by Greg Merritt
If it had been about just one man, even one as famous as Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, his presumptive return never would have created the momentous firestorm it did. This was about much more. It was America’s first great battle in a culture war. Society was changing fast—too fast for many—and Hollywood, with its drugs, its sexual libertinism, its flaunting of Prohibition, its disrespect for authority, and its moral relativism, was at the forefront of this change. Or so the editorialists said, over and over again—and with renewed vigor once Wallace Reid’s drug addiction became common knowledge. Motion pictures themselves were a new and powerful force, having soared to prominence within the previous decade, and people were still coming to terms with a technology that permitted Fatty to ogle a young woman on thousands of screens. The outrage was great that a man who now represented the worst of Hollywood immorality could be welcomed back onto those screens.
Arbuckle’s heights of euphoria on December 20 were supplanted by depths of despair the following weeks when he realized his hopes of returning to the life he knew before had been dashed. An article in January portrayed Arbuckle as depressed. He had gone from the stately West Adams mansion, his home during the height of his fame and fortune, to “a little obscure cabin in Hollywood” where he lived with Luke the loyal dog. “I just want to work and to make people laugh—and to eat,” he said. The day that article ran, January 10, was the day he began acting in Handy Andy. It was never released and likely never finished.
Arbuckle would retreat behind the camera. On January 31 came the announcement that he had signed to direct five shorts for Reel Comedies, Joseph Schenck’s new company, incorporated the day prior. Among those backing the venture were Lou Anger, Buster Keaton, and, again, Gavin McNab. The movies would be distributed by Educational Pictures, a small company previously known for instructional films. Arbuckle said that directing was “a chance to make good in the right way”—and that he was done with acting. A reporter who talked with the ostracized actor several times during this period remembered, “He was very bitter over what he believed was injustice, which financially and professionally ruined him. I had never seen a more hopeless man.”
Arbuckle did appear in a film in 1923—and for Paramount. James Cruze, director of five of his Paramount features, made Hollywood, a comedy feature about the struggles to find movie industry success. It was loaded with cameos by celebrities, including Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford. But one uncredited bit part stole the show. When the hapless heroine joins a casting cattle call, an unrevealed overweight man steps aside to give the nervous wannabe his place. After she strikes out, the man steps up to the casting director’s window for his turn, only to have the window slammed in his face. He stares at CLOSED on the window before the camera reveals his identity: Roscoe Arbuckle. “It was a superbly forcible touch, inserted in the picture without comment,” a reviewer opined. “Whether one feels sympathy or contempt for Arbuckle, one cannot deny that this was a vitally dramatic moment in Hollywood.” The movie played with no notable protests. Instead, Arbuckle’s appearance was applauded at screenings, including in San Francisco, two years after Labor Day.
Ultimately, Arbuckle was not credited for his work directing, writing, and producing shorts for Reel Comedies, as publicizing his involvement would provide little upside and raise the potential for protests. His unacknowledged efforts began in February 1923 with Easter Bonnets, which allowed him to finally cast the now-twenty-three-year-old actress Doris Deane, whom he had met and courted on the steamship Harvard the day after Labor Day 1921. The next five shorts starred Edwin “Poodles” Hanneford, a circus clown noted for his horse-riding tricks. The work occupied Arbuckle’s time and provided a creative outlet, but it brought little of the joy he had experienced as a movie star.
He still desired the spotlight, and he needed the large paychecks that came with it to pay down his debts. In May he signed on for a four-week stint at Chicago’s upscale Marigold Gardens cabaret club, telling corny jokes punctuated with singing and dancing. When Arbuckle the vaudevillian first acted in the then-debased medium of motion pictures in 1909, it was the equivalent of slumming. Now he had traveled full circle: he was a former movie star from glamorous Hollywood returning to the decaying world of vaudeville. The money was good—a guaranteed $2,500 per week and more if the gate was strong—but all but $500 of that went straight to the IRS, to which he owed $30,000 in back taxes.
The first time the crowd of two thousand at Marigold Gardens saw Arbuckle at the debut performance on June 4, he was in a movie on a screen running toward the camera, growing ever larger, and then the real man burst through the paper screen in three dimensions. The resulting ovation lasted fifteen minutes. “This is the first smile I’ve had in a long, long time,” he told the audience. The show’s producer remembered opening night: “A little girl strolled over to present him with a rose. The comedian went down on his knees and with tears streaming down his face he kissed the child in gratitude. The entire audience, including myself, was in tears.” That producer admitted he had friends planted about the auditorium on opening night to foster applause in case the crowd was cold; the ringers were not needed.
The show was popular, but the attempt to transfer some of Fatty’s slapstick antics to the stage was not deemed an artistic success. “The people have been very kind,” Arbuckle said. “They have come out to see me and they have been extremely generous in their applause. In return I have done my best to amuse them in a poor act.” The poor act included him in a ballerina dress and the return of Keystone’s custard pies. Failing to shy away from misogynistic humor, he sang, “Our women are lean and fat, and some are darn good-looking. But the only use we have for them is when they do our cooking.”
He took the act east to a boardwalk cabaret in Atlantic City, where he pulled in $6,000 weekly. Minta Durfee was set to perform at a competing club, billing herself as “Mrs. Fatty Arbuckle.” This angered the owner of the club hiring Mr., and he tried to forbid Mr. from seeing Mrs. When the club owner requested that Arbuckle sue his wife for using his full name, Arbuckle told the press, “She stood by me in my time of trouble. Sue her? I’ll be at the train [when she arrives] with a bouquet of roses.” He was.
The couple had remained close friends, but there was no chance of them resuscitating their marriage. On November 2, 1923, Durfee filed for divorce in Providence, Rhode Island. The state was then the Reno of the East, noted for its relatively easy divorces—but not easy enough for Durfee. Her preliminary divorce was rescinded when she failed to prove she had lived in Rhode Island for four years.
In a letter from Arbuckle to Durfee dated November 18, 1923, it’s clear he was regularly sending her money as contractually obligated by their separation agreement. The tone is affectionate toward his divorcing wife and her family, and he reveals a bluer strain of humor than his films could capture, closing with “Well kid don’t get discouraged, keep a stiff upper lip, that’s the only thing of mine that is stiff, I think somebody put salt peter in my coffee. Kisses and flowers, will write soon. Dingle-tit Roscoe.” Earlier in the letter, he explained why he had “been busier than a dog with turpentine in his ass”: “I have been thrown in at the last minute to direct Buster’s next picture and I have been very busy trying to get the story ready.”
Fatty Arbuckle is now a Buster Keaton director under the name Will B. Good, so maybe he will.
—HERALD-STAR (STEUBENVILLE, OHIO), JANUARY 17, 1924
Released in April 1924, Sherlock Jr. was Buster Keaton’s third feature film,* the first on which he alone was credited as director, and today it is regarded as one of the masterpieces of silent cinema. In this surreal comedy, Keaton plays a movie projectionist who dreams that he climbs into a projected movie and enters its storyline. The action and stunts are breakneck; the effects are astonishing. And the original codirector was Keaton’s close friend and mentor, Roscoe Arbuckle. In his autobiography, Keaton wrote:
We were about to start Sherlock Jr. in 1924 whe
n I decided that I must do something for my pal, Roscoe…. Roscoe was down in the dumps and broke…. I suggested to Lou Anger that we give Roscoe a job directing Sherlock Jr. Lou said it could be arranged, but that we better get him to use some other name. I suggested “Will B. Good,” but this was considered too facetious, so we changed it to “Will B. Goodrich.”* The experiment was a failure. Roscoe was irritable, impatient, and snapped at everyone in the company. He had my leading lady, Kathryn McGuire, in tears dozens of times a day. One day, after Roscoe went home, the gang of us sat around trying to figure out what to do next. It was obvious that we couldn’t make the picture with a man directing whose self-confidence was gone, whose nerves were all shot.
In one of the two scenes Arbuckle likely directed with McGuire, she is abducted by her butler and taken to a shack where the implication is the butler is about to rape her. Helming this scene may have been particularly stressful for Arbuckle, as he would have perceived that everyone was focused on him. He lasted no more than three weeks codirecting Sherlock Jr. before his best friend fired him. “He hadn’t recovered from those trials, of being accused of murder and nearly convicted,” Keaton said. “It just changed his disposition. In other words, it made a nervous wreck out of him.”
Arbuckle wrote and directed four comedy shorts in 1924. All starred Al St. John, who was credited as writer and director in his uncle’s place. All also featured Arbuckle’s new (and long-delayed) love interest, Doris Deane. She was thirteen years his junior, born Doris Dibble in Wisconsin in 1900. Deane was the only child of peripatetic parents: in 1910 the family was renting a house in Iowa, where her father worked in a saloon, but by her high school years they lived in Butte, Montana, then a copper-mining boomtown. Subsequently, they relocated to Southern California.
There, under her new name, nineteen-year-old Deane nabbed her first film role. She was a tall and thin brunette with dimples and an easy smile. She dreamed of movie stardom. Things were looking up when she met Arbuckle on the Harvard in 1921. One week prior, her second film, Universal’s The Shark Master, was released, and she had a major part. But only two additional roles followed before Arbuckle began casting her in comedy shorts in 1923.
She was best known for a flurry of publicity in December 1922 because of her rumored engagement to Jack Dempsey, then the world’s heavyweight boxing champion. Chummy photos of the pair appeared on sports pages. The rumor was neither confirmed nor denied, but she would marry another heavyweight.
“Weeks ago I saw Fatty alone in a boat fishing off Catalina shore. Before that several times I had encountered him on solitary walks in the Hollywood Hills.” So wrote a journalist in the summer of 1924. “He was getting a grip on himself. By such lonely vigils he achieved readjustment to begin once more where he started years since.” Bolstered by his young love interest, steady work, and improving financial strength, Arbuckle’s mood lifted. When he wasn’t walking in the hills, he again drove a luxury automobile, as he owned a $9,000 McFarlan Knickerbocker Cabriolet, fire-engine red with FATTY license plates.*
In June 1924 thirty-seven-year-old Roscoe Arbuckle returned to Alexander Pantages’s vaudeville troupe, which he had first traveled with as a teen twenty years prior.* Now he would perform a comic monologue as the lineup’s star attraction. At his first show, at the Pantages Theatre in San Francisco, he was greeted by an eleven-minute ovation. Even Matthew Brady backed off, saying the three trials were “the only way an accused man could be cleared of a horrible charge” and “I would rather build up than tear down and help than hurt, and Arbuckle has been condemned and hurt enough.”
“San Francisco’s reception of me is, I think, just evidence of the American fair play spirit that never dies—given time,” Arbuckle said. “I’ve had my dose of foul play. Now it’s fair play.” When asked if his films would now be released, he answered, “I hope not. They would be old stuff now…. I want to make new comedies. Better pictures. I’m more serious now than I was in the old days.” He exercised daily, and he claimed to have lost twenty pounds in the previous three weeks, all in an effort to get in shape for his “reappearance on the screen.”
In Utah, he didn’t avoid the topic on everyone’s mind, joking, “No, I don’t belong to either the Republicans or Democrats; no more parties for me.” He said he hoped to return to movie stardom “just as soon as I recover from the Hays fever.”
It wasn’t all joviality and applause. In some communities, censors fought to keep him off stages just as they had screens. In Kansas City, Missouri, as a resolution was being read before the city council to bar him from local theaters, the subject of the ban appeared and asked to speak. Permission granted. He asked the council for a “chance to live a clean, decent life and pay my debts” and concluded with, “I come to you as Mary Magdalene—asking forgiveness.” After the council peppered him with questions, the resolution was defeated ten to five. When his appearances in Quincy, Illinois, were protested by a local minister, he asked to testify from that minister’s pulpit about his own turn to Christianity since the famous party. Permission denied.* The Quincy shows drew large crowds.
In Cleveland, he headlined a bill filled out by a local singing/dancing/comedy duo that included a twenty-one-year-old British immigrant named Lester Hope. Arbuckle was impressed enough by the youngsters’ blackface act to recommend them to a vaudeville producer. Lester later changed his name to Bob and became one of the most famous entertainers who ever lived.
On his way to shows in Louisville, Kentucky, the train that carried Arbuckle stopped in Logansport, Indiana, long enough for him to talk with an enterprising local reporter and to receive three telegrams (all collect, two from Durfee) from a messenger boy who called him “Mr. Fatty.” He bummed a cigarette and a light from the reporter, but he had difficulty finding a single among his roll of hundreds when he paid the messenger. He said he envied the creative freedom of Charlie Chaplin, who could dote on his very occasional projects at United Artists, and he stated he would be returning to Los Angeles to act in a movie (untrue) and that he had sworn off booze (untrue) and women (untrue).
This had become his practiced storyline over the previous two and a half years, for to him his return was all about his reform. If people believed he was a changed man, why couldn’t they accept him again as a comedic film character? A telegram to a Toledo theater showed Arbuckle’s strategy at work:
Appeal to you as one of several in motion picture industry to help me place before followers of motion picture screen my request for permission to return to pictures. May I ask privilege of use of your stage for a few minutes daily for one week to talk personally to motion picture fans and if possible obtain consensus of opinion regarding my return to my life work, motion pictures.
The theater responded in the affirmative. “I don’t claim to be an angel,” Arbuckle told the appreciative audience three days later, just before reading them the third trial jury’s statement regarding his innocence. “I was a young fellow whose head had been turned around by success. I had plenty of money and there were plenty of fair weather friends to ‘yes’ me. I simply was led into bad company—and for that I already have paid dearly.”
This spin was different from his strategy during the trials. Under oath, he had claimed to be an “angel,” assisting an ill Rappe. Now he said that he’d been ushered down the wrong path, seemingly blaming his connection to the tragedy on his playboy lifestyle. As to him being a “young fellow” in September 1921, he was thirty-four.
Durfee once stated that early in her marriage her husband did not share her love of books, but in a letter to her dated September 13, 1924, he mused on literary matters. He panned Émile Zola’s L’assommoir (“Of all the morbid, filthy, dirty smelly books I ever read, it is the worst”) and claimed he was going to buy Edward Gibbon’s gargantuan The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when he returned to Los Angeles, joking, “I would certainly delight to read about something that fell harder than I did.”
Arbuckle’s tour t
hrough the Pacific Northwest was a bust. By a unanimous vote, the Portland, Oregon, city council banned him. When the censorship board forbade him from stages in Tacoma, Washington, he and the theater sought a court injunction. Injunction denied. Appealed to the federal court. Injunction denied. He returned to Los Angeles and performed at the Pantages Theatre there.
On September 4, 1924, Arbuckle wrote Durfee. Referring to her by his term of endearment “Mint,” he said he “received contract okay” and went on to discuss a crucial component of it: how he intended to send a check to her each week. This appears to have been a new financial arrangement. They agreed that he would pay her 15 percent of his earnings for the first year and 20 percent thereafter, and “not less than $200 per week” until she remarried or until death terminated the contract. (Their 1919 separation agreement had paid her $500 weekly, but he had a lucrative movie deal then.) He mentioned that she would be sailing on the ocean liner Majestic and said, “I envy you that trip”—which he was financing. That November, Durfee was in Paris, where she would find it easier to end her marriage. She had, at Arbuckle’s behest, traveled thirty-six hundred miles to file for divorce from her husband of sixteen years.
On December 5 came the announcement that Arbuckle would marry Doris Deane. Alluding to the death of Virginia Rappe, one acerbic headline read, DORIS IS DARING. The wedding was originally set for February, and a March ceremony was scrapped hours before it was to go off because the divorce could not be formalized. Finally, on May 16, 1925, Roscoe Arbuckle and Doris Deane married at her mother’s home. Buster Keaton was the best man, and Keaton’s wife, Natalie Talmadge, was the maid of honor. Joseph Schenck (who by now was chairman of United Artists) and Lou Anger were among the thirty-five guests.* Hundreds attended the reception at Keaton and Talmadge’s new Beverly Hills home. Subsequently, the newlyweds moved into a nearby house they rented from Schenck, but not before they went on a honeymoon at a location reportedly “hidden away in the country.”
