THE WIVES OF FATTY ARBUCKLE

Comedian Fatty Arbuckle had a sad and short life. Due to his raping scandal, he was banished from Hollywood. The poor soul was married three times but never had any children. Even though Fatty was divorced twiced, all three of his wives said he was a good man. Here is a break down of the three wives of Fatty Arbuckle...

MINTA DURFEE (1889-1975)

Minta was a minor silent screen actress. She met Roscoe Arbuckle when he was attempting to get started in theater, and the two married in August 1908. Durfee entered show business in local companies as a chorus girl at the age of 17. She was the first leading lady of Charlie Chaplin.. 

Durfee and Arbuckle separated in 1921, just prior to a scandal involving the death of starlet Virginia Rappe. There were three trials and finally Arbuckle was acquitted. His career was destroyed and he received few job offers. Durfee and Arbuckle divorced in 1925. Durfee in her later years said Arbuckle was "the most generous human being I've ever met", and "if I had to do it all over again, I'd still marry the same man.

A regular performer on television, Durfee appeared on such shows as Noah's Ark (1956). She had minor roles in motion pictures including How Green Was My Valley (1941), Naughty Marietta (1935), Rose-Marie (1936), It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), and Savage Intruder (1970). In later life, Durfee gave lectures on silent film and held retrospectives on her and her husband's pictures. She was surprised and excited by the renewed interest in silent film.

DORIS DEANE (1901-1974)

Doris married film director Roscoe Arbuckle May 16, 1925. The marriage followed soon after his divorce from Minta Durfee and followed the rape and manslaughter accusations against him in the death of Virginia Rappe.They planned to honeymoon in New York. They later divorced and she sued for alimony in 1929. She and Arbuckle were guests of writer Gouvineur Morris before their marriage.She was in the 1944 play The Day Will Come.

ADDIE MCPHAIL (1905-2003)

Addie was another actress that Fatty married. She appeared in 64 films between 1927 and 1941.She was married to Fatty when she died. After she retired from acting, she served for 17 years as a volunteer nurse at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. 

THE LAST DAYS OF FATTY ARBUCKLE

No one seems to remember the comedic genius of Fatty Arbuckle. The poor man was completely framed for the murder of Vriginia Rappe. After three trials Arbuckle was finally acquitted on April 12, 1922 but not until his reputation was destroyed and his movies were banned. In November 1923, Arbuckle's estranged wife Minta Durfee filed for divorce, charging grounds of desertion. In January 1924, the divorce was granted. They had been separated since 1921, though Durfee always claimed he was the nicest man in the world, and that they were still friends. After a brief reconciliation, Durfee again filed for divorce, this time from Paris, in December 1924. Arbuckle married Doris Deane on May 16, 1925.

Arbuckle tried returning to filmmaking, but industry resistance to distributing his pictures continued to linger after his acquittal. 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 giving him work on his films. Arbuckle wrote the story for a Keaton short called Daydreams (1922). Arbuckle allegedly co-directed scenes in Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (1924), but it is unclear how much of this footage remained in the film's final cut. In 1925, Carter Dehaven made the short Character Studies. Arbuckle appeared alongside Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Jackie Coogan.

Eventually, Arbuckle was given work as a film director under the alias William Goodrich. According to author David Yallop in The Day the Laughter Stopped (a biography of Arbuckle with special attention to the scandal and its aftermath), Arbuckle's father's full name was William Goodrich Arbuckle. A persistent but unsupported legend credited Keaton, an inveterate punster, with suggesting that Arbuckle become a director under the alias "Will B. Good". The pun being too obvious, Arbuckle adopted the more formal pseudonym "William Goodrich".

During the middle and late 1920s and early 1930s, Arbuckle directed a number of comedy shorts under the pseudonym for Educational Pictures, which featured lesser-known comics of the day. Louise Brooks, who played the ingenue in Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931), told Kevin Brownlow:

"He made no attempt to direct this picture. He sat in his chair like a man dead. He had been very nice and sweetly dead ever since the scandal that ruined his career. But it was such an amazing thing for me to come in to make this broken-down picture, and to find my director was the great Roscoe Arbuckle. Oh, I thought he was magnificent in films. He was a wonderful dancer—a wonderful ballroom dancer, in his heyday. It was like floating in the arms of a huge doughnut—really delightful."

In 1929, Doris Deane sued for divorce in Los Angeles, charging desertion and cruelty.[33] On June 21, 1931 Roscoe married Addie Oakley Dukes McPhail (later Addie Oakley Sheldon, 1905–2003) in Erie, Pennsylvania.

In 1932 Arbuckle signed a contract with Warner Bros. to star under his own name in a series of two-reel comedies, to be filmed at the Vitaphone studios in Brooklyn. These six shorts constitute the only recordings of his voice. Silent-film comedian Al St. John (Arbuckle's nephew) and actors Lionel Stander and Shemp Howard appeared with Arbuckle. The films were very successful in America, although when Warner Bros. attempted to release the first one (Hey, Pop!) in the United Kingdom, the British Board of Film Censors cited the 10-year-old scandal and refused to grant an exhibition certificate.

Roscoe Arbuckle had finished filming the last of the two-reelers on June 28, 1933. The next day he was signed by Warner Bros. to make a feature-length film. He reportedly said, "This is the best day of my life." He suffered a heart attack later that night and died in his sleep. He was 46. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean. The unhappy and tortured clown could finally rest at last...

LIFE OF FATTY ARBUCKLE COMING TO THE SCREEN

HBO is preparing to bring the story of Fatty Arbuckle to their network. The project ,which is in development, would revolve around the famed comedian's rise and fall.

Modern Family star Eric Stonestreet is channeling his inner Fizbo the Clown for HBO.

The actor is attached to star in The Day the Laughter Stopped, a telefilm in development at HBO Films revolving around silent film star Fatty Arbuckle.

John Adams writer Kirk Ellis is on board to pen the project, with Barry Levinson on board to direct the telepic based on the book by David A. Yallop.

Arbuckle (1887-1933) was a silent film star, comedian, director and screenwriter who mentored Charile Chaplin and discovered Buster Keaton and Bob Hope.

The popular comedian also had his troubles: in 1921 Arbuckle was accused of raping and accidentally killing actress Virginia Rappe and was tried for her death three times. Though he was acquitted, the scandal plagued his career and worked sparingly in the 1920s.

The HBO telepic would span his rise to fame and subsequent fall.

"In addition to the fact that I'm from Kansas and he's from Kansas, I just always found it to be such a fascinating and tragic story," Stonestreet told Vulture. "He went from this jolly person who fell down and entertained people into a sexual deviant. It's a true story people don't know about, with a twist."

Ellis, Levinson, Stonestreet, Ron West, Chris Henze, Christine Vachon and Steve Kavovit are on board as executive producers.

It is really surprising that Arbuckle's life has not been made into a film sooner. Comedian Chris Farley was interested at one time in making an Arbuckle film, but Farley died of a drug overdose in 1997 before the project got off the ground. Eric Stonestreet is a talented actor, who could easily bring the tragic Fatty Arbuckle story to the screen...

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THIS WEEK IN FILM HISTORY

As he head into July, here are some important events that happened in movie history this week:

June 30, 1929: Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail, which nearly saw completion as a silent film, was re-shot with sound, becoming Britain's first "talkie."

June 29, 1933: Unable to overcome the scandal that plagued him 12 years earlier, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, 46, dies penniless of a heart attack.

June 30, 1933: The Screen Actors Guild is founded in Hollywood, presided over by actor Ralph Morgan.


June 29, 1934: The Thin Man, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, launches a series of six films MGM will make featuring Dashiell Hammett's characters.

June 27, 1944: Esther Williams makes a splash in her first "all-singing, all-dancing, all-swimming" musical for MGM, Bathing Beauty.

June 27, 1961: Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour come home to rest with the release of the seventh and final "road" flick, The Road to Hong Kong.

June 28, 1961: The search is on for the perfect James Bond, after United Artists announces it will produce seven films based on Ian Fleming's superspy.

June 27, 1964: Ernest Borgnine marries Ethel Merman (during a spell of "temporary insanity," she'll claim later). The union lasts less than some of her high notes: 32 days.

June 29, 1967: Screen sex kitten Jayne Mansfield, 44, is killed in a car accident on a Louisiana highway. The sight of her wig nearby will stir up "beheading" rumors.

June 27, 1973: The tuxedo is passed on, as Roger Moore plays superspy James Bond for the first time in Live and Let Die.

July 2, 1973: Betty Grable, the favorite actress and pin-up of many American G.I.s during World War II, dies of lung cancer at the age of 56.

June 30, 1983: Spanish-born director and master of cinematic surrealism Luis Buñuel dies in Mexico at 83.

June 30, 1989: Spike Lee's controversial look at race relations in a Brooklyn pizza parlor, Do the Right Thing, opens.

July 1, 1997: Robert Mitchum, sleepy-eyed tough guy and leading man from the '40s through the '90s, dies at age 79.

July 2, 1997: James Stewart, affable leading man and father figure from the '30s through the '90s, dies at age 89.