Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (27 page)

Arbuckle told an incredulous Chicago reporter of his recent hospital stay and weight loss, and his short stay in the Windy City provoked a mention of his injury and a reference to his libidinous big-screen reputation:

Arbuckle had a carbuncle on his knee. The farthest he walked, while in Chicago, was from the train to the street, where an Elgin Six was
waiting for him.
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Ordinarily, “Fatty” likes the lady admirers, but, in this case, his wife was with him, so he could do nothing else than place his foot on the accelerator and shoot through the dense crowds as fast as the speed ordinance would allow.

He was “chairman of the reception” at a free screening of Paramount’s
Snow White
in Pittsburgh one day and guest of honor at a Motion Picture Machine Operators Union ball in Washington, DC, the next. Between a parade for him at the Philadelphia train station and a ritzy banquet that evening, he placed a wreath on the Liberty Bell. As the trip progressed, the daily public luncheons and dinners, during which Fatty was expected to eat heartily, packed the trademark pounds back on.
^†
Boston was the last stop on the tour, where on the evening of March 6, dinner was served at the regal Copley Plaza Hotel. Zukor, Lasky, Marcus Loew, and the Massachusetts attorney general were among the notables in attendance when Arbuckle was enthusiastically received by more than 125 of Paramount’s New England exhibitors.

That was the official reception party. There was also an unofficial afterparty—and what a party! In the early hours of March 7, several prominent members of the Arbuckle reception attended an event in nearby Woburn, Massachusetts. The location was Mishawum Manor, a brothel. Hush money kept the criminal facts of that late night quiet for over four years. But they would scream out on July 11, 1921, less than two months before Labor Day. Thus, the notorious Mishawum “chicken and champagne orgy” will be addressed when our story turns to the summer of 1921.

Later on March 7, the Arbuckle entourage took a train to New York City, where the Arbuckles moved back into a suite at the Cumberland
Hotel. Arbuckle regained lost leg strength. And as he began planning comedy shorts for his new production company that did not include his wife, the bonds of his marriage grew weaker. Durfee would always blame Lou Anger for forcing her out of her husband’s film plans, effectively ending her acting career and severing her marriage beyond repair. She was right on one count: by 1917 the Arbuckles’ marriage, which had begun with a for-profit wedding, had been reduced to principally a business arrangement.

Lou Anger may have hastened the end of that arrangement, but the romantic relationship had been troubled for years. Arbuckle liked drinking with the guys and wild nights on the town; Durfee liked reading books and quiet nights at home. They argued. In private, fueled by alcohol, his insecurities could boil over into a rage. And by Durfee’s accounts, her pained husband had not been able to perform sexually on the cross-country tour. She recounted one rampage after he failed at sexual intercourse in which he threw dresser drawers and ripped a telephone free of the wall. “I’m a star! I’m not supposed to be married! I can’t be hampered by a wife!” he yelled at her, before kicking a table, cutting his leg. He subsequently locked himself in the bathroom, remorseful and embarrassed. “I never heard a man cry so hard in my life,” Durfee said. “It was terrible.”

Arbuckle had probably been unfaithful, most likely with Alice Lake and with others as well. He had married young, with little experience in romance, when he was a poor and virtually unknown singer in stage shows. Eight and a half years later he was one of the most famous men in the world, wealthy and soon to be much wealthier, and he was a film director capable of launching the careers of beautiful young actresses. As Durfee, his loyal supporter, recalled him saying,
“I’m a star! I’m not supposed to be married!”
He wanted to experience all that the movie star lifestyle entailed.

March 24 marked Arbuckle’s thirtieth birthday, and Durfee bought him memberships in the Friars Club and the Lambs Club, exclusive all-male New York City theatrical societies. Soon thereafter, he moved into the Friars’ new Manhattan clubhouse (dubbed the “Monastery”), claiming
the massages and baths there were ideal for his recovery. A little over eight and a half years after it began, the Arbuckle marriage ended in all but title. Durfee moved into a Manhattan apartment with her sister and brother-in-law.

Years later, trying to bolster her husband’s reputation after his arrest, Durfee offered a judicious view of the marriage breakup (which again infantalized her husband), but nevertheless she pointed to fissures that had likely grown over years: “Well, if he can be stubborn, so can I. Probably our separation was as much my fault as it was his. We began to clash a little, probably over some very unimportant things. He wouldn’t admit that he was wrong, and neither would I. He is like a boy; he wants to be coaxed; and as for myself, I cannot force myself on anyone, least of all a man, if I have the slightest feeling that I may not be welcome. So we simply got on one another’s nerves, and it never got properly straightened out.”

In 1917 divorce was a scandal sure to harm Arbuckle’s image, and at a crucial turn in his career. Durfee signed a separation agreement that paid her $500 weekly (about $9,000 in today’s dollars) while he and she privately lived apart. And thus, finally, there was a price for their business arangement.

Mickey,
the troubled production of troubled Mabel Normand, would not be released until August 1918, but it was well reviewed and popular, and Durfee had a plum supporting role. In 1919 Durfee starred in a series of two-reel comedies for Truat Film Corporation, a small New York company. Few noticed. She slipped from public view, only to emerge again in September 1921, defending the husband from whom she had been separated for four and a half years.

One door closed and another opened. In the same month that Arbuckle’s marriage effectively ended, his strongest friendship began.

Joseph Keaton was born October 4, 1895, as his parents passed through tiny Piqua, Kansas, in the employ of a traveling medicine show. The story of his early years grew more in the telling than Arbuckle’s own:
A cyclone blew away the town where he was born. When not yet two, on “a pretty strenuous day,” he lost his finger in a clothes wringer, his head was split open by a brick he had tossed, and he was sucked out of his bedroom window by another pesky tornado and deposited a block away. He called the trifecta of torment “superb conditioning for my career.” And the nickname that his career would make famous was given to him by Harry Houdini; after the tot fell down a flight of stairs but suffered no consequences, the great magician noted, “That was a buster.”

Little in the previous paragraph about Buster Keaton’s toddlerhood is true. Houdini was a family friend, but if we can believe the original version of the story told by Keaton’s father, another entertainer bestowed the name upon the boy after just such a youthful tumble. And while a too-curious infant Buster did shred his right index finger in a clothes wringer (a doctor then amputated it at the first joint), the tale of misfortune was embellished to further the legend of the indestructible child.

Keaton began his stage career at an even younger age than Arbuckle. His parents, Joe and Myra, moved with their son to New York City in 1899, and against all odds, they began to establish Joe’s acrobatic table act in vaudeville theaters. (Myra played the coronet and sometimes dodged Joe’s kicks and table twirls.) In Delaware in October 1900, Joe placed his five-year-old son onstage as a miniature observer. Soon Buster was garnering laughs, and thus the Two Keatons became the Three Keatons, the act focusing on the father’s doomed attempts to control his rambunctious son. When Buster repeatedly interrupted Dad’s monologue, Joe tossed him about the stage and into the orchestra pit. Slapstick child abuse caused the audience to recoil and squirm, but then laugh and applaud when Buster reappeared unhurt—only to be punished again.

Joe realized the biggest laughs came when a pratfall went unacknowledged, so he coached his son not to smile or grimace no matter how funny or painful the gag. Buster’s stone-faced persona was thus born just a few years after he was. “The Man with a Table” and the show’s unique, pint-sized participant, “the Little Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged,” grew in
reputation and profitability. A 1901 story in the
New York Clipper
said of Buster, “The tiny comedian is perfectly at ease in his work, natural, finished and artistic.”

Buster always claimed he enjoyed the professional roughhousing and learned early how to break his falls, rarely suffering more than the sorts of abrasions earned in child’s play. But New York’s child labor laws restricted young performers, and the Keatons played cat-and-mouse games with enforcement agents for years before incurring a two-year ban from New York theaters in 1907. On October 4, 1909, an ad in
Variety
announced Buster’s sixteenth birthday and his legal return to the stage. He was actually fourteen, but regardless, he had grown too big to be easily hurled about. The act had evolved. Father and son traded blows as physical equals, and Buster parodied popular songs and other acts on the bill.

Over subsequent years, resentments and grievances between father and son grew, accelerated by Joe’s fondness for alcohol. Sometimes the onstage violence was as real as it appeared. The Three Keatons stayed together until January 1917, but by then twenty-one-year-old Buster was exhausted by the thrice-daily performance schedule and weary of his father.

He signed with Max Hart, who secured a role for him in Broadway’s
The Passing Show.
Keaton’s relationship with Hart was as brief as Arbuckle’s—and was ended by the same man. In mid-March, in the midst of rehearsals for the stage production, Keaton was striding through Times Square when he ran into Lou Anger, with whom he had shared vaudeville bills. Now Anger was segueing into movies as the manager of Roscoe Arbuckle, who was starting production on his new company’s first motion picture. The manager invited the vaudevillian to stop by the set the next morning.

Joseph Schenck’s Colony Studio occupied a warehouse on East Forty-Eighth Street. On the morning Buster Keaton paid a visit, the Norma Talmadge Film Corporation was on the first floor, making another opulent
drama starring its eponymous star, who was also Schenck’s wife.
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On the top floor, beneath a glass roof, the Comique Film Corporation was shooting in a re-creation of a general store. There, as the bustling crew set up the next shot, director and star Roscoe Arbuckle was going over gags for a slapstick scene with Al St. John and actors playing store customers. Arbuckle was dressed in the costume that had become nearly as recognizable as Chaplin’s: plaid shirt, suspenders, pants worn too high, and, balanced precariously atop his head and angling slightly left, a bowler, several sizes too small.

Arbuckle was familiar with the Keatons’ act, and he invited the visitor to join the on-screen mayhem. Keaton hesitated. Though he had grown up sharing vaudeville bills with moving pictures and later sat in the dark, mesmerized, watching
Tillie’s Punctured Romance
four times and
The Birth of a Nation
thrice, his father considered film acting beneath a theatrical performer. Perhaps the desire to break fully free of his father influenced his decision to join the scene after a bit more coaxing. Mostly, he was eager to experience firsthand the art of performing for a camera lens.

Dressed in overalls and a straw hat, Keaton plays a customer who examines brooms and effortlessly kicks one up off the floor with a maneuver worthy of a soccer star. Buying a bucket of molasses from butcher Fatty, Keaton’s foot sticks in a puddle of the goo, and he’s knocked free and out of the store by Fatty. Arbuckle could easily throw the five-foot-five, 140-pound Keaton about. “Between one thing and another,” Keaton recalled, “I would say that my long career as a human mop proved most useful from the start of my work as a movie actor.”

Like Arbuckle, Keaton was fascinated by mechanical inventions. “Roscoe—none of us who knew him personally ever called him Fatty—took the camera apart for me so I would understand how it worked and what it could do. He showed me how film was developed, cut, and
then spliced together.” Keaton was hooked. “Everything about the new business I found exciting and fascinating.” That included the secretary, another Talmadge sister, Natalie, whom he met that first day and would marry five years later.