In 1998 Second City producer Kelly Leonard walked by a locked cabinet on the third floor of the theater company’s Wells Street headquarters for the last time. “It had been there as long as I’d been there–since at least 1992,” he says. “It had been bugging me. No one knew what it was, and no one had the key to it, so I broke into it.” Inside he found a trove of old Second City scripts, some audiotapes, and a bunch of reel-to-reel film.
As a teenager growing up in Oak Park, Fournier discovered Chicago’s theater scene. One 1986 Steppenwolf show, Frank’s Wild Years–cowritten by and starring Tom Waits–stuck with him. “I’d just never seen anything like it, the way the music was incorporated, the power of the music,” he says. “When I saw it I said, ‘Wow! I can do that!’”
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After getting a BA in jazz saxophone and an MA in music education from the University of Miami, Fournier found himself “yearning for theater” and a vibrant music scene and convinced his wife, Mary Davis Fournier, whom he’d met in high school, to return to Chicago. When they got here in 1996 he put together a band and started playing out at places like Schubas, the Metro, and Martyrs’. He released two CDs: Roll Your Soul All Over the Place in 1997 and Breakfast at Epiphany’s in 1998. One critic called Fournier “a poor man’s Dave Frishberg.” Another dubbed him “the bastard child of Randy Newman and Louis Armstrong.”
The facts on Arbuckle start and end ugly. In 1899, when he was 12 years old, five-foot-seven, and 200 pounds, his mother died. He was sent off to San Jose with a sandwich and a cardboard suitcase to live with his father, who’d left Arbuckle and his mom to make a fortune in the gold rush. “He was a drunk and a failure,” says Fournier, and in fact he’d taken off before Arbuckle got to town. The boy ended up at the local hotel, living in a cabinet and doing odd jobs in exchange for room and board. When the hotel’s lounge singer heard him singing on the job, she sent him to the local amateur night. In his first performance, he was about to be pulled from the stage when “he does this perfect acrobatic flip into the orchestra pit and gets this enormous response for dodging the hook,” Fournier says. “The local theater takes a shine to him, and he becomes Roscoe A., Boy Singer.”
Moviemakers feared the public’s reaction to the scandal. Arbuckle was cut loose by Paramount and blacklisted by the heads of other studios. His movie career was ruined. “He’s their scapegoat,” says Fournier. “There was a general feeling at the time that Hollywood was out of control–Charlie Chaplin dating underage girls, there were three or four things like that happening at the same time. Hollywood had to create the illusion they were going to do right by the public interests. So they hang [Arbuckle] out to dry and then they can go back to business as usual. Twelve years later he dies of a heart attack.” When he died, Fournier discovered, Arbuckle had $2,000 to his name. “Buster Keaton said he died of a broken heart.”
Fournier contacted Shade Murray, associate producer of Writers’ Theater, and asked him to take a look at the show. “I hear the music, I’m inspired. I read the script, I’m less than inspired,” recalls Murray. He saw potential in the piece, based most of all on Fournier’s treatment of his subject. “John has a fascination with drunken losers who continue to fuck themselves up in spite of themselves,” Murray says. “His onstage persona is so close to Arbuckle’s. He has this broken-man thing that he does by deprecating himself and then he plays this wonderfully brilliant song and it just works everybody into this lather.”
All these facts complicated the creative process. “We wanted to absolve ourselves of any responsibility of being biographers, because we are artists, not biographers,” says Murray. “Also, we wanted to create a vaudeville experience where the entire show was a public performance, where the characters are performers.”
