I, Fatty

by Jerry Stahl

  A lot of these erstwhile stars were broke, and Buster berated me nonstop about what an easy touch I was. One Saturday he dragged me onto a conga line. The dancers held up a banner that said THE "FATTY, LOAN ME A QUARTER" LINE. Everybody in the club had to dance past me with their hands out. And I gave everyone who showed me their palm a quarter. No lie. Some chiselers came by twice, but I let it slide. You think I don't remember what it was like being hungry? I'll tell you a secret: I don't remember what it's like not to be. Even when I'm not.

  You figure it out.

  Crash

  Had I known the financial fate in store for the nation, I'd have hung on to some of those quarters. Black Tuesday hit in October '29 like a thug with a blackjack, and I was caught as flatfooted as any Wall Street sidewalk diver. The Plantation gasped along for another couple of months, but few folks had the money left to burn. And the ones who did did not want to spread it around. My last gesture as club owner was to rip out John Gilbert's bar stool from the floor and hand it to him. I don't think the old ham had anywhere to go when the doors closed. That stool was the closest thing he had to family.

  Maybe I was the only man in America secretly glad when the market got kayoed. Now everybody was just trying to survive. I signed on with Educational Pictures, to do my part once more as William Goodrich. Considering the state of the union, I tried not to feel too badly about the dregs it was my lot to "direct." I could ride the streetcar to the hack factory every day and hold my head high. At least I had a job. And I wasn't wearing state-issue drawers.

  Educational was the brainchild of an erstwhile idealist named Earl Hammol. Hammol began with the high-tone intent of supplying quality films to schools and churches. As the economy tanked, he saw his ideals go down the toilet, along with his life savings. To stay afloat, Earl stopped shooting history lessons and started cranking out cheesy one- and two-reelers, short subjects other studios snapped up as filler to run before their feature presentations. "More time to get their asses in their seats," explained Mr. Hammol, a formerly erudite man, when I asked him why exactly movie theaters would even want to run these lousy filmettes.

  For the most part, Educational was the kind of place where nobody really met anybody else's eyes. It was the studio where you began working for the sole purpose of making enough money to stop working there. I met the very young Louise Brooks at Educational, while directing Windy Riley Goes Hollywood. Louise, like anybody with a thimble of ambition, was just passing through. Educational, it was common knowledge, stood out as last stop for many an older talent, and as the only stop for young ones with no talent at all. Both of which were fine with me.

  Life passed by in a mist of pills and cocktail glasses. One day I realized I'd directed an entire reel of film without once raising my eyes from the toes of my brogans. In spite of that, RKO Studios asked me to bang out some stories to direct for Louie Bartels, a quirky comic who starred, if that's the word, in a series of Traveling Salesman Comedies. My first was called That's My Line—the tale of a nightie salesman who stumbles into Olde Mexico, where he gets set up by a married matron and seduced by a young woman. The two females also have a couple of men friends, who try to ventilate Senor Lingerie's forehead with fireplace pokers.

  It felt strangely nice to mine the hackmeat I'd tumbled into, molding it for hammy Louie Bartels instead of myself. I followed That's My Line up with Beach Pajamas. In this one our salesman steps into the web of a conniving lady who cons him into mucking up her niece's wedding engagement. Pretending to try on a bathing suit, the evil aunt arranges for her niece, the sweet fiancée, to crash in and catch her in the altogether with her intended, our friend the flummoxed salesman. Another innocent sinner bites the dust.

  While I wasn't paying attention, something else happened. I started to care again about what I was doing. Maybe it's because in my shorts, so to speak, I was trying to capture a feeling, not just set up a gag. Each little movie asked the same question life had left me asking myself every waking hour: What do you do when the world thinks you're a monster, and you know it's the world that's monstrous?

  You try and make good movies, that's what you do. What you don't do is kid yourself that it matters.

  Somehow things felt lighter now. I couldn't tell peaceful from numb with a burp gun to my head, but so what? Maybe this was neither. Maybe, I know it sounds sappy, maybe it was just my heart unclenching. Not completely, mind you. Just enough to let a sliver of light into the blackness. A little ray of sunshine called Addie Oakley Dukes McPhail, a sweet-eyed Hollywood up-and-comer who, for reasons I myself could not explain, decided she liked my company. I don't remember meeting Addie, I remember feeling like I knew her. Sure, I was older, and the size of an ice wagon. But Addie laughed like she was falling backwards. It was intoxicating. I could tell her whatever story I was broiling for a Bartels shorty and she'd guffaw. How many girls guffaw?

  To my surprise, Addie replied "I wouldn't mind" when I got up the gumption to ask "Would you?" Even after I gave her the ring, I kept thinking she was going to jump up in the middle of dinner somewhere and say, "Just kidding! I wouldn't marry you if your head was a slot machine and your nose spit nickels." But she never did. Say that.

  Number Three

  Call me a romantic. Addie and I tied the knot on June 21,1931.1 picked the longest day of the year. But I didn't believe in long courtships, and pretty much proposed a week after I met her. Why not? Do you think, in this life, there is one right way and one wrong way to do anything? Maybe the idea is to fuck up as many ways as we can before we die. Maybe the gag is you weren't fucking up after all. In Pittsburgh, I met a midget who juggled sardines. When I asked him "Why sardines?" he said, "Shark won't fit in the suitcase." You got a better explanation for your stellar performance on this planet? Or am I going Oriental?

  In 1932,1 brought my blushing bride to Broadway. I'd been asked to join an all-star bill in New York with Jack Whiting, Milton Berle, and a pipsqueak named Peter Lind Hayes, making his onstage debut. I only signed on the dotted line 'cause I knew my new girl would be coming with me. I know what you're thinking. What about sex? Well, what about it? Of all the free sleigh rides in the world, what good had sex ever done me? You figure it out.

  Addie and I took a big old apartment over Central Park. I used to like just sitting there and staring at the trees. The way the light played on the leaves—dark one second, bright the the next. Somehow it's not a view you get in Los Angeles. Addie would sit beside me and we'd both stare until dusk turned the elms and maples to blurs. I was happiest when things got blurry. I'd do my shows, have dinner with my better half, and go back to Central Park West. That was enough.

  Then, out of nowhere, at the end of the Whiting-and-Berle run, Jack Warner called: Would I be available to do Hey, Pop!, a two-reeler with child star Billy Heye?

  I told Warner I hadn't directed in a while and he got mad, asked if I was trying to aggravate him. "I'm not talking about directing. This is about you, and little Billy. Starring in the film. That's what I'm talking about."

  I couldn't believe I would be appearing on-screen again. "Under my own name?" I asked Warner, at least twice.

  "Unless, for some reason, you want to use mine, yeah," Warner said. "If you and the kid click, it'll be the first in a series of two-reelers. Then we move to features."

  Just like that. Eleven years after he was so rudely interrupted, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was back. In fact, by now I'd become such a moral paragon, little Billy's dad left his son in my care for the entire two weeks of shooting. I made it my job to take him to Coney Island every day and teach him manners. We were great copy, and the magazines sent teams of photographers and writers to cover us. "The beach is good, clean, wholesome fun, just like my pictures," I'd say to that now friendly scribe on hand, as he'd write my words down on his little pad. I won't name names, but he was the same fellow who'd printed scurrilous rumors about me and a certain container of bubbly cola. But now he was beaming, grateful for both of us I'd become fit for hu
man consumption again.

  "Roscoe," the reporter said, and the way his eyes wet up I think he really meant it, "in this town you're either corn or firecrackers. Well, now you're pure corn, buddy boy."

  When Hey Pop! came out, the story that ran about my two weeks as little Billy Heye's sorta-Dad made me out to be a cross between scoutmaster and a wacky uncle.

  I took time off from work at Warner-Brooklyn to walk onstage at the Strand before the opening of Hey, Pop! It had been 10 years since my name had appeared on a film. The decade had ridden me to the curb. It opened with Finally I've Made It and ended with What Difference Does It Make Anyway?

  Life Is the Pie That Hits You

  in the Face and Kills You

  After Hey, Pop! I signed with Vitaphone, a Warner Bros, holding company, for five more two-reelers: How You Been?, Buzzin' Around, Tomalio, Close Relations, and In the Dough. I worked like a man being chased. You spend a few dusk-to-dawns contemplating death by chemical asphyxiation, and tell me how long it takes your eyeballs to stop rattling.

  In the Dough wrapped around 9 p.m., June 28. It almost wrapped about nine hours earlier, when I ran down a hill top speed for a chase sequence and got so winded I nearly keeled over. I used to be able to do one take on a scene like that, then trot back to my mark, do another one, and do five more. But all it took was one sprint down the road and I was gasping like a gut-punched lunger. Breathing became so painful I had to double up.

  The thought formed, as the first stars started passing before my eyes, that I had not really expended much physical energy since going to jail for the first time a million years ago. It's as if, in some way, I'd forgotten about my body for all that time. Maybe this was because of all the horrible things the paper said I'd done with it, and the horrible ways I'd done them. Did my belly think it was guilty?

  For a second—it felt like a second, it might have been weeks—I blacked out, and suddenly one voice started echoing inside my head. Right behind my yellow eyeballs. What the voice kept blaring was that uncontrolled, roiling sea monster of a sentence from the first tabloid I saw after they locked me up. I can't even remember the paper. Probably the Examiner. What I remember are those words. The image they conveyed. The boot-in-the-balls shock of the fact that someone had seen fit to commit mythical slander about my life to print. You can't describe the sensation.

  I am hated. People want to ruin me.

  What these revelations bode for my immediate future was beyond scary. But before any of that could sink in, there was the voice itself. The voice I heard in my head—it was the voice of my father.

  Didn't I always tell you, Roscoe? Didn't I? Listen to what you are . . .

  And for a second, the shame and fear of the present was mercifully trumped with memories of past awfulness. Until Daddy began to read, in that high Hoosier whine of his, from the scabrous article I found in the jailhouse crapper.

  "Smothered by Fatty's copious man-breasts, Virginia struggled to inch her face sideways, trying for a final, desperate breath. But Arbuckle had other plans. Chuckling and spilling champagne over the girlish actress's exposed belly, the actor rolled his elephantine form on top of her, thrusting with an animalistic grunt, like a boar in rut, again and again. Until, her insides crushed, Virginia's feeble gasps and cries faded away to faint nothing"

  The Daddy in my head took a deep, dramatic pause, then rode the story home.

  "She was helpless in the grasp of desires so perverted, so perhaps she can count herself blessed she did not live to feel herself soiled by a fat man's foulness"

  I'm giving you that last, scalding sample of what lived behind my eyes. What I saw projected in the eyes of others. Just to show you how every word of sanctioned slander was emblazoned in my brain. I'm not as dumb as people think. I have a sizable vocabulary. There's just not much use for that brand of baggage when you do what I do. Not really . . .

  But I was talking about slander. After one year. After five years. After 10. The burn of those words had not let up a single degree. I found ways not to visit them, but their heat was there. Like a boiler in the basement, going full-tilt even in summertime.

  I can hear you groaning. Fatty Arbuckle, going philosophical? It's like the old Professor Pork Act, where the pig puts on a tux, then stands on two legs and does geometry.

  After my little attack in the middle of In the Dough, I struggled wobbly to my feet and blinked. Jack Henley, the director, took one look at me and made the decision. "Let's call it a day."

  I told Henley, "No dice, we keep going!" And so we kept shooting. The film was due that day, and by God, I'd make sure it was finished. See, this was my chance to get everything back. But—like you always hear people say—by the time I got what I wanted, I realized how little I really wanted it. And anyhow, what was anything a fat man accomplished worth? There seemed little doubt that I would become beloved again. But this time, I'd know it meant nothing. It was a bitter kind of happiness.

  That same night, on the 28th—a week late—Addie and I celebrated our one-year anniversary. That very day, word had come down from on high, I'd be back making features next year. Warner was talking talkies. The contract was being drawn up. Maybe, I thought, everything would be returned to me, like the swallows to Capistrano. But what did that matter, once you knew the things were just going to fly away again?

  Addie walked down Fifth Avenue and I held her hand and I looked up at the stars and I felt . . . nothing. But not in a bad way.

  We went up to our rambling apartment. Gazed at the trees silhouetted by the streetlight. I felt so happy at that moment it was almost crummy. Because everything was so perfect. But I'd had perfect happiness before, more or less, and look what happened . . . The trouble with everything was how suddenly it could turn to nothing. Every Baby Ruth a toothache in a fancy wrapper. So this is what I did: I told Addie I loved her and wanted to hit the hay. She asked if she could undress me, and I said sure. We did that sometimes. Addie took off my clothes and ran me a bath. I called her my geisha girl, since I'd known a few of those in my Mikado days.

  This is when Addie announced that she had something special she wanted to wear. But she insisted that she wait until after I came out of the bath before showing me. I told her, "Fine, dear." No longer even lamenting my lack of feeling. Life could be just as pleasant without feeling anything. I was going to be a star again. That was enough. Even if I wouldn't feel any differently, at least the world would be right again. And what was that worth?

  I lay back in the tub. Closed my eyes. So this is what Job got in the end, I thought, with something like relief. Everything he lost came back—except the delusion that it was really his, and the belief that it mattered.

  And then a voice I recognized, but couldn't, wouldn't let myself acknowledge, spoke right at me. Daddy again. Why wouldn't the old juicehead stay dead?

  Well, bully, for you, Fat Boy. You got just what you wanted. Think that makes you special? Don't kid yourself, potato sack, it don't . . .

  And in a flickering, like one frame of a two-reeler, I saw the old man standing there. Ragged as the clothes he was buried in, floating in front of the tub. Out of habit, I checked to see if he was holding a belt.

  You know what you got? You got to keep your big rump roast out of the gas oven. That's what you got, Daddy said. And that's all you got.

  I made the decision to get up and get the needle right there, and commenced to fix myself an arm cocktail on the spot. Same old heroin the folks at Bayer used to peddle. Okie had a pal in the warehouse. He'd slipped me enough for a weeks' supply.

  I fired the whole tube and felt my toes uncurl. I never knew they were curled until I took a shot and I uncurled them. The bubble of dread in my heart whispered P-O-P! Red warmth flooded my eyes. The smallest breath of air became a solid thing, nearly too heavy to lift. But that was all right. I didn't need much air. Just enough to hoist my haunches out of the tub.

  I toddled out of the bathroom, naked and dripping, and shuffled my last few steps to t
he window overlooking the park. Let my gaze rest on the dark under the trees.

  Now I feel some peace. It's too much, getting everything back. The strain of maybe losing it again and again makes it ashes in my piehole. I would have lived with a crick in my neck from looking over my shoulder, waiting for Calamity Jane to ride up and shoot a message in my fat and mortal ass one more time.

  No, sir. It's easier this way. Easier to gaze out the window, into trees and darkness. I ask you again, what was anything a fat man accomplished? A pile of leaves waiting for a wind.

  I've been dodging the hook since I was 10. I'm out of somersaults.

  Write this down.

  St. Francis Hotel, Room 1221

  San Francisco

  2003

  Bibliography

  American Silent Film. William K. Everson. New York: Da Capo Press, 1978 (reprint).

  American Silent Film: Discovering Marginalized Voices. Gregg Bachman and Thomas J. Slater, eds. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University, 2002.

  American Weekly. "Love, Laughter and Tears: The Hollywood Story." Adela Rogers St. Johns. Oct. 22, 1950.

  A-Z of Silent Film Comedy: An Illustrated Companion. Glenn Mitchell. London: B. T. Batsford, 1998.

  Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime—Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era. Kevin Brownlow. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

  California Babylon: A Guide to Sites of Scandal, Mayhem, and Celluloid in the Golden State. Kristan Lawson and Anneli Rufus. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2000.