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Minta and Axbuckle were married when he was 21 and she was 17. They were married on the stage of a small Long Beach theatre on August 5, 1908. They were broke and happy.
They toured in the El wood Musical Company for some time after their marriage. Arbuckle had a fine voice. Years later, when he was a top film star, he met and sang for Enrico Caruso. The world's greatest tenor tried to persuade him to take up opera seriously.
During a lull in the tour Arbuckle took a day off and wandered onto the Mack Sennett lot in Edendale. The year was 1913. He watched a Ford Sterling take and laughed so loud Sennett rushed up to him and offered him a job with this quip: "Never heard anybody laugh like that. You laugh in all languages, fat boy."
Teamed with Mabel Normand, Arbuckle's two reelers, Fatty's Flirtations, Fatty and the Heiress and Fatty Joins the Cops spun a magical web that was to capture him the highest salary paid any comedian of his day.
Sennett raised his salary from $5 a day to $45 a week as the rave notices poured in from all over the country. He also gave him bonuses, since Arbuckle kept three pictures in release all during the year. This was the bulwark of Sennett' s income.
Minta was hired as a supporting player and then elevated to Chaplin's leading lady and later star of the Keystone Comedies.
Husband and wife had arrived as laugh-makers.
Roscoe's star continued to rise. Adolph Zukor offered him a fabulous contract to make feature-length films, and the man who was born a 16-pound baby during a tornado in Smith Center, joined the stars. Roscoe always had this to say about Smith Center: "A tornado and my birth blew Smith Center, Kansas, off the map. No one has ever heard of it since,"
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