Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (10 page)

The earliest film studios were in the New York metropolitan area, or in one case, Philadelphia, and two cases, Chicago. But this presented a quandary. At a time when the sun was a crucial component of even indoor lighting (via glass ceilings), the short, drab days of winter made it difficult to keep to production schedules, and the potential for inclement weather made exterior shooting impractical. Some studios wintered in Cuba, and in 1908 Jacksonville, Florida, emerged as “the World’s Winter Film Capital,” a title it kept for years afterward. However, Jacksonville had already, nearly unnoticed, gained a rival for the title from another city in another temperate coastal area, this one on the opposite side of what then seemed a much wider continent.

By the spring of 1909, newly married and barely twenty-two, Roscoe Arbuckle had traveled all around the American West, but he had never been east of the Kansas farm where he was born. It was therefore fortuitous that the movie industry came to him.

Started by former magician and minstrel show operator William Selig, the Selig Polyscope Company was one of the two aforementioned Chicago studios. It shot mostly slapstick comedies, travelogues, and industrial footage. In the winter of 1907, Selig director Francis Boggs and a small crew had journeyed west. Though the interiors were filmed in Chicago (with a different cast), they shot exterior scenes for
The Count of Monte Cristo
at a beach near San Diego and on a roof in downtown Los Angeles, earning incorrect renown as the first fictional film with footage shot on the West Coast. (The actual first was
A Daring Hold-Up in Southern California,
shot for Biograph in 1906.) Boggs moved to Los Angeles in March 1909 and set up an outdoor studio for Selig in the drying yards behind a downtown laundry. The third movie Boggs shot there was
Ben’s Kid,
a western that featured comic relief by a young actor named Roscoe Arbuckle.
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At the time, Arbuckle and Minta Durfee were living with her family, and local vaudeville bookings had dried up. The newlywed husband was anxious to prove he could provide, even if it meant the star singer was reduced to doing mime work in the debased medium of flickers. At Selig, he earned the going rate of five dollars daily, a pittance when compared to future Hollywood salaries but acceptable (the equivalent of about $125 today) for what surely seemed an easy effort compared to a day of performances onstage.

By Arbuckle’s second film,
Mrs. Jones’ Birthday,
he was starring. He played a husband who keeps comically breaking the presents he buys for his wife. The
New York Dramatic Mirror
noted, “The Jones of the picture is a fat fellow, a new face in picture pantomime, and the earnestness of his work adds greatly to its value. There are times when he plays to the camera, but there are other actors more experienced than he in this line of work who do the same thing.”

He did not tell his wife where the daily five dollars came from, but following a tip, one morning Durfee and her mother took the next streetcar after his to find Arbuckle in a red satin shirt and a cowboy hat with a guitar, playing to a hand-cranked box camera. “My God! They’re making a motion picture!” Durfee exclaimed, as if catching her husband in flagrante delicto.

Seeing them, a furious Arbuckle shouted, “Go home! Go home!” Later, his mother-in-law asked him why he had hidden his work, and he answered, “Because I didn’t want Minty to know or to come down there. I’m afraid they will ask her to work. They need people, but I’m not going to permit her to work there. It isn’t show business. I’m ashamed of this kind of work, but we need the money.” He later said of film acting in those early years, “Then, there was nobody breaking in. Everyone was doing as I did—sneaking in.”

Earlier in 1909, Arbuckle had been a member of a theater troupe that staged plays based on fables and literary works at Los Angeles’ Auditorium Theater. Most of them lasted only a week, allowing him to hone his still-raw acting skills in a variety of roles. He was a singing baron in
Cinderella,
one of two robbers (together forming an id-like wolf) in
Little Red Riding Hood,
and the blackface title character in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Most of his reviews were positive, though the
Los Angeles Times
quipped, “[He] sings much better than he acts.”

Also in the Auditorium company with Arbuckle was Walter Reed, a veteran vaudevillian who highlighted his Irishness in his comedy. The two men decided to form a partnership. This was a second chance for Arbuckle after failing to deliver the laughs when he paired up with Pete Gerald three years prior. With more practice, he was by then growing confident in his comedy.

In May 1909 Reed and Arbuckle were booked into the Orpheum Theater in Bisbee, Arizona (three years before statehood), just ten miles from the Mexican border. With gold, silver, and copper discovered in abundance in the Mule Mountains that surrounded it, Bisbee had blossomed into one of the liveliest of the mining boomtowns. In the early
1900s the residents numbered over twenty thousand, mostly men, and when not shoveling ore, those men wanted to forget about shoveling ore. Drinking, gambling, and whoring were the most popular pursuits. The notorious Brewery Gulch contained a sinner’s row of some fifty saloons, bordellos, and opium dens that never closed. Bisbee was the West at its wildest.

It was no place for a lady, so Arbuckle’s wife stayed in Los Angeles. But her mother admonished her, “You wanted him, you married him, and you’ll go where he goes.” Durfee boarded a train heading east and moved into a Bisbee boarding house with her husband. She became a principal member of the Reed & Arbuckle company, acting and singing, sometimes in duets with her husband. The company changed its musical comedies every few days, staging such plays as
King Slodo
(described as an “Oriental burleque [sic] operetta”),
A Tip on the Derby,
and the minstrel
Way Down South,
with Arbuckle as Uncle Rastus.

Like a Las Vegas entertainer booked at a casino for an extended run, Reed & Arbuckle made the Orpheum its venue for most of 1909. There the performers ingratiated themselves with the mining executives living up high in the exclusive “Quality Hill” houses. Arbuckle sang solo at an Elks Club funeral, he and Reed serenaded and boxed three comical rounds (declared a draw) at an Eagles Club affair, and the entire company sang at a country club “dinner and smoker.”
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Other times they bonded with the miners who lived in the valley in crowded barracks. Reed was the timekeeper and Arbuckle the play-by-play announcer at an Orpheum wrestling match attended by seven hundred “enthusiastic followers of the game” in which the Swedish champ defeated California’s best, the Big Indian. Arbuckle was a fixture in Brewery Gulch saloons, much to Durfee’s consternation, and they both regularly visited the new Warren Ballpark, where the Bisbee Muckers baseball team played. Arbuckle guest umpired one game. After another game, the press noted, “Roscoe Arbuckle and the rest of the Orpheum bunch were again on
hand making things lively in rooter’s row, especially the ladies. Arbuckle gave a free eccentric dance act when his hopes ran high in the seventh. None of the thespians ever miss a game and are among the loyalist [sic] of the loyal legion.”

Other than a stint in northern Mexico performing for American miners, the Reed & Arbuckle company remained in Bisbee for eight months. After their final, standing-room-only performance on December 27, the
Bisbee Daily Review
wrote, “At the close of the performance, members of the entire company lined up across the stage and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as a fitting climax to their long, successful engagement here. The company left yesterday for Clifton, and Bisbee will now be a ‘sure enough’ lonesome town during the intervals between road shows.” Clifton was another mining boomtown, also in the Arizona Territory. The Reed & Arbuckle tour of the Southwest wound down.

By the spring of 1910, Walter Reed was back in Bisbee. Arbuckle and Durfee were back in Los Angeles and living with her parents again. Arbuckle organized his own vaudeville company, writing, producing, and starring; Durfee had supporting roles. They played the Princess Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, cranking out three shows daily (3:00, 7:45, 9:15), seven days a week, changing the content weekly. The brutal schedule persisted from late April to mid-July, and the shows earned positive reviews. A newsman later recalled:

I remember [Arbuckle] when he was a third-rate comedian playing down at a cheap little burlesque house on Main Street. He used to come climbing and blowing onto the old Main street car after the show was over. I remember how it used to embarrass him, yet sort of please his vanity, to be looked at by the people on the late car. He had about as much chance, then, of being rich and famous as he had of being turned into a little baby lamb with a pink ribbon around his neck.

At the end of his Princess Theatre run, worn down by the manic pace of producing and performing in twenty-one vaudeville shows weekly, Arbuckle decided to focus solely on his acting. He did his fourth Selig
movie in the fall of 1910,
The Sanitarium,
of which
Variety
wrote, “It may have been slammed together in the night.” And he joined the Burbank Theatre stock company, acting in dramas and musical comedies.

At home, Arbuckle and his wife were sharing space not only with Durfee’s parents but also with her seventeen-year-old sister, Marie; her thirteen-year-old brother, Paul; and a thirty-five-year-old male lodger. But Arbuckle was content with the arrangement. He grew especially fond of his mother-in-law and brother-in-law. Flora was more fostering of him than the mother he had lost when he was twelve. Paul was the younger sibling he’d never had.

He played baseball and tag with Paul and other kids, or they pitched corncobs at tin cans and other makeshift targets. Durfee remembered, “Roscoe’s swinging off the street car was always a ‘come on’ for the kids in the neighborhood. They would yell, run and jump on him. We always had studying for the next week’s role and song to do, but watching him tumbling on the grass, throwing a baseball or playing marbles made you know he had very little fun in childhood.” In contrast to an early life filled with abuse and neglect in which he entered the workforce young, the adult Arbuckle found the childhood he had desired: a loving mother and father, and siblings and friends who wanted nothing more than to play with him. The man-child he was when frolicking with the neighborhood kids would have a great influence on his big-screen persona.

Around the same time, the industry that would make Arbuckle famous was also beginning to coalesce into a now-familiar form. In 1910 the Selig Polyscope Company established the first permanent movie studio in Los Angeles. With nearly 320,000 residents, the city was then in the midst of a population explosion. Having tripled its numbers over the past decade, it would nearly double them over the next decade, and much of the growth between 1910 and 1920 would be due to the industry and glamour of film production.

In addition to its mild weather, Southern California provided movie producers with a landscape appropriate for virtually any story: deserts,
forests, mountains, lakes, and ocean, from endless vistas of undeveloped chaparral to a rapidly industrializing metropolis. Los Angeles was also a nonunion town, flush with new laborers eager for any job; the craftsmen necessary for constructing stages, sets, costumes, and, ultimately, movies, pocketed as little as half as much as they did in New York. Land, too, was cheap. Soon every American movie studio of note would establish its base in or around Los Angeles, while former East Coast giants like Edison went bust.