Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood

by Greg Merritt

  March 24 marked Arbuckle’s thirtieth birthday, and Durfee bought him memberships in the Friars Club and the Lambs Club, exclusive all-male New York City theatrical societies. Soon thereafter, he moved into the Friars’ new Manhattan clubhouse (dubbed the “Monastery”), claiming the massages and baths there were ideal for his recovery. A little over eight and a half years after it began, the Arbuckle marriage ended in all but title. Durfee moved into a Manhattan apartment with her sister and brother-in-law.

  Years later, trying to bolster her husband’s reputation after his arrest, Durfee offered a judicious view of the marriage breakup (which again infantalized her husband), but nevertheless she pointed to fissures that had likely grown over years: “Well, if he can be stubborn, so can I. Probably our separation was as much my fault as it was his. We began to clash a little, probably over some very unimportant things. He wouldn’t admit that he was wrong, and neither would I. He is like a boy; he wants to be coaxed; and as for myself, I cannot force myself on anyone, least of all a man, if I have the slightest feeling that I may not be welcome. So we simply got on one another’s nerves, and it never got properly straightened out.”

  In 1917 divorce was a scandal sure to harm Arbuckle’s image, and at a crucial turn in his career. Durfee signed a separation agreement that paid her $500 weekly (about $9,000 in today’s dollars) while he and she privately lived apart. And thus, finally, there was a price for their business arangement.

  Mickey, the troubled production of troubled Mabel Normand, would not be released until August 1918, but it was well reviewed and popular, and Durfee had a plum supporting role. In 1919 Durfee starred in a series of two-reel comedies for Truat Film Corporation, a small New York company. Few noticed. She slipped from public view, only to emerge again in September 1921, defending the husband from whom she had been separated for four and a half years.

  One door closed and another opened. In the same month that Arbuckle’s marriage effectively ended, his strongest friendship began.

  Joseph Keaton was born October 4, 1895, as his parents passed through tiny Piqua, Kansas, in the employ of a traveling medicine show. The story of his early years grew more in the telling than Arbuckle’s own: A cyclone blew away the town where he was born. When not yet two, on “a pretty strenuous day,” he lost his finger in a clothes wringer, his head was split open by a brick he had tossed, and he was sucked out of his bedroom window by another pesky tornado and deposited a block away. He called the trifecta of torment “superb conditioning for my career.” And the nickname that his career would make famous was given to him by Harry Houdini; after the tot fell down a flight of stairs but suffered no consequences, the great magician noted, “That was a buster.”

  Little in the previous paragraph about Buster Keaton’s toddlerhood is true. Houdini was a family friend, but if we can believe the original version of the story told by Keaton’s father, another entertainer bestowed the name upon the boy after just such a youthful tumble. And while a too-curious infant Buster did shred his right index finger in a clothes wringer (a doctor then amputated it at the first joint), the tale of misfortune was embellished to further the legend of the indestructible child.

  Keaton began his stage career at an even younger age than Arbuckle. His parents, Joe and Myra, moved with their son to New York City in 1899, and against all odds, they began to establish Joe’s acrobatic table act in vaudeville theaters. (Myra played the coronet and sometimes dodged Joe’s kicks and table twirls.) In Delaware in October 1900, Joe placed his five-year-old son onstage as a miniature observer. Soon Buster was garnering laughs, and thus the Two Keatons became the Three Keatons, the act focusing on the father’s doomed attempts to control his rambunctious son. When Buster repeatedly interrupted Dad’s monologue, Joe tossed him about the stage and into the orchestra pit. Slapstick child abuse caused the audience to recoil and squirm, but then laugh and applaud when Buster reappeared unhurt—only to be punished again.

  Joe realized the biggest laughs came when a pratfall went unacknowledged, so he coached his son not to smile or grimace no matter how funny or painful the gag. Buster’s stone-faced persona was thus born just a few years after he was. “The Man with a Table” and the show’s unique, pint-sized participant, “the Little Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged,” grew in reputation and profitability. A 1901 story in the New York Clipper said of Buster, “The tiny comedian is perfectly at ease in his work, natural, finished and artistic.”

  Buster always claimed he enjoyed the professional roughhousing and learned early how to break his falls, rarely suffering more than the sorts of abrasions earned in child’s play. But New York’s child labor laws restricted young performers, and the Keatons played cat-and-mouse games with enforcement agents for years before incurring a two-year ban from New York theaters in 1907. On October 4, 1909, an ad in Variety announced Buster’s sixteenth birthday and his legal return to the stage. He was actually fourteen, but regardless, he had grown too big to be easily hurled about. The act had evolved. Father and son traded blows as physical equals, and Buster parodied popular songs and other acts on the bill.

  Over subsequent years, resentments and grievances between father and son grew, accelerated by Joe’s fondness for alcohol. Sometimes the onstage violence was as real as it appeared. The Three Keatons stayed together until January 1917, but by then twenty-one-year-old Buster was exhausted by the thrice-daily performance schedule and weary of his father.

  He signed with Max Hart, who secured a role for him in Broadway’s The Passing Show. Keaton’s relationship with Hart was as brief as Arbuckle’s—and was ended by the same man. In mid-March, in the midst of rehearsals for the stage production, Keaton was striding through Times Square when he ran into Lou Anger, with whom he had shared vaudeville bills. Now Anger was segueing into movies as the manager of Roscoe Arbuckle, who was starting production on his new company’s first motion picture. The manager invited the vaudevillian to stop by the set the next morning.

  Joseph Schenck’s Colony Studio occupied a warehouse on East Forty-Eighth Street. On the morning Buster Keaton paid a visit, the Norma Talmadge Film Corporation was on the first floor, making another opulent drama starring its eponymous star, who was also Schenck’s wife.* On the top floor, beneath a glass roof, the Comique Film Corporation was shooting in a re-creation of a general store. There, as the bustling crew set up the next shot, director and star Roscoe Arbuckle was going over gags for a slapstick scene with Al St. John and actors playing store customers. Arbuckle was dressed in the costume that had become nearly as recognizable as Chaplin’s: plaid shirt, suspenders, pants worn too high, and, balanced precariously atop his head and angling slightly left, a bowler, several sizes too small.

  Arbuckle was familiar with the Keatons’ act, and he invited the visitor to join the on-screen mayhem. Keaton hesitated. Though he had grown up sharing vaudeville bills with moving pictures and later sat in the dark, mesmerized, watching Tillie’s Punctured Romance four times and The Birth of a Nation thrice, his father considered film acting beneath a theatrical performer. Perhaps the desire to break fully free of his father influenced his decision to join the scene after a bit more coaxing. Mostly, he was eager to experience firsthand the art of performing for a camera lens.

  Dressed in overalls and a straw hat, Keaton plays a customer who examines brooms and effortlessly kicks one up off the floor with a maneuver worthy of a soccer star. Buying a bucket of molasses from butcher Fatty, Keaton’s foot sticks in a puddle of the goo, and he’s knocked free and out of the store by Fatty. Arbuckle could easily throw the five-foot-five, 140-pound Keaton about. “Between one thing and another,” Keaton recalled, “I would say that my long career as a human mop proved most useful from the start of my work as a movie actor.”

  Like Arbuckle, Keaton was fascinated by mechanical inventions. “Roscoe—none of us who knew him personally ever called him Fatty—took the camera apart for me so I would understand how it worked and what it could do. He showed me how film was developed, c
ut, and then spliced together.” Keaton was hooked. “Everything about the new business I found exciting and fascinating.” That included the secretary, another Talmadge sister, Natalie, whom he met that first day and would marry five years later.

  The next morning, Keaton told Hart he was withdrawing from The Passing Show to pursue movie acting with Arbuckle.* Twice foiled by Lou Anger, Hart tore up their contract—presumably for another fee. When Keaton later arrived on the Colony Studio set, Arbuckle looked up and said, “You’re late.” One of the most fruitful pairings in cinema history had begun.

  Their first film together was The Butcher Boy, which like most Comique two-reelers was a tale in two halves (each lasting ten to twelve minutes): the first in the general store, the latter in a girl’s boarding school with both Arbuckle and St. John dressed in drag. Keaton’s three-and-a-half-minute segment is the highlight, culminating in a flour fight among Arbuckle, St. John, and Keaton. In comparison to what followed, The Butcher Boy is a tepid retread of Keystone absurdity. But The Butcher Boy was Arbuckle’s first movie in over nine months; accustomed to getting a new Fatty flick about every two weeks, Fatty’s audience had been on a severe diet. Paramount’s publicity machine generated a buzz, some newspaper ads were as big as those for feature films, and it was well reviewed and well attended.

  By this point, Al St. John had developed a niche for himself as the villain in Arbuckle’s movies, a role he played in all five of the initial Comique shorts and most of those that followed. Usually, he was a psychopathic rube endeavoring to steal Fatty’s girl. When the camera began rolling on The Butcher Boy, Arbuckle’s nephew was twenty-three and married and had appeared in nearly a hundred movies. St. John was never leading-man material; Uncle Roscoe referred to his “gross contour” and “supremely terrible face.” Still, it was mostly stagecraft that imparted his distinctive creepiness. Teeth were blackened to look lost. Makeup ghoulishly accentuated his cheekbones and darkened his lips, giving him a skeletal mien; he typically wore the clothing of a country bumpkin; and he flung his gangly form about on rubbery legs and mugged for the camera with bug-eyed grimaces or goblin grins. He was an actor of broad strokes but one whom the audience came to accept immediately as an amoral foil, and he was an acrobatic athlete who performed his own superb stunts. It is difficult to imagine Arbuckle’s oeuvre without Al St. John.

  Four more shorts followed The Butcher Boy over the next six months, and working with Keaton, Arbuckle’s artistry grew substantially. In an extended scene in The Rough House, Fatty lazily fights a fire in his burning bed with one cup of water at a time, and then he wrangles with a garden hose as if it’s an out-of-control fire hose. This is the sort of surreal comedy in which Keaton would later specialize in his own movies. In a throwaway bit, Fatty makes two rolls dance as Charlie Chaplin would, to great fame, in The Gold Rush eight years later.

  His Wedding Night is likely the first movie featuring a same-sex marriage ceremony, as Fatty nearly weds, by mistake, Keaton, who had earlier donned a wedding dress. The movie contains a scene in which Fatty kisses a woman while she is knocked out. It was just one of numerous cinematic moments in which the licentious Fatty behaves unscrupulously toward females. Frequently his libido is raging, his morals are lax, and his shame is nonexistent. Remembrances of such on-screen behavior would help the public form a rapid opinion in September 1921.

  There’s more of the same in Oh Doctor! with Arbuckle as the salaciously named Dr. Fatty Holepoke, who brazenly tries to cheat on his wife. Keaton plays Arbuckle’s abused son, but with each blow from his father, the son seems mortally injured and cries uproariously, lampooning his previous employment. Arbuckle also references his past, donning a Keystone Kop costume and even a Chaplinesque moustache.

  The fifth and final film Arbuckle and Keaton made in New York in 1917 was shot on location.

  Joseph M. Schenck

  Presents

  ROSCOE “FATTY” ARBUCKLE

  in

  CONEY ISLAND

  The opening shots are of Coney Island’s Luna Park and its Mardi Gras parade. (As was the practice at Keystone as well, Arbuckle filmed an actual event that would have been prohibitively expensive to stage.) At the beach, following Luke’s lead, Fatty not only digs in the sand but buries himself and then escapes his shrewish wife (Agnes Neilson). In the park, Keaton attempts to rescue his lost date (Alice Mann) after she’s stolen away by Al St. John—a turn of events that leaves “Old Stone Face” crying. After Fatty facilitates St. John’s arrest, Keaton’s date winds up with Fatty instead, and, after a wild water ride, the two enter a bathhouse.

  When Fatty tries to rent a bathing suit, the man behind the counter says, “Can’t fit you. Hire a tent.” Fatty steals a fat woman’s bathing suit, and he breaks cinema’s fourth wall when he sees the camera about to capture him naked and tells it to shoot him from the chest up. The camera obliges.* At the beach, Keaton and Mann reunite, while Fatty and St. John fight in the ocean. Cops are called. Thrown in the same jail cell, Fatty and St. John restart their battle but knock out the cops. Escaping, Fatty locks up his wife. Outside, he and St. John swear: “RESOLVED: That women were the cause of our trouble. From now on we cut them out. We stand one for all and all for one.” Their resolution remains in effect only until two women pass by.

  THE END

  Written by Arbuckle, Coney Island has a caustic view of romantic relationships. Fatty brazenly cheats on his wife, a woman leaves her date for first one man (who can better provide for her) and then another, and the perpetually prurient St. John pursues every female (and a cross-dressing Fatty) without regard to their availability. Only Keaton’s character remains righteous. When he sees Mann in the leotard she wears under her swimsuit, he faints, but Fatty ogles and grins. Keaton wins Mann back, but the final image is of St. John and Fatty on the prowl again. Earlier, a fortune-telling machine promises Fatty an answer to the question “When will I marry and have a happy home?” The married Fatty receives a card that reads, “There ain’t no such animal.”

  In the spring and summer of 1917, Arbuckle was newly “single,” newly wealthy, and living a bachelor and moneyed lifestyle in New York City. As desired, he got to experience all that a movie star life entailed. And he had a new best friend in Buster Keaton. Unlike his cinematic persona, Keaton was quick to smile and laugh offscreen; he and Arbuckle shared a similar irreverent sense of humor, including a love of practical jokes. They also shared a fascination with cars and trains. Though the two men worked long hours at the studio or on location, they spent their evenings on the town, dressed impeccably and traveling in Arbuckle’s Rolls-Royce.

  They were regulars at Reisenweber’s. A veritable department store of dining and entertainment nestled in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle, Reisenweber’s occupied half a block and was four stories tall with a rooftop garden lounge and a dozen dining rooms. It employed a workforce of one thousand and could hold five thousand diners and spectators. Its tropical-themed Hawaiian Room featured hula dancers, while its lavish Paradise was a ballroom that showcased a cabaret revue and imposed the city’s first cover charge (twenty-five cents). When Reisenweber’s 400 Club opened in January 1917, it booked the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which promptly became the band to see in the venue to be seen in, thus helping popularize a new music known as jazz. At 400, Roscoe Arbuckle danced to such songs as “Livery Stable Blues,” “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” and “Tiger Rag.” He was front and center at the inception of the Jazz Age.*

  Some weekends, Arbuckle and Keaton attended Gatsby-like parties at the waterfront estate of Joe Schenck and Norma Talmadge in Bayside, Queens. There they sailed on Long Island Sound, ate the steaks Schenck barbecued, drank champagne (Arbuckle drank for both, as Keaton was a teetotaler then), played croquet, and conversed with various business tycoons and celebrities, almost always including composer Irving Berlin, a childhood friend of Schenck’s.

  Arbuckle appeared at public events, sometimes for charity, sometimes for profit. In May, at the Moti
on Picture Charity Ball—a benefit for the Red Cross attended by “at least 5000 people,” including “almost every prominent film actor and actress in New York”—he had the honor of leading the grand march and punctuated it with a bit of comical dancing. The weekend after the ball, he traveled three hundred miles with seventy-five others on a private train to attend opening night of a minor league baseball game in Portland, Maine. The Duffs were owned by Hiram Abrams, a Portland native who was then president of Paramount.*

  America had entered World War I on April 6, 1917, and in June the draft was instituted for all men aged twenty-one to thirty-one. That month, Comique purchased nearly $50,000 in loans to support America’s efforts, and Arbuckle declared that he was “in doubt as to his practical usefulness on the ‘firing line.’” He did, however, joke that he would “be very efficient when it came to stopping bullets or providing a human fortification behind which my entire company could hide.” On June 5 both he and Keaton registered for the draft, as required. Keaton listed his employer as “Roscoe Arbuckle”; Arbuckle wrote “Comique Film Corp.” Question 12 read: “Do you claim an exemption from draft (specify grounds)?” Keaton, who was missing most of his trigger finger, left it blank. Arbuckle wrote “yes” but specified no grounds.

  In August Arbuckle sold his Rolls-Royce, which had become a familiar sight in midtown Manhattan, to Hiram Abrams, and he purchased his first Pierce-Arrow. Three months later, he bought his manager, Lou Anger, a surprise gift: a new Cadillac. Minta Durfee said, “Roscoe was a poor boy, abandoned as a kid by his father, who was an alcoholic. So I guess he had to make up for his impoverished childhood. He spent money wildly. He was the first star to have the entourage.”