Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (59 page)

Maybe it was a way to start the party again, a way for a middle-aged has-been to return to those glorious days before Prohibition when nights were filled with dancing and drinking, eating and laughing in Vernon and Venice and Hollywood. The world then had been a blur of practical jokes and pretty starlets, boxing matches and poker games, steaks, clams, and—always—drinking. There were famous friends, whole packs of them, but none more famous than him. Everyone knew him. Everyone wanted to be his pal. Going back seems the sort of thing he would dream up in the lobby of the Hollywood Hotel. The acting, the money, the prestige—the best part of it all then was those nights when, as Buster Keaton said, “the world was ours.”

And so Roscoe Arbuckle bought his own nightclub. Ironically, initial reports claimed he was launching a nationwide chain of coffee shops. It must have been the name: Roscoe Arbuckle’s Plantation Cafe. Launched under different ownership in the summer of 1922, the Plantation Cafe, with its row of eight Corinthian columns and its regal white facade, resembled a Southern mansion, as did buildings at MGM and Culver
Studios, both just up the street. The club was located in Culver City, an incorporated municipality virtually surrounded by Los Angeles but with little enthusiasm for Prohibition.

Culver City’s main thoroughfare, Washington Boulevard, was crowded with a long string of nightclubs with flashing signs—Ford’s Castle, Kit Kat Club, Doo Doo Inn, Lyon’s Den, Monkey Farm. Thousands flocked to this strip nightly for the live jazz from future legends like Lawrence Brown and Lionel Hampton, but also for the dancing, gambling, prostitution, and booze. Much of the alcohol was brewed up in the backyards of nearby houses, further aiding the local economy. The hottest joint on Washington was Sebastian’s Cotton Club (where Louis Armstrong would headline in 1930—31), but the Plantation Cafe also developed a reputation as an upscale destination, because of its quality jazz bands and comedy revues and the actors who were frequent masters of ceremony. Since Culver City did not completely condone violations of the Volstead Act, raids were a regular feature at the Plantation. Arrests were made, bottles destroyed, fines paid, only to have the nightclub open again—and be raided again. D
RY
S
TORM
R
AGES OVER
P
LANTATION,
read a typical
Los Angeles Times
headline from January 1926.

By the time Arbuckle and his fellow investors purchased the Plantation Cafe in July 1928, the club’s aura had faded. Arbuckle set out to change that. On opening night, August 2, the colonial foyer was stuffed with floral tributes, including a giant likeness of Arbuckle from Mabel Normand, and celebrities dined on the ten-dollar-a-plate dinner (about $130 in today’s dollars). After more typical cabaret acts, Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Al St. John, Tom Mix, and vaudeville comedian Jack Pearl performed slapstick antics, including custard pie tossing. A report said, “Every screen star of note now in Hollywood was present with ears pinned back and hair well larded. And if their hosannas is [sic] a criterion, the future of Arbuckle as a restaurateur is assured.”

The newly revived club was a hit from the start, selling out nightly to “a strange crowd of big-time movie stars, would-be stars and tourists.” “I guess I’ll go back to the stage,” Arbuckle said soon after the opening. “But for now I’ll do my entertaining here.” Jazz greats played
the Plantation, but Fatty was the biggest attraction in his own club. He also inspired its new theme: fat farmers. The waiters, hat check girls, and parking attendants were all corpulent, and befitting plantation workers and reminiscent of Arbuckle’s country bumpkin character, they wore bib overalls.

The month after Roscoe Arbuckle’s Plantation Cafe opened, England’s Prince George, a notorious playboy, was in Los Angeles and partying with an actress, first at the estate of Hollywood power couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and then at Gloria Swanson’s house. Sometime in the early morning hours, everyone journeyed to the Plantation and persuaded Arbuckle to keep it open. The shindig there ended at 5
AM
but continued back at Swanson’s. This was the lifestyle Arbuckle wanted to preserve: to be a member of royalty, Hollywood or otherwise, in a party that seemed like it would never end. It was the lifestyle he had publicly sworn off six years prior when what he desired most was a return to movie stardom, but now that his return had been denied, he embraced it more openly than before.

Two days before Christmas 1928, the Plantation was raided, and ten men, not including Arbuckle, were arrested for Prohibition violations. In January 1929 the club was cited after neighbors complained about its sleep-preventing sounds, but Arbuckle ignored the quieting order until the Culver City mayor visited and threatened to close the club. Alcohol busts and code violations were one thing, but in May 1929 a riot broke out at the Plantation, and when police tried to disperse it the brawlers turned on the men in blue—but without the pulled punches of a Keystone comedy. A policeman was critically injured.

This was the sort of publicity that repelled customers. Then came the stock market crash of October 1929 and the subsequent Depression. Arbuckle sold his share in 1930, and shortly thereafter the Plantation Cafe closed for good.

After his two features fizzled, Arbuckle’s directing career had stalled, and he spent the next three years working on vaudeville stages and greeting
guests at his Plantation. Meanwhile, without him, the motion picture industry was finding its voice.

For the three decades that movie actors were rendered mute, their silence was a peculiarity that everyone—performers, filmmakers, viewers—had adopted as the new normal. It was both limiting and, in the way someone who loses one sense appreciates more her other senses, liberating. Some complexities of storytelling and characterization were lost, but silent cinema in the 1920s developed an exuberant expressiveness to compensate. Writing in
Photoplay
in 1921, editor in chief James Quirk rhapsodized:

In [motion pictures’] silence it more nearly approximates nature than any arts save painting and sculpture. The greatest processes of the universe are those of silence. All growth is silent. The deepest love is most eloquent in that transcendent silence of the communion of souls…. The talking picture will be made practical, but it will never supercede the motion picture without sound. It will lack the subtlety and suggestion of vision—that vision which, deprived of voice to ears of flesh, intones undisturbed the symphonies of the soul.

From nearly the beginning, inventors had attempted to make motion pictures talk. In 1895, two years after unveiling his viewing-box Kineto-scope, Thomas Edison introduced the Kinetophone, which added sound via a phonograph player (which Edison had invented in 1877). Viewers listened to music and effects via earphones as they peered into the cabinet, observing moving pictures unsynchronized to the audio—the nineteenth-century equivalent of using an iPad with earbuds to experience
Avatar.
Only forty-five such machines were sold, and film projection soon rendered even audio-equipped viewing boxes obsolete.

Many inventors attempted to synchronize projected films with phonograph records. Competing systems had names like the Chronophone, the Synchroscope, and, nearly a century before the word took on another meaning, the Cameraphone. Edison kept to his original name, relaunching a Kinetophone in 1913 that utilized a complex pulley system pairing a cylindrical phonograph player and a film projector to marry image and
sound. Ads claimed it “startles the civilized world and revolutionizes the picture business,” but synchronization was spotty and sound amplification was lousy. It flopped.

Meanwhile, others were blazing a different path. In 1901 German physics professor Ernst Ruhmer wrote an article for
Scientific American
about his new Photographophone, which played back sounds recorded as waves on film strips. The volume of those sounds could be manipulated via increasing or decreasing the amount of light used during playback. Ruhmer had created the first optical tape recorder and player, but it was former Edison employee Eugene Lauste who made the greatest advances in the recording, projection, and amplification of sound and picture on strips of film. He (and two others) secured the patent for his system in 1907, and he shot America’s first true sound movie in 1911. Lauste worked to improve the technology, but World War I and a lack of financing stifled his dreams of commercialization.

In 1919 Lee de Forest patented an improved method for recording sound and moving images simultaneously on film. His De Forest Phonofilm Corporation commercially screened eighteen short sound movies (mostly of vaudeville acts) on April 13, 1923, in New York City. The “talking picture” industry was born. The major studios yawned. In 1924 a small animation company began using de Forest’s process for sing-along cartoons, but after business arrangements with two fellow inventors crumbled, Phonofilm declared bankruptcy. Those fellow inventors, Freeman Owens and Theodore Case, sold their sound patents to Fox Film Corporation, and Fox, in turn, released
Sunrise
on October 23, 1927, with the first feature-length sound-on-film soundtrack. Still, those sounds were only music and effects; dialogue was subtitled.

In the same way some still swear by vinyl recordings in the digital age, Edison’s concept of marrying a phonograph record with a motion picture persisted even as men on both sides of the Atlantic innovated and improved sound-on-film techniques. D. W. Griffith employed the disc technology for singing and effects in his 1921 feature
Dream Street,
which bombed. Struggling Warner Bros. utilized the Bell Telephone Company’s sound-on-disc process, which Warners dubbed Vitaphone. The initial result was
Don Juan,
released on August 6, 1926; the otherwise silent
feature boasted a synchronized soundtrack of music and effects.
Don Juan’s
screenings were preceded by Vitaphone shorts, including one with a man hyping the sound process. That man was Will Hays.

Sound-on-disc motion pictures were cheaper to make than sound-on-film productions and had superior audio fidelity, but their synchronization was a continuous challenge, as was the distribution of the necessary discs, which wore out quickly and were prone to skipping and breaking. Therefore, a coalition of studios—not including Warners and Fox—agreed on a standard sound-on-film technology in early 1927.

But it was Warners’ second sound-on-disc feature that launched the “talking pictures” phenomenon.
The Jazz Singer,
starring singer Al Jolson, was released on October 6, 1927. Though most of the audio was a score recorded separately and most of the “talking” was singing, Jolson’s songs and some dialogue were recorded live on the set—a first in a feature film. It was a huge success.

Still, the studios in the sound-on-film coalition were hesitant to produce their own talkies. With the addition of audio, motion pictures became a new medium, with new challenges and expenses. Dialogue became a screenwriter’s paramount concern instead of an intertitle afterthought. Delivering those words became the crucial function of actors—many of whom, by the late 1920s, had never before spoken a line heard by an audience. Directors and cameramen were bound to the constrictions of recording via microphones and a bulkier camera (padded to muffle its hum from the mic). Studios needed to invest in audio equipment and personnel. Theaters needed to purchase and install sound systems. Fending off the inevitable, there was a brilliant burst of creativity in the silent movies of 1927 and 1928; many films were filled with lyrical cinematography and nearly devoid of intertitles. They were the final poems of a dying language.

Warner Bros. continued to release sound-on-disc movies,
*
including the first “all-talking” feature,
The Lights of New York,
on July 28, 1928. It was another blockbuster. “Talking pictures” were all the rage. The other studios were no longer hesitant. Even James Quirk, seven years after glorifying
silence, was resigned to sound: “It’s up to us to sit tight, cross our fingers, and let the scientists tinker,” he wrote in October 1928.

By the end of February 1929, all of the major studios had released at least one sound feature, and the final entirely silent feature by a major studio came out that August. Mute movies did not survive to greet the new and troubled decade. The art form and industry of D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett, of Buster Keaton and Mabel Normand, and of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was extinct. Cinema had a new language.