Authors: Jerry Stahl
But banning alcohol wasn't enough. Once they got a taste for outlawing bad behavior, the reformers themselves were like drunks on a bender. They couldn't find enough things to object to. Once, when Luke the Dog crapped on the dining-room rug, I caught the headline on the paper I was crumpling to whack him with: AMERICAN SOCIETY OF DANCE TEACHERS DECRIES BALLROOM DANCING. There was a picture of a woman who might have been my twin sister. She was that kind of plump, with troubled puppy eyes and pursed pink lips. Underneath her beauteous mug ran the story of her crusade: "Organization President Dot LeMay Says 'Jazz Music Impels Degenerate, Degrading Movement . . . ' " I laughed so hard Luke got away without a well-deserved snout swat for soiling another Persian.
What wasn't funny was, every newspaper or magazine article, every crackpot pamphlet, ended the same way. With a call for government censors to oversee moving pictures. Filthy things that they were.
Paramount's very own Rudolph Valentino was held responsible for much of this moral turpitude. Ads for
The Sheik
were so racy some citizens' groups threatened boycotts.
"See the auction of beautiful girls to the lords of Algerian harems . . . See the heroine, disguised, invade the Bedouin's secret slave rites . . . See Sheik Ahmed raid her caravan and carry her off to his tent . .
."
Arbuckle asks you, what happened to decency?
Well, Arbuckle's had a lot of time to think about this. And Arbuckle will tell you.
You see, the War To End All Wars gave a lot of gals jobs, and when it was over a lot of 'em didn't want to go back to darning socks for Daddy. In my world I was used to independent women. Actresses worked to eat, just like actors. But out there in Hamhock City and Back Porchville, the "authorities" wanted the fair sex to forget they ever went to work in factories, to toddle on home and back to sock darning.
Too late, Gramps. Modern girls didn't want to be like Mother. They wanted to be like movie stars. Like Colleen Moore, the original flapper, who clipped her hair, shortened her dresses, and tossed her corset in the trash. But that's not all. Colleen was so shameful she sucked cigarettes in public, dabbed on makeup, and—get the kids out of the room—rolled her stockings up.
This is when the police, at the behest of said reformers, started arresting bathing beauties. Some towns equipped the officers with rulers, to check on the offending temptress's hem. If her dress was too short, it was off to the slammer. Other cities were more inclined to jail lady smokers. Mind you, if the cops had done that in the Keystone days, there wouldn't have been a female left on the lot. The clams Mack hired showed a lot of thigh and smoked like steam trains. Otherwise they wouldn't get the job.
Before the Reform Movement, managers like Anger or Joe Schenck would encourage successful actors and actresses to buy as much crap as they could: fancy cars, grander mansions, more of everything, as long as it was expensive and wild. Now the talk was about "toning things down." Six million people were unemployed. Striking coal miners were being shot. The Red Scare was on. The folks in charge needed somebody to blame. Why not some movie-star type with a snifter of cocaine and a 40-grand solid-gold bathtub? As long as they could point the finger at us Hollywood types, politicians did not have to defend their own lavish appointments. Nobody seemed inclined to point out that movie actors were not to blame for the policies that put honest workadaddies out of work. The politicos were. But who wanted to fuss with niggling details?
All of a sudden, America saw sin everywhere. And Hollywood was Sin City. Even God was mad at us. I heard a preacher on a soapbox in Santa Monica rant about "the demonic hand at work in the immoral drama and motion-picture industry." And all Reverend Soapy was doing was parroting the message government and religious types were belting out on pulpits everywhere. No wonder I was tired. It was hard work corrupting the minds of Christian youth.
Just kidding! I, Fatty, remained a paragon of all that was good and decent in the entertainment industry. I had no choice—Jesse Lasky picked the scripts. He'd promised me artistic control, but that particular pledge never exactly panned out. What could I do? Sue? They'd have had me branded Red so fast I'd be playing canasta with Sacco and Vanzetti.
Not that Lasky didn't have an eye for what worked, movie-wise. By way of "classing" me up a tad, buying respectability for the studio, and—most important—hedging their bets by using material already beloved by the public, I was handed
The Round-Up.
A nice enough bit of fluff,
Round-Up
started out life as a popular Broadway play. And ended up as my first full-length movie vehicle.
In
Round-Up
I play Sheriff Slim Hoover. As a gag, Keaton, who had his own company by now, showed up to play an Injun. For my second epic, Lasky snapped up another popular fave,
The Life of the Party,
an award-winning
Saturday Evening Post
story. What I liked about both films—okay if I take myself serious here?—is that they gave me as much chance for characterization as slapstick. I was trying to be funny without being
fat
funny. They both turned out to be hits. But Adolph and Jesse seemed more glad that they were both wholesome.
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. Then Mary Pickford divorced her movie-star hubby, Owen Moore, and married Doug 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 even further.
The door, of course, swung both ways. When a motorcycle cop caught Bebe Daniels blasting 72 miles an hour through Santa Ana—with Jack Dempsey and her mother in the car—the judge threw her in jail for days. Instead of hushing it up, Paramount spreads the word around, alerts the papers. And before you know it, the big department store up there, Barker Brothers, is furnishing her cell with carpets, divan, and curtains. Restaurants are competing to see who can provide her meals. And somebody shells out for Abe Lyman and his Orchestra to bus up from Los Angeles and serenade her on the prison lawn.
And how did the moral giants at Paramount respond to Bebe's misbehavior? They cranked out a fly speck of a film called
Speedgirl.
And starred her in it.
Paragon of All That's Good
Somehow, in the midst of this "Epidemic Immorality," this "lecherous lair of debauchery," as the tabloids loved to call my hometown, I managed to maintain a sterling reputation. Lovable Fatty drew kudos from the very publications who were railing the loudest against the evils of moviedom.
Not to toot my own horn—it doesn't really toot anymore—but listen to this, from a humble exhibitor in Billings, Montana, after
The Life of the Party
knocked 'em dead up there. "How do you spell family entertainment? A-R-B-U-C-K-L-E, that's how. At a time when so many movies glorify lust, adultery and drugs, luring countless young Americans into the gutter, we wish more Hollywood actors made good, clean fun-for-the-kids photoplays like
The Life of the Party."
Would I be shoving this at you if what happened later hadn't happened? Of course not. I wouldn't have bothered to save this scrapbook. The second
Party
wrapped, I got going on
The Traveling Salesman.
I finished that on a Tuesday morning in July and started
Brewster's Millions
that afternoon. By then the public couldn't get enough, and I couldn't see straight.
Trust me on this, making movies wears you out. Which didn't stop Lasky and Zukor from cracking the whip. With my contract inching to a close, these two slave drivers decided I could make three pictures at the same time. So, in January 1921, before I even had my
Brewster
pants off, I jumped straight into
Gasoline Gus, Leap Year,
and
Freight.
By the end of the summer, all three were completed.
In
Leap Year,
I played an innocent, rich little rollo who just can't shake the passel of females who want to get their clutches on him. At one point these women crowd into my house, all but smothering me with love. Needless to say, they never released it. Considering what transpired, the subject matter might have seemed a little—let's just say "ill-conceived."
I'd worked 15 hours a day, pretty much seven days a week, since signing with Famous Players. When Lasky had the moneysaving notion of having me shoot three movies simultaneously, I went along. I need a nap just thinking about it.
A Dream Ride to Frisco
In September, on the last afternoon of shooting the last picture,
Freight Prepaid,
the Pierce-Arrow folks showed up with the $25,000 extra-large custom convertible I'd ordered. It had a flush toilet and a full cocktail bar. I don't think I've loved a person as much as I loved that car. I immediately took it for a spin, inspired to go on a buying spree, and returned home with a pocketful of diamonds, cases of perfume, and imported shoes. That's the strangest thing about having big money: when you can finally afford to pay cash on the table for everything, everybody wants to give you credit.
All
I
wanted to do was drive that car, and the only time I could do it was Labor Day weekend. That's how I came up with the idea of San Francisco. Ever since my Portola days—and my gratitude over not getting pancaked in the quake—I've had a soft spot for the place. A lot of us did. Hollywood loved San Francisco, even if Frisco didn't exactly return the affection. I even had an editorial from the
Chronicle
framed and mounted in my guest toilet. To our northern cousins, we were "Rogues and Ruffians from Hollywood . . . children who had not yet experienced the back hand of a parent," et cetera . . . But what the heck. Outside of the
Chronicle's
city desk, the rest of the town was happy to take our money. And we were happy to give it. Frisco liquor made our L.A. swill taste like cat drip.
Buster and I'd been up north a million times, and I was hoping he'd come along for the Labor Day jaunt. But Buster'd become a fishing nut. He and the missus were boating to Catalina to do some angling. They invited me to sail along, but I declined. Then the brass got involved. Still battling to make the film business look wholesome, Zukor and Lasky had organized something called Paramount Week. During P Week, stars were ordered to show up and entertain the folks, to show what a happy, wholesome, just-like-the-family-back-in-Wichita batch of Joes and Josephines we really were.
That's what these dog-and-pony shows were all about. Book the studio movies into some showplace theater, then have some muttonhead actor give a speech on what a fine, moral place Hollywood, California, was. Tickets were free with purchase of laundry detergent or cold cream.
Giving the audience a free peek at their big names, Zukor banked on buying goodwill in hopes that Mr. and Mrs. Normal would stop their nasty boycotts and see how decent we showbiz types could be. That was a big thing with Zukor—maybe because so many of the scandals that made people think Hollywood was Sodom and Gomorrah happened at his studio. He was always having us do stuff to make the magazines think we were basically outsized Boy Scouts. Three weeks before I packed the Pierce-Arrow and headed north, Adolph made me sit down with Adela Rogers St. John for
Photoplay.
I must have talked to her for 20 minutes tops, but from the way her article read—"Love Confessions of a Fat Man!"— you'd have thought she and I had lollygagged for a month in Naples. Her style was what you fancypants would call louche:
"We were lunching together in his bedroom
. . .
I'd never interviewed anyone in pongee pajamas before."
As if that weren't ridiculous enough, she went on to quote
"a couple of schoolgirls
—
of the cut-his-picture-out-and-sleep-with-it- under-the-pillow age."
This is what we're dealing with, fellow earthlings. Listen:
"After admitting that Wally Reid was undoubtedly the handsomest man in the world
—
one girl said, 'But I just adore Roscoe Arbuckle.'"
Then it gets really peculiar. I mean, listen to me: "A
woman today has got to have a good-natured husband. Statistics show that there have been more love murders, marriage murders and suicide love pacts in the last few years than ever before in the history of the world. It is very hard either to murder or to be murdered by a fat man."
Sure. That's exactly the kind of thing I say. You want to talk about how good that was gonna look a couple of weeks later? Hand me the rat poison while I get a glass of arsenic.
Angering the Gods of Hollywood
I don't know who snitched. But when Zukor got wind I wasn't going to show up at Grauman's for a Labor Day showing of my latest,
Gasoline Gus,
he blew up. El Jefe wanted me there, extolling the virtues of Bible study before the movie. After Grauman's, I was slated to appear with Wallace Reid and Conrad Nagel downtown, for another showing of
Gasoline.
I ask you, is there no rest for the wholesome?
Zukor and Lasky both fired off telegrams to Schenck. Zukor's had steam coming off it. He was furious. Called me uncooperative. Called me ungrateful. Schenck, the lunk, thought he could play to Zukor's sympathies. "Roscoe's taking a holiday in San Francisco," he tells him. "He's been working like a coolie, he deserves time off."