Fatty
Just this morning I heard another high-minded editorial bemoaning President Clinton’s alleged sex with and lies about Monica Lewinsky (no videotape). And I’m sure I’ll hear another Clinton joke or three today, as the scandal’s oily slick of speculation continues to spread over the airwaves and the newspapers, smothering more important news.
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The headline wasn’t entirely accurate, however: according to John Fournier, comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was the first fatty to fall into a national scandal. And now, in the multimedia piece Fatty, Fournier and his jazz quartet, directed by Rob Mello, have staged the story of the great comedian’s Hollywood rise and fall.
After three trials based almost entirely on hearsay, a jury finally found Arbuckle innocent, but it was too late for the comedian to reclaim his career. He’d become a symbol of the threat to America’s moral fiber that Hollywood represented, a monster whose gigantic presence and flirtatious winking no longer seemed innocent or amusing. Arbuckle made a wan comeback in the early 30s, but he died broke, an alcoholic, in 1933 at age 46.
The truth behind the “rape”–the uncomfortable middle ground–is that it probably resulted from a complicated amalgam of circumstances: drunken Hollywood excess, political frame-up, and media moneymaking. In one song Fournier adds an element of class criticism, saying that the studio and the public conspired to bring Arbuckle down because he sought to exceed his station in life, providing a valuable twist to the public’s moral outrage and Paramount’s canceled contract. It’s a cliche to say that no one is innocent, but in the Arbuckle case I began to think that everyone was both innocent and guilty.
