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

by Greg Merritt

  Critics at highbrow publications might have scorned such silliness, but those who worked in the film industry rarely shared this dismissive view of slapstick. When even the most serious dramas required broad pantomime and exaggerated emotions to overcome muteness, a rotund comedian in drag absorbing a custard pie garnered the respect of fellow big-screen actors and directors. Arbuckle was invited to join the prestigious Photoplayers’ Club, the initial social organization of the motion picture industry. He and Durfee were among the nearly two thousand who attended the club’s 1915 Valentine’s Day ball, and he was a semi-regular at its Wednesday dinners.

  Arbuckle acted in twenty short films in the first seven months of 1915, directing or codirecting fifteen of them. Most paired him with Normand, and many featured his familial stock company: Durfee, St. John, and Luke. However, none of the preceding performers appeared in Miss Fatty’s Seaside Lovers. Arbuckle plays a woman who is pursued by three men, one of whom is twenty-two-year-old virtual unknown Harold Lloyd.* Nor are others from his stock company in Fatty’s Tintype Tangle, which ups the violence to such heights it plays like a parody of Keystone comedies. A jealous husband has two six-shooters that function as sixty-shooters, and every bullet seems to connect with Fatty’s flesh but causes no lasting consequence. Only a point-blank shot to Fatty’s chest fells him, but he rises unbloodied and unpained to run the shooter’s hand through a meat grinder. Afterward, in perhaps his greatest stunt, Fatty shimmies up a telephone pole and scampers about on the suspended wires.

  With the breakneck filming schedule and the fact that Arbuckle and Durfee were together at work as well as home, the couple’s marriage grew strained. “We were both busy, and busy people are often nervous and irritable,” Durfee remembered. “Two busy people in a family frequently clash, not because of any dislike, but simply because they get on each other’s nerves, and neither one, because of the continual strain of work, has the time to acquire sufficient calmness to meet the other’s needs.”

  Another time she said, “He wasn’t a man who could say, ‘I’m sorry.’ And that hurt me in some of the disagreements we had before and after the trials. We’d have an argument, and the next day he’d make up for it by buying me a diamond ring or a necklace or just some little present. But all he had to do was say, ‘I’m sorry.’ He never did.”

  MABEL NORMAND FIGHTING DEATH

  Los ANGELES, Sept. 20

  While medical science waged a desperate battle for her life, Mabel Normand, famous film star and comedy queen, was unconscious and rapidly sinking today. Her physician, Dr. O. M. Justice, early today stated that the chance for her recovery was slight.

  By the summer of 1915, Sennett and Normand’s tumultuous relationship had stretched to more than four years, and it remained unacknowledged in the press. In June 1915, they finally, but privately, became engaged. In mid-September, the relationship ended with a crash. According to Minta Durfee’s account, an actress phoned Normand and told her to go to Sennett’s place immediately. She knocked on his door and he opened it in his underwear. She recognized a woman in a negligee trying to hide behind a sofa: twenty-three-year-old Mae Busch, who had arrived in Los Angeles early that year and by summer was headlining in Keystone movies. Busch hurled a vase, which met the tender flesh of Normand’s forehead. Sennett tried to quell the crimson flow, but Normand pushed him away and staggered out the door.

  Arbuckle and Durfee were in chaise lounges on the porch of their Santa Monica house when, as Durfee remembered, “we heard what we thought was an animal suffering. Then we saw the door of the taxi open, and there was the driver carrying Mabel, who was cradled in his arms, up to our porch. There was blood all over Mabel’s face and hair. It was streaming down her neck and all over her body. Naturally, we paid the driver a little something, and Roscoe gave him something extra, hoping he would keep this a secret.”

  Normand was discreetly checked into a hospital. More than a week later, a cover story appeared in newspapers:

  It was learned yesterday that Miss Normand was injured during the staging of a wedding scene at the Keystone studio. It was a typical wedding, which means there was considerable “rough stuff.” Roscoe Arbuckle, the heavyweight comedian, was the bridegroom and Miss Normand the bride…. There was a general bombardment of old shoes and rice after the ceremony, and some enthusiastic celebrator hurled a boot at the bridal couple. Arbuckle dodged the boot, and it struck Miss Normand on the head.

  Normand playing a bride adds a bitter irony to the lie the studio propagated. For years, Keystone had been generating a stream of publicity about Normand’s dangerous exploits. In recent weeks, she had supposedly killed a rattlesnake, stopped a studio burglar with a well-thrown medicine ball, bested twenty others in a five-mile ocean swim race, and fended off an octopus attached to her leg. But this time, Normand went off script, perhaps purposely giving a less credible explanation, when she told Photoplay the following April, “Roscoe sat on my head by mistake. I was unconscious for twelve days and laid up for three months. Don’t talk to me about being killed—I’ve been through it.”

  Mabel Normand acted in only one other film in 1915, but Fatty and Mabel Adrift, written and directed by Arbuckle, is the duo’s definitive collaboration, and it was a huge financial success. The usual elements are there—Fatty and Mabel as newlyweds, Al St. John as villain, Luke the dog as hero—but they occupy an ambitious disaster plot, as the newly-weds are cast on the ocean in their barely floating house. The convincing aquatic effects are carried off with a bigger-than-usual budget; shooting took place in a studio water tank and the Pacific Ocean. Arbuckle’s advancement as a director is evident in his creative flourishes, as when his shadow kisses sleeping Normand and when he and Normand appear framed by hearts (linked via Cupid’s fired arrow) and the heart frame of jealous St. John crumbles. It’s the sort of delightful whimsy the movies forgot how to do nearly a century ago.

  Before the end of 1915 Roscoe Arbuckle had made extended stays in the territories of Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, and the Philippines; he had worked in Mexico and Canada; he was the rare American who had traveled to the Far East, visiting storied metropolises in Japan and China. And yet he had never been east of Chicago. Despite his eighteen years in vaudeville, he had never set foot in the center of American theater, never visited the nucleus of American media, never experienced the city he would come to love, the city he would—for extended periods—call home, the city where he would die.

  When the train ended its journey in Grand Central Station, New York, New York, on the next-to-last day of 1915, a Keystone company of a dozen departed, including Arbuckle, Durfee, Normand, and St. John. Also in the group was Ferris Hartman, with whom the Arbuckles had toured the Orient. Arbuckle had given him the job of assistant director—a gracious gesture, as Hartman had fallen on hard times.* The company, there to make movies in nearby New Jersey, was met at the bustling station by executives of the Triangle Film Corporation, formed in July to finance, distribute, and exhibit the movies produced by three Hollywood heavyweights: D. W. Griffith, Thomas Ince (noted for his westerns), and Mack Sennett. A crowd of stunned fans swarmed as the Keystone group strolled across the concourse.

  New York City in late 1915 was home to over five million residents, many of them recent European immigrants. The city was experiencing its adolescent growth spurt; while Europe was immersed in the horrors of trench warfare, New York City was asserting itself as the world’s de facto capital. And the Keystone group stayed in the center of it, on Broadway in Times Square at the Hotel Claridge. Chauffeur-driven limousines were at their beck and call. On their second night in Manhattan, New Year’s Eve, they attended the Broadway musical Peter Rabbit in Dreamland as guests of the New York Globe, and the two thousand in attendance applauded them.

  For Arbuckle and Durfee, the stay at the Claridge was short. On one of the company’s first nights there, a drunken, belligerent Arbuckle tried to make the kitchen staff cook him a meal at 3 AM. When they wouldn’t, he yelled, “Then I’ll fi
nd a hotel that does!” He did—the Cumberland, a few blocks away, which provided them a larger suite and constant care. In recalling the incident, Durfee affixed a rare insult: “Roscoe knew he was good for publicity and the [Cumberland] manager knew it. Roscoe also knew that money could buy anything. Except good manners.”

  Filming occurred not in Manhattan but just across the Hudson in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Edison and other New York behemoths had begun shooting in Fort Lee in 1907, and independent studios had sprouted up there, building the facilities and buying the equipment to shoot, edit, and process film. By 1916 it was “Hollywood East.” Triangle leased studio space there.

  The main reason for the cross-country trip was to court publicity from the New York media. During Keystone’s first New Jersey production, a Picture-Play magazine writer spent a day on the set and interviewed the stars for what became a lengthy feature article, “Behind the Scenes with Fatty and Mabel,” which provided an intimate look at Arbuckle and Normand at work. The reporter is driven, wildly, to the Fort Lee studio by Normand:

  The studio was bristling with activity. Roscoe Arbuckle, the elephantine author-actor-director, was superintending the construction of a set, aided by Ferris Hartman, his co-worker, and a dozen prop men; Elgin Lessley, the intrepid camera man, who has the reputation of turning out the clearest films of any Keystone crank turner, was loading his magazines. A dozen rough and ready comedians were practicing falls down a stairway. The heavyweight director turned and saw us.

  “Oh, Miss Normand, get ready for the hall scenes please.”

  “Very well, Roscoe and—very good!”

  The dainty little comedienne going to her dressing room, I strolled over to the busy throng and exchanged greetings with Arbuckle.

  “How are you getting along with your new picture?” I asked.

  “Slow, but sure,” was the reply. “It’s a new theme, and I want to go at it easily. I’m not trying to be a ‘high brow,’ or anything like that, but I am going to cut an awful lot of the slapstick out hereafter. If any one gets kicked, or pie thrown in his face, there’s going to be a reason for it.”

  “How about that staircase?” I queried. “That looks as though something exciting was going to happen.”

  “Oh, nothing much,” he answered.

  “St. John and I are going to fall down it, but that’s about all. Here, I’ll show you,” and I snapped the picture as he did.

  “Oh, it’s great to be a comedian—if there’s a hospital handy!”

  As the day’s shoot got under way, the Picture-Play reporter marveled at the surreality of the experience (a pistol shot rang out, and Arbuckle said, “Oh that’s only St. John shooting apples off Joe Bordeaux’s head. I’m going to pull that stunt in my next film!”) and at the Keystone players’ ability to take falls and absorb blows without complaint (bit parts in New Jersey were played by new recruits, and they were shell-shocked by the repetition of violence, including St. John bloodying an extra’s nose with a kick). Arbuckle credited his coworkers with helping him talk through story ideas: “I certainly have a clever crowd working with me. Mabel alone, is good for a dozen new suggestions in every picture. And the others aren’t far behind. I take advice from everyone. It’s a wise man who realizes that there are others who know as much, if not more than he does himself.”

  The lasting images of the article are Arbuckle falling off the bannister—once face-first—in take after take, and in another scene, cracking heads with an actor while searching for a button, and again doing it repeatedly despite the pain.

  “How many times do you take the same scene?” the reporter asked.

  “Till I can’t do any better,” Arbuckle replied, as one assistant straightened his bow tie and another combed his hair. “Often I use 10 or 15 thousand feet of film for a two reel production…. Generally, I take a month or more to produce a picture that runs less than thirty minutes on screen.”

  The movie Arbuckle, Normand, and company were making that January day was He Did and He Didn’t, an odd but compelling departure for the team. How odd? The alternate title was Love and Lobsters, and in a sequence near the end, jealous Fatty shoves the man he suspects of cheating with his wife out a window and strangles his wife (Normand) to death before he’s shot dead. Spoiler alert: it’s a nightmare, brought on by consuming bad shellfish.

  Arbuckle went on to write, direct, and star in a total of seven movies in Fort Lee. But only one more featured Mabel Normand. She left Keystone, but Sennett—who himself wanted to get free of his New York partners—offered his ex her own independent production company, complete with facilities in Los Angeles. Wanting to focus on dramedy feature films, she accepted. Rehearsals began in June for her feature Mickey. That summer, Normand gave a “burial party” aboard her yacht. Inside a casket was a slapstick. As a funeral dirge played, “Madcap Mabel” offered her final good-byes to her old friend, and the casket was committed to the sea.

  Minta Durfee returned to Los Angeles as well, to act in Mickey and be with her mourning family; her father had died. Her husband stayed behind to shoot his last three films in Fort Lee. These pictures featured twenty-year-old Alice Lake, a five-foot-two brunette, a former dancer and native New Yorker. She resembled a younger and more spirited version of Durfee, the woman she was replacing on-screen—and may have already been replacing offscreen.

  “What’s the worst thing that can happen to an actor?” a journalist asked.

  “To arrive,” Arbuckle replied.

  “I thought that was what they all desired more than anything else.”

  “They do,” Arbuckle said, “but the trouble is, once they arrive, there isn’t much to do but to leave again. When they are coming up, the public applauds and says, ‘That chap is coming along—doing better every day.’ But once the actor is heralded as an absolute arrival, the public begins to criticize and pick flaws and expect him to better his own standard, and it is a tremendous strain. He’s simply forced to keep ahead of the public’s opinion and to spring something newer and better every season. The man or woman who can survive an ‘arrival’ is a star of the greatest magnitude.”

  “The world has Chaplinitis…. Any form of expressing Chaplin is what the public wants…. Once in every century or so a man is born who is able to color and influence the world…. A little Englishman, quiet, unassuming but surcharged with dynamite is flinching the world right now.” So Motion Picture Magazine had stated in July 1915. At Essanay in 1915, Charlie Chaplin spawned fourteen films, including his seminal The Tramp, and his vagabond persona took hold of the public imagination like none before or since. Syndicated comic strips let readers follow the Little Tramp’s adventures daily. All manner of Little Tramp merchandise flooded stores. Wearing the wardrobe and mimicking the mannerisms of the beloved character became so ubiquitous that movie theaters sponsored “Charlie Chaplin nights” wherein whole audiences were packed with Tramps.

  Chaplin the employee proved to be as vagabond as his character. He left Essanay, as he had Keystone, after one year. In February 1916 the onetime resident of a London poorhouse signed with Mutual Film Corporation for a record $10,000 weekly and a $150,000 bonus. In return he had to make one comedy short per month for twelve months—an obligation he took eighteen months to fulfill.* As “Chaplinitis” spread unabated, and as its namesake signed a deal worth $670,000 in a year, Roscoe Arbuckle—who had been, three years prior, Chaplin’s more celebrated costar—was still at Keystone with an annual salary of $26,000.

  In 1916, of filmdom’s four biggest stars, Charlie Chaplin relied on the business acumen of his older half-brother Syd, while the other three—Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Arbuckle—negotiated their own contracts. Talent agents had played supporting roles in the theatrical business since the 1890s, but they wouldn’t take hold in the film industry until the late 1920s. Here, Arbuckle would be a trailblazer. In Los Angeles he may never have encountered an agent, but in New York he shook hands with Max Hart, the leading vaudeville talent rep. Hart spec
ialized in elevating his clients—including Eddie Cantor, W. C. Fields, and Will Rogers—to Broadway. Arbuckle had retained his love for the stage while his singing voice was silenced by cinema, and Hart may have promised him Broadway stardom as great as his Hollywood fame. As for Hollywood fortune, the agent secured Arbuckle a contract with Metro Pictures worth $200,000 annually, which also brought along Durfee and St. John.

  But before Arbuckle could make the move, fate intervened in the short, portly personage of Lou Anger. Touring with his songstress wife, Anger had been a minor vaudeville comedian for a decade. As late as February 1916, he was performing onstage at a military benefit in New York City, but he was searching for a career change, and he had a connection to the film industry he was eager to exploit. Promising a better deal than Hart’s, Anger enticed Arbuckle to attend a clandestine meeting in Atlantic City. There the Keystone star met thirty-seven-year-old Joseph Schenck.

  Born in Russia in 1878, Schenck was fourteen when he immigrated to New York City with his family. He and his younger brother Nicholas operated a beer concession stand in an amusement park, offering free vaudeville performances to keep their thirsty patrons near the suds. In 1910 they purchased controlling interest in the Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey, a small, crude dump that the Schenck brothers popularized by adding better attractions. The man who advanced their financing was Marcus Loew, then the owner of a chain of vaudeville theaters and nickelodeons. Consequently, when their park began turning a profit, the brothers also invested in the fledgling movie business, buying and operating nickelodeons in partnership with Loew and financing low-budget movies, some of which were distributed by Paramount.* By 1916 Joseph Schenck was looking for a route to the Hollywood big time.

  Founded in 1914, Paramount Pictures was the first nationwide distributor of feature films. Previously, features were leased to regions or screened in rented theaters, but Paramount cultivated its own coast-to-coast theater network. Of the production companies whose movies were distributed by Paramount, the most prominent were Famous Players Film Company, run by Adolph Zukor, and the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, run by its namesake. In May 1916 half of Paramount’s stock was acquired by Zukor and Lasky. Lasky became Paramount’s vice president and primary creative force, and in 1917 Zukor would take over as president and begin to consolidate production, distribution, and exhibition into one increasingly powerful entity.