FOUR

 

JINGLES JUNGLE

 

 

Insiders familiar with all the tricks of comedy couldn't help wondering how Buster survived his father's treatment. Percy Williams, owner of a large theater chain, watched nervously a few minutes and turned to his secretary, Frank Jones. Weren't the Keatons scheduled to play the Colonial shortly? 

"In about six weeks."

“Well, you'd better book them for next week before the old man kills Buster."

Sarah Bernhardt once threatened to have Joe arrested for mistreating his son. Eddie Leonard, a popular blackface minstrel who played the same bill with Buster, said that "it looked as though his dad would break his neck." In 1935 during a hospital stay at Sawtelle Veteran's Hospital in West Los Angeles, an X ray revealed that Buster did in fact have cracked vertebrae. A callus had by then grown over the fracture.

 

In 1903 Buster's paternal grandmother was surprised to learn that the seven-year-old didn't know what to do with a pencil. What struck her as shameful was a matter of relative indifference to Myra and Joe. However, they promised to attend to the matter.

By this time most states had passed laws requiring children to attend elementary school, and as a result the country's illiteracy rate had fallen to lower than 8 percent. The Keatons were reluctant to let school interfere with their livelihood.

That fall, a few weeks after he turned eight, Buster entered first grade in Jersey City, a port town just across the Hudson River from New York, where the Keatons were playing at the Bijou Theatre. One morning at 8:00 a.m., his mother took him to the school. Whether Myra and Joe now voluntarily complied or a truant officer finally caught up with them is debatable. No situation could have been more alien to Buster, who operated on theater time and ordinarily was fast asleep at that hour. Even though he had no inhibitions about appearing before an audience of two thousand, a class of children was a different story.

Buster had no idea how to behave. Being confined to a desk, surrounded by strangers several years his junior, and required to focus on geography and spelling was not easy for a child whose attention span measured approximately twenty minutes, the length of the act.

After lunch Myra came back and took him to the theater for the matinee. The next morning she did not bring him back to school, and he never returned. After their engagement at the Bijou ended, the Keatons quietly slipped out of Jersey City.

Vaudeville children often had poor—sometimes very poor— educations. In the 1920s, the two little Hovick sisters in "Madame Rose's Dancing Daughters" (later the burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee and actress June Havoc) were asked to name the vice president under Woodrow Wilson. They had never heard of President Wilson.

In the 1960s Keaton would tell his friend Susan Reed that he was taught to read by actresses he met backstage. At other times he said Myra taught him in her free time. Actually, Myra had become a rabid card player whose free time was almost totally occupied with pinochle. Most likely he taught himself.

 

After Keaton's death, his business partner, Raymond Rohauer, expressed doubts about Keaton's ability to read. Whenever Rohauer presented a document for Keaton's signature, it was invariably returned unread. When Rohauer protested Keaton said, "Oh, I trust you." He would sometimes sign a contract "Buster," and Rohauer would have to remind him to write his full name.

In 1962, touring West Germany with a revival of The General, Rohauer had to read the superlative press notices aloud to Keaton "because he never read a paper and he couldn't understand."

As an adult, he would sign his name in a spidery, hesitant script to various applications, fan pictures, and book jackets. However, there is nothing to indicate that he could compose more than a simple letter. Among the few items in his handwriting that exist is a two-sentence note to gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, in which he misspells his granddaughter Melissa's name and is shaky on punctuation and grammar.

Rohauer was not the only one to wonder about Keaton's literacy. MGM producer Lawrence Weingarten thought he was shallow, "a child, with the mentality of a child." Weingarten questioned whether he was capable of functioning at all around educated people. Friends of Keaton suspected that he was more or less functionally illiterate, but they felt protective of him and kept quiet about it.

Sometimes Keaton sought the help of professionals and arranged for the unofficial services of ghostwriters as well as ghostreaders. Toward the end of his life, he worked with writer Charles Samuels on an autobiography, talking as Samuels took notes and typed. Keaton never glanced at the completed manuscript. When Paramount Pictures purchased the film rights to his life story in 1955, he refused to read the screenplay because "I don't need to grow an ulcer on my ulcer." After 1940, his wife, Eleanor, assumed responsibility for reading scripts and offered her opinion on their suitability.

Seldom did Keaton agonize about what might have been. "He used to say that he had absolutely no choice about what his life and career were going to be," Eleanor Keaton recalled in 1990. Despite Keaton's first-rate intelligence, he would always have the unread person's sense of inferiority around educated people. Yet lack of schooling was not a handicap in vaudeville. Child performer George Jessel spent a total of eight months in school; George Burns ended his schooling in fifth grade, Jimmy Durante in seventh. The only requirement for success in show business was talent, which Keaton never had to worry about.

 

In 1904 vaudeville box office receipts had never been better. And yet the handwriting had already appeared on the wall—three years later the whole country would be crawling with nickelodeons, some four to five thousand of them. Not theaters but simply converted mom-and-pop stores that seated fewer than three hundred customers, circumventing the need for amusement licenses, nickelodeons showed primitive movies for five cents. In these darkened stores with dirty floors, people would be thrilled by flickering life-sized cops chasing robbers, travelogues of the Eiffel Tower, silent galloping cowboys, and newsreels of auto races. Nickelodeons ran twelve to eighteen thirty-minute shows a day and made a good deal of money. Attendance was unbelievable: more than two million customers a day, a third of them children. Most patrons had never stepped foot in a theater or watched a vaudeville show. Many were immigrants who had not yet learned English. Many were poor, but was there anybody without a nickel to spend for magic?

Shortsighted vaudeville managers thought nickelodeons posed no threat to them. How could a machine ever compete with a flesh-and-blood performer?

 

In ten years of marriage, Myra at age twenty-seven had produced no further live babies or stillbirths. What is likely is she carefully avoided sex with her husband not by banishing him from bed but by bringing her son into it. Life on the road did not permit the luxury of separate quarters for children, and so Buster continued to sleep with his parents far beyond the age when such arrangements were desirable or healthy.

For the most part, the Keatons' marriage had developed into a practical arrangement. Like other vaudeville acts, they were business partners. To pass the hours between shows, Myra smoked, gossiped, and cultivated a passion for pinochle, on which she would eventually lavish more attention than on her family. Joe spent his free hours talking about the subject he knew best—himself—and drinking beer at saloons. W. C. Fields remembered getting into a drinking match with Joe one night after a show at Tony Pastor's.

Looking back, Buster remembered neither one of his parents as demonstrative, with each other or with him, "but not many children expected that of their parents in those days." It seemed perfectly natural to him.

Now that the Keatons were doing well financially, they decided to indulge in the luxury of more expensive sleeping cars when they traveled, which they did all the time. Joe and Myra took the lower berth, while Buster shared the upper berth with his mother's saxophone. Buster slept alone, probably for the first time in his life. Even worse for him, "the Pullman babies began arriving," as Keaton put it. In 1903 Myra became pregnant. The family was in New York, at Ehrich's boardinghouse, when the Keatons' second child was born on August 25, 1904. They named the blond-haired, blue-eyed boy Harry (after Houdini) Stanley Keaton. When the baby was three weeks old, eight-year-old Buster carried him out to the footlights at Keith's during his curtain call. Even so, nothing made Buster more resentful than sharing applause with the Pullman baby. He had become a child who could respond to an ovation with a princely sweep of his hand for silence. He once said to an audience, "I thank you for this applause." Then, after a perfectly timed pause, he added: "I deserve it." This got him a huge laugh, but no doubt his words also came from the heart.

Before long, the baby got a nickname, Jingles, because he made such a racket playing with his toys. Joe now turned his attention to the new child, figuring that since his first son had unique comic ability, so would his second. He began grooming Jingles for life on the stage. First as a baby, then as a toddler, he would be sent on to provide a cute finish to the act. The Keatons believed he'd be just as good as Buster.

As if all the fuss over Jingles was not troubling enough for Buster, his mother became pregnant again in the winter of 1906. Joe got Buster a booking as Little Lord Fauntleroy. He spent his mother's pregnancy working in velvet pantaloons and a curly blond wig for a New England stock company.

 

On March 21, 1906, the New York Telegraph published a story with a Portland, Maine, dateline: "Tries to Kidnap a Child Actor. Man Seizes 'Jingles' Keaton in Portland Street and Then Jumps into Cab." The article reported: "A bold attempt at kidnaping was made in this city at 11:30 o'clock this morning when an unidentified man . . . seized 'Jingles' Keaton, the year and a half old son of Joseph H. Keaton, the vaudeville performer, almost under the eyes of his father."

Jingles was found alone on a bench in the waiting room of Union Station, happily stuffing his face with candy. The kidnaper had fled and was never apprehended. For good reason. He was a prop man, whom Joe had hired for the job. Joe faked the abduction for publicity. Myra's layoff had made him extremely nervous that the act might be forgotten.

Joe wanted another son, but on October 30, 1906, Myra gave birth to a daughter in Lewiston, Maine. She was named Louise Dresser Keaton, after the Indiana-born vocalist who had made popular such ballads as "On the Banks of the Wabash" and "My Gal Sal."

 

In the Rivermont Casino in Lynchburg, Virginia, Buster shot his father in the face. The gun was a new addition to the act. Buster was supposed to fire a blank cartridge at Joe when his back was turned. But that night their timing was off, and Buster firing the gun gave his father a full charge of powder in the face. A newspaper account described Joe as "badly lacerated but not seriously injured."

 

In November 1907, the Keatons were in New York at their favorite rooming house on West Thirty-eighth Street, all five of them squeezed into a single room. The Five Keatons, like the Three Keatons, still had no permanent address.

The year was ending on a bad note for the economy. A few weeks earlier, a run on New York's Knickerbocker Trust Company sent tremors felt by smaller banks all over the country. Now the stock market had collapsed, businesses were folding, and workers were losing their jobs. The Keatons continued to roll along. Buster reigned as a royal prince of vaudeville, the most popular child comedian in the country, fawned over by the trades. "Young though he is," raved the Clipper, "he ranks with the funniest of his older brother professionals, and none can create laughter better than he."

Buster also produced money, hundreds of dollars a week. To make sure the gusher kept flowing, his father furiously promoted the act, cooking the family history as thoroughly as the dried-out pot roasts they consumed at theatrical doss-houses. Since family acts were generally well received on the circuit, Joe had begun touting his family as the most wholesome act in vaudeville. He dreamed of developing a kiddie act similar to the one that Eddie Foy would devise a few years later with his seven youngsters. For that reason he was determined to bring Jingles and Louise into the act as often as possible.

Soon after they arrived in New York, Joe began working out a deal with the Dramatic Mirror for a front-page feature about all five Keatons, the kind of publicity that money could not buy. To clinch the coverage with the editors, who had never seen the two youngest Keaton children onstage, Joe would have promised practically anything.

On Sunday evening, November 17, the Keatons took part in a benefit concert at Brooklyn's stately Grand Opera House. Joe arranged for the Dramatic Mirror to be there. Buster, Myra, and Joe did their regular act, and as a surprise finale, Buster burst into the wings and came back pushing a baby carriage. Three-year-old Jingles sprang out and went hippity-hopping around the stage, chased by his brother. Jingles lost most of his clothing when his father grabbed him and stood him on his head. For an encore, a bewildered Louise was carried on and urged to dance. Only twelve months old, she soon plopped flat on her face.

Two officers of the Gerry Society witnessed this brazen flouting of the child labor law. The next day Joe was arrested. Uncharacteristically meek, he admitted under interrogation that he had no permit for Jingles and Louise (whose names were recorded as George and Vera), nor did he bother to deny that he had knowingly violated the law. But, he told the police, it had all been done to oblige the Dramatic Mirror, and then he pulled out a postcard from John Springer, manager of the opera house, with instructions to introduce Jingles at the end of the act. As a result, Springer was arrested later that day.

It was not until the first week of December that the Keatons faced the judge in the Court of Special Sessions at Jefferson Market Courthouse. The Three Keatons were barred from performing in New York City for two years. It was, Buster would recall, "a cruel setback."

 

By this time the Keatons could well afford to hire capable caretakers. Frequently Joe boasted to reporters that "a first-class governess accompanies them so that the care and education of the youngsters is looked after as well as if they were located permanently in one place." Such teachers did exist—they had to be certified—but no governess, first-class or otherwise, was ever employed by the Keatons. Their governess existed only for the benefit of the Gerry Society. Joe was too cheap to pay for teachers, or any sort of child care.

As a twelve-year-old, Buster wound up bearing an inordinate amount of domestic responsibility. Not only did his talent support the family, he was also expected to arrange hotel bookings and train reservations and keep an eye on his two needy siblings. He began to give silent expression to his resentment by exuding an air of helplessness, an orphaned manner that made females, his own mother excepted, want to mother him. In Boston he accompanied his brother and sister to the Common to feed the pigeons. Bored and distracted, he failed to notice when Jingles moseyed away. When he left to hunt for his brother, Louise also got lost. They were all eventually picked up by the police.

His resentment toward Jingles had to do, in part, with Joe's ambition to mold him into a second child prodigy, even though Jingles showed no particular talent for comedy. Audiences loved Louise. One customer, Dorothy Dana Walton, said that Joe and Buster, two grungy tramps in baggy pants and battered hats, "looked filthy, just dreadful. Then Mrs. Keaton would come out in a fresh immaculate dress wheeling the little sister in a go-cart. When people saw the baby in a lovely little white dress, they would just applaud wildly."

Signs of emotional disturbance had already appeared in Jingles, a chronic bed wetter. He and Louise were slapped around by Joe and neglected by their mother. They had become exceptionally aggressive with other children. Jingles's backstage scrapes were reported in the trade papers. He fought with his sister so frequently the Telegraph ran a photo of them in boxing gloves, slugging it out.

On a rare trip to Iowa they visited Myra's family in Modale. A picture taken there opens a window on the private world of the Keaton children. It shows them in a summer yard with flower bushes and fruit trees, standing next to their aunt, a tall, smiling woman in a lacy blouse. The children, however, appear to be in a stupor. Buster, next to his aunt, stands rigidly behind the two smaller children with a grim expression on his face. His brother and sister look as if they had just been thoroughly whipped. Louise is staring submissively at the ground, while a woebegone Jingles tries to control his fidgeting hands.

Eventually Joe was forced to accept the fact that Jingles and Louise lacked their brother's talent. In due course they would be packed off to Catholic boarding schools in Michigan. More than once, Louise recalled, her father was late with the tuition.

 

During the next two years the Keatons went about their business, banished from New York, biding their time until Buster reached sixteen—actually fourteen—the legal age at which the Gerry Society could not touch him. They crisscrossed the country: the West Coast, the Deep South, the Midwest. Twice they landed one of the much-coveted cover stories in the Dramatic Mirror. "The only place that the Gerries had any real power was in New York," recalled Eileen Sedgwick, who first met the Keatons while touring with her own family's variety act, the Five Sedgwicks. "As baby Eileen the child wonder, I was always underage. We had so much trouble in New York that finally we just couldn't go there."

The Keatons made good money, $750 a week. Still, Joe and Myra were far from extravagant. They shunned luxury cars and lavish hotels, and they all continued to sleep in one room even though rates at the best hotels seldom exceeded $2.50 a night. It would be another three years before the glory of big-time vaudeville began to fade and managers slashed salaries.

 

On July 1, 1909, the Keatons set off for London on the steamship George Washington. Any act that played abroad could parlay the trip into bigger salaries and better bookings back home. The Palace Theatre offered them $200 for a one-week engagement, a quarter of their wages in America. It made no difference because the Palace was easily the most important music hall in the world.

On July 8, they docked at Southampton. From the first day nothing about London pleased Joe. He hated the hotel, the food, even the Palace. The Keatons were not listed on the billboard posters out front and were given the worst place on the program. The stage was full of splinters.

On Monday evening the house was poor and the audience did not respond to the Keatons' act. When Joe threw Buster around, nobody laughed. Worse, when Joe took his call, a number of affronted patrons began |hissing.

The next morning the theater manager asked Joe, "Is that your own son? Or an adopted one?"

Joe thought he was joking.

"My word," sniffed Alfred Butt. "I imagined he was an adopted boy and you didn't give a damn what you did to him." After their one contracted week, the Keatons went home.

 

Once troupers finished playing amusement parks, it was common practice to spend the remainder of their summers recuperating and relaxing. A few years earlier, the Keatons had been booked into an amusement park near Muskegon, in upper Michigan. Enchanted with the scenic beaches, they rented a house in the village of Bluffton. The following year they decided to return. Among performers, Muskegon was known as a good show town, a community hospitable to artistic people. Joe and several other vaudevillians got the idea of building a summer haven for actors in the shoreline area of Bluffton, and inviting their friends.

In 1908, the Actors Colony Club was established on a tract of land on the western shore of Lake Muskegon. It was subdivided into lots and sold to several dozen actors, eventually housing nearly two hundred.

After their England trip, the Keatons headed straight for their new Michigan home, a clapboard cottage with three bedrooms on Edgewater Street. A typical example of summer cabins built at that time, it had a generous veranda in front and an outhouse at the back. On the porch, along with five new rocking chairs, Joe hung a crudely painted sign, JINGLES JUNGLE. On the gasoline stove, Myra, at the age of thirty-two, finally taught herself to cook. Years later Buster would describe his seven summers at the Actors Colony as the happiest of his life. In almost every photograph there, he is smiling. After years of suitcases and railway stations, he reveled in the first home he had ever known, even making friends with children his own age.

Buster loved baseball. Finally, he had a chance to play on a sandlot team. With his exceptional athletic skills and superb timing, he had already shown enough talent, it would frequently be said, to have made a career in major league ball. Throughout his life, baseball would be his religion. Playing shortstop for Dickie's Colts, he spent long hours on the field with his new friends Lex Neal, Vince Edlund, and Dick Gardner. Afterward they would head over to Cobwebs and Rafters, and if no one was watching, sneak a beer from the clubhouse kegs.

The social life of the colony centered around the Keaton family, its most famous and perhaps most eccentric residents. Myra shocked people by not only smoking cigarettes but rolling them herself. Usually she spent her time with pinochle. Joe, founder and president of the Actors Colony Club and a member of the Muskegon Elks Club, purchased a secondhand twenty-five-foot steam launch, which he christened Battleship. Buster easily replaced the old boiler with a two-cylinder gasoline engine. Although he had no previous experience with machinery, it came naturally to him.

Joe could be found on his boat fishing, wearing an admiral's hat. Otherwise he was at a favorite hangout, Bullhead Pascoe's tavern on Beach Street, which served heaping platters of succulent fried perch, crispy from being rolled in cornmeal, along with crackers and a stein of draft beer.

All the Keaton children would get into their bathing suits in the morning and take them off at bedtime. Bluffton was, Louise would remember, "that most wonderful little town" where she spent "unforgettable days."