Roscoe Arbuckle

Roscoe Conkling Arbuckle was born on March 24, 1887, in Smith Center, Kansas, one of nine children of Mary E. Gordon and William Goodrich Arbuckle. His father, believing the infant — who weighed more than 13 pounds at birth — to be illegitimate, named him after Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, a philanderer he despised. The family relocated to Santa Ana, California, before Arbuckle turned two. He made his first stage appearance at age eight with Frank Bacon's company during a performance in Santa Ana, and continued performing until his mother's death in 1898, when he was eleven.

Left without parental support, Arbuckle took odd jobs at a hotel, where a professional singer overheard him and encouraged him to enter an amateur talent show. During the competition, anticipating removal by the shepherd's crook used to pull failing acts offstage, he somersaulted into the orchestra pit, winning over the audience and launching a career in vaudeville. In 1904, Sid Grauman invited him to perform at his Unique Theater in San Francisco. Arbuckle subsequently joined the Pantages Theatre Group on a West Coast tour and in 1906 appeared at the Orpheum Theater in Portland, Oregon, as part of a vaudeville troupe organized by Leon Errol. He later joined the Morosco Burbank Stock vaudeville company and toured China and Japan, returning in early 1909. On August 6, 1908, he married actress Minta Durfee, who appeared alongside him in numerous early comedy films.

Arbuckle entered the film industry in July 1909 with the Selig Polyscope Company, making his debut in Ben's Kid. After sporadic appearances in Selig one-reelers, he moved briefly to Universal Pictures before becoming a prominent figure in Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops comedies. Despite his approximately 300-pound frame, he was notably agile; Sennett recalled that Arbuckle moved up a staircase as lightly as Fred Astaire and executed a backward somersault with the grace of a trained tumbler. Arbuckle was self-conscious about his weight and declined to use it for easy physical gags. He worked at Keystone alongside Mabel Normand and Harold Lloyd, as well as his nephew Al St. John. He also played a role in bringing vaudeville performer Buster Keaton into the film business and mentored Charlie Chaplin, Monty Banks, and Bob Hope.

In 1913, the earliest known pie-in-the-face gag in film appeared in the Keystone one-reeler A Noise from the Deep, featuring Arbuckle and Normand. By 1914, Paramount Pictures offered him $1,000 per day plus twenty-five percent of profits and full artistic control. The arrangement proved so successful that in 1918 Paramount extended a three-year, $3 million contract for up to eighteen feature films. In 1916, a severe leg infection required doctors to consider amputation; Arbuckle retained the leg but was prescribed morphine during his recovery. Following that period, he co-founded the film production company Comique with Joseph Schenck, later transferring his controlling interest to Keaton. By 1920, he had signed a new contract with Paramount Pictures worth $1 million per year. Operatic tenor Enrico Caruso, upon hearing Arbuckle sing, urged him to pursue formal vocal training, telling him he could become the second greatest singer in the world.

In September 1921, actress Virginia Rappe fell ill at a party Arbuckle hosted at San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel and died four days later. A friend of Rappe accused Arbuckle of rape and manslaughter. Three widely publicized trials followed between November 1921 and April 1922. The first two ended in hung juries; the third acquitted him, with the jury issuing a written apology for his treatment by the justice system. Despite the acquittal, Adolph Zukor, president of Famous Players–Lasky, arranged for industry censor Will H. Hays to ban Arbuckle's films. Pressure from organizations including the Lord's Day Alliance, the Federation of Women's Clubs, and the Federal Trade Commission contributed to Arbuckle's public ostracism. Hays lifted the ban within a year, but Arbuckle worked only sporadically through the remainder of the 1920s, directing films under the pseudonym William Goodrich.

In 1927, Arbuckle appeared on Broadway in the farce Baby Mine. He returned to on-screen acting in 1932 and 1933, making short two-reel comedies for Warner Bros. Arbuckle died in his sleep of a heart attack on June 29, 1933, at age 46, reportedly on the same day he signed a contract with Warner Bros. to make a feature film.