I, Fatty
Authors: Jerry Stahl
Praise for I,
Fatty
"The 'memoir' has about it a convincingly addled tone, sometimes rambling, rarely self-pitying, often humorous, full of 1920s showbiz jargon and evoking plenty of empathy for Arbuckle...In Stahl, the silent star Arbuckle could not have hoped for a more well-equipped mouthpiece."—
Atlanta Journal Constitution
"I,
Fatty
is all voice, and that voice—wisecracking, shrewd, bawdy, self-deprecating, and rueful—is a tour de force."—
Newsday
"This is a writer who knows how to give voice to despair. He also reveals a keen eye for the details of early Hollywood, with everyone from Buster Keaton and Mack Sennett to Mabel Norman and Charlie Chaplin making appearances...Stahl has masterfully re-imagined an American tragedy that will seduce you and break your heart all over again."—
Rocky Mountain
News
"Jerry Stahl crawls inside the vilified fat man's head and emerges with a masterpiece.
1, Fatty
is a fine, fine piece of work—the definitive new word on an important figure in film history."—
Anthony Bourdain, author of
Kitchen Confidential
and
A Cooks Tour
"An imaginary memoir written in the slangy lingo of an early Hollywood hep-cat... One part morality tale, one part frisky romp through the decadent years of nascent Hollywood."—
San Francisco Chronicle
"Jerry Stahl...is a better-than-Burroughs virtuoso when it comes to depicting every paranoid high and cold-kicking torment obtainable from the street and the medicine chest."—
New Yorker
"Though Stahl revels in Fatty's overindulgences and generally vile behavior, he also manages to make the ol' buffoon sympathetic—especially during the trial that ultimately found Arbuckle not guilty but still destroyed his career." —
Maxim
(Book of the Month; five stars)
"Finally, the true skinny on Fatty. Jerry Stahl brilliantly gives life, voice, truth, and respect to Roscoe Arbuckle, redeeming the unjustly tarnished memory of a wildly great talent and a great wild man."—
Johnny Depp
"[A] compelling rags-to-riches-to-nearly-rags tale."—
Oregonian
"Jerry Stahl tells Arbuckle's story as nimbly as that graceful fat man took a pratfall.
I, Fatty
joins the shelf of Hollywood tragedies alongside
The Day of
the Locust "
—Robert Sklar, author of
Movie-Made America
"Fascinating...I,
Fatty
may overflow with insider gossip and speculation on the often sordid affairs of the young movie industry's biggest stars, but it also reveals how exciting it was to be an actor or director in Hollywood's formative years. As channeled through Stahl, Arbuckle's memory is remarkably lucid, and his sense of pre- and post-gallows humor remains wonderfully intact."
—
Chicago Sun-Times
"A wisecracking, sepia-toned novelization of the chemical highs and legal lows of silent-film-era star Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle and the more famous Hollywood scandal that undid him."—
Los Angeles
Times
"Witty, compassionate, occasionally cynical, always entertaining,
I, Fatty
is a triumph of ventriloquism, and an unexpectedly moving examination into our desperate need to create and then tear down our heroes."—
JT LeRoy, author of
Sarah
and
The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
"Stahl's first-person narrative gets inside his subject's head, while sticking close to the facts. Arbuckle gains readers' sympathy as the wounded fat kid who felt no love from his father. He is also a funny storyteller and, like many good autobiographers, occasionally self-aggrandizing...[A] complex and moving
portrait."—
Time Out New York
"[Stahl is] just the man to tell the Arbuckle tale...This is a chatty, zoom-fast, often very funny book, written in the rueful, oddly fastidious voice of a late-life Arbuckle."—
Boston Herald
"Poignant...Through Arbuckle's bemused, raunchy voice, [Stahl] draws a sympathetic portrait of a keen, wounded actor in a tale replete with insightful portraits of American vaudeville and silent film...An illuminating story about actors, studios, and audiences."—
Kirkus Reviews
"From laughter in the dark, the shame of the species, and the cheap moth-eaten fabric of a ruined life, Jerry Stahl has woven a morality tale from which there is no escape."—
Nick Tosches, author of
In the Hand of Dante
and
Dino
"Stahl's deep dedication to the whacked-out and marginalized helps him inhabit Arbuckle's character sharply and convincingly."—
Publishers Weekly
"Entertaining and surprisingly poignant...an utterly believable yarn that has as
Reporter
I, FATTY
a novel
JERRY STAHL
BLOOMSBURY
This is a work of fiction. The lives of the characters in this book are matters of historical record. What went on in their heads and came out of their mouths is pure speculation on the part of the author.
Copyright © 2004 by Jerry Stahl
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers
All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Stahl, Jerry.
I, Fatty : a novel /Jerry Stahl.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58234-582-6
1. Arbuckle, Roscoe, 1887-1933—Fiction. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—Fiction. 3. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. 4. Motion picture industry—Fiction. 5. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. 6. Trials (Murder)—Fiction. 7. Comedians—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.T3125I15 2004
813'.54—dc22
2003028011
First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2004
This paperback edition published in 2005
3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Polmont, Stirlingshire, Scotland
Printed in the United States of America
by Quebecor World Fairfield
For Stella Jane Stahl and Chris Calhoun
There is nothing funnier than unhappiness.
—Samuel Beckett
Contents
I
WAS ONCE picked up by the police on Fatty Arbuckle's front lawn. Of course, by then Fatty—who preferred to be called Roscoe—had moved on. Arbuckle died in 1933. And this was the mid-eighties, before the dawn of the Crack Era. Street dealers dotted that no-longer-upscale strip of Adams Boulevard, near downtown Los Angeles, flagging down white kids in cars to sell them loads, a potent combo of Doredin and Codeine 4. Dors-'n'- 4s offered a slow-motion rush that lasted half an hour, with a residual opiate buzz that kept you scratching your nose and not moving your bowels for days at a time. Looking to deeply wound legions of much-loathed punks—core consumers for the narcotic combo described above—a cabal of LAPD, DEA, and two mysterious men named Leon from Compton made Doredins disappear, forcing an entire community to jump to junk.
Fatty's pad, by the time your author landed facedown in front of it, had already been converted to a stately outpost of Christ called Amat House. Amat served as home base for a batch of Vincentian priests, a sect devoted to chaste men doing charitable works. These, apparently, did not include rushing out to aid drug-crazed strangers in moments of distress—though I do recall a couple of startled white faces peering from a pushed-aside curtain as an officer bade me lie "lips down" on the sidewalk. I was not, technically, on the Catholic brothers' lawn; my face was pressed between the prongs of the metal fence that surrounded their grass. Still, I remember savoring the dank, naturey smell of steer manure, pretending that I was on a farm, napping with my face in the dirt, the way farmers do.
All of which would mean absolutely nothing if not for the fact that three-quarters of a century earlier, in 1916, a fetus-faced five-foot-seven, 3 75-pound millionaire was shooting heroin and contemplating his ruin in the very chamber from which the strange white faces stared down at my own. Who knows but that Arbuckle, nodding in some bygone era, closed his eyes and heard the cries of drug abusers three generations unconceived stumbling down the sidewalk of the house he occupied?
At the time of his needle ride, 29-year-old Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was more popular than Charlie Chaplin. And, on that particular August day, at the screaming height of World War I, in an upscale corner of the cow town packed with transplanted White Trash, first-generation Euro-escape artists, marginal theatrical types, and native Mexicans, the colossal, nodding Arbuckle could claim to be the most loved movie star waddling the earth—if not the most clean-living.
Hooked by an incompetent intern who botched a boil-lancing procedure and prescribed heroin to ease the agony, Arbuckle was left with an on-again, off-again habit on top of his already rampant alcoholism. Attending to his special "needs" was a Japanese manservant named Okie, a combination valet, handyman, and gofer whose status in Arbuckle's life presages the "personal assistant," now a virtual prerequisite for Hollywood status holders.
Okie stuck with his master through three marriages, an arrest for murder and rape, three trials, and an overnight fall from massive stardom to object of mass hate—a spiral that stripped him of millions and left him in financial ruin. It was the financial ruin that got Okie worried.