Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (56 page)

He still desired the spotlight, and he needed the large paychecks that came with it to pay down his debts. In May he signed on for a four-week stint at Chicago’s upscale Marigold Gardens cabaret club, telling corny jokes punctuated with singing and dancing. When Arbuckle the vaudevillian first acted in the then-debased medium of motion pictures in 1909, it was the equivalent of slumming. Now he had traveled full circle: he was a former movie star from glamorous Hollywood returning to the decaying world of vaudeville. The money was good—a guaranteed $2,500 per week and more if the gate was strong—but all but
$500 of that went straight to the IRS, to which he owed $30,000 in back taxes.

The first time the crowd of two thousand at Marigold Gardens saw Arbuckle at the debut performance on June 4, he was in a movie on a screen running toward the camera, growing ever larger, and then the real man burst through the paper screen in three dimensions. The resulting ovation lasted fifteen minutes. “This is the first smile I’ve had in a long, long time,” he told the audience. The show’s producer remembered opening night: “A little girl strolled over to present him with a rose. The comedian went down on his knees and with tears streaming down his face he kissed the child in gratitude. The entire audience, including myself, was in tears.” That producer admitted he had friends planted about the auditorium on opening night to foster applause in case the crowd was cold; the ringers were not needed.

The show was popular, but the attempt to transfer some of Fatty’s slapstick antics to the stage was not deemed an artistic success. “The people have been very kind,” Arbuckle said. “They have come out to see me and they have been extremely generous in their applause. In return I have done my best to amuse them in a poor act.” The poor act included him in a ballerina dress and the return of Keystone’s custard pies. Failing to shy away from misogynistic humor, he sang, “Our women are lean and fat, and some are darn good-looking. But the only use we have for them is when they do our cooking.”

He took the act east to a boardwalk cabaret in Atlantic City, where he pulled in $6,000 weekly. Minta Durfee was set to perform at a competing club, billing herself as “Mrs. Fatty Arbuckle.” This angered the owner of the club hiring Mr., and he tried to forbid Mr. from seeing Mrs. When the club owner requested that Arbuckle sue his wife for using his full name, Arbuckle told the press, “She stood by me in my time of trouble. Sue her? I’ll be at the train [when she arrives] with a bouquet of roses.” He was.

The couple had remained close friends, but there was no chance of them resuscitating their marriage. On November 2, 1923, Durfee filed for divorce in Providence, Rhode Island. The state was then the Reno of
the East, noted for its relatively easy divorces—but not easy enough for Durfee. Her preliminary divorce was rescinded when she failed to prove she had lived in Rhode Island for four years.

In a letter from Arbuckle to Durfee dated November 18, 1923, it’s clear he was regularly sending her money as contractually obligated by their separation agreement. The tone is affectionate toward his divorcing wife and her family, and he reveals a bluer strain of humor than his films could capture, closing with “Well kid don’t get discouraged, keep a stiff upper lip, that’s the only thing of mine that is stiff, I think somebody put salt peter in my coffee. Kisses and flowers, will write soon. Dingle-tit Roscoe.” Earlier in the letter, he explained why he had “been busier than a dog with turpentine in his ass”: “I have been thrown in at the last minute to direct Buster’s next picture and I have been very busy trying to get the story ready.”

Fatty Arbuckle is now a Buster Keaton director under the name Will B. Good, so maybe he will.

—H
ERALD-STAR
(S
TEUBENVILLE,
O
HIO),
J
ANUARY
17, 1924

Released in April 1924,
Sherlock Jr.
was Buster Keaton’s third feature film,
*
the first on which he alone was credited as director, and today it is regarded as one of the masterpieces of silent cinema. In this surreal comedy, Keaton plays a movie projectionist who dreams that he climbs into a projected movie and enters its storyline. The action and stunts are breakneck; the effects are astonishing. And the original codirector was Keaton’s close friend and mentor, Roscoe Arbuckle. In his autobiography, Keaton wrote:

We were about to start
Sherlock Jr.
in 1924 when I decided that I must do something for my pal, Roscoe…. Roscoe was down in the
dumps and broke…. I suggested to Lou Anger that we give Roscoe a job directing
Sherlock Jr.
Lou said it could be arranged, but that we better get him to use some other name. I suggested “Will B. Good,” but this was considered too facetious, so we changed it to “Will B. Goodrich.”
*
The experiment was a failure. Roscoe was irritable, impatient, and snapped at everyone in the company. He had my leading lady, Kathryn McGuire, in tears dozens of times a day. One day, after Roscoe went home, the gang of us sat around trying to figure out what to do next. It was obvious that we couldn’t make the picture with a man directing whose self-confidence was gone, whose nerves were all shot.

In one of the two scenes Arbuckle likely directed with McGuire, she is abducted by her butler and taken to a shack where the implication is the butler is about to rape her. Helming this scene may have been particularly stressful for Arbuckle, as he would have perceived that everyone was focused on him. He lasted no more than three weeks codirecting
Sherlock Jr.
before his best friend fired him. “He hadn’t recovered from those trials, of being accused of murder and nearly convicted,” Keaton said. “It just changed his disposition. In other words, it made a nervous wreck out of him.”

Arbuckle wrote and directed four comedy shorts in 1924. All starred Al St. John, who was credited as writer and director in his uncle’s place. All also featured Arbuckle’s new (and long-delayed) love interest, Doris Deane. She was thirteen years his junior, born Doris Dibble in Wisconsin in 1900. Deane was the only child of peripatetic parents: in 1910
the family was renting a house in Iowa, where her father worked in a saloon, but by her high school years they lived in Butte, Montana, then a copper-mining boomtown. Subsequently, they relocated to Southern California.

There, under her new name, nineteen-year-old Deane nabbed her first film role. She was a tall and thin brunette with dimples and an easy smile. She dreamed of movie stardom. Things were looking up when she met Arbuckle on the
Harvard
in 1921. One week prior, her second film, Universal’s
The Shark Master,
was released, and she had a major part. But only two additional roles followed before Arbuckle began casting her in comedy shorts in 1923.

She was best known for a flurry of publicity in December 1922 because of her rumored engagement to Jack Dempsey, then the world’s heavyweight boxing champion. Chummy photos of the pair appeared on sports pages. The rumor was neither confirmed nor denied, but she would marry another heavyweight.

“Weeks ago I saw Fatty alone in a boat fishing off Catalina shore. Before that several times I had encountered him on solitary walks in the Hollywood Hills.” So wrote a journalist in the summer of 1924. “He was getting a grip on himself. By such lonely vigils he achieved readjustment to begin once more where he started years since.” Bolstered by his young love interest, steady work, and improving financial strength, Arbuckle’s mood lifted. When he wasn’t walking in the hills, he again drove a luxury automobile, as he owned a $9,000 McFarlan Knickerbocker Cabriolet, fire-engine red with F
ATTY
license plates.
*

In June 1924 thirty-seven-year-old Roscoe Arbuckle returned to Alexander Pantages’s vaudeville troupe, which he had first traveled with
as a teen twenty years prior.
*
Now he would perform a comic monologue as the lineup’s star attraction. At his first show, at the Pantages Theatre in San Francisco, he was greeted by an eleven-minute ovation. Even Matthew Brady backed off, saying the three trials were “the only way an accused man could be cleared of a horrible charge” and “I would rather build up than tear down and help than hurt, and Arbuckle has been condemned and hurt enough.”

“San Francisco’s reception of me is, I think, just evidence of the American fair play spirit that never dies—given time,” Arbuckle said. “I’ve had my dose of foul play. Now it’s fair play.” When asked if his films would now be released, he answered, “I hope not. They would be old stuff now…. I want to make new comedies. Better pictures. I’m more serious now than I was in the old days.” He exercised daily, and he claimed to have lost twenty pounds in the previous three weeks, all in an effort to get in shape for his “reappearance on the screen.”

In Utah, he didn’t avoid the topic on everyone’s mind, joking, “No, I don’t belong to either the Republicans or Democrats; no more parties for me.” He said he hoped to return to movie stardom “just as soon as I recover from the Hays fever.”

It wasn’t all joviality and applause. In some communities, censors fought to keep him off stages just as they had screens. In Kansas City, Missouri, as a resolution was being read before the city council to bar him from local theaters, the subject of the ban appeared and asked to speak. Permission granted. He asked the council for a “chance to live a clean, decent life and pay my debts” and concluded with, “I come to you as Mary Magdalene—asking forgiveness.” After the council peppered him with questions, the resolution was defeated ten to five. When
his appearances in Quincy, Illinois, were protested by a local minister, he asked to testify from that minister’s pulpit about his own turn to Christianity since the famous party. Permission denied.
*
The Quincy shows drew large crowds.

In Cleveland, he headlined a bill filled out by a local singing/dancing/comedy duo that included a twenty-one-year-old British immigrant named Lester Hope. Arbuckle was impressed enough by the youngsters’ blackface act to recommend them to a vaudeville producer. Lester later changed his name to Bob and became one of the most famous entertainers who ever lived.

On his way to shows in Louisville, Kentucky, the train that carried Arbuckle stopped in Logansport, Indiana, long enough for him to talk with an enterprising local reporter and to receive three telegrams (all collect, two from Durfee) from a messenger boy who called him “Mr. Fatty.” He bummed a cigarette and a light from the reporter, but he had difficulty finding a single among his roll of hundreds when he paid the messenger. He said he envied the creative freedom of Charlie Chaplin, who could dote on his very occasional projects at United Artists, and he stated he would be returning to Los Angeles to act in a movie (untrue) and that he had sworn off booze (untrue) and women (untrue).

This had become his practiced storyline over the previous two and a half years, for to him his return was all about his reform. If people believed he was a changed man, why couldn’t they accept him again as a comedic film character? A telegram to a Toledo theater showed Arbuckle’s strategy at work:

Appeal to you as one of several in motion picture industry to help me place before followers of motion picture screen my request for permission to return to pictures. May I ask privilege of use of your stage for a few minutes daily for one week to talk personally to motion picture fans and if possible obtain consensus of opinion regarding my return to my life work, motion pictures.