by Greg Merritt
They may have spoken about San Francisco. They had both lived there previously, though not at the same time. Both had attended the World’s Fair. And Rappe, like Arbuckle, had likely been to Tait’s and other local nightlife destinations. They may have spoken about Los Angeles. They had likely danced in the same Southern California nightclubs and previously attended the same parties.
They had other things in common. Both had traveled to some of the same cities and made ocean journeys to Europe. They had both lived in New York City. They had lost their mothers at nearly the same age: she at eleven, he at twelve. She never knew her father; his had been absent for most of his childhood and was now deceased. And they had each launched public careers in their youth: she was a model, he a stage actor and then a singer.
As the music played and they sat together in room 1220, drinking, they probably flirted. He likely prefixed some of his sentences with “Gee”—his favorite expression, and one that made him seem endearingly childish, like his film characters. But he may also have made risqué jokes and quips, as he sometimes did, and this too was reminiscent of his usual movie role—for on-screen the childlike Fatty had adult preoccupations.
Then or some time after then, Rappe tried to enter the bathroom in room 1221. The door was locked. She heard Maude Delmont inside and asked if she could enter. The answer was no. Sherman was in the bathroom with Delmont. Rappe walked back through 1220, where Arbuckle, Blake, and Prevost were situated, and entered room 1219 to use its bathroom.
Shortly thereafter, just before 3 PM, when Mae Taube was due to return, Roscoe Arbuckle entered 1219, the bedroom he shared with Fred Fishback. When he closed the door leading to 1220, the music faded. He locked the door.
* From 1910 to 1918, approximately 1,250 Pierce-Arrow Model 66s were produced. Fourteen are known to survive today. One is Arbuckle’s, which was fully restored in recent years.
* The French-born Hirtzler had been the personal chef to Nicholas II, emperor of Russia, and Carlos I, king of Portugal, and oversaw the legendary kitchens of Sherry’s and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City before those of the St. Francis.
* Actual name: Alice Westphal. She likely went by “Blake” to disguise her café career.
* Actual name: Sadie Reiss. She chose the exotic “Zey Prevost” to bestow upon herself some Hollywood-style glamour.
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JOURNEYS: 1887-1908
The cinema is little more than a fad…. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.
—CHARLIE CHAPLIN, JANUARY 1914
Fittingly, the account of his birth, too, contains a dubious legend, one long accepted as fact. Roscoe Arbuckle purportedly weighed sixteen pounds at delivery. His alleged heft, more than twice that of the average newborn, is likely a story spawned later to support his larger-than-life persona. Arbuckle’s supposedly prodigious entrance into this world is sometimes presented as if it nearly killed his mother and left her in frail health until it did indeed eventually finish her—twelve years later! Legends breed legends.
This much is true: Roscoe Conkling* Arbuckle was born March 24, 1887, in a farmhouse near Smith Centre, Kansas, to parents William and Mary, both of whom were likely thirty-eight. He was the youngest of five children; a sixth child died at birth. His oldest sister Lola Belle (seventeen at his birth) married and moved out when Roscoe was an infant. His other siblings were Nora (sixteen); Arthur (eleven), who was already helping his father in the fields; and William Harrison (eight), known as Harry.
Both William and Mary had grown up in farming families in rural Indiana before marrying in 1867. They and their first four children left the Hoosier State in 1880. Like over a half-million other pioneers before them, they were searching for opportunities in the wide spaces of the West. The Arbuckles staked out a farming homestead just outside the recently formed township of Smith Centre in north-central Kansas, fifteen miles from the Nebraska border. Smith Centre fulfilled the needs of a county measuring nine hundred square miles that had exploded from sixty-six people in 1870 to nearly fourteen thousand ten years later. The town in 1883 had nineteen stores and three hotels.* Nearly every building was new. Nearly everyone had only just arrived.
Life proved harsh on the Great Plains. Farmers there cultivated wheat at a time when plows and reapers were pulled by horses and much work was done by hand. Children old enough to swing a sickle or tie a bushel were put to work from sunup to sundown. Because lumber was scarce, families huddled in earthen huts, always at the mercy of the elements. The Arbuckle home was later described as “a sod house of the most primitive kind.” Though in later life he would romanticize his Kansas birthplace, Roscoe Arbuckle resided there for only his first year and a half and thus remembered only the tales of his family. And there was little to romanticize; his father was frequently drunk and abusive. In the autumn of 1888, the family sold their farm and farming equipment and headed west again.
After traveling more than eleven hundred miles by horse-drawn wagon, the Arbuckles arrived in Santa Ana, California, thirty miles southeast of Los Angeles. Incorporated in 1887 during a California real estate boom, Santa Ana became the county seat of Orange County around the time the Arbuckles settled there in 1889. Its population had blossomed to nearly four thousand and businesses were thriving because the town was a key stop on the new Santa Fe Railroad “Surf Line” connecting Los Angeles to San Diego. Tracks for horse-drawn streetcars bifurcated the dirt streets. Buildings as tall as four stories with ornate frontispieces seemed to sprout overnight from the dust, monuments to optimism. The Arbuckles bought a double house. They crowded into the front half of the bottom floor and rented out the remainder of that floor and all of the second to boarders.
Almost as quickly as they had settled, William Arbuckle wandered again, heading to Northern California in search of more lucrative business opportunities. Later, Arthur and Harry went to work for him. It is unknown what emotional effect the departure of her husband had on Mary, a devout Baptist, but Roscoe later said he never felt loved as a child. Financially, William’s absence surely had an impact on the son he left behind: the youngest Arbuckle entered the workforce at age five, running errands for storekeepers. Schoolmates would remember him wheeling around a little red wagon, delivering to families the clothes washed by his mother.
He spent much time alone. His father remained out of the picture for most of his childhood. Like his brothers, his sister Nora left home in the early years after the family moved to Santa Ana. And his oldest sister, Lola, died as a young adult. He was, in essence, the only child of a single mother. Much of the time that other children used for building friendships with peers, the youngest Arbuckle spent performing errands for his mother or employed by shopkeepers.
Still, others would recall him gathering with friends to play marbles in a dirt street. In a photo of him at age eight, he looks much as he would as an adult. His head is nearly round, cheeks plump, chestnut hair parted from the left. Teasing children bestowed on him the dreaded title of overweight kids everywhere: “Fatty.” He hated it. The verbal torment he endured for his weight caused him to withdraw further.
Santa Ana had one schoolhouse, which Roscoe Arbuckle seldom attended after the second grade. Instead, he sneaked into vaudeville theaters, watching the practiced precision, smelling the greasepaint, hearing the applause, and fantasizing that he too could revel in such adoration, that he too could escape into a make-believe world of costumes and songs, backdrops and pratfalls. Adults looked down on vagabond actors performing in a train stop like Santa Ana, but the idea of playing for pay had great cachet to a lonely and curious child.
“My stage career was thrust upon me in the twinkling of an eye,” Arbuckle recalled. The purveyor of this life-changing opportunity was a Northern California performer named Frank Bacon. Before turning to acting in his midtwenties, Bacon had been a sheepherder, a newspaper publisher, and a failed political candidate. In the final four years before his death in 1922 at age fifty-eight, he was probably
America’s most popular stage actor—star and cowriter of the Broadway smash Lightnin.” His obituary would be splashed on the front pages of New York’s papers. In between, he was a character actor with his own stock company based in San Jose. The New York Herald noted, “For years and years he barnstormed from town to town with a cheap repertoire company and ate meals cooked by his wife over an oil stove. It was hard living.” It is estimated he played a thousand parts through the years, many of them rustic types, owing to his large frame and inelegant features.
In 1895, near the beginning of those “hard living” years, the Frank Bacon Stock Company arrived in Santa Ana to stage their comedy and musical revue Turned Up in the Grand Opera House. A local child was cast for a small role, but he failed to show for the final rehearsal just hours before the opening. On that September day, a chubby eight-year-old lurked in the shadows when Frank Bacon turned to him.
The child role was that of an African American. As black roles then were nearly always played by white actors in exaggerated makeup, Arbuckle’s acting debut was to be performed in blackface—but because he wore knickerbockers but was barefoot and sockless, Bacon told him to run home and retrieve black stockings to cover his calves and feet. The boy could not show up at his mother’s door when he was supposed to be in school. He began to cry. So greasepaint was used to blacken not only Arbuckle’s face but his lower legs and feet as well. That evening he stepped onto the stage bathed in the theater’s new electric carbon arc lights, feeling the eyes of paying spectators upon him.
He received fifty cents a week for three weeks of shows and told his overworked mother he’d earned it by sweeping store floors. Meanwhile, the women in Bacon’s company fawned over the cherubic child in their midst. He was stagestruck. At eight years old, Roscoe Arbuckle caught the acting bug.
His mother eventually discovered his secret, and he overcame her religious objections—a child performing with decadent adult actors!—and convinced her that acting was a lucrative supplement to selling newspapers in the streets or hawking food on the electric trains. After all, he was her only child in a home bereft of an adult male, and money was always scarce. Over the next four years, he took most of Santa Ana’s child acting roles, including accomplice to a hypnotist and a psychic, as well as his first drag performance.
Offstage, he remained shy around other kids because of his pudginess, but he was better than most at athletics despite it. For recreation, he favored swimming, at which he became proficient. On Sundays, he sang with his mother in the church choir. Though as an adult he would be irreligious, the public performances and voice-tuning practice of singing hymns aided his initial career. Nevertheless, it appeared at the time that he would grow up to be just another anonymous adult who happened, as a child, to have acted the stooge for charlatans and filled out the background of theater productions long since forgotten.
As the manager of a boarding house, Mary Arbuckle devoted most of her time to the struggling business and little to her child. Nevertheless, the youngest Arbuckle was dependent on one person, the one who had not left him—and then he lost her. Roscoe Arbuckle was twelve years old when his mother died at age fifty in 1899. His need for maternal love would carry over into adulthood, when his first wife was a nurturing presence and he developed a strong bond with his first mother-in-law.
After his mother’s death, he stayed for several weeks in Santa Ana with his sister Nora, her much older husband, Walter St. John, and their then-five-year-old son Alfred, who would grow up to be a ubiquitous supporting actor in his uncle’s movies. Then Arbuckle was sent north to live with the father who had abandoned him. William Arbuckle owned a small hotel in Watsonville, a town of thirty-five hundred on California’s central coast. On the lonely 360-mile train ride, the boy knew not what to expect when he arrived. Though he would eventually make other gut-wrenching journeys from Southern to Northern California, this was his first.
As instructed, when the train stopped at the Watsonville station he stayed in his seat until he was ushered off. Sitting forlornly on a bench at the station with his cardboard suitcase, he waited for his father. Hours later, a railroad worker took pity on the sad and frightened 180-pound boy and ushered him to William Arbuckle’s hotel a few blocks away, where the boy learned that his father had sold the establishment and moved away. He was all alone in a strange town. He had two dollars and fifty cents. The desk clerk arranged for him to eat with the hotel staff and gave him a small room off the dining hall. In return for odd jobs, he would earn room and board.
He was enrolled at the local school, though as was his habit, he rarely attended. Encouraged by the hotel’s dining hall singer, who believed the boy had a beautiful singing voice, Arbuckle sang for tips from guests when other hotel chores were scarce. He also practiced juggling and pratfalls. Entering an amateur contest at the local theater, he sang two songs, and then, uncertain of what to do when the audience demanded an encore, he improvised, dancing, rolling, and leaping about the stage, much to the amusement of all. This was the first time he experienced the beguiling feeling of making an audience laugh on his own, and it may also have been when he realized his fatness—the cause of so much distress when among other kids—could be an advantage. Admiring his fearless athleticism and self-effacing good humor, spectators rooted for the blubbery, baby-faced boy. Not wanting the laughs and applause to die, he continued until the giant hook (an amateur-night staple) reached for him from offstage. Dodging it, he somersaulted into the orchestra pit. He won first prize: five dollars. Soon he was an amateur-night regular.
Stories vary regarding how William Arbuckle returned to his son’s life. Shortly after Mary’s death, the family patriarch wed another woman named Mary, a widow who went by “Mollie” and had six children of her own. They would have two additional children together, in 1900 and 1903, the last when Mollie was forty-four. Before the arrival of the final two, the 1900 census listed eleven family members at the Arbuckles’ rented farmhouse in Santa Clara—including thirteen-year-old Roscoe C., who found himself in the regular presence of his father for the first time since he was an infant.
Located forty-five miles south of San Francisco, the future hightech capital of Santa Clara was then devoted to citrus farming. Again Arbuckle was teased for his weight, a torment compounded by his father’s insistence he wear overalls and ragged shoes. One Santa Clara resident remembered, “Whenever a baseball went over the fence or out of the lot, the other lads put up a cry of ‘Go get it, Fatty,’ and with kicks and punches, sent the big boy on his way after the ball. He always was punched and kicked by the other boys.” Again he seldom attended school. Instead, he fished and swam in a nearby pond. He toiled on the farm, as did his father and brother Harry. He cleaned a saloon. And he served coffee and donuts at the restaurant in the hotel his father bought. These years would inform his future film characters, as he later played lazy country bumpkins in overalls and lowly laborers, including hotel and restaurant workers.
Arbuckle still pursued show business, which then extended to not just shilling for medicine shows and traveling hypnotists but also dancing jigs or belly-flopping onto hard saloon floors for beer and cigarettes. In his early teen years, he again sang in amateur shows, this time at the Victory Theatre in nearby San Jose. The stage was a means to overwhelm his shyness, to replace isolation with an audience, and to find the love—if conveyed only in cheers and applause—that he didn’t feel at home.
“He was aggravatingly lazy as a boy. Neither his father’s cuffings nor my pleadings could cure it,” his stepmother remembered. “Roscoe didn’t seem to fit in anywhere.” She spoke openly about what a loveless, frequently terrifying home it was for her stepson: “His father used to beat him—and he often deserved it.” In a horrifying glimpse at the brutality, she claimed she saved the boy’s life once when “his father was choking him and beating his head against a tree.” When the adolescent Arbuckle was fortunate, his alcoholic father would only insult him for his excess weight and not draw his bel
t or his fists. Still, the sting of words—including William’s contention that someone else must have fathered Roscoe—lingered far into adulthood. The abused boy longed for an escape.
In 1903 Arbuckle received an offer from theater owners Sid and David Grauman. Father David and teenage son Sid had migrated to Canada’s Yukon Territory in 1898 during the Klondike Gold Rush. There they staked a gold claim but found greater fortune staging vaudeville shows and boxing matches for the miners. In San Francisco two years later, the Graumans bought a downtown store, moved in eight hundred chairs, and christened the Unique Theatre, a vaudeville house.* In February 1903 they opened a Unique Theatre in San Jose. They had heard Arbuckle sing at the Victory, and they soon enticed him to perform at the new Unique, singing illustrated songs for $17.50 weekly.
Illustrated songs were precursors to music videos. A singer performed onstage accompanied by either a pianist or a record while a series of slides combining photography and painting were projected on a screen, illustrating the lyrics. Offering two advantages over early motion pictures—(painted) color and verbal sound—they were popular in the early twentieth century, running between vaudeville acts or movies, buying time for the changing of stage backdrops or film reels. Audiences often sang along, and just as music videos would boost CD sales eighty years later, illustrated songs fueled sheet music sales. And for Arbuckle, performing these numbers in several vaudeville shows daily allowed him to hone his baritone voice.
It’s likely that Arbuckle was also being exposed to early motion pictures. Between their first public projections in 1895 and the rise of nickelodeons in 1905, movies were seen primarily in vaudeville shows. Typically, they were prizefights, travelogues, or gag reels lasting as little as a minute. Their novelty waned rapidly, so “flickers” were wedged into the middle of bills with dancing girls, jugglers, comedians, and illustrated-song singers like Arbuckle, just another diversion in the theatrical lineup. But as the young performer witnessed the impact of such transformational inventions during his early years—not just motion pictures but also electric lights, telephones, phonographs, and automobiles—he developed a curiousity about technology that he retained throughout his life.
