DRETZKA: Hollywood’s first media victim

In the early days of television — before color dominated the electronic palette and talk shows competed with soap operas for daytime real estate — hardly a station didn’t make use of the one- and two-reel comedies that were created during the first 30 years of America’s cinematic century. Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Ben Turpin, Buster Keaton and the Keystone Cops were as popular and recognizable in the ’50s as Captain Kangaroo and Buffalo Bob Smith. Three decades past their prime, the names Mack Sennett and Hal Roach were as synonymous with family entertainment as Walt Disney.

And again, 20 years later, these same comedy shorts — in combination with ’50s-era sitcoms and cowboy serials — would provide a foundation for cable’s emerging superstations. Even today, they still sell pretty well in the video and DVD marketplace.


As prehistoric as these and talkie shorts featuring the Little Rascals and Three Stooges seemed, their appeal has endured for one simple reason: They were then, and still are, every bit as entertaining as most of the original sitcoms airing opposite them on larger, network-owned stations.

One name, though, among those great talents of the Silent Era is better known, not for his work on-screen, but his tragic personal tale off-screen.

The biography of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle — whose star once eclipsed even the great Chaplin — is just such a tale. The trajectory of the heavyweight comic’s meteoric rise and fall has already provided journalists with some fascinating material.

The most recent work to focus on Arbuckle’s almost lifelong battle for respect is Jerry Stahl’s “I, Fatty.” If all one knows about Arbuckle is his alleged involvement in the sordid death of a young woman in San Francisco — over one Labor Day weekend, nearly 83 years ago — then this novel will be a revelation. It also will help explain why, when it comes to the bottom line, the power elite of Hollywood 2004 behaves little different than those who ruled the Hollywood of 1921.

Based solely on a chronological timeline of Trials of the Century, Arbuckle’s falls roughly between those of Sacco & Vanzetti (1921) and Leopold & Loeb (1924). In the ensuing 79 years more than two dozen of these ostensibly singular trials would be conducted in the name of justice and the media’s First Amendment right to profit from the tragedies of others.

The thing that differentiated Arbuckle’s case from the half-dozen Trials of the Century that preceded it — including those of socialite Harry Thaw and the Chicago Black Sox — was that it featured a major Hollywood star, and the hysteria that surrounded the proceedings was fuelled by special-interest groups itching to control an entire industry. It took three separate trials, over a span of nearly three years, for a San Francisco jury to clear Arbuckle of any wrongdoing in the death of Virginia Rappe. So incensed was the third panel over the prosecution’s behavior that the jurors composed a letter wishing Fatty success and asking the public to accept “the judgment of fourteen men and women, who have sat listening for 31 days to evidence, that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.”

Today, almost no one today remembers that part of the story.

By the time of the final verdict, the damage to Arbuckle and the fledgling movie industry already was complete. Former U.S. postmaster general Will Hays had already been recruited by studio executives to police Hollywood’s public image, and head off an army of conservative politicians and religious leaders at the Cahuenga Pass. Before the ink was dry on the original indictment, Hays conspired with a compliant Joseph Schenck, Adolph Zukor and Jessy Lasky to blacklist their falsely accused star and pull all of his hit movies from distribution. Even with the subsequent exoneration, the 36-year-old actor’s career was effectively over, and he was ruined financially and emotionally.

Hays’ draconian Production Code loomed over Hollywood’s creative community for the next 30 years, while radio and television delivered the misadventures of celebrities into America’s living room at lightning speed. As William Randolph Hearst reportedly bragged to Arbuckle’s close friend and defender, Buster Keaton, “the Examiner has sold more newspapers because of the Arbuckle case than the sinking of the Lusitania.”

All of this would qualify as old news — fully documented on dozens of true-crime sites on the Internet — if it weren’t for two things: 1) even 80 years removed from his exoneration, few people alive today are cognizant of the fact that Arbuckle not only didn’t rape Rappe, but his rumored sexual aid, a Coke bottle, never existed; and 2) the publication last month of Stahl’s novel, which sheds new light on the man, the case and the Halcyon early years of Hollywood filmmaking.

Stahl is a novelist, journalist and screenwriter whose own detours into drug-induced depravity resulted in the book and movie “Permanent Midnight.” Stahl apparently found a kindred spirit in Arbuckle who, despite all his athleticism and directorial savvy, was a prisoner to booze and then-legal heroin (prescribed to ease the pain of a botched medical procedure). The author must have seen, as well, parallels to today’s generation of studio swine, who would trade their children for a shot at a $100-million opening weekend.

If there’s a subtext to Stahl’s story, beyond the personal angle, it’s the inference that very little has changed in Hollywood since the Silent Era gave way to talkies. Greed, hypocrisy and cowardice — when mustered in defense of the bottom line — will always get you center table at Spago.

In his Introduction, though, Stahl is in more of a confessional mood:

“I was once picked up by the police on Fatty Arbuckle’s front lawn. Of course, by then, Fatty — who preferred to be called Roscoe —had moved on. Arbuckle died in 1933. And, this was the mid-eighties, before the dawn of the Crack Era. Street dealers dotted that no-longer-upscale strip of Adams Boulevard, near downtown Los Angeles, flagging down kids to sell them loads, a potent combo of Doredin and Codeine 4. …

“Fatty’s pad, by the time your author landed facedown in front of it, had already been converted to a stately outpost of Christ called Amat House. Amat served as a home base for a batch of Vincentian priests, a sect devoted to chaste men doing charitable works. These, apparently, didn’t include rushing out to aid drug-crazed strangers in moments of distress — though I do recall a couple of startled white faces peering from a pushed-aside curtain as an officer bade me lie “lips down” on the sidewalk. …

“All of which would mean absolutely nothing if not for the fact that three-quarters of a century earlier, in 1916, a fetus-faced, five-foot-seven, 375-pound millionaire was shooting heroin and contemplating his ruin in the very chamber from which the strange white faces stared down at my own. Who knows but that Arbuckle, nodding in some bygone era, closed his eyes and heard the cries of drug abusers three generations unconcealed stumbling down the sidewalk of the house he occupied?”

From here, Stahl imagines a scenario that required the complicity of Arbuckle’s trusted manservant, Okie, and his ability to ply his boss with enough heroin to extract the memoirs contained in “I, Fatty.” As the author further advises, though, “the reality of how the manuscript came to exist at all can never be known for certain. And to the truth of the document you’re about to read, the jury’s out on that, too.”

In constructing Arbuckle’s nearly 280-page monologue, Stahl sticks to most of the known facts and legends of Arbuckle’s life, but embellishes them with what he perceives would be the disgraced star’s wistful and self-deprecatory take on the circumstances. The 20th-century horror show begins with the future star’s hard-scrabble upbringing in rural Kansas, where an alcoholic father held the giant child personally responsible for his wife’s ill health and abhorrence of any further sexual intimacy. The punishment for being born large was almost constant beatings and verbal abuse, which only would end when the family moved to California and an 8-year-old Fatty would escape into the sanctuary of show business.

Arbuckle proved to be a natural, whether he was impersonating female characters on stage, leading illustrated sing-alongs or performing the kind of unexpectedly balletic stunts that would become his trademark. Arbuckle was loyal to the theater and his much-traveled stock company for years, but surrendered to the lure of movie money after being forced to move in with his wife’s family to make ends meet. It was at Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studio that he discovered his own genius.

In the company of Mabel Normand and fellow-Kansan Keaton, Arbuckle would move from one- to two-reelers, and his bankroll would grow in kind. He was a master of the pie fight — which the author attributes to an unexpected encounter with Pancho Villa — and famously gave sartorial definition to Chaplin’s Little Tramp. These refugees from the stage would turn slapstick into art form.

Stahl’s descriptions of life on Sennett’s farm are consistently hilarious and often illuminating. Arbuckle’s troubles begin when he signs his pact with the devil, who arrives in the form of Paramount czar Adolph Zucker and his hand maidens, Joseph Schenck, Lou Anger and Jesse Lasky.


Stahl positions the events that led to Arbuckle’s demise in a way that leaves room for liberal interpretation by readers on the true sponsors of the Labor Day debacle, and whether Rappe was merely a dupe or co-conspirator in her own accidental demise. It’s also possible to come away from the middle chapters assuming that Fatty’s lying to protect whatever’s left of reputation, and was too drunk to remember if he inadvertently did something to accelerate Rappe’s death. She was a notorious Hollywood party girl and con artist, and, internally, the failed actress was an autopsy waiting to happen.

Before that fateful weekend in 1921, Arbuckle had been forced by his soon-to-be-former bosses at Famous Players to complete three movies simultaneously. Exhausted, he wanted nothing more than to hop in his new Pierce-Arrow convertible and escape L.A. for a few days of relaxation in Hearst’s backyard, San Francisco. Unfortunately for Arbuckle, Lasky and Zucker had quietly scheduled Paramount Week — a good-will event, designed to comfort those fans fearful of Hollywood’s moral decay — the same holiday period, and the moguls were enraged that their biggest star was taking a pass on it.


“A rash of scandals had been plaguing the movie business, beginning with Charlie Chaplin’s marriage to his child bride, the pregnant and 16-year-old Mildred Harris,” Arbuckle recalls. “Then Mary Pickford divorced her movie-star hubby, Owen Moore, and married Douglas Fairbanks five minutes later. AMERICA’S SWEETHEART A HUSSY, the headlines screamed.

“Meanwhile, at Famous Players-Lasky, Mary’s baby brother, Jack, was implicated when his lovely wife, Olive Thomas, swallowed arsenic and killed herself. Unable, according to rumors, to tolerate another day of her husband’s out-of-control cocaine addiction. To make matters worse for the Lasky lot, the police arrested the notorious ‘Captain Spaulding, Drug Dispenser to the Stars.’ The Captain, no fool, threatened to name names if charges weren’t dropped. Nobody questioned that Zukor himself had shelled out half a million in hush money to keep his studio’s reputation from sinking any further.”

It soon would, of course, not only with the travails of Fatty, but also with the similarly ill-timed murder of fellow Paramount director William Desmond Taylor (another friend of Normand’s) and drug-related death of popular actor Wallace Reid. Together, Hearst and Hays couldn’t have asked for a better foundation on which to build a case for the cleansing of Hollywood.

“I, Fatty” may overflow with insider gossip and speculation on the often sordid affairs of the young movie industry’s biggest stars, but it also reveals how exciting it was to be an actor or director in Hollywood’s formative years. As channeled through Stahl, Arbuckle’s memory is remarkably lucid, and his sense of pre- and post-gallows humor remains wonderfully intact. How much of his memory has been clouded by Okie’s narcotic Dictaphone remains an open question, even as the novel approaches its final graceful pratfall and Fatty’s career is enjoying something of a resurgence, albeit under the alias William Goodrich.

Anyone who loves the movies will come away with this novel with a new respect for Arbuckle and the anarchic beginnings of the cinematic art. They’ll be far less impressed with the moguls who built their studios on broken promises, unethical behavior and horrific greed, and whose names are still revered in the hallways of Hollywood’s major studios.

Thanks to Stahl and other biographers, we now understand how big a void was left when Roscoe Arbuckle’s overworked heart finally gave out. Perhaps it’s time for the many active and recovering substance abusers in the Motion Picture Academy to forgive Fatty — Normand, too, for that matter — and posthumously honor their artistry and contributions to the craft. It will give everyone a last laugh.

“I, Fatty” is published by Bloomsbury and retails for $23.95. If you live in or near Chicago, Second City is staging “Fatty Arbuckle’s Spectacular Music Revue” this month.

***

A decade under the influence: For those of you who managed to survive the ’60s with most of your brain cells intact, the movies and videos showcased in Irv Slifkin’s voluminous “VideoHound’s Groovy Movies” will be recalled with varying degrees of delight, embarrassment and horror. The common denominator here is the near-certainty that at least one key player involved in each of these titles from the “psychedelic era” was stoned out of his/her mind when the project was conceived, written, filmed or edited.

Slifkin has filtered out some of the more exploitative genre concoctions — many as idiotic as the worst specimens of blaxploitation — and makes a case for the worthiness of those that made the cut. Indeed, several of the surviving titles are quite special, indeed. Still, what’s made painfully obvious here is that Hollywood producers had a much more difficult time crossing the generation gap than some of their European counterparts, who weren’t nearly as fixated on paisley-patterned nightmares, bearded radicals and braless hippie chicks.

Fortuitously, though, Hollywood’s inability to communicate with its Baby Boomer children/customers effectively opened the door to such film-school wunderkind as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and John Milius. Ultimately, these and other more open-minded filmmakers would make Hollywood relevant to the same generation of Americans it exploited in slop like “R.P.M. (Revolutions Per Minute),” “Wild in the Streets,” “Three in the Attic,” “Psyche-Out” and “Skidoo.”

Needless to say, the book’s cover is designed to appeal to those audiences whose only knowledge of the ’60s comes from their parents’ self-censored memories, and repeated viewings of “Easy Rider,” “Woodstock” and the Austin Powers trilogy. Roger Corman, who had a better fix on the era than most filmmakers, wrote the book’s foreword.

(“VideoHound’s Groovy Movies” is published by Visible Ink and retails for $24.95.)

Gdretzka@yahoo.com

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