MoviesWhen Addie Sheldon met and married Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle he was a scandal-ridden Hollywood outcast. As she turns 95, she tells Austin M Mewse that her husband died a happy man

Just as the movies were beginning to talk, Addie Sheldon met the comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle on the set of a film he was directing for Educational Pictures called Up a Tree in 1931, in which she was to star. She started work in the 1920s, known as Addie McPhail, in Gower Street, a line of low-budget studios dubbed Poverty Row.

It was a momentous meeting: "I had feelings for Roscoe," says Addie, who's just turned 95. "We worked together for several months at the studio before we even had lunch together. Even then, it was at the studio commissary, so the rest of the cast and the director were there too, so you might say that love came slowly for me. For Roscoe it was completely different - he had seen two of my movies, Midnight Daddies [1929] and Three Sisters [1930], and had immediately fallen in love with me. I believe at the time he was dating the heiress Dorothy Wallace. It was a short-lived affair. He had been married twice before."

Arbuckle had spent 10 years adrift since he became involved in the first scandal to shake Hollywood when a wild party in San Francisco ended in a starlet called Virginia Rappe meeting a gruesome death. There are many versions of what happened, but widespread rumours alleged that Arbuckle had forced himself on her and accidentally suffocated her while having sex.

He denied the charges and claimed he had no part in the affair. But it was too late: his name was anathema to every women's group and church organisation in America. In her 1980 autobiography, Swanson on Swanson, Gloria Swanson wrote: "The newspapers had proved in less than a week that the public got a much greater thrill out of watching stars fall than out of watching them shine. One day Fatty Arbuckle had been their most beloved comedian next to Chaplin; the next day they were screaming for his head."

Although he was cleared by a jury, the public had decided Arbuckle was guilty. After the court case, he disappeared. "Roscoe was in the wilderness for 10 years," Addie recalls. "The stock market crash of October 1929 hit him hard. He sold his nightclub and attempted a comeback as a film director under the pseudonym of William Goodrich. That is when we met. He rarely spoke about the scandal to me. I know he didn't want me to feel any sympathy for him. I didn't. Roscoe neither needed it nor wanted it."

In Kevin Brownlow's book The Parade's Gone By, actress Louise Brooks recalled meeting Arbuckle: "I was working at Educational Pictures in May 1931. He made no attempt to direct the picture. He sat in his chair like a man dead. It was such an amazing thing for me to come in to make this broken-down picture [Windy Riley Goes to Hollywood] and to find my director was the great Roscoe Arbuckle. Oh, I thought he was magnificent in films. He was a wonderful dancer, a wonderful ballroom dancer, in his heyday. It was like floating in the arms of a huge doughnut - really delightful."

Addie saw Arbuckle as a jolly, big-hearted man. She had seen him in comedies with Mabel Normand when her mother took her to the movies as a young girl. "I never gave the whole affair a thought," she said. "He hated people calling him Fatty. That was a character. After the scandal broke, I don't think he minded what people called him as long as they called."

Addie McPhail was born in White Plains, Kentucky, on July 15, 1905. Her father was in the insurance business. He moved his family around America almost every two years. "We settled in many small towns. In 1911, daddy took us to Chicago, Illinois."

Addie loved the movies. In November 1925, the family was uprooted again, this time to Hollywood. "I had already decided that I wanted to be an actress, so I thought this move was fate." Addie began working less than two weeks after her arrival in Hollywood. "I came to Hollywood by the Santa Fe train. It was a very clean town in 1925.

"I signed a contract for the Stern Brothers comedies. When I wasn't working for them, they allowed me to go off and work as an extra doing bits for other studios in order for me to become acquainted with the profession. I was a stranger in Hollywood so it was only my appearance that opened doors, although they never opened very wide. Maybe I was never the actress I wanted to be." Addie felt her career would consist largely of having custard pies thrown in her face: "The rough and tumble of comedy was hard, it eventually cooled my ardour for acting."

For Arbuckle, on the other hand, the tide began to turn in September 1931, when Motion Picture magazine ran an article under the heading: Doesn't Fatty Arbuckle Deserve a Break? Director James Cruze was quoted as saying he was willing to direct the comedian in a movie and not take a cent of salary. Other movie people rallied to his side, including Buster Keaton, Marion Davies and Laurel and Hardy. The public joined the stars in support. It seemed that a new generation was about to forgive the man.

By this time, Addie was engaged to Arbuckle and was working with him on a vaudeville tour. "Roscoe was warmly received, even in Montreal and Quebec, and met with only a little opposition. He wanted to prove to himself that he had been missed."

In February, 1932, a call came through from Jack Warner offering him the chance to perform in front of the camera again under his real name. "Roscoe felt he had been given his life back. It was the call he had been waiting 11 years for. The Hays office was still wary of public opinion, and wanted to wait and see if they would forgive him before allowing Warner Bros to thrust him back into the limelight." Two months later, in Erie, Pennsylvania, the couple woke up the justice of the peace and were married.

The two celebrated their first wedding anniversary together in a New York restaurant. "Roscoe told Rivkin [his agent] that it was the happiest day of his life. We left the restaurant some time after midnight, Roscoe had a headache. Back at the hotel, Roscoe was laughing about something that had been said earlier that evening. He was really belly laughing, even when he got into bed. I went to the bathroom, I was calling out to him, on the way out I was still talking. Still he did not answer me. He was very peaceful. Looked as if he had fallen asleep. Then I realised, he was dead!"

Roscoe Arbuckle died at 2.15am on June 29, 1933. He was 46. Hollywood mourned his death. The actor and humorist Will Rogers said at the time: "Those who demanded their pound of flesh finally received their satisfaction. Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle accommodated them by dying from a broken heart."

"What really surprised people was the fact that Roscoe never held any malice," Addie recalls. "All he wanted to do was to make people laugh. His sudden death left me feeling devastated for a long while." During the 30s, Addie attempted her own comeback, but it did not last. After only a handful of films, her last being Northwest Passage in 1940, with Spencer Tracy and Ruth Hussey, Addie retired. "It was over for me. I don't believe I ever did anything spectacular enough in pictures or on stage to be remembered for it. I was like a small ship passing through a rough sea."

Today, Addie lives not 20 miles from Hollywood in a modest apartment block. Until recently, she worked as a volunteer nurse at the Motion Picture and Television country house and hospital in Woodland Hills, California. "I was extremely happy in my 17 years of volunteer service. Some of the patients I knew from my time in Hollywood, or they knew Roscoe. When I reminded Norma Shearer, Caryl Lincoln, Viola Dana, Stepin Fetchit and others who I was, they would always smile and say something good about Roscoe."

While Arbuckle's fall is well-known, the happy ending to his life is not. "I believe Roscoe died happy," Addie concludes. "He was with a girl who loved him and Hollywood had forgiven him and welcomed him back."

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