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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."
Actor/comedian Jim Gaffigan is slated to
star in the long-awaited Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle bio pic, "The Life of
the Party". Kevin Connor will direct the film, as reported by the
website Dark Horizons.
****
Born March 24, 1887
Smith Center, Kansas, USA
Died June 29, 1933
New York, New York, USA
****
Biography
Early Career
Born in Smith Center, Kansas, to Mollie and
William Goodrich Arbuckle, he had several years of Vaudeville
experience, including work at Idora Park in Oakland, California, when he
began his film career with the Selig Polyscope Company in July 1909. He
was called "Fatty" because of his 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 the 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.
According to a legend, Arbuckle created the
gag after encountering Pancho Villa's army on the Rio Grande during a
Vaudeville appearance in El Paso, Texas. The story claims that the
Arbuckles were picnicking on the river and they and Villa's men
playfully threw fruit at each other across the river with Roscoe
knocking one of the men off his horse with a bunch of bananas to
Pancho'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
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 pierced Rappe's bladder while raping her. Arbuckle,
confident that 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.
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[citation needed].
Although Arbuckle was 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 in England at the time. 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.
****
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