Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (28 page)

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

R
OSCOE
“F
ATTY”
A
RBUCKLE

in

C
ONEY
I
SLAND

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: “R
ESOLVED:
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.

T
HE 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 Motion 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.”

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.