I, Fatty (12 page)

Put it this way. I didn't like what it was people liked about me. I was grateful, but I wasn't happy about it. At 26, what the newspapers called my "cherubic" and "innocent" face, my "infantile charm"—this was before they switched to "porcine," "imbecilic," and "evil"—made me popular with people who couldn't agree on anything else. Little kids and crotchety uncles. Tee-totaling blueblood spinsters and drunken micks. They all loved me. Or was it something else? Was it, maybe, that no matter how poorly any of 'em felt, they could all wake up glad they weren't me?

I spent a lot of time whispering inside my head,
I am so tired of being the Fat Guy.
But of course, a diet would have ruined me.

Trampled

When Chaplin showed up in 1914, Lehrman was as nasty to him as he'd been to me. During their first film,
Making a Living,
Lehrman's veins bulged out at how long it took Charlie to work out a simple gag. Charlie was a serial rehearser. Pathé went whining to Mack, as was his wont. Even though Sennett's the one who discovered Charlie—at the Orpheum, doing a falling down act—and even though Mack knew all about Charlie's compulsive rehearsal habits, he acted shocked when Lehrman came to him and complained.

Charlie
was
the slowest-working man in show business. He had to be great—because everybody else on the set hated him in five minutes. Mabel worked with him a grand total of one hour and called it quits. Though later she confessed it was due to their "animal attraction," she sure didn't say that to Mack, who put my Minta in the role and was busily contriving a way to squeak out of his contract with Charlie when he called me in.

Shortsighted as a sewer rat, Mack just cared about getting the films shipped on time. When he came to me and said, "Big Butt, I don't think the Brit's for us," I said keep him. "The guy's a little queer," I said to Mack, "but he's funny.
I'll
get the GD films out on time."

So Lehrman quit, I started directing, and Charlie stayed. For a while. Chaplin wasn't much happier than Mack was. In fact, right before we stumbled onto his Little Tramp getup, Charlie was the one ready to pack it in. I can hear him now, snotty as an earl:
"Really, Roscow"
—that's how he used to say my name—
"the cinema's just a fad anyway. No real actor should get caught doing this."

In case it ain't obvious, Charlie spilled that whine about an hour before me and the boys made him the gift of a lifetime. What happened is, Mack heard there was a soapbox derby going on in Venice, so naturally he wanted to jump in and film it. The caper called for Charlie to play an inept shutterbug, a real "schlemiel" (Mack's favorite wora1). It was a classic film-on-the-fly: get the footage and we'll find out what we need it for later. Mabel used to say, if Jesus Christ came back to save mankind, Mack would show up with the Keystone Kops and toss him in a jalopy.

The problem this particular day was a fiscal one. Mack had given Charlie $25 to go out and buy shutterbug duds. And Charlie, justly famous for being so tight his keister squeaked, pocketed the money instead. Five minutes before we were supposed to leave for the ride to Venice—which, of course, Mack would also film—Charlie tore into the dressing room, where Chester Conklin, Mack Swain, and I were sharing a bit of liquid conviviality. "I'm in a bit of a spot," he said—his Yorkshire-pudding way of telling us he needed to mooch a wardrobe.

So that's how it happened. I slipped him one of my too-tight derbies and a pair of pants that ballooned on him. Chester supplied a cutaway. Mack Swain lent him that toothbrush mustache. He still didn't have shoes, so I gave him an old pair of mine. While I watched, he put the shoes on, walked around in a circle, then took 'em off and—scratching his head for a second—put them back on
the wrong feet.
That's when I knew he really was a genius.

By the end of the year, the Little Tramp was as popular as I was. The big diff: highbrows loved Charlie. I, on the other hand, was lowbrow as a beer-hall crapper. Charlie was Maine lobster to my sardines in a can. The other difference, natch, a Little Tramp stops being a tramp when the camera stops rolling. But a Fatty stays fat. Not something you probably ever thought about, but glug-glug-glug. Chaplin was always a better businessman than me. So when he announced to Mack—Charlie never asked, he announced—that he wanted $200 a week, Mack gave him the heave-ho. The Little Tramp—who would have made a world-class accountant—ambled over to the Essanay Company, who scooped him up for $1,500 a week. Not long after that he funny-walked to Mutual, where they hooked him for a mere $670,000 a year.

But I'll tell you something about Charlie—or really, about Charlie and me—that I've never told anyone. See, everybody at the studio was always impressed how nice I was to the upstart limey. From the beginning, I made sure he didn't get fired. I gave him the "Buck up, it happens to everybody" speech when a critic called him "Chapman" in a review of
His New Profession,
one of his first Keystones. And not to harp, but I already told you about helping cook up the whole tramp thing. He never paid me for the pants, but never mind. Noble Roscoe never acted anything but proud when CC wiggle-waggled from mangy vaudevillian to biggest comic in the world. But here's the truth:

I was nice to Charlie Chaplin 'cause of all the times I tried to kill him.

Okay, I'm exaggerating. But I hurt him a little, and I can't say I lost any beauty sleep over it. Once Charlie and I were being filmed in a rowboat in Echo Park. I think it was during
Pastime,
but with enough tom-tom juice all those two-reelers blend into one big fall-down-and-bite-my-mother-in-the-neck car chase. I already knew Charlie hated the water. And not just 'cause he never met a bathtub he couldn't avoid. "Gamy," I do believe, is the technical term—though Mabel said that was being cruel to game. No, I knew because Chaplin didn't know how to swim. Not really. He'd been out to Casa Arbuckle, on the beach, and he wouldn't get in the ocean on a bet.

Water-wise, I was the opposite. The happiest times of my life were in the water. Out in Santa Monica, I'd swim every day. It got so the local dolphins knew I was coming and would swim along. I learned how to jump straight out of the water, like they do, and even used it in a picture. Just don't ask me which one. I don't have wet brain, I'm just a little damp under the ear flaps. Mack was convinced the dolphins thought I was their homely pink cousin.

Anyhooch, there we were, halfway to the middle of the Echo Park lake, when I kicked out the stopper of the rowboat with my shoe. When he saw the water gushing in, I thought Charlie's eyeballs were going to crack like eggs. He started chewing his lips. He even peed himself before the Echo Park lake made the rest of him wet. But, I gotta give it to Charlie, he never stopped acting. Even when the boat was nearly under, with us in it, all he did was make sure his derby didn't float away. He kept vamping till we were up to our necks.

And this wasn't a one-off event. Me nearly killing him, I mean. From doing odd jobs around the Durfees', I'd gotten handy with electric wiring. So, when the opportunity arose—as it did, oddly, the very week I heard Mack was going to be paying Charlie the same as I was getting—I wired the toilet so whoever who sat on it would get a jolt. This time, I told some of the guys, and we crouched in the dressing room trying not to giggle when Charlie went in. Five seconds later—
"Yeeoww!"
Out flies Chaplin, skivvies at half-mast, clutching his nuggins doing that herky-jerk shuffle that turned into his trademark.

Again, part of me feels bad, another part figures, "C'mon, Roscoe, he got that funny walk out of it, so why feel guilty?" After he left Keystone, I couldn't look at a Charlie Chaplin movie and not think:
What would the public do if they knew that famous walk was the product of electrified testicles?
File under things the world will never know.

Life's a pie-fight, and then you die.

A Thought on Comedy,
from a Tragic Perspective

In slapstick, the hero can never relax. As soon as he thinks he's got things licked, a safe falls out the window he's strolling under and that's that. I guess you could say Mabel Normand walked under a lot of safes. And I'm not talking about in the movies.

Even in life, Mabel was always a script that needed work. More than anyone I ever met, she had a unique way of doing things. Like, one time, tired of the Keystone Kops flirting with her, she waited till they broke for lunch, then, looking springy in her flowered dress, did cartwheels all the way across Echo Park and back right in front of them. "There," she said when she finished, "now go home and kiss your wives and think of me." Coincidentally, she'd left her panties in the dressing room. So they had plenty to think about.

Mabel liked being known as the wildest woman in Hollywood. On another occasion, when Mack got on her about disappearing from the set in the middle of the day, she rolled her eyes at all of us, then let out a big put-upon sigh. "For gosh sakes, Mackie, even a movie star sometimes has to relieve herself. But if you don't want me to take the time to walk to the little girl's room, fine!" With that, in front of everybody, she pulled up her dress and sat on his lap. And wet all over him.

Still, for all the cocaine and hi jinks—did I mention she had a bit of an inhalation problem?—Mabel was an old-fashioned gal. All she really wanted was some lunkhead to pop the question.

Old Onion-Breath finally proposed in 1915—they'd only been engaged seven years—and Mabel went out driving with Minta and another actress named Anne Luther to celebrate. That's when Anne decided to let Mabel know Mack might not be the man of her dreams. At that moment, according to Minta, Anne felt compelled to tell her good friend that her future hubby was having his manly way with one Mae Busch. "Mae!" Mabel shrieked. "But she's my
friend!
She didn't know a soul when she came out, so I let her use my apartment."

Poor Mabel wasn't naive about anything—except her own life. But after her chat with Anne and Minta, she dumped those gals out and drove like Barney Oldfield back to her own place. Big surprise, Mabel found Mack in her bed, clad in nothing more than a milk mustache, alongside the New York stray she'd taken in. Her good friend Mae.

Mack insisted, and you almost have to respect him for this, that he and the actress were discussing tomorrow's script. "We're working out a gag." Before Mabel could think of a comeback for that, Mae Busch panicked and cracked a vase over Mabel's head, leaving her bloody and stunned. "I'll tell you the scary part," Mabel told me later, in one of her own more scary moments. "The movie they were about to shoot was
One Night Stand!
Maybe they
were
rehearsing." Her cackle was hellish.

Ten days later, Mabel tied rocks to her waist and jumped off the pier in Santa Monica. If she couldn't find a safe to fall on her, she'd improvise. Fortunately, more or less, she was quickly rescued by a clammer and hospitalized for a month.

Understandably, even after her release, Mabel stayed away from the set for a while. And Mack being Mack, when the press wanted to know why there were no Fatty-and-Mabels slated, he blamed me. Not that
I
knew about it. No, I knew nothing of my own heinous behavior until I opened a
Photoplay,
and there it was in black and white. The article was called "Why Aren't We Killed?" Mack—who wouldn't stop filming if an actor's spleen plopped onto the sidewalk—was lamenting how dangerous, how
careless
those doggone actors could be. Case in point, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Apparently, I was always throwing myself around and breaking things. I had, in fact, "recently nearly crushed poor Mabel in a good stunt gone bad." That's how Mack Sennett made me the heavy. The public believed that
I
was the cause of their favorite actress's head injury. Do I need to tell you how good this looked later?
"Why, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Mister Arbuckle's irresponsibility has already been well documented."

Funny how I'm always the last to know. About anything. I didn't even know how big I was. I'm not talking about weight, either. The studio loved to tell movie magazines I topped off at 286, when I wasn't a nosehair over 260. What I'm talking about is how much clout I really had. How much I was worth. Folks knew me most places I went. But even that doesn't give you the global perspective.

What did give me an inkling was Luke the Dog. Willie Lucas, a Brit director, dumped this crazy pup in Minta's lap after they made
Love, Speed, and Thrills.
For one shot, Willie asked Minta to dangle from a tree root by a piano wire—over a 100-foot drop down the Arroyo Seco. Minta looked a little skeptical, so Willie promised her a bonus. Back then, directors were always promising bonuses if you'd stick your face in a fan or dive off a flagpole into a bucket of coleslaw. In this case, the big bonus turned out to be Luke the Dog. Who, if I do say so myself, ended up one of the most dependable stars in the Keystone kennel.

Now back to how it started sinking in I was really a star. As a joke I asked Sennett to put the canine on the payroll. And damned if that mutt didn't start pulling down $150 a week! This was a lot more than most two-legged dogs were making. In fact, my wife's canine was making a lot more than
I
did for the majority of my professional life. I would have been jealous if I didn't know that she made him eat out of a bowl.

Even more than making a bull terrier wealthy, what showed me how far things had come was New York City. In 1916, figuring to make some movies with different backdrops, Sennett dragged us back East with a full crew. We stayed six months, shooting out in Fort Lee, New Jersey—where Mack made the execrable
Cohen
way back when. And every day, even in sleet, you could hardly get to the set for the mob that showed up to see Fatso Me-o. The half that were press you might expect—I was their bread and butter. But the rest were regular people. Which was even stranger. "What's going on?" I asked the coffee boy, the first time I saw the throng of folks on hand at the start of
He Did and He Didn't.
"They givin' away hams, or is President Wilson in the neighborhood?" He thought I was kidding.