Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (19 page)

Before the end of 1915 Roscoe Arbuckle had made extended stays in the territories of Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, and the Philippines; he had worked in Mexico and Canada; he was the rare American who had traveled to the Far East, visiting storied metropolises in Japan and China. And yet he had never been east of Chicago. Despite his eighteen years in vaudeville, he had never set foot in the center of American theater, never visited the nucleus of American media, never experienced the city he would come to love, the city he would—for extended periods—call home, the city where he would die.

When the train ended its journey in Grand Central Station, New York, New York, on the next-to-last day of 1915, a Keystone company of a dozen departed, including Arbuckle, Durfee, Normand, and St. John. Also in the group was Ferris Hartman, with whom the Arbuckles had toured the Orient. Arbuckle had given him the job of assistant director—a gracious gesture, as Hartman had fallen on hard times.
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The company, there to make movies in nearby New Jersey, was met at the bustling station by executives of the Triangle Film Corporation, formed in July to finance, distribute, and exhibit the movies produced by three Hollywood heavyweights: D. W. Griffith, Thomas Ince (noted for his westerns), and Mack Sennett. A crowd of stunned fans swarmed as the Keystone group strolled across the concourse.

New York City in late 1915 was home to over five million residents, many of them recent European immigrants. The city was experiencing its adolescent growth spurt; while Europe was immersed in the horrors
of trench warfare, New York City was asserting itself as the world’s de facto capital. And the Keystone group stayed in the center of it, on Broadway in Times Square at the Hotel Claridge. Chauffeur-driven limousines were at their beck and call. On their second night in Manhattan, New Year’s Eve, they attended the Broadway musical
Peter Rabbit in Dreamland
as guests of the
New York Globe,
and the two thousand in attendance applauded them.

For Arbuckle and Durfee, the stay at the Claridge was short. On one of the company’s first nights there, a drunken, belligerent Arbuckle tried to make the kitchen staff cook him a meal at 3 A
M.
When they wouldn’t, he yelled, “Then I’ll find a hotel that does!” He did—the Cumberland, a few blocks away, which provided them a larger suite and constant care. In recalling the incident, Durfee affixed a rare insult: “Roscoe knew he was good for publicity and the [Cumberland] manager knew it. Roscoe also knew that money could buy anything. Except good manners.”

Filming occurred not in Manhattan but just across the Hudson in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Edison and other New York behemoths had begun shooting in Fort Lee in 1907, and independent studios had sprouted up there, building the facilities and buying the equipment to shoot, edit, and process film. By 1916 it was “Hollywood East.” Triangle leased studio space there.

The main reason for the cross-country trip was to court publicity from the New York media. During Keystone’s first New Jersey production, a
Picture-Play
magazine writer spent a day on the set and interviewed the stars for what became a lengthy feature article, “Behind the Scenes with Fatty and Mabel,” which provided an intimate look at Arbuckle and Normand at work. The reporter is driven, wildly, to the Fort Lee studio by Normand:

The studio was bristling with activity. Roscoe Arbuckle, the elephantine author-actor-director, was superintending the construction of a set, aided by Ferris Hartman, his co-worker, and a dozen prop men; Elgin Lessley, the intrepid camera man, who has the reputation of turning out the clearest films of any Keystone crank
turner, was loading his magazines. A dozen rough and ready comedians were practicing falls down a stairway. The heavyweight director turned and saw us.

“Oh, Miss Normand, get ready for the hall scenes please.”

“Very well, Roscoe and—very good!”

The dainty little comedienne going to her dressing room, I strolled over to the busy throng and exchanged greetings with Arbuckle.

“How are you getting along with your new picture?” I asked.

“Slow, but sure,” was the reply. “It’s a new theme, and I want to go at it easily. I’m not trying to be a ‘high brow,’ or anything like that, but I am going to cut an awful lot of the slapstick out hereafter. If any one gets kicked, or pie thrown in his face, there’s going to be a reason for it.”

“How about that staircase?” I queried. “That looks as though something exciting was going to happen.”

“Oh, nothing much,” he answered.

“St. John and I are going to fall down it, but that’s about all. Here, I’ll show you,” and I snapped the picture as he did.

“Oh, it’s great to be a comedian—if there’s a hospital handy!”

As the day’s shoot got under way, the
Picture-Play
reporter marveled at the surreality of the experience (a pistol shot rang out, and Arbuckle said, “Oh that’s only St. John shooting apples off Joe Bordeaux’s head. I’m going to pull that stunt in my next film!”) and at the Keystone players’ ability to take falls and absorb blows without complaint (bit parts in New Jersey were played by new recruits, and they were shell-shocked by the repetition of violence, including St. John bloodying an extra’s nose with a kick). Arbuckle credited his coworkers with helping him talk through story ideas: “I certainly have a clever crowd working with me. Mabel alone, is good for a dozen new suggestions in every picture. And the others aren’t far behind. I take advice from everyone. It’s a wise man who realizes that there are others who know as much, if not more than he does himself.”

The lasting images of the article are Arbuckle falling off the bannister—once face-first—in take after take, and in another scene, cracking heads with an actor while searching for a button, and again doing it repeatedly despite the pain.

“How many times do you take the same scene?” the reporter asked.

“Till I can’t do any better,” Arbuckle replied, as one assistant straightened his bow tie and another combed his hair. “Often I use 10 or 15 thousand feet of film for a two reel production…. Generally, I take a month or more to produce a picture that runs less than thirty minutes on screen.”

The movie Arbuckle, Normand, and company were making that January day was
He Did and He Didn’t,
an odd but compelling departure for the team. How odd? The alternate title was
Love and Lobsters,
and in a sequence near the end, jealous Fatty shoves the man he suspects of cheating with his wife out a window and strangles his wife (Normand) to death before he’s shot dead. Spoiler alert: it’s a nightmare, brought on by consuming bad shellfish.

Arbuckle went on to write, direct, and star in a total of seven movies in Fort Lee. But only one more featured Mabel Normand. She left Keystone, but Sennett—who himself wanted to get free of his New York partners—offered his ex her own independent production company, complete with facilities in Los Angeles. Wanting to focus on dramedy feature films, she accepted. Rehearsals began in June for her feature
Mickey.
That summer, Normand gave a “burial party” aboard her yacht. Inside a casket was a slapstick. As a funeral dirge played, “Madcap Mabel” offered her final good-byes to her old friend, and the casket was committed to the sea.

Minta Durfee returned to Los Angeles as well, to act in
Mickey
and be with her mourning family; her father had died. Her husband stayed behind to shoot his last three films in Fort Lee. These pictures featured twenty-year-old Alice Lake, a five-foot-two brunette, a former dancer and native New Yorker. She resembled a younger and more spirited version of Durfee, the woman she was replacing on-screen—and may have already been replacing offscreen.

“What’s the worst thing that can happen to an actor?” a journalist asked.

“To arrive,” Arbuckle replied.

“I thought that was what they all desired more than anything else.”

“They do,” Arbuckle said, “but the trouble is, once they arrive, there isn’t much to do but to leave again. When they are coming up, the public applauds and says, ‘That chap is coming along—doing better every day.’ But once the actor is heralded as an absolute arrival, the public begins to criticize and pick flaws and expect him to better his own standard, and it is a tremendous strain. He’s simply forced to keep ahead of the public’s opinion and to spring something newer and better every season. The man or woman who can survive an ‘arrival’ is a star of the greatest magnitude.”

“The world has Chaplinitis…. Any form of expressing Chaplin is what the public wants…. Once in every century or so a man is born who is able to color and influence the world…. A little Englishman, quiet, unassuming but surcharged with dynamite is flinching the world right now.” So
Motion Picture Magazine
had stated in July 1915. At Essanay in 1915, Charlie Chaplin spawned fourteen films, including his seminal
The Tramp,
and his vagabond persona took hold of the public imagination like none before or since. Syndicated comic strips let readers follow the Little Tramp’s adventures daily. All manner of Little Tramp merchandise flooded stores. Wearing the wardrobe and mimicking the mannerisms of the beloved character became so ubiquitous that movie theaters sponsored “Charlie Chaplin nights” wherein whole audiences were packed with Tramps.

Chaplin the employee proved to be as vagabond as his character. He left Essanay, as he had Keystone, after one year. In February 1916 the onetime resident of a London poorhouse signed with Mutual Film Corporation for a record $10,000 weekly and a $150,000 bonus. In return he had to make one comedy short per month for twelve months—an
obligation he took eighteen months to fulfill.
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As “Chaplinitis” spread unabated, and as its namesake signed a deal worth $670,000 in a year, Roscoe Arbuckle—who had been, three years prior, Chaplin’s more celebrated costar—was still at Keystone with an annual salary of $26,000.

In 1916, of filmdom’s four biggest stars, Charlie Chaplin relied on the business acumen of his older half-brother Syd, while the other three—Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Arbuckle—negotiated their own contracts. Talent agents had played supporting roles in the theatrical business since the 1890s, but they wouldn’t take hold in the film industry until the late 1920s. Here, Arbuckle would be a trailblazer. In Los Angeles he may never have encountered an agent, but in New York he shook hands with Max Hart, the leading vaudeville talent rep. Hart specialized in elevating his clients—including Eddie Cantor, W. C. Fields, and Will Rogers—to Broadway. Arbuckle had retained his love for the stage while his singing voice was silenced by cinema, and Hart may have promised him Broadway stardom as great as his Hollywood fame. As for Hollywood fortune, the agent secured Arbuckle a contract with Metro Pictures worth $200,000 annually, which also brought along Durfee and St. John.