by Greg Merritt
By the time Sennett left Biograph to launch Keystone, Normand was a minor star, and she moved to the opposite coast with the promise of $125 weekly. Her fearless physicality dominated early Keystone comedies like Mabel’s Lovers, released in November 1912, the first of numerous films with her name in the title.
The emergence of Mabel Normand was something of a one-woman revolution. Before her and for some time after, comediennes were deemed grotesques who tarnished the traditional norms of womanhood. They were typically overweight or otherwise unattractive, if they were represented at all. Comedy was mostly man’s work—even if that man wore a dress. A Moving Picture World editorial of December 1912 professed, “Woman is rarely ridiculed in comedy. It does not please the better class to see her held up to scorn.”
“Madcap Mabel,” as she was known, was both ridiculed and ridiculing. She was also petite and pretty. She battled the male villain and rescued her male rescuers. She did her own death-defying stunts. She played laborers, as in Mabel’s Dramatic Career (dramatic career: maid) and Mabel’s Busy Day (busy day: hot dog vending), and her persona was ideal for a studio whose principal audience was the working class. The sort of man who toiled all day in a factory thought she was an attainable beauty, and the sort of woman who, as Normand had, toiled all day as a seamstress revered her. In 1914 the readers of Photoplay would vote her their favorite film personality. She was also one of the first female movie directors.
Normand craved excitement. She bought a luxury sports car and a sixty-foot yacht used for deep-sea fishing and party trips to Catalina Island. She learned to fly an airplane. She won dance contests, ocean swimming contests, and horse races, and she entered cyclecar races. She purchased a summerhouse in a California forest where she and her friends fished and hunted. Her adventurous exploits were regularly reported in the press, but there was never any mention of a boyfriend. Instead, a notice in August 1914 would clarify that, despite reports, she had not recently married “the director general” of Keystone. Presumably, she was as emancipated as her strongest characters, one of the first to live the Hollywood lifestyle, with no greater concern than which car to drive and how fast to go.
It was Normand who prevailed on Mack Sennett to cast Arbuckle in larger roles, convincing her boyfriend that the fat man was funny. In Peeping Pete, one of the six movies Arbuckle appeared in in June 1913, he plays a housewife whose husband (Sennett) spies on his neighbor’s more attractive spouse.* Normand coached Arbuckle to ignore the noisy, cranking camera and play to the invisible audience. He excelled, and as summer wore on he blossomed into her costar, supplanting Ford Sterling, and his salary was bumped to the standard five dollars per day.
The pairing of newcomer Arbuckle with the studio’s lead actress was a calculated maneuver. In 1913 Keystone’s chief competition was cinema’s first comedy duo, John Bunny and Flora Finch. Between 1911 and 1914 they would star in over 160 Vitagraph comedies, popularly known as “Bunnyfinches.” They were as incongruous a pair as Mack and Mabel: Bunny was short and fat with a bulbous nose and jolly demeanor, resembling an obese gnome. Finch was skinny, stork-like, with an elongated neck and beaklike nose. Together playing wife and husband, they looked like the number 10, and the physical contrast was inherent in their comedy. So when Sennett, who had previously acted with Finch, teamed up Arbuckle—fair-haired, five foot eight, rotund—with Mabel Normand—raven-haired, five foot one, dainty—he hoped to duplicate the success of Vitagraph’s duo.
In July Normand and Arbuckle shot A Noise from the Deep, playing lovers who fake Normand’s drowning so they can elope. The pair supposedly improvised a gag that spawned a thousand repetitions when Normand hurled a custard pie from a catering table into Arbuckle’s face.* In fact, the first pie toss occurred in Keystone’s That Ragtime Band, released two months earlier. Regardless, the splat of pies would become a regular component of slapstick, and no one was more adept at throwing them than Arbuckle. The ambidextrous actor sometimes accurately hurled two pies in opposite directions simultaneously.
In movies, Arbuckle’s athletic ability could finally be put to good use: running, leaping, swimming, climbing. He was fearless with stunts and became expert at taking falls and absorbing and throwing blows. Comedic acting had not come naturally to him—he had originally struggled with it onstage—but now he practiced playing to the invisible viewers, following Normand’s advice. Because big screens could exaggerate expressions, he discovered that less could be more. He learned how to virtually “wink” at the audience via the camera lens, bringing viewers in as his confidants, whereas others, including Ford Sterling, were forever hamming it up, virtually “shouting.”
Arbuckle acted in at least thirty-six movies in 1913, the year in which he went from a background player to a headliner and his screen persona took shape. There were a lot of opportunities for the public to get to know him. His name was secondary; people recognized his round face and portly body on the street and at the beach and in the saloon. They had spent joyful time with Fatty before encountering Arbuckle. He was one of the first to experience this—one of the first to be recognizable on sight and beloved too, wherever he went, for his moving image was traveling before him like a goodwill ambassador.
Movie fame was different. Pharaohs, emperors, and prophets were famous millennia ago, as were presidents, authors, and stage actors in the decades before moving pictures, but their names were better known than their visages. Early newspaper and magazine “photographs” were engraved reproductions, losing verisimilitude. If you saw a celebrity alone in public void of any trappings of his fame, you would have passed by without pausing.
Not only did motion pictures accurately capture performers, they captured them in movement—smiling, laughing, frowning, striding. Stars were glimpsed inside kitchens and bedrooms and parlors, in something resembling ordinary life—and yet bigger, projected in shades of gray onto a screen, sometimes in close-ups so you could note the slightest twitch, the briefest narrowing of the eyes, the precise alignment of their teeth. Movie fame was an artificial familiarity, but familiarity nonetheless.
Roscoe Arbuckle would be much wealthier later—more famous and, later still, infamous. He would own a mansion and possessions fit for a mansion, and he would employ servants to care for it all. But the best times came just before that, when he could see it coming. He was going to make it. Out of all the vaudevillians, out of all the actors in the young medium of moving pictures, out of everyone who strode through Keystone’s Edendale gates, out of even those with caps and clubs who appeared then as Keystone Kops (what were their names?), Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was going to make it. His dreams were going to come true.
The first true “Fatty” film, Fatty’s Day Off, was released in September 1913, pairing him with Normand again and tossing in a Kops chase. In title credits, he was Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. The nickname he’d hated as a kid was destined to stick to him as an adult, and he accepted it as a business practice but never otherwise adopted it. Friends called him Roscoe, with the exception of Normand, who affectionately nicknamed him “Big Otto,” after an elephant in the large public zoo William Selig had recently opened in conjunction with his movie studio.
Fatty’s Day Off also featured a twenty-three-year-old actress making her big-screen debut: Minta Durfee. Arbuckle’s wife later remembered this as a momentous time in their marriage. They were working together and with his nephew Al St. John. They were making new friends in the new movie industry and living in the city they thought of as home. They developed an especially close friendship with Normand. With his growing fame, Arbuckle’s salary rose—to $200 per week by the end of 1913.
One movie presaged troubles to come. In Fatty Joins the Force, Fatty reluctantly saves the police commissioner’s daughter and is given a job as a cop. He’s harassed by kids, one of whom hits him in the face with a pie. After jumping in a lake to wash, the kids steal his clothes, and his fellow cops assume he drowned. Afterward, he falls about in his underwear, and a hysterica
l woman tells policemen, “There’s a wild man at large.” Fatty is arrested, and the film ends with him in a jail cell, disgraced, sobbing, pleading to the heavens.
While a minor Arbuckle movie, Fatty Joins the Force nonetheless illuminates the emerging Fatty persona: cowardly (shoved into rescuing the commissioner’s daughter by his girlfriend), childlike in his simple outlook, surprisingly spry (a fall after an inadvertent punch turns into a prolonged backflip) but a clumsy chaser prone to stumbles and falls, generally genial but capable of sudden bursts of rage, a schemer whose plans will go awry. It’s easy to grasp his appeal to children, for most of his characters possess the personalities of bratty ten-year-old boys, and yet Fatty’s adult motivations—sex, money, occupational success—make him a boylike brat adults could laugh at too.
But Arbuckle was eager to take on a different role: that of director. Seeing how others segued from acting to calling the shots—Mabel Normand directed her first movie in 1913—Arbuckle wanted to do the same. Many of the Fatty films were directed by Henry Lehrman, about whom Arbuckle later said, “All my mechanical knowledge of pictures I learned under the direction of Lehrman.” When Lehrman and Ford Sterling left Keystone in February 1914, Arbuckle, who had already supplanted Sterling as the studio’s go-to male lead, filled Lehrman’s void in the director’s chair. Arbuckle—forever curious about technology—supposedly dismantled and reassembled a film camera one night before his directing debut to better understand the essential moviemaking tool. But by the time he first called “Action!” there was another rising star at Keystone.
In a Keystone dressing room, he modeled crepe under his nose until he found the truncated moustache he liked. He slipped on a pair of Arbuckle’s pants, losing his legs in the excess fabric. Arbuckle and others, playing cards nearby, laughed. The snug coat may have belonged to Normand, one of the few performers at the studio notably smaller than the English newcomer. The bowler hat he perched atop his dome was Arbuckle’s but had originally been Durfee’s father’s. The clownishly large shoes were Sterling’s and had smacked the Edendale streets during Keystone Kops chases. With the addition of a bamboo cane, Charlie Chaplin began to shuffle about, scoring laughs from his coworkers as he pantomimed an impoverished bumbler in ill-fitting clothes struggling to maintain his dignity. The Little Tramp was born.
The character formed in January 1914 but originated in Chaplin’s youth, an upbringing worthy of the adjective “Dickensian.” When, in Victorian London, his mentally unstable mother was institutionalized, he lived in a workhouse and rural orphanage and with his alcoholic father, who died when Charlie was twelve. He toured Great Britain with a professional dance troupe as a child and spent most of his teenage years playing child characters on England’s stages. As he neared age twenty in 1908, he joined the troupe of former acrobat Fred Karno, who was to stage comedy what Mack Sennett would be to movie slapstick. Karno’s rehearsal space was even called “the Fun Factory,” and there his troupe drilled gags until every gesture was precisely timed. Discovering that pathos and slapstick were a potent mix, Chaplin fleshed out his comedic characters. He practiced a measured rhythm and developed an avidity for perfection.
In 1912 the Fred Karno Company Chaplin was winding down a tour of North America when Sennett and Normand (both still at Biograph) attended a performance. The following spring Sennett told his Keystone partners in New York to find him the English chap in Karno’s show, named something like “Chapman” or “Champion.” Chaplin signed to Keystone for $150 per week—three times his peak salary with Karno and a substantial investment in an actor yet to appear in a single celluloid frame. In his 1964 autobiography, Chaplin wrote: “I was not terribly enthusiastic about the Keystone type of comedy, but I realized their publicity value. A year at that racket, and I could return to vaudeville an international star.”
After fulfilling his obligations to Karno, Chaplin reported to Keystone in December 1913. He was twenty-four and boyish, five foot five and slight, humble and shy—and he was tossed into the assembly line of a second Fun Factory, this one predicated on breaking the rules he had learned at the first. Comedy was fast, emotions were broadly expressed, and rewriting and rehearsals were luxuries the breakneck schedule could not accomodate. “I’m too shy, and I feel uncomfortable around here. I feel lost. I’m in a foreign country, and I don’t know anyone,” he told Durfee. He starred as a shifty swindler in his film debut, Making a Living, which pitted him against the soon-to-depart Lehrman, who also directed. They clashed offscreen as well, when the slow-working newcomer resisted the standard Keystone pace.
Soon thereafter, the Little Tramp made his first appearance, complete with Arbuckle’s pants and hat. The character registered with the studio’s target audience, for here was a poor man the poor could laugh at. In A Film Johnnie, the Tramp is a movie fan who sneaks into a studio. Actors play themselves, including Arbuckle. The bashful Tramp compliments Fatty, even nervously patting his protruding gut, and Fatty hands him a coin before striding away. The Tramp subsequently bumbles onto a set and infuriates a director, and we can now see A Film Johnnie as an in-joke about Chaplin’s difficulties fitting in at Keystone.
Unlike others at the studio, however, Arbuckle did not resent the peculiar English newcomer nor view him as a threat. Arbuckle was not prone to jealousies; he was much more likely to focus on his own perceived faults. In addition, he was receptive to Chaplin’s slower comedic pace, as he himself often lobbied for a greater variety of humor styles in Keystone movies. Finally, Chaplin shared a strong working relationship with Minta Durfee, who frequently acted opposite him; to her husband, this reflected well on the Englishman.
Including two cameos, Arbuckle was in six films with Chaplin in 1914. In The Masquerader, written and directed by Chaplin, they play film acting rivals, and in its best scene they torment each other in a dressing room via precisely timed gags. In contrast, in The Rounders, which Chaplin also wrote and directed, they play neighbors who, thrust together after drunkenly annoying their wives, go out to continue drinking. They create a ruckus in a posh café, and in a very dark ending, are destined to drown in a rowboat. That peculiar final shot of them asleep side by side and slipping underwater was the last cinematic image of these two comedy giants together.
At the end of 1914, Charlie Chaplin’s Keystone contract expired. The Essanay Film Manufacturing Company was a minor studio looking to go major, and it offered him $1,250 weekly and a $10,000 bonus. This was more than Mack Sennett paid himself, and his counteroffer didn’t come close. With that, the Little Tramp shuffled away.
There was one more reason why Arbuckle felt no ill will toward the ascendant Charlie Chaplin: his own celebrity, fortune, and creative control were also rising rapidly throughout 1914. When Arbuckle began directing in March, Sennett gave him his own comedy unit, which included Durfee and St. John, and he helmed thirty-one of the fifty films he is known to have acted in that year. He typically worked from 8 AM to 6 PM six days per week. Uncredited, Arbuckle also wrote many storylines, sketching out plots, routines, and stunts. He set comedies in the Old West, an amusement park, cities, farms, a seaside resort, a hot-air balloon, an Indian reservation. Unlike others, he repeatedly delivered finished films on schedule.
Durfee remembered a reward for her husband’s punctuality:
Mr. Sennett asked Roscoe, Mabel, and I to go with him to the famous old Van Nuys Hotel [in downtown Los Angeles], whose cuisine was considered some of the finest in America. And Mr. Sennett loved to eat. So finally, before dinner was clear over he handed Roscoe a check, and he said, “This is yours, big boy, because we now have got the release, and we owe it to you because you’ve kept the reels going,” and he handed us a thousand dollar check. And of course neither one of us had ever had one of those in our lifetime.
Nine of Arbuckle’s fifty movies in 1914 featured “Fatty” in the title, so that just as moviegoers were turning out to see Chaplin pictures, they were turning out to see Fatty pictures too.* Most featured St. John as some so
rt of lecher, Durfee as the love interest, and Arbuckle as an ignoble character who bumbles into trouble. Chases, fights, falls, and humiliation ensue.
“Nobody Love a Fat Man?” was the provocative title adorning a magazine profile of Arbuckle in June 1914, the sentiment tempered via the punctuation. Arbuckle joshed back and forth with the interviewer about his weight, his attractiveness to female fans, being confused for actor Macklyn Arbuckle,* and the proficiency of the Keystone baseball team, of which he was a member. Of his acting, he joked, “But outside of falling on my ear, being surrounded by snakes, chased by bears, and made to do forty-five foot dives off the long wharf at Santa Monica, my work has been rather uneventful.” In truth, Arbuckle loved his work, and he practiced and experimented to improve both his comedic acting and his film directing.
The organist begins to play, the projector flickers, and the light streaming overhead transmits the title card:
Mack Sennett Comedies
Presents
ROSCOE ARBUCKLE
In
“FATTY’S MAGIC PANTS”
Outside a boarding house, Fatty and Durfee learn about a benefit dance. Charley Chase returns to the same house and discovers the couple dancing about on the walk. Chase, who is carrying a tuxedo, informs Fatty that he can’t get into the dance without formal wear. Durfee decides to go with Chase. Trying to steal the suit, Fatty decks Chase, and then Durfee decks Fatty. The two woozy men fight.
Later, after his mother beats him instead of lending him fifty cents, Fatty steals Chase’s tux off a clothesline. The extended shot showcases Arbuckle’s growing directing acumen: The clothesline is strung across a courtyard as wide as the film frame from Chase’s open window on one side to Fatty’s on the opposite. Peeking in from the edge of the frame, Fatty pulls the clothes to himself while in the background a third window is open, heightening suspense.