Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (18 page)

An article in the August 1915 edition of
Photoplay,
“Heavyweight Athletics,” covered the eating habits of Roscoe Arbuckle. His ideal dinner: “Martini or Bronx, crabmeat cocktail, dozen raw oysters, thin soup, stuffed celery parisienne, cold artichokes with mayonnaise, fried salmon steak or sand dabs, hungarian goulash with homemade noodles, roast turkey with dressing and cranberry sauce, fresh asparagus, green peas, stewed corn, fresh pastry, Roquefort cheese with toasted crackers, large cup of coffee.” This and similar “athletic” feats of calorie consumption were surely exaggerated; Arbuckle had an average appetite.

But the celebrity press, intertwined with Keystone publicity, presented a portrait of Arbuckle more in line with the role he played onscreen: that of a man with unchecked and outsized appetites. To that end, they also exaggerated his weight, athletic ability, and gambling habits, and implied a seemingly unquenchable thirst for alcohol. In the same
Photoplay
article, Arbuckle shared an admonition: “Do not drink more than six steins of beer during the course of the meal.”

Eleven floors below room 1219, six years and six months before the fateful Labor Day, Roscoe Arbuckle sat on a plush chair beneath a rococo ceiling in the palatial lobby of the Hotel St. Francis, drinking a highball.

While much of the world in April 1915 was embroiled in World War I, San Francisco was staging a World’s Fair, ostensibly to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal the previous August but primarily to advertise the city’s recovery from the 1906 earthquake. The same World’s Fair that attracted an ambitious model and fashion designer named Virginia Rappe also brought Roscoe Arbuckle. The Keystone cast and crew were there to shoot two movies, both directed by Arbuckle and starring him and Mabel Normand. As they waited out the rain, Arbuckle, Normand, another Keystone actress, and Keystone moneyman Adam Kessel sat in the St. Francis lobby for an interview with Flickerings from Film Land columnist Kitty Kelly.

While dramatic feature films were the rage, Kessel explained the Keystone formula for comedy shorts: attract children and their parents will follow. “I cater to the kids,” Arbuckle said, before explaining how a famous operatic concerto waited twenty minutes to meet him because her eight children “are so crazy about these Keystone pictures. I really felt much complimented.” Still, the column’s prevailing image is Arbuckle “blinking unconcernedly at his highball.” It is likely this cocktail consumption was encouraged by Kessel. If his image demanded such indulgences, the star would oblige.

With the departure of Chaplin, Arbuckle and Normand were the top box office draws at Keystone. Sennett returned to the “Bunnyfinch” formula, pairing them as husband and wife and highlighting the twosome in titles such as
Mabel and Fatty’s Wash Day, Fatty and Mabel’s Simple Life,
and
Mabel and Fatty’s Married Life.
These sound like anything but must-see cinema, but their coupling meant childish playfulness and slapstick shenanigans within an adult plot. Audiences loved them.

Both Keystone stars were making $500 weekly, but Arbuckle was nursing some discontent. Sennett had offered the upstart Chaplin $750 a week to renew his contract, only to watch him defect to Essanay for even more. And the studio head had paid Broadway star Marie Dressler, a big-screen rookie, $2,500 weekly to headline
Tillie’s Punctured Romance,
cinema’s first feature-length comedy.
*
The 1914 production had been directed by Sennett and featured, with one exception, the entire Keystone company at the time, including Chaplin, Normand, Al St. John, and Minta Durfee. The exception was Arbuckle. According to legend, the full-figured Dressler insisted Keystone’s rotund star not appear onscreen for fear he would upstage her. Arbuckle was feeling underpaid and underappreciated.

Arbuckle’s pay was spent as quickly as he got it. “Roscoe bought me a Rolls Royce, the first one in Hollywood with a genuine silver radiator,” Durfee remembered. “And jewels, my darling, like you’ve never seen. He was the most generous man on earth. I never knew a man as generous as he was, not only to me but to everybody. He couldn’t say no to anyone. Roscoe used to give me all the money he didn’t spend himself. My dear, I’ve sat with thousands and thousands of dollars in my purse. Roscoe always said, ‘I’ll make it, darlin’, and you spend it.’”

At least others in his Santa Monica home were bringing home star salaries as well. In addition to his wife, their dog was making many times more than most working stiffs. Pit bull Luke’s cinematic debut came in January 1915, and since celebrities were manufactured overnight at the Fun Factory, two months later he was headlining in
Fatty’s Faithful Fido,
stealing scenes and pulling off stunts, some involving ladder climbing, for which the canine had a preternatural proficiency. Luke would appear in ten Fatty movies over five years, and whether the two were sharing a sandwich, drinking from the same garden hose, or snuggling in straw, the affection between Fatty and his dog registers in scene after scene. Theirs was a love story, on- and offscreen.

Critics at highbrow publications might have scorned such silliness, but those who worked in the film industry rarely shared this dismissive
view of slapstick. When even the most serious dramas required broad pantomime and exaggerated emotions to overcome muteness, a rotund comedian in drag absorbing a custard pie garnered the respect of fellow big-screen actors and directors. Arbuckle was invited to join the prestigious Photoplayers’ Club, the initial social organization of the motion picture industry. He and Durfee were among the nearly two thousand who attended the club’s 1915 Valentine’s Day ball, and he was a semi-regular at its Wednesday dinners.

Arbuckle acted in twenty short films in the first seven months of 1915, directing or codirecting fifteen of them. Most paired him with Normand, and many featured his familial stock company: Durfee, St. John, and Luke. However, none of the preceding performers appeared in
Miss Fatty’s Seaside Lovers.
Arbuckle plays a woman who is pursued by three men, one of whom is twenty-two-year-old virtual unknown Harold Lloyd.
*
Nor are others from his stock company in
Fatty’s Tintype Tangle,
which ups the violence to such heights it plays like a parody of Keystone comedies. A jealous husband has two six-shooters that function as sixty-shooters, and every bullet seems to connect with Fatty’s flesh but causes no lasting consequence. Only a point-blank shot to Fatty’s chest fells him, but he rises unbloodied and unpained to run the shooter’s hand through a meat grinder. Afterward, in perhaps his greatest stunt, Fatty shimmies up a telephone pole and scampers about on the suspended wires.

With the breakneck filming schedule and the fact that Arbuckle and Durfee were together at work as well as home, the couple’s marriage grew strained. “We were both busy, and busy people are often nervous and irritable,” Durfee remembered. “Two busy people in a family frequently clash, not because of any dislike, but simply because they get on each other’s nerves, and neither one, because of the continual strain of work, has the time to acquire sufficient calmness to meet the other’s needs.”

Another time she said, “He wasn’t a man who could say, ‘I’m sorry.’ And that hurt me in some of the disagreements we had before and after the trials. We’d have an argument, and the next day he’d make up for it by buying me a diamond ring or a necklace or just some little present. But all he had to do was say, ‘I’m sorry.’ He never did.”

M
ABEL
N
ORMAND
F
IGHTING
D
EATH

Los A
NGELES,
Sept. 20

While medical science waged a desperate battle for her life, Mabel Normand, famous film star and comedy queen, was unconscious and rapidly sinking today. Her physician, Dr. O. M. Justice, early today stated that the chance for her recovery was slight.

By the summer of 1915, Sennett and Normand’s tumultuous relationship had stretched to more than four years, and it remained unacknowledged in the press. In June 1915, they finally, but privately, became engaged. In mid-September, the relationship ended with a crash. According to Minta Durfee’s account, an actress phoned Normand and told her to go to Sennett’s place immediately. She knocked on his door and he opened it in his underwear. She recognized a woman in a negligee trying to hide behind a sofa: twenty-three-year-old Mae Busch, who had arrived in Los Angeles early that year and by summer was headlining in Keystone movies. Busch hurled a vase, which met the tender flesh of Normand’s forehead. Sennett tried to quell the crimson flow, but Normand pushed him away and staggered out the door.

Arbuckle and Durfee were in chaise lounges on the porch of their Santa Monica house when, as Durfee remembered, “we heard what we thought was an animal suffering. Then we saw the door of the taxi open, and there was the driver carrying Mabel, who was cradled in his arms, up to our porch. There was blood all over Mabel’s face and hair. It was streaming down her neck and all over her body. Naturally, we paid the
driver a little something, and Roscoe gave him something extra, hoping he would keep this a secret.”

Normand was discreetly checked into a hospital. More than a week later, a cover story appeared in newspapers:

It was learned yesterday that Miss Normand was injured during the staging of a wedding scene at the Keystone studio. It was a typical wedding, which means there was considerable “rough stuff.” Roscoe Arbuckle, the heavyweight comedian, was the bridegroom and Miss Normand the bride…. There was a general bombardment of old shoes and rice after the ceremony, and some enthusiastic celebrator hurled a boot at the bridal couple. Arbuckle dodged the boot, and it struck Miss Normand on the head.

Normand playing a bride adds a bitter irony to the lie the studio propagated. For years, Keystone had been generating a stream of publicity about Normand’s dangerous exploits. In recent weeks, she had supposedly killed a rattlesnake, stopped a studio burglar with a well-thrown medicine ball, bested twenty others in a five-mile ocean swim race, and fended off an octopus attached to her leg. But this time, Normand went off script, perhaps purposely giving a less credible explanation, when she told
Photoplay
the following April, “Roscoe sat on my head by mistake. I was unconscious for twelve days and laid up for three months. Don’t talk to me about being killed—I’ve been through it.”

Mabel Normand acted in only one other film in 1915, but
Fatty and Mabel Adrift,
written and directed by Arbuckle, is the duo’s definitive collaboration, and it was a huge financial success. The usual elements are there—Fatty and Mabel as newlyweds, Al St. John as villain, Luke the dog as hero—but they occupy an ambitious disaster plot, as the newly-weds are cast on the ocean in their barely floating house. The convincing aquatic effects are carried off with a bigger-than-usual budget; shooting took place in a studio water tank and the Pacific Ocean. Arbuckle’s advancement as a director is evident in his creative flourishes, as when
his shadow kisses sleeping Normand and when he and Normand appear framed by hearts (linked via Cupid’s fired arrow) and the heart frame of jealous St. John crumbles. It’s the sort of delightful whimsy the movies forgot how to do nearly a century ago.