I, Fatty

by Jerry Stahl

  No time to mull on love gone wrong, though. We'd arrived right in time to meet a phalanx of deputies from the L.A. Sheriff's Department. Call me sentimental, I was beginning to feel lonely without men in uniform around. The burly sheriffs were doing double duty as furniture removers. A line of them were busy removing couches, tables, chairs, doilies, and anything else not nailed down and worth more than a nickel from inside my house. Or what I, nostalgically, continued to refer to as my house.

  My mug must have looked particularly hangdog when the policeman-in-chief approached me with a bill of lading. "Sorry, Fatty, says here you owe the, uh, California Furniture Company $6,500." A Boggsy loveseat happened by us at that moment, followed by a satin couch and a pair of lounge chairs. "That's all right, Officer," I managed to chuckle, "all the stuff gives me backaches anyway."

  "You got heart, I'll give you that," the top cop said to me. This may have been my proudest moment. If Daddy was watching from purgatory, at least he couldn't say I whined.

  The next weeks were spent consolidating whatever assets I had, scraping up money to wage a legal defense, and trying not to think of what would happen if the trial went on more than a week and a half. After that, I'd have to find lawyers who didn't mind being paid in old suits and shoes.

  Right off I cashed in my shares of Comique. Keaton's Metro shorts were produced there, so that brought some moola. Then I unloaded the Vernon Tigers. They'd been on a losing streak, anyway.

  Domestic Derangements

  Besides finances, there remained a more delicate matter: Minta. She and I had not lived together in a while—yet here we were, man and wife, reunited under one roof. We decided on separate bedrooms without really discussing it. I appreciated her coming back, but at the same time the way she kept talking to me—"I don't care what you did to me, I forgive you"—made me almost wish I'd taken my chances going solo. She was happy to be needed, like she said. That, or she was anxious not to pass up a chance to rub my nose in what a "bottom-heavy bastard" (her words) I was for ending our marriage. For banishing a selfless specimen like her to Manhattan while I sashayed around neck-deep in debt and splendor on West Adams.

  Oddly, Minta never asked me if I did the deed with Miss Rappe. A state of affairs I found alternately gratifying and eerie. Mind you, I still loved the woman. (Minta, not Virginia.) Even now, I have nothing bad to say about the Durfees' baby daughter. These were just stranger-than-strange times, so the usual strains were, you might say, amplified.

  Sometimes, when Buster, Bebe Daniels, or Mabel dropped by—they were the only ones uncowed by Zukor's keep-away commandment—we'd find the most horrific headlines and read them out loud. Buster's favorite was a Hearst sidebar in the Examiner claiming that I had actually held "dog weddings" on my property. The tone of the piece lent the whole activity an unsavory implication, as if, somehow, dog nuptials were one rung up the Heinous Behavior Ladder from bestiality. A fact duly noted by Buster. "You don't read too careful, devil-boy, they make it sound like you're bangin' poodles."

  Once my blood was in the water, tabloid-wise, no evidence of my depravity was too far-fetched. Four-legged romance was the least of it. In truth, the dog-wedding gag had its origin in some two-reeler I can't even remember. Luke took a bride, a saucy little schnauzer, which made for a moment or two of comic business. Maybe we rehearsed it a couple of times at a party. Did that make me a pagan? "Caninus Foulupalus Disgustus Nono," Buster intoned dolorously. Translating, in his trademark deadpan mode: "There is none more foul than he who stages dog weddings in his driveway." It was funny, but the laughter always rang a bit hollow during these visits. It was like trying to enjoy the coffee cake at a wake. You can't really savor a single bite, because someone has died.

  Not even madcap Mabel could counter the air of doom. Gone were the days of fun and frolic. On her last visit, the once-vivacious beauty was so toasted on coke that all she did was babble about some one-legged jockey she claimed was her latest paramour. Pretty soon her babbling turned manic. She began laughing and sobbing at the same time. We had to hold her down and ply her with brandy. I still had a stash in the trunk of my Model T, the one car the feds hadn't towed. Nothing else could stop her from chatting to the shrubs all night. With all those reporters staked out, there's no telling what Hearst would have made of Mabel's rantings.

  Most evenings, during that pretrial madness, it was just Minta and me. After another day of scrambling for cash to cover my legal bills, we'd have some newspapers delivered and size up the day's damage. Leaving the house, by now, was out of the question. Holding each other on my bed—hers we hocked, along with everything else—we'd take turns perusing the newest twist in my public dismemberment. Minta tried to act like we were generals manning strategy as the battle waged, but that never lasted. We were both so scared I think we had no choice but to hold on to each other. I was in this alone, and she had chosen to come to me, at considerable cost to her own career on the New York stage—and, let's face it, to her reputation.

  People threw stones at the house at all hours. When we did have to go somewhere, getting from driveway to street involved a gauntlet of screaming, hate-crazed lunatics convinced that I was the source of evil, lust, and ungodly behavior in Christian America. At first I would just stare straight ahead. Once the abuse became routine, I took to finding the most livid maniac and staring at them full-on—a move which, for reasons I myself am helpless to explain, would silence even the most shrill and violent.

  What I'm about to tell you sounds straight out of a two-reeler in Hades. You see, only in this crisis, gripped by the most hopeless, incomprehensible despair you can imagine, when our future together seemed so bleak Minta and I felt like trench-bound soldiers, blinking out at No-Man's-Land as the haze of gas drifts slowly towards them . . . only when we both felt absolutely doomed, was I finally able to perform. To be a husband.

  Imagine! What if you knew, every morning of your life, that something horrible was going to happen that day? Or no—that something horrible had already happened, and it was only going to get worse?

  This was a perfect description of my post-Virginia existence. Yet this is when "it" happened. Slandered daily in the press, attacked in public, shunned by friends, drummed out of the profession I loved, and awaiting a future so tainted it promised to be worse than today—which is saying something—only in the midst of this nightmare was I able to accomplish, with Minta, what I never could when life was a dream.

  Strange but true, ladies and jugglers. In the good times, the act was like trying to push linguine through a keyhole. Success gave me plenty. But ruin left us with something those drunk and famous days had denied us. Each other.

  PART 7

  Purgatory

  SORRY IF I 'M getting windy here, but I feel—how can I say this?—immodest even talking about these things. Only I have to, darn it! Because this is what saved my life. Temporarily, at least. See, it took falling through the trap door—from legend to leper—to let me be a man. If Freud's couch was wide enough, I'd have liked to hop on and hear what the old coker had to say on the subject. Call it the silver lining. Sort of. All that public humiliation made fears of any private humiliation downright niggling. Which meant I could finally relax. From abjection, erection. Once in a while, anyway. I didn't have to be anything for anybody. That was over. The Fatty star had fallen out of the firmanent, hauled off with the other props of a show that closed fast in the middle of a good run. All that was left now was me. A stripped-down, ham-cheeked, got-nothin', got-nothin'-comin' hoo-boy any woman would have to be crazy—or crazy in love—to be with.

  The night I achieved the miracle of coitus with Minta stone cold sober, the mailman had brought a note from the government. More good news! The IRS had hit me with another 100 G's in back taxes.

  It was my lucky day. "I don't know what else can they can do," I told Minta. "I feel like Job!" She was in her nightie, and I was resting my head in her lap. Minta shifted a little and repositioned herself. "Well, I bet I know what
kept Job going," she giggled. The joy in that giggle. How long had it been since I'd felt joy? Then she batted her lashes in a way she hadn't done since our early days on the Long Beach Pier, outside the Bide-A-Wee.

  We had just retired to the bedroom. After dark we always went upstairs, since reporters would sneak right up to the first-floor windows and try to peek in or take pictures. At least upstairs you could hear the ladders hit the house, if they were trying to get a shot of you—or just shoot you. Minta's room still had a plush Persian carpet on the floor. Luke had ripped a hole in it, so it wasn't worth much.

  There we were, on the floor, my head on her little thigh. When suddenly, like I'd gotten a shot of he-man serum, I found myself wanting her like I'd never wanted anything. Even lunch. It was almost frightening. I was scared to do anything—how could she possibly want me? How could anybody? Then, in spite of myself, I kissed her. To my surprise Minta kissed me back. Pretty soon she was ripping her unmentionables off. Even then, I couldn't help but think to myself: Thank God she's not screaming and bleeding! Couldn't help but remember Virginia peeling off her chemise like it was made of burning rags.

  As Minta and I kissed, a rock smashed the gable window of her bedroom. The hole in the glass let the voices outside rush in even louder. Cries of "Satan!" "Jew-lover!" and "Rapist!" echoed from the mob. But what should have distressed me somehow goaded me on instead. At last—with "Fatty, you monster, you deserve to die" ringing in my ears—I began to experience that mystery known to most but, up till then, more or less foreign to me.

  And after that—I will go into no detail, except to say, when it was over, Minta and I were at last man and wife. I was careful to settle my bulk alongside, as opposed to on top of, her. (I could already imagine that headline: FATTY ARBUCKLE BREAKS WIFE'S RIBS IN LUST-CRAZED FRENZY!) It still warms me to recall how Minta snuggled her tiny body into mine under our old Navajo blanket.

  McNab to the Rescue

  A couple of weeks before going back to court, Joe Schenck dropped by to say Zukor was kicking in 50 grand to hire another lawyer. "It's only because you got some films in the can," Schenck confided, shaking his head over the lox and bagels he brought. Schenck preferred to eat when he talked. And I was happy for the food. "The good news is you're back on the payroll," Joe said, licking a shmear of cream cheese off his pinky.

  I nearly spit my lox out on the card table. "You mean I can work again?"

  "Not exactly," Joe sighed. "You're on the payroll so he can garnish your pay and use it toward the legal bills. That way it's a tax writeoff."

  I nearly smiled. Leave it to Adolph to find a way to help you and screw you at the same time.

  Schenck also wanted to let me know how he'd tried to get Clarence Darrow to defend me. He was proud about that one. But Darrow was busy defending himself against charges of jury tampering. So instead Joe roped in Gavin McNab, the sheister who smoothed out Mary Pickford's divorce from Owen Moore so she could marry Douglas Fairbanks. McNab hailed from Frisco. He had friends there—a big help defusing the San Francisco-Los Angeles hate party now raging full-tilt. Dominguez, whose say-nothing strategy blew up, had fired himself.

  The first thing McNab and his team did was start digging up the real Virginia. Not that anybody was surprised to find out she wasn't a choir girl. Choir girls didn't usually require fumigation. But the facts McNab's man unearthed in Chicago, her hometown, were as sad as they were shocking. My alleged victim had endured a handful of abortions, along with a battery of treatments for chronic cystitis, all due to her penchant for copious intercourse. A nice lady who ran a home for unwed mothers confirmed that Miss Rappe had been a frequent visitor—dropping by five times for treatment of venereal warts alone. Which, as McNab described it in his first phone call, put her in line for some kind of Venereal Wart Olympic record. Where was Guinness when you needed him?

  But there's more. While nude modeling, Virginia met a sculptor by the name of Sample who proposed to her, then threw himself off his roof a week later and died. After that she moved in with a one-armed dress manufacturer named Robert Muscovitz. Poor Muscovitz "fell" in front of a trolley car and expired shortly thereafter, in the Granada Sanitarium.

  Then Virginia turned 18.

  If her juvenile résume wasn't damning enough, there was some scuttlebutt that, prior to her illustrious career as bit player in Henry Lehrman epics, she'd worked for her family's business in Los Angeles—as a prostitute in a whorehouse run by her mother.

  When Minta heard all this she said she felt sorry for the girl. I'm generally inclined to compassion myself, but in Virginia's case I found it tough sledding. Did I mention that her funeral, at St. Stephen's Episcopalian in East Hollywood, attracted 8,000 panting strangers? Unknown in life, Virginia attained a brief spate of stardom after her demise. Ever noble, the studios made sure the three or four movies in which Miss Rappe's sloe-eyed gaze graced the screen were rereleased. Maybe, I told Buster, if all else fails, I could arrange for agents to pay me to look suspicious when a client dies. Anybody the public thinks I killed was bound to be box office gold.

  Slander

  While McNab and company were busy digging up dirt on dead Virginia, Maude, Rumwell, and the rest of them, Brady pressed his compadres to the south to clamp down in Los Angeles. Arrests for lewd and immoral behavior, and prostitution in particular, suddenly skyrocketed. And I was to blame. The degenerate reputation of my hometown was surely as big a factor in my trial as the doctored photos Randolph Hearst had begun to run. The most appalling of these depicted your friend Fatty, looking lewd and greasy-lipped, guzzling a bottle of bug juice over the nightie-clad, pure-as-the-driven-snow figure of the virgin Virginia. If one reader in the country still had doubts, that picture would convince them I'd done what they said I'd done—and probably worse.

  I've saved this happy concoction from Page One of the Examiner, which just happened to hit the stands the day of Virginia's funeral. I keep it folded in my wallet. Fake calfskin, thanks for asking. Somehow, until I read this I really didn't know what I was up against. Somehow, in spite of myself, I could not stop believing that the truth still meant something. I know, I'm an idiot. But I saw the paper and my pants went damp. Listen: "Would not this dead girl now, whose every impulse is said to have been wholesome and kindly, whose life is said to have been given to defend her honor, would she not feel that her life and death had not been in vain if those who read her story would be influenced to saner, simpler living, would see as she saw at the end how futile it is to seek gaiety and pleasure which are not 'within the law'?"

  Be still my heart. The sheer size of the lie was staggering. But no lie was too big for Randolph Hearst! That was the secret of his success. The truth was, McNab had proof that Rumwell had left a nurse's finding of "severe alcoholic poisoning" off his death report. But, just to really help me sleep at night, my lawyer let slip that they—as in Zukor and Lasky—did not want to press the good doctor too hard on this point, on account of he'd done some "work" for Paramount.

  "What kind of work?" your friendly bumpkin asked.

  "What kind do you think?" McNab snapped. "Rumwell performed abortions on a couple of stars, and the last thing the studio needs is him blabbing about it. The public's already itching to dig a big pit, throw Hollywood in, and burn it till there's nothing left but false teeth and mascara ash." McNab was a colorful man with a phrase.

  Of course, if Rumwell did list alcohol poisoning as a contributing factor, that raised another hoary beast. Who supplied the hooch? Fischbach, now playing teetotaler, wanted the authorities to know that the illegal drinks were Mr. Arbuckle's idea. McNab spotted my reaction to that whopper. After some prodding, I admitted that it was Fischbach who provided the antifreeze—but under no circumstances was I going to rat him out. The way I looked at it, if Fred cooked up that story, it's because he had to. This may sound simpy after what he did to me, but deep down I knew Fred wasn't a bad guy. He just had gambling debts.

  "Yeah, I know all about those debts," McNab sc
offed. He always liked to let you know he was two steps ahead of you. "Lehrman paid them off."

  That was news. Turns out Fishbach had lost a bundle at the track, and Lehrman offered to pay him if he'd take a trip to San Francisco and "check up" on Virginia. Apparently Henry'd met a rich debutante at the Waldorf he wanted to marry, but he had to make sure Miss Rappe was sufficiently blotto she wouldn't remember that he'd asked her to marry him first—and make a stink before Henry could get the deb to the altar. Fred was supposed to spy on Virginia and report back, but after he spent a little time with her, he came up with a different plan. Virginia had poor Fred's nose wide open. Or, as the ever highbrow Mack Sennett liked to say, "she gave him a midget leg."

  So much info! So many backstories! Trying to follow it was like trying to juggle clawhammers and do geometry at the same time. All I knew, I told McNab, was that Fred Fischbach said he was coming to San Francisco to scout locations. "He wanted to find some seal pelt or something."

  McNab gave a snort. "The only pelt he laid eyes on was Virginia's—right before she got delirious. Oh, and Fred didn't just say the liquor was your idea—he told the feds you supplied it, Tiny."

  I didn't see how that mattered much, considering the rest of my calamities. In the grand scheme of personal betrayals, this one hardly registered. But it made the government perk right up.

  Around lunchtime, October 7, the federales showed up again. Where's Pancho Villa when you need him? Minta and I were just walking in the Japanese garden when three agents in matching fedoras introduced themselves from behind a bamboo thicket. "Roscoe Arbuckle, we're here to inform you that you have been found to be in violation of the Volstead Act." Then they asked for $500, bail money, and I called Gavin McNab to see about getting it. He showed up in 40 minutes with Joe Schenck, who brought a bag of deli. After the feds left with half a grand, Joe, Gavin, and I sat down to smoked whitefish.