Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (35 page)

Still, as the first celebrity owner of a sports franchise, he received a windfall of publicity. Game reports referred to the Tigers as “Fatty’s Team.” He appeared in team photos and on the covers of game programs. He even had his own baseball card (dressed in the Tigers’ uniform, he is biting into a baseball).
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He was the biggest attraction at any game. A May 16 story noted, “San Francisco won a ball game for itself, 8 to 5, when Vernon got back on the losing end. Yet President Fatty Arbuckle is no less a hero. Even in the hour of defeat, fond mothers stood at the exit and pointed out this great man to their children.” At another May game, he, Al St. John, and Buster Keaton, fresh from his military stint, performed in Tigers uniforms, pitching and hitting with plaster-of-Paris bats and balls that, when ball met bat, exploded to the delight of the crowd. By August the press had nicknamed the Tigers the “Custard Pies” in a nod to Fatty’s Keystone roots.

On August 8 Arbuckle and his entourage—including Anger and Keaton—headed by train to San Francisco for several games pitting the Tigers against the San Francisco Seals and the Oakland Oaks. The actors performed baseball sketches before record crowds of thirty thousand. San Francisco nights were spent at parties in Arbuckle’s honor and drinking and dancing at the Tait-Zinkand Cafe. One night began at Tait’s by the bay and ended, sometime in the morning, at Tait’s downtown. Arbuckle presumably stayed at the Hotel St. Francis, which soon thereafter began
touting him in its advertising. As always, he picked up the bill for everyone. He estimated ahead of time the trip would cost him about $2,000 (about $26,000 in today’s dollars).

On October 5 the Tigers won their first-ever Pacific Coast League title, edging past their chief rival, the Los Angeles Angels, by sweeping a doubleheader on the series’ final day. But, in the year of the Chicago Black Sox scandal, the Tigers’ championship was blighted by its own gambling infraction. Allegedly, opposing players were bribed to throw games in Vernon’s favor. Five players were expelled from the PCL. Arbuckle was not implicated, but the publicity for “Fatty’s Team” had gone from good to bad. Owning a team had required more time and money than he had bargained for, and when he should have been celebrated as the president of the league champions, his name was instead sullied via its association with cheating. He sold the Vernon Tigers less than seven months after purchasing them.
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Corporal Buster Keaton had not left France until more than three months after the armistice that ended World War I. Suffering a hearing impairment, he convalesced in a military hospital in New York and at another in Baltimore. After being discharged from the army on April 29, he returned to Los Angeles, where he again acted opposite his best friend, Roscoe Arbuckle.

Comique’s acting roster had changed over the previous nine months. Molly Malone was in. Alice Lake was out. Jackie Coogan was in.
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Al St. John would soon be out.
Back Stage,
the first movie Keaton made upon returning, was St. John’s last with Comique. Arbuckle’s nephew signed
with Paramount before moving to Fox, where he was the prolific star and director of slapstick shorts.

The three shorts Arbuckle and Keaton made in 1919 each have bursts of brilliance.
Back Stage
has a stunt in which the front of a house falls toward Fatty but misses him as the open window passes over him.
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The Hayseed
presents Fatty at his most likeable in a subdued, more character-driven comedy. And
The Garage,
which, like
The Hayseed,
was shot at Henry Lehrman’s studio, includes some inspired gags involving the overuse of motor oil and a giant turntable for washing and drying cars.
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Best of all is a bit in which Keaton hides from a cop by walking, stride for stride, in front of or behind the much-wider Fatty. There is also an in-joke wherein Fatty kisses a photo of Mabel Normand. Released in January 1920,
The Garage
marked the fourteenth and final comedy short with Arbuckle and Keaton together.

Offscreen, when not watching a Tigers game or boxing match or partying at a nightclub, Arbuckle and Keaton reveled in practical jokes. When Adolph Zukor attended a dinner party at Arbuckle’s West Adams mansion with Sid Grauman, Alice Lake, and others, he was the only one not in on the joke that the clumsy butler spilling the turkey dinner was Buster Keaton, even after an “outraged” Arbuckle shattered a breakaway bottle on the butler’s head. When Marcus Loew came to town, Keaton played Arbuckle’s chauffeur, inflicting upon the theater magnate a horrifying ride through Los Angeles. Pretending to be gas company workers, Keaton and Arbuckle nearly tore up the pampered front lawn of actress Pauline Frederick’s Beverly Hills mansion. And they convinced Vic Levy, a Belgian dressmaker who clothed the Hollywood community, that the king and queen of Belgium wished to dine at his house. At the resulting dinner, only Levy was unaware that the royal couple were actors. Keaton said, “Few of us in that whole Hollywood gang had had time to acquire an education. I suppose we were doing the things in our
twenties
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that we would have done earlier if we’d gone to high school and college.” In his autobiography, Keaton detailed these shenanigans in a chapter titled “When the World Was Ours.”

Six years after Keystone’s feature
Tillie’s Punctured Romance,
Arbuckle had still not appeared in a movie longer than two reels. Comedy was the genre of shorts, and those shorts played prior to features on the same bills. In the fall of 1919, he was eager to transition to feature films. “I mean to have some real drama interspersed with comedy,” he said. Features were beyond the scope of his current production company, so Joseph Schenck sold Arbuckle’s contract from Comique to Paramount—the studio that was already paying handsomely to distribute Arbuckle’s movies. Keaton would become the new solo star of Comique shorts, and Arbuckle would star in Paramount feature films written and directed by that studio’s top talents.

Along with seemingly everyone else in the film industry, Roscoe Arbuckle spent the early hours of Thanksgiving 1919 at the Hotel Alexandria, dancing, drinking, and dining at the Directors Ball, then Hollywood’s most glamourous annual event. Most evenings he pursued the low entertainments of boxing, gambling, and jazz dancing, but when Hollywood’s formal galas occurred, he was almost always there. He was a member of the Motion Picture Directors Association and attended events of the American Society of Cinematographers. Fraternal organizations were popular then, and Arbuckle joined a Los Angeles Elks Lodge. He was not a recreational reader, the first commercial radio broadcast in Los Angeles was still two years away, and he had no children, so it was rare that he would spend an evening at home unless he was throwing a party.

Just before Christmas, he fulfilled a longtime dream by performing on a New York stage—and not just in any theater, but in the fifty-three-hundred-seat Hippodrome. He was part of a one-night all-star benefit that included singer Sophie Tucker. He subsequently spent the holiday
with his wife. They had remained on good terms, corresponding via affectionate letters and frequent long-distance telephone calls.

Brewed over decades by an alliance of puritans and Progressives, the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect at the stroke of midnight on January 17, 1920, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors. The Volstead Act put the devil in the details of its enforcement. On the eve of Prohibition, an especially cold night in the East, the expected last-chance revelry failed to materialize. The
New York Times
noted, “Instead of passing from us in violent paroxysms, the demon rum lay down to a painless, peaceful, though lamented, by some, death.” Billy Sunday had staged the demon rum’s funeral in Norfolk, Virginia, the day before, complete with a twenty-foot coffin carried by twenty pallbearers. The evangelist told ten thousand “mourners”: “The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.” Reports of the demon’s death were greatly exaggerated.

Just before Prohibition took effect, Arbuckle bought the West Adams mansion from the Miners for $250,000 (about $3 million in today’s dollars). “Had to do it to save my cellar!” Arbuckle joked of the purchase and its liquor-filled basement. “The authorities won’t let me move it, so I bought the whole house to protect it. Also I’m thinking of giving out to the newspapers a story that my cellar has been robbed, so if there’s anybody contemplating doing this they’ll lay off.”

According to the census, on January 2 Arbuckle lived in the house with a thirty-seven-year-old male cook and a twenty-seven-year-old female maid. Both were Japanese immigrants. His secretary/housekeeper, butler, chauffeur, and gardener lived elsewhere. The house’s other movie star, Luke the dog, was not counted in the census. Arbuckle now had three dogs. Durfee said, “He and the big St. Bernard have wonderful times. Mr. Arbuckle gets into his bathing suit, and puts a tub in the garage, and he and the dog are perfectly happy there for half a day.”

He continued decorating the house in a manner he deemed befitting West Adams and its titans of industry. He imported an intricately carved front door from Spain (cost: $12,000) and bought and bought and bought: ornate mahogany paneling, gold-leafed bathtubs, crystal chandeliers, Oriental rugs, marble counters, fine-art paintings, antique china. The red lacquer dining room table with golden-clawed feet was from China. The lanai featured a Hawaiian royal chair. There was a Japanese bridge over the pond. Forever fascinated by technical gadgetry, Arbuckle had his closets and dressers wired with lights that came on when a door or drawer was opened.

As ostentatious as his house’s interior was, it was overshadowed by his new car. In 1919 he’d had the mammoth skeleton and innards of a Pierce-Arrow delivered to Don Lee Coach & Body Works in Los Angeles. There twenty-five-year-old Harley Earl
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performed $28,000 worth of coachwork to the luxurious $6,000 original, reshaping the hood and cowl and adding such features as a backseat mahogany cabinet, headlamps like silver soup pots, and a radiator cap monogrammed with an A. In April 1920 Earl completed his work, and for the next week more than ten thousand awed observers crowded into Don Lee’s showroom to marvel at the $34,000 machine. The
Los Angeles Times
stated that it would take “a special squad of police” to clear traffic of stunned witnesses whenever Arbuckle’s Pierce-Arrow appeared on a street.

Arbuckle continued to throw frequent house parties, ever so slowly depleting his cellar stockpile while the jazz played. There were stag parties, lawn parties, dinner parties, early morning parties. He staged a party around a dog wedding, at which Luke was the best man, so to speak. His favorite Venice and Vernon haunts had gone dry, so some weekends he journeyed to San Francisco or Tijuana. He was among the Hollywood celebrities who spent Halloween of 1920 at Tijuana’s Sunset Inn. A news story said that “a ‘spirited’ program is assured in the Mexican village.”