Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (5 page)

Stories vary regarding how William Arbuckle returned to his son’s life. Shortly after Mary’s death, the family patriarch wed another woman
named Mary, a widow who went by “Mollie” and had six children of her own. They would have two additional children together, in 1900 and 1903, the last when Mollie was forty-four. Before the arrival of the final two, the 1900 census listed eleven family members at the Arbuckles’ rented farmhouse in Santa Clara—including thirteen-year-old Roscoe C., who found himself in the regular presence of his father for the first time since he was an infant.

Located forty-five miles south of San Francisco, the future hightech capital of Santa Clara was then devoted to citrus farming. Again Arbuckle was teased for his weight, a torment compounded by his father’s insistence he wear overalls and ragged shoes. One Santa Clara resident remembered, “Whenever a baseball went over the fence or out of the lot, the other lads put up a cry of ‘Go get it, Fatty,’ and with kicks and punches, sent the big boy on his way after the ball. He always was punched and kicked by the other boys.” Again he seldom attended school. Instead, he fished and swam in a nearby pond. He toiled on the farm, as did his father and brother Harry. He cleaned a saloon. And he served coffee and donuts at the restaurant in the hotel his father bought. These years would inform his future film characters, as he later played lazy country bumpkins in overalls and lowly laborers, including hotel and restaurant workers.

Arbuckle still pursued show business, which then extended to not just shilling for medicine shows and traveling hypnotists but also dancing jigs or belly-flopping onto hard saloon floors for beer and cigarettes. In his early teen years, he again sang in amateur shows, this time at the Victory Theatre in nearby San Jose. The stage was a means to overwhelm his shyness, to replace isolation with an audience, and to find the love—if conveyed only in cheers and applause—that he didn’t feel at home.

“He was aggravatingly lazy as a boy. Neither his father’s cuffings nor my pleadings could cure it,” his stepmother remembered. “Roscoe didn’t seem to fit in anywhere.” She spoke openly about what a loveless, frequently terrifying home it was for her stepson: “His father used to beat him—and he often deserved it.” In a horrifying glimpse at the brutality, she claimed she saved the boy’s life once when “his father was choking
him and beating his head against a tree.” When the adolescent Arbuckle was fortunate, his alcoholic father would only insult him for his excess weight and not draw his belt or his fists. Still, the sting of words—including William’s contention that someone else must have fathered Roscoe—lingered far into adulthood. The abused boy longed for an escape.

In 1903 Arbuckle received an offer from theater owners Sid and David Grauman. Father David and teenage son Sid had migrated to Canada’s Yukon Territory in 1898 during the Klondike Gold Rush. There they staked a gold claim but found greater fortune staging vaudeville shows and boxing matches for the miners. In San Francisco two years later, the Graumans bought a downtown store, moved in eight hundred chairs, and christened the Unique Theatre, a vaudeville house.
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In February 1903 they opened a Unique Theatre in San Jose. They had heard Arbuckle sing at the Victory, and they soon enticed him to perform at the new Unique, singing illustrated songs for $17.50 weekly.

Illustrated songs were precursors to music videos. A singer performed onstage accompanied by either a pianist or a record while a series of slides combining photography and painting were projected on a screen, illustrating the lyrics. Offering two advantages over early motion pictures—(painted) color and verbal sound—they were popular in the early twentieth century, running between vaudeville acts or movies, buying time for the changing of stage backdrops or film reels. Audiences often sang along, and just as music videos would boost CD sales eighty years later, illustrated songs fueled sheet music sales. And for Arbuckle, performing these numbers in several vaudeville shows daily allowed him to hone his baritone voice.

It’s likely that Arbuckle was also being exposed to early motion pictures. Between their first public projections in 1895 and the rise of nickelodeons
in 1905, movies were seen primarily in vaudeville shows. Typically, they were prizefights, travelogues, or gag reels lasting as little as a minute. Their novelty waned rapidly, so “flickers” were wedged into the middle of bills with dancing girls, jugglers, comedians, and illustrated-song singers like Arbuckle, just another diversion in the theatrical lineup. But as the young performer witnessed the impact of such transformational inventions during his early years—not just motion pictures but also electric lights, telephones, phonographs, and automobiles—he developed a curiousity about technology that he retained throughout his life.

Next, the Graumans purchased San Francisco’s Portola Café, which featured singing waiters. They offered the headwaiter/soloist position to Arbuckle. Thus, in 1904 the seventeen-year-old escaped his father’s reach and moved to the West Coast’s cosmopolis, a vibrant seaport and rapidly expanding city of over 350,000 inhabitants from around the globe. San Francisco was a mélange of unknown languages and streetcar bells, horses and motorcars, and foghorns from ships in the bay. Singing to the city’s moneyed crowd, he was generously tipped for his tunes. He worked late into the night and slept away many daylight hours. Nocturnally, the City by the Bay was lit in electric and gas lights and cast in deep shadows and dense fog. An aristocrat might slip him a fiver for a song at the Portola, and a knave might steal it from him at knifepoint in a Tenderloin alley.

On March 21, 1904, the Hotel St. Francis opened its doors. A line of horse carriages and primitive automobiles stretched for blocks, as the city’s elite, dressed in tuxedos and gowns, waited to tour the brightly lit Grand Dame of Union Square. Perhaps, in the ensuing months, Arbuckle first strode the palatial lobby of the city’s newest attraction. If so, he would have marveled at the artwork, including an enormous painting of nearby Mount Tamalpais, purchased for $5,000 and hung behind the front desk. (The hotel’s art was ruined by the earthquake’s fire two years later and replaced before the 1907 reopening by newly acquired paintings and the lobby’s celebrated Magneta grandfather clock.) Whether he entered or not, he surely noted its twin towers, each twelve stories tall. That’s where the rich and famous stayed.

In the same year he moved to San Francisco, Arbuckle’s baritone impressed another ambitious theater impresario, Alexander Pantages. A Greek immigrant who ran away to the sea at age nine, Pantages had been a sailor, boxer, Panama Canal digger, and gold prospector before entering the theater business in first the Yukon Territory and then Seattle. “Alexander the Great” would, in just a few years, build an empire of vaudeville and motion picture theaters, but when he and Arbuckle met he had but two, both in Seattle. He also had a vaudeville troupe traveling the West Coast, which, at Pantages’s invitation, Arbuckle joined.

Teenage Arbuckle was a star singer on the Pantages circuit, performing with the troupe in theaters big and small from Phoenix to Seattle, spending much of his time in railroad cars. Unlike most other Americans then, who never ventured far from their places of birth, in his first eighteen years Roscoe Arbuckle had seen mountains and metropolises, the bleakest deserts and the densest forests. He had lived on farms as well as in the largest city west of St. Louis. He had traveled a thousand miles from his hometown of Santa Ana. He made an impressive fifty dollars weekly. He answered fan letters, greeted admirers, signed autographs.

While doing a stint in a Portland, Oregon, theater in 1905, he agreed to join two burlesque comedians, Leon “Rubberlegs” Errol and Pete Gerald, during their run across the upper West. It was a gig that, despite halving his pay, allowed him to branch out from illustrated songs to sing numbers untethered to a slide show—and to try his hand at comedy.

He said it was Errol “who persuaded me that I had a voice, ability, and that I would make a good actor.” Errol also “taught me several valuable things like how to fall all over the place without making myself a candidate for a hospital.” Practicing stunts, dancing soft-shoe, mastering comedic timing, personifying characters in costumes and self-applied makeup—this was Arbuckle’s education, Errol was his teacher, and stages were his schools. Other than his dodging the hook at an amateur show, there is no remembrance of Arbuckle being a funny youth. To the contrary, he was reserved, only coming out of his shell when he sang. But at eighteen, he began to develop the skills of a comedian.

In Butte, Montana, a boisterous copper-mining town known for its vast district of bordellos, saloons, and gambling halls, the trio performed with a blonde singer of large proportions and dubious character who was popular with the overwhelmingly male audiences. A liberal drinker, she often missed her entrances, and one evening when she could not be found, a new woman appeared onstage, dressed in the female singer’s white gown and sporting a blonde wig, singing “The Last Rose of Summer” in a falsetto. It was Arbuckle. The audience loved it, and even more so when the enraged female singer showed up and chased him around the stage.

The upper West circuit, known in vaudeville as the “death trail” because of the long distances between venues, was not lucrative, so Leon Errol accepted a better offer.
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Arbuckle attempted to fill Errol’s role with Gerald but floundered. He was not yet a skilled comedian. Gerald found a new partner, and Arbuckle returned to the dying medium of illustrated songs, earning enough for a seat on a train back to San Francisco. There, at 5:12
AM
on the morning of April 18, 1906, he was awoken by a tremendous earthquake. Fires, caused by ruptured gas mains, burned for another four days and nights.

Arbuckle turned again to Alexander Pantages, who booked him as a singer in the prospecting town of Vancouver, British Columbia. When that engagement folded, he joined a stock company performing classic plays for appreciative audiences in Alaska. Heavy costumes guarded the actors against the chill of drafty theaters, just as beards and bearskin coats did for most in attendance. At the end of the year and the beginning of the next, he was in a burlesque revue in Seattle, singing solo and in choruses and doing two comedy roles per show. His rotation of characters included Jasper the Janitor, Little Willie Wilkinson, and Private Roundhouse, as he continued to refine his comedic abilities.

Twenty-year-old Roscoe Arbuckle returned to San Francisco in February 1908. He had traveled far over the previous four years, and from
boy to man, but he ultimately ended up where he started, no wealthier nor better established and still alone. There is no remembrance of him having had a girlfriend before that point, and there was little time for relationships to develop on the road. Life as a vagabond vaudevillian in the red-light districts of mining and ranching towns had grown wearisome. He wanted to stick somewhere long enough to establish his singing career. After auditioning, he was signed to sing with the Elwood Tabloid Musical Comedy Company when it moved south that June to the new Byde-A-Wyle Theatre across the street from Long Beach’s Virginia Hotel, a favorite getaway destination for the region’s elite and only seventeen miles from Santa Ana. Arbuckle was returning to Southern California as a featured performer at a first-rate venue.

In romantic comedies the term “meet cute” applies to the contrived ways the male and female leads meet, such as one insulting the other on a train before realizing they’re both headed to the same workplace. One day, while returning to Long Beach from a sightseeing trip in Los Angeles, Arbuckle noticed a young woman seated across from him on the electric train. He offered up a smile to the auburn-haired, blue-eyed girl, who was barely five feet tall and one hundred pounds. She refused it. When her suitcase began to slip in the luggage rack above her, he pushed it back, again bidding for her attention.

“Please don’t touch my suitcase,” she told him. “I don’t like blonds or fat men. I can manage for myself.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Gee, I’m sorry.” He moved to another seat.