew at Keystone. Though Brady would have probably strong-armed them like he did all the other witnesses. "Shut up or I'll fumigate ya, ya little bloodsuckers!"
I just realized that I haven't mentioned Matthew Brady's problem. See, two years ago he beat the incumbent DA, a fellow named Fickert, by criticizing Fickert's ho-hum record in prosecuting big-time criminals. Since taking office, though, he hadn't done much.
More than anything, the San Francisco DA wanted to snag the governor's seat, so when Maude Delmont waltzed into his office with her St. Francis fairy tale it was like God said, "Here, Matty me boy, a gift from political-hack heaven!"
Clapping the biggest comedian in the country in shackles, convicting him of the city's biggest crime, would make Brady famous, beloved, and bulletproof. It would also make the public forget the two years he did absolutely nothing.
There was a problem, however. Even before the trial started, word leaked out that Maude was packing a rap sheet longer than Al Capone's. She was, among other things, a grifter, panderer, and blackmailer with a string of aliases from Rothberg to Montez. For some reason she always kept the same first name. When not busy corset-modeling, the enterprising Miss Delmont-Rothberg-Montez spent her free time being convicted for fraud and racketeering. And there was still a warrant out for a bigamy charge. She was a busy woman.
Testament to his skill at chicanery, Brady managed to keep his star witness from testifying before the Grand Jury. As far as the good people of San Francisco were concerned, Maude Del-mont's word was gold. When it came t
o the Coroner's Jury, convened to determine cause of death, Brady pulled off another hat trick. The coroner apparently agreed with the esteemed Dr. Rumwell that the cause of Virginia's untimely demise was peritonitis, due to a crushed bladder, along with a smorgasbord of other fat-man-inflicted internal injuries.
The niggling detail Brady successfully suppressed: Rumwell had not only performed an illegal autopsy, but removed Virginia's internal organs and disposed of them. In return for Brady letting the Wakefield Sanitarium stay in the abortion business, all its director, Doc Rumwell, had to do was not mention that he'd just given Virginia Rappe an abortion—and tried to hide it by slicing out her parts. Something he was understandably happy to do.
I almost wished my own attorney had not seen fit to tell me these details. It drove me crazy, sitting there for an entire trial, knowing the one fact that could spare me was not going to be mentioned: Virginia Rappe would have died anyway. With or without coming to my party. She'd been fatally penetrated before our paths ever crossed.
But I'm leapfrogging again. Barkeep, a shot of lead and a bicarbonate of soda.
Fatty Behind Bars
Thank God I knew how to juggle. Every time one of the inmates tried to sneak up and steal my shoes—handmade, ostrich and soft leather—I'd grab three of whatever was handy and start throwing them in the air. One time I even punched myself in the head, which had my fellow reprobates roaring. I'd played to harder crowds in Tucson.
Despite the DA's edict to the contrary, Dominguez pulled enough strings to get himself into the jail for a meeting. We used a laundry room, which smelled about like I did after 36 hours in the same socks and boxers. Checking the door to see if we were monitored, Dominguez laid out the abortion situation. Maybe I was a little cheered to hear about Virginia's illegal surgery. I'm not without feeling, but it now seemed clear that she walked into the St. Francis a dead woman, victim of Rumwell's butchery.