I, Fatty

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was abandoned as a boy in Kansas. He found the adoration he lacked, first on the vaudeville stage and then in the new medium of film. In the 1910s he was a bigger draw than Chaplin, and he became the first screen actor to earn a million dollars a year.

In 1921 his career collapsed. After a party in San Francisco, the actress Virginia Rappe died a few days later, and Arbuckle was accused of her rape and murder. A unanimous jury eventually acquitted him. By then the press had fed a storm of vicious speculation that ruined him. Conservative voices held up the case as proof of everything wrong with show business. Whether he was presumed guilty or claimed innocent, Arbuckle became the first modern celebrity to grip a whole nation.

In this novel, Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight, tells the story in Arbuckle's own voice. It portrays a comic talent whose rise and fall set a pattern for the scandals that still shake Hollywood.