"Who knew that being a dope fiend
was a great career move?" cracked Mr. Stahl, who has not been out of work
since.
It was heroin that led Mr. Stahl, clean now
for over a decade, to his latest success – writing "I, Fatty," a fictional
memoir of the silent film actor Roscoe Arbuckle, better known as Fatty.
Arbuckle, the first movie star to sign a million-dollar contract, was a
heroin addict, too. In 1921, when he was more popular than Charlie Chaplin,
Arbuckle ignited the first major Hollywood scandal when he was arrested
on charges that he raped and murdered a starlet, Virginia Rappe, during
a Labor Day orgy at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco.
The book, ranked No. 9 on the Los
Angeles Timess best-seller list, has generally been well reviewed. Thomas
Mallon wrote in the New Yorker, "Stahl remains a writer who delivers, every
few pages, a bit more than a reader expects."
Last week Johnny Depp's Hollywoodbased
production company, Infinitum Nihil, optioned the book for a possible film
project that it is to develop with a New York-based production company,
This Is That, Mr. Depp said from London that he would not play Fatty. "It
would take a hell of a fat suit," he commented. But he said he would be
a hands-on producer, at least early on. "Its a period that's the foundation
of what we do," he said, "and I want to make sure the film stays in the
same arena as Jerry's book." He said he could see a padded Philip Seymour
Hoffman playing Arbuckle.
Writing his books and seeing his own
messy life on screen has made Mr. Stahl something of an authority on moral
turpitude and the public's appetite for It-a taste that time has done nothing
to diminish.
"The righteous masses decried Fatty,
but at the same time they spent their last dime to read about him," Mr.
Stahl said, noting the giddy abandon with which William Randolph Hearst
directed his newspapers to crank out sensational stories about Arbuckle's
fall.
"The difference is, at this point
self-destruction is a wing of show business, and back then it wasn't,"
Mr. Stahl said. "Look at Hugh Grant – he didn't murder anybody, but he
certainly had a weird time with Divine Brown down on Sunset Boulevard –
or anybody who goes through the drug routine. It has almost become a station
of the celebrity cross to have that rehab moment, when you do something,
you're caught, then you come clean and everybody loves you again and you're
back in. The return is part of the story. That wasn't a part of the story
for Fatty. He was out." That was the case even though Arbuckle was acquitted
on all charges after three trials.
"Once Fatty got in trouble, nobody cared
if he was guilty or innocent," Mr. Stahl explained. "Once the image of
this man naked on top of a small, sylphlike woman was in people's brains,
it was over. He could never be funny again."
Truth played little role as the Arbuckle
story took on a life of its own. "Hearst invented the tabloid on the ample
back of Fatty Arbuckle," Mr. Stahl said. "He made Virginia Rappe into this
virginal victim, when in fact she had given half the Keystone Cops gonorrhea
and the other half lice and had been a prostitute since she was 14. People
love to see a hero squirming and kicked in the face, because they hated
the fact he was partying on a weekday afternoon and they had to work for
a living."
Mr. Stahl himself enjoys a good tabloid
read, though he says the Vanity Fair on the floor of his shiny, black Cadillac
is his daughter's. Give him The Star any day.
"I love its glossy, viciously cruel
photos," he admitted. "It's like being rocketed back to ninth grade with
the worst zit on your face except now it's a movie star being pointed at.
Shakespeare knew it, the Greeks knew it," He said people want to see kings
when they're down.
With the acclaim for "I, Fatty," Mr.
Stahl is riding high, though he cannot shake the celebrity-addict label
or the feeling that the rug could be pulled out from under him at any time.
"I still buy a car based on what it'll be like to live in it," he said.
But that probably will not happen
soon. Mr, Stahl recently moved into a house high in the hills east of Hollywood,
which he says reminds him of the place in "Cape Fear," with its steep driveway
winding along a cliff, "That's my favorite thing about L.A." he said. "You
have gunshots all night and then you wake up to falcons nesting on your
deck."
And his career has definitely come
a long way since the time, he joked, that he turned in a "Twin Peaks" script
with blood and hair on it. He is writing a remake of "Sharky's Machine"
for Warner Brothers and an original screenplay about celebrity minders
– "Fatty could have used one," he joked – for the producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
He was also hired recently to write
the 100th episode of the CBS series "C.S.I.,"
one of several scripts he has done for the program. The gigs stem from
a chance meeting with the show's star, William L. Peterson, in the sauna
at the Hollywood Y.M.C.A.
"It was one of those weird encounters
that result in gainful employment," Mr. Stahl said. By writing "I, Fatty"
in Arbuckle's voice, Mr. Stahl said, he learned a lot about himself.
"When everybody turns on you, you
finally become what you always knew you were in your heart from childhood:
this alien, shunned being," he said. "And when you finally get what you
want and you still feel like that, you realize you are creating yourself.
At least when you're a dope fiend, you can attribute it to being a dope
friend, but when you realize it's just some addiction to alienation, it's
a bore."
Arbuckle, Mr. Stahl said, never gained
that awareness, because he was never able to kick drugs – though not for
lack of effort. At one point, Mr. Stahl's research showed, Arbuckle lost
so much weight trying to kick his heroin habit that he took to wearing
a fat suit in public.
"That beautiful image of the weird
double life a junkie has to live made me fall in love with the guy," Mr.
Stahl said.