Roscoe Arbuckle: Difference between revisions

Roscoe Arbuckle

Roscoe Conkling (Fatty) Arbuckle (March 24 1887 – June 29 1933) was an American silent film comedian. He was given the nickname Fatty (a name he detested and used only professionally) because of his substantial girth. Arbuckle was one of the most popular actors of his era, but is best known today for his central role in the so-called "Fatty Arbuckle scandal."

Biography

Birth, Girth and Early Career

Born in the small town of Smith Center, Kansas, to Mollie and William Goodrich Arbuckle, he had several years of Vaudeville experience, including work at Idora Park in Oakland, California, under his belt when he began his film career with the Selig Polyscope Company in July 1909. He reluctantly acquired the moniker "Fatty" due to his sizeable girth.

He appeared sporadically in Selig one-reelers until 1913, moving briefly to Universal Pictures before becoming a star in the Keystone Kops comedies for producer-director Mack Sennett. On August 6, 1908, he married Araminta Estelle Durfee (1889-1975), the daughter of Charles Warren Durfee and Flora Adkins. Durfee played leading lady in numerous early comedy films under the name "Minta Durfee," often with Arbuckle.

Size and skill

Despite his size, Arbuckle was physically adept and surprisingly agile. His comedies are known for being rollicking, fast-paced, full of chase scenes and having many sight gags. Arbuckle was particularly fond of the famous "pie in the face," a cliché that has come to signify silent film comedy in general. In fact, the earliest known use of the "pie in the face" in a Hollywood movie was in the June 1913 Keystone one-reeler A Noise from the Deep, starring Arbuckle and frequent screen partner Mabel Normand.

A legend has Arbuckle creating the gag after a chance encounter with Pancho Villa's army on the Rio Grande during a Vaudeville appearance in El Paso, Texas. The story claims the Arbuckles, picnicking on the river, and the Villa men playfully threw fruit at each other across the river, with Roscoe knocking one of Villa's men off his horse with a bunch of bananas, to Villa's own extreme amusement.

Buster Keaton

Arbuckle gave Buster Keaton his first experience of film-making in his 1917 short, The Butcher Boy. The two men also became close friends off the set. The friendship between Arbuckle and Keaton never wavered, even when Arbuckle was beset by tragedy at the zenith of his career, and through the period of depression and downfall that followed. In his autobiography, Keaton described Arbuckle's playful nature and his love of practical jokes, including several elaborately constructed schemes the two successfully pulled off at the expense of various Hollywood studio heads and stars.

Scandal

Roscoe Conkling Arbuckle (1887-1933)

At the height of his career, Arbuckle was under contract to Paramount Studios for $1 million a year, the first such official salary paid by a Hollywood studio. On September 3, 1921, Arbuckle took a break from his hectic film schedule, driving to San Francisco with two friends, Lowell Sherman and Fred Fischbach. The three checked into the St. Francis Hotel, decided to have a party, and invited several women to their suite. During the carousing, one of the women, a 26-year-old aspiring actress named Virginia Rappe, became seriously ill and was examined by the hotel doctor, who concluded that she was probably mostly just intoxicated.

Rappe died three days later of peritonitis caused by a ruptured bladder. Rappe's companion to the party, Maude Delmont, implicated Arbuckle over his involvement in the matter, claiming that he'd crushed Rappe's innards while raping her. Arbuckle, confident he had nothing to be ashamed of, refused to be intimidated. Delmont then made a statement to the police in an attempt to get money from Arbuckle's attorneys, but the matter soon got out of her hands. Newspapers, particularly those controlled by William Randolph Hearst, made a fortune endlessly crucifying Arbuckle in spurious and surreally vicious articles and editorials (the New York Times stated that Rappe was lucky to be crushed to death during the rape before having to consciously endure "a fat man's foulness").

Roscoe Arbuckle's career is seen by many film historians as one of the great tragedies of Hollywood. The Arbuckle trial was a major media event, and stories in Hearst's newspaper empire made Arbuckle appear guilty. After two trials resulted in hung juries, the third resulted in an acquittal and a written apology from the jury—a gesture unprecedented in American justice.

Although Arbuckle was completely cleared of the allegations involving Rappe, the resulting infamy destroyed his career and his personal life. During the trial, morality groups nationwide called for Arbuckle to be sentenced to death, and studio moguls ordered Arbuckle's friends in the industry not to come to his public defense. Charlie Chaplin was out of the country at the time on a triumphant return to England. Buster Keaton did, however, make a public statement in support of Arbuckle, calling Roscoe one of the kindest souls he had known.

The Arbuckle case was one of four major Paramount-related scandals of the period, the other three being the drug-related death, in Paris in 1920, of actress Olive Thomas, wife of matinee idol Jack Pickford; the still-unsolved 1922 murder of director William Desmond Taylor, which effectively ended the careers of actresses Mary Miles Minter and former Arbuckle screen partner Mabel Normand; and the drug-related death of actor/director Wallace Reid in 1923. Those four occurrences rocked Hollywood and led to calls for reform of the "indecency" being promoted by motion pictures and resulted in the creation of the Production Code, which set standards for decency in Hollywood films.

The Hays Office banned all of Arbuckle's films, although Will H. Hays later issued a statement that Arbuckle should be allowed to work in Hollywood. Ironically, one of the very few of Arbuckle's feature-length films known to survive, Leap Year, had been one of two finished films Paramount held back from release at the time the scandal broke; while it was eventually released in Europe after the acquittal, it was never theatrically released in the United States nor in Britain.

Many of Arbuckle's films, including the feature Life of the Party, survive only as a print with foreign-language inter-titles; Life of the Party was released before the scandal, but no effort was made to preserve the original English-language prints.

In recent years, some of his early short subjects (particularly ones which co-starred Chaplin or Keaton) have been restored, released on DVD, and even screened theatrically.

Second marriage

On January 27, 1925, he divorced Araminta Estelle Durfee in Paris. She had charged desertion. He then married Doris Deane on May 16, 1925.

Late career

Arbuckle tried to return to moviemaking, but the ban on his pictures came too soon after his acquittal to allow for that, and he retreated into alcoholism—in the words of his first wife, "Roscoe only seemed to find solace and comfort in a bottle."

Buster Keaton attempted to help Arbuckle by letting him work on Keaton's films. Arbuckle wrote the story of the Keaton short "Day Dreams." Arbuckle allegedly co-directed scenes in Keaton's Sherlock, Jr., but it is unclear how much of this footage made it through to the final film. Arbuckle also directed a number of comedy shorts for Educational Pictures featuring lesser-known comics of the day under the pseudonym William Goodrich.

A discredited but persistent legend gives an inaccurate explanation for the origin of Arbuckle's pseudonym. Allegedly, Keaton (an inveterate punster) suggested that Arbuckle should become a director under the alias "Will B. Good." Supposedly, Arbuckle agreed but—recognizing that the pun was too obvious—he expanded the name to "William B. Goodrich." This story appears to be false. Arbuckle directed dozens of films in which his pseudonym is clearly listed in the opening credits as "William Goodrich" ... lacking the middle initial. Author David Yallop has uncovered that Arbuckle's father's full name was William Goodrich Arbuckle; this thus seems the most likely source of the alias. The "Will B. Good" story, in all its improbability, does indeed reinforce the fondness for puns shared by both Keaton and Arbuckle.

Third marriage

In 1929 Doris Deane sued for divorce in Los Angeles, charging desertion and cruelty. On June 21, 1931, Roscoe married Addie Oakley Dukes McPhail, later Addie Oakley Sheldon (1906-2003) in Erie, Pennsylvania. Shortly before that marriage, Arbuckle signed a contract with Jack Warner to star in six two-reel Vitaphone short comedies, using his own name. He finished filming the last of the two-reelers on June 28, 1933, and was signed by Warner Brothers to make a feature-length film just hours before he died.

Arbuckle's six Vitaphone shorts, filmed in Brooklyn, constitute the only recordings of his voice. Silent-film comedian Al St. John (Arbuckle's nephew) and actors Lionel Stander and Shemp Howard each appeared with Arbuckle in one apiece of the six shorts. Sadly, when Warner Brothers attempted to release the first of these six shorts ("Hey, Pop!") in Britain, the British film board—citing the scandal of more than a decade earlier—refused to grant it an exhibition certificate.

Death

Roscoe Arbuckle died from heart failure on June 29, 1933, in Hollywood. He was only 46 years old. Buster Keaton stated repeatedly that Arbuckle died of a broken heart. The same day he died, he had just filmed two new comedy reels, and he was reported to say "This is the best day of my life." He was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean. (It is Macklin Arbuckle, an early screen actor reputed to be Roscoe Arbuckle's cousin, who is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York.)

Museum of Modern Art Retrospective

In April and May of 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a huge 56-film, month-long retrospective of most of Arbuckle's surviving work, taking the unprecedented step of running the entire series twice in a row for additional emphasis. Highlights included The Rounders (1914) with Charles Chaplin and Fatty and Mabel's Simple Life (1915) with Mabel Normand.

See also

• Fatty Arbuckle filmography
• List of United States comedy films
• I, Fatty, a novelized account of the actor's life and career

External links

• Arbucklemania: The Official Roscoe Arbuckle Website
• Corliss, Richard. (2001) That Old Feeling: Fatty and Buster at Time online.
• Crime Library on Roscoe Arbuckle
• Find-A-Grave profile for Roscoe Conkling "Fatty" Arbuckle
• "Restoring Fatty Arbuckle's Tarnished Reputation at MoMa" by Dave Kehr, April 16 2006, New York Times.
• Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle at IMDb
• Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle Photos
• Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle website: CallMeFatty.com
• The Trial of Fatty Arbuckle

Further reading

• David A. Yallop: "The Day the Laughter Stopped" ISBN 0-340-16901-X
• Andy Edmonds: "Frame-Up!", William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, NY, 1991

Selected coverage in the New York Times

• New York Times; September 12, 1921; pg. 1. "San Francisco, California; September 11, 1921. "Roscoe ("Fatty") Arbuckle was arrested late last night on a charge of murder as a result of the death of Virginia Rappe, film actress, after a party in Arbuckle's rooms at the Hotel St. Francis. Arbuckle is still in jail tonight despite efforts by his lawyers to find some way to obtain his liberty."
• New York Times; September 13, 1921; pg. 1. "San Francisco, California; September 12, 1921. "The Grand Jury met tonight at 7:30 o'clock to hear the testimony of witnesses rounded up by Matthew Brady (District Attorney) of San Francisco to support his demand for the indictment of Roscoe ("Fatty") Arbuckle for the murder of Miss Virginia Rappe.