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360 MOTION PICTURES I922-I945
result, he gave a brilliant performance, finishing the picture with flying colors.
During that December week I saw Tom Patten and helped him get installed in our Hollywood office, and when I left, Joseph J. O'Neill stayed behind to assist in getting it organized. For a time Tom and Joe comprised our entire office staff. With the West Coast Association I conferred on the Monroe Doctrine Centennial Commemoration, scheduled for the following summer and in which the industry took a notable part. We were getting closer together all the time, and a few weeks later I received a fine tribute from Carl Laemmle, the founder and Grand Old Man of Universal, in the form of a New Year greeting in which he said: "You proved to us that our interests were nearer identical than we imagined." Since "Uncle Carl," as he was called throughout the industry, had been one of the signers of the round-robin letter of a year before, I was gratified that his faith in the Association he had helped to launch, and in me, was being justified.
It was not all business that week. Christmas was approaching and I had to take at least one afternoon off, for my son had wired me that he expected Santa Claus to bring him a railroad train, complete with caboose, and an airplane with no less than two wings, and the order had to be filled in triplicate because, he added, "This goes for Harry and Frank, too."
On December 20 I left for home, and my last official act of 1922 was one destined to cause more discussion than anything I had done in my new job. I removed the official employment ban against Roscoe ("Fatty") Arbuckle.
In doing this, I was not acting without long deliberation. Of the criminal charge against him, Arbuckle had been acquitted; he had been leading an orderly life ever since. I happened to know that he was wellnigh bankrupt. It was not my wish that he again become a movie actor, as many at the time professed to believe, nor was I exuding sentimentality for a comedian whom I had never met. I merely refused to stand in the man's way of earning a living in the only business he knew.
It had been decided by the producers of some unreleased Arbuckle films that those pictures would never be seen in any theatre, although they were not outmoded— for that type of slapstick comedy is hardly topical— nor unsavory. The two men who deserve the credit for that decision are Joseph M. Schenck, who had Arbuckle under contract, and Adolph Zukor of Paramount, who had been producing the latest Arbuckle comedies. With hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in completed but unreleased films, Zukor decided to make a sacrifice rather than bring further discredit on the industry or give the slightest added impetus to public outrage. So far as he was concerned, the outrage was very real. Arbuckle had let him down— he had let the whole