A troubled life finds its counterpart

Tipped toward the 10 o’clock hour, it’s five deep at the bar. Drum-and-bass tracks skulk out over the stereo. Skin and gin flow through freely, the proceedings all cordoned off by the requisite stone-faced bouncer.

Just another Thursday night in Hollywood, some would say.

Not so for Jerry Stahl -- or rather, not so anymore.

Still, this big to-do at the Belmont is all for him to mark the happy occasion of the publication of his latest book, “I, Fatty,” a wisecracking, sepia-toned novelization of the chemical highs and legal lows of silent-film-era star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and the more famous Hollywood scandal that undid him.

Stahl is no stranger to scandal and excess himself. He scrawled it all out, billboard size for the world to see, in his 1995 memoir, “Permanent Midnight.” Both the book and the film -- which starred Ben Stiller -- detailed in spare-no-grim-detail fashion Stahl’s swim into the deepest waters of heroin addiction. “It’s been said before,” he says. “There is just something about watching the worst things you ever did in your life, written by someone else, projected 9 feet tall on a screen.” You don’t quite get over it.

So tonight Stahl has found a comfy place, more or less, to stand in the shadows. Outfitted in urban camouflage -- shades of black and gray -- he’s wedged toward the back of a slim street-side patio in an unlighted corner banquette, chatting with manageable groups of threes and fours. “I don’t know who most of these people are,” he whispers, casting a severe gaze, not so much judgment as discomfort, over the crowd.

Stiller, now Stahl’s cohort, arrives and does a turn or two around the room -- briefly reprising his Stahl stand-in role -- until revelers finally suss out the real Stahl stashed in the corner. He signs and chats dutifully. But in between glad-handing, his jaw works on an expression that lands somewhere between grimace and smile: “This just isn’t my scene.”

Despite his run as a screen and TV writer (“ALF,” “thirtysomething,” “Moonlighting”), as a journalist for such glossies as Esquire and Details, and as a writer of fiction, Stahl wears his outsiderness like a cloak tugged tight beneath his neck. After all, he was making $5,000 a week while shooting up $6,000 worth of heroin during his “ALF” years. This wasn’t tossing off the stress of the week at happy hour: “I never used dope to party.”

He cracks wise about his post-”Permanent Midnight” career -- which included the novels “Perv: A Love Story”) and “Plainclothes Naked.” “My last book went from computer to shredder with one mouse click,” he says. The book, a whacked-out turn on a detective tale, flat-lined: “Which is exactly what you want to be saying at the beginning of another book tour.”

While he’s been paying the bills writing for TV and screen, most recently “CSI” and “Bad Boys II,” books have provided his real canvas -- well received or not. The Arbuckle book is gathering its own steam.

“Hey, the New Yorker talked about my oeuvre! A word I can’t even say. The guy who wrote three ‘ALFs’ has an oeuvre!” he says, playing it low-key, soft, as if it’s all incidental music. “Good or bad, two pages in the New Yorker ... I’ll take it. I wanted to get as far as I could from my own story -- and look where I ended up. Channeling my inner Fatty.”

Modern resonances

So what’s so hot about an 80-year-old scandal revolving around the mysterious death of a would-be starlet and the beloved comic star who was accused of causing it? Partly it’s the setting: the lavish San Francisco hotel suite, the debauched party that transpired there, the protracted media circus that ensued. But what carries the most powerful punch is that it feels like we watched it all last night on the evening news. The beloved gone bad.

“Here’s what you find out when the world turns on you,” the Stahl-channeled Arbuckle says, surveying the ruins of his life. “You see things differently. You take a telephone book full of people you thought were your friends -- or at least not your enemies ... and you listen to them ... say things about you that you couldn’t imagine your worst enemy even thinking, let alone voicing out loud. I’m talking about awful, hateful, personal things. ... And they’re saying them to newspapers.”

Arbuckle was known for his excesses -- food, drink and drugs -- and was the first millionaire film star. He owned mansions, a baseball team (the Vernon Tigers) and a fancy Pierce-Arrow touring car.

The wild party that uncorked one Labor Day weekend was more than likely on Arbuckle’s tab as well. What was supposed to have been just a little R&R; turned irrevocably disastrous after actress Virginia Rappe got drunk and passed out. What happened -- or didn’t happen -- caught Arbuckle in the crosshairs.

This retelling of his fall from grace taps into an audience now well versed in celebrity scandal -- O.J. and Robert Blake and now Kobe -- the kind of three-ring-circus entertainment that misery/tragedy provides.

It was a freighted choice for a book project for a number of reasons. The faded memory of Arbuckle’s star, the interior struggles of another “celebrity junkie” (as Stahl once tagged himself) felt perhaps too familiar, but Arbuckle’s twisting journey from vaudeville to the screen had wormed its way into Stahl’s consciousness: a metaphor, a cautionary tale, a doppelganger or who knows what all else?

It was also a way to look at the box that fame locks you into, as Arbuckle quips early on. “I spent a lot of time whispering inside of my head, ‘I am so tired of being the Fat Guy.’ But, of course, a diet would have ruined me.”

Stahl, 50, could relate on a visceral level. “Some subjects choose you. I figured there are brilliant biographies of the era. They can get the facts. I can do the conjecture.”

Days before his book tour’s set to start, Stahl takes time out over lunch at a restaurant not too far from where, in the early 1900s, director Mack Sennett unleashed his madcap Keystone Kops on the unsuspecting residents of Echo Park, Silver Lake and a wedge of land between the two once known as Edendale. A longtime resident, Stahl says he’s finally parting ways with the neighborhood: “Silver Lake has gotten way too hip.”

Back in Arbuckle’s day these impossibly hilly, tree-lined, working-class neighborhoods were where the comedian lived and worked, beginning his career rolling out one-reelers for Sennett. Those “flickers” eventually catapulted him to stardom, to a place in America’s heart as a “cherubic innocent.”

Stahl, like many, got one of his first whiffs of the Arbuckle scandal in the pages of Kenneth Anger’s cult classic “Hollywood Babylon.” In that telling, Arbuckle was cast in the role of a rapist-murderer that September weekend in 1921, one who ruptured Rappe’s bladder with a bottle -- mortally wounding her.

It’s been this legend that has floated as fact -- or near fact -- for decades. Arbuckle was eventually acquitted. But the scandal was a permanent stain. Trial testimony and various set-the-record-straight biographies revealed that Rappe died of peritonitis, which could have been the result of an infection or a botched abortion.

Stahl would later revisit Arbuckle during his drug blur of the ‘80s. As he recounts in the novel’s introduction, he was picked up one evening in a drug sweep that coincidentally occurred in front of the comedian’s former home in L.A.’s West Adams district -- the house Arbuckle eventually had to unload to pay legal fees.

The detritus of Arbuckle’s story seemed familiar. “I love stories of ruin and self-destruction,” he says, picking halfheartedly at a beet salad. “I wanted to write about Hollywood in that era. It was so much less innocent than it is now.”

Stahl zoned in on the hypocrisies -- the Wild West and its “wet” towns and speak-easies. At about the same time, Stahl says, “Heroin was for housewives, and it was packaged by Bayer.” Hollywood was experiencing a temblor -- a philosophical one. “The Hays Commission [which set out to regulate on-screen content] was going to shut Hollywood down. There was this whole right wing conspiracy.” Arbuckle became not just the target and the scapegoat but the convenient symbol for everything that was wrong in Hollywood and America. Fast forward, Stahl says, “and it’s just like Ice Cube and the police.”

The book has a jittery, slipped-sprocket feel. One can imagine Arbuckle sitting in an armchair, sifting through the chaos of his life -- an abusive alcoholic father, life as a de facto orphan, the wild vaudeville life. The eating and drinking and drugging not just to buoy the courage and the spirit but to give himself some breathing room -- and later to blot it all out.

At one point, Stahl says, “Poor Fatty detoxed, lost all this weight but had to wear a fat suit to appear in public. I mean, what a classic double life.”

Stahl had a unique challenge: to invent “a voice” for a silent film star. “I read wisecracking writers from that era. I have all of these slang dictionaries. I just love argot. I just immersed myself in that.”

He dug around gathering research, some old, some new. He even booked a night in the infamous St. Francis Hotel suite, where the rape was said to have taken place, to see what secrets the walls might spill.

Then he sat quietly and just let Arbuckle come to him. It wasn’t as difficult as it might seem: “Here he was, a second-grade dropout, full-on drug abuser,” Stahl says. “Essentially all of our secrets were the same.”

In the space of 80 years, little has changed, Stahl says. There’s still a healthy audience for derailed lives and tragedy. “Where would we all be if it weren’t for people blowing their lives up into shards?” Arbuckle could never piece it back together. “Not guilty” didn’t mean “innocent.” He got some work under pseudonyms but died of heart failure in 1933, still trying to cobble together a career.

Arbuckle’s story has a timelessness to it. “It’s the universal language of pain,” Stahl says. “The top layer is lingo. The bottom layer is emotional truth. Fatty was this bemused, tortured, angry drunk. He was overfed but undernourished.

“He didn’t care about being a millionaire. He cared about the control of his work. His voice,” Stahl says. “What we all care about. The story.”

*

Stahl readings and book signings

Stahl readings and book signings

Where: Borders, 14651 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks

When: 7:30 p.m. today

Contact: (818) 728-6593

Also

Where: Barnes & Noble, 1201 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday

Contact: (310) 260-9110

Also

Where: Vroman’s, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena

When: 7 p.m. Aug. 5

Contact: (800) 769-BOOK