Jerry Stahl - I, Fatty

Praise for I, Fatty

"The 'memoir' has about it a convincingly addled tone, sometimes rambling, rarely self-pitying, often humorous, full of 1920s showbiz jargon and evoking plenty of empathy for Arbuckle...In Stahl, the silent star Arbuckle could not have hoped for a more well-equipped mouthpiece."Atlanta Journal Constitution

"I,Fatty is all voice, and that voicewisecracking, shrewd, bawdy, self-deprecating, and ruefulis a tour de force."Newsday

"This is a writer who knows how to give voice to despair. He also reveals a keen eye for the details of early Hollywood, with everyone from Buster Keaton and Mack Sennett to Mabel Norman and Charlie Chaplin making appearances...Stahl has masterfully re-imagined an American tragedy that will seduce you and break your heart all over again."Rocky MountainNews

"Jerry Stahl crawls inside the vilified fat man's head and emerges with a masterpiece. 1, Fatty is a fine, fine piece of workthe definitive new word on an important figure in film history."Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential and A Cooks Tour

"An imaginary memoir written in the slangy lingo of an early Hollywood hep-cat... One part morality tale, one part frisky romp through the decadent years of nascent Hollywood."San Francisco Chronicle

"Jerry Stahl...is a better-than-Burroughs virtuoso when it comes to depicting every paranoid high and cold-kicking torment obtainable from the street and the medicine chest."New Yorker

"Though Stahl revels in Fatty's overindulgences and generally vile behavior, he also manages to make the ol' buffoon sympatheticespecially during the trial that ultimately found Arbuckle not guilty but still destroyed his career." Maxim (Book of the Month; five stars)

"Finally, the true skinny on Fatty. Jerry Stahl brilliantly gives life, voice, truth, and respect to Roscoe Arbuckle, redeeming the unjustly tarnished memory of a wildly great talent and a great wild man."Johnny Depp

"[A] compelling rags-to-riches-to-nearly-rags tale."Oregonian

"Jerry Stahl tells Arbuckle's story as nimbly as that graceful fat man took a pratfall. I, Fatty joins the shelf of Hollywood tragedies alongside The Day ofthe Locust "Robert Sklar, author of Movie-Made America

"Fascinating...I, Fatty may overflow with insider gossip and speculation on the often sordid affairs of the young movie industry's biggest stars, but it also reveals how exciting it was to be an actor or director in Hollywood's formative years. As channeled through Stahl, Arbuckle's memory is remarkably lucid, and his sense of pre- and post-gallows humor remains wonderfully intact." Chicago Sun-Times

"A wisecracking, sepia-toned novelization of the chemical highs and legal lows of silent-film-era star Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle and the more famous Hollywood scandal that undid him."Los AngelesTimes

"Witty, compassionate, occasionally cynical, always entertaining, I, Fatty is a triumph of ventriloquism, and an unexpectedly moving examination into our desperate need to create and then tear down our heroes."JT LeRoy, author of Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things

"Stahl's first-person narrative gets inside his subject's head, while sticking close to the facts. Arbuckle gains readers' sympathy as the wounded fat kid who felt no love from his father. He is also a funny storyteller and, like many good autobiographers, occasionally self-aggrandizing...[A] complex and moving portrait."Time Out New York

"[Stahl is] just the man to tell the Arbuckle tale...This is a chatty, zoom-fast, often very funny book, written in the rueful, oddly fastidious voice of a late-life Arbuckle."Boston Herald

"Poignant...Through Arbuckle's bemused, raunchy voice, [Stahl] draws a sympathetic portrait of a keen, wounded actor in a tale replete with insightful portraits of American vaudeville and silent film...An illuminating story about actors, studios, and audiences."Kirkus Reviews

"From laughter in the dark, the shame of the species, and the cheap moth-eaten fabric of a ruined life, Jerry Stahl has woven a morality tale from which there is no escape."Nick Tosches, author of In the Hand of Dante and Dino

"Stahl's deep dedication to the whacked-out and marginalized helps him inhabit Arbuckle's character sharply and convincingly."Publishers Weekly

"Entertaining and surprisingly poignant...an utterly believable yarn that has as

Reporter

I, FATTY

a novel

JERRY STAHL

BLOOMSBURY

This is a work of fiction. The lives of the characters in this book are matters of historical record. What went on in their heads and came out of their mouths is pure speculation on the part of the author.

Copyright 2004 by Jerry Stahl

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Stahl, Jerry.

I, Fatty : a novel /Jerry Stahl.1st ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-1-58234-582-6

1. Arbuckle, Roscoe, 1887-1933Fiction. 2. Motion picture actors and actressesFiction. 3. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)Fiction. 4. Motion picture industryFiction. 5. San Francisco (Calif.)Fiction. 6. Trials (Murder)Fiction. 7. ComediansFiction. I. Title.

PS3569.T3125I15 2004

813'.54dc22

2003028011

First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2004

This paperback edition published in 2005

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Polmont, Stirlingshire, Scotland

Printed in the United States of America

by Quebecor World Fairfield

For Stella Jane Stahl and Chris Calhoun

There is nothing funnier than unhappiness.

Samuel Beckett

Contents

I WAS ONCE picked up by the police on Fatty Arbuckle's front lawn. Of course, by then Fattywho preferred to be called Roscoehad moved on. Arbuckle died in 1933. And this was the mid-eighties, before the dawn of the Crack Era. Street dealers dotted that no-longer-upscale strip of Adams Boulevard, near downtown Los Angeles, flagging down white kids in cars to sell them loads, a potent combo of Doredin and Codeine 4. Dors-'n'- 4s offered a slow-motion rush that lasted half an hour, with a residual opiate buzz that kept you scratching your nose and not moving your bowels for days at a time. Looking to deeply wound legions of much-loathed punkscore consumers for the narcotic combo described abovea cabal of LAPD, DEA, and two mysterious men named Leon from Compton made Doredins disappear, forcing an entire community to jump to junk.

Fatty's pad, by the time your author landed facedown in front of it, had already been converted to a stately outpost of Christ called Amat House. Amat served as home base for a batch of Vincentian priests, a sect devoted to chaste men doing charitable works. These, apparently, did not include rushing out to aid drug-crazed strangers in moments of distressthough I do recall a couple of startled white faces peering from a pushed-aside curtain as an officer bade me lie "lips down" on the sidewalk. I was not, technically, on the Catholic brothers' lawn; my face was pressed between the prongs of the metal fence that surrounded their grass. Still, I remember savoring the dank, naturey smell of steer manure, pretending that I was on a farm, napping with my face in the dirt, the way farmers do.