The Day the Laughter Stopped, page 11
Again and again, members of the film industry recalling Hollywood as the 1920s approached, remarked to me, ‘It was like a village.’ You could walk down Hollywood Boulevard in 1918 and see half a dozen movie stars. Louis Blondeau had been the top barber, but he had realized more quickly than most the implications of the film immigration to the West Coast; pocketing his comb and scissors, he went into real estate, reselling sites to movie companies at huge profits. Now the main barber shop was Helmens, and there on a good day one could reasonably expect to find leading men Wally Reid, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle, waiting for a trim. Rudolph Valentino’s engagement to Natacha Rambova was announced in a monthly magazine; a similar event would be front-page news around the world today. Louella Parsons was still waiting for William Randolph Hearst to tell her that she was a gossip columnist, and Hedda Hopper was, to use Adela Rogers St Johns’ phrase, ‘still a bad actress running around’. The national newspapers weren’t geared yet to cope with a phenomenon like Hollywood, nor did they realize what the film industry and its products were coming to mean to millions of people around the world. By the end of the First World War, Hollywood was the centre of the world’s film industry.
Wally Reid, America’s number-one screen heart throb for years, was learning what it meant to be a leading man: he was plagued by women, who didn’t seem to mind that he was married. Driving his car out of his garage one morning, he was surrounded by six girls who had hidden all night in the inspection pit beneath the car. Another girl travelled three thousand miles from New York and offered Reid’s dresser a $10,000 bribe to hide her in the star’s dressing room. The dresser took the bribe. The time would come when Reid would shock the nation with his drug addiction; Reid would be past caring about his image then, although the news would contribute to destroying his good friend Roscoe Arbuckle.
But now Hollywood was not only young, but also strangely innocent. The glamourous film set was in many ways unsophisticated. A wild night for Bebe Daniels and Adela Rogers St Johns meant stealing a couple of bicycles from Western Union and riding them home. Charles Chaplin gives the impression in his autobiography that when he was not making superb pictures, which he unquestioningly did, he spent all of his spare time in conversation with the likes of Melba, Godowsky, Paderewski and Nijinsky. But his recreation was often less elevated. The Western Athletic Club held weekly boxing promotions in which Chaplin often acted as second for one fight, with Roscoe Arbuckle doing the same in the opponent’s corner. (On one occasion Roscoe advised his man: ‘Hit him where he is, not where he was.’)
Night spots like the Sunset Inn, Al Levy’s cafe, and Baron Long’s were favourites of the period, and there was a time when a night out meant nothing more than going to the Vernon Country Club and dancing the turkey trot, the grizzly bear and the black bottom. There was a time when Hollywood did not have a ‘society’, when an invitation to eat at the home of Tom Mix meant helping to cook the meal and wash up afterwards. Even when the stars felt obliged to hire large domestic staffs, they did so with disarming innocence; a star might insist on cooking the meal if he thought the cook looked tired. As late as 1924 Elinor Glyn, who was into the ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ scene a generation before Nancy Mitford, was driven to complain, ‘Where else in the world will you find a coloured cook bursting into a drawing room to say, “You folks better hustle to dinner if you don’t want the stuff to get cold.” ’ In 1918 few gave dinner parties because few knew how to give them. At that time the candle that an entire generation would burn at both ends had only just been taken from the box. They were still looking for the matches.
Hollywood the film village would quickly be no more than a memory. Already an extraordinary situation was making the innocence unlikely to continue: huge wealth was suddenly placed in the hands of people who a few years before had had barely the price of a dinner. Adela Rogers St Johns talked of this to me:
None of us had any idea what we were doing. There was no-one to handle our money. The exception was Mary Pickford. She was smart enough to have for a mother a woman who knew more about money than the Secretary of the Treasury. Jack Pickford [Mary’s brother] used to say of her, ‘Charlotte never buys anything but corners’ [a reference to her real estate acumen]. Another exception was Harold Lloyd. His father had been in banking. Most of us, however, spent as fast as we could. We bought houses, automobiles, gold-plated baths, grass lawns imported from England. You name it, we bought it.
If they didn’t know what to do with their new wealth in 1918, they certainly knew how to make movies – and they made hundreds of them. Comique was a scene of ceaseless activity. The last film Buster Keaton worked in before he went to war was The Cook, a two-reeler that few today have been able to see – a film from which Chaplin in 1925 would lift a whole comic sequence of Arbuckle’s to use in The Gold Rush.
Comedy routines were not all Chaplin took from his contemporaries. Jackie Coogan recalled for me recently how he came to work with Chaplin in The Kid:
My dad knew all the people in LA. It was like a great club. He was captain of the actors’ golf team. He was also captain of the crap-shooting team. He got to LA with the act after a fifty-week tour and Chaplin saw me. Roscoe came down and asked Father if he wanted to go to work in the movies. Meanwhile I had met Chaplin. He was anxious to get into The Kid; it was to be his first feature. He was giving a lot of thought to it, but he does not at this stage relate me to it, he doesn’t tie me up or anything. So my dad goes down to San Diego to finish his tour, then it’s announced in the newspaper that Jack Coogan has been signed by Roscoe Arbuckle. For Charlie the penny drops, he goes nuts, he says, ‘I can see that fat son of a bitch with the little boy. God, why didn’t I think of that?’ Chaplin became determined to buy Roscoe out. He sends people down to discuss a deal with my father. This is done with complete secrecy. My father tells him, ‘No, it isn’t little Jackie who Roscoe’s signed, it’s me.’ Chaplin gets me contracted, fast.
Later Chaplin signed Coogan Sr up, too, realizing that the boy would feel more at ease with his father on the set.
Coogan continues the story:
When Dad came over to join us from Roscoe’s company, he got more money than I did. He wound up playing six parts in The Kid. He also wound up as Chaplin’s assistant. I was making $75.00 per week. By the time the picture was finished, Dad was at $150.00 per week. To me, working with Chaplin was like working with a big kid. He wasn’t as physically big as most grown-ups, and we’d play games together; he knew how to entertain a child. There was no script, sometimes we would go a week without shooting. Having established a given situation, Chaplin would work out the business as to exactly what we were going to do. After I got the feel of it, I started to come up with ideas, and I got a dollar for each one that was used. When I realized that, I came up with lots of ideas. I insisted on being paid in gold – that was real, the other stuff was tin money. As for paper money, to my mind that was to hang in the bathroom.
The Kid was destined to make a great deal of paper money. Coogan told me that the film on which he earned a mere $75.00 a week ultimately grossed thirty-five million dollars – at a time when the price of admission was a nickel!
When Roscoe Arbuckle learned how Jackie Coogan had been stolen from under his nose by Chaplin, he laughed and wished Chaplin every success. Arbuckle was a close friend of the Coogan family. Talking of him, Jackie said to me, ‘Roscoe used to come over to our house. I loved him, he was always clowning. He used to play and make me laugh. There was no affectation about him. In other words, there were no chinks in his armour as far as a child was concerned. I think that’s more important than the opinions of any sixty-year-old bluenose.’
That last remark had to do with Roscoe after his San Francisco trials.
The most significant film Arbuckle made for Comique in 1918 was The Sheriff. At the time, Douglas Fairbanks was the action hero of the silver screen. He appeared to spend his entire film life leaping from balconies, diving into raging rivers, or jumping from rooftop to rooftop. I was told in Hollywood that he once refused to make a movie because the plot didn’t provide a balcony for him to jump from. Roscoe, although a close friend of Fairbanks, decided the time was ripe for a burlesque.
In The Sheriff Roscoe climbs church spires at record speed, leaps on to the balconies of fair señoritas, and listens as bandits beg for mercy. One reviewer wrote, ‘The most amazing thing about “Fatty Fairbanks” was the downright frankness with which he impersonated the great athletic star. It was the most apparent piece of imitation ever seen on stage or screen, and that is why it proves one of Arbuckle’s greatest mirth-provokers. He is a perfect artist in burlesque.’ The film was a hit with the general public as well as Hollywood. Even Fairbanks considered the impersonation better than the original.
In The Sheriff Arbuckle also introduced macabre humour to the screen. During one sequence in the film he rides into a Western town as the newly-appointed sheriff. Passing a graveyard on the outskirts of town, he sees tombstones almost filling the landscape, and the locals tell him it is the cemetery for sheriffs. Riding closer to town, he passes a large house, in each window of which sits a weeping woman, and the locals tell him that it is the home for the widows of sheriffs.
(Arbuckle’s mordant comedy style was evident in a number of movies. In one film a rival suitor for the hand of the heroine lies in ambush for Arbuckle behind a curtain. Arbuckle embraces the girl and empties his revolver into the curtain without taking his lips from the girl’s.)
After finishing The Sheriff, Arbuckle took time off from making money for himself and Paramount to raise funds for his country. The Germans had surrendered in November, but although the war machine had stopped, somebody had to pick up the bills. In America as in every other country, the bills were to be paid by the people. The government initiated a series of loan drives. One money-raising activity was an all-star Hollywood movie in which the gods and goddesses of the silver screen exhorted their fellow citizens to give. Appearing in the film with Roscoe were, among others, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Lillian Gish and Wallace Reid. The million-dollar cast raised millions of dollars, then did the same for the Canadian government with another film. It was one of Hollywood’s finer hours.
Paramount’s rivals in the industry were paying close attention to Roscoe; his popularity had soared in his two years with Paramount. When Adolph Zukor heard that a number of rival companies were making overtures to his biggest star, he quickly left New York for the West Coast. A handshake might be good enough between Joe Schenck and Roscoe, but Zukor desired more tangible evidence of commitment. He had not become one of the most powerful men in the film industry through gentlemen’s agreements. (Ironically, it was a gentleman’s agreement with Schenck that had superseded a written agreement with Max Hart.)
Arriving on the West Coast, Zukor went straight into conference, first with Joseph Schenck, then with Jesse Lasky, and finally with Roscoe Arbuckle. He made Arbuckle an offer that remains unique in the history of cinema: Zukor asked to buy the exclusive rights not to the next two or three of Roscoe’s films, but to the next twenty-two. Roscoe would retain total artistic control, and the films would be made by his own company. The films for 1919 were already scheduled as two-reelers, but from then on all were to be feature-length films. This was unheard of in the industry. No comedian, including Chaplin, had ever been thought good enough to risk in more than an occasional feature film. Chaplin would still be making two-reel comedies in 1922, Harold Lloyd until 1922, Keaton until 1923, and Harry Langdon until 1926. These four men are generally considered to be the major comedians of the silent period. It is possible that Roscoe Arbuckle is not now considered one of the greatest silent film comedians because most experts have never had the chance to see the best of his work. But in 1919 the general public and men like Zukor and Lasky had no doubt who the top film comedian was, and Paramount was prepared to put a fair amount of money down to prove its point. Paramount offered Roscoe three million dollars over a three-year period. In precisely six years Arbuckle had risen from a $5.00-a-day extra at Keystone to become the highest-paid star in the world, making nearly $3,000 a day – at a time when taxes were low. As one writer at the time observed, ‘Roscoe’s income makes that of the President of the United States look like a sick nickel.’
With the new contract signed, Joseph Schenck again urged Roscoe to live in a manner consistent with his astronomical earnings. It was all right for a film extra to stay the odd week here and there, but it was not good enough for a star. Roscoe was disinclined to play the Hollywood game, but under pressure from Schenck he gave way. And when he did, he played a big game.
He bought a house on West Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles. The previous tenant had been Hollywood’s first vamp, Theda Bara, and Alla Nazimova had also rented the house for a while. Arbuckle did not waste time renting. He bought the house from Randolph Huntington-Miner for $250,000.
The front door, imported from Spain, had cost $15,000. The drawing room could seat nearly two hundred. A chandelier with a thousand candles hung in the large hall, and each room was decorated and furnished in the style of a different country. The gardens contained plants from all over the world, with other international touches as well, such as a Japanese bridge in one garden and a Mexican love seat in another. Roscoe spent another $33,000 ‘doing little things to it’, and later he would spend even more, buying such things as a $75,000 Chinese rug.
It was a long way from the sod hut in Kansas where he had been born.
Roscoe had always had a passion for automobiles. His West Adams house had a garage big enough to hold six cars; by the end of 1919 it contained a Rolls Royce, a Stevens-Duryea, a white Cadillac, a Renault, and one of the most extraordinary cars ever made, a Pierce Arrow worth $25,000. Among the extras in the Pierce Arrow were a cocktail bar and a toilet. The chauffeur usually rode in the back while Arbuckle drove.
In 1919 he also invested in a baseball club, the Vernon Tigers, ‘to please Lou Anger’, who was a baseball fanatic. Roscoe had a golden touch that year: in their first season under Roscoe, the Tigers won the Coast League pennant and showed a profit of over $30,000 – after several years of running at a loss.
On 24 March 1919, Roscoe celebrated his thirty-second birthday with plenty of company. The notables of Hollywood dropped in, but they did this even without a birthday to celebrate. It was amazing what news of Roscoe’s contract did to Hollywood’s social life. He had always been popular, but now he was the wonder boy. Free with both money and advice, he was surrounded by people who seemed to hope his genius, his originality – his success – would rub off on them.
Although his marriage with Minta was shattered, every time he went to New York he would stay with her, and for a while it would be like the old days. Minta told me they would laugh together and make love, but all too soon Roscoe would have to return to the West Coast. He didn’t have a sexually active life outside his marriage partially, at least, because self-consciousness about his weight made him shy with women. The only woman with whom he formed a serious friendship during this period was his co-star Alice Lake, and there is no evidence to suggest that he had an affair with her. In fact, Arbuckle may have been the most chaste man in Hollywood.
One day, more than ten years after their last meeting, Roscoe’s father turned up. Brushing aside bitter memories of his youth, Roscoe welcomed his father. The obvious pleasure that William Goodrich Arbuckle felt in his son’s success was short-lived. He developed cancer of the mouth, and though Roscoe spent large sums of money to save him, he died in November 1920.
Roscoe’s stepmother still lived in San Jose, but there was no contact between them. A neighbour of hers who suggested that Roscoe should share his wealth with Mrs William Goodrich Arbuckle was sent packing. Because Roscoe had achieved his success without any help from his family, his stepmother would have considered it immoral to take his money. For his part, Roscoe never regarded his stepmother or her children as his ‘family’.
If Mrs William Goodrich Arbuckle had scruples, others did not. Roscoe was approached daily by people begging for loans of ‘just a few dollars until I get my next part’, and few went away empty-handed. If most of the other stars didn’t know what to do with their new-found wealth, Roscoe did: he gave his away.
Redistributing his wealth voluntarily was one thing, though. Having it taken forcibly was another. Roscoe was plagued by robbers. He couldn’t walk around the block without being held up. Eventually he presented himself at the office of Sheriff Cline and asked for a sheriff’s star and a gun; he wanted the star so he could carry the gun. The delighted sheriff swore him in as a deputy, and the hold-ups stopped immediately.
The pace was quickening, the merry-go-round moving into top gear. If Arbuckle worked hard and worried enough, the three-million-dollar minimum could be doubled. He pushed his mind and body to the limits, staying up till two, three and four in the morning to create new funny situations, driven to make the next film funnier than the last, to improve the timing, polish the techniques. He was making some of his greatest films, but some of his remarks in 1919 indicate the pressure he felt: ‘Many a night, I’ve laid awake for hours chewing over some gag that had to be done on the morrow. And sometimes it wouldn’t come, and it took a lot of energy to keep up this sort of thing year in and year out. But the results seem to have justified the effort.’
Irving Thalberg credited Harold Lloyd with being the first star to preview his work publicly, but Lloyd began previewing his work in the early ’20s; Arbuckle had been doing it since 1917. The sneak preview allowed the silent-film-maker to size up the finished product before it was released. The film could then be reshot and re-edited, depending on how the audience at the sneak preview had reacted. (Such extensive changes would not be possible under today’s system.)
