On Keaton – John Lahr in LRB:

“Low comedy may have been lost by then to popular American entertainment, but it had been found as high art by the international theatrical avant-garde. The model for Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty turned out to be the Marx Brothers and their ‘hymn to anarchy’. Vsevolod Meyerhold’s biomechanics and his call for actors to adopt the amazements of the fairground booth drew inspiration and example from Charlie Chaplin. (‘In the contemporary theatre,’ Meyerhold wrote, ‘the comedian has been replaced by “the educated reader”.’) Brecht’s Epic Theatre and his ‘alienation effect’ had their origins in the artificiality of the German cabaret clown Valentin. Even Samuel Beckett deconstructed the slapstick low comedians for his tragi-comic avatars. ‘I never realised that I was doing anything but trying to make people laugh when I threw my custard pies and took my pratfalls,’ Keaton said, but he starred in Beckett’s movie Film(1965) nevertheless. For his part, in 1956, Lahr debuted Beckett’s Waiting for Godot on Broadway.”

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“Keaton didn’t like to read books, but even in his teens, a star turn on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, he’d mastered the art of reading an audience. As a hyperactive one-year-old, the first of three Keaton siblings, Buster had accidentally tottered on stage in 1896 and interrupted the tent show act of Joe and Myra Keaton. His lanky, brash, hot-tempered father was a high-kicking acrobat and blackfaced monologist; his diminutive mother sang and played the saxophone. ‘He was always in the way of the stagehands, and after getting hurt several times the idea struck me to make him up in a counterpart of myself and just let him stand around,’ Joe Keaton recalled. ‘He made a hit and by the time he was three years of age we found that he was capable of doing an act all by himself.’ Keaton’s school was his father; the flips, shoulder rolls and pratfalls were learned from rough-housing with Dad. Myra called these sessions ‘Buster’s story hour’. While horsing around, father and son made the acrobatic discoveries from which they built the narrative for their sensational act. Before Buster’s arrival in front of paying customers, the Keatons’ double act was going nowhere; afterwards, dressed as Joe’s pint-sized mini-me in whiteface, fright wig, whiskers and slap shoes, Buster’s knockabout carry-on was the family’s ticket to the big time. The Three Keatons became a star attraction.”

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“‘Neither mom nor pop was demonstrative,’ Keaton said. He didn’t have much of a childhood, except for a couple of months’ lay-off each year at their Michigan family retreat. ‘The old man would never let us out of work. I wanted to go to school, and he wouldn’t let me.’ The stage was Keaton’s on the job training not just for comedy but for life. His preternatural passivity and the face that became its emblem were beaten into him. ‘If something tickled me and I started to grin, the old man would hiss, “Face, Face!” That meant freeze the puss. The longer I held it, why, if we got a laugh the blank pan or the puzzled puss would double it.’ Keaton went on: ‘He kept after me, never let up, and in a few years it was automatic. Then when I’d step on stage or in front of a camera, I couldn’t smile.’ The vaudeville routine was far more gruelling than a modern public can understand: two or three shows a day, shifting cities two or three times a week, staying on the road for as many as 48 weeks a year.
‘Sweet Jesus, our act!’ Keaton recalled of their vaudeville glory days. ‘What a beautiful thing it had been. That beautiful timing we had – beautiful to see, beautiful to do. The sound of the laughs, solid, right there where you knew they would be.’ But, by 1917, Keaton had grown into a handsome, lithe young man, and Joe had grown into a full-blown abusive alcoholic. ‘Not like the old man anymore. Mad most of the time, and could look at you as if he didn’t know you’ Keaton said. ‘When I smelled whiskey across the stage, I got braced ... There were times when it was him or me, but we had to keep it funny.’”

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“By the time he directed and starred in his first independent two-reeler, the ingenious One Week (1920), slapstick comedy was holding up a funhouse mirror to the central discombobulating fact of the new century: industrial momentum. ‘Prosperity never before imagined,’ Henry Adams wrote in 1907, ‘power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.’ Motion pictures – 24 projected frames a second which gave the illusion of movement – were themselves a wonder whose spell was cast by speed; and speed was what the slapstick cinematic chase both celebrated and satirised. Of all the great silent clowns, no one was swifter than Keaton. Over the next decade, he sprinted from a swarm of eager brides and an avalanche of boulders (Seven Chances), from an entire police force (Cops), and from three hundred head of cattle stampeding down a Los Angeles main street (Go West). He sometimes even found himself an extension of engines, propelled on the cattle guard of a locomotive (The General), a paddle wheel (Day Dreams) or the handlebars of a runaway motorcycle (Sherlock Jr). At a certain speed all things disintegrate, but Keaton’s grace note and his good news was that he somehow remained intact. His popularity was immediate, ‘the key to the big money vaults’ as one early trade ad boasted to distributors.”

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“When we made pictures, we ate, slept and dreamed them,’ Keaton said. On screen and off, he lived in his own Superbia. ‘Keaton at home was no different from Keaton in films,’ his friend Louise Brooks wrote. He lived like a playful pasha. Money was no object and of no account. He took scant interest in business, in his celebrity, or latterly in his children. To please the regal whims of the actress Natalie Talmadge, whom he married in 1921, Keaton built one of Hollywood’s most magnificent mansions: a two-storey five-bedroom Italianate villa which housed six servants, including a cook, butler, chauffeur and governess for their two sons. He had married into the serene and secure Talmadge matriarchy, ruled by their pragmatic mother, ‘Peg’, who used the house as her headquarters. ‘There was never any “make, make, make” when he got home,’ Brooks wrote, which ‘left Buster in creative freedom’.”

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“He was no longer his own greatest invention but a corporate creation. He’d lost control of his comic persona and, even worse, his playfulness. Discovery was taken out of his process, and with it the joy of moviemaking.
On his own, Keaton had been an innovator; within the studio system, he was an employee. ‘If they had known I was still essentially a slapstick comedian they would not have bought for me the sort of stories they did,’ he said. Instead, MGM repackaged ‘Buster’ as ‘Elmer’, transforming him at a stroke from dynamo to doofus. ‘In the translation from Buster to Elmer,’ Dana Stevens writes in Camera Man, ‘Keaton’s slightness of build became a pitiable masculinity; his stoic reserve turned into dull incomprehension; and his characters’ heroic struggle to master the material conditions of their world (technology, the laws of physics, the elemental forces of weather) was reduced to mere clumsiness.’”

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“In 1932, Natalie Keaton, who had long since banished Keaton to another wing of the mansion, divorced her alcoholic husband. Keaton lost his wife, his home and his children, whose surnames were legally changed to Talmadge. (He wasn’t reunited with his sons for eight years.) ‘About all I had left when my wife obtained an interlocutory decree on 8 August were my clothes and the third car,’ he wrote. ‘I did not even have a place to live.’ Then in February 1933, when Louis B. Mayer gave him his cards ‘for good and sufficient cause’, Keaton was stripped of everything but his self-loathing. What followed were a few unmoored years of benders and breakdowns.
In 1940, Keaton Productions Inc. was dissolved; his life as a filmmaker was over. In the same year, the 21-year-old dancer Eleanor Norris became Keaton’s third wife. (His second was a brief union with a nurse he’d met in rehab.) Keaton seemed to have outlived his art and his fame; but, at 44, he had found love. His life of emotional fulfilment had begun. ‘I think I have had the happiest and luckiest of lives,’ he said. ‘Maybe this is because I never expected as much as I got. What I expected was hard knocks. I always expected to have to work hard. Maybe harder than other people because of my lack of education. And when the knocks came I felt it was no surprise,’ he said. ‘I find it impossible to feel sorry for myself. I count the years of defeat and grief and disappointment, and their percentage is so minute that it continually surprises and delights me.’ Keaton began his fightback as a $100-a-week gag man and troubleshooter at MGM, working up comic business for others but no longer for himself. Only the advent of television in 1949 brought Keaton back as an actor.”

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“He had some good comic innings at the Cirque Medrano in Paris; and in the mid-1950s Paramount paid him $50,000 for the rights to make the sensationally inaccurate The Buster Keaton Story, enough for him to buy an ivy-covered farmhouse on a single acre in the San Fernando Valley – the ‘ranch’ as he called it – where he and Eleanor planted lemon, peach and apricot trees, made a vegetable garden, and lived among dogs, cats and a dozen Rhode Island Red chickens whose henhouse he built to resemble a schoolhouse with flagpole.
Old clowns, like old soldiers, don’t die, they just fade away. But in Keaton’s case, not without glory. In 1960, he was awarded an Academy Award for his lifetime’s achievement. He lived long enough to see his films restored and his comic star resurgent. But his real accomplishment was to achieve gratitude. ‘It would be ridiculous of me to complain,’ he said. He had a life as well as a career: his ukulele, his animals, his gardening, his inventions – including a model railroad track he’d constructed that ran from his garage workshop to the kitchen to the backyard. Its cars transported snacks to the poolside guests, and the caboose carried Alka-Seltzer. He remained playful, poetic and sweet. At the beginning of each day, Keaton would raise the flag in front of his henhouse, and lower it at night. ‘The chickens seem to like it,’ he said.”

Read the article here.

Many of the Keaton movies are still worth seeing, and they belong to the best of what slapstick has to offer.
He is good in ‘Sunset Boulevard” – an indispensable movie. Erich von Stroheim is better in that movie, but that’s a bit unfair to Keaton, the butler is always better.

To live with hens, to raise the flag every morning in order to please the hens, that is not a bad ending for a clown, or an author for that matter.