Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader (83 page)

• Like Chaplin and Lloyd, Keaton routinely risked his life performing virtually all of his own stunts. He nearly drowned while filming a river scene in
Our Hospitality
(1923) when a safety line broke, and he actually broke his neck filming a scene in
Sherlock Jr.
(1924), when he fell onto a railroad track while dangling from a water tower. Both of these scenes were used in the final films. (Keaton didn't even realize he'd broken his neck until 11 years later, when he finally got around to having it X-rayed.)

• Keaton had a very distinctive onscreen persona—he
never
smiled on camera. His legendary “Great Stone Face” was something that dated back to his childhood in vaudeville. “If I laughed at what I did, the audience didn't,” he told an interviewer in the 1960s. “The more serious I turned the bigger laugh I could get. So at the time I went into pictures, that was automatic. I didn't even know I was doing it.”

Keaton spent nearly his entire life in show business, first in vaudeville and then in film and television. He was born Joseph Frank Keaton, Jr. in Piqua, Kansas, on October 4, 1895, while his parents were performing in a traveling medicine show with magician Harry Houdini. His father, Joe Keaton, Sr., was a dancer and acrobatic comic; his mother Myra played the saxophone.

Joe Jr. got his nickname from Houdini, following an accident in a hotel when he was only six months old. “I fell down a flight of stairs,” Keaton told an interviewer in 1963. “They picked me up… no bruises, didn't seem to hurt myself, and Houdini said, ‘That's sure a Buster.'” (In vaudeville, pratfalls were known as “busters.”)

The name stuck and so did Buster's ability to survive accidents. Family legend has it that he also lost his right index fingertip (true), nearly lost an eye (unknown), and was sucked out of a hotel room window by a cyclone (unlikely) in three separate incidents all on the same day. True or not, three-year-old Buster got into enough trouble backstage that his parents decided the safest
thing to do was to put him in their act, so they could keep an eye on him when they were working.

It wasn't long after they added little Buster to the act that they realized
he
was getting all the laughs. So they reworked the act. In one skit, Joe would demonstrate how to make children obey their parents while Buster tripped his dad up and hit him with a broom. Joe would pretend to lose his temper and then hit, kick, and throw little Buster all over the stage—into the scenery, into the orchestra pit, and even into the audience—using a hidden suitcase handle and a harness sewn into Buster's costume. The Keatons billed their son as “The Human Mop” and “The Little Boy Who Can't Be Damaged.”

Keaton claimed that in all his years of performing in vaudeville, he was rarely if ever injured during the act. It
seemed
violent, but he'd learned at a very early age how to perform pratfalls and other stunts without getting hurt. “I learned the tricks so early in life that body control became pure instinct with me,” he remembered. Still, the Keatons had to hustle to stay one step ahead of child welfare groups, who kept trying to have the act shut down.

“The law read that a child can't do acrobatics, walk a wire, can't juggle, a lot of those things, but there was nothing in the law that said you can't kick him in the face or throw him through a piece of scenery,” Keaton explained. “On that technicality, we were allowed to work, although we'd get called into court every other week.”

The Three Keatons toured until 1917. By then Joe, drinking heavily, really
was
starting to beat 21-year-old Buster onstage. The act split up and Buster got a job as an actor in film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle's studio.

Say what you will about Buster's “abusive childhood,” but when he walked into Arbuckle's studio for the first time at the age of 21, he had more than 17 years of experience performing pratfalls two shows a day, six days a week. He was a master of physical
comedy and improvisation, someone perfectly suited to make his mark in the movie business.

Arbuckle knew it, too. He let Keaton perform in a movie called
The Butcher Boy
his first day at the studio. And Keaton—already wearing his trademark flat porkpie hat—was such a polished performer that he filmed his scene in just one take.

After just two more films, Keaton was promoted to assistant director and soon after that he was writing and co-starring in Arbuckle's films. The pair made 12 short comedies together between 1917 and 1920. When Arbuckle left to work in full-length feature comedies, Keaton inherited his studio, and after making a single introductory feature-length film called
The Saphead
, he began directing and starring in his own movies. These were the films that established Keaton as a star in his own right, and one of Hollywood's most brilliant comedic talents.

He made 19 comedy shorts between 1920 and 1923, including
The Boat
(1921),
Cops
(1922), and
The Electric House
(1922), which are considered some of his finest work. In 1923 he switched to feature films, making 10 in five years, including
Three Ages
(1923),
Sherlock Jr.
(1924),
The Navigator
(1924), and
The General
(1926).

Ironically, the film that is now considered his greatest masterpiece and one of the finest comedies ever made,
The General
, ruined Keaton's career as an independent filmmaker. The film was based on an actual incident that took place during the Civil War, when Northern raiders stole a Confederate train called
The General
. Keaton plays the Southern engineer who tried to steal it back.

Keaton shot the film on location in Oregon using real locomotives and more than 400 members of the Oregon National Guard. It was one of the most expensive silent films at the time and though it is now considered a classic, it flopped after its release. So did Keaton's next film,
College
(1927). Those two failures forced his distributor, United Artists, out of the independent film distribution business altogether.

Keaton then made what he would later call “the worst mistake
of my career,” when he closed his film studio and signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1928. Keaton, 34, was at the height of his creative powers and had 45 films to his credit. He didn't realize it at the time, but his creative career was largely over.

Buster's first movie with MGM,
The Cameraman
(1928), is considered the last of his great films. But MGM reneged on its promise to give Keaton creative control and proceeded to stick him in one terrible picture after another.

It was at this point that Keaton's life—both onscreen and off—began to fall apart. As his career plummeted, he began drinking heavily; his long-troubled marriage fell apart and in the subsequent divorce he lost custody of his two sons. By the time he started work on the ironically titled
What, No Beer?
(1933), he was drinking more than a bottle of whiskey a day and was frequently too drunk to show up for work. MGM sent him to alcohol rehabilitation clinics more than once, but he continually relapsed and in February 1933, the studio fired him. He would never star in another major Hollywood film; he was only 37.

It took Keaton years to get his drinking under control, but he never gave up. Whenever he was sober enough to work, he did. Between 1934 and 1949, he appeared in 3 foreign films and more than 20 low-budget films he called “cheaters” because they were slapped together in three or four days. They were the worst films of his career.

Still, because the “cheaters” were produced by Columbia Pictures, they got wide distribution, and that helped Keaton get small parts in feature films. And
that
helped him get his first television appearance—on
The Ed Wynn Show
in 1947—at a time when many other film stars were shunning the new medium. He landed his own TV show in Los Angeles the following year, all the while continuing to act in feature films.

Remember, this was before movie channels, VCRs and DVD players made it possible to view old movies, so it may be difficult
to imagine how important these TV and film appearances were to reviving Keaton's popularity. He was the only silent film star still working regularly; other greats like Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd were largely unknown to younger audiences because their best films had not been seen in movie theaters for more than 20 years.

Not so with Keaton: by the early 1950s, he was popping up regularly on TV and in films, and this regular exposure helped generate new interest in his old silent films. As they were restored and rereleased they played to huge adoring audiences.

Keaton died from lung cancer in 1966 at the age of 70. By then he'd won an honorary Academy Award and had lived to see his reputation reestablished as one of the legends of the silent screen.

Even if you've never seen any of Buster Keaton's silent classics, you may have seen some of his cameo appearances. Look for him in the following films:

• Sunset Boulevard
(1950).
Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond, a faded silent screen star who takes in a down-on-his-luck screenwriter played by William Holden. Keaton is one of the “wax works”—the old Hollywood stars who play bridge at Desmond's house.

• Limelight
(1952).
Charlie Chaplin plays a washed-up music hall clown who tries to revive his career; Keaton is his piano-playing sidekick.

• Pajama Party
(1964).
Fourth of the “Beach Party” movies starring Annette Funicello. Keaton plays an indian chief named Rotten Eagle.

• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
(1966).
Keaton's last major cameo. His character Erronius spends much of the film going from horse to horse collecting mare's sweat for a love potion.

The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
is a wonderful story, but would you really want to be stranded on a raft in the middle of the ocean? Here are four true stories of shipwrecks and castaways.

Alain Bombard was a 27-year-old French doctor who thought it strange that shipwreck survivors on life rafts tend to die quickly. A person can live up to six weeks without food and go up to 10 days without water, so why do so many castaways die within days of being set adrift? The common belief was that they drank salt water, which robs their body's tissues of water. Bombard disagreed. He felt sure that the reason people died was because they waited until their bodies were already dehydrated before drinking the seawater out of desperation.

In 1952 Bombard set out to prove that the ocean will support a castaway indefinitely and that drinking seawater is not detrimental to one's health. He decided to cross the Atlantic Ocean alone in a rubber raft without food or water, taking only emergency supplies in a sealed container to be used as a last resort.

Bombard set out from the Strait of Gibraltar in a 15-foot inflatable sailboat dubbed
L'Hérétique,
French for “The Heretic.” He sailed first to Casablanca, which took a week, then to the island of Grand Canary, which took 18 days. From there, he set out to cross the Atlantic, leaving on October 19, 1952.

Bombard caught fish, drank seawater, and even ate a bird that landed on his boat. By straining seawater through fabric, he collected plankton, which provided vitamin C and warded off scurvy. Bad weather resulted in constant bailing, but storms brought fresh rainwater, a welcome change after drinking nothing but saltwater for the first 23 days. He lost weight, began to suffer from saltwater boils, got diarrhea, and became depressed.