Buster Keaton

The Full Biography

Buster Keaton. Actor. Director. The Great Stone Face who treated gravity as a colleague and then outlived the silence that had made him rich.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a house facade falling around a man who does not change expression, an open window passing over him like a blessing that was measured in inches. The year was 1928. The picture was Steamboat Bill, Jr. What the still cannot show is Joseph Frank Keaton of Piqua, Kansas, a vaudeville child thrown across stages before he could vote, an independent filmmaker who lost the shop to MGM, and a later life of liquor, television, and a second fame that arrived while he was still around to be surprised by it.

He was born on October 4, 1895, on the road. The family act, the Three Keatons, used the boy as a projectile. Harry Houdini, the story goes, watched a tumble and said the kid was a buster. The nickname stuck. Whether Houdini said it is less important than the fact that the childhood was a stunt. He learned to land. He learned not to ask the audience for pity. The stone face is not a lack of feeling. It is a professional decision made before he had a union.

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle brought him into pictures around 1917. Keaton looked at a camera, understood it as a machine, and never treated it as a god. By the early 1920s he had his own unit. Our Hospitality. Sherlock Jr. (1924), in which a projectionist walks into the film he is showing. The Navigator. The General (1926), a Civil War locomotive chase that still looks impossible because much of it was. He wrote, directed, starred, and did the falls. Chaplin was the poet of pathos. Keaton was the engineer of peril. Both are art. Only one of them looks like a blueprint.

In 1928 he signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It paid. It also ended the independence that had made the pictures. MGM wanted a star, not a shop. Sound arrived. His first marriage, to Natalie Talmadge, collapsed; she took the sons’ names away from Keaton in the credits of their lives. He drank. The 1930s are a file of smaller comedies and a man who could still do the work if anyone asked him to design it. Most people asked him only to appear.

A comedian does funny things. A good comedian does things funny.Buster Keaton

The independent years are the monument. After Arbuckle he made two-reelers that treated a camera as a machine you could argue with. One Week (1920) is a house that refuses to stay a house. The Playhouse (1921) multiplies him on screen by trick photography he helped invent. Cops (1922) is a chase that still looks like a city having a nervous breakdown. Then the features: Our Hospitality (1923), a Southern feud and a river; Sherlock Jr. (1924), in which a projectionist walks into the film he is showing and edits his own life; The Navigator (1924), two people and an empty liner; Seven Chances (1925), a landslide of brides; Go West (1925); Battling Butler (1926). The General (1926) is a Civil War locomotive chase shot with a real train, a real trestle, and a crash the studio could not fake because he would not fake it. The picture underperformed. It is now the one film students are told to watch if they want to know what a camera can do without a computer. College (1927). Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), the falling facade, two inches of clearance, a face that does not ask the audience to clap.

In 1928 he signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The Cameraman (1928) is still his picture, mostly. After that the shop closed. MGM wanted a star, not a unit. Sound arrived and the studio put him in vehicles other men designed. Free and Easy (1930). Doughboys. Parlor, Bedroom and Bath. The 1930s Educational Pictures shorts and the Columbia two-reelers of 1939–41 are a man still able to fall and no longer allowed to decide why. Natalie Talmadge, married in 1921, left; the divorce was 1932; she had their sons James and Robert carry Talmadge instead of Keaton. He married Mae Scriven in 1933 and was divorced by 1936. He drank. The face stayed still. The hands, on the wrong pictures, still knew the gag.

The turn is not a comeback picture. The turn is survival. He kept working: shorts, bits, industrial films, television when television would have him. He turned up in Sunset Boulevard (1950) as himself at a card table of silent ghosts. Chaplin put him in Limelight (1952), two silent kings in a room, a scene kinder than the industry had been. James Agee’s 1949 essay “Comedy’s Greatest Era” told a new generation to look again. Festivals in Europe ran the old prints. Students found The General and could not believe a man had done that with a train and no digital net. In April 1960 the Academy gave him an honorary Oscar. He accepted the news the way he accepted a falling wall: without a speech.

The Arbuckle two-reelers of 1917–19 are the apprenticeship: The Butcher Boy first, then a run of shorts in which a young man learns that a camera is a machine with a sense of humor. He left Arbuckle, formed his own company, and for most of the 1920s answered to himself. That independence is the career. Chaplin had pathos. Lloyd had the climb. Keaton had physics. He storyboarded gags as if they were engineering problems. The falling house in Steamboat Bill, Jr. was measured, not wished. The train crash in The General was a real locomotive on a real trestle. He broke bones and did not advertise the breaks. The stone face is a labor practice from vaudeville, when a child who cried would have ruined the act.

Joe Keaton, the father, ran the act as a throwing sport. Myra played saxophone. The boy landed. They played the Keith and Orpheum circuits before he had a grammar-school year that stayed in one town. When he came to pictures he brought that circuit’s timing and none of its plea for pity. The 1920s unit — a bungalow studio, a small crew, a man who was writer, director, stuntman, and star — is the shop MGM closed. The Cameraman is the last picture that still feels like that shop. After it, other men designed the falls. He could still take them. He could no longer decide why. That is the wound the honorary Oscar could not close, and he did not ask it to.

Educational Pictures in the mid-1930s and Columbia in 1939–41 kept him in two-reelers a man of his skill should not have needed. He took them. Rent is a fact. The drinking is a fact. Eleanor is the fact that interrupted both. By the time Agee wrote and the festivals called, the engineer of peril had already become a television guest and a beach-picture cameo. He did not resent the beach pictures the way a monument would. He showed up, hit the mark, and went back to Victoria Avenue. That is the professional decision, same as the face: do not ask the audience for pity. Chaplin’s Limelight scene is the one kindness the industry staged for him on purpose. The festivals did the rest. He lived long enough to hear the word genius and treat it as weather. The prints were already being restored while he could still walk into the theater. Venice and the other houses ran The General as if a man had not already paid for that train with his own body. He sat in the dark, heard strangers laugh, and went home to Eleanor and the gadgets in the garage. That is a better last act than a studio speech.

He married three times. The third marriage, to Eleanor Norris in 1940, is those years’ kindness. She was younger, steady, and present through the drinking and the rediscovery. Friends describe a man who played cards, built gadgets, and did not narrate his own myth. The face stayed still. The hands stayed busy.

The later years

Home was a house on Victoria Avenue in Woodland Hills, in the San Fernando Valley, with Eleanor answering the phone. She had been a dancer. She became the person who got him to the set, kept the bottle from finishing the job, and sat beside him when the festivals started calling. He built gadgets in the garage. He played bridge. He did not narrate the myth. Students who knocked on the door found a small man who would show them how a fall worked and then offer a sandwich.

Television paid the years the studios had wasted. He appeared on The Twilight Zone in 1961, in an episode called “Once Upon a Time,” as a janitor who borrows a time helmet — a silent routine dropped into a talking show, which is a joke he was qualified to tell. He took beach pictures because they asked: Pajama Party (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, Sergeant Deadhead. He had a cameo in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). In 1965 the National Film Board of Canada put him on a track speeder for The Railrodder, a nearly wordless short that is the old engineer’s last clean gag. The same year Samuel Beckett wrote Film for him — twenty minutes of a man fleeing a camera, which is either a philosophical joke or the story of 1928. He shot it in New York, sick, and still hit the marks.

Venice and the other festivals had already begun to tell him he had been a genius. He sat in the dark and watched strangers laugh at work he had done when the century was young. He accepted the honorary Oscar in 1960 and went back to the Valley. Lung cancer took him on February 1, 1966, in Woodland Hills. He was seventy. Eleanor was there. The stone face, at the end, was just a man in a bed. He had already, in the better silents, filmed his own philosophy: you do the next precise thing. You do not explain the wall.

The Valley house was not a shrine. Eleanor ran the calendar. Collectors and students came. He showed them props. He played cards with neighbors who had not seen The General. In 1947 he had gone to Paris and performed at the Cirque Medrano, a circus date that closed a circle the Three Keatons had opened. The 1950s industrial films and commercial bits paid groceries. He took them without a speech about art. When the Venice and other European houses ran the old prints, he sat through the applause and then asked what time the train was. The honorary Oscar is a clip now. The useful remainder is a man in Woodland Hills who still knew how a fall worked.

The last year was work until it could not be. The Railrodder and Film are 1965. The beach pictures are 1964 and 1965. He was already sick. He hit the marks anyway. Lung cancer is a prosaic end for a man who had been thrown across vaudeville stages as a child. He died on February 1, 1966. He was seventy. Eleanor outlived him and guarded the name. The stone face, at the end, needed no close-up. He had already filmed the instruction: do the next precise thing.

After he was gone

Every director who cuts from a face to a machine is in his debt. Jackie Chan said so. So did people who never learned his name and still stole the window gag. The prints were restored; the trains still look real because they were. Chaplin’s Tramp is the more famous silhouette. Keaton’s silhouette is a man already moving.

He came out of a vaudeville trunk, built a studio in his head, let MGM take the shop, drank, married a woman who stayed, and lived to sit in a festival dark while strangers laughed at work he had done when the century was young. If you only remember the falling house, you have the still. If you remember the child projectile, the MGM signature, and Eleanor, you have him.

Portrait: Bain News Service · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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