I, Fatty

by Jerry Stahl

  And it was that moment I clung to a week later, in Dallas, when Ernie Young, the twitchy yokel who'd booked me for the Texas State Fair, burst into my room and blubbered that he had to bounce me for an Italo Muscle-man Act, The Amazing Corelli, before I ever hit the stage. "Technically, that means I can't cover your hotel bill, Roscoe, since you didn't actually perform. It's in the contract. You know how it is."

  I knew how it was. The Dallas City Fathers, who ran the theaters, "just didn't want my kind." And they wouldn't want Twitchy Ernie Young's kind if he didn't get rid of me, either.

  When the tour died, I stopped in to Atlantic City, where Minta was appearing, billed as "Mrs. Roscoe Arbuckle," at the Club Palais Royal. The Palais manager, a conniver named M. A. Williams, offered me six grand a week just to stay in his cafe—and not to wander onto the boardwalk where folks could see me for free. M. A. thought word of Mr. Arbuckle on the premises with Mrs. Arbuckle would reel them in the way grubs snag haddock. If grubs snag haddock. I was never one for fishing. A drunken fat man on a rowboat is a dangerous situation.

  I admit it wasn't the brightest maneuver on my part to suggest that Minta and I book a suite together. I don't know why, I had a yen to go back and try it with her, maybe even start up an act together. Minta helped me come to my senses. With a slap.

  Doris—did I mention this?—had been a friend of my wife's. I mean, of Minta's. And Minta, ever the definition of class on perfect pins, actually told me she was glad that if she had to lose me, it was to a wonderful girl like Doris. I know I said she filed for divorce in Providence. But she ended up making it legal in Paris. Parisians didn't care about niceties like nuptial fidelity. A faithful marriage—mais non! Nothing was more chic, in the '20s, than a Parisian divorce. Thank the God of the Jews, I somehow managed to make enough to keep my first wife in diamonds and dresses while I went about the business of trying to secure my second one.

  Doris had considered my proposal—I haven't told this story more than five times, have I—and to my surprise decided that I was the man for her. What I'd realized, during my Atlantic City stint with Minta, was that I needed someone whose head was not full to bursting with images of me as a sniveling junkie, a sweaty accused criminal, a fall-down, boorish drunk. Somebody who couldn't drag my history out and whack me with it, the way Minta did. Not that I blamed her. I had not exactly made her life a celebrity paradise.

  At first, Doris's parents seemed less than thrilled at the big surprise their daughter dragged home to San Moreno to ask for her hand. I've always liked old-fashioned girls. And really, what bride's daddy would not want a fat actor, accused killer and sex criminal, for a son-in-law? Whole chunks of the country still wanted to see me strung from a lamppost and deballed. What a catch!

  Not Losing a Daughter,

  Gaining a Felon

  Even if they had reservations, I liked the Deanes straightaway. Doris's dad, a natty little wisp of a man, asked me if I always drank like sobriety was a hanging offense. I told him a bit of whiskey dulled the pain in my leg. Then Daddy Deane pulled out a hip flask, said he reckoned he'd been havin' some leg pains of his own, and joined me on the back porch.

  Joe Schenck, in a show of paternal concern that still gets me misty, made the wedding arrangements. Through the entire ceremony, he never failed to provide a Dad-like shoulder to lean on. The novelty of that alone made the experience special. Buster was best man. A commitment for which he paid in blood to his mother-in-law, Peg Talmadge, who found it disgraceful that her daughter's husband should even associate with a pervert villain like me, let alone host my wedding in his home.

  Nothing could deter Buster, though. Even after the Sherlock Jr. fiasco, even after his wife's family locked him in the doghouse over the wedding, he came back with a still bigger demonstration of friendship. Behind my back—it would have to be behind my back!—Buster approached William Randolph Hearst about me directing his beloved better half, Marion Davies, in The Red Mill.

  You heard me. William Randolph Hearst. The man who doubled his fortune spewing lies about my life and crimes in his personal birdcage liner. But forget that for a minute. (Not that I ever could.) Lest there be any misunderstanding, this was by no stretch a plum project. Marion was a natural comedienne. But Hearst was so sensitive about the fact that they'd met when she was 18 and he was 54, he always thought people were laughing at him when they laughed at her. So instead of comedy, he'd secure her dishrag dramas like The Red Mill, which began life as an operetta in 1906—and was every bit as musty 20 years later. He'd buy these cornballs and put them into production through Cosmopolitan, a company set up for no other reason than to make movies featuring Marion. Movies Hearst could control.

  When I first heard that Hearst's secretary had called to invite me and Doris to San Simeon, I had the temporary bends. Hearst—can I say this too many times?—who had single-handedly created a lust-crazed, murderous version of me so awful even I didn't think I deserved to live. Hearst, who had made untold millions on the broken back of my career and reputation. Hearst, who had done everything but offer to pay for the cyanide to guarantee that I got the gas chamber for my so-called crimes.

  Yes, that Hearst was inviting us for lunch.

  Even though I swore I wouldn't, within two minutes of meeting my tormentor—who'd have guessed the man who could break other men had a squeaky voice?—I got him in a corner and asked him, straight out, "How can you just call like this, after what you said about me?"

  The pallid giant had taken me out to his menagerie to feed his gorillas, Cain and Abel. "Son," Hearst said, throwing a handful of rotten apples to the caged apes, who seemed glad to get them, "you sold more papers than the sinking of the Lusitania. Least I can do is offer you a little job."

  "So just like that, you're my friend?"

  Hearst laughed, a high, whinnying titter that seemed even less worthy of a man of his gravity than his chirpy voice. "Son," he said, in a not unkindly matter, "let me save you a lot of trouble and explain something. The only difference between a friend and an enemy is five minutes and the right price."

  He may have put his hand on my shoulder. I was too stunned by the whole situation to pay close attention. All I could think was, So that's the kind of wisdom that snags you a castle with matching monkeys.

  Hearst made it clear that a number of directors had turned him down. Directors, he made no pains to conceal, he preferred to me. But since Buster spoke so highly of my work, he figured what the heck. He'd take a flyer. After all, we had history together . . .

  Even while he was talking, I still couldn't believe I was standing in front of William Randolph Hearst. Something about his prim lips, and the way Marion and Doris looked at him like he was a wind-up doll, made it impossible to hate the man. Doris had told me he and Marion never slept together, which immediately made me wonder if Randolph had the same problem I had. Maybe his doctor told him to eat more bloodmeats.

  At lunch, we sat at a table large enough to sail across the Atlantic. I realized, from the way he talked at me over the tureen of clam chowder, that Hearst believed I'd done everything I'd been charged with. And that, even more alarming, it didn't matter to him.

  It mattered to me, though. And from the beginning—the very first shot—I could feel the shadow of the great man falling over my every step. By the third day, King Vidor, a young MGM director, had started hanging around the set. King didn't say much. When I introduced myself, he looked sheepish and said that Mr. Hearst had asked him to keep an eye on things. "That's it?" I asked him.

  "Actually," said Vidor, doing his level best to keep things civilized, "Mr. Hearst wanted me to run every shot by him before you start rolling."

  I believe I stroked my jowls for a minute, then sucked it up and said, "Fine, the more the merrier." Not that I meant it. But I had no beef with King, who could not have been more respectful. All I really wanted to know was how his parents happened to name him King. Did he have a sister named Queen and a little brother named Jack? But somehow, I neve
r found the right angle of approach. Vidor was always staring, in that way people stare when they don't want you to know they're staring.

  In a funny way, it was like Lehrman sending Fischbach to check up on Virginia all over again. Except I didn't think Vidor was mattressy with Marion. For all their disparity in age and sensibility—stodgy Hearst, sprightly Marion—the young lady seemed to genuinely care for the high-pitched old toad.

  When it hit the screen, The Red Mill packed about as much impact as boiled broccoli. Without the flavor. Marion mouthed her lines as well as anyone could have, but the film as a whole sagged badly. A state of affairs Hearst himself wasted no time in blaming on the director.

  After The Red Mill came and went, I was no longer just tainted—forced to work in the shadows, forever unnamed—I was also deemed incompetent. In the plus column, I was a former million-dollar talent who worked in a pinch. The perfect fall guy for problem projects. After The Red Mill, Joe Schenck secured me a directing slot on Special Delivery, a bit of fluff featuring Eddie Cantor and a dewy-cheeked William Powell in a comic mail-robbery caper.

  Somehow, prior to my arrival on Special Delivery, it had not occurred to anyone that a heist comedy mocking the post office might not sit well with former Postmaster General Hays. Sure enough, Holy Will, expressing much umbrage about citizens not taking the business of mail delivery seriously, demanded a total rewrite. Which left the story good and butchered by the time Joe persuaded me to sign on and ride the barrel over the Falls.

  Special Delivery went the same route as The Red Mill. Straight to Dudsville. Meanwhile, Cecil B. DeMille, that brainy hypocrite, was in all the papers talking about the strict moral code he maintained during shooting oiKing of Kings. "It would never do to have the Virgin Mary getting a divorce or Saint John cutting up in a nightclub . . . " DeMille never explained why Jesus turned water into wine if He didn't want people cutting up. And nobody asked him. Midway through Kings, the director began to see himself as a biblical figure. Buster said he heard Cecil DeMille had hired the Pope to do punch-up—and paid so much the Pontiff kissed DeMille's ring.

  The moral, ladles and geraniums, is that when one door closes, another swings open—and breaks your nose. But not always. I was ready to pawn my own ring—Doris and I were already on the rocks—when, out of the proverbial blue, Pantages offered me another 12 weeks. Back on the road, at $1,200 a week. A different hotel towel around my rumble seat every night. Nothing like wondering if an audience is going to hear your name and throw tomatoes with razor blades in them. Or leap to their feet and clap their hands bloody to show you how much they love you. Sometimes in the same night.

  In Cleveland, when the crowd threatened to go native, a kid with a big forehead ambled onstage and started dishing the snappy platter. In a minute, he was passing the laughs off to me. He did a variation on the two-bit routine, where he taps me for two bits, I say I'm not sure I have two bits, and he says, "Okay, then, I'll take whatever you got—except advice about women. I was in jail once, Mr. Arbuckle, and it didn't agree with my complexion." There was, as they say, a gasp—then the laughs let loose in a torrent. Maybe a monsoon.

  The kid with the big forehead had the phoniest handle I ever heard: Bob Hope. But he was as crafty with a setup as any comic I'd crossed paths with. I wired Joe Schenck about the kid and slipped him train fare to L.A. If you can't buy your friends, who can you buy?

  Then I caught the sleeper to New York, where I'd just gotten the offer I wanted my whole life: a prime part in an honest-toGod play, on honest-to-God-Broadway no less. By now I didn't want to go home to Doris. This must sound abrupt, but I don't feel like going into it. Who wants to relive the days and nights with a woman he used to adore and now seems forever at war with? If you've been there, you know. If you haven't, pull up a bottle and hit yourself over the head. That'll give you a hint.

  So when Broadway beckoned, I succumbed.

  The Great White Whale

  Baby Mine—a whimsical drama about motherhood, with some B plot about infant switching—ran for the first time in 1910, for 287 days. It wasn't what you'd call a great play. But still . . . My name would be on the marquee at Chanin's Theater on 46th, just above that of a junior phenom named Humphrey Bogart. Could anything be a bigger cinch? The backers were expecting another long run with me on board.

  The rave in the New York Telegram was nice enough to say I was the best thing in the show. The Tribune went even further, quoting a batch of snappy patter I did after a curtain call. "Ladies and gentlemen, I just want to tell you, a motorcycle policeman overtook me on the way to the theater this evening. I asked him how he was doing and he said. "Fine—$25:"

  That kind of run. Old vaudeville stuff. People seemed to eat it up. For a minute and a half.

  Like I said, the backers were expecting another long run. They didn't get it . . . We closed before my name was dry on the dressing-room door.

  Mae West bit the dust that year, too, in a play called Sex. Mae ended up doing 10 days and paying $500 in fines. But she wanted it that way. Nobody saw fit to throw me in the clink for acting in Baby Mine, but it wouldn't have surprised me.

  If I had to come up with a slogan that captured my state of mind after the St. Francis imbroglio, it would have been: Dread everything, expect nothing. Doris said that was no attitude for a man supposed to be in love with his wife, and I agreed.

  The Coast I Left Behind

  This time, when I rolled back to Hollywood, the prospect of reinventing myself once again seemed too daunting to even contemplate. I had a bit of money socked away. I knew a thing or two about saloons. So when the opportunity came to open up my very own watering hole in Culver City, I figured why not just go ahead and become what everyone already thought I was? A profligate lush who does nothing but drink and party.

  After the tabloids ran me around the block in my funny underwear, the public demanded ever more scandalous stories about the famous. They even wanted to mingle with them, to feel famous and dangerous themselves—if only for an evening. Which is why so many speakeasies were owned or hosted by celebrities.

  Gangsters were celebrities, too, and not all that removed from actors, who now had their own criminal tinge. A joint like Salon Royal in Manhattan got popular because regular folks wanted to rub elbows with the greeter, a colorful lady named Tex Guinan, who'd once been partners with real-life mobster Larry Fay at the El Fay Club. At the Salon, Tex heralded one and all with her trademark, "Hello sucker!" Since the joint charged $25 for a fifth of booze, and eight bits for a pitcher of tap water, the lady wasn't kidding. Jimmy Durante's Club Durant, on Broadway and 58th, was another spot—always packed. Helen Morgan's Chez Morgan did business at West 54th from fall to spring. Then the joint moved to West 52nd, in its incarnation as Helen Morgan's Summer House. What brought the crowds to all these rub joints was the personality of the name on the door. Showbiz dives promised late hours, secret revelry. Real-life adventure. Slow learner that I am, it always took a while to register the obvious: I was never going to get respectable enough to make a decent living, so maybe I could make an indecent living by not being respectable. A career, if nothing else, with better hours.

  With no better half to answer to, and no prospects on either side of a camera, I opened a playhouse with my name on it, Roscoe Arbuckle's Plantation Club.

  Once the Plantation doors swung open, I took to living a life of all-night revels and all-day morphia nods. Why not? It's not like I needed to memorize lines to shake hands with the genuine imitation flappers and glamour boys who passed through the doors. I kept ROSCOE "FATTY" ARBUCKLE AND HIS MERRY GANG IN A SMART SET REVUE on the marquee. The folks like to know they're getting a show. Even if the show was just a fat souse who pumped your hand at the cash register.

  Charlie Chaplin was as likely to roll into the joint as Clara Bow, Al Jolson as Janet Gaynor. In fact, Janet showed up with Charlie the night she won her Academy Award for Best Actress—the very first one ever given out. Janet said if she sharpened the statue's
head she could use it to roast weenies. Otherwise, what good was it?

  By way of after-hours entertainment, Chaplin invented the Coke Bottle Shuffle, in which he parodied a certain, ahem, alleged activity once attributed to me but long since discounted. Theoretically. With a willing lass before him, posterior posed just so, Charlie would rework some music-hall bit to current themes. Waggling the bottle in flagrante delicto, he'd sing and wiggle:

  It's those darn cokeettes

  With their darn darn coke . . .

  Why, one thing leads to another

  And pretty soon a girl's broke!

  Broke he'd punctuate with a forward bump of his hips that sent the cokeette of the evening flying, usually into the bass drum.

  I no longer cared who made carnival with my calamities. Or else I did. Or else I'd floated so much alcohol and good German painkiller through my veins I couldn't tell you the difference between please and thank you.

  Most nights at the Plantation I started at the door, pressing flesh. More important than the biggos who showed up was how you treated the no-names who walked through the door behind them. And believe me, I hadn't reached the point where I'd lost sympathy for the little fella. Our friendly burg was rife with little guys trying to make it big. (I was one of the few big guys who got little again.)

  In the beginning, the Plantation made so much money I couldn't believe it was possible. Feature drinking till dawn every night with your friends and getting paid handsomely for the privilege. A sizable chunk of the clientele were silent actors who never made their way into talkies. Professionals who, even if they hadn't exactly rallied round in my time of need, I still had feelings for. Poor old John Gilbert, a silent titan, spent so much time at the club I gave him his own bar stool. Sometimes he could go as long as an hour without falling off of it.