by Greg Merritt
That entourage was a group of men, mostly employed in the film industry but less famous and wealthy than Arbuckle. Included in it were Buster Keaton, Lou Anger, and Joe Bordeaux, but members could change from night to night and from nightclub to nightclub. “Roscoe loves company,” Anger stated. Durfee said, “He likes nothing better than to get a crowd of men together and sing and laugh and enjoy themselves like a crowd of college boys.” In effect, Arbuckle created the family he’d never had. And it was his family. He called the shots; he picked up the tabs; he led and they followed. At thirty he was enjoying an extended adolescence.
Some of the money wildly spent went toward new suits, hats, and shoes. Arbuckle was a clotheshorse, for as he said, “There’s nothing in the world so repulsive as a fat man who isn’t well-dressed.” But he had the funds for fancy clothes, his generous gifts for coworkers and friends, and his entourage’s nights of food and drink at Reisenweber’s and other hot spots. His weekly income, minus Schenck and Anger’s shares and Durfee’s $500 and not counting his share of box office profits, was $3,100, which was slightly more than twice the average annual household income in America at the time. Arbuckle was acquiring money to match his fame and establishing himself as the archetypal Hollywood celebrity.
Directing, cowriting, and starring in two-reelers churned out at a pace of one every six to seven weeks, Arbuckle grew ever more meticulous about his craft, and his craft was, foremost, the production of laughs. He was a student of humor, analyzing how and why jokes and gags did or didn’t work. An article noted, “Mr. Arbuckle has probably the most complete joke library in the world…. Every joke that appears in the weekly and monthly publications is clipped and placed on Mr. Arbuckle’s desk and then classified in the library.” As he matured as a comedic filmmaker, he grew less dependent on slapstick and stunts and was able to garner laughs in other ways, such as heightened absurdity, macabre shocks, intertitle wisecracks, and parodies of silent film tropes.
In May and July of 1917, he did two interviews that provided insights into his filmmaking processes and philosophy.
Improvisation: “I make up my own plays. I don’t write them. I make them up as I go along. I have a general idea in my head when we begin, but I don’t have a written scenario or even a synopsis. I try out every scene I can think of, working out the business by actually rehearsing it. And all the time I’m rehearsing out there I’m trying to devise funny little twists that will get a laugh.”
Acting: “I never try to divert attention from the situation to myself. If you feel a scene slipping, let it slip. If you are rehearsing, do it over again, even if it is seventy times seven, and only when you know that you have it right get out your camera.”
Production: “How long do you think it takes to make a picture that you’ll laugh at—maybe—for half an hour? It takes me a solid month, and it costs $40,000 in cash.”
Editing: “By the time I’m through I have about 15,000 feet of film—and all I need is 2,000 feet. I’ve got to skim the cream off that milk. I go over all the films and pick out the best scenes. Then is the time I write the story. I make out the scenario from the scenes I intend to use.”
Comedy: “I refuse to try to make people laugh at my bulk. Personally, I cannot believe that a battleship is a bit funnier than a canoe, but some people do not feel that way about it. There are persons who think it is excruciatingly funny because I weigh 300 pounds. Of course, I cannot keep them from laughing at me, but I refuse to sanction it.
“A situation must be funny enough to play itself once it is properly placed, and no amount of grimaces or slapstick comedy will make it humorous if it isn’t.”
“I know one thing. I’d a heap rather make people laugh than make ‘em cry. It’s a darned sight harder to do. Sometimes I think I’ve picked out the worst job in sight. If you don’t believe me, try to be funny for thirty solid minutes yourself. After that you’ll want to be a villain or a vampire just by way of a little relaxation.”
Arbuckle had spent a winter filming in the New York area two years earlier. That was enough of that. In October 1917, as the days grew shorter and colder, he and his company relocated to Southern California in rapidly populating Long Beach, where he had performed and married more than nine years prior. Two brothers, Herbert and Elwood Horkheimer, had purchased Edison’s small Long Beach studio in 1912 and started expanding. By the time Arbuckle and company arrived, Balboa Studio occupied twenty buildings on eight acres in downtown Long Beach, six blocks from the ocean. The studio was noted for its modern facilities and technical innovations, including the largest glass-enclosed stage on the West Coast. With as many as ten companies shooting simultaneously, Balboa in 1917 was Long Beach’s largest employer and tourist attraction, and luring Arbuckle there and away from Hollywood was its biggest coup.
Arbuckle rented a house on the ocean about a mile from the studio, sharing it with former vaudevillian Herbert Warren, then working as Comique’s editor, Warren’s wife, and Luke the dog. Keaton rented an apartment with his parents. Witnessing his son’s rapid rise in movies, Joe Keaton had changed his opinion of the medium, and he acted in the three initial Comique pictures shot at Balboa.
The first of these, A Country Hero, is the only Arbuckle and Keaton movie now lost, but it exemplified Arbuckle’s greater emphasis on elaborate settings and Keaton’s focus on technology-themed comedy. A scene in which a train crashes into two cars ballooned the budget, and a rural town, dubbed “Jazzville,” was constructed on the Balboa lot. The town’s name captured the hot new music, while according to dubious Comique publicity, the town itself was an exact reproduction of Arbuckle’s birthplace of Smith Centre, Kansas.
Having grown accustomed to New York City nightlife, Arbuckle sought out the same in and around Los Angeles. He and his entourage were almost certain to encounter fellow movie royalty at Al Levy’s Tavern in still-somnolent Hollywood, the Cabrillo Ship Café off the Venice pier, and Cafe Nat Goodwin on the Santa Monica pier. A typical Tuesday night began with dinner at the tony Hotel Alexandria downtown, moved to ringside seats for the professional boxing matches at Jack Doyle’s two-thousand-seat arena in nearby Vernon, and ended with dancing and (more) drinking at the Vernon Country Club, where waiters drew lots to serve Arbuckle because of his stream of generous tips.
The entourage expanded as the night progressed. Casual acquaintances and even strangers learned they could be friends with Fatty by the end of a late night if they joined his group along the way. And, as always, the movie star picked up every bill. Celebrity journalist Louella Parsons said of him and his entourage: “Some men might resent such a thing as putting them in the easy-mark class, but it is one of the nice things about Roscoe Arbuckle that he is like a big boy in wanting to share with his friends the good things which have come his way.”
Comique’s next Balboa film, Out West, was Arbuckle’s first western and a spoof of the genre. We can see his continuing advancement as a director when the men chasing him atop a speeding train are captured beautifully in a long-shot silhouette. Both Arbuckle and Keaton were fans of macabre humor, and much of the comedy in Out West is dark. Keaton’s saloon-keeper character casually shoots a card cheat in the back multiple times, kicks the dead man through a door in the saloon floor, drops a corset onto the corpse, dons his hat for a one-second blessing, and slams the door shut. So much for no blow or bullet inflicting damage in slapstick comedies. Part of the way Out West spoofed early westerns was by exaggerating their violence.
As Arbuckle continued to innovate within the medium of filmed pantomime, Comique comedies grew increasingly surreal. The Bell Boy contains a random but excellent scene involving a mysterious man with a long beard who desires the services of a barber. Fatty the bellboy uses scissors, a razor, and hats to turn the customer into a dead ringer for first General Grant, then Abraham Lincoln, and then Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm. Moonshine features a shot wherein forty-five men come out of a Model T and another of a blown-up cabin reassembling itself. This was the sort
of magical humor only motion pictures could provide. There’s much of it in The Cook, as chef Fatty instantly prepares foods and beverages that he then flips across the kitchen for waiter Keaton to effortlessly catch without spilling a drop—even as both are dancing “Egyptian-style” in a spoof of Theda Bara’s title role in Cleopatra (Fatty wears a risqué costume he makes out of pots and pans).
The height of Arbuckle’s surrealism was Good Night Nurse. It opens with drunken Fatty in a torrential rainstorm as people literally blow by him. Fatty rips the skirt off the woman he’s trying to help, and she promptly high-kicks him in the face (she’s Keaton); and he helps a fellow drunk get home by sticking stamps to his face and draping him over a mailbox. Other ingenious bits include Arbuckle in drag and Keaton bashfully flirting in a hallway and an orderly in a hall catching two items tossed out of an operating room: a saw and a human leg. Motion Picture Magazine complained, “It borders over much of the vulgar. The parading of a man in a supposedly blood-splattered physician’s apron is not at all our idea of a comedy situation.” But it’s this macabre humor that makes Good Night Nurse feel surprisingly modern today.
Many of the biggest laughs in these shorts came via intertitles. These were generally written after filming, and with a slower production schedule than at Keystone, Comique’s titles were markedly improved. Sometimes they functioned as a comical commentary track. In Moonshine, the fourth wall is demolished when, after the moonshiner’s daughter leaps into Fatty’s arms, Fatty tells her father, “Look, this is only a two-reeler. We don’t have time to build up to love scenes.” The father replies, “In that case go ahead, it’s your movie.” One can picture Arbuckle and company at an editing session noting how truncated the romance is and deciding to insert the lines that make them laugh the loudest with no concern about the story.
The short films Arbuckle made with Keaton are the best of his career, and in part this is because of his generosity as an actor and director. Whereas other comedic stars would have felt threatened, Arbuckle welcomed Keaton’s ability to generate laughs, and he gave his friend the space and time to improvise. The teaming of the rotund and expressive Arbuckle with the slight and reserved Keaton was inspired, and in movies like The Cook they feel like equals, though only one name appears above the title. Arbuckle also encouraged Keaton’s contributions to writing, directing, and editing, and Keaton served as Arbuckle’s de facto assistant director. Keaton said in his autobiography:
The longer I worked with Roscoe the more I liked him. I respected without reservations his work both as an actor and a comedy director. He took falls no other man at his weight ever attempted, [and] had a wonderful mind for action gags, which he could devise on the spot. Roscoe loved the world and the whole world loved him in those days. His popularity as a performer was increasing so rapidly that he soon ranked second only to Charlie Chaplin. Arbuckle was that rarity, a truly jolly fat man. He had no meanness, malice, or jealousy in him. Everything seemed to amuse and delight him…. I could not have found a better-natured man to teach me the movie business, or a more knowledgeable one.
The war in Europe was still raging, and by mid-1918 America would be sending ten thousand soldiers per day “over there.” Arbuckle said his excessive weight kept him out of uniform. Instead, he used his celebrity and wealth to support the war effort. He performed at military and Red Cross benefits, “adopted” an army company, and let some American and Canadian military personnel, back from the front, visit him on his Balboa Studio set. In January 1918 he and his Comique troupe performed gratis vaudeville shows at Southern California army camps.
War bonds were the primary means for those at home to support the military. In New York City in April 1918, Arbuckle was one of five “kings of the movies” (the other four were studio executives) who pledged to purchase $50,000 in bonds. In May he was the surprise participant in a Long Beach war bond parade, waving an American flag and mobbed by children. In movies financed by the American and Canadian governments, he proclaimed the benefits of each country’s bonds. And as a longtime smoker, he made it his cause to ensure that soldiers were not denied their nicotine fix. His contributions to the New York Sun Tobacco Fund helped them ship cigarettes to the front, and every time he bought a carton of cigarettes for himself he dropped another into one of the receptacles on the Balboa studio grounds,* which were there “to gather in smokes for the boys in France.” The Los Angeles Times article that focused on the latter practice was entitled, simply, “Patriotic Arbuckle.”
Buster Keaton did not merely support the soldiers. He was one, drafted into the army in July 1918. The night before he departed for Camp Kearney, near San Diego, Comique threw him a farewell dinner at the Jewel City Cafe in Seal Beach.† An impromptu vaudeville and minstrel show featured Arbuckle and Al St. John. When Keaton’s outfit shipped to New York three weeks later, Arbuckle, St. John, and Lou Anger journeyed to Camp Kearney to see their friend off.
While stationed at a New York base awaiting a ship, Keaton was visited by Natalie Talmadge in a chauffeured limousine. That day, spent dining and dancing at Long Island’s finest establishments, was the genesis of the Keaton/Talmadge romance. Stationed in Amiens, France, Keaton saw no combat, but it was cold and frequently rainy, and he slept on the ground or on equally dirty floors and developed an ear infection that permanently impaired his hearing. When the Germans agreed to a ceasefire on November 11, 1918, the war on the Western Front was over, but Keaton’s service was not. He was transferred to a town near Bourdeaux, and there the movie star organized entertainment for anxious soldiers awaiting ships to carry them home. He remained in southwest France, performing for his fellow doughboys, even as his audience was continuously shipping back to America.
In its 1918 “Analytical Review of the Year’s Acting,” Photoplay said:
Roscoe Arbuckle shares comedy honors this year with Chaplin—though no comedian, it must be admitted, even approaches Chaplin in personal variety and appeal. But Arbuckle’s material—his own make—has, in the main, been consistently funny and human. He has surrounded himself with good people. He has made good productions. He has kept moving.
He kept moving in Keaton’s absence, enlisting a Comique gag writer, the Italian-born Mario Bianchi, to step in front of the camera, acting under the name Monty Banks. (Banks became a prolific comedic actor and director.) After completing Camping Out, his second movie without Keaton, Arbuckle spent two weeks at the end of 1918 in San Francisco, seeking more nightlife than Los Angeles could provide.
The press did not note the peculiar absence of his wife on the trip, nor did they mention a different female companion—though it is probable Arbuckle did not sleep alone on a two-week holiday sojourn. He was subsequently romantically linked to Alice Lake (as was Keaton). She called him “Arbie.”* Actress Viola Dana, who dated Keaton, claimed the Arbuckle/Lake relationship was off and on for three years, but it stayed out of the fan magazines because Arbuckle remained married.
The press was mindful of Arbuckle’s privacy, but his audience could be more demanding. When out in public, Arbuckle was frequently mobbed by fans. Around the time the war came to an end, Photoplay said:
The people adored “Fatty,” I soon discovered—young and old. They felt that somehow he was a rock to cling to, a prop against the shadows that are falling all too heavily these days of stress. He represented the way of escape—he and his merry-making crew—the defiance that we humans must hurl at woe; in a way he typified the happy, serious spirit of the American: the ability to see the funny side of anything, however seemingly tragic.
* Automobile fanatic Arbuckle had the Elgin Six touring car delivered from the Elgin Motor Car Corporation, located in suburban Chicago. He had his own such car in Los Angeles.
† What Fatty ate remained a press preoccupation. A Philadelphia newspaper published “Breakfast a la Arbuckle,” the menu of the first meal the movie star consumed on his day in Philly: fruit, cereal, steak and potatoes, six eggs on toast, three cups of coffee, butter an
d rolls.
* When Schenck met Talmadge in August 1916, she was starring in movies for Triangle, and the hammer-faced thirty-seven-year-old Schenck was smitten by the comely twenty-three-year-old brunette. He promptly set up her film company, and two months after meeting, they were married.
* Keaton claimed he had never discussed pay with Arbuckle and was surprised to find only $40 in his first weekly pay envelope. This climbed to $75 weekly six weeks later and “not long after that” to $125 weekly.
* Arbuckle debuted this gag three years earlier in The Knockout.
* Reisenweber’s, which originated as a tavern in 1856, was not around for most of that age. A prime target for Prohibition raids, it closed in 1922.
* He was soon replaced by Adolph Zukor, who had installed Abrams as a figurehead the previous July but grew dismayed when Abrams treated his title as more than honorary.
* The last film shot at Balboa Studio was The Cook, made in June 1918. The Horkheimer brothers’ production company had declared bankruptcy that April. The studio facilities were demolished in 1925. Hollywood won.
† The café was popular then with movie stars working or staying in Long Beach, including Charlie Chaplin, Theda Bara, and Douglas Fairbanks. Long Beach was dry while neighboring Seal Beach was not.
* Camping Out was the last movie Lake made with Arbuckle. In 1919 she acted for Keystone before signing a deal with Metro that made her a minor star.
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PRELIMINARIES
… that abominable and voluptuous act known as reading the paper.