I, Fatty

by Jerry Stahl

  "So Hollywood's a cesspool. Stop the presses. Daddy needs a job."

  And back and forth like that from the laugh-packed script we'd replay every night. Without an audience. No props but a bed, a bottle, and a broken man. It sounds like the title of a cowboy song. One night I actually jotted down our patter. Maybe I could sharp it up a little.

  Scene from Fun Night with Roscoe and Minta:

  M: I'm sick of all of it.

  R: I'm sick of you!

  M: I'm sick of you!

  R: No, no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sick of myself.

  M: Oh, Roscoe, come here . . .

  I went to Europe. Can you blame me? I went for the sheer fuck of it. (Now I cuss all the time—why not? I can't get sent to hell, I already get my mail there.) The Old Country treated me like a king—even more than on my first visit. Girls in Paris kept putting their pantaloons in my soup. I don't know if that's a tradition or if they were low on dinner rolls. Douglas Fairbanks and Chaplin also happened to be in Paree. Fairbanks was shilling for The Three Musketeers. The Frenchies kept screaming "Chariot!" at Charlie, like he was some kind of wine.

  Those boys could cheer up a dead pigeon. But one night we went to the Crazy Horse with Mary Pickford, and I had the distinct feeling Mrs. Fairbanks would have rather been seen with Lincoln's corpse. Still, back in London, it buoyed me considerably when the Brits broke into one of those "hip-hip-hip hoorays"! on Piccadilly Circus. The English and the French had pretty much the same opinion about the trials: "What do you expect? You Americans are all Puritans."

  I guess, like Oscar Wilde, another outsized, publicly shamed sex criminal, I emerged from the experience humbled and shunned.

  And, in my own way, somewhat more spiritual. Wilde wrote De Profundis. I wrote a groveling letter to Will Hays begging to get my old job back.

  And why not? Back in the States, still buzzing from the cocktail of "continental adulation" (as Buster called my reception overseas), I decided to compose a mash note to the ex-postmaster. I had, in fact, just lumbered through De Profundis, or as much of it as I could swallow, and probably tried too hard to ape Wilde's loftier style. "There is a higher law which deals with the spiritual side of mankind," I wrote, "and surely this Christmastime should not be a season when the voice of the Pharisee is heard in the land. No one ever saw a picture of mine that was not clean."

  Hays, no doubt, kept the entreaty framed in silver and propped at his bedside, so he could see it before he laughed himself to sleep.

  Too Much, Too Late

  You might think redemption would be sweet. But when—after my pleas, countless letters from Minta, plus pressure from Keaton and Joe Schenck—Will Hays finally relented, the end result was less than stunning. Three days before Christmas the moral arbiter of the nation declared that I was "entitled to a chance to redeem" myself.

  If I had any illusions that this meant I'd be returned to my former glory—or, at least, my former state of not being hated like a rabid, child-killing dog—the New York Times editorial the day after the jury's apology should have tipped me off. "Arbuckle was a scapegoat, and the only thing to do with a scapegoat, if you must have one, is to chase him off into the wilderness and never let him come back." The last line was even worse: "It will do the picture business no good to have him trotting back into the parlor bringing his aroma with him."

  Did he say "aroma"? Roscoe Arbuckle, parlor skunk. Not exactly We missed you, laddie, welcome back!

  There's no deodorant for desperation. And, apparently, no way to wash off that jailhouse cologne.

  Not that everyone turned against me. I think I already mentioned that Joe Schenck showed surprising backbone. Joe was always simpatico. After Hays issued his half-baked retraction of my satanic status, Schenck stepped up to Zukor and said they had three scripts for me ready to go. The three I'd been slated to shoot during my unfortunate detainment had all gone to other actors. Will Rogers galloped off with The Melancholy Spirit. The great John Barrymore swordplayed The Man from Mexico into a bag-o'-laughs swashbuckler. And, before he rode his horse over the cliff, Wallace Reid smackled his handsome way through Thirty Days.

  Naturally, this being my life, the very thing I thought would relieve my situation soon proved to be the worst thing for it. See, Schenck's plan was to release Leap Year, the last classic I'd made before the safe fell on my head. The movie would put me right back on the Happyland map. Mark my return as Much-Loved Funny Man. Or tank so badly I'd want to claw my eyes out and throw them at the projectionist.

  If you picked the second possibility, you win the stuffed pink elephant. When Leap Year hit, the effect was quite the opposite of what I thought it would be. Moviegoers now found my hijinks more horrifying than funny. Since my arrest, my place in the world had backflipped. Gags once good for a sure chuckle—Roscoe the Coy Fat Boy making googoo eyes at a retiring violet, Roscoe as Chester Chubby-Money, the innocent tubbo being chased by a bevy of beauties—had been rendered nauseating.

  I snuck into the back of a theater showing Leap Year in New York and heard the Mommykins in front of me whisper quiet as a buzzsaw to Daddykins: "How can they let that fat rapist chase that little virgin!"

  It was terrifying. I staggered out of the movie house and took a cab around Central Park. Within two days the Examiner came back full-blast: FATTY'S FACE AGAIN STAINING NATION'S SCREENS.

  What did I ever do to make Hearst love me so much?

  After that headline there wasn't a civic leader worth his saltines who didn't cash in with a public statement protesting my return. "Just because he's innocent, he's still a monster" was a sentiment echoed by the mayors of Boston, Detroit, and Indianapolis. These civic giants joined a floating country club of suffragettes, pastors, and moral paragons of every stripe. So popular a topic was Roscoe Arbuckle in sermons, the Devil must have felt slighted for weeks after my acquittal.

  Need I point out that this backlash was encouraged} The Anti-Fattyites were supported by Hays, whose off-the-record insistence that studio heads blacklist me was not even off-the-record. I knew my pork was roasted when William Jennings Bryan, of all people, published an open letter to Commissioner Hays. Via some trick of rhetoric, Bryan, the failed presidential candidate, managed to make the fact that I was found innocent the most damning aspect of my entire orderal. "His acquittal only relieved him of the penalty that attaches to a crime. The evidence showed a depravity entirely independent of the question of actual murder."

  Thanks for thinking of me, William!

  I know, I shouldn't be bitter. Might as well pound nails into my kneecaps as dredge up the memory of my detractors. It's painful. But sometimes pain is the one thing left a man can feel. Maybe I stole that line from De Profundis. Or the three and a half pages I could decipher without dozing off. Or maybe it came out of the rye I just dumped down my gullet. What does it matter? Wronged Fatsoes Of The World, Unite!

  Gainful Employment

  Against all odds, Joe Schenck still took a chance and pitched me as a director to Zukor. Zukor had his eye on a circus act named Poodles Hanneford, and Schenck told him I might be the man to crank out some two-reelers with him. The shorts would take two weeks and cost 20 grand. I'd get a 20th of that, two weeks in a row. Schenck was so nice to me, I was starting to think he had a guilty conscience.

  Except for Lew Cody—who had less clout than a canned ham—the only old-time pals who'd dare show their faces in public with me were Buster, Schenck, and Charlie.

  Chaplin, truth be told, never saw fit to jeopardize his standing in the community by endorsing me for a job. Buster, on the other hand, did everything but walk a HIRE ROSCOE sandwich board up and down Hollywood Boulevard. Thanks to him, five studios—Keaton's, Metro, Paramount, Goldwyn, and Educational—tossed 33 G's into the hat to start Reel Productions and set me up again.

  My Reel deal was not set up with prestige in mind. For my sins, I was signed on to direct the fellow professional lard-ass just mentioned in his gaggle of two-reelers. Poodles had made his name tou
ring with Billy Sunday. But happily, the flask in his pants defused any tension I might have had about his Godfearing tendencies.

  My big hits with Hanneford were No Loafing and The Bonehead, if that tells you anything. Circus people were always different than vaudeville people. Nights when we worked late, Poodles would lie right down on the ground and go to sleep. He was happy in sawdust. We'd shake him awake when the cameras were about to roll. All he'd need was a bang of rye and a cigarette and he was ready for his first take.

  I wrote and directed the Poodles sorties. Not that you'd know it. I couldn't slap my own name on the marquee, so I opted for the moniker Will B. Good. Until Buster, in a moment of typically inspired Busterdom, decided over martinis at Musso and Frank's that it wasn't legit enough. He stared at me for a moment and then announced. "You're more of a 'William Goodrich' type. Now that son of a bitch is legit!"

  So that's how I became William Goodrich. Though, thanks to Hays's continued harassment, it wouldn't have mattered if I'd called myself Puddin' the Wonder Chimp. The Front Office decided it was best to keep my name off the credits altogether. And after six weeks of yeomanlike effort, there was no getting around it: Roscoe Arbuckle was one more out-of-work fat actor.

  "When in doubt, exit left." That's what old Poodles said every night before he fell off his bar stool. I took his advice to heart and signed on for eight weeks at the Marigold Gardens, a nightclub outside Chicago. Two grand a week beat anonymous directing gigs. And it was definitely a left turn.

  I won't lie. I was nursing a case of wet-seat the first night I stepped onstage at the Marigold. "Ladies and gentleman, I'dhave been here sooner, but I had trouble checking out of my hotel in San Francisco." BEAT. "They thought I was stealing towels!"

  The standing O I got every night made me happy. But what really thrilled me was the sound of ice clinking in my glass offstage at the start of my last number, a joke version of "California, Here I Come": "California, here I come. Even though you want me hung . . ."

  "Oh wait," I'd fake ad-lib, "where s my head? They wanna hang me here, too, don't they? Did you read that editorial in the Trib?"

  Hard as it was to laugh at my trials, it was the only way to let the jakes in the audience know they could laugh, too. Since a quarter of the crowd were gawkers, it helped to cut right to the chase. When I got back to Los Angeles, I got a cameo in Hollywood, a movie biz satire Jimmy Cruze was directing for Paramount. It was one of those a-star-in-every-part vehicles the studio nabobs concoct to make sure their big names still know how to come when the front office whistles. I played a down-on-his-luck actor cooling his heels in a casting office. If I had had any pride left, it would have probably stung. But 500 bucks is 500 bucks. Then I went back to anonymity and directing again.

  Did I relish punching a clock as a nameless director? The answer is yes and no. For a while I humped it as journeyman comedy hand for Educational, Metro, and Universal, directing whatever claptrap they threw at me. The good news was, at Educational I crossed paths with Doris Deane, the pretty thing I met on the ferry back from San Fran, right before I changed my profession from actor to pariah. Doris Deane, whose ex-boyfriend was the reason I was walking around in my own clothes.

  Doris acted in a number of goofball efforts, including the memorable Stupid but Brave and Lovemania. I guess you could say we fell in love. Or at least I fell in love, and she didn't seem to mind the attentions of a gin-soaked marshmallow. The hardest letter I ever had to write was the one to Minta, telling her I'd met someone, asking for a divorce. I had to get so polluted I could barely hold the pen.

  The split was official on January 27, 1925. Despite everything, tiny Minta'd been my biggest champion since the acquittal. She hounded Hays with letters nearly every day, even when I was abroad. But she was kind—and classy—enough to wish me the best and start marriage-ending proceedings immediately. The last thing either of us wanted was another scandal, so she arranged to file the divorce papers in Providence, Rhode Island. During Christmas season. An unlikely time and place for celebrity snoops.

  Then Keaton, God bless his porkpie hat, came through again. He snagged me a chance at my first credited directing job post-Virginia. I'd be filming him in Sherlock Jr. I left Educational to write and lay out the gags with him. I was excited, and so was he. It was great to be working together again. And, feet in the fire, I still couldn't tell you why it went south.

  I guess, about one-third in, Buster and I both realized I was coming up with stuff I wanted to do—not what worked for him. And it was too painful to keep talking around the fact that I was not allowed to perform on camera. It's one thing to not act, another not to act when you're on the set, the camera's running, and you have a headful of great gags that no one can sell but you.

  Little by little, I started getting touchy about everything. I heard grips whispering behind my back. I felt their judgment. The lighting man, I knew, was worried because his wife's folks, Four Square Church people, would throw the couple out of their house if word got out her husband worked with the blubber-thighed Antichrist Roscoe Arbuckle.

  Then, of course, there was the drinking. Buster never came out and said it wasn't a good idea for a director to gulp out of the bottle between takes, but it was obviously a problem. Things ended before my best friend had to fire me outright. I knew it was over and left one morning in the middle of a gag involving Keaton's hat and a lovesick dove. The dove gag didn't make it into the movie, and neither did the directing credit.

  After the Sherlock debacle I did a few more comedies back at Educational. On The Iron Mule, the last one I directed with Doris Deane, I asked her if she'd consider marrying me. I always say she looked like a bunny who saw a bear when I popped the question. Or semi-popped it.

  I know I've mentioned this already, but indulge me. Here's the official version. I didn't want to be so bold as to assume Miss Deane would say yes. Minta had bandied Sigmund Freud around often enough for me to know I had some ego problems. (I was oral, too. But that's part of your job when you're a professional fat man.)

  I suggested Doris take her time in deciding. In the meantime, I ran into Alexander Pantages, my champion from way back when, drying his hands in the men's room of Musso's. He asked me what I was doing and I went fag on him, "Not looking for phone numbers, thailor." Pantages laughed his way into a coughing fit and accidentally whacked Jackie Coogan, who was behind us, trying to see between our shoulders to wet-comb his hair in the mirror. After we dusted Coogan off, Pantages turned to me, with tears in his eyes, and said, "I'm gonna do something crazy and offer you a cross-country tour."

  I didn't have to check my date book to say yes.

  The show, a variety bill, was slated to open in Long Beach, at some dump catty-corner to the Bide-A-Wee, where Minta and I'd gotten married onstage a few centuries earlier. But your Long Beachers, it turns out, are not the nostalgic type. There was a petition in City Council to keep me out. So instead of a dump in Long Beach, I opened at the Cotton Club, a hop-skip-and-a-lawsuit from Goldwyn Studios in Culver City. The Cotton got raided occasionally, but Pantages assured me he'd paid off the cops.

  All the big movie people in town turned out for the revue. They hadn't exactly been flocking to see me before now, but my guess is everybody was so relieved I was leaving movies, they came to show their support. On account of me, after all, any actor who sneezed on the Sabbath was bound to show up in a tabloid. An entire industry devoted to trailing the stars around, trying to catch 'em in some unsavory gaffes, had sprung up from my own phantom crime at the St. Francis. Gloria Swanson actually laid me out at a restaurant, "Charlie Chaplin used to do underage girls by the bucketful. Now he's so scared Photoplay will find out he won't even drive by a grade school. And I nearly had to hide in a nunnery after my divorce. Thanks to you, Roscoe Pee-in-theSoup Arbuckle, nobody in this town can have fun anymore . . ."

  What could I say but "Gee, sorry. I was framed. It could happen to anybody . . ."

  The crowds were with me in every city, ev
en if the local headlines steamed over the return of Beelzebub in Santa Claus's body. That's when the obvious sank in: The people who buy the tickets aren't the ones who go to church. In fact, the greater the commotion over my show, the greater the devotion of those who braved public opinion to take it in. Big lesson.

  At Saxes's Strand Theater in Milwaukee, it was all I could do to get through the seething frenzy of women's clubs, Christian Youth Groups, and theater owners' association members, all in full, self-righteous rut under the marquee out front. The protesters' idea was to force any folks who wanted to attend my performance to walk a gauntlet from sidewalk to theater doors. But my theory held—and the people who walked in did not seem to mind the scoffs of the Fundamentalists. The fracas became part of the show.

  Inside the theater, the foot stomping and whistling commenced the moment I stumbled onstage. The reception was more deafening than any I'd earned with an actual gag. What were they cheering for, really, but the happy fact that I hadn't been given the gas? It was bittersweet. Night after night, I got so choked up all I could do was pretend to slip and fall on my ass.

  Opening night, as a joke, the management paid a 16-year-old to stand up in the first row and throw a pie at me. Much to everyone's surprise—but mostly mine—I caught the thing, Pancho Villa style, and hurled it back. The kid ducked, and the custard splatted square in the mascara of an elegant, middle-aged woman. Her husband was one of those industrialist types with iron pilings for hair. When he jumped out of his seat, I had visions of strike-breaking goons pinning my arms in the dressing room while hubby worked me over with a lead pipe.

  I'd gotten so used to the worst that could happen actually happening, I was almost nervous when it didn't. In fact, after I hit her with the pie, the elegant lady froze for a moment, then ran a finger over the blob of whipped cream on her cheek, licked it off, and burst into the grandest horse laugh I ever heard. One of those laughs that make other people laugh. Till pretty soon the entire place was teary-eyed from laughing. It's the kind of moment you want to scoop up and lock in a vault, to pull out and savor when life returns to its usual ho-hum catastrophe.