Left: In the early 1900s Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was America’s most popular comic film star, eclipsing even Charlie Chaplin by 1919. Arbuckle actually made several popular silent westerns, and his first full-length feature film, made for Paramount in 1920 was also a western, The Round Up in which he played a relatively straight role as the town Sheriff. The tag line, “Nobody loves a fat man” may have been true for the film’s character, but not for Fatty Arbuckle. Right: This 1923 McFarlan Knickerbocker Cabriolet was the second most elaborate car produced by the Connersville, Indiana automaker in the company’s 18-year history.
The ’20s marked a well-defined shift from the previous two decades, when nearly half of the country’s population had lived in rural areas and on farms, to one of a more mobile populace. Now, more people were moving to the cities, which in turn were spreading block by block further into what had once been the countryside. Taller and larger buildings were being erected, industry was growing, and from Main Street to the Lincoln Highway, roads were being built across the land, and the automobile was fast becoming the most popular means of personal transportation in the country.
In 1909, in the quiet Indiana town of Connersville, where the McFarlan Carriage Company had been manufacturing wagons and carriages since 1856, it was rumored and then confirmed in the trade press that the wagon works was going to begin building motorcars. Later in 1909 that became a fact when the first McFarlan automobile rolled out of the Connersville factory.
 Getting into the motor trade was the idea of Harry McFarlan, grandson of the company's founder John B. McFarlan. Harry chose to present his new cars to the public with some fanfare by testing them on the track at Indianapolis over the Labor Day weekend in 1910! The McFarlans finished third and fifth, and fourth and fifth, in two races held the year before the first Indianapolis 500. It was an impressive first outing and cars began to sell in small numbers, about 200 a year, which was all that Harry could build from the wagon works.
In 1913 the company was reorganized as the McFarlan Motor Car Company. As a manufacturer of exclusively hand-built luxury cars, McFarlans were very pricey from the start, beginning at around $2,000 and rising to a lofty $9,000 in 1923 when the company built this almost larger-than-life Knickerbocker Cabriolet for film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.Atlas bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders, also bore the McFarlan name as the marque’s mascot.
Arbuckle had been an automotive enthusiast since the very early 1900s and had already owned a Franklin, a Packard, and a handsome Pierce-Arrow before purchasing the massive ’23 McFarlan Knickerbocker Cabriolet. Powered by the company’s new Twin-Valve six-cylinder engine, introduced in 1921, it featured triple ignition, 18 spark plugs, and a menacing 120 horsepower from a swept volume of 572 cubic inches!
Handsomely built atop a 140-inch wheelbase chassis, the Knickerbocker was McFarlan’s top-of-the-line model and as equipped for Arbuckle it came with a canopy that snapped onto the back of the roof and was supported some six feet hence by a pair of lance-like poles. It also came with a director’s chair with Arbuckle’s name embroidered across the back. By 1923 directing was what kept Arbuckle busy. He was more than just an actor; he was also a talented screenwriter and film director. And he often performed all three tasks simultaneously in the 1910s and early 1920s. The large but very agile actor, who could dance as lightly as Fred Astaire and do somersaults like a gymnast, began his career as so many did after the turn of the century, pounding the boards as a vaudevillian. He first appeared in films around 1910 and signed with Mack Sennett in 1913 as a member of the Keystone Cops. But Arbuckle soon rose to prominence performing and collaborating with Mabel Normand (the “queen of comedy”) and Charlie Chaplin in the early silent Keystone Comedies. By the mid-teens he was not only writing his own screenplays but directing the films and the other comics with which he stared. By then he was earning up to $1,000 a day. In 1917 he formed Comique, his own production company, and brought in a promising young comic named Buster Keaton. With Arbuckle and Keaton’s Comique films, the rotund actor reached his artistic zenith, and after Charlie Chaplin stepped out of the limelight and went into semi-retirement in 1919, Hollywood’s comedy crown was passed on to Arbuckle, who had become one of the most loved actors in Hollywood films. Studios with film offers in hand were lining up and Arbuckle left Keaton to run Comique in 1920 when he signed a contract with Paramount that would make him a millionaire by 1921. His first film under the new contract, however, was not a comedy.
A number of Arbuckle’s earliest silent films had been westerns, and having been born in 1887 Roscoe Arbuckle grew up in the real environment. In his early films, many of which he also directed, Arbuckle chose to play the hero lawman, albeit a rather hefty one. In his first full length feature film for Paramount, The Round Up, a western made in 1920, producer Adolph Zukor cast Arbuckle as the town sheriff, a serious part, even though the film was billed as a comedy western. A not funny Arbuckle made for a film that was less than successful at the box office. The film’s tag line that, “Nobody loves a fat man,” was not necessarily true when it came to Fatty Arbuckle, he starred in six films in 1921.
That September Arbuckle and film director Fred Fischbach threw a lavish Labor Day weekend party at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco which was attended by an attractive young starlet named Virginia Rappe. During the party she fell seriously ill and died a few days later. The cause of death was determined to be a ruptured bladder and secondary peritonitis. Arbuckle had been the first to find Rappe colapsed on the bathroom floor, and he had carried her to a bed in one of the rooms. It was assumed that something had transpired between them, and on the comments of Maude Delmont, a norotious Hollywood Madame who had accompanied Rappe to the party, Arbuckle was accused of rape and manslaughter. After three trials, none of which Delmont was called to testify at, Arbuckle was formally acquitted; his acquittal in the third trial (the first two ended with hung juries), was accompanied by an unprecedented statement of apology signed by all 12 members of the jury and both alternates, stating, in part, that, “Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him...there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime. He was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story which we all believe. We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of 14 men and women that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.”
Nevertheless, the damage had been done. The press, particularly William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, made much of Arbuckle’s supposed guilt. It was the beginning of Hollywood Tabloid journalism. Worried for their future Hollywood’s powerful moguls started the Hays Office (headed by former Postmaster General Will Hays) to protect the image of the film industry and Hays used Arbuckle as the commission’s first “sacrifice.”  Though banned from the silver screen by Hays, and driven to the brink of bankruptcy by the cost of his defense for three trials (an estimated $700,000), several of Arbuckle’s friends helped him find work as a film director, which kept him behind the camera throughout the late 1920s. He also appeared on stage, where a still adoring public applauded him. A group of film stars, led by Buster Keaton, came forward and helped pay off Arbuckle’s legal bills. Then they sent him on a trip to the orient (Arbuckle had played on the stage their in the early 1900s). Upon his return to America in 1923, Director James Cruze snubbed the ban, and gave Arbuckle a small part in the film Hollywood, a satire of the movies. Roscoe played himself, forever waiting in a casting office. From then on until 1932 he sat in the director’s chair and used the alias William Goodrich, after his father William Goodrich Arbuckle.
After almost a decade in absentia, the Warner Bros. Studio produced half-a-dozen comedies either starring or directed by Arbuckle, one of which co-starred Marion Davies, Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst’s mistress. Hollywood was Hollywood then as it is now. Despite his return to movies, for Arbuckle, it was too little too late. He died in 1933 at age 46. The cause of death was medically heart disease. His close friend Buster Keaton said, “He died of a broken heart.”The driver’s compartment of the McFarlan Knickerbocker Cabriolet was handsomely styled as it was intended to be an owner/chauffeur driven car. Arbuckle liked driving as much as riding around in luxury and had been an automotive enthusiast since the turn of the century.
The fate of McFarlan wasn’t much better. With the exception of a 1923 Knickerbocker built for display at the Chicago Automobile Show and fitted with 24-carat gold trim and hardware (subsequently selling for a record $25,000 to the wife of an Oklahoma oilman), Arbuckle's Knickerbocker was the most lavishly appointed car the company ever built, but by 1928 McFarlan was out of business. The company had not failed because their cars were unpopular but simply, and ironically, because Harry McFarlan and his close associate Burton Burrows had always managed the design, production, and sales of the automobiles, and since 1924 Harry McFarlan had been in very ill health. There was no one else to direct operations but Burrows, who died in 1928 and with him the McFarlan Motor Car Company, whose assets were acquired that same year by automotive and aviation mogul Errett Lobban Cord.
The McFarlan and the great Knickerbocker models sadly have become one of automotive history’s more obscure makes, except at the Nethercutt Collection in Sylmar, Calif., where Fatty Arbuckle’s 1923 Knickerbocker Cabriolet is always on display, including his director’s chair.
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