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"What do you do when the world thinks you're a monster, and you know it's the world that's monstrous?" This question is posed by Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle in Jerry Stahl's heart-eating, fictionalized portrait of the turn of the century's original star of Hollywood meltdown.
Meltdown (or becoming the "monster") has been mastered by contemporary fallen stars Michael Jackson, Robert Blake, and Courtney Love. The difference between this dreaded threesome and the dearly departed Fatty is that Arbuckle was incinerated by courtroom media scandal at the zenith of his sparkling vaudeville-to-screen career, not as a post-fame footnote. This fact is what gives I, FATTY, a Kafkaesque masterpiece, its flavorful rum punch in the face. In proving that fat is far stranger than fiction, Stahl's Fatty is clearly guilty of a crime he did not commit.
As a writer for the pre-millennium hit TV show "Alf," Stahl has publicly lived the chaotic celluloid life of success, breakdown and redemption. He was even nabbed by the Keystones on Fatty's old front lawn. In Fatty's smelly old clown shoes, Stahl romances, chills, thrills, revolts, and delivers the sweat drenched goods in this impossible to put down imagination of the mind controlling the plump though flaccid funny man who made Hollywood's first million dollars as a contract actor and lost everything after being accused of a brutal "Coke bottle rape" that killed young actress Virginia Rappe.
From the days of Fatty's unusual arrest and three-trial prosecution, America has not reconciled its fear of fat. Thanks to this blood curdling imbroglio of 1921, even the success of charming, Bowflex-bucking Teletubbies John Goodman, Kirstie Alley and James Gandolfini are highly suspect. But I, FATTY is more than a mouthful of lunchmeat versus morality.
Like O.J. Simpson, Fatty lived to see his own character assassination at the hands of the district attorney, the lawyers, families and "friends," on both sides of the case, and the Hearst-controlled tabloid media --- a "crusifiction" --- can I get a witness for this fact ladies and germs? --- at the hands of a court, press and public that assumed Fatty was guilty before hearing any of the facts and, of course, before hearing one word from Fatty himself.
But Fatty didn't do it. Sure, he was psychologically abused by his father and downed enough Prohibition-era bathtub gin and morphine to stagger Jumbo the elephant, but he didn't kill the "virgin" Vi Rappe --- her abortion doctor did. For starring in too many lead roles as the pie-faced man, eating a few too many cream buns and washing them down with fire water, Fatty got set up by a producer with a grudge, a whore with an attitude, a bad lawyer, a DA with gubernatorial dreams, and a whole bunch of other phonies who used Fatty's big butt to cover their own.
Post-World War I America, and Hollywood, needed a fall guy to show the commies and the liberals that women belonged at home, barefoot and pregnant --- not in the factories or in the voting booths --- and that Tinsel Town was not the arbiter of porn. Short skirts, bobbed hair and feminism be damned! As a modern-day Job, Fatty was, as Stahl relates, the first Hollywood fall guy, but no one at the studios told Fatty until it was too late. See, they made a killing themselves at the box office when Fatty was the hero and made themselves look Holier than Thou in the conservative social circles when Fatty was the devil. So, Fatty found, either the box of donuts (whiskey, fatty foods, sex, sinful thoughts, racy movies, bad actor behavior) went, or he went. And Hollywood still writes these types of scripts, for movies and for reality; quick, name the high and low points in the career of Paris Hilton.
Best supporting roles and comic relief are offered --- as well as a hipster education in 1920s Broadway and Hollywood culture --- by Buster Keaton, Mabel Normand, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, William Randolph Hearst, Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Fatty's three wives, and others in this fiction that will make you, Miss or Mr. American film star wannabe, think twice about going on a reality show.
The reality is … drum roll please … there is no such thing as reality, only perception, which, as Fatty and so many others learned, is a fatal dose of remembrance and imagination. Oscar Wilde, step aside --- Jerry Stahl is back in town!
--- Reviewed by Brandon M. Stickney
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