Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (36 page)

More than nine months into Prohibition, the quotation marks bracketing “spirited” were a knowing wink.

The painted poster features Arbuckle in a ten-gallon hat (properly sized), a leather vest, and a blue shirt. A red kerchief adorns his neck, a six-shooter is strapped to his waist, his arms are crossed, and his eyes gaze wistfully into the distance. His name is as big as the title,
The Round Up,
but “Fatty” is parenthesized and squeezed between the much larger “R
OSCOE”
and “A
RBUCKLE,”
as if a mere whisper. Although Arbuckle’s first feature film includes his signature bit of rolling a cigarette with one hand and a few other minor gags (one featuring Keaton, uncredited, as a blackface Indian), it is otherwise void of comedy. It’s a western romance with too many plots.
Variety
wrote, “It is evident that Fatty Arbuckle of the mammoth breeches and slapstick funnies has given away to Roscoe Arbuckle in a regular hero role, serious in personation with but a modicum of comedy for relief as behooves his corpulent build. The change has not been for the better.”

It may have alienated fans of slapstick, but
The Round Up
accomplished its goal. A box office success, it established its star’s bona fides as a feature film actor. The story remains tedious, but Arbuckle brings a surprising pathos to the part of Sheriff “Slim” Hoover, the role that gave him his signature line. In the end, unable to get the girl, he forlornly rests his head on a fence post, and the final intertitle reads, “Nobody loves a fat man.”

Passport application of Roscoe Arbuckle:

November 16, 1920.

Object of visit:
business

Father:
dead

William Goodrich Arbuckle had only recently died from cancer at age seventy-one. Roscoe paid his father’s final medical bills, but it’s unknown
whether he ever saw the man again after leaving their unhappy Santa Clara home at seventeen. (His bitter stepmother claimed he “abandoned” his stepfamily when he became successful.) He did not attend the funeral.

Instead, he was in New York City, planning to board an ocean liner bound for France with friend Fred Ward, a former actor. As they awaited its departure, a rumor surfaced in
Variety
that Arbuckle would soon be marrying a former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl. Never mind that he was still married to Minta Durfee; even the showbiz press had forgotten. In Jazz Age Manhattan, Arbuckle partied so much that he literally missed the boat, and he and Ward had to take another ship five days later. Never mind that Prohibition had been the law of the land for eleven months. Addressing the marriage rumor, Arbuckle joked that he might return from France with a French wife. Never mind that he was still married; perhaps even he could forget.

Eight years after his trip across the Pacific, this was Arbuckle’s maiden journey across the Atlantic. In Europe, he learned just how great his fame had grown. Motion pictures were a major American export—even more so after World War I decimated the European movie industry.

“Paris went wild over Fatty Arbuckle,”
Photoplay
noted. “From the time he landed until he sailed for home, he was dined and wined and feted, for the French took him in portly person as readily as they take to his pictures.” Four thousand Parisians crowded on a street just to glimpse him. Hundreds of fans and dozens of reporters followed his chauffeured car wherever he went. There were banquets and dinners and dances. Much of the official thanks given Arbuckle was for the comfort his movies had provided the French during four years of bloody conflict. He reciprocated when, at the Arc de Triomphe, he laid a bouquet on the spot where the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier would appear a few weeks later.

His trip’s final nine days were in London. There, while staying at the luxurious Hotel Savoy, he hosted a dinner attended by 150 British notables. For a movie star of his magnitude, simply being in the right public places while cameras clicked and delivering ready-made quips to
the swarming reporters was a function of his occupation. Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s product was himself, and every day in every place was an opportunity to sell. He returned to New York City on December 22 and again spent Christmas in Manhattan with his wife, even if all had forgotten he was married.

The Round Up
was the first of five feature films Arbuckle acted in in 1920, though with their greater postproduction and publicity schedules, they weren’t making it to screens nearly as fast as his slapstick shorts had. Only one other was released that year. In it Arbuckle plays an unsuccessful attorney who runs for political office. In an unfortunate subplot, a woman tries to entrap Fatty and spawn a ruinous scandal. Originally released in December 1920, it was still playing in theaters ten months later when a ruinous scandal engulfed its leading man, conferring a morose irony on its title:
The Life of the Party.

Roscoe Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin as two drunks in a sinking row-boat at the end of
The Rounders
(1914).

Luke the dog, Arbuckle, and Mabel Normand in
Fatty and Mabel Adrift
(1916).

Left to right: Buster Keaton, Arbuckle, and Al St. John in a publicity photo for
Back Stage
(1919). Arbuckle is dressed in his best-known costume: flannel shirt, suspenders, baggy pants worn too high, undersized bowler.

Poster for
The Round Up
(1920), Arbuckle’s first feature.

Virginia Rappe.