I, Fatty

by Jerry Stahl

  The first day of my second trial, my other old friends, the Women's Vigilante Committee, were back at the courthouse to greet us. When they saw the ladies, my police protectors—a trio of shifty flatfeet recruited from their beat on the Tenderloin—stepped quickly away. Leaving 50-odd morally outraged females to encircle me. They kept about a one-yard distance. And when the righteous grayhair who reigned over the ladies stepped forward and cried, "America, Do your duty!" all 50 spat in unison. The throngs on hand cheered them on.

  "Fatty made a most impressive centerpiece in the fountain." That's what the Examiner said. I felt like a punch line trapped in a bad joke. But as long as Hearst could make money telling it, I was stuck.

  When I was thoroughly soaked—it's unnerving how warm saliva is—the Tenderloin bluebirds stepped back to their positions, politely letting the Vigilantes pass. I said, "Thank you, ladies," and took my hat off to wring it out. Then we continued on to the courthouse.

  I didn't talk much to anybody after the spitting incident. I preferred to keep things muffled, and the right cocktail of moonshine and needle juice kept me what you might call pillow.

  For Trial Two, Alice Blake and Zey Prevon were back in center stage. Zey tearfully admitted she "couldn't remember" if she'd lied or not during the first trial. Then McNab took her further. What nearly got me fried last time was Zey's claim that Virginia screamed, "He hurt me! He nearly killed me!" Now McNab had her thinking she wasn't so sure . . .

  DA Friedman was incensed. "So, Miss Rappe did not say what you claimed?" he chided Zey. "You have heard of the crime of perjury, haven't you?"

  Zey looked at me like she wanted a splash of holy water. "No, you don't understand," she pleaded. "Virginia said it, but she wasn't talking about Roscoe. She was talking about Fred Fischbach."

  Even the bailiff gasped. McNab grabbed my hand and whispered, "We got him!" But Friedman, the trouper, didn't flinch. He just waited for the courtroom to calm down, then casually asked his crumbling witness, "All right, dear. And what did the defendant, Mr. Arbuckle, reply when he heard Virginia's explanations?"

  Zey looked panicked again. "He, Mr. Arbuckle, said, 'Someone shut that monkey up. I'll throw her out the window if she doesn't stop yelling!'"

  Friedman smiled like the cat that ate the cat that ate the canary. McNab grew old in front of me. Why couldn't I just leap up and tell them the truth? "She was a bughouse slut! Every time she got bombed she started screaming and tearing her drapes off. How was I supposed to know this time she was dying?"

  But the damage was done. Friedman came flying out of his corner and pinched his brow in front of the jury box. "Ladies and gentlemen"—big sigh, like what he was about to say pained him, but doggone it, he had to say it—"ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I am ashamed at what you've had to hear today! It offends the ears of decent people. But I must ask you all to look in your hearts, and to ask yourselves, 'What kind of beast could ever utter such foulness in the presence of a young woman, no matter her station in life?' I bow my head at the depths to which this defendant—and other so-called movie stars in that Gomorrah called Hollywood—have descended. And pray that you will all look in your hearts and decide whether this defendant deserves to walk free. Free to force himself upon your daughter. Free to thrust his unnatural bulk upon your little sister."

  McNab was apoplectic. He must have interrupted the Assistant DA with objections five times. To no avail. Zey's statement had proved my innocence—and the sermon it unleashed from Friedman tarnished me worse than guilt.

  Everything that happened after Friedman's speech is a whirling blur: gasps, gavel banging, reporters slamming through swinging doors out to the phone booths. Judge Louderback—who boasted the complexion of a rum-soaked sponge—chose this juncture to announce a recess. When McNab pressed him—"Your Honor, why now?"—the judge admitted it was so that he could perform a wedding in his chambers. McNab objected to this, too, and Brady, who'd been waiting all day for something to say, tugged his suspenders out and winked at the jury. "A lawful ceremony between decent people—of course Mr. Arbuckle's lawyer would object." The decent folk ate it up.

  From that instant on, our fate seemed sealed. The very morning the jury was sequestered, my good friend William Desmond Taylor, the suave Brit Paramount director, was found shot to death in his home on Alvarado. Old Billy DTs, as a select few liked to call him, was either a wily fruit or a world-class ladies' man, depending on who you talked to. One of his ladies happened to be another great friend, Mabel Normand. But more important than any of this, Taylor was an industry darling: a leading proponent of censorship and head of the Motion Picture Directors Association.

  Within a day, you'd have had to pull a blanket over your head not to hear the screaming headlines. Splattered over front pages everywhere was poor coke-addled Mabel Normand, alongside Henry Peavey, Taylor's pansy, drug-dealing butler. Most damning, for the dead director's reputation, were details of his famous 500-plus panty collection—all dated, rated, named, and stashed in a custom humidor in his lavish boudoir. (Scuttlebutt had it some of the panties were boxers, but not even Hearst saw fit to slap that in 12-point type and see if it stuck.)

  Had Taylor consulted me, I'd have encouraged him to postpone his murder till after my trial. Or at least hide his undie stash with a little more care. Only he didn't consult me . . .

  But where was I? Right. So even though the facts showed me innocent, the jurors were inclined to convict on general principle. To send those heathens down in Sin City a message. Faced with such public outrage, McNab decided to forgo a final argument. The less they see of us the better, was his thinking. But the jury—and the papers—took this concession as evidence he'd given up.

  Years later, I found out from Buster Keaton's sister-in-law, Norma Talmadge, that Zukor had actually wired 10 grand to Brady during the second trial. I also found out that Zukor arranged for McNab to get the plum job—immediately after dispensing with me—of representing Mary Pickford before the Nevada Supreme Court. The movie star's movie star was trying to quash an attempt by disgruntled hubby Owen Moore to keep her from trading up to marry Douglas Fairbanks. Norma claimed McNab acted like he couldn't wait to blow San Francisco and set up shop in Reno. But I'll never know, will I?

  Only a fluke holdout prevented the jury from going 12-0 for conviction. A fellow named Lee Dolson was my savior. Dolson happened to have accompanied his pretty girlfriend, Doris Deane, to the ferry at the start of this fiasco, the very day I met her myself on deck. Thanks to Doris telling her sweetie I was a good egg, Lee promised on the sly that he wouldn't vote to convict. He might have changed his vote if he'd known I was going to make the girl of his dreams my second wife. Which I did, on May 16, 1925, in San Moreno, after parting amicably with Minta. (Could you see it coming?) Doris and I only stayed married till '28, but still, that's three years—and a lifetime—that poor Dolson didn't have with her. Stop me if I'm getting mushy.

  But wait! I neglected to mention the stern fellow with the slicked-down Princeton who showed up every day of the second trial, scribbling furiously, his beady eyes fixed on mine with vivid hate. That beady-eyed scribbler was Will Hays. Zukor, Lasky, Selznick, and a bunch of the other big boys had finally corraled him to run the censorship board—and keep the craven goyim in Washington from closing down Hollywood and locking up all the studio heads' kosher behinds for rank immorality and onscreen heathen behavior.

  Ex-postmaster generals didn't come cheap. Along with a tidy $150,000 a year, the Movie Jews sweetened Hays's pot with two million in life insurance, an expense account with no top, and complete discretion over what was moral and what wasn't.

  Officially, Will Hays did not unchain his brainchild, the decency-defending Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America, until March 14. But he accepted on January 14—just in time to tackle his first boil on the festering cheeks of the movie business: me.

  In the meantime, Matthew Brady, knowing his chances at landing the governor's seat were ni
l if he didn't put me on ice, finagled a third trial, beginning on March 6. By the time they dragged my carcass back to San Francisco for that tea party, I felt like I had a new calling in life: Professional Murder and Rape Defendant. If you can concoct a more unpleasant occupation, wire me and I'll send you a dressed turkey.

  In case William Desmond Taylor's rubout and Mary Pickford's wanton divorce had not yet cemented the notion of movie folks as moral lepers, word that Wally Reid had to be diapered and strapped down in the throes of narcotic withdrawal hit the papers. I thank my lucky stars—and the ever-discreet Okie—that my own hayride on the needle was never leaked to the press. Wouldn't that be the perfect trifecta: Killer, Rapist, Drug Addict. And worse than all three—ACTOR! Hearst would have died and gone to slander heaven.

  Not every Filmtown dope fiend was so lucky. One enterprising pen pusher bribed Wally Reid's doctor so he could sneak into the dope ward and tantalize a hungry public with grainy candids and a screaming lead: "Drooling and diaper-clad, the one-time heart-throb now sits rocking in a corner, mewling like a kitten and spewing teary gibberish . . . " I always pictured Hearst's stringers panting when they typed.

  In San Francisco, Brady started mewling himself when word came down there might not be a third trial. The DA pleaded his case to Will Hays. Hays promised him that he'd have his chance. Holy Will, as it happened, needed something to counter criticism that all the chicanery the moral public loved to hate—the murders, divorces, and godless narcotic mayhem—had continued unabated on his watch. This gave Hays's enemies—the Democrats who hated him and the Harding he rode in on—plenty of ammo to mock him as a high-paid shill for the studios. Translation: Slave of the Hebes. FATTY GETS GAS was the one headline that could save the DA and the Morality Czar. And at least it was a half-decent gag.

  Zukor had lifted the idea for a Movie Morality Czar from baseball. Studio heads have to lift their ideas from somewhere, otherwise they wouldn't have any. After the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, baseball execs had been in the same spot Hollywood was now: they needed to show folks their sport was clean again. To this end they enlisted Illinois's own Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a Red-baiting judge famed for sentencing Big Bill Hay-wood, number-one labor man in the country, to 20 years. As baseball's morality Czar, Landis made the game wholesome again. Exactly what wholesome and sanitary Will Hays was brought in to accomplish for the movie business.

  On the dismal eve of Trial Three, Hays staged an event to pledge publicly that "no longer would stars be allowed to act as hooligans with little regard for the American public." That I was the hooligan in question was no surprise. What surprised me was Gavin McNab showing up unannounced at West Adams—mortgaged but not abandoned—and admitting over a glass of hair tonic that he'd made a gaffe by passing up his closing argument in the last trial. "Right here and now," he said, taking my hand in his over the card table, "I'll make you a pledge." This time, he promised, he would cut the legs off the prosecution once and for all. Which, to the dismay of right-thinking citizens everywhere, he did.

  Gavin McNab, "a veritable terrier of truth," as he liked to call himself, dug up a crusty old gal named Josephine Roth, matron of a "maternity home" in Virginia's hometown. The heavily powdered Miss Roth testified to Virginia stopping in to "become a mother" when she was 14—and leaving her baby boy behind when she left.

  After this winning maneuver, McNab hammered away at the continued absence of the prosecution's chief witness—their chief accuser—the bigamist chiseler Maude Delmont. For his piece de résistance, McNab announced that he could prove once and for all that the alleged damage I'd caused Miss Rappe's bladder was the result of prior misbehavior. And plenty of it. This he did—get the children out of the room—by producing the actual organ.

  Put down your sandwich, Happy Lips. McNab had Virginia's bladder floating in the same kind of jar you'd reach into for a penny dill pickle at the deli. To the untrained eye, the dead girl's bladder looked like a blob of rotten gefilte fish. (I'd eaten gefilte, when Joe had poker night, and it always tasted a little rotten.) When the bailiff lugged the thing in, the poor lunk was so nauseated he nearly tripped and dumped the stippled dumpling in Friedman's lap. I suspected my attorney had greased the man handily for his pratfall, but when I asked, Gavin held his mud.

  After the near bladder-spill, the Assistant District Attorney went ashen, looking dangerously close to presenting his breakfast as evidence. During closing arguments Friedman was pallid and rambling. This left McNab to stand in front of the courtroom, an avenging prophet, and address the jury in high moral dither.

  For the first time since my trial had begun, my first trial, I felt myself come alive and listen. "Did the state illustrate how Roscoe hurt Virginia Rappe? Nobody saw it. There was no proof of it. Because he never did hurt her!"

  Then, while I tried 11 different expressions on my face, McNab wrapped up with a recitation of my good works and accomplishments. He summed the whole thing up: "Roscoe Arbuckle has made millions of people happy. Brought joy to the world. Never hurt a living soul. And this has been his reward."

  I get the weeps just thinking about it! And the jury felt the same way.

  Six minutes after the case was submitted to them, on the afternoon of April 12, the 12 souls who controlled my fate shocked the masses on hand by returning a verdict. More than a verdict. The foreman, a square-jawed, bespectacled, retired tractor salesman, requested permission to read a statement to the court. I knew enough not to get my hopes up. But Minta, who'd stayed by my side in court despite the fact that we barely spoke, grabbed my face and kissed me before he even got the square of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. The spark of sex ignited by my calamity had long since fizzled, but my future ex-wife was still glad I'd managed to stay out of the gas chamber.

  "Acquittal," the foreman read in a thin voice unaccustomed to public presentation, "is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle."

  Before he could continue, the courtroom exploded with happy yips and hoots. These surprised me as much as the verdict itself. Much as I longed for acquittal, I was afraid the backlash among the vigilantes on hand would set off a lynch mob. My worse fear was that they wouldn't be able to find a branch that could hold me, so they'd try stringing me up to trees all over town, and I'd keep breaking them. Set free, only to survive with a crushed voice box and permanent rope burn around my neck.

  When the cheers died down, the foreman continued. "We feel that a great injustice has been done. We feel also that it was only our plain duty to give him this exoneration . . .

  "He was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story on the witness stand, which we all believed."

  Manly! Feature that!

  "The happening at the hotel was an unfortunate affair for which Arbuckle . . . was in no way responsible.

  "We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of 14 men and women who have sat listening for 31 days to the evidence that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from blame."

  But I was not too manly to let the hot tears roll down my cheeks in front of everybody. This was my second adult crying jag. My first in public. Though this one was much more subdued. But those few hot tears were not from joy. Gratified as I was at being proved innocent, I wept from the crushing knowledge that it no longer mattered. Innocence and two bits would buy you a bowl of gruel but no crackers. I was 700 grand in the hole, I was still suspect and hated, and if there was any place on the map I could ever be funny again, it would probably take a safari to get there. Was any free man ever more condemned?

  I'd won the case, and lost any reason for caring.

  I reeled out of the courtroom and back to Los Angeles in a darker haze than any drug or panther piss had put me.

  Buster and Chaplin came to meet me at the station. But I could barely wave when I saw them. My arms and legs were made of pig iron. Keaton and Charlie kept asking me, "What do you want to do now?"

  So I finally told them. "Pass out . . ."

&
nbsp; Aftershocks

  Shall I even bother to tell you about the years that remained? The mug's game called redemption? I could have done talkies. I mean, I can do voices. I could do everybody's voice. Play the woman and the man. Man and wife, Dog and pony. But I couldn't play Adolph Zukor. Nobody could ever play Adolph.

  Six days after the jury apologized, Zukor held a powwow in the Paramount bunker with Lasky and General Hays himself. Eager to finish off the job the Prosecution couldn't, the three wise men were meeting to cook up a statement for Hays to sign.

  That afternoon, over Hays's signature, on off-white Famous Players-Lasky bonded paper, they issued my professional death sentence. Lemme play you the high notes:

  After consulting at length with Blah, Blah, and Blah, Mr. Adolph Zukor and Mr. Jesse Lasky of the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, the distributors, etc. . . . canceled all showings and all bookings of the Arbuckle films . . . notwithstanding the fact they had nearly ten thousand contracts in force for the Arbuckle pictures. Et cetera, et cetera . . .

  Will Hays

  Minta, who could do jigsaw puzzles in minutes, made no secret of her suspicion that Zukor was behind everything that happened. "That bastard never forgave you for skipping Paramount Week." She hardly ever swore. But when she was this upset, little Minta steamed with a kind of seriousness that was almost frightening. She glowered as she went on with her theory. "Plus which, Fischbach took money from Zukor, and from Lehrman, and flimflammed Lehrman's fiancee. Fishy used you to hide his grift from both of them. It's disgusting."