Authors: Jerry Stahl
As rumor has it, Okie worked for free when Arbuckle lost his fortune due to legal bills. He stayed on, earning nothing, in what many of Arbuckle's friends considered an act of supreme employee devotion. The darker truth is that Okie—real name Tomokita Ito—knew he had nowhere to go. Who would hire a manservant whose last man was a fat rapist and sex murderer? It behooved the cagey valet to have a plan B—which he did. If you so choose, you're about to read it.
From the time of his employer's first surgical mishap—when pain drove Fatty the actor to become Fatty the addict—Okie controlled the drugs. He knew how much to dispense, and when to stop dispensing it. But at the end, when it was clear the man whose fate determined his own was never going to win back more than a sliver of his former status—or earning power—Okie took matters into his own hands. In a series of "no story, no medicine" sessions, the determined servant withheld narcotics to his employer until, facing the throes of withdrawal, the big man told his story. Bit by tragicomic bit.
Okie'd boosted one of those newfangled Dictaphones from the back of Adolph Zukor's Pierce-Arrow and learned how to use it. They scheduled sessions wherein Arbuckle would dredge up his life as best he could, and when he began sweating too badly to focus, Okie would give him his shot.
Roscoe's last wife, Addie McPhail, knew that her husband was overworked. Sustaining a career was hard enough, but the pressure of staging a comeback was
crushing.
Sometimes Roscoe's leg hurt so badly he could not get off the divan without an injection. Happily—for us—Addie never questioned his occasional disappearances to his "study" with Okie in tow. Roscoe always returned chatty and affectionate, if a little glassy-eyed.
The apocryphal version of
I, Fatty
is that Arbuckle finished spilling his proverbial beans—eyes on Okie's fingers around that loaded syringe as he poured his life out—on the very day, maybe at the very minute, he expired. (The way the book landed in my hands is a saga in itself and would require another tome.) Suffice it to say, the reality of how the manuscript came to exist at all can never be known for certain. As to the truth of the document you're about to read, the jury's out on that, too.
Not that a jury's version of reality has much to do with anything. One lesson Roscoe learned—the way one does after surviving three murder trials, worldwide vilification, jail, and pie fights—is that what people are willing to believe about a man, and what a man believes about himself, tend to be wildly divergent enterprises.
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle stood out as the O.J. of his day. The difference—aside from niggling matters of race, guilt, and innocence—is that, for his "crimes," not only was Roscoe hounded from the top of the Hollywood food chain to the bottom, but the furor over his alleged behavior left Hollywood itself nearly hounded out of existence, victim of a morally indignant, rabidly fascinated, tabloid-fed public.
Of course, that very public's appetite for the sordid details of Arbuckle's "crime" gave rise to an entire industry of celebrity-obsessed, and celeb-baiting, journalism that persists to this day. As do the church-based fundamentalist moralizers who blamed Fatty for all the family-threatening ills of a society they believed to be straying from right-living into moral decay. Bad enough the millionaire butterball was a degenerate perv—
he worked for jews!
And Jews, as every fundamentalist knows, want nothing better than to corrupt the heart of the heartland.
The tale of Arbuckle's rise, fall, and double-edged redemption is here filtered through the sometimes bilious, sometimes anguished, oddly lighthearted soul of the man himself. As narrator—and male lead—Roscoe stands out as funny as he is tormented. A simple Kafka in a fat-suit. He was massively candid, given the circumstances. Which were pretty extreme. But who knows?
As the somewhat portly Dr. Johnson liked to remind his admirers, "Seldom any splendid story is wholly true."
Daddy Was a Custer Man
D
ADDY REFERRED to my mother's reproductive organs as "her little flower."
In my earliest baby-boy memories, the man's either looming and glum—not drunk enough—or bug-eyed and stubbly after a three-day bender, so liquored up he tilts when he leans down to snatch me off the burlap rags my brothers and sisters piled on the floor of our Kansas shack and called our "sleepy blankets." I'd blink awake in the air, shaking cold, my face so close to Daddy's the rye fumes burned my eyeballs. He'd rattle me till my teeth clacked, then start ranting in that high, Hoosier whine he only got when he was blotto and wanted to hurt something.
"You broke her little flower, pig boy!"
—WHACK!—
"Sixteen pounds of baby? That's just wrong!"
—SLAP PUNCH SLAP—
If, against my better judgment, I'd speak up—
"Ouch, Daddy, please
. . .
I'm sorry!"
—it only made him more furious. He'd drop me outright—one blessing of fat, it's good padding—and strike a pose like John L. Sullivan, whom he liked to think he resembled.
"I'll show you sorry, jumbo! You broke Mama's little flower squeezing your sideshow keister out of her
. . .
If you'd never been born, she wouldn't have gotten sick!"
That was Daddy. Willie Arbuckle. Born in Indiana, died in Kansas, California, Mexico, and anywhere else he tried his luck. In the magazines, I always called him a "gentleman farmer." The real article was a professional boozehound, gifted at going belly up in five languages. He married a church-going lovely, beat her senseless, then embarked on a life of leaving for glory and crawling home broke.
Daddy liked to say that his fondest wish was to have "gone with Custer." The general had perished four years before Dad moved to Smith Center—which, in 1880, was the geographical center of the continental United States.
"The boys in the Seventh U.S. Cavalry found glory at the hands of savages
—
and all I've ever done is pass out in Kansas"
Just a Big Little Boy
I was born three days ahead of schedule—always eager to get to the next date—so Mama had to make do without a midwife. When Daddy got word, he barreled in from the fields, took in my girth and my mortally exhausted mother, and let out a yowl. According to my sister Norah, who was bringing in boiled sheets, Daddy threw Mama's Bible against the wall and cursed.
"Goddamm it, Dee, that can't be mine. It's got the haunches of a hog!"
He hated me on sight. Which does something to a boy. Knowing I caused so much distress for my mother and father by just
being me
made me want to eat. The more I ate, the more Daddy went Hun on me for how fat and stupid I was. I topped 100 at 5. When my mother died, Daddy told me I killed her. The old man got whirly drunk, belt-whipped me, and locked me in a steamer trunk for a week. I was 12. He kept screaming that after I was born, my mother "stopped being a wife." I had ruined her womanhood.
Ladies and their little flowers pretty much scared me from then on. Because you could break them without knowing it. Or somebody could say you did.
"Jesus didn't need a penis!"
Mama liked to remind me. For as long as I can remember, she would quote the Bible to show me that sex was wrong. As I grew older, it seemed worse than wrong. It seemed impossible. After I married and suffered a droopy honeymoon, a doctor in Los Angeles said that my girth had left me with a weakened nuptial muscle. "Heft problems. Nothing to be ashamed of," he explained. "Eat more blood-meats."
Easier to just say I'd been drinking. Easier to just drink. . . . I knew how to be affectionate, and relished a cuddle. But it didn't come up that often.
A Curious Parallel
A funny thing—well not funny, but
funny:
when that DA accused me of forcing myself on poor, demented Virginia Rappe in San Francisco, I felt the same way I did when Dad used to stagger in drunk and beat the molasses out of me. I knew I was innocent, but I knew it didn't matter. Truth was whatever the person hitting you with a belt buckle needed to believe. Underneath the shock and heartbreak at how fast everybody chose to assume the worst—from Bigger Than Chaplin to Senor Dog-meat in less time than the Red Line took from Hollywood to Glendale—there was this feeling, too:
Dad was right.
I could almost see his sneering face floating just over mine,
"You broke that poor girl like you broke your mama."
Even if I never touched Virginia Rappe, or any other female, people had their reasons for believing. For wanting to believe I'd done something worth hating me for. I hated the name Fatty, and I made a career out of being that name. (Buster Keaton said that to get people to love me, I became what I loathed the most. Buster was the one pal who stood by me through it all.)
So, before we really get going here, I just have to say this: Something strange happens when you lose everything. Something strange happened to me. All those years of being lucky, being successful—first comic actor to direct his own movies, first to make a million a year—I never felt comfortable. I had to pay a bootlegger to feel even half-good, and after that, a croaker, for narcotics.
Once all my money—and all my luck—was used up, I could relax. I wanted to die, but at least the feeling was
familiar.
Does this make sense? Before the court lynched me, I was as big a success as Daddy was a failure, and I needed the hooch more than he did. Sometimes more. After the St. Francis fiasco, I didn't need the drink. I mean, I did, but not the same way. Thanks to Virginia Rappe, I had an excuse to feel the way I had always felt, but could never explain when things were aces.
But there I go, rushing the gag. . . .
Hell on the Prairie and Santa Ana
We—Dad, when he was sober and at home, my ailing mother, and a ragtag quartet of siblings—occupied a drafty one-room cabin with a sod roof. If Daddy hit me too hard, I'd bang off a wall and chunks of sod would fall off, which made him madder.
"If you hadn't been born, Mama wouldn't've got sick, and your brothers and sisters wouldn't be huddled like pack wolves on the floor of a one-room shack in Kansas
. . . ."
Like I say, that's all I heard as a young pudge. Daddy believed that every failure he suffered was on account of me. It was my fault he'd ended up some washed-up souse of a farmer and prospector. When he was really plastered, he'd even tell me that I wasn't his, and beat me harder, while Mom just shut her eyes and recited Bible quotes. If he was tired of punching, he'd drag me outside and make me haul wood off the ground until I had enough for a fire. He'd beat me in the head with branches, then start a fire and threaten to toss me in.
"Time for sucklin' pig!"
he'd chuckle. It was the only joke he ever made. And he made it over and over.
When I was 5, Dad up and moved the family to Santa Ana, this broke-down cowboy town in California. (Though from what I could tell, every town in California was broke-down, and drowning in cowboys.) "Santa Ana is heaven for kids," Mom said. "Lots of open fields and space."
We were going to have a new life. Which we did. Except the new life had less money in it than the old one. Daddy couldn't find work, so he drank more while all us kids got jobs. Thanks to my bulk, I looked older than 5, so I was able to get a job doing cleaning up and light delivery for a grocery. Anything was better than being in our house, which was dark and damp, even with the sun scorching the ground outside. Then Mom enrolled me in school and things got bad.
School nearly destroyed me. I'd never been around anybody but my own family, so I couldn't talk to other kids. They'd call me Fatty and I'd get the clam-ups. So in second grade I just kind of dropped out. But I had to go
somewhere,
so every morning I'd ditch my brothers and sisters and duck into whatever theater left their stage door open. Right from the first, the theater was an escape from life. It was life, but better.
Santa Ana was what they called a low-end stop on the vaudeville circuit. There were lots of stock companies floating around. Back then, actors were pretty much nomads. Normal people saw them as whores and hoboes who couldn't get honest work. All these troupes would float through—like the first one I weaseled my way into, the Frank Bacon Stock Company.
I was always sneaking into theaters. I loved sniffing around backstage, eyeballing the costumes, running my fingers through the makeup dust on the battered trunks. What I loved most was eavesdropping on the performers. Off the boards they seemed even more exotic than on. Pirates and Gypsies rolling cigarettes and reading the funny papers.
If the manager didn't throw me out, I'd hide in the wings and watch the show. All that clapping! The first time you hear clapping, it's like firecrackers. A room full of firecrackers, all going off for some little shnip with a big Adam's apple doing Hymie dialect. Or for a couple of hoofers. Or a Chinee plate-spinner. Nobody could spin a plate like the Chinee.
When their run was over, I'd stay to watch the troupes pack up and march off to their next glamorous marquee performance. Everybody stared at them when they sauntered up Main Street to the train station. Shopkeepers came out and sneered. If a little kid threw a rock at an actor, his Dad would chuck him under the chin. If he hit one, he probably got a penny.
But the actors didn't seem to mind. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, being stared at, if you weren't the only one. Daddy used to tell me I should work in a sideshow, 'cause then I'd be surrounded by people just like me. Geeks and deform-os. Gosh knows I knew a little something about being gawk-fodder.
Daddy-Fetchin'
Mostly, what I tried to do with my young life was not go home. My older brother and sister had moved out, and Mom was pretty much sick all the time. "Bedridden" is what my sister Norah called it. "Mama's bedridden, so don't be a strain." All I wanted was to help her. But I hated having to Daddy-fetch.