I, Fatty (30 page)

After the near bladder-spill, the Assistant District Attorney went ashen, looking dangerously close to presenting his breakfast as evidence. During closing arguments Friedman was pallid and rambling. This left McNab to stand in front of the courtroom, an avenging prophet, and address the jury in high moral dither.

For the first time since my trial had begun, my
first
trial, I felt myself come alive and listen. "Did the state illustrate how Roscoe hurt Virginia Rappe? Nobody saw it. There was no proof of it. Because he never did hurt her!"

Then, while I tried 11 different expressions on my face, McNab wrapped up with a recitation of my good works and accomplishments. He summed the whole thing up: "Roscoe Arbuckle has made millions of people happy. Brought joy to the world. Never hurt a living soul. And this has been his reward."

I get the weeps just thinking about it! And the jury felt the same way.

Six minutes after the case was submitted to them, on the afternoon of April 12, the 12 souls who controlled my fate shocked the masses on hand by returning a verdict. More than a verdict. The foreman, a square-jawed, bespectacled, retired tractor salesman, requested permission to read a statement to the court. I knew enough not to get my hopes up. But Minta, who'd stayed by my side in court despite the fact that we barely spoke, grabbed my face and kissed me before he even got the square of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. The spark of sex ignited by my calamity had long since fizzled, but my future ex-wife was still glad I'd managed to stay out of the gas chamber.

"Acquittal," the foreman read in a thin voice unaccustomed to public presentation, "is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle."

Before he could continue, the courtroom exploded with happy yips and hoots. These surprised me as much as the verdict itself. Much as I longed for acquittal, I was afraid the backlash among the vigilantes on hand would set off a lynch mob. My worse fear was that they wouldn't be able to find a branch that could hold me, so they'd try stringing me up to trees all over town, and I'd keep breaking them. Set free, only to survive with a crushed voice box and permanent rope burn around my neck.

When the cheers died down, the foreman continued. "We feel that a great injustice has been done. We feel also that it was only our plain duty to give him this exoneration . . .

"He was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story on the witness stand, which we all believed."

Manly!
Feature that!

"The happening at the hotel was an unfortunate affair for which Arbuckle . . . was in no way responsible.

"We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of 14 men and women who have sat listening for 31 days to the evidence that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from blame."

But I was not too manly to let the hot tears roll down my cheeks in front of everybody. This was my second adult crying jag. My first in public. Though this one was much more subdued. But those few hot tears were not from joy. Gratified as I was at being proved innocent, I wept from the crushing knowledge that it no longer mattered. Innocence and two bits would buy you a bowl of gruel but no crackers. I was 700 grand in the hole, I was still suspect and hated, and if there was any place on the map I could ever be funny again, it would probably take a safari to get there. Was any free man ever more condemned?

I'd won the case, and lost any reason for caring.

I reeled out of the courtroom and back to Los Angeles in a darker haze than any drug or panther piss had put me.

Buster and Chaplin came to meet me at the station. But I could barely wave when I saw them. My arms and legs were made of pig iron. Keaton and Charlie kept asking me, "What do you want to do now?"

So I finally told them.
"Pass out
. . ."

Aftershocks

Shall I even bother to tell you about the years that remained? The mug's game called redemption? I could have done talkies. I mean, I can do voices. I could do everybody's voice. Play the woman and the man. Man and wife, Dog and pony. But I couldn't play Adolph Zukor. Nobody could ever play Adolph.

Six days after the jury apologized, Zukor held a powwow in the Paramount bunker with Lasky and General Hays himself. Eager to finish off the job the Prosecution couldn't, the three wise men were meeting to cook up a statement for Hays to sign.

That afternoon, over Hays's signature, on off-white Famous Players-Lasky bonded paper, they issued my professional death sentence. Lemme play you the high notes:

After consulting at length with Blah, Blah, and Blah, Mr. Adolph Zukor and Mr. Jesse Lasky of the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, the distributors, etc. . . . canceled all showings and all bookings of the Arbuckle films
. . .
notwithstanding the fact they had nearly ten thousand contracts in force for the Arbuckle pictures. Et cetera, et cetera
. . .

Will Hays

Minta, who could do jigsaw puzzles in minutes, made no secret of her suspicion that Zukor was behind everything that happened. "That bastard never forgave you for skipping Paramount Week." She hardly ever swore. But when she was this upset, little Minta steamed with a kind of seriousness that was almost frightening. She glowered as she went on with her theory. "Plus which, Fischbach took money from Zukor,
and
from Lehrman,
and
flimflammed Lehrman's fiancee. Fishy used you to hide his grift from both of them. It's disgusting."

"So Hollywood's a cesspool. Stop the presses. Daddy needs a job."

And back and forth like that from the laugh-packed script we'd replay every night. Without an audience. No props but a bed, a bottle, and a broken man. It sounds like the title of a cowboy song. One night I actually jotted down our patter. Maybe I could sharp it up a little.

Scene from
Fun Night with Roscoe and Minta:

M: I'm sick of all of it.

R:
I'm sick of you!

M: I'm sick of you!

R: No, no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sick of myself.

M: Oh, Roscoe, come here . . .

I went to Europe. Can you blame me? I went for the sheer fuck of it. (Now I cuss all the time—why not? I can't get sent to hell, I already get my mail there.) The Old Country treated me like a king—even more than on my first visit. Girls in Paris kept putting their pantaloons in my soup. I don't know if that's a tradition or if they were low on dinner rolls. Douglas Fairbanks and Chaplin also happened to be in Paree. Fairbanks was shilling for
The Three Musketeers.
The Frenchies kept screaming "Chariot!" at Charlie, like he was some kind of wine.

Those boys could cheer up a dead pigeon. But one night we went to the Crazy Horse with Mary Pickford, and I had the distinct feeling Mrs. Fairbanks would have rather been seen with Lincoln's corpse. Still, back in London, it buoyed me considerably when the Brits broke into one of those "hip-hip-hip hoorays"! on Piccadilly Circus. The English and the French had pretty much the same opinion about the trials: "What do you expect? You Americans are all Puritans."

I guess, like Oscar Wilde, another outsized, publicly shamed sex criminal, I emerged from the experience humbled and shunned.

And, in my own way, somewhat more spiritual. Wilde wrote
De Profundis.
I wrote a groveling letter to Will Hays begging to get my old job back.

And why not? Back in the States, still buzzing from the cocktail of "continental adulation" (as Buster called my reception overseas), I decided to compose a mash note to the ex-postmaster. I had, in fact, just lumbered through
De Profundis,
or as much of it as I could swallow, and probably tried too hard to ape Wilde's loftier style. "There is a higher law which deals with the spiritual side of mankind," I wrote, "and surely this Christmastime should not be a season when the voice of the Pharisee is heard in the land. No one ever saw a picture of mine that was not clean."

Hays, no doubt, kept the entreaty framed in silver and propped at his bedside, so he could see it before he laughed himself to sleep.

Too Much, Too Late

You might think redemption would be sweet. But when—after my pleas, countless letters from Minta, plus pressure from Keaton and Joe Schenck—Will Hays finally relented, the end result was less than stunning. Three days before Christmas the moral arbiter of the nation declared that I was "entitled to a chance to redeem" myself.

If I had any illusions that this meant I'd be returned to my former glory—or, at least, my former state of not being hated like a rabid, child-killing dog—the
New York Times
editorial the day after the jury's apology should have tipped me off. "Arbuckle was a scapegoat, and the only thing to do with a scapegoat, if you must have one, is to chase him off into the wilderness and never let him come back." The last line was even worse: "It will do the picture business no good to have him trotting back into the parlor bringing his aroma with him."

Did he say "aroma"? Roscoe Arbuckle, parlor skunk. Not exactly
We missed you, laddie, welcome back!

There's no deodorant for desperation. And, apparently, no way to wash off that jailhouse cologne.

Not that everyone turned against me. I think I already mentioned that Joe Schenck showed surprising backbone. Joe was always simpatico. After Hays issued his half-baked retraction of my satanic status, Schenck stepped up to Zukor and said they had three scripts for me ready to go. The three I'd been slated to shoot during my unfortunate detainment had all gone to other actors. Will Rogers galloped off with
The Melancholy Spirit.
The great John Barrymore swordplayed
The Man from Mexico
into a bag-o'-laughs swashbuckler. And, before he rode his horse over the cliff, Wallace Reid smackled his handsome way through
Thirty Days.

Naturally, this being my life, the very thing I thought would
relieve
my situation soon proved to be
the worst thing for it.
See, Schenck's plan was to release
Leap Year,
the last classic I'd made before the safe fell on my head. The movie would put me right back on the Happyland map. Mark my return as Much-Loved Funny Man. Or tank so badly I'd want to claw my eyes out and throw them at the projectionist.

If you picked the second possibility, you win the stuffed pink elephant. When
Leap Year
hit, the effect was quite the opposite of what I thought it would be. Moviegoers now found my hijinks more horrifying than funny. Since my arrest, my place in the world had backflipped. Gags once good for a sure chuckle—Roscoe the Coy Fat Boy making googoo eyes at a retiring violet, Roscoe as Chester Chubby-Money, the innocent tubbo being chased by a bevy of beauties—had been rendered nauseating.

I snuck into the back of a theater showing
Leap Year
in New York and heard the Mommykins in front of me whisper quiet as a buzzsaw to Daddykins:
"How can they let that fat rapist chase that little virgin!"

It was terrifying. I staggered out of the movie house and took a cab around Central Park. Within two days the
Examiner
came back full-blast: FATTY'S FACE AGAIN STAINING NATION'S SCREENS.

What did I ever do to make Hearst love me so much?

After that headline there wasn't a civic leader worth his saltines who didn't cash in with a public statement protesting my return. "Just because he's innocent, he's still a monster" was a sentiment echoed by the mayors of Boston, Detroit, and Indianapolis. These civic giants joined a floating country club of suffragettes, pastors, and moral paragons of every stripe. So popular a topic was Roscoe Arbuckle in sermons, the Devil must have felt slighted for weeks after my acquittal.

Need I point out that this backlash was
encouraged}
The Anti-Fattyites were supported by Hays, whose off-the-record insistence that studio heads blacklist me was not even off-the-record. I knew my pork was roasted when William Jennings Bryan, of all people, published an open letter to Commissioner Hays. Via some trick of rhetoric, Bryan, the failed presidential candidate, managed to make the fact that I was found innocent the most damning aspect of my entire orderal. "His acquittal only relieved him of the penalty that attaches to a crime. The evidence showed a depravity entirely independent of the question of actual murder."

Thanks for thinking of me, William!

I know, I shouldn't be bitter. Might as well pound nails into my kneecaps as dredge up the memory of my detractors. It's painful. But sometimes pain is the one thing left a man can feel. Maybe I stole that line from
De Profundis.
Or the three and a half pages I could decipher without dozing off. Or maybe it came out of the rye I just dumped down my gullet. What does it matter?
Wronged Fatsoes Of The World, Unite!

Gainful Employment

Against all odds, Joe Schenck still took a chance and pitched me as a director to Zukor. Zukor had his eye on a circus act named Poodles Hanneford, and Schenck told him I might be the man to crank out some two-reelers with him. The shorts would take two weeks and cost 20 grand. I'd get a 20th of that, two weeks in a row. Schenck was so nice to me, I was starting to think he had a guilty conscience.

Except for Lew Cody—who had less clout than a canned ham—the only old-time pals who'd dare show their faces in public with me were Buster, Schenck, and Charlie.

Chaplin, truth be told, never saw fit to jeopardize his standing in the community by endorsing me for a job. Buster, on the other hand, did everything but walk a HIRE ROSCOE sandwich board up and down Hollywood Boulevard. Thanks to him, five studios—Keaton's, Metro, Paramount, Goldwyn, and Educational—tossed 33 G's into the hat to start Reel Productions and set me up again.

My Reel deal was not set up with prestige in mind. For my sins, I was signed on to direct the fellow professional lard-ass just mentioned in his gaggle of two-reelers. Poodles had made his name touring with Billy Sunday. But happily, the flask in his pants defused any tension I might have had about his Godfearing tendencies.