Authors: Jerry Stahl
The cast knew how much cash had gone to keeping me out of scrapes. They also knew how much it cut into the net profits. My assaholic behavior was taking money out of everybody's pockets.
By the time we hit the Philippines, the strain and firewater caught up to me. My voice went. I got a fever of 104. For three weeks I soaked the sheets in Manila, stinking up a hotel room and shutting down the show—leaving the rest of the company unpaid and justifiably hateful.
Living with In-Laws
Is Its Own Kind of Death
All I wanted to do was crawl back to Los Angeles. Once we actually returned, though, it was back to Minta's parents' house, back to scraping around for work. It didn't take too many botched auditions before I had to admit I was never going to be a high-paid serious stage actor. With my body, I was not likely to be a serious anything. Who was I kidding? They were paying to see a dancing elephant, not a dramatic one.
Minta grabbed some chorus work through a man her Dad met in his capacity as streetcar conductor. This gave me more time to hunker in the Durfees' easy chair and stew. Some days my big activity was lifting my ankles when Minta's Mom vacuumed around me.
For hours, I sat in that chair, sneaking sips from a flask and pawing my tattered scrapbook to see what a big-time headliner I was in vaudeville. But sooner or later I'd have to raise my eyes and admit what I was in life: a dead broke, bone-tired 22-year-old who'd been hustling nonstop for 12 years, a young man who'd known top billing and now lived off the charity of his wife's parents.
That night, waiting at the streetcar stop to meet Minta and walk her home after her night on the chorus line, I ran into a hoofer named Davey Woods. Woodsy and I had worked a tour or two together and crossed paths on the circuit for years. The last time I'd seen him he was fanny-out-of-his-pants broke in Idaho, stranded after a promoter stiffed him. Now here he was, back in Los Angeles, in a spanking new suit and boater. When I told Woods how well he looked, he smiled sheepishly and looked down at his shiny new shoes. "Movies, Roscoe."
"Movies!" I launched into my usual diatribe:
"Only people so poor they couldn't afford a vaudeville ticket go to the nickelodeon. .
. .
Any actor who would demean himself by blah blah blabbity blah . .
."
Then I heard myself and laughed. What was more demeaning than living off your wife's parents? Even if I could go star in a vaudeville show, right now I couldn't afford a ticket to one. Years after this, Buster Keaton told me how, in 1914, William Randolph Hearst offered his father big money to put the Three Keatons, the family vaudeville act, in a feature movie version of the comic strip
Bringing Up Father.
Pops Keaton turned Hearst down flat. "The dough's great, but the work's beneath us." He'd sure change his tune down the road, but then who wouldn't?
Like Errol the Aussie used to say, sometimes the truth sneaks up on you and whispers. Sometimes it smacks you in the face with a catfish. This was definitely a catfish moment. For once, instead of boring myself and everybody else with my antimovie spiel, when Woodsy mentioned that the Selig-Polyscope Company was casting for some fluffball called
Alas! Poor Yorick!
I just thanked him for the info and shut up. When he told me the part was for an actress, I thanked him again and told him I didn't care. I couldn't afford a streetcar ride, let alone something as upscale as dignity.
The very next day, I showed up at Selig's studio dressed like a respectable woman. It hadn't been that long ago I was sashaying across the stage for the gold-dust thugs in Boise. And I hadn't lost my feminine touch. I got the part, and appeared on screen—not for the last time—dressed as a female with an exceptionally large torso and lovely hair.
Hands off, Cowboy!
To keep from scratching under my wig during filming—the brute light got the studio temperature up to 110—I focused on the details of this peculiar process. How the camera had to be cranked to keep it whirring. How an actor had to exaggerate every gesture—like doing pantomime for the nearsighted. How you learned to stick out your lower lip so you could aim your breath upward, cooling your face, staving off that dread moment when the pancake starts running down your face.
Filmmaking was an uncomfortable, impractical, and highly irritating endeavor. On the other hand, it paid well and you got to sleep in your own bed at night.
Comedy Has a Special Stench
T
HE FIRST thing you noticed about Mack Sennett was his breath. Mack crunched raw green onions, lettuce, and radishes for breakfast, washed down with straight whiskey. The rest of the day he skipped the rabbit food and stuck with the whiskey. The stink of those booze-and-onion fumes was legendary—a fact in which Mack, if this tells you anything, took great pride. His belches could singe your eyebrows, and he liked to aim them.
I did not particularly want to meet Mack Sennett, and only went because Fred Mace happened to sit down next to me on the streetcar—another Red Line moment—and told me I had to. I didn't know Fred from Adam. But he was as hefty as I was, and when he saw me he told me he'd been working as an actor with this Mack Sennett character and he was getting ready to pull up stakes. It might be the perfect opportunity for a fellow fat man.
Gumming a silver toothpick, Fred filled me in. "Mack used to work with D. W. Griffith. He's the only moviemaker who writes his own stories. Comedies only. No dialogue. How it works is, the director tells you where to stand, yells 'Action,' and then you either wing it or do whatever the hell else he tells you to do."
"Like what?"
"Fall off a roof. Drive over a cliff. Squirt yourself in the face with a firehose."
"Sounds crappy."
"It
is
crappy," Fred said wearily, staring out the window as we clattered past a cowfield. "But what it really is is five clams a day and lunch."
If I had had any work coming up, or even the prospect, I would not have bothered. But I didn't, so I did. Next day I rode the streetcar to Effie and Edendale, the end of the line. Which was exactly how I felt, trudging through the dusty weeds, clutching Mace's back-of-a-matchbook map to the unmarked gate of Keystone Studios.
Once you were inside, things weren't much better. To get to Mack's office, you had to pick your way through an obstacle course of muddy scenery, camera parts, bits of tattered-looking clothes, and the odd, unexplained mannequin with breasts and pubic hair painted on. Those mannequins gave me pause, but I pushed on.
The Keystone grounds, if you could call them that, looked like a theatrical trash heap—a symbol I did not want to dwell on. Mace had told me to just go upstairs and introduce myself. On the top step, I checked the collars of my suit and shirt, wiped the dust off my shoes, then straightened up and knocked on the door. Nobody answered. Then I heard what sounded like splashing, and the voice of someone clearly used to barking out orders.
"Get in here or get out!"
After a minute's jittery consideration, I chose the former option. Inside, Mack Sennett reclined in a full bathtub in the middle of a private office, flanked by a giant Turk in a turban and a tired-looking accountant type. The Turk had a towel over one arm and carried a whiskey bottle in a bucket. The accountant slumped on a folding chair tapping a notepad with his pencil. The bathtub was set on a raised wooden platform, like a fruit bowl on a dinner table. It faced a window so Mack could soak away and still have a bird's-eye view of whatever went on in his domain.
"Too neat to be funny!" Mack bellowed as soon as he saw me. Before I could protest, he raised his head and delivered a stream of tobacco juice into a spittoon 20 feet away. With a little shoe polish, his spittoon trick could have made a first-class carny act. It was impossible not to stare.
"Still here, fat boy?" Mack stood up in full manhood and raised his freckled arms while the Turk toweled him off. "What makes
you
think you're chuckle-bait?" By now I was so nervous, all I could do was throw my arms up in the air and do a backflip. I bounced out of that into a forward tumble—like I was going to join Mack in the bath—and landed square on my two flat feet.
Sennett just nodded, like fat guys were flying around his bathtub all day long. Then he kind of whistled through his teeth and jiggled his testicles. It didn't take long around Mack for the rankest behavior to seem ho-hum. That was part of his charm, if you could call it that.
Thrusting his empty glass towards the Turk, Mack asked him with great sincerity, "What do
you
think, Abdul?" The swarthy character poured more whiskey and grunted. Mack then turned to the harried man with the pad and pencil. "How about you, Glassmeyer?" The fellow fiddled with his glasses and gave a weak nod of approval. I later learned that Glassmeyer was a writer, and that while Mack kept a restaurant stocked with food for actors and hands, he never let the writers eat. Mack believed if he kept writers hungry, they'd think more. That's why all the Keystone writers looked so miserable. On the other hand, they were all pretty damn trim.
Mack was always cheap with talent—especially actors—which is why he lost them. Ford Sterling, Harold Lloyd, Chaplin . . . They all asked for more money, and they all got the ax. When Paramount made me the first actor in Hollywood to make a million a year, Sennett said it would be the end of me. So how'd
he
know?
Anyway, Mack's standing up in the tub in front of me, naked as an imbecile, lifting one gam so the Turk can dab the underside of his thigh, then lifting the other. After that Abdul wrapped him in a towel, like a big hairy-legged baby in swaddling. Then Mack stepped out of the water and grabbed a Panama hat off a rack. When he put it on, his dyed black hair poked out of the top, where he'd cut the lid out.
"Nothing beats sunlight for a healthy scalp," he declared, as if daring Glassmeyer or myself to try and tell him otherwise. Then, bare feet puddling the floor, Mack stepped out of the towel Abdul'd just wrapped him in. He padded up to me twirling his penis like a dandy with a little cane. Later he said Charlie stole his routine. I suppose he wanted to shock me. But I grew up around farm animals.
Mack put his face close to mine and rattled off his stellar offer. "Players make five dollars a day, extras a box lunch and a buck. Be here tomorrow at eight, fat boy."
I managed to breathe without inhaling onion gas, and smiled big.
"Sure thing, Mr. Sennett. And nice hat."
Keystoned
Imagine. I'd known Mack Sennett 10 minutes and already felt a physical revulsion to the man. Even after his bath, he reeked. The poor Turk who dried him must have mastered some Muslim rite of nostril blockage.
The whole scene distracted me so, on the way down the stairs after our "meeting" I collided with some Dapper Dan in a monocle. The man I bumped protested, in a stage-French accent, as though I'd shown him some grave offense: "I beg your pardon, sir!" Then he made a show of looking me up and down, before sniffling at me and wrinkling his nose. By now I was too frazzled for false propriety. Mack Sennett had just showed me his one-eyed milkman. Was I supposed to mind my manners?
"Frenchy," I snapped at him, "if you don't like how
I
smell, the guy upstairs is going to
kill
you."
Henry Lehrman—the kind-of-but-not Frenchman I'd bumped—did not think this was funny. Like he did not think most of what I did was funny in years to come, when he started directing me. Sennett held Lehrman in such contempt that he called him "Pathé"— in mocking homage to the cinematic pedigree this Belgian ex-theater usher liked to claim—but he let him direct because he was adequate. And he worked cheap.
From the second he gave me the okey-doke on the stairs, Pathé always made me uneasy. My world would explode nine ways to Sunday—in good ways and bad—before I found out why. In the meantime, I just wanted to grab the streetcar and run back to Minta, just to tell her I could pay for groceries. That I had a job. This was a night we were going to celebrate. Of course, after all the embarrassment in the Orient, I'd promised I wouldn't drink. But I easily convinced the little missus that champagne was okay, and we went dancing.
This was the last good night for a while. My first day at Keystone Studios, Sennett stuck me in some bit of nonsense called
The Gangsters,
which as far as I could tell involved a bunch of misshapen miscreants running up a hill, bumping into each other, and falling down the hill. The script left a lot of room for what Sennett called "improvisilization."
In the dressing room—the men's was side by side with the women's, leaving less privacy than Union Station at rush hour—I had to squeeze into a Keystone Kop uniform so tight it felt like an ankle-length corset. Sennett saw it and said it was perfect.
Worse, after that fake Frog Lehrman yelled "Action!" on my virgin outing, he didn't
stop
yelling. "Fatty, go right! . . . Fatty, look scared! . . . Fatty, stub your toe!"
You forgot to say "Simon says"!
Every time Lehrman opened his mouth during shooting, I'd look over at him. And every time I did, he yelled at me not to look at him during shooting. On top of that, people in the neighborhood were hanging out their windows, waving white hankies, trying to get our attention.
It was all so chaotic, I had to ask Edgar Kennedy, one of the other actors, what the heck was going on.
Why are all those housewives surrendering?
Edgar explained they weren't surrendering, they were trying to get the company to film over at their place. Everybody in the neighborhood knew Sennett paid $10 for front yards, $15 if the actors were going to run around the sides of the house. If it was hard to concentrate with the director yelling at me, the cheers and waves of the Edendale locals made it all but impossible. These people never needed to pay to go to the movies. They saw them in the raw on their front lawns. And they wanted to cash in.