Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (34 page)

Dear Mr. Arbuckle,

I have just been sentenced to twelve years in this prison for burglary and now that my head is shaved and I’ve got the stripes on, I don’t think they were joking. I used to drive a taxi cab in New York and you occasionally rode with me. It is only a step from driving a taxi to second story work and my foot slipped.

I told all the boys here in this prison that I knew you and they asked me to write and invite you to come down here and entertain us some evening. Please come, Mr. Arbuckle. Anything you do will be appreciated because it is very dull here.

Subsequently, Arbuckle, accompanied by Lou Anger and a few Comique players and escorted by armed guards, strode through the gates of a California penitentiary. From the stage in the main hall, he told old vaudeville jokes, and after three rousing ovations, he greeted individual members of his captive audience.

As indicated by this anecdote, as well as his financial and moral support of the troops during World War I, Arbuckle was charitable with his time and money. In fact, he went further than most of his fellow movie stars. Louella Parsons recounted how benevolent he was to individuals behind the scenes. She mentioned an instance involving “a certain little girl whom Fatty had given his friendship and advice.” Two and a half years before a very different image of Fatty took hold, Parsons wrote, “To those who think the Arbuckle life is one round of continual pleasure, it might be well to hear how he went out of his way to befriend this girl when things looked black for her. I shall like him always for that, though he modestly refused to admit he had done more than any other man would do when I spoke to him of this young woman.”

By mid-1919 Arbuckle was in a position to be particularly generous. Just a few months earlier, he’d signed a deal worth $3 million.

The inmates took over the asylum. The seed had been planted the previous year, when Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and William S. Hart were together promoting war bonds. With their power and popularity, why couldn’t they oversee the distribution of their own films, thus maintaining creative control and ownership from the first spark of an idea until the final print was projected? D. W. Griffith joined them, and as negotiations progressed, the press dubbed the quintet the “Big Five.” Hart eventually bowed out, but on February 5, 1919, Chaplin, Fairbanks, Pickford, and Griffith launched United Artists. With neither contract players nor acres of stages, UA was an affront to the increasingly powerful studio system. It was a “studio”—a film exchange incorporating four independent production companies—run by artists to distribute their own art. Only three UA films were released in
1919, and none were Chaplin’s (due to contractual obligations to First National Pictures, he would not make his UA debut for another four years). Nevertheless, the news of United Artists’ formation rocked the industry—including Arbuckle’s employer, Paramount, which was by then the premier Hollywood company.

UA was launched, in part, by former Paramount president Hiram Abrams, who became the new company’s managing director. Fairbanks and Pickford had only recently declined to re-sign at Paramount. That left Arbuckle as the studio’s brightest star. Fortuitously for him, his contract was expiring. Rumors swirled in early 1919 that the “Big Five” would become six (or remain five, when discussions with Hart fell through), with Arbuckle joining his friends Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Pickford. It would be a major coup for Abrams, with whom Arbuckle had maintained a friendship, to pull the strongest remaining pillar away from Paramount. Negotiations ensued.

But on February 21 Arbuckle met Adolph Zukor in Kansas City, Missouri, where the superstar signed a three-year Paramount contract reportedly worth $1 million annually.
*
“Anyhow, you can see by this contract that the big one decided not to take in the big five,” Arbuckle quipped. The big contract for the “big one” accomplished its immediate intention, stirring up nationwide publicity for Paramount and its star: $1,000,000 A
Y
EAR FOR
M
OVIE “FATTY,”
screamed one front page, and similar $1 million or $3 million headlines appeared throughout the country. Arbuckle set out on another Paramount promotional tour, two years after his initial contract victory lap, traveling by train to New York City, Washington, DC, and New Orleans. “With all the stars I have had Mr. Arbuckle is the least tempermental and the most appreciative,” Zukor effused.

During a brief stay in Manhattan, Arbuckle met opera legend Enrico Caruso (Arbuckle was a fan). He also hung out with Louella Parsons; the celebrity gossip pioneer was present in a smoky Manhattan screening
room with Arbuckle, Zukor, Schenck, and others as actresses were considered for Arbuckle’s love interest in future Comique comedies. Parsons accompanied the men to Sherry’s, a French restaurant popular with high society. There, over oysters, chicken, and cocktails, Arbuckle revealed that if he were not an actor/director/writer, he would like to be a surgeon. For entertainment and enlightenment, he frequently witnessed a doctor friend operating in the Los Angeles county hospital. “I have watched Doc take out so many appendices, I believe I could do it myself,” he mused. “It is a pretty sight to see Doc work.” Several times, Charlie Chaplin accompanied him, and the world’s two greatest comedic actors spent evenings peering inside human bodies.

Also in the month of February, an article entitled “On the Advantages of Embonpoint” appeared in
Photo-Play Journal
under Arbuckle’s name. It contended:

[A fat man] is regarded as harmless and innocent just because he looks so solid and easy-going. He may be harboring the most malicious thoughts, but he is disarmed by his own fat. Nobody suspects him…. A fat man makes a comfortable person to have around the house. His lap is a favorite perch for young and beautiful debutantes and sub-debs. They call him Uncle and punch him in the solar-plexus and generally kid him along. What fat man could fail to be happy under such circumstances?

When a sub-deb was not perched upon his lap, and when he was not gazing at an appendectomy or betting on a boxing match or buying yet another round for friends and hangers-on, Arbuckle continued to make movies without his best friend, Buster Keaton, who was still serving Uncle Sam. All told, Arbuckle made six shorts while Keaton was in the army.

In the first years of the twentieth century, the West Adams district near downtown was the most exclusive area in Los Angeles. Its Victorian mansions
housed Southern California’s titans of industry. The home at 649 West Adams Boulevard was built in 1905 for US Navy officer Randolph Huntington Miner and his socialite wife, who furnished the twenty rooms with treasures from their foreign travels. The drawing room alone could accommodate two hundred guests. The house was constructed in the Tudor revival style, with a gabled roof, stained glass windows, and exterior walls of red brick on the ground floor and a second floor decorated with half-timbering that formed branch-like trusses near the roof. It was as if a European country estate had been transported into the heart of a city born yesterday. The image was not just old money but medieval money—a salient point to Hollywood’s nouveau riche.

The first movie star to live there was the original vamp, Theda Bara, who rented it from the Miners in 1917 when they headed to France and Bara’s fame and fortune were soaring. Bara was born Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati, but Fox publicized her as an Egyptian-born occultist with an affinity for snakes and raw meat, and the Jewish star’s new name was supposedly an anagram of “Arab Death.” She played along, in part by filling the mansion’s elegant rooms with sarcophagi, crystal balls, and other exotica. Her home was portrayed in the press as a sort of proto-Addams Family dwelling, one you had best be wary of. When Bara’s contract with Fox lapsed near the end of 1919, she retired. By then, she had left West Adams.

Meanwhile, Comique’s productions had moved from Long Beach to a studio in Edendale, next door to Keystone. Arbuckle was in need of a home nearer his workplace, and Joe Schenck encouraged him to live in a house worthy of a millionaire celebrity. He moved in to the West Adams house, also renting from the Miners. He ordered the removal of Bara’s ghoulish or feminine decor and began decorating to match his own ostentatious tastes—befitting, so he thought, a wealthy movie star. A tongue-in-cheek article in the
Los Angeles Times
wondered if the refinements of such a house—its Japanese meditation garden and koi pond, for instance—and the bourgeois neighborhood would cause Arbuckle to forsake the “shimmey at Vernon,” “wild, rude games of poker,” and the Tuesday-night fights in favor of drinking “tea with his little finger
crooked daintily.” The article concluded with the assertion that “Theda Bara’s astral mind” was leading Arbuckle to Ibsen and Oscar Wilde.

Arbuckle was indeed behaving like a man possessed, but his preoccupation was an old one and not especially genteel. With haste, he was stocking the walled shelves in the basement of his new abode with a collection of alcohol that grew to legendary proportions: gin, scotch, rye, rum, wine. This was his doomsday shelter, meant to protect him against the coming ravages of Prohibition. It’s unlikely his regular parties, which typically lasted until dawn, significantly depleted his stockpile—but not for lack of trying.

The rapid rise in the popularity of movies over the fist two decades of the twentieth century coincided with the similar ascension of baseball. Grander stadiums—including Wrigley Field and Fenway Park—opened, and such players as Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, and Babe Ruth garnered headlines and pulled in an ever-expanding fan base. Arbuckle was one such fan. He had played the game as a youngster and on Keystone’s team, and he had regularly attended games, whether on the vaudeville circuit or in Southern California.

Until the late 1950s, baseball teams traveled via train, and by train, the West Coast was days away from eastern cities. That’s why in 1919, there were sixteen major league teams but none farther west than St. Louis. The West Coast had the Pacific Coast League. Unaffiliated with major league clubs, the PCL for the first half of the twentieth century was, in effect, a shadow major league, and it nurtured such legends as Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. Until 1958, when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and the Giants to San Francisco, the PCL was the big league for baseball fans in California.

Thus, it was huge news when on May 5, 1919, Arbuckle bought controlling interest in the PCL’s Vernon Tigers and installed himself as president. Since their inception in 1909, the Tigers had been unprofitable. Their location was not ideal for family entertainment. Vernon, home of the aforementioned boxing arena and nightclub, was Los Angeles’
adult playground, and the ballpark was located adjacent to Doyle’s Bar, billed as “the longest bar in the world,” with thirty-seven bartenders working thirty-seven cash registers and space to serve more than a thousand patrons.

After Arbuckle’s purchase, Lou Anger, whose wife was the sister-in-law of the team’s ace pitcher, became the Tigers’ general manager, despite having no previous baseball experience. Arbuckle professed, “I’m just going into it for the sport of the thing and nothing else.” He later said he “just bought them to please Anger” and all he did was “sign checks.”