Authors: Jerry Stahl
I guess the best way to find out you're a real celebrity is when people
you
think are celebrities want to meet you. When Enrico Caruso showed up on the set, I nearly fell off my high chair. We had an Italo dinner together, and after we both dumped a bucket of vino down our gullets, Caruso asked me to sing. I declined, like any sane man. But after another bucket of paint peeler, I got up the nerve. I did my old vaudeville tune "Find Me a Girl Like Mother (and I'll Meet a Girl Like You)."
When I was done, the whole restaurant applauded—Caruso the loudest. Then, taking my hand in his—if I didn't know he was a ladies' man I would have blushed—he leaned over the table, very serious, and asked me why I wanted to "put on ze clownfeet" when I could be a serious singer.
I still couldn't tell you if this was the biggest compliment I ever got—or the worst insult. Maybe both. But it did get me thinking. Knowing the money Chaplin was making, and knowing that what Mack paid me was cashews compared to that—though we were equally popular—I started listening to offers. They'd been pouring in for a while. But the one I went for was Max Hart, the big-time agent. Hart not only guaranteed me 200 grand a year, he promised that wherever I went, Minta would be hired, too. Then came the real head spinner. Max told me Sennett was making $200,000 off of each movie I made for him. And that's just in the States. "You're so big in Europe, there's fistfights from Germany to England every time Mack sends over another picture, 'cause everybody wants a ticket. You're an international star, Arbuckle."
All this was news to me. And $200,000 sounded pretty sweet after being treated like the House Negro by my good friend Sennett. Imagine not telling me I was internationally adored! So I signed. Big mistake. Or actually, it wasn't a mistake.
Thinking
it was a mistake was a mistake. Or—never mind. You'll see. Let's just say, before the ink was dry another show-bizzer, a guy with sweaty palms named Lou Anger, invited me to Atlantic City to meet the legendary Joe Schenck. Schenck called himself "the second most powerful man in the movie business." Joe would be there on behalf of Adolph Zukor, then head of Paramount. He didn't have to tell me that Zukor was Numero Uno to his Dos.
We all got a little tipsy on the boardwalk, and I heard myself tell Schenck, a little slurrily, "It isn't just the money, I'm sick of making pictures I don't want to make. I wanna call the shots." Schenck excused himself to make a phone call. I stared at the Atlantic and peed. The ocean was calm. It was beautiful. But for some reason I kept thinking,
That just makes it easier for the monsters.
When he came back Schenck announced, with no fanfare, "I can get you artistic control, 1,000 bucks a day, and 25 percent of the profits." While I was trying to filter this through the alcohol in my brain, sweaty Lou Anger felt compelled to chime in. "That comes to more than a million per, Roscoe." "Izzat so?" I said. I wanted to ask if I'd heard him right, but I didn't want to look like a simp. A lot of people assume all fat people are stupid. Which we all ain't.
"Here's Zukor's idea," Schenck continued, tossing his fat cigar into the sea. Insanely, I remember thinking,
What if it lands on a clam?
"You can create your own film company, call it Comique. All you gotta do is make—you should pardon the expression—Fatty pictures. Adolph says Paramount will keep its mitts off. Famous Players-Lasky distributes. Lou here runs your studios. Deal runs for 10 years, with annual sit-downs to figure out bonuses."
By now the stars were whirling in the sky. I had to sit down myself before I introduced the clams I'd had for dinner to Joe's suit. But that wasn't the only thing bothering me. I knew there was something, I just couldn't find it in my juice haze . . . Then it came to me, and I did feel sick. "What about Max Hart? I just signed with him."
Schenck and Anger exchanged looks, then Schenck nodded and Lou signaled to somebody I couldn't see. Next thing I knew, this Rolls-Royce the size of Canarsie comes rolling right up the boardwalk. "I like Max," Schenck said, "but could he give you anything like this?"
By then I was too drunk to drive. In my looming stupor, I just gazed at that beautiful machine and hoped I didn't pass out in it.
The morning after my boardwalk kibbitz with Schenck and Anger, my head felt like I'd used it to crack walnuts. But I managed to have breakfast with Hart and lay things out. I figured he'd be upset. Maybe throw his eggs at me. Max wasn't mad, though. He was sad. "You're making a mistake," he said, so quiet it gave me the willies to think about it later, when I realized he was right—and it was too late to matter.
Max just smiled sadly and put his hand on my cheek, the way you'd touch a child. "God help you, Roscoe. These guys are gonna chew you up and spit you out."
With that my agent for five minutes picked himself up, shook my hand somberly, and told me to give my regards to Minta.
Minta!
In all the excitement about the Rolls and the millions, I forgot to ask Joe and Lou about putting her in the contract. I called Lou and he acted put out. We made a deal and that wasn't part of it. When I wouldn't let it go, he said he'd see what he could do and hung up. His tone was a lot chillier than it had been the night before.
When I told all this to Minta, over Waldorf salad at the Waldorf, she threw down her napkin, as mad as I've ever seen her. "First you walk over Max Hart, then you walk over your own wife. After all the years I've looked after you . . ."
Maybe it was the hangover. Maybe it was some part of me, deep down, that didn't want to admit she was right, but I pounded my fist on the table so hard the plates rattled. "Nobody ever took care of me but me," I yelled at her, in front of the entire restaurant. "I've been doing it since I learned to waddle."
I regretted this as soon as I said it. But Minta, who never failed to surprise me, just took my hand in both of hers and started to cry. "Oh, Roscoe," she kept repeating, over and over. It was as if I'd tugged her heart out, jammed a nail in it, and put it back. "Oh, Roscoe, you don't even know what you've done . . ."
Everything I Want I Get
Celebrated comedian to begin work on production of two-reelers in March. "Fatty" Arbuckle, the funniest man on the screen, who has long abandoned his first name of Roscoe, has entered into a contract with Paramount Pictures Corporation . . .
The secret of Arbuckle's great popularity is the fact that he makes his audience laugh at him as well as with him, never fearing to be made the victim of a joke.
—
Moving Picture World,
1915
T
HERE ' S ONE for the tombstone, huh?
He never feared being the victim.
I look at these scrapbooks now and I still don't get it. The Russkies were running Czar Nicholas II out on his can. The Anti-Saloon League was passing dry laws in 24 states. The Marines were landing in Santo Domingo and clouds of mustard gas were burning boys' lungs to bloody mush over there at Verdun and the Somme. But for some reason the international newshounds could not get enough Arbuckle-alia.
Predictably, Sennett cursed me up and down. Like Ford Sterling, like Chaplin, like his own Mabel before me, I was an ingrate abandoning the saint who'd turned him from vaudeville hack to movie star. Oddly, Mack's words echoed Max Hart's. And there could not have been two less similar characters. "Fat boy," Sennett spat at me, "you sign on with those bastards, they'll work you like a packhorse, then sell you for glue. Zukor would stab
himself in
the back if he could make a shekel out of it." Then Mack did something I'd never seen him do before. He actually choked up. "Keystone may be a nest of freaks, but we look after our own. That's how it is in the sideshow, sonny. You walk in the center ring, your life ain't even gonna be yours anymore."
Then he gave me a stinky hug, and I went home to shower.
Très Comique
A few months later, Keystone was history, and I was being sent scripts by my new studio. Only they weren't movie scripts. Months before I even set foot in front of a camera, Anger, Schenck, and Zukor had me doing more interviews than Woodrow Wilson. But they weren't really interviews, either. They were performances. For
Photoplay,
for
Movie World,
for—who cares? Listen:
"My pictures are turned out with clean hands and a clear conscience, which, like virtue, is its own reward. Nothing would grieve me more than to have mothers say, 'Let's not go to the movies today, Arbuckle is playing and he isn't fit for the children to see
. . . '"
No need going into how
that
came back to bite me on the bowser. I never liked slinging this kind of guff in the first place. But that was Paramount. They had me saying a lot of things, things I didn't know I'd said until I picked up a movie mag. I may have thought I'd signed on to make silent pictures, but the brass had a whole wing devoted to making an ass out of me. "
'Let me handle the Huns,' boasts jokester Arbuckle. Til find the Kaiser and sit on his family!'
"
Anger was always there to make sure I mouthed my lines for the press. If I didn't like what I was mouthing—like I never liked fat jokes—he'd smile, snip the tip of a cigar, and say what a shame it would be if the public found another fat man to love.
Talk about your command performance!
"Whatever success I've had, I credit to my mother's love and my father's guidance."
That's from "Fatty Talks to Young People," a phony article Paramount planted in the papers. Even stranger than stumbling on these bromides in print was having to deliver them, in person, at whatever women's club or boys' home or studio-staged affair they made me attend. Half the time I was smashed to my dewlaps on heroin when urging an earnest crowd to "join me in thanking Mr. Zukor for making Paramount a studio for the whole family." Though I didn't mention that to any bug-eyed reporters.
Oh, wait—I'm
sorry .
. . Did I forget to tell you about the fairy dust? Boy, is my face red!
Bayer, the Heroin That's Good for You
What happened is, at the end of August, anticipating my Paramount millions, I snapped up Theda Bara's old house on West Adams. Theda didn't say why she was selling it, but my first night, I got a hint. No sooner had I unpacked my easy chair and collapsed in it than I felt a sharp pinch on my left knee. I yelped, then forgot about it. When you're born on a dirt floor in Kansas, you grow up thinking insects are
pets.
Not to mention, I may have had a sip or two of liqueur at lunch and been incapable of feeling the pain in real time. But Minta, who'd decided to stay though our marriage had a toe-tag on it, swears she saw a spider hop behind the couch. I told her spiders don't hop. "Except," Minta said, "when they bite something as big as you!"
Whether it hopped or took a cab home, the eight-legger must have hated me, because a few days later my knee blew up to the size of a medicine ball. The whole leg was so inflamed I screamed every time my pants touched the skin. My luck, though, it was Labor Day, when the whole town was off work and off duty. Minta wanted to drive me to the hospital, but the last thing I wanted was publicity. Even if you're there for a hangnail, the papers get a hold of it and pretty soon nobody can laugh at you anymore cause they think you're sick. Who'd laugh at a sick comedian? Of course, sick was five flights up from where I was headed. Sick would have been good news—but don't rush me.
Finally we tracked down a sawbones who looked no older than a paperboy. Dr. Cub Scout took one look at my limb, announced that I had a poison boil, and explained that if he didn't drain it that minute the toxins might seep into my bloodstream, leak into my heart, and leave me stricken.
I wasn't sure what "stricken" meant, but it sounded bleak. So bleak that, right there in the living room, I let the baby-faced M.D. take my pants off. I lay on the Persian rug with my leg up on the ottoman while he fished in his black bag. He swabbed the unsightly growth with alcohol and asked Minta to bring a washrag. This he rolled up and stuck in my mouth, telling me to bite down when it hurt.
"When what hurts?"
My words came out muffled around the rag. By way of reply, the doctor pulled a gleaming scalpel out of his bag and stabbed me in the leg.
I thought I knew what pain was, but I was wrong. When Junior started rooting around with the blade I bit through the gag and saw red and yellow stars. I screamed so loud the Dohenys, our snooty neighbors, sent a colored servant over to say they were calling the police. The Dohenys were old money and resented the influx of actor types creeping into their sanctum. "Boy, listen!" I yelped, delirious, spitting the rag out and spewing at the startled visitor. "Tell Mr. Dodo I have photos of Mrs. Dodo doing the funny can-can. That'll shut 'em up!"
Minta and the servant went wide-eyed. No surprise, considering I was ranting through a bloody mouth, with what looked like a rabid wolf bite on my knee.
"What photos?" Minta wanted to know.
"The ones of her and the pack mule," I cackled, winking at the colored fella, who didn't know if he was allowed to laugh, but when he started he couldn't stop until I sent Minta to the pantry for a glass of brandy and made sure she got it down him.
"Consorting with the help," Minta tut-tutted, in that way she had, where you didn't know if she was joking or not.
"It's that or scream," I said, and meant it. The pain made it hard to breathe. Then the pink-cheeked doctor, who'd remained mum through my little performance, stuck a drain in my leg and I started yowling all over again.
"Roscoe, please!" Minta shushed me. "The
Dohenys!"
Before he fled, I made sure their loyal servant—dressed in a red jacket some organ-grinder might have stuck his monkey in—received a second brandy to fortify himself. It was a long slog through our back garden into theirs. I'd done it myself once, having mistaken their front door for mine after a long night imbibing furniture polish with Chaplin. At least I
think
it was Chaplin. After the first hour I went blind for a while. They don't make hooch like that anymore!