Se acaba de publicar "I, Fatty", una novela en la que Jerry Stahl (autor de "Permanent Midnight") analiza la figura del contrivertido Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle desde una perspectiva inédita hasta ahora: la del propio cómico. Este es el resumen de la novela que dan en Amazon:

Abandoned as a boy in Kansas, Fatty Arbuckle found adulation first onstage, and then in the new medium of the cinema. In his day, during the second decade of the 1900s, Fatty was more popular than Chaplin; he became the first screen actor to make a million dollars a year. But in 1921 he was accused of the rape and murder of actress Virginia Rappe, whom he encountered at a party in San Francisco and who died a few days later. Though he was eventually acquitted by a unanimous jury, the virulent speculation by the press ultimately destroyed Arbuckle's career for good. Framed for a crime he didn't commit, and demonized by conservative powers that hyped the case as emblematic of all the evils of show business, Fatty Arbuckle was the O.J. Simpson of early Hollywood, the first modern celebrity whose presumed guilt - and alleged innocence - galvanized a nation.

Si queréis saber toda la verdad sobre este ídolo caído del cine mudo (y no podéis esperar a leer el libro), este artículo de 1995 es una inmersión en las más turbulentas aguas de Hollywood Babylonia, esa ciénaga de sueños rotos que no puede dejar de fascinarnos.