Authors: Jerry Stahl
Then the fan letters started. Every day, a limping Irish girl who called herself Harvey would bring me a stack of fan letters and I'd go around the back of the stage, sit on a barre, and try to read them. "Dear Fatty, Me and my sister think you're Tops. She's got the goiter . . ." "DEAR FATTY, I DON'T HAVE A DAD, BUT YOU WOULD BE SWELL . . ."
One time I made the mistake of showing a note to Minta, from a Greek boy with tuberculosis. Naturally, the next day we took the train to the hospital, and when I walked in the room he had my photo in his pale little hand. I said, "How are you, scooter?" The kid just smiled. Pink lips in a little gray face. Then his mother, a nervous woman who kept wringing her apron, whispered something to the father, a big bald moussaka with arms like pylons. Dad looked at the floor and asked if I would mind touching his boy on the head. I was embarrassed.
It was awful. Knowing this kid put so much faith in me. An
actor.
I patted his head, surprised that his hair was so damp. "Fever sweats," the doctor said. The youngster—his name, I'll never forget, was Paris Tsangaris—raised his sunken brown eyes to mine. I don't remember what I said to him. What was I supposed to say? The poor nipper was so scared he shook. I looked into his eyes and knew everything that was going on in there. That's when it hit me: this kid was scared before he got the TB. You could tell by the way his brothers and sisters cowered. The way he kept sneaking looks past me, at his silent father, as if expecting a backhand any second.
That shook me up good. Made me remember Daddy. Waking up with his belt buckle across my face. Once I made my way out of my own childhood, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was remember it. When magazines asked, Sennett's office passed out an official press release about my happy boyhood. Much to my surprise,
"I was born in an average, middle-class family of five
. . . A
graduate of Santa Clara College
. . . A
football star and glee club feature
. . ."
Sometimes I almost believed this hogswaddle. I preferred it to the truth, which the terrified look in Paris Tsangaris's eyes made me recall all over again. I remembered what it felt like to be scared. To be Daddy's punching bag. To be told you're a piece of dogmeat so many times you're embarrassed to even look anybody in the eye, 'cause after a while you just believe it's true. I looked in that little TB boy's eyes and saw the 200-pound 12-year-old me, crying on my suitcase in the San Jose train station. What could I tell him but
"Run! Gawdamighty, run, you little lunger!"}
The second we got home from the hospital I picked up a bottle and didn't put it down till it was empty. Minta tried to comfort me and I pushed her into the wall. I shouted at her.
"I'm just a comedian! I'm too fat to be Jesus!"
Minta didn't understand. "But honey, don't you feel for that child?" How could I tell her where I'd been at that boy's age? I used to
wish
I'd come down with the croup, or something else that killed you. Even coughing myself to death seemed like a better deal than lying awake, keeping my eyes open, never knowing when Dad was going to bang in with a belt in his hand and rotgut on his breath.
I didn't say any of this, of course. Minta came from a real family. Her Mom and Dad loved her. They loved each other. How could I begin to tell her about life in the Arbuckle asylum? The last thing I remember about that night, after the Greek TB boy visit, I picked up a vase that had been in the Durfee family in the Old Country and hurled it across the room. And the only reason I know I said that bit about Jesus is because Minta told me the morning after, when she was cleaning up the crockery.
The next day, at Keystone, I must have still been in the mood for throwing things. We were looking for a slammer—something to break up a sequence—during
A Noise from the Deep.
We were shooting on the stage that day and I couldn't get anything right. I was still out of sorts. Mack asked what the problem was, and when I told him I'd skipped breakfast, he sent Harvey to the bakery. She came back with a tray full of cupcakes, turnovers, and a fresh blueberry pie—just like the one Pancho Villa and I tossed across the Rio Grande. That's when it came to me. I yelled for Mack to run camera. I whispered to Mabel what I wanted to do. As film rolled, we concocted some squabble. I was waiting to give the cue—
"when I pull my ear, that means I'm going to throw the pie!"
—when, Lord in a latrine, she scooped the thing up before me and threw it right in my kisser.
I thought Mack was gonna wet his drawers! Which happened to be all he was wearing, it being bath day. He sent Harvey for more pies and by the end of the day I'd mastered the two-handed hurl, the side-arm, and the over-the-shoulder. From then on pie-throwing was de rigueur. The lucky duck who ran the bakery down the street, a Hebe named Greenberg, even developed a blueberry-and-paste pie that didn't fall apart midair. For longdistance throwing.
Greenberg retired at 35, bought a mansion near Santa Barbara, and hung a sign over the front door that said THE HOUSE THAT PIES BUILT. All thanks to a poor little chest case who made me feel so bad I wanted to fling something at my wife. That daddy-scared boy with Greek TB.
But look at me, I'm tearing up!
Zipper Money
Mabel used to toodle over to the Durfees' and visit after a day shooting in Echo Park. Then Mack gave me a raise. From $5 to $18 a week, and from there to $25. Eventually it would hit $150. Even before I got that much, I was able to buy a car. An Alco. We arrived in Echo Park homeless vagabonds and moved out in a spanking-new coupe to a beach house in Santa Monica. Praise Jesus, Hollywood be thy name.
No more living with the in-laws, uplifting as that can be. I even suggested we get a butler. At first we had a Brit, named Mackens, but he spoke better English than I did, and I always felt like he thought I should be picking up
his
socks. So we found a Japanese. His name was something like Oka Lima Beana. So we called him Okie. I don't think he knew five words of English, which was fine. We communicated in pantomime. Minta bought me a pair of pants with a zipper—the new rage in men's fashion—and that's when I knew I was making money.
I taught Minta to drive, but after two weeks there was a permanent indentation in the driver's seat—
from
the driver's seat—and when poor Minta sat behind the wheel, she said it was like sitting in a pothole. So I had to get her one of her own. Which I swore not to sit in and ruin.
Across the globe, world war was breaking out. Nobody got too fussed about it in California. Mabel thought Archduke Ferdinand's wife had peculiar taste in hats, but otherwise we were a merry band—or at least a busy one—working 12 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. The biggest problem for the writers was finding new ways to keep Mabel and me in hot water in front of the camera. But it didn't seem to matter. We could make a two-reeler about doing laundry—
Mabel and Fatty's Wash Day
—and it would turn into gold. The trick was to keep coming up with new places for Mabel and me to mix it up. Airplanes, autos, motorcycles; opera house, outhouse, a mother-in-law's house flooded with water and floating down the street. Et cetera. And that's when I wasn't dressing up like some tarty woman and showing my knickers.
When ideas ran low, Mack was always ready to throw us in some public event and film whatever happened.
"Okay, kiddies,"
he'd say, with that greasy-radish grin of his,
"let's go drop the piranha in the goldfish bowl."
One time we all went down to the San Diego Exposition. Sennett pretended to set up a demonstration of how movies were made. But our cameras were empty. What Mack was really doing was filming us cut up in front of the crowds. Same thing at the World's Fair in San Francisco. The films we made from crashing parades or gallivanting through collapsed water mains were no different than the ones we shot normally. They just had different extras. At public functions—or calamities, as we used to call them—half the action was made up. More than once, we had firemen stop to wave at the camera, much to the consternation of families waiting for them to rush in and save Grandma's knitting basket. Basically you could get killed any minute.
What started to amaze me on these outings was how many people felt the urge to approach us. How excited they were. It never stopped being a surprise, having total strangers skittle over and talk to you like you were old friends. Course, I still hated it when folks called me Fatty. If it was a little tyke, I'd grin and tell 'em my real friends call me Roscoe. If it was an adult, and I'd had a couple of nips in me, I'd say something really classy, like "How'd you like it if I called you No Neck?"
One time we ran across a sideshow setting up in Echo Park and met the Fat Lady. She must have had 200 pounds on me, all packed in a bathing suit. Mabel said she looked like a pile of albino tires. The funny part, she kind of shimmied up behind us and yelled, "Hey, Skinny!" Me, Mabel, and Mack turned around and nearly fell over.
That was the one time Mack was caught flat-footed. A jalopy had backed over his camera when he was taking a leak, so me, Mack, Mabel, Minta, and Lehrman were standing around waiting for somebody to show up with another one. Mack nearly died at missing a shot of me and Jumbelina. He bit through his knuckle-skin when he saw the Fat Lady wobble off. First time in my life I ever felt normal. Minta said the woman was actually quite sweet. Just a little slow. "She'd been manhandled as a child," she told us. "All that fat's just a wall between her and any man who might get ideas."
"She'd be safe if Fatty got an idea," Lehrman cracked. "Those two couldn't mate without a crane and tweezers."
Right away my face got red. The way it did when Daddy browbeat me. Pathé stood there, waiting to see what I'd do. When I didn't do anything, he said, "I rest my case." I can still see that self-satisfied smirk. Until Mabel opened her mouth and the smirk disappeared. "Oh, Henry," she said, in that slit-your-throat-but-make-it-sound-chipper way she had, "everybody knows the only time you get laid is when you meet a girl dumb enough to think your accent is real. Just 'cause you
smell
French, honey, doesn't mean you are."
Escaping Lehrman wasn't the only reason I decided to direct. But, like I told Minta, he was the bite in the ankle that made me run the 50-yard dash. My first two one-reelers were
Barnyard Flirtations
and
Chicken Chaser.
I got out of animal husbandry with
A Bath House Beauty,
my third, and hit my stride teaming up with Mabel in
Where Hazel Met the Villain,
which has a burglar scene in it. Nothing opens more doors for comedy than burgling. We'd write 'em, we'd shoot 'em, and then we'd write another one. Those were great days: jumping out of our chairs with comedy Eurekas, then pullin' the stunts under the sun with the camera runnin'—if that ain't heaven on earth, it sure beat shining shoes.
Pretty soon Minta got in the act. She costarred in
A Suspended Ordeal,
also known as
Hung by a Hook.
Both titles, Minta claimed, pretty much summed up our marriage when I was on a bender. Which wasn't all the time, just almost. When I wasn't drinking to get drunk I was drinking to kill the hangover. Unfortunately, I was the only one who could tell the difference.
Liquid Refreshment
You could say it was the pressure that made me guzzle the hard stuff. But pressure was having no work, not working too hard. And drinking didn't make pressure go away. It only made you have to work harder walking across the room. Trying not to tip over took your mind off of whether you were breaking the gag-a-minute rule.
Minta used to tiptoe out of bed at three a.m. and find me slumped in my easy chair, pencil in one hand, bottle in the other, and a pad on my lap. That's how I got my ideas. Stinking drunk in my easy chair. But try telling that to a sweetie who thinks a sip of gin on the Fourth of July is plenty, thanks for asking. Sadly but truly, as they used to say in the minstrel shows, I felt more pressure hunkered in our house some nights than I did at work. I just couldn't turn off the action-gland. So we started going out. Minta and me. The Sunset Inn on Ocean Boulevard was our big haunt. Later on, Buster Keaton and I hosted a party there every Saturday. We even booked the bands . . . But where was I?
Minta hated going to the Sunset 'cause of the time I ran out of the bar, down to the beach, and into the Pacific fully clothed. I would have swum a few laps but I banged my knee up on a rock. Later that knee got revenge on me, but that's up the road, and the road ain't built.
Sennett lived at the Alexandria, on Fifth and Spring, so sometimes we'd slide by for a pop at the hotel bar after work. Lots of show people stayed there. My favorite bar was Good-fellow's Grotto, on South Main Street. Goodfellow's installed a special reinforced booth in the back, extra-wide, so I didn't have to worry about getting stuck going in and out. It would have been easier sitting in a chair, but I hated eating with my back to the dining room. I could feel all those eyes on me, like spiders. Made the back of my neck rash up red as an orangutang's ascot.
By then the world was calling Mack the King of Comedy. And Mack was calling me his right-hand man. I still remember his stellar quote from the
New York Times:
"Roscoe may act foolish before the camera, but he is one of the most sensible young men in pictures." Why,
garsh . . .
All the old onion-gobbler had to do was plunk a poster of me or Lady Mabel in front of a theater and the crowds poured in. It's a weird feeling to be lying on your back at three in the morning thinking,
People I'll never meet pay money to laugh at me.
When I was little they did it for free. I guess that's success—getting paid for the same thing that used to make you wish you were dead. I should have asked the Fat Lady if she ever thought she'd grow up and be fat for a living. Not that that's what I was doing. Why, not at all! I was fast on my feet. I could cook up a scene. And I was pretty when I was fed and watered.