I, Fatty (10 page)

To homeowners insane enough to open their doors to the Keystone Kops, Mack would pay $25—with no responsibility for damage. But that's not the craziest. Right before quitting time my second day, a firetruck clanged by and Mack yelled for us all to follow it. A house was burning down on the corner, so we ran around like idiots while the firemen were trying to do their job. Chester Conklin grabbed a hose and tramped on it. When I picked up the nozzle to pretend to see what the problem was, Chester lifted his foot and blasted me in the face. After that I climbed on the roof to save a baby—which turned out to be a doll—and promptly fell off. The fire was actually in a barrel of rags somebody had torched in their backyard. But Mack worked with whatever came his way. If he didn't need the footage for the film we were shooting, he'd use it in another one.

After a week, Mack said he needed to talk to me upstairs. Walking behind him up the stairs, all I hoped was that he wasn't going to run a bath. What happened was worse. Sennett told me he didn't think I had anything on-screen. My hair was too light for the camera. My eyes looked watery. But the biggest problem of all, I was stiff.

"The gag's gotta come right after the plant. Slam-bang!" he yelled. Sennett only spoke in yells. "I don't got a yuck every 100 feet of film—
every 90 seconds
—I don't got a film." A week of smashed cars, dismantled kitchens, tree jumps—and all I got was I'm too
stiff?
My
hair's
too light? My anger must have shown through—or else he was afraid I was going to cry. Whatever the impulse, Sennett decided to try and let me down easy. "Look," he said, "I liked the way you fell off that roof. I'll call you as soon as more roof stuff comes up."

Saved by the Mabel

As luck would have it, Mabel Normand was walking into Mack's ramshackle office just as I was walking out. Mabel Normand, of course, was the big reason Keystone made nearly a million in its first eight months of existence. She was the only actor who got a private dressing room. Mabel was more than pretty. She'd been an artist's model in New York, and had these big soft eyes that made men she'd never met want to throw their lives away for the chance to take care of her. When she wanted, Mabel could look sophisticated enough to write operas in heels. But her favorite mode of attire, shockingly, was overalls and an old shirt with a straw hat on top.

You didn't expect a woman with Mabel's class to be madcap. But prior to signing on with Keystone, she'd worked for D. W. Griffith's Biograph in New York. She made a name for herself when she spent 10 minutes on top of a box-kite plane, in mid-flight, for a daring aerial sequence. Mabel was more fearless than any man. When Mack made his parody of Griffith's last-minute-rescue films, hiring Barney Oldfield for
Barney Old-field's Race for Life,
Mabel agreed to an amazingly dangerous high dive. It took so long for her to hit the water Sennett had to use two cameras, which had never been done before. But she was just as comfortable in a suds fight.

Mabel was also Sennett's girl. Why a woman like her would go near an onion-breathed, womanizing, testicle-juggling crackpot like Mack was a subject of much speculation. One wag on the lot claimed that Mabel'd sniffed so much cocaine, she was the only starlet who couldn't smell him. It was as good an explanation as any. Though the goofer dust didn't really become a problem—or at least a noticeable problem—until later, when Mabel's whole life began to unravel.

That afternoon—which looked like my last on the lot—Mabel smiled and said, "See you tomorrow, Big Otto." I told her probably not and she stopped dead, as though completely shocked. Mabel'd been nice to me from that first day I showed up at Keystone. She dubbed me "Big Otto" because of how German I looked. We weren't close exactly, but we were friendly.

Now here was Mabel Normand, ready to stand up to the boss to make sure I stayed at the studio. Without so much as a blink, she stomped over to Sennett and poked her finger in his chest, while I dawdled self-consciously behind her. "Keep the big kid around, Mack. He's funny even if you don't know it yet."

Sennett, who hated conceding to any opinion but his own, stalled for time. He made a show of wiping some crumbs off his foul suit, then spat a chaw like Annie Oakley shooting a bull's eye into the corner spittoon. "You wanna keep Fat Boy, then
you
work with him," he finally told her. It was probably the most lucrative decision Mack Sennett ever made, even if he did it out of spite.

All the way back to the Durfees' on the streetcar, I thought about the day's strange turn. I'd never wanted to work in the movies, but the prospect of working with the actor friends I'd already made—and the ones I knew who would end up being more than friends, like Mabel—was hard to turn away from. I even got excited at the idea of learning a little more about working for the camera. The possibilities were there—it's just that the movies were so new, there was no way to say what those possibilities were.

Even if Minta and I didn't need the paycheck, I would have been sad to leave Keystone. Still, underneath my relief and gratitude, what stuck in my craw was the way Mack called me Fatty. I was more than used to teasing. For better or worse, Fred Mace, Charlie Murray, Edgar Kennedy, Slim Summerville, and the other Kops already had nicknames for me: My Child the Fat; Matching Saddlebags; Sir Hefty Dumpling, Esquire. Somehow those were okay. But the one that stuck—the one that always stuck— was the one that hurt the most. The one Daddy called me. Fatty.

Fatty!
What made this one different was the way Mack spat it out, just like my father. Like it was something disgusting. Thanks to Sennett, I was listed on title cards as Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. And pretty soon most people forgot the Roscoe and just remembered Fatty. From that moment on, the joy of my accomplishments would be forever tainted by mortification over the name I accomplished them under.

And I had not been consulted.

The Happy Factory

That first year at Keystone, there were 50 title cards with my name on them.
Fifty.
Some weeks we'd grind out three or four one-reelers. To say my life changed is like saying Vesuvius got a little hot and burped. The pace made vaudeville seem stately. On the other hand, no more sleeping in train stations and skipping meals for 50 weeks. I took a streetcar to work in the morning. Sennett supplied decent grub. (Unless, like I said, you were a writer.) And the money was good and steady.

Let me wade into it, though. Because everything seemed to happen fast and slow at the same time. True to his word, Sennett paired me with Mabel for my second movie,
Passions, He Had Three.
Mack's idea was that the whole film should play out on a beach full of "bathing beauties." Mack was big on bathing beauties. That was the joke around the Happy Factory:
"If she wants to be a Sennett bathing beauty, a beauty has to bathe with Sennett"

Anyway, what happens in
Passions,
Harry Langdon plays the wolf and starts giving my gal Mabel looks. Naturally, I get jealous. Harry and I end up rivals for Mabel's affections. We compete like schoolboys. Not that I know too much about being a schoolboy. The school I attended, your final exam was getting hymied after a nine-show-a-day run in Bakersfield, helping the juggler pawn his Indian clubs so you can cadge a train ticket. Arbuckle, you're rambling . . . I know that.

"Hey, Mishter, your whiskey's showing!"
Mack used to shout this at himself whenever he passed a mirror. Or, on occasion, when he passed Yours Truly. The conditions under which I'm trying to rein in these memories is less than stellar. Whiskey helps. So does Aunt Hazel. The doctor said it would kill me—but he was always the optimistic type.

So where was I? Keystone. Mabel.
Passions, He Had Three.
There we are.
Passions
was Mack's version of light romance. In the course of the seaside shenanigans, Harry pops me one in the beak and Mabel takes off in Harry's balloon. Which makes me so mad I call in the cavalry. The Keystone Kops wobble in to end things with suitable chaos and injury.

Macking

Sennett came up at Biograph under D. W. Griffith, whom he idolized. According to Mack his mentor had a blind spot: Griffith didn't see the point of filming "guys chasing other guys." Especially if the guys doing the chasing were policemen. That was the difference between them. Wark—I love saying Griffith's middle name; he was David
Wark
Griffith—wanted to make people good. Sennett wanted to make them happy—which to him meant making the cops look like morons.

This creative difference gave Sennett his brainstorm: a studio that only made comedies. He raised the money for Keystone with a couple of bookie pals and kicked off in New York with Mabel, Ford Sterling, and Henry "Pathé" Lehrman, the fake Frenchman who hated my guts. They shot a one-reel stinker in Fort Lee, New Jersey—
Cohen at Coney Island
—then Mack got the California bug after his god D. W. hightailed it from East 14th Street to sunnier climes.

In New York everything was shot indoors. In the winter, it got dark at four. If it rained or snowed the light was gone altogether. To people who started as pups filming in freezing New York studios, just the
idea
that you could shoot outside in December was enough to send them running. The lush scenery meant you didn't have to spend time and money building sets. The cheap labor and material were just gravy.

After Tom Ince got rich in five minutes making his California westerns, movie people started flocking to Los Angeles like the proverbial lemmings. Some went straight over the cliff; some took a while.

Keystone had been in business eight months by the time I rolled in. Mack and the gang worked off a simple formula: create mayhem and film it. When I first got there, I though the plots were ridiculous. Worse, actors had to improvise much of the action. And the stories made no sense. But Sennett had a different take. He loved to tick off the ingredients of a Keystone Comedy on his fingers: pace, gags, motion, and the expression on the actor's face when, just when he thinks things are going his way, they go all to hell.

"It ain't a comedy till the wheels fall off" was another Mackism, which may as well have referred to the crates the Kops used to bang around in. Mack never minded seeing an employee get hurt. He was fine with it. As long as the camera was on and you didn't bleed in his whiskey. One time, after making me do five takes of tumbling out of a palm tree into a mud puddle, he strolled over to watch me putting ice on my jaw. "Hurts, huh, Fat Boy?" I just looked at him: this big Irish lug in a soiled suit, his face smeared with dust and that open-top Panama askew on his head.

"What do you think?" I asked him back.

"What I think," Mack cackled, "comedy is
you
fall in a ditch and die. Tragedy is I get a hangnail. It all comes down to human nature, Arbuckle. People just naturally love watching bad go to worse."

"Worse," in the case of the Kops themselves, meant more than just a laugh. At any given time half the guys nursed broken bones. And Sennett didn't pay for their time off, either. In his mind, there were two kinds of comedians: fast or f—ed. I never liked that kind of cursing in my presence, but Mack didn't care, any more than he cared about calling me Fatty. That explained another Fun Factory fact: Keystone spent more on bandages than on makeup. We were usually shooting on some hill on Manzanita, Hyperion, or Effie, or down in Echo Park, so whoever got gandied that day would recline in the sun back at the studio, which would turn into a Red Cross center. Somebody was always hobbling around the Keystone lot on crutches or nursing a fresh bloody nose. The injured would try to lure a bathing beauty over to clean their wounds. This was as much as Mack was willing to provide in the way of balm for the wounded.

Did I describe the Keystone stage already? The whole thing was nothing but three exterior walls with muslin slung over the top, for filtering. The worst job in the studio was moving that muslin sheet on the roof. After a rain, it stayed mildewed for weeks, and the pigeons who called the lot home liked to relieve themselves on it. Why am I telling you this? Because, if for some reason Mack wanted to shoot inside and needed to alter the light, he'd assign whoever he hated that week to Sheet Duty. My first months at Keystone, I got used to coming home with pigeon poop on my kneecaps.

Pain Lessons

What Sennett said over and over was that comedy was not about being funny. It was about being desperate. What, besides desperation, could make a person walk on telephone wires 30 feet off the ground, then smash through a skylight and bang off a busted-out mattress 20 feet below? They weren't doing it to be funny. They were doing it because, in the movie, they
had
to! You can watch that wire-to-mattress sequence in
Fatty's Tintype Tangle
and say "That's one brave fat man!" But maybe the fat man doesn't think it's particularly brave. Maybe he thinks that's what he has to do to keep his job.

No matter. After 20 years of struggling,
Movie World
magazine called me an overnight sensation. They declared my face "more familiar than the president's!" President Who?

Back then, Minta would always tell me that I worked like a man being chased. Sometimes she'd ask me what was chasing me. All I could think to answer was, "I won't know until it catches me. That's what scares me . . ."

She told me to read Freud.

Mabel-and-Fatty Magic

Here's the funny thing. After the first three Mabel-and-Fatty pictures—
Passions, For the Love of Mabel,
and
The Waiters'
Picnic
—audiences went berserk. They could not get enough of us. But even after I knew Mabel and I were making hits, I didn't know what it meant. Not really. I knew I had steady work. I knew that after six years of marriage, I was finally able to buy my wife flowers. That every morning, Minta, who'd gotten a job at Keystone thanks to Mabel, would wake up, make me a breakfast of eggs and bacon and a tureen of coffee and ride the streetcar by my side to the lot. I had a future, even if it wasn't the future I'd imagined. What did I know? I'm a fat kid from Kansas. My own good luck scared me. Life seemed unbelievably livable.