Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle

Arbuckle’s movie career truly started on an April morning in 1913, when he visited Mack Sennett’s Keystone lot in Edendale in search of work. Sennett hired him for a salary of $3 per day - considerably less than he had earned at Selig four years before. Sennett released Arbuckle’s first Keystone film, Murphy’s IOU, on 17th April 1913. However, he failed to realise his latest recruit’s potential. It was Mabel Normand, Sennett’s star performer and lover, who recognised Arbuckle’s talent. Mabel taught Arbuckle how to play to the camera, and soon the young comic replaced Ford Sterling as her regular co-star and saw his wage rise to $5 per day. By the end of the year, he had appeared in at least thirty-six comedy shorts, and his wage had risen to $200 per week. His wife joined him in September 1913. They appeared together in several films for Keystone, often supported by Arbuckle’s nephew, Al St. John.

Arbuckle added another string to his bow in 1914 by taking over directing duties when Henry Lehrman left Keystone. Legend has it that Arbuckle dismantled a camera to see how it worked before directing his first picture. That year, he appeared in half-a-dozen movies with Sennett’s newest sensation, Charlie Chaplin, while his continuing screen partnership with Normand cemented his place among Keystone’s comic aristocracy.

Chaplin’s departure in late 1914 stirred a growing discontent in Arbuckle. Sennett had paid the British comic $750 per week, but still it wasn’t enough to keep him at Keystone. Broadway comedienne Marie Dressler had earned $2,500 a week to appear in Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914), the world’s first comedy feature. And yet Arbuckle, one of Sennett’s biggest stars, received only $500 per week. That didn’t go far for a man with an insatiable appetite for the finer things in life.

The sudden - and violent - end of Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand’s romantic involvement in 1915 spelled also the end for her screen union with Arbuckle. One of their last films together, Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916), was arguably their best. But a near-suicidal Normand was finding it impossible to work for her former lover. She left Keystone to go independent, and Arbuckle signed a deal with Paramount. So keen were they to sign him, they offered him his own production company, a salary of $5,000 a week and 10% of his picture’s profits. The studio also threw in a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost to sweeten the deal.From now on, Arbuckle would make films for his own production company, Comique.

Shortly after clinching the deal, Arbuckle suffered an inflamed carbuncle on his leg. For a while, it looked as if he might lose the limb. Doctors administered morphine to ease the pain. Arbuckle became addicted to a drug which, just a few years later, would contribute to the death of fellow star Wallace Reid. Arbuckle went cold turkey and suffered horrifying withdrawal symptoms for over a week. He lost over 80lbs in the time it took him to beat his addiction.

Arbuckle’s marriage to Minta Durfee ended soon after. She blamed Lou Anger, Arbuckle’s new manager, who had negotiated his lucrative Paramount deal, but the marriage had been dying before he came on the scene. Durfee was a stay-at-home; her husband liked wild nights out with the boys. To avoid the scandal of a divorce, Durfee signed a separation agreement that paid her $500 a week.

Around this time, Arbuckle forged a new friendship with twenty-two-year-old Joseph 'Buster' Keaton, a comic who had toured vaudeville theatres since he was four. The established comic became the screen newcomer’s mentor, once again taking apart a camera to show him it worked, and teaching him how to perform for it. Their first film together, The Butcher Boy (1917), was the first of seventeen collaborations between 1917 and 1921. After long hours at work, churning out a new two-reeler every couple of months, the two friends enjoyed a riotous swirl of nightclubs and parties.

After over six months making movies in New York, Arbuckle returned to the West Coast - not to Hollywood, but to Long Beach, where he filmed at the Balboa Studio. While the location might have changed, the nightlife continued, with Arbuckle almost always paying the bill. Only WWI, during which Keaton was posted to France, interrupted the party.

In February 1919, Arbuckle re-signed with Paramount, silencing rumours he was about to join Pickford, Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Griffith at United Artists. This time, his three-year deal was worth a reported $1 million per year. He moved into the fashionable West Adams district and stocked his basement with a formidable supply of alcohol to ensure prohibition didn’t disrupt his lifestyle.

Two months after Arbuckle signed his new contract with Paramount, Keaton returned from the war and they resumed their screen partnership. But when Arbuckle decided he wanted to branch out into feature production, Keaton became Comique’s solo comic star. Arbuckle would make films for his distributor, Paramount, using material created by its team of writers.

Prohibition did little to slow Arbuckle’s dissolute lifestyle. He held regular parties at his newly purchased West Adams mansion. His first feature film, a western called The Round-Up (1920), marked a departure from his customary slapstick. Critics were unsure, but it was a box-office hit.

His popularity continued into 1921. He worked tirelessly, completing four feature films by the end of August. Life was good. The lavish parties continued, as did the public adulation, undimmed by the variable quality of his work for Paramount. Six cars filled the garage of his mansion, and he wore the finest clothes. Arbuckle was a man of unbounded generosity, for whom life must have seemed a giddy pleasure ride.

The Virginia Rappe Scandal

On 3rd September 1921, he drove to San Francisco with actor Lowell Sherman and writer/director Fred Fishback for the Labor Day weekend. He had reserved three adjoining rooms at the plush Hotel St. Francis. On Monday, 5th September, Arbuckle hosted the small, impromptu gathering that was to cost actress Virginia Rappe her life and bring his career to an abrupt and shocking end.

Four days after the party, thirty-year-old Rappe died of acute peritonitis caused by a ruptured bladder. The rupture, autopsy surgeon Dr Shelby Strange reported, was caused by “some external force.” The following day, 10th September 1921, police summoned Arbuckle for questioning and charged him with murder.

He had to suffer through three court trials conducted amid a media frenzy before receiving an acquittal that did little to salvage his reputation. The first, held less than two months after Rappe’s death, ended in a mistrial with jurors deadlocked 11-1 in favour of acquittal. Arbuckle’s defence team decided against having him testify during the second trial. It was a mistake: the jury was again deadlocked, but this time 9-3 in favour of a conviction. The third and final trial, which concluded on 12th April 1922, found the actor not guilty. He even received a written apology from the jury.

Had Adolph Zukor and Paramount stood behind their biggest star, it’s possible that Arbuckle’s career would have survived. But the spectre of censorship, and the vocal protests of fervent reformers, hung heavy over the mogul, and he made a clinical decision to abandon the funny man. He even pressured Will H. Hays, the newly appointed head of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America, into denouncing Arbuckle. By blacklisting Arbuckle from the movie industry, Zukor could show he was doing all that was necessary to rid it of its evils.

Bankrupted by enormous legal fees, Arbuckle found it virtually impossible to find work. His friends, at least, rallied around. Buster Keaton engaged him to direct Sherlock Jr., but Arbuckle, depressed, drinking heavily, and low on confidence wasn’t up to the task. Eventually, he found employment as a director, releasing several short comedies for Educational Pictures under the pseudonym William Goodrich.

In 1932, Warner Brothers signed him to star under his own name in six comedy shorts. They were successful enough to earn him a contract to star in a feature-length film. It looked as though his career might be back on the road to recovery, but after celebrating signing the contract with friends, he died in New York of a heart attack on 29^th June 1933. He was 46 years old.

Reputation and legacy

Although his name became synonymous with Hollywood scandal, Arbuckle has become recognised as a pioneering silent screen comedian and director. His blending of sophisticated staging with rough-and-tumble slapstick, his mentoring of Buster Keaton, and his early adoption of the comedian-director role place him at the centre of silent-era comedy’s development.

The intense coverage of Arbuckle’s trial - much of it highly sensationalised - influenced Hollywood’s later adoption of self-regulation, including the eventual introduction of the Production Code. While he might notbe as revered as his protégé Keaton, or Chaplin and Lloyd, he has come to be recognised as one of the founding fathers of American film comedy.

Sources: Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal that Changed Hollywood, Greg Merritt; The Day the Laughter Stopped: The True Story of Fatty Arbuckle, David Yallop.