Roscoe Conkling Arbuckle (March 24, 1887 – June 29, 1933) was an American silent film comedian. He was given the nickname "Fatty" (a name he hated and used only professionally) because of his rotund figure. 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."

Birth and Early Career

Born in the small town of Smith Center, Kansas, to Mollie and William Goodrich Arbuckle, he had several years of Vaudeville experience, including work at Idora Park in Oakland, California, under his belt when he began his film career with the Selig Polyscope Company in July 1909.

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). She was the daughter of Charles Warren Durfee and Flora Adkins.

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 Mabel Normand.

A legend has Arbuckle creating the gag after a chance encounter with Pancho Villa's army on the Rio Grande during a Vaudeville appearance in El Paso, Texas. The story claims the Arbuckles, picnicking on the river, and the Villa men playfully threw fruit at each other across the river, with Roscoe knocking one of Villa's men off his horse with a bunch of bananas, to Villa's own extreme amusement.

Buster Keaton

Arbuckle discovered Buster Keaton and made him a star. 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.

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. The three 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 she was examined by the hotel doctor, who concluded she was merely intoxicated.

Rappe died three days later of peritonitis caused by a ruptured bladder; significantly, while in San Francisco she also had allegedly asked Arbuckle to help pay for an (illegal) abortion, which could have also possibly contributed to her death. Rappe's companion to the party, Maude Delmont, tried to blackmail Arbuckle over his involvement in the matter. Arbuckle, confident 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 William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire made Arbuckle appear guilty. After two trials resulted in hung juries, Fatty was acquitted at the third, with a written apology from the jury --- an apology unprecedented in American justice.

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. Buster Keaton did, however, make a public statement in support of Arbuckle, calling Roscoe one of the kindest souls he had known.

Arbuckle's case has been examined by scholars and historians over the years, and it is believed by most serious historians that Arbuckle was indeed an innocent man.

The Arbuckle case was one of four major Paramount-related scandals of the period. The other three being the drug-related suicide of actress and wife of matinee idol Jack Pickford, Olive Thomas in Paris in 1920, the murder of director William Desmond Taylor, which effectively ended the career of actresses Mary Miles Minter and Mabel Normand in 1922, and the other being the drug-related death of actor/director Wallace Reid in 1923. Those three cases rocked Hollywood and led to calls for reform of the "indecency" being promoted by motion pictures. It 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 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.

Another of Arbuckle's features, Life of the Party, survives only as a print with Polish-language intertitles; Life of the Party was released before the scandal, but no effort was made to preserve the original English-language prints.

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 feature films (he allegedly co-directed scenes in Keaton's Sherlock, Jr., but it is unclear whether any of this footage made it through to the final film), and Arbuckle directed a number of comedy shorts for Educational Pictures featuring lesser-known comics of the day under the pseudonym William B. Goodrich (supposedly a play on "will be good"), but Arbuckle by this time had become irritable and difficult to work with.

Shortly before marrying for the third time, to Addie McPhail, 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.

Third marriage

In 1929 Doris 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.

Death

Roscoe Arbuckle died from heart failure on June 29, 1933, in New York City. Buster Keaton stated repeatedly that Arbuckle died of a broken heart. He was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean. (It is Macklin Arbuckle who is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York.)