Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (13 page)

Watching the early Keystone flicks today, their weaknesses are as apparent as their strengths. Plots are vaporous and repeatedly recycled. Acting can veer into wild pantomime. Racial and ethnic stereotypes abound. Much screen time is merely filler before the next round of mayhem. Still, you wait for the infectious moment when the uppity heiress lands in the lake or the Keystone Kops give chase in cars, bicycles, and shoes but can’t quite catch the crook. Or when, again and again, a fat man falls.

In early April 1913 Roscoe Arbuckle got off the trolley car wearing his best white suit and strolled onto the bustling Keystone studio lot in Edendale. He met Mabel Normand, he met Mack Sennett, and he was hired for a salary of three dollars per day—40 percent less than he’d made for his film debut four years prior. The popularity of movies was rising in 1913, however, and Arbuckle likely felt motion pictures could provide greater long-term financial security than vaudeville.

Other histories say that Arbuckle’s nephew Al St. John followed his uncle to Keystone, but the opposite is true. On the heels of an acrobatic vaudeville career, in which his specialty was bicycle tricks, the gawky, loose-limbed St. John had begun doing bit parts for Keystone the previous January. The nineteen-year-old likely introduced Uncle Roscoe, just six and a half years his senior, to Sennett. St. John, Henry Lehrman, and Sennett himself all acted in Arbuckle’s first Keystone film,
Murphy’s I.O.U.,
released on April 17, 1913.

Sennett called Keystone “a university of nonsense where, if an actor or actress had any personality at all, that personality developed in full blossom without inhibition.” Still, he was initially oblivious to Arbuckle’s skills. The new arrival was relegated to background roles—until another Keystone trailblazer intervened.

If Mack Sennett was the King of Comedy, Mabel Normand was the Queen. Born into poverty in 1893 in New York City, she was an accomplished swimmer and diver as a teen and labored in a garment factory before taking up modeling and working as a bit player at Biograph. There she met Mack Sennett. For greater opportunities, she moved to Vitagraph, where she usually played a mischievous comic character named Betty, but Sennett encouraged her to return to Biograph. By August 1911 she was back in the fold, acting first in D. W. Griffith’s dramas and then almost exclusively as the star of Sennett comedies. She was a dark-haired, doe-eyed pixie with a coy smile, and the camera loved her. So did the man behind it.

Contentious romantic relationships between directors and actresses are now a Hollywood cliché, but Mack and Mabel were the first and set the template.
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He was a gray-haired bear in ill-fitting clothes who never shed his rural Canadian sensibility; she was short and slender, fashionable, almost fourteen years younger, a native New Yorker. But they shared a contagious sense of humor, dedication to their developing crafts, and a laissez-faire attitude toward many of life’s concerns.

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.
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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.
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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.