NONFICTION - Feb. 24, 1991

FRAME-UP! The Untold Story of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle by Andy Edmonds (William Morrow: $19.95; 319 pp.). It’s sad to think that Fatty Arbuckle’s career always will be disfigured by the notorious 1921 party after which a young actress died, supposedly because the early film comic had viciously raped her. Andy Edmonds’ “Frame-Up!” is an attempt to rehabilitate Arbuckle, and she largely succeeds--mostly because the traditional accounts of the incident at the St. Francis hotel in San Francisco have been far off the mark. Based on the evidence Edmonds provides, it’s misleading to call the party a “frame-up,” although the author points a finger at the tight-fisted Adolph Zukor, who had signed Arbuckle to a nearly million-dollar contract. Arbuckle’s own account of the episode, supposedly revealed here for the first time, amounts to just a few pages and proves no more plausible than any other. Yet the book does give Arbuckle his proper due; Hollywood in the ‘20s had developed a reputation as Sin City, and Arbuckle--guilty or not--was a convenient scapegoat.