Authors: Jerry Stahl
My big hits with Hanneford were
No Loafing
and
The Bonehead,
if that tells you anything. Circus people were always different than vaudeville people. Nights when we worked late, Poodles would lie right down on the ground and go to sleep. He was happy in sawdust. We'd shake him awake when the cameras were about to roll. All he'd need was a bang of rye and a cigarette and he was ready for his first take.
I wrote and directed the Poodles sorties. Not that you'd know it. I couldn't slap my own name on the marquee, so I opted for the moniker Will B. Good. Until Buster, in a moment of typically inspired Busterdom, decided over martinis at Musso and Frank's that it wasn't legit enough. He stared at me for a moment and then announced. "You're more of a 'William Goodrich' type. Now
that
son of a bitch is legit!"
So that's how I became William Goodrich. Though, thanks to Hays's continued harassment, it wouldn't have mattered if I'd called myself Puddin' the Wonder Chimp. The Front Office decided it was best to keep my name off the credits altogether. And after six weeks of yeomanlike effort, there was no getting around it: Roscoe Arbuckle was one more out-of-work fat actor.
"When in doubt, exit left." That's what old Poodles said every night before he fell off his bar stool. I took his advice to heart and signed on for eight weeks at the Marigold Gardens, a nightclub outside Chicago. Two grand a week beat anonymous directing gigs. And it was definitely a left turn.
I won't lie. I was nursing a case of wet-seat the first night I stepped onstage at the Marigold.
"Ladies and gentleman, I'dhave been here sooner, but I had trouble checking out of my hotel in San Francisco." BEAT. "They thought I was stealing towels!"
The standing O I got every night made me happy. But what really thrilled me was the sound of ice clinking in my glass offstage at the start of my last number, a joke version of "California, Here I Come": "California, here I come. Even though you want me hung . . ."
"Oh wait,"
I'd fake ad-lib,
"where
s
my head? They wanna hang me here, too, don't they? Did you read that editorial in the
Trib?"
Hard as it was to laugh at my trials, it was the only way to let the jakes in the audience know they could laugh, too. Since a quarter of the crowd were gawkers, it helped to cut right to the chase. When I got back to Los Angeles, I got a cameo in
Hollywood,
a movie biz satire Jimmy Cruze was directing for Paramount. It was one of those a-star-in-every-part vehicles the studio nabobs concoct to make sure their big names still know how to come when the front office whistles. I played a down-on-his-luck actor cooling his heels in a casting office. If I had had any pride left, it would have probably stung. But 500 bucks is 500 bucks. Then I went back to anonymity and directing again.
Did I relish punching a clock as a nameless director? The answer is yes and no. For a while I humped it as journeyman comedy hand for Educational, Metro, and Universal, directing whatever claptrap they threw at me. The good news was, at Educational I crossed paths with Doris Deane, the pretty thing I met on the ferry back from San Fran, right before I changed my profession from actor to pariah. Doris Deane, whose ex-boyfriend was the reason I was walking around in my own clothes.
Doris acted in a number of goofball efforts, including the memorable
Stupid but Brave
and
Lovemania.
I guess you could say we fell in love. Or at least
I
fell in love, and she didn't seem to mind the attentions of a gin-soaked marshmallow. The hardest letter I ever had to write was the one to Minta, telling her I'd met someone, asking for a divorce. I had to get so polluted I could barely hold the pen.
The split was official on January 27, 1925. Despite everything, tiny Minta'd been my biggest champion since the acquittal. She hounded Hays with letters nearly every day, even when I was abroad. But she was kind—and classy—enough to wish me the best and start marriage-ending proceedings immediately. The last thing either of us wanted was another scandal, so she arranged to file the divorce papers in Providence, Rhode Island. During Christmas season. An unlikely time and place for celebrity snoops.
Then Keaton, God bless his porkpie hat, came through again. He snagged me a chance at my first credited directing job post-Virginia. I'd be filming him in
Sherlock Jr.
I left Educational to write and lay out the gags with him. I was excited, and so was he. It was great to be working together again. And, feet in the fire, I still couldn't tell you why it went south.
I guess, about one-third in, Buster and I both realized I was coming up with stuff
I
wanted to do—not what worked for him. And it was too painful to keep talking around the fact that I was not allowed to perform on camera. It's one thing to not act, another not to act when you're on the set, the camera's running, and you have a headful of great gags that no one can sell but you.
Little by little, I started getting touchy about everything. I heard grips whispering behind my back. I felt their judgment. The lighting man, I knew, was worried because his wife's folks, Four Square Church people, would throw the couple out of their house if word got out her husband worked with the blubber-thighed Antichrist Roscoe Arbuckle.
Then, of course, there was the drinking. Buster never came out and said it wasn't a good idea for a director to gulp out of the bottle between takes, but it was obviously a problem. Things ended before my best friend had to fire me outright. I knew it was over and left one morning in the middle of a gag involving Keaton's hat and a lovesick dove. The dove gag didn't make it into the movie, and neither did the directing credit.
After the
Sherlock
debacle I did a few more comedies back at Educational. On
The Iron Mule,
the last one I directed with Doris Deane, I asked her if she'd consider marrying me. I always say she looked like a bunny who saw a bear when I popped the question. Or semi-popped it.
I know I've mentioned this already, but indulge me. Here's the official version. I didn't want to be so bold as to assume Miss Deane would say yes. Minta had bandied Sigmund Freud around often enough for me to know I had some ego problems. (I was oral, too. But that's part of your job when you're a professional fat man.)
I suggested Doris take her time in deciding. In the meantime, I ran into Alexander Pantages, my champion from way back when, drying his hands in the men's room of Musso's. He asked me what I was doing and I went fag on him, "Not looking for phone numbers,
thailor."
Pantages laughed his way into a coughing fit and accidentally whacked Jackie Coogan, who was behind us, trying to see between our shoulders to wet-comb his hair in the mirror. After we dusted Coogan off, Pantages turned to me, with tears in his eyes, and said, "I'm gonna do something crazy and offer you a cross-country tour."
I didn't have to check my date book to say yes.
The show, a variety bill, was slated to open in Long Beach, at some dump catty-corner to the Bide-A-Wee, where Minta and I'd gotten married onstage a few centuries earlier. But your Long Beachers, it turns out, are not the nostalgic type. There was a petition in City Council to keep me out. So instead of a dump in Long Beach, I opened at the Cotton Club, a hop-skip-and-a-lawsuit from Goldwyn Studios in Culver City. The Cotton got raided occasionally, but Pantages assured me he'd paid off the cops.
All the big movie people in town turned out for the revue. They hadn't exactly been flocking to see me before now, but my guess is everybody was so relieved I was leaving movies, they came to show their support. On account of me, after all, any actor who sneezed on the Sabbath was bound to show up in a tabloid. An entire industry devoted to trailing the stars around, trying to catch 'em in some unsavory gaffes, had sprung up from my own phantom crime at the St. Francis. Gloria Swanson actually laid me out at a restaurant,
"Charlie Chaplin used to do underage girls by the bucketful. Now he's so scared
Photoplay
will find out he won't even drive by a grade school. And I nearly had to hide in a nunnery after my divorce. Thanks to you, Roscoe Pee-in-theSoup Arbuckle, nobody in this town can have fun anymore . .
."
What could I say but "Gee, sorry. I was framed. It could happen to anybody . . ."
The crowds were with me in every city, even if the local headlines steamed over the return of Beelzebub in Santa Claus's body. That's when the obvious sank in:
The people who buy the tickets aren't the ones who go to church.
In fact, the greater the commotion over my show, the greater the devotion of those who braved public opinion to take it in. Big lesson.
At Saxes's Strand Theater in Milwaukee, it was all I could do to get through the seething frenzy of women's clubs, Christian Youth Groups, and theater owners' association members, all in full, self-righteous rut under the marquee out front. The protesters' idea was to force any folks who wanted to attend my performance to walk a gauntlet from sidewalk to theater doors. But my theory held—and the people who walked in did not seem to mind the scoffs of the Fundamentalists. The fracas became part of the show.
Inside the theater, the foot stomping and whistling commenced the moment I stumbled onstage. The reception was more deafening than any I'd earned with an actual gag. What were they cheering for, really, but the happy fact that I hadn't been given the gas? It was bittersweet. Night after night, I got so choked up all I could do was pretend to slip and fall on my ass.
Opening night, as a joke, the management paid a 16-year-old to stand up in the first row and throw a pie at me. Much to everyone's surprise—but mostly mine—I caught the thing, Pancho Villa style, and hurled it back. The kid ducked, and the custard splatted square in the mascara of an elegant, middle-aged woman. Her husband was one of those industrialist types with iron pilings for hair. When he jumped out of his seat, I had visions of strike-breaking goons pinning my arms in the dressing room while hubby worked me over with a lead pipe.
I'd gotten so used to the worst that could happen actually happening, I was almost nervous when it didn't. In fact, after I hit her with the pie, the elegant lady froze for a moment, then ran a finger over the blob of whipped cream on her cheek, licked it off, and burst into the grandest horse laugh I ever heard. One of those laughs that make other people laugh. Till pretty soon the entire place was teary-eyed from laughing. It's the kind of moment you want to scoop up and lock in a vault, to pull out and savor when life returns to its usual ho-hum catastrophe.
And it was that moment I clung to a week later, in Dallas, when Ernie Young, the twitchy yokel who'd booked me for the Texas State Fair, burst into my room and blubbered that he had to bounce me for an Italo Muscle-man Act, The Amazing Corelli, before I ever hit the stage. "Technically, that means I can't cover your hotel bill, Roscoe, since you didn't actually perform. It's in the contract. You know how it is."
I knew how it was. The Dallas City Fathers, who ran the theaters, "just didn't want my kind." And they wouldn't want Twitchy Ernie Young's kind if he didn't get rid of me, either.
When the tour died, I stopped in to Atlantic City, where Minta was appearing, billed as "Mrs. Roscoe Arbuckle," at the Club Palais Royal. The Palais manager, a conniver named M. A. Williams, offered me six grand a week just to stay in his cafe—and not to wander onto the boardwalk where folks could see me for free. M. A. thought word of Mr. Arbuckle on the premises with Mrs. Arbuckle would reel them in the way grubs snag haddock. If grubs snag haddock. I was never one for fishing. A drunken fat man on a rowboat is a dangerous situation.
I admit it wasn't the brightest maneuver on my part to suggest that Minta and I book a suite together. I don't know why, I had a yen to go back and try it with her, maybe even start up an act together. Minta helped me come to my senses. With a slap.
Doris—did I mention this?—had been a friend of my wife's. I mean, of Minta's. And Minta, ever the definition of class on perfect pins, actually told me she was glad that if she had to lose me, it was to a wonderful girl like Doris. I know I said she filed for divorce in Providence. But she ended up making it legal in Paris. Parisians didn't care about niceties like nuptial fidelity. A faithful marriage—
mais non!
Nothing was more chic, in the '20s, than a Parisian divorce. Thank the God of the Jews, I somehow managed to make enough to keep my first wife in diamonds and dresses while I went about the business of trying to secure my second one.
Doris had considered my proposal—I haven't told this story more than five times, have I—and to my surprise decided that I was the man for her. What I'd realized, during my Atlantic City stint with Minta, was that I needed someone whose head was not full to bursting with images of me as a sniveling junkie, a sweaty accused criminal, a fall-down, boorish drunk. Somebody who couldn't drag my history out and whack me with it, the way Minta did. Not that I blamed her. I had not exactly made her life a celebrity paradise.
At first, Doris's parents seemed less than thrilled at the big surprise their daughter dragged home to San Moreno to ask for her hand. I've always liked old-fashioned girls. And really, what bride's daddy would not want a fat actor, accused killer and sex criminal, for a son-in-law? Whole chunks of the country still wanted to see me strung from a lamppost and deballed. What a catch!
Not Losing a Daughter,
Gaining a Felon
Even if
they
had reservations, I liked the Deanes straightaway. Doris's dad, a natty little wisp of a man, asked me if I always drank like sobriety was a hanging offense. I told him a bit of whiskey dulled the pain in my leg. Then Daddy Deane pulled out a hip flask, said he reckoned he'd been havin' some leg pains of his own, and joined me on the back porch.
Joe Schenck, in a show of paternal concern that still gets me misty, made the wedding arrangements. Through the entire ceremony, he never failed to provide a Dad-like shoulder to lean on. The novelty of that alone made the experience special. Buster was best man. A commitment for which he paid in blood to his mother-in-law, Peg Talmadge, who found it disgraceful that her daughter's husband should even associate with a pervert villain like me, let alone host my wedding in his home.