Authors: Jerry Stahl
To shut me up—Minta claims I was howling—the medicine man pulled out a hypo and asked for my arm. With the pain I was in, I'd have given him both arms and an ankle. Doctor wrapped my bicep with a rubber tube, squeezed tight enough to find a vein floating in the fat, then stuck in the needle. Next thing I know I'm Floaty M'loaty. Falling down never felt so good. I wanted to thank the doctor, but my tongue seemed to have moved, with no forwarding address.
"That should settle you," the young sawbones smiled, almost like he knew a secret. Boy, did he, the peach-fuzzed little fraud! Then he snapped his bag shut and shook my hand like a grownup. "That leg is too dangerous to play with. I'm putting you on a daily dose of heroin. Stay off your feet a few weeks and you should heal up just fine."
I was more concerned about the staying-off-my-feet part than I was about taking the heroin. Though, now that I'd had a bang, I wasn't too concerned about anything, except maybe how soft the armchair felt when I ran my fingers over it. Funny, I never noticed before . . . Back then Bayer advertised heroin to mothers who wanted to calm their toddlers' cough. It was that benevolent. Oddly enough, it was their newest product, aspirin, that had solid citizens of the day concerned.
Heaven in a Tube
My new friend the doctor left enough medicine for a month. For the first two weeks while Minta went off to work—she was still at Keystone—I stayed at home, in that easy chair, happily staring off. Sometimes I'd move my toes. By the end of the third week, I was still staring off, but the pain had gotten worse. And the swelling doubled. When the doctor came for a follow-up he looked grim, said he'd heard of cases where this happened, and doubled my daily dose. Yum!
I'd had a screening room put in at the house, so every day I'd arrange my audience-of-one narcotic film festival. The studios were wild about drug movies—especially if there was a pretty girl who turned into a prostitute somewhere in the story. So I'd take my feel-no-pain shot, sit back, and nod in and out of
White Slave Traffic, The Devil's Needle, The Girl Who Didn't Care,
or this really strange one,
Half-blood,
directed by some pervert Kraut named Fritz Lang, about a party gal who lures a regular Joe to Hades with an opium pipe.
By early November, it was obvious that not only wasn't I healing, but the infection had spread. Now my entire thigh had swollen like a drowned man's. I had to measure every breath. The slightest movement was excruciating, like someone plunging a fork in my flesh and twirling the nerve ends like spaghetti. When the doctor made his next house call, he looked very grave. After administering a healthy injection (enough to set me off in a drooly smile, even though I knew, underneath, the pain was screaming) he announced, from very far away—possibly Ohio—that "the leg will have to go."
"Go where?" I asked, feeling positively blithe after the injection. "On vacation?"
Minta knew what he meant, and she was aghast. Paramount had paid for a whole comedian. They were funny that way. If they shelled out a million, they wanted the whole star. Panicked, Minta called everyone she knew—up till now, my condition'd been top secret—asking them if they could recommend a doctor. It was Max Hart, of all people, who provided one. The new medico was a serious old gent who informed us that, first of all, the so-called doctor who'd been treating me was actually an intern, and had no business not telling us. And second, the infection in my leg could be treated in the hospital, but once that was done, there was the other problem.
"What other problem?" Minta and I both wondered aloud.
"Heroin addiction," said the doctor, looking so doctorly he could have been acting. "It usually affects housewives." Here he paused, raised his eyes to the ceiling, as if appealing for divine guidance, and lowered them to me and Minta again. "I know what kind of pain you've gone through, son. But that's nothing compared to what you're going to go through coming off this stuff."
I Get a Kick out of Life!
Minta wasn't surprised that I was scared. Being the reasonable type, she assumed that what I was scared of was the pain of withdrawal. Which was true, as far as it went. How could I tell her I was even more scared of living without heroin?
From that first shot, when the turned-out-to-be-an-intern pushed in the needle, it was like I was home. Returned, in swaddling, to a blessed baby-state I never knew existed. The pain relieved was not the pain the drug was prescribed for. Or not just. It killed everything—the agony in my leg and the anxious, restless Daddy's-Right-I'm-A-Freak-And-EverythingGood-Is-For-Other-People heebie-jeebies. It's as if the fingers wrapped around my throat since childhood began to loosen. I'd gotten so used to them, I didn't know I was being choked until they were gone. Even when I closed my eyes and relived Daddy's drunken punches, heroin made them fluffy pillows.
I had two choices, the new doctor told me: six months of slow, careful withdrawal—uncomfortable, but not
that
—or three weeks, over and out, of utter hell. I wanted to go for careful. (I never said I was brave.) But my career required over and out. The hell route. Paramount had set up a nationwide tour to promote its hearty new star. And when I asked Anger for more time to get well, he turned me down flat. "Zukor," he said, "doesn't give more time."
The doc arranged for a private hospital, so nobody would know I was in there, plus a padded cell, so I couldn't bang my head off the wall trying to knock myself out. Talk about a dream vacation!
At the last minute, naturally, I chickened out. But not all the way. If I was going to bite my feet and claw the walls in a padded cell, I'd rather it was
my
padded cell. So we set up a room in West Adams. The place was so big, even the closets had closets.
My home kick-bin had all the amenities: rubber sheets and foam rubber walls. I don't know what the workmen thought when they installed the stuff. I was too busy shaking and sweating to inquire. For two weeks Minta listened to me scream and beg and upchuck like a gut-shot buffalo. The people we trusted, like my friends Barney Oldfield and Charlie C, came over to empty my barf buckets. Friends like that you can't buy more than once.
I wasn't even allowed alcohol, so on top of the pain-shakes and puking I got DTs. God knows what my poor wife thought when she heard me thundering around in there, trying to dodge the tiny red-eyed rhinos. I would have killed for a good old-fashioned pink elephant, but they never showed up. She said I cried so much she had to put cotton in her ears or go crazy herself. But all I remember is those rhinos. The scut they left all over the room. And the rat-sized fleas that hopped out of them, then burrowed under my skin, until I had to rip the skin off my flesh to dig them out.
By the day the doctor came and let me out, I'd lost nearly 100 pounds. From 285 to 190. My pants fit about as well as the ones I lent Chaplin way back whenski, as Mabel used to say, doing her Polish-maid routine. Anger stopped by, but he was all business. All he said when he saw me was, "The studio better send some tailors."
Minta, brazen as ever, told Anger I couldn't go on the tour—now only weeks away—and you'd have thought she said I planned to rape his grandmother. His rage was instant, but he kept a lid on it.
"Roscoe's going on that tour," Anger said. Then he looked my way, adding icily, "He can't disappoint his public."
When the film business started, the Myrons who ran the companies tried to keep actors and actresses no-names—so other studios couldn't steal 'em. Now the big boys played it just the opposite. They did everything to make us famous. When you signed on the dotted line, you didn't just pledge your talent, you forked over your life. The real acting job was trying to make the public think you were what the studio said you were. Which, in my case, meant being the perpetual happy-go-lucky fatso funster. Not a half-dead junkie, a fraction of his normal size, who shuffled like a piped-up Chinaman and burst into tears 'cause his hair hurt. The slightest breeze raked my skin like a cheese grater. And I hadn't had a bowel movement since Lincoln died. I felt like one of those sideshow boas with a gopher in it. At the other end, whatever I tried to eat had a round-trip ticket. But I'm lying about shuffling like a Chinaman. I could barely crawl.
Needless to say, the studio put out a story I'd injured my knee doing a tricky stunt.
Party Problems
Zukor insisted on an elaborate bash, a "kickoff dinner" at the Hotel Alexandria, to publicize the nationwide tour. I spent the weeks beforehand practicing walking in my living room. By the morning of the event, I could make it from the Victrola to the couch without a pair of canes. While Anger, pragmatic right down to the soul he didn't possess, had arranged to have three suits of clothes made for the journey: one for the svelte new me, one a bit bigger, and one, optimistically, for my old nearly 300-pound self. My Svengali made it clear I needed to get back up to Fatty status pronto. In case I didn't, however, he laid in a fat suit of foam-rubber padding, to slip over my skin and bones so the public would never know I was secretly wizened. Already clammy, as a by-product of my narcotic problems, beneath that foam suit my sweat turned to horse lather. It was like wearing a portable steam room. Even Minta, most tolerant of women, remarked on my pungent new stench.
The night of the big do, Paramount prez Zukor sat on the dais with Jesse Lasky and Marcus Loew, alongside Doug Fairbanks, my pal Barney Oldfield (who walked around with a steering wheel in his hand), the lovely Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin. For the occasion, Thomas Woolwine, L.A. district attorney, served as master of ceremonies. Woolwine showing up gave the soiree a kind of legitimacy most movie events couldn't claim. Zukor, whose past was said to be slightly less than legit, was always big on legitimacy. In fact, Woolwine was in Zukor's pocket. When William Desmond Taylor was killed, and Mabel Normand was involved up to her coke-addled eyeballs, it was an open secret big Adolph had his boy Wooly quash the whole thing. When it was my turn in the barrel, I had no such gestures made on my behalf. But why barrel into that maw before we have to?
Anger made me promise I'd walk up to the dais.
On my own.
The sight of me crawling might have scared exhibitors. So we waited in a hall backstage for my entrance cue. Drumroll, please, and a big bleat from the band. Off I go, and—uh-oh!—here comes the floor rushing up to my face.
S-LAM!
Before I even made it out of the wings, I fell flat on my kisser.
Thinking fast, Minta and Lou wrapped their arms around me from either side. They propped me up that way, linked like ice skaters, till I made it to the podium.
Not to go misty-eyed, folks, but I gotta say, the standing O I got from the crowd helped keep my pins steady. I was able to stand upright and say the few words I'd prepared with Anger. Cornpone stuff. "Well, friends, as some of you know, I almost didn't make it up here tonight. No, not cause of the knee injury—I couldn't fit through the ballroom door . . . Who'd they design this dump for, anyway—some little tramp?"
That got a hoot or two, even though I kept waiting for a hunk of foam rubber to pop out of my collar and give me away. My fat suit must have soaked up 40 pounds of perspiration. And it chafed where it dug into my privates. It took a little maneuvering on the part of Lou and Minta to make it look like I was walking under my own steam to my seat on the dais, but we pulled it off. By the time the waiters—all smiling Negroes, who'd seen me flop in the wings—delivered our filet mignons, I was so happy I was able to eat three bites of meat without throwing up. It was the first solid food I'd had since my detoxification in the family rubber room.
I have a dim memory of thinking, at the writhing height of withdrawal, that this whole thing could be a funny two-reeler. Really! I'm a kick-crazy patient. Mack Sennett's the male attendant. Mabel's the cutie-pie nurse he flirts with—forgetting that he's left me tied to the bed with my head over the bucket! I scream, but Mack just pooh-poohs my pleas. Until Nurse Mabel, concerned, pushes past him and finds me flopping like a hooked cod.
"It's the H,"
Mack says. "Poor baby," coos Nurse Mabel, kneeling to stroke my sweaty brow while Mack looks on, aggrieved. In a fit of jealous pique, he straps me to the bed and covers me with a sheet so just my big toe's sticking out. A fly lands on my toe. Hijinks ensue. Later, when Minta told me how much I screamed my first week in the room, I told her, "Darling, I just wanted a pencil. I had an idea."
After my debut, so to speak, it was off on the grand tour. For the trip, we were packed into a private railway car. Zukor, pulling strings as usual, got it on loan from Evalyn Walsh McLean, a Washington, D.C. society lady and newspaper publisher. She was also owner of the Hope Diamond. According to Anger, who knew this kind of stuff, she'd loaned it to President Roosevelt's daughter for her honeymoon trip.
I understand that some couples find long train rides romantic. Mabel said train wheels had "sex rhythm." But that kind of thing was not exactly a big part of my marriage to Minta. Every city we went to the routine was the same. I would hop off the sleeper, show up and make some snappy patter to a Women's Club or a cadre of local theater owners. Then I'd repeat the performance until there was no place left to sing the praises of Paramount's family fare, and we'd hop back on the train for the next whistle stop.
Travel Contracts as It Broadens,
and Vicey-Versey
Twenty miles out of Kansas, the pain in my legs grew so bad I sat down on the floor of the sleeper and cried. Minta heard me, and swore she was going to make Anger stop the tour, whatever it took. I tried to grab her ankles, but she was too fast for me. Five minutes later, Anger stormed into the room, railing. "These people pay your salary, and you're going to earn it!" Five minutes after that bit of kindness, a doctor showed up. Before you could say "Drop your pants and lick your kneecaps," I had a needle in my buttocks. Five seconds later, my pain was gone. The world took on a fuzzy glow. Anger led me out on the platform, where I waved gaily to the crowds, feeling love in my heart for every one of them. By then my eyes were so crossed the people looked more like seaplants. A happy gaggle of seaplants, gently waving underwater.