Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (57 page)

The theater responded in the affirmative. “I don’t claim to be an angel,” Arbuckle told the appreciative audience three days later, just before reading them the third trial jury’s statement regarding his innocence. “I was a young fellow whose head had been turned around by success. I had plenty of money and there were plenty of fair weather friends to ‘yes’ me. I simply was led into bad company—and for that I already have paid dearly.”

This spin was different from his strategy during the trials. Under oath, he had claimed to be an “angel,” assisting an ill Rappe. Now he said that he’d been ushered down the wrong path, seemingly blaming his connection to the tragedy on his playboy lifestyle. As to him being a “young fellow” in September 1921, he was thirty-four.

Durfee once stated that early in her marriage her husband did not share her love of books, but in a letter to her dated September 13, 1924, he mused on literary matters. He panned Émile Zola’s
L’assommoir
(“Of all the morbid, filthy, dirty smelly books I ever read, it is the worst”) and claimed he was going to buy Edward Gibbon’s gargantuan
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
when he returned to Los Angeles, joking, “I would certainly delight to read about something that fell harder than I did.”

Arbuckle’s tour through the Pacific Northwest was a bust. By a unanimous vote, the Portland, Oregon, city council banned him. When the censorship board forbade him from stages in Tacoma, Washington, he and the theater sought a court injunction. Injunction denied. Appealed to the federal court. Injunction denied. He returned to Los Angeles and performed at the Pantages Theatre there.

On September 4, 1924, Arbuckle wrote Durfee. Referring to her by his term of endearment “Mint,” he said he “received contract okay” and went on to discuss a crucial component of it: how he intended to send a check to her each week. This appears to have been a new financial arrangement. They agreed that he would pay her 15 percent of his earnings for the first year and 20 percent thereafter, and “not less than $200 per week” until she remarried or until death terminated the contract. (Their 1919 separation agreement had paid her $500 weekly, but he had a lucrative movie deal then.) He mentioned that she would be sailing on the ocean liner
Majestic
and said, “I envy you that trip”—which he was financing. That November, Durfee was in Paris, where she would find it easier to end her marriage. She had, at Arbuckle’s behest, traveled thirty-six hundred miles to file for divorce from her husband of sixteen years.

On December 5 came the announcement that Arbuckle would marry Doris Deane. Alluding to the death of Virginia Rappe, one acerbic headline read, D
ORIS IS
D
ARING.
The wedding was originally set for February, and a March ceremony was scrapped hours before it was to go off because the divorce could not be formalized. Finally, on May 16, 1925, Roscoe Arbuckle and Doris Deane married at her mother’s home. Buster Keaton was the best man, and Keaton’s wife, Natalie Talmadge, was the maid of honor. Joseph Schenck (who by now was chairman of United Artists) and Lou Anger were among the thirty-five guests.
*
Hundreds attended the reception at Keaton and Talmadge’s new Beverly Hills home. Subsequently, the newlyweds moved into a nearby house they rented from Schenck, but not before they went on a honeymoon at a location reportedly “hidden away in the country.”

Shortly before the wedding ceremony, one of the guests, producer Roland West, gave Arbuckle a most unique present: a contract worth $100,000 to direct ten two-reel comedies. The press made much of the gesture, but it was essentially a continuation of his current occupation, directing low-budget shorts in an age of features. He had already made thirteen for Reel Comedies, the last seven starring Al St. John, including
The Iron Mule,
a spoof of John Ford’s railroad epic
The Iron Horse.
His name appeared on none of them.
*
The new comedies starred either Johnny Arthur or Lupino Lane, former vaudevillians destined for busy but undistinguished celluloid careers. Despite the initial publicity for the contract, when the shorts were released, “William Goodrich” was credited, not Arbuckle.

It is unknown why Arbuckle chose his father’s first and middle names to direct under. It may have been a tribute—a means of forgiving the man who had died a half-decade prior and had been mostly absent or abusive when Roscoe was young. But it could have been a slander—a way of tying his dad to forgettable flicks, even if only Arbuckle and his family knew. Perhaps it was just a convenient moniker that had no greater meaning. Regardless, “William Goodrich” was destined to become a very prolific director. It was as though Arbuckle had returned to his unglamorous, anonymous movie work of 1909, doing chores for paychecks. As Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton won great acclaim for creating innovative features, Arbuckle saw little benefit to having his name attached to shorts starring second-string talent.

However, a first-stringer made a cameo. For
The Iron Mule,
Buster Keaton let Arbuckle use the exact replica of a pioneering steam engine built for Keaton’s feature
Our Hospitality,
and Keaton also appeared in the short as an Indian, uncredited and virtually unrecognizable. The roles were reversed a few months later when Arbuckle appeared in drag in Keaton’s 1925 feature
Go West.
As Keaton’s character tries to control a cattle stampede through Los Angeles, Arbuckle plays a frightened
mother in a department store; the rotund actress Babe London is his daughter. Neither role was credited, and it was easy for audiences to miss Fatty in drag. But the cameo was more than just another practical joke for Arbuckle and Keaton. London remembered, “It was their way of thumbing their noses at the people who had decreed that Roscoe could not appear on the screen.”

Keaton wasn’t the only industry friend who stuck by Arbuckle. The Masquers, an all-male social club of mostly actors, was born in May 1925 as sort of a West Coast version of the Friars Club. Arbuckle was made an official member on October 7 of that year. Other early members included Keaton, Joseph Schenck, Tom Mix, and Lionel Barrymore.
*
It was a little over four years since the Los Angeles Athletic Club voted Arbuckle out, so being voted by his peers into another exclusive club—while still blacklisted as an actor by Hollywood—was a satisfying triumph.

But he soon found out how little some things had changed. On October 16 the Masquers were set to give a comedy revue at Hollywood High School, but after receiving protests, the school demanded Arbuckle be dropped from the cast. The Masquers stood by their newest member, canceled the high school show, and instead rented the Philharmonic Auditorium, where the revue played to a packed house full of movie professionals. Arbuckle’s appearance in the first skit elicited a long ovation, and when it faded and some hisses were heard, the ovation began again.

In December 1925 Hollywood heavyweights Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin, and every studio head were among the six hundred who gathered for a banquet in honor of Sid Grauman. Maybe, as he sat at a table with wife Doris Deane and his friends, Roscoe Arbuckle was remembering those teenage days long ago when he worked for the Graumans: singing illustrated songs on a vaudeville bill at the Unique in San Jose and then soloing at the Portola Café in San Francisco, back when
the Hotel St. Francis was going up, back when he could walk the streets and no one recognized him, and strangers neither loved nor loathed him.

Writer Rupert Hughes, the master of ceremonies, introduced some of the notables at the banquet. When he came to Arbuckle, he asked him to stand. “Here is the sad spectacle of a man being punished by so-called democracy!” Hughes shouted. Arbuckle’s head bowed. “A man who was acquitted of a trumped-up charge by three American juries! But our militant
good people
arose to crucify, to persecute an innocent man! They dragged him down from the topmost pinnacle of being the clean and funny comedian that he was and made of him the world’s most tragic figure!” The applause thundered. It was much louder for Roscoe Arbuckle than anyone else. Hollywood showered with love the man blacklisted by Hollywood.

*
Pedestrian trivia example: Doris Deane, a minor actress who would play a major role in Arbuckle’s life, was featured in a March 1922 item for rescuing her mother’s orange trees from “Jack Frost” by lighting dozens of smudge pots.

*
The house is today a Catholic rectory.

*
It was later reported that his index and middle fingers on his right hand were permanently paralyzed. This was untrue.

*
It is arguably not feature length. Keaton recut it after poor previews, shrinking it to forty-five minutes.

*
William Goodrich was the given name of Arbuckle’s father, so it is likely this was Arbuckle’s first choice for a nom de plume and the Will B. Good pun followed. In the November 18, 1923 letter to Durfee, Arbuckle wrote: “I am taking my father’s name to direct by and from now on to the screen I will be known as William Goodrich. Ain’t that the cat’s nuts. Sounds like a tire.” However, the Will B. Good pseudonym was told to the press, who reported it in January 1924.

*
The still-stunning car is displayed today in the Nethercutt Museum in Sylmar, California.

*
In a parallel to Arbuckle’s life, in 1929 Alexander Pantages would be accused of raping a seventeen-year-old aspiring actress. He claimed it was a setup but was convicted and sentenced to fifty years imprisonment. On appeal, the conviction was overturned. Pantages was financially devastated by court costs and the Depression before his death in 1936.

*
The minister asked for “written evidence of Christian life and fruitage during the three years that have elapsed since your tragic ordeal.” Arbuckle responded: “I did not know it was customary to get a written receipt from God when you decided to follow Him. Furthermore, I am not asking you for salvation. I have already received that. However, if you must have a written recommendation, get in touch with Rev. Brougher of Los Angeles. I have taken God into my heart, but did not know that it was necessary to advertise it, but since I have decided to go straight with God I have learned to turn the other cheek. God bless you.” The evidence of Arbuckle’s supposed turn to a Christian lifestyle is limited to his embracing it during censorship battles, for then he did find it necessary to advertise.