Books like I, Fatty

Through a syringe darkly. There's so little written on Roscoe Arbuckle that I'm grateful for anything, and I find that "fictionalized autobiographies" can sometimes reveal much more than the real thing. The first part of the book dealing with Roscoe Arbuckle's childhood rings very true, a shy, self-conscious, overweight boy who's mother is preoccupied with her own illness, she died when Roscoe was 12 years old. And a father preoccupied with getting drunk and verbally abusing and beating his son. So like many performers of the silent era Roscoe's comedy comes out of his personal tragedy. Also like many of Hollywood's early stars he started in Vaudeville at a young age. The parts of the book that covers Arbuckle's incarceration and trials for murder and rape also rings very true. An innocent man whose life is turned upside down, who's convicted in the tabloid press before he is ever given a trial and who's studio's, where he helped make his bosses millions and millions of dollars, abandonment of him. But it's the main body of the book, Roscoe's rise to fame and his years at the top that sounds false. The author, Jerry Stahl, himself a surviving heroin addict, makes Roscoe's life reads like the war stories you hear at AA and NA, surviving old-timers tales of horror and substance abuse. But what's sounds most incongruence and false is Arbuckle's constant self loathing throughout the book. Stahl's Roscoe always refers to himself and his accomplishments in the most demeaning and abusive ways imaginable. This self hatred seems impossible when we see Arbuckle's films or read what little we can about his life before his fall from grace. Stahl takes a classic tragic figure and makes us shake our head and say, "Poor bastard... but I guess he got what was coming to him." Yet another unfair judgment for Roscoe Arbuckle.