Buster Keaton

• 1. Introduction

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  Buster Keaton never smiled on screen. Not when a two-ton building facade toppled directly onto him, leaving only the gap of an open window between his body and certain death. Not when a wall of water from a railroad tower broke his neck mid-take, an injury he did not discover until years later. That frozen, unreadable face became one of the most recognized images in cinema history, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face." The real story of how it got there starts not in Hollywood but in a vaudeville act where a father hurled his toddler son into the orchestra pit for laughs. How did a child trained to be thrown across a stage become, in critic Roger Ebert's words, "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies"? And how did the man who made what Orson Welles called "the greatest film ever made" end up fired, institutionalized, and nearly forgotten before being rediscovered? The arc of Buster Keaton's life is one of the most improbable in American entertainment.

• 2. Born Into the Act

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  Keaton was born on the 4th of October, 1895, in Piqua, Kansas, a small town his mother Myra was simply passing through. His father, Joseph Hallie Keaton, ran a traveling show called the Mohawk Indian Medicine Company, which combined stage performances with the sale of patent medicine. The name Buster came from an incident at eighteen months, when the child tumbled down a long flight of stairs without injury. A friend of the family named George Pardey reportedly remarked, "Gee whiz, he's a regular buster!" Keaton would retell the story for the rest of his life, though his own version shifted the age to six months and gave the credit to Harry Houdini.

  At three years old, Keaton joined his parents onstage in an act called The Three Keatons. His first performance was in 1899 in Wilmington, Delaware. The act centered on a comedy sketch in which the young Keaton goaded his father, and his father responded by throwing him against the scenery, into the pit, or directly into the audience. A suitcase handle was sewn into his clothing to make the tossing easier. What looked like abuse was in fact precise physical training. Keaton was billed as "The Little Boy Who Can't Be Damaged", and he was able to show authorities, whenever they investigated, that he had no bruises or broken bones.

  The falls taught him everything. In 1914, Keaton explained the technique to the Detroit News: "The secret is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me." He also noticed that when he laughed during the act, audiences laughed less. So he stopped laughing. The deadpan expression that would define his entire screen career was not a stylistic choice. It was a professional adjustment made on a vaudeville stage before he was old enough to read.

• 3. The Silent Film Years

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  In February 1917, Keaton met Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle at the Talmadge Studios in New York. His father disapproved of films, and Keaton himself had reservations. But when Arbuckle invited him to jump in and start acting during their first meeting, the result was immediate. Keaton was hired on the spot after his first day on The Butcher Boy. That evening, he borrowed one of the cameras, took it back to his hotel room, and had it completely disassembled and reassembled by morning. He appeared in a total of 14 Arbuckle shorts.

  After those years with Arbuckle, producer Joseph M. Schenck gave Keaton his own production unit: Buster Keaton Productions. He made a series of 19 two-reel comedies, then moved to features. His writers included Clyde Bruckman, Joseph Mitchell, and Jean Havez, but director Leo McCarey later recalled that Keaton's best gags could not be stolen because Keaton thought them up himself. The more ambitious ideas required Keaton to risk his body. During the railroad water-tank scene in Sherlock Jr., a torrent from a water tower fell on him and broke his neck; he did not learn this until years later. In Steamboat Bill, Jr., he stood on a precise mark while a two-ton building facade fell forward and passed over him, the window frame clearing his body by only a few inches.

  The General, released in 1926 and set during the American Civil War, combined Keaton's love of trains with physical comedy and a storyline drawn from an actual wartime incident. The climactic scene of a locomotive falling through a burning bridge was, at the time, the most expensive single shot in silent-film history. The film received mixed reviews on release; some audiences found it too dramatic for a comedy. It was considered a financial failure and cost Keaton his total creative control. Orson Welles would later call it "the greatest comedy ever made...and perhaps the greatest film ever made."

• 4. MGM and the Loss of Control

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  In 1928, film executive Nicholas Schenck arranged a deal that moved Keaton to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd both warned him against it. Keaton had no input into his salary or the contract's terms. He would later call it the worst business decision of his life in his autobiography.

  The problems were immediate. When Keaton saw the script for The Cameraman, he recalled it being "as long as War and Peace." He cut 40 characters and several subplots. At MGM, even a simple prop request required written authorization. "You had to requisition a toothpick in triplicate," Keaton said. The studio's view was explicit: in the time it took Keaton to develop a project his way, he could have appeared in two or three films put together by the studio's own production staff.

  Keaton wanted to make his next film, Spite Marriage, with sound. MGM refused, reasoning that silent prints could be sold worldwide to theaters that had not yet converted. When sound films did arrive, Keaton and his cast were required to shoot each scene three times: once in English, once in Spanish, and once in either French or German, memorizing the foreign lines phonetically moments before filming. The studio also forced Keaton to use stunt doubles during dangerous scenes. "Stuntmen don't get you laughs," Keaton said.

  The one commercial bright spot was Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, which biographer James Curtis described as pulling in worldwide rentals of $985,000, with a net profit of $299,000. It was the most profitable of all of Keaton's features, silent or sound, and the only MGM feature he completed under budget and ahead of schedule. But Keaton's absences from work during his collapse into alcoholism were costing the studio $3,000 a day. Louis B. Mayer ultimately fired him on the 2nd of February, 1933, in a letter signed for "good and sufficient cause." The firing ended his career as a leading man in feature films.

• 5. Rebuilding from the Wreckage

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  Starting in 1934, Keaton made two-reel shorts for Educational Pictures at $2,500 per film. These were simple, low-budget visual comedies. Keaton had a free hand staging the gags, and he often recycled material from his vaudeville years and his earlier films. The high point of the Educational series was Grand Slam Opera in 1936, for which Keaton wrote his own screenplay. When Educational was forced to cut costs in 1937, Keaton was its most expensive comedian and the studio could no longer carry him.

  Keaton then returned to MGM, not as a star but as a gag writer. He supplied material for the final three Marx Brothers MGM features: At the Circus, Go West, and The Big Store. He also gave help and advice to Red Skelton and Lucille Ball. In 1939, Columbia Pictures hired him for a series of two-reel comedies at double the standard rate for the studio's short-subject comedians. His personal favorite from the series was Pest from the West, directed by Del Lord. Trade publication Film Daily called it one of the funniest shorts "of any season."

  His personal life stabilized on the 29th of May, 1940, when Keaton married Eleanor Norris, who was 23 years his junior. She has been credited with salvaging his life and his career. Between 1947 and 1954, the couple appeared regularly in the Cirque Medrano in Paris as a double act. Critics rediscovered Keaton in 1949, and James Agee's article about silent comedians in Life magazine, Comedy's Greatest Era, was key to renewing serious attention to his work.

• 6. The Body as Instrument

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  Film critic David Thomson wrote that Keaton was "a man inclined towards a belief in nothing but mathematics and absurdity... like a number that has always been searching for the right equation." What Thomson identified as mathematics was in fact a lifetime of engineering. Every fall, every stunt, every gag had to be calculated precisely or someone died.

  Critic Gilberto Perez focused on Keaton's face: "his large, deep eyes are the most eloquent feature; with merely a stare, he can convey a wide range of emotions, from longing to mistrust, from puzzlement to sorrow." James Agee wrote that Keaton's face "ranked almost with Lincoln's as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny." Agee described Keaton's running as progressing through distinct gears: from an accelerating walk to an easy jogtrot to a brisk canter to a headlong gallop, always "floating, above this frenzy, the untroubled, untouchable face."

  That face required its own maintenance. Keaton designed and modified his own pork pie hats throughout his career. He told an interviewer in 1964 that he started with a good Stetson and cut it down, stiffening the brim with sugar water. Hats were frequently destroyed during filming, given away, or stolen by souvenir hunters. Keaton said he was lucky if he used only six hats per film. He and Eleanor made thousands over the course of his career. During his silent period, a hat cost him around two dollars; by the time of his 1964 interview, the price had risen to nearly thirteen dollars.

• 7. Final Years and Legacy

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  On the 3rd of April, 1957, Ralph Edwards surprised Keaton on the NBC program This Is Your Life. That appearance coincided with the release of The Buster Keaton Story, a fictionalized film biography starring Donald O'Connor that contained many factual errors and collapsed his three wives into a single character. A more accurate accounting came in 1987 with the documentary Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow, directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, which won two Emmy Awards.

  In his final years, Keaton made cameos in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard in 1950 and Charlie Chaplin's Limelight in 1952. Limelight marked the only time the two greatest silent comedians appeared on screen together. Keaton also appeared in Samuel Beckett's experimental Film in 1965, directed by Alan Schneider. For the Beach Party pictures produced by American International Pictures, director William Asher recalled that Keaton "would bring me bits and routines" that were "wonderful, inventive stuff." In the autumn of 1964, Keaton traveled from one end of Canada to the other on a motorized handcar for The Railrodder, performing gags similar to those in films he had made five decades earlier, wearing his traditional pork pie hat.

  Keaton was diagnosed with cancer in January 1966 but was never told his condition was terminal. He believed he was recovering from severe bronchitis. Eleanor told producers from Thames Television that he was up out of bed and playing cards with friends the day before he died. He died of lung cancer on the 1st of February, 1966, aged 70, in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Hollywood Hills. His Academy Honorary Award, accepted at the 32nd Academy Awards in April 1960, was followed in 1999 by the American Film Institute ranking him as the 21st-greatest male star of classic Hollywood cinema. The International Buster Keaton Society was founded on the 4th of October, 1992, Keaton's birthday, and its members call themselves the Damfinos, after the name of the boat in his 1921 comedy The Boat.