Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle

Roscoe Arbuckle was born in Smith City, Kansas, on March 24, 1887, into a large family -nine brothers-, which in this case was not synonymous with happiness. His mother died when he was a child, and his father was an alcoholic. With no one really busy educating him, chance wanted him to play a small role at the age of eight on stage, to which he liked to escape to keep an eye on as a spectator. He went with the Webster-Brown Stock Company. Surprisingly for his “tonnage” – the boy was born weighing 2.75 kilos, and reached 135 kilos as an adult – Roscoe was agile on stage, and demonstrated the ability to do some graceful somersaults, a personal trademark, in addition to she was good at singing, and had a sense of humor; which did not prevent him from being nicknamed Fatty, which he personally hated. In fact, in daily dealings he asked to be called by his first name, which he was not always able to do, as you can imagine; and it is that that would be, much to his regret, the artistic name with which he would be known throughout the world.

In 1904 Sydney Grauman hired him to sing at the Unique Theatre. That was already a professional job with all of the law. With the Morosco Burbank company he traveled to the Orient, to China and Japan, quite an experience for a ‘redneck’ from Kansas, although he later moved to California. And right after the tour was over, and back on the west coast of the United States, the possibility of working in the cinema arose, an activity that the pro actors despised, but that Arbuckle would discover, could be very satisfying. Signed by Mack Sennett’s studio in 1909, he would appear in countless comedy shorts in the Keystone Cops series, almost always directed by Henry Lehrman .. He would go on to star in his own films, paired on countless occasions with Mabel Normand. He even earned the right to direct in 1914, and scored a record salary in 1921 of one million dollars a year, thanks to his association with Joe Schenck at Comique, and a distribution deal with Paramount. He truly became the king of comedy, and it is worth noting that the three greats of comedy cinema, Charlie Chaplin , Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd , worked with him in supporting roles. The famous number of Charlot’s dancing buns in The Gold Rush , could be seen earlier in Three Feet for the Cat. And he discovered Keaton in New York, gave him his chance at the cinema, and they worked together on a dozen films, with very fruitful results, such as The Bellboy (1918) and Fatty in the Garage . A friendship was forged there that proved genuine with Fatty’s subsequent fall from grace: indeed, his friend maintained the relationship, even though he was frowned upon for it, and offered him a job as a screenwriter on Young Sherlock Holmes , although the plump actor He ended up standing out, because his spirits at that time were very low.

Arbuckle came up with his own gags, and he made a point of not basing them on his fatness, or at least not directly. There were no jokes in the films about a character breaking chairs or getting stuck in doors, but rather what caught his attention was how agile he moved despite his abundant kilos. And the people adored him… until one fateful night in 1921, when a disreputable young woman, Virginia Rappe, went to a party in the actor’s suite, which was attended by a small group of people. The woman died of peritonitis, and the actor would be accused of rape and manslaughter. The actor went through three trials, and although he was finally acquitted, the damage to his career was done. William Randolph Hearst’s press exploded the scandal, and a wave of damning puritanism swept the United States, condemning the debauchery of Hollywood. The actor became something of a scapegoat, with many studio executives and supposed friends turning their backs on him. At that time, he also ended his marriage with the actress Minta Durfee, although they were already separated before the Virginia case broke out. He would still go through two marriages before his death, to Doris Deane and Addie McPhail, also actresses.

“I don’t think there is a mission on earth better than making people laugh,” Arbuckle had declared. Contrary to what might be believed, the actor strove to continue in the world of cinema, fulfilling that goal. Keaton helped him, as has already been said, and signed a good handful of shorts under the pseudonym William Goodrich. Ironically, Goodrich directed Marion Davies , Hearst’s mistress, in  The Red Mill (1927). And it even seemed that his career was being remade when Jack Warnercalled him in 1932 to co-star with child star Billy Hayes in a series of shorts where his face could be seen on the screen, in addition to his name appearing in the credits. Whether Arbuckle would have been able to shine again with the brilliance of yesteryear will never be known, because in 1933 he died of a heart attack.