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THE COMING OF THE CUSTARD PIE 91
when the year was over? In the end he accepted the offer only because Adam Kessel, outraged by Chaplin's I-don'tcare-whether-I-do attitude, offered him a year's contract at one hundred and twenty-five dollars a week. It was the highest price Mack Sennett had ever paid to a beginner, and afterwards he confessed: "I don't know why I did it. I wasn't too hopeful. He was English all the way through, but he could make you laugh till you cried."
Mack Sennett in 1913 was at the height of his powers. It was the time of Roscoe Arbuckle, Hank Mann, Chester Conklin, Rube Miller and Ford Sterling. They were superb mimes, comedians by instinct, incapable of lowering themselves to whatever is the pantomime equivalent of a wisecrack, the arch gesture or the calculated applause. The humor was physical and robust. They went out after it like happy warriors. They had no tidy props, no big budgets, no elaborate sets; the scripts were very apt to be written down on someone's cuffs, though Mack Sennett has confessed to writing scripts eight or nine pages long. The scripts were usually torn up half way through. The theme of all the Keystone comediesaltogether there were about nine hundred of them— was simple. Out of whatever props and actors lay at hand, the utmost confusion was made to flower. The aim was a mounting crescendo of madness. The theory behind it all was the same theory which produced the vaudeville: if you mix up a circus, a freak-show and a number of comic turns you get a Keystone comedy. A little later the bathing belles were added. They arrived by accident. Mack Sennett decided that the presence of bathing belles close to the comedians inspired the newspapers to reproduce more photographs from his films. The fabulous mad rush in which cops, comedians and bathing belles all contributed was equally accidental. It had simply happened one day during a street scene that the police interfered. They began to chase the actors and directors who had roped off a part of Hollywood Boulevard, and the cameraman had continued to photograph the chase with a hidden