Everything about Buster Keaton totally explained
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton (
October 4 1895 –
February 1 1966) was an
Academy Award-winning
American comic
actor and filmmaker. Best known for his
silent films, his trademark was physical comedy with a
stoic,
deadpan expression on his face, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face" (referencing the
Nathaniel Hawthorne story about the "
Old Man of the Mountain"). He has also been called "The Michelangelo of Silent Comedy".
Keaton's career as a performer and director is widely considered to be among the most innovative and important work in the history of cinema. He was recognized as the seventh greatest director of all time by
Entertainment Weekly.
A 2002 world-wide poll by
Sight and Sound ranked Keaton's
The General as the 15th
best film of all time. Three other Keaton films received votes in the survey:
Our Hospitality,
Sherlock, Jr., and
The Navigator.
Biography
Early life in vaudeville
Buster Keaton was born into a
vaudeville family. His father was Joseph Hallie Keaton, a native of
Vigo County, Indiana. Joe Keaton owned a traveling show with
Harry Houdini called the
Mohawk Indian Medicine Company, which performed on stage and sold
patent medicine on the side. Buster Keaton was born in
Piqua, Kansas, the small town where his mother, Myra Edith Cutler, happened to be when she went into labor.
According to Keaton, in an interview that he and his wife Eleanor did with the
CBC television program
Telescope in 1964, Keaton acquired the nickname "Buster" at about six months of age. Keaton told interviewer
Fletcher Markle that
Harry Houdini happened to be present one day when the young Keaton took a tumble down a long flight of stairs without injury. After the infant sat up and shook off his experience, Houdini remarked, "That was a real buster!" According to Keaton, in those days, the word
buster was used to refer to a spill or a fall that had the potential to produce injury. Thereafter, it was Keaton's father who began to use the nickname to refer to the youngster. Despite Keaton's story, however, Houdini didn't begin touring with the Keatons until Buster Keaton was well beyond infancy.
At the age of three, Buster began performing with his parents in
The Three Keatons; the act was mainly a comedy sketch. Myra played the saxophone to one side while Joe and Buster performed on center stage. The young Keaton would goad his father by disobeying him, and the elder Keaton would respond by throwing him against the scenery, into the orchestra pit, or even into the audience. A suitcase handle was sewn into Keaton's clothing to aid with the constant tossing. The act evolved as Keaton learned to take trick falls safely; he was rarely injured or bruised on stage. Nevertheless, this knockabout style of comedy led to accusations of
child abuse. Decades later, Keaton said that he was never hurt by his father and that the falls and physical comedy were a matter of proper technical execution. He claimed he was having so much fun that he'd begin laughing as his father threw him across the stage. This drew fewer laughs from the audience, so he adopted his famous deadpan expression whenever he was working.
The act ran up against laws banning child performers in vaudeville. It is said that, when one official saw Keaton in full costume and makeup, and asked a stagehand how old he was, the stagehand then pointed to the boy's mother, saying
"I don't know, ask his wife!" According to one biographer, Keaton was made to go to school while performing in New York, but only attended for one day. Despite tangles with the law and a disastrous tour of
music halls in the UK, Keaton was such a rising star in the theater that, when his parents tried to introduce their other children into the act, he remained the focus of attention.
Keaton himself stated that he learned to read and write late, and was taught by his mother. By the time he was 21, his father's
alcoholism threatened the reputation of the family act, so Buster and his mother left Joe in Los Angeles. Buster travelled to New York, where his performing career moved from vaudeville to film.
Although he didn't see active combat, he served in
World War I, during which time his hearing became impaired.
Silent film era
In February 1917, Keaton met
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle at the Talmadge Studios in New York City, where Arbuckle was under contract to
Joseph M. Schenck. Joe Keaton disapproved of films, and Buster also had reservations about the medium. During his first meeting with Arbuckle, he asked to borrow one of the cameras to get a feel for how it worked. He took the camera back to his hotel room, dismantled and reassembled it. With this rough understanding of the mechanics of the moving pictures, he returned the next day, camera in hand, asking for work. He was hired as a co-star and gag-man, making his first appearance in
The Butcher Boy. Keaton later claimed that he was soon Arbuckle's second director and his entire gag department. Keaton and Arbuckle became close friends.
After Keaton's successful work with Arbuckle, Schenck gave him his own production unit, Buster Keaton Comedies. He made a series of two-reel comedies, including
One Week (1920),
The Playhouse (1921),
Cops (1922), and
The Electric House (1922). Based on the success of these shorts, Keaton moved to full-length features.
Keaton's silent films are characterized by clever visual gags and technical trickery. His writers included
Clyde Bruckman and Jean Havez, but the most ingenious gags were often conceived by Keaton himself. The more adventurous ideas called for dangerous stunts, also performed by Keaton at great physical risk; during the railroad-water-tank scene in
Sherlock Jr., Keaton broke his neck and didn't realize it until years afterward. Comedy director
Leo McCarey, recalling the freewheeling days of making
slapstick comedies, said, "All of us tried to steal each other's gagmen. But we'd no luck with Keaton, because he thought up his best gags himself and we couldn't steal
him!"
Buster Keaton's most enduring feature-length films include
Our Hospitality (1923),
The Navigator (1924),
Sherlock Jr. (1924),
Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928),
The Cameraman (1928), and most notably
The General (1927).
The General, set during the
American Civil War, is considered his masterpiece, combining physical comedy with Keaton's love of
trains. Keaton took his crew on picturesque locations and painstakingly re-enacted an actual wartime incident, complete with epic locomotive chase. This film was Keaton's proudest achievement, but was received poorly at the time. It was too dramatic for moviegoers expecting a lightweight comedy, and reviewers thought it was "fair" and noted it only had a "few laughs." The fact that the heroes of the story were the Confederate army may have also contributed to the film's unpopularity. Later audiences have given more favorable reviews, but in its day it was an expensive misfire, and Keaton was never entrusted with total control over his movies again. His distributor,
United Artists, insisted on a production manager, who monitored expenses and interfered with certain story elements. Keaton endured this treatment for two more feature films, and then exchanged his independent setup for employment at Hollywood's biggest studio,
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Keaton's loss of independence as a filmmaker coincided with the coming of sound films and mounting personal problems, and his career in the early sound era was hurt as a result.
Marriages
In 1921, Buster Keaton married
Natalie Talmadge, sister-in-law of his boss, Joseph Schenck, and sister of actresses
Norma Talmadge and
Constance Talmadge. During the first three years of the marriage, the couple had two sons, James (1922-2007) and Robert (1924-), but after the birth of Robert, the relationship began to suffer.
According to Keaton in his autobiography, Natalie turned him out of their bedroom and sent detectives to follow him to see who he was dating behind her back. Her extravagance was another factor in the breakdown of the marriage. During the 1920s, according to his autobiography, he dated actress
Kathleen Key. When he ended the affair, Key flew into a rage and tore up his dressing room. After attempts at reconciliation, Natalie bitterly divorced Keaton in 1932, taking his entire fortune and refusing to allow any contact between Keaton and his sons, whose last name she'd changed to Talmadge. Keaton was reunited with them about a decade later when his older son turned 18. The failure of his marriage, along with the loss of his independence as a filmmaker, led Keaton into a period of alcoholism.
During the height of his popularity, he spent $300,000 to build a home in Beverly Hills. Later owners of the property were actors
James Mason and
Cary Grant. The "Italian Villa," as Keaton called it, can also be seen in the movie
The Godfather, as well as in Keaton's own film
Parlor, Bedroom and Bath. Keaton later said, "I took a lot of pratfalls to build that dump." It was James Mason who later discovered numerous cans of rare Keaton films in the house; the films were quickly transferred to safety film before the original
silver nitrate prints further deteriorated.
Keaton was at one point briefly institutionalized; however, according to the the TCM documentary 'So Funny it Hurt,' Keaton managed to escape a straitjacket with tricks learned during his vaudeville days. In 1933 he married his nurse, Mae Scriven, during an alcoholic binge about which he afterwards claimed to remember nothing (Keaton himself later called that period an "alcoholic blackout"). Scriven herself would later claim that she didn't even know Keaton's real first name until after the marriage. When they divorced in 1936, it was again at great financial cost to Keaton.
In 1940, Keaton married Eleanor Norris, who was 23 years his junior. She has been credited with saving his life by stopping his heavy drinking, and helped to salvage his career. The marriage lasted until his death. Between 1947 and 1954, they appeared regularly in the
Cirque Medrano in
Paris as a double act. She came to know his routines so well that she often participated in them on TV revivals.
Sound era and television
Keaton signed with
MGM in 1928, a business decision that he'd later call the worst of his life. He realized too late that the
studio system MGM represented would be more restrictive than the freedom he'd known, severely limiting his creative input. He would have to adhere to dialogue-laden scripts and (for the first time) would be forced to use a stunt double during some of the more dangerous scenes, as MGM wanted badly to protect its investment. He also stopped directing, but continued to perform and made some of his most financially successful films for the studio. MGM tried teaming the laconic Keaton with the rambunctious
Jimmy Durante in a series of movies including
The Passionate Plumber,
Speak Easily, and
What! No Beer? Although the two comedians never quite meshed as a team, the films proved popular.
In the first Keaton pictures with sound, he and his fellow actors would shoot each scene three times: one in English, one in Spanish, and one in either French or German. This was done before dubbing became commonplace. The actors would memorize the foreign-language scripts a few lines at time and shoot immediately after. This is discussed in the TCM documentary
Buster Keaton: So Funny it Hurt, with Keaton complaining about having to shoot lousy movies not just once, but three times. His stage name in Spanish markets was
Pamplinas ("Nonsense"), and his nickname became
Cara de palo ("Wooden face").
cineclasico.com (Spanish)
Keaton's last starring feature in America was
What! No Beer? Behind the scenes, Keaton's world was in chaos, with divorce proceedings contributing to his alcoholism, which in turn caused production delays and unpleasant incidents at the studio. Keaton was so depleted during the filming of
What! No Beer? that MGM released him, despite the film being a resounding hit. In 1934 Keaton accepted an offer to make an independent film in Paris,
Le Roi des Champs-Élysées. During this period he made one other film in Europe,
The Invader (released in America as
An Old Spanish Custom in 1936).
Upon his return to Hollywood, he made a screen comeback in a series of 16 two-reel comedies for
Educational Pictures. Most of these are simple visual comedies, with many of the gags supplied by Keaton himself. The high point in the Educational series is
Grand Slam Opera, featuring Buster in his own screenplay as an amateur-hour contestant. When the series lapsed in 1937, Keaton returned to MGM as a gag writer, including the
Marx Brothers films
At the Circus (1939) and
Go West (1940), and for
Red Skelton.
In 1939,
Columbia Pictures hired Keaton to star in two-reel comedies. The series ran for two years. The director was usually
Jules White, whose emphasis on
slapstick made most of these films resemble White's
Three Stooges comedies. Keaton's personal favorite of the 10 Columbias was directed not by White but by
Mack Sennett veteran
Del Lord,
Pest from the West (1939), a two-reel remake of Keaton's feature
The Invader. Moviegoers and exhibitors welcomed Keaton's Columbia comedies, which were successful enough to be re-released again and again through the 1960s.
Keaton's personal life had stabilized with his 1940 marriage, and now he was taking life a little easier, abandoning Columbia for the less strenuous field of feature films. Throughout the 1940s Keaton played character roles in both "A" and "B" features. Critics rediscovered Keaton in 1949 and producers now hired him for bigger pictures. He guest-starred in such films as
Sunset Boulevard (1950),
Around the World in Eighty Days (1956),
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), and
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966). He appeared in Chaplin's
Limelight (1952), recalling the vaudeville of
The Playhouse. With the exception of
Seeing Stars, a minor publicity film produced in 1922,
Limelight was the only time in which the two giants of silent comedy would appear together on film.
Keaton had a successful series on Los Angeles television,
The Buster Keaton Show (1950). An attempt to recreate the first series on film as
Life with Buster Keaton (1951), which allowed it to be broadcast nationwide, was less well received, although veteran actress
Marcia Mae Jones and gagman
Clyde Bruckman made contributions. A theatrical feature film,
The Misadventures of Buster Keaton, was fashioned from the series. Keaton said he cancelled the filmed series himself because he was unable to create enough fresh material to produce a new show each week.
Keaton also appeared on
Ed Wynn's variety show. At the age of 55, he successfully recreated one of the stunts of his youth, in which he propped one foot onto a table, then swung the second foot up next to it, and held the awkward position in midair for a moment before crashing to the stage floor.
I've Got a Secret host
Garry Moore recalled, "I asked (Keaton) how he did all those falls, and he said, 'I'll show you'. He opened his jacket and he was all bruised. So that's how he did it — it
hurt — but you'd to care enough not to care."
Keaton's silent films saw a revival in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1961 he starred in
The Twilight Zone episode "
Once Upon a Time", which included
both silent
and sound sequences. Keaton played time traveler Mulligan, who traveled from 1890 to 1960, then back, by means of a special helmet. Keaton also found steady work as an actor in TV commercials, including a popular series of silent ads for Simon Pure Beer in which he revisited some of the gags from his silent film days.
In 1960, Keaton returned to MGM for the final time, to participate in one of the numerous adaptations of
Mark Twain's
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Much of the film was shot on location on the
Sacramento River, which doubled for the
Mississippi River in Twain's original book.
In August 1960, Keaton accepted the role of mute King Sextimus The Silent in the national touring company of
Once Upon A Mattress, already a successful Broadway musical. Eleanor Keaton was cast in the chorus, and during rehearsals she fielded questions directed at Buster, creating difficulties in communication. After a few days, Keaton warmed up to the rest of the cast with his "utterly delicious sense of humor", according to Fritzi Burr, who played opposite him as Queen Aggravaine. When the tour landed in Los Angeles, Keaton invited the entire cast and crew to a spaghetti party at his Woodland Hills home, and entertained them by singing vaudeville songs.
At the age of 70, Keaton suggested a piece of physical comedy for his appearance in the 1965 movie
Sergeant Deadhead, in which he ran past the end of a firehose into a six-foot-high flip and crash. When director
Norman Taurog balked, expressing concerns for Keaton's health, Keaton said, "I won't hurt myself, Norm, I've done it for years!"
Keaton starred in a short film called
The Railrodder (1965) for the
National Film Board of Canada. Wearing his traditional porkpie hat, he travelled from one end of
Canada to the other on a motorized handcar, performing gags similar to those in films he made 50 years before. The film is also notable for being Keaton's last silent screen performance.
The Railrodder was made in tandem with a behind-the-scenes documentary about Keaton's life and times, called
Buster Keaton Rides Again — also made for the National Film Board. He played the central role in
Samuel Beckett's
Film (1965), directed by
Alan Schneider. Keaton's last film appearance was in the musical farce
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966). He amazed the cast and crew by doing many of his own stunts in the film, although Thames Television said he did have a stunt double for some of his scenes.
Death
Keaton died of
lung cancer on
February 1 1966, at the age of 70. He was never told that he was
terminally ill, thinking that he'd bronchitis. Confined to a hospital in his final days, Keaton was restless and paced the room endlessly. In a documentary on his career, his widow Eleanor told
Thames Television that Keaton played cards with friends the night before he died. It was said that Keaton was buried with a rosary in one pocket and a deck of cards in the other, preparing him for both eternal possibilities. Eleanor herself died in 1998, also of lung cancer.
Legacy and contribution
Buster Keaton,
Charlie Chaplin and
Harold Lloyd are remembered as the great comic innovators of the silent era. Keaton enjoyed Lloyd's films highly and often praised Chaplin.
Keaton has two stars on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame: 6619 Hollywood Boulevard (for motion pictures); and 6321 Hollywood Boulevard (for television).
A 1957 film biography,
The Buster Keaton Story, starred
Donald O'Connor as Keaton. The screenplay was vaguely based on his life, but contained many factual errors and merged his three wives into one character. Most of the story centered on his drinking problem, in the producer's attempt to imitate the success of
I'll Cry Tomorrow, a sudsy biography about another alcoholic celebrity (
Lillian Roth). The 1987 documentary
Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow, which won 2
Emmy Awards, is considered a much more accurate telling of Keaton’s story.
Porkpie hats
Keaton designed and fabricated many of his own
porkpie hats during his career. In 1964, he told an interviewer that in making the porkpie he started with a good
Stetson hat and cut it down, stiffening the brim with concentrated sugar water. The hats were often destroyed during Keaton's wild movie antics; some were given away as gifts and some were snatched by souvenir hunters. Keaton said he was lucky if he used only six hats in making a film. Keaton estimated that he and his wife Eleanor made thousands of the hats during his career.
Filmography
Further Information
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