Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood (60 page)

Arbuckle must have thought the movies had left him behind for good. But in November 1929 came the announcement that the great silent film actor would star in a talkie feature directed by the ever-loyal James Cruze, who had helmed Arbuckle’s final four features before Labor Day 1921 and sneaked him into 1923’s
Hollywood.
Cruze had launched his own production company. “Now Hollywood wonders—and expects soon to learn—whether the passing of years has softened these opinions,” one article mused about the women’s clubs’ condemnations of Arbuckle. But Hollywood did not soon learn, for the Cruze-directed feature was never produced.

Instead, Arbuckle returned to the industry he loved by writing uncredited gags for comedy sound shorts produced by RKO. Later that year, “William Goodrich” was directing comedy shorts starring Lloyd Hamilton and other lesser lights. Over the next two years, “Goodrich” directed (and frequently wrote) twenty-seven talkies for Educational, and during his downtime he made five more for RKO. It was a Keystone pace of approximately one new movie every three weeks. In two of the RKO shorts, Arbuckle took aim at the incident that led to his banishment:
That’s My Line
and
Beach Pajamas
both feature a scheming female trapping an innocent traveling salesman in a compromising position.

Another Hollywood outcast, actress Louise Brooks,
*
starred in the ninth of the twenty-seven films, 1931’s
Windy Riley Goes to Hollywood.
She later recalled, “[Arbuckle] made no attempt to direct this picture. He sat in his chair like a man dead. He had been very nice and sweetly dead ever since the scandal that ruined his career. But it was such an amazing thing for me to come to make this broken down picture, and to find my director was the great Roscoe Arbuckle. Oh, I thought he was magnificent in films.”

Windy Riley Goes to Hollywood
was one of seven of Arbuckle’s new shorts with
Hollywood
in the title, which typically focused on a starlet breaking into the film business.
*
They allowed Arbuckle to poke fun at the studios that prevented him from appearing on-screen.
Windy Riley
is awful, and it immediately followed another actress-breaking-into-Hollywood short, so it’s easy to believe Brooks’s contention that Arbuckle mostly collected a paycheck.

However, if you watch
Bridge Wives,
made a year later and starring Al St. John as the neglected husband of a woman addicted to the national craze of bridge, you see Arbuckle utilizing sound creatively (via a radio that can neither be turned off nor destroyed), dishing up original camera moves (St. John seemingly kicks the camera’s focus onto his wife), and expertly capturing St. John’s mania. Perhaps the clever script and the fact that it starred his nephew invigorated the director.
Bridge Wives
transcended its minuscule budget, and in pacing and originality it has aged well—in marked contrast to many early sound films.

It leaves us to wonder what its director could have accomplished with more money, more time, and longer stories. He directed his final movie,
Niagara Falls,
in the summer of 1932. It was the 129th film Roscoe Arbuckle or “William Goodrich” was known to have helmed.

Some of Arbuckle’s later films lampooned the foibles of married life, a topic he likely had a bleak view of after two failed marriages. In September 1929 Doris Deane filed a second divorce complaint, this time
making no mention of another wild party but instead claiming desertion and cruelty: “He left me and went to a Hollywood hotel. I called him and asked him to come back, but he wouldn’t. He said he was through.” The marriage, though, was not officially through for another thirteen months. Around the time of the divorce, Arbuckle met his next wife. Like his first two, she was a young actress.

Born in 1905, Addie Dukes spent her early childhood in Kentucky before relocating to Chicago with her family. There the teenage Dukes won singing competitions. In 1922, the week after she turned seventeen, she married a musician. A daughter, Marilyn, was born. The couple separated, and in 1925, Addie McPhail moved with her family to Los Angeles, where she swiftly landed her first film role. She was a slim brunette with a striking jawline and, like Deane, a dimpled smile. She signed with a low-budget company and was featured prominently in two series of comedy shorts and played smaller roles in features.
*
“I was a stranger in Hollywood, so it was only my appearance that opened doors, although they never opened very wide,” she remembered. McPhail worked steadily, but the glamorous life eluded her. In the 1930 census, she was living in a Hollywood apartment with her father and her daughter.

Roscoe Arbuckle claimed he fell in love with Addie McPhail, eighteen years his junior, after seeing her in 1930 in two features. He cast her in Educational shorts. “I had feelings for Roscoe,” McPhail recalled, but “we worked together for several months at the studio before we even had lunch together.” By the time of that lunch, Arbuckle’s future wife, McPhail, had acted in a movie with his ex-wife, Deane, that he wrote and directed. Little is known of this lost comedy short beyond its fitting title:
Marriage Rows.
As it was Deane’s first film in six years and the last of her career, in retrospect it looks like a farewell present from Arbuckle to his ex.
^†
Arbuckle cast McPhail in more films, including the aforementioned
Beach Pajamas.

As their romance blossomed, Arbuckle and McPhail dined at the Brown Derby and danced at the Ambassador Hotel and the rooftop garden of the Roosevelt Hotel. He turned forty-four in 1931, and most of the “beautiful people” at the Hollywood hot spots—the new stars of the talkies—were, like McPhail, young enough to be his children, but Arbuckle still lived the high life. He still spent generously on food and drinks for himself and his friends—and any faux friends who might glom on to him. He still went out clubbing. (He was then living in an apartment a block from the heart of the Sunset Strip in what is today West Hollywood but was then unincorporated. Immune from Los Angeles police raids, the Strip was a playground of Prohibition-era nightclubs.) He still had to have a flashy luxury automobile. (In June 1929, he listed his monthly income at $500. If true, he spent his annual gross and then some on a new Lincoln town car, which cost $6,105.57.) He still enjoyed his extended adolescence. (A dubious item in a syndicated column in December 1931 featured a drawing of a nervous Arbuckle carrying a giant rolled rug and read: “‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, on a wager, stole the lobby rug of a Los Angeles hotel! He was aided by two accomplices who staged a fake murder in an adjoining room to draw attention of employees and guests of the hotel.”) And McPhail, for whom acting meant a modest income, was thrust into a world of Hollywood gossip columns, the VIP areas of exclusive clubs, and black-tie gatherings.

The biggest of those gatherings was held on November 7, 1931, when a who’s who of film notables congregated at the Biltmore Hotel ballroom for the opening event of the movie industry’s social season, Great Depression be damned. Dinner was served at 10
PM,
and dancing ended sometime around dawn. A highlight “was the dancing of the serpentine by all the guests, during which Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle became the drummer in the orchestra in an impromptu display of jazz-band talent.”

As for the exclusive clubs, none was more exclusive than the Embassy Club, an opuluent two-story space in Hollywood with a glass-enclosed rooftop lounge. The three hundred members included Charlie Chaplin, Sid Grauman, Gloria Swanson, and Roscoe Arbuckle, and only members
and their guests could enter. The Embassy was the place for celebrities—especially fading silent stars—to eat, drink, and dance. On September 19, 1931, Arbuckle was there with a screenwriter and two unidentified women, one of whom was likely McPhail. After leaving at 2 A
M,
a policeman prevented Arbuckle from driving because he thought he was intoxicated. Arbuckle smashed a bottle of alcohol that had been in his car, saying, “There goes the evidence.”
*
At the police station, he and the screenwriter passed sobriety tests, and Arbuckle insisted the officer take the same test. He did and passed. In court, Arbuckle paid a twenty-five-dollar fine for breaking the bottle. Ten years prior, his name was splashed across front pages for a very different arrest. Now, when many had forgotten him, he made a dubious comeback: F
ATTY
A
RBUCKLE
J
OKES ABOUT
M
ORNING
A
RREST
was on the front page of the
Los Angeles Times.

Before then, in August 1931, it was announced that Arbuckle and McPhail would marry—though she was not yet divorced. Some of the coverage led with the actress’s engagement and made no mention of her fiancé’s career—as if the reporter was unaware. For others, time had only coarsened their memories. An editorial in an Iowa newspaper opined, “There ought to be a law prohibiting the marriage of such types of men as Fatty Arbuckle. He has forfeited the right to the esteem of all right-thinking people.”

In the March 1931
Photoplay,
an article about Arbuckle appeared under the title “Just Let Me Work.” It summarized his struggle against censorship and his attempts to clear his name and reclaim his place in front of the cameras. “For years, his name and the news of the fight were good copy,” the article mused. “But then, inevitably, came the indifference that is worse, in ‘Fatty’s’ profession, than the most rabid condemnation. ‘Fatty’ was left to be forgotten.” The article concluded with Arbuckle making another argument for his return:

All I want is to be allowed to work in my field. It isn’t for money. I’m not broke…. My conscience is clear, my heart is clean. I refuse to worry. I feel that I have atoned for everything. You know, people can be wrong. I don’t say I’m
all
right. I don’t believe the other side is
all
right. And anyway, so much worse has happened in history to people vastly more important than I am that my little worries don’t matter, in comparison. So why should I kick? People have the right to their opinions. The people who oppose me have the right to theirs. I have the right to mine—which is that I’ve suffered enough, and been humiliated enough. I want to go back to the screen. I think I can entertain and gladden the people that see me. All I want is that. If I do get back, it will be grand. If I don’t—well, okay.

Two months later,
Motion Picture Classic
published “Isn’t Fatty Arbuckle Punished Enough?” which explained that one recent plan for Arbuckle’s return had been deterred by the protestations of women’s clubs. Still, the article tried to rally readers: “Statisticians have figured out a life sentence in prison is commuted on an average of ten years. Isn’t a decade a long sentence for any man to serve? Hasn’t Fatty suffered enough? Is he to be forever denied a chance to stage a comeback?”

Meanwhile,
Photoplay
’s James Quirk went on a radio program and asked listeners to weigh in on Arbuckle’s possible return. Over three thousand letters poured in to the magazine, overwhelmingly in the affirmative. Among the letter writers was Matthew Brady, who averred, “Arbuckle should be allowed to make his own living in his own way.” A third fan magazine,
Motion Picture,
chimed in with two articles: “Doesn’t Fatty Arbuckle Deserve a Break?” and “The Fans Want Fatty Arbuckle Back on the Screen.”

The subject of these articles had had his hopes dashed too often. In June 1931 he said, in an obvious play for sympathy, “I have no desire to return as an actor. In the dark hours of my life it was a consolation to know that I had given happiness to millions of people. There doesn’t seem to be much chance of happiness for me. No man can live and be happy without work, and all I want to do is to be permitted to use whatever
talents and training I have in the writing and direction of pictures under my own name.”