Looking for Mabel Normand
Madcap Mabel Normand
Fatty and Mabel's Simple Life
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FATTY Keystone-Mutual 2 reels, The Runaway Auto dir. Roscoe Arbuckle cast: Mabel Normand, Roscoe Arbuckle, Joseph Swickard, Al St. John, Hank Mann finished: Jan 4, Location: Keystone, farm in copyright: COPY at LC
Farm-girl Mabel and The Fat Boy have trouble eloping when car explodes and everyone falls in the well |
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In Fatty and Mabel's Simple Life, a melodrama parody, the two play a couple of country kids whose childhood love is threatened by the greed of "Mabel's" father. One especially good moment, for instance, occurs when, in the course of eloping, Mabel lets fall an enormous trunk filled with her belongings. It comes tumbling down on Arbuckle, who, ascending the ladder to her room, is sent crashing through a living room window. (William Thomas Sherman) |
Why Aren’t We Killed
by
“I didn't raise my wife to be a widow, but ¾” Roscoe Arbuckle paused, slanted a critical eye down a steep banister, twenty-five feet as the crow flies, and then added: “We are getting a little behind on Keystone releases, and the thing must be done.”
It was no prop banister, though, as befitted the use to which it was dedicated, it was well propped. The general outstanding idea for which it had been erected in the Fort Lee studio was that Mr. Arbuckle should slide down it, take a flying leap as he neared the jewel post, grab a chandelier, swing around half a dozen times, say “Now I lay me,” and drop. They didn't want to build the banister; it cost too much. They tried to get “locations,” but the locators would take a look at Roscoe and then a fond look at the old home banister, and guess they would like to keep the family mansion intact yet a while. Besides there are few home grown banisters which would look kindly upon the idea of three hundred and eighty-five pounds of comedy doing an avalanche down their tender spines, so a special banister was built.
Roscoe looked down the banister over and under, and up and down, and decided that, upon the whole, it was a right pert banister. To make sure he exploded a few tons of nitro-glycerine under it, and as it did not budge, the chances were it might hold his weight, when said weight was going at the enthusiastic speed of a French shell on its way toward a German trench. So he tried a slide down it. Half way down something happened. Nobody knows what it was exactly, but the net result was a well-known comedian reclining gracefully upon the floor, with the most of his three hundred and eighty-five pounds sustained by a protesting neck. So he tried it again, and with similar results. You would hardly think a human neck could stand the pressure. But he tried it two or three more times, and always about the same point in the descent he lost his balance, doing an Annette Kellerman to the floor instead of a Wright Brothers to the chandelier. Finally he rubbed his neck and remarked to Ferris Hartman, who was standing sympathetically near:
“I'll guess we'll have to take it that way.”
So when you see the Triangle-Keystone release “He Did and He Didn't,” you will know what it means, to wit: He did survive, but he didn't take much interest in the fact.
You would have every right to expect that, after a man had been doing this sort of thing a few years, his friends would speak of him in subdued voices, and say how nice and green his grave was being kept. But for three years, Roscoe Arbuckle and Mabel Normand, “Fatty and Mabel,” the team of a thousand laughs, have performed hair-raising feats for the purpose of giving the public comedy thrills, Roscoe the while, putting on weight, and Mabel just about holding her own, which makes for mirth and beauty in both cases. Yet when you ask them why it is they haven't been killed long ago, they disagree. It is the only point upon which there is not perfect comedy in the Keystone camp.
Arbuckle is very prosaic about it. “I am the only man my size and weight the New York Life Insurance Company ever issued a policy to,” he says. “I am five feet, eleven inches tall, and weigh three hundred and eighty-five pounds, which is forty per cent more than the law allows. But I passed every physical test they put up to me.”
In other words, A, in addition to standing for Arbuckle, stands for acrobatic, agile, athletic, able-bodied, alert, active, animated, alive, astir, and so on.
Mabel Normand lacks this positiveness, and not without cause.
“Why have you never been killed?” I asked her, with the utmost sincerity.
“Why haven't I? Why --¾ I have. I guess you don't read the
“But it wasn't permanent.”
“That didn't make it any better while it lasted,” the fair Mabel insisted.
“How did it happen?”
“Roscoe sat on my head by mistake. I was unconscious for twelve days, and laid up for three months. Don't talk to me about being killed -- I've been through it,” and Mabel's eyes took upon themselves that dreamy, distant gaze you read about. I think she was offering up a little prayer of thanks for being alive, as I know I always should, if Roscoe Arbuckle sat on my head and I lived to tell about it.
“But that was your only serious death in all your adventures, thus far?”
“Yes, but I just live along from day to day. I never make any plans. Nobody in the world lives up to the literal instruction, ‘Take no thought for the morrow,’ like I do. What's the use of making plans to go places or marry people, when like as not you will have to write a note saying, ‘Excuse me. I did want to become your blushing bride today, but it's no go. I was killed yesterday doing a high dive into a tank of brickbats.’”
“Then you're always afraid you are going to be killed when you have a rough stunt to handle?”
“Afraid?” and Mabel was daintily angry. “Who said anything about being afraid? I'm usually in too big a hurry to be scared, but I just absolutely know I am going to be killed. When I come through alive I am so surprised that I feel quite sure it isn't myself at all, and want to be introduced to the woman that's hanging around in my clothes.”
So there you have the Keystone policy of preparedness in a nutshell --¾ sort of filopena. Roscoe believes in strength and speed, and Mabel believes in anticipating the worst. It was to be expected that a quest of this sort would uncover a great assortment of lifesaving ideas, elaborate preparations for protecting the players from injury. You naturally look for a fully equipped Department of Accessories, so that when the ambulance corps telephones in a size 8 3/4 left hind leg, or a dark blue eye No. 1986, the order can be filled immediately. You expect to find a supply of ready made artificial limbs that would make a Soldier's Home seem like a gymnasium, and a Red Cross service beside which those adjacent to the European unpleasantness are mere training schools for the kindergarten. Not so. Here is the remarkable fact:
Notwithstanding all its rough work the Keystone company has a record for freedom from accident and sickness that is the envy of the craft. And Roscoe Arbuckle, who has borne the brunt of battle, never has suffered any injury that has kept him away from work five minutes. Here are a few of his more spectacular stunts:
In “Fatty and the Broadway Stars” he dropped through a skylight and fell about ten feet upon a table, with nothing to ease the percussion. In “The Village Scandal” he rolled down a roof and dropped fifteen feet into a trough of water. In “Fatty's Tintype Tangle” he walked along a bunch of telephone wires thirty feet above the ground, and dropped through the roof of a house, lighting upon a bed eighteen feet below. In “Fatty's Jonah Day” he dived seventy feet from the top of an electric light mast above a bridge in
The question that keeps arising constantly, is how can they tell it is going to work? How does Roscoe know, when he goes through a skylight, that he is going to land on the table, instead of stabbing out several ribs with its corner? When he rolls off the roof, how does he know he is going to land in the comparatively soft water and not mash out his young life on the edge of the trough? Are preparations made so that if any of these mishaps occur, there will not be a large enough opening for a stout comedian with Keystone?
“Why, we figure it out on paper, and if it looks as if it will work we do it. That's all there is to it. Now and then it doesn't work, and we either have to plan it a different way, or do it over again until we get it. Naturally I figure pretty carefully, because I don't want to roll off a roof more than seven or eight times just for a foot or two of film.”
Then it isn't a question of tricks?”
Each one of Arbuckle's three hundred and eighty-five pounds got mad.
“Say ¾ if you, or anyone else, can show me a way that I can seem to fall through a roof, or into a river, and not do it, or even do it slow so that I can land gently, you can have just about half my salary. Our stuff cannot be faked. When people see it they know they are seeing real stunts. Of course, now and then we do a trick film, but everyone knows it is a trick when they see it ¾ there is no bunk about it. In fact, it was in one of these trick pictures that I took the longest chance of all.
“This was the picture called ‘Fatty and Mabel's Simple Life.’ In one scene I was backed against a tree by a runaway Ford. We had a man crouching down on the floor of the machine, working it from the pedals. All he had to guide him was a line on the ground. He would run the machine up to this line, at which time it pressed close against me; then he would back up a few feet and run into me again. It gave the impression that the machine was acting like a goat. Well, of course no one believed that the car was doing this without some sort of control, so it was a trick picture and yet it wasn't. But if that man ever had gone past the line I surely would have had an attack of indigestion.
“No, the only times I have been injured in the least, is when I have loafed on the job. A child or a drunk can fall all over itself and never be hurt. It is because they simply let go and flop. The same rule works with me. If I go right after the stuff, we get a real picture and I don't get a scratch. If I happen to be lazy, we usually have to do the scene over again, and I get a few bruises as a result.”
Excepting for her water exploits, the secret of Miss Normand's immunity from injury is that with her, things are only apparently going to happen, and disaster is averted. The public would not stand for pictures where so pretty a girl was slammed around like a medicine ball. Yet her adventures have been hair-raising, and have varied from aviation and auto racing to deep-sea diving. Notwithstanding her remark that she is positive that each film will be her last, she is game clear through, and certainly her pictures suggest no trepidation. After all the difference in the viewpoint of these two Keystoners is easy to understand, viz.: If anything hits Mabel Normand, she is so little that it hits her where she lives. But ¾
If anything hits Roscoe Arbuckle, the news has so far to go that he does not know about it until it is all healed up.
Photoplay, April 1916
