FOURTEEN

 

POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE

 

 

Keaton realized that no other star in Hollywood lived as modestly as he did. Everyone was scrambling to spend money on palatial homes. Joe Schenck said that the public had anointed all of them kings and queens and expected to see them living like pashas. In 1925 housing starts had become Hollywood's hottest topic of conversation.

Going all the way was Mack Sennett, who purchased a moun-taintop in the Hollywood Hills east of Cahuenga Pass. On display in a Hollywood real estate office sat a model of his granite-and-marble mansion, which he boasted would be as permanent as the pyramids and as noble as New York's Pennsylvania Station. Sennett's Xanadu would never materialize, but plenty of other fantasies did: John Barrymore's seven-acre Belle Vista estate with its skeet range and private zoo, and Harold Lloyd's Greenacres, a forty-room Italianate villa under construction on sixteen acres in Benedict Canyon, a project that would include a nine-hole golf course.

On Sundays Keaton was a regular visitor at Norma and Joe's Santa Monica beach house. On the so-called Gold Coast, a community of two dozen houses, pastel oceanfront palazzi, had foot-thick stucco walls to keep out the heat. The Schencks' neighbors included MGM's Louis B. Mayer with his twenty-room, thirteen-bath house and Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst, who owned a monstrous 118-room compound named Ocean House.

By 1925 Keaton had done well in real estate and various other investments. With Schenck and Lou Anger, he owned two oil wells paying substantial dividends. That year he commissioned the architectural firm of Gene Verge to design a neo-Italian Renaissance villa for his three-acre parcel of land located above Sunset Boulevard, just off Benedict Canyon. Keaton's neighbors included Chaplin, Fairbanks, Lloyd, Tom Mix, Marion Davies, and the Beverly Hills Hotel.

 

Fred Talmadge died at the end of November 1925, his system finally succumbing to a lifetime of alcohol abuse. Four years earlier, when Norma and Connie moved west, he had been relocated from the Bowery to the Sunset Strip. In California his life was little changed; there still was no room for him in the lives of his busy, glamorous daughters.

Now for a few hours he got to be the star of a Hollywood funeral. Drunk though he was, he was the father of the Talmadge Girls and father-in-law of Buster Keaton and Joseph Schenck. A Hawaiian orchestra played "Aloha."

Even now Peg Talmadge could not forgive her husband for poisoning her marriage and then walking out on his family. Particulars about his corpse were included in her report for Anita Loos: The girls visited the funeral parlor three and four times a day, hovering over the coffin and staring down at the face on the satin pillow. Fred had been fifty-six but now looked thirty, thanks to an artistic embalmer.

That Christmas the Keatons were living with Peg Talmadge on South Plymouth Boulevard. After unloading the home on Muirfield Road for a sizable profit, they moved into her house while waiting for their Beverly Hills house to be built. Peg had trimmed a Christmas tree for the children, but the holiday was cheerless. Fred's death had left his daughters so morose that Norma and Connie talked about retiring from the screen. Disappointing box office reports for Go West made Keaton nervous, and he was on a strict diet in preparation for his next film.

Joe had acquired rights to a decent musical comedy with a hero Keaton happened to like. Alfred Buttler is a rich coddled brat, like Rollo Treadway in The Navigator and Bertie Van Alstyne in The Saphead. He looks as if he had just stepped out of Abercrombie & Fitch. We see him first in the family drawing room, where he is sipping a cocktail. His father looks disgusted. Why doesn't Alfred do something manly for a change? Take a hunting trip. Rough it. Kill a few animals. Next Alfred and his valet (Snitz Edwards) are seen in a palatial tent with a king-size bed, dining on French cuisine. Buttler transforms himself from a weakling into a boxer, who knocks out the champ. Keaton was fascinated not by Alfred's life of ease, but by his life in training for the ring.

Battling Buttler was a three-year-old English musical comedy that had run 288 performances on Broadway with Charles Ruggles in the leading role. Keaton's millionaire happens to bear the same name as a famous prizefighter, Alfred "Battling" Buttler, the world lightweight champion contender. To impress a young woman (Sally O'Neil), Alfred pretends to be the boxer. After their marriage, he is stuck being Battling Buttler and must train to fight the real Buttler's upcoming match with the champion.

Keaton dumped all the songs and dances and much of the plot as well, and subtracted one of the t’s from the name Butler. In the stage musical the hero is reprieved at the last minute from having to fight the Alabama Murderer. Keaton knew that he couldn't tease an audience "for seven reels that I was goin' to fight in the ring and then not fight." Keaton's version would conclude with one of the most realistic boxing matches in silent pictures. When Martin Scorsese filmed Raging Bull in 1980, he remembered Battling Butler and made sure the camera stayed in the ring with Robert De Niro. During his childhood, Scorsese recalled being bored by filmed boxing matches shown at Saturday matinees because all the action was shot from the same angle. "The only person who had the right attitude about boxing in the movies for me was Buster Keaton," Scorsese said.

Keaton was a physical-fitness fanatic who kept himself in excellent shape. The only flaw in his physique, in his opinion, was his legs, which were short for his torso. Legs notwithstanding, he had no objections to showing off his body by wearing the skimpiest of costumes. For Battling Butler, he increased his daily exercise workouts by adding roadwork and began a special training diet.

To make the fight scenes realistic, he rounded up battered-looking fighters from gyms throughout the state. For the climactic scene, which is supposed to take place in Madison Square Garden, he persuaded Lou Anger to rent the huge Olympic Auditorium. Hundreds of extras were hired to fill the ringside seats; the rest of the crowd were people who were admitted free of charge to watch a movie being shot. Schenck was convinced that the picture would be a hit. Long before its release, MGM trade ads touted Butler as "the biggest Keaton of them all! And don't forget—KEATON MEANS KALE!"

Production was halted unexpectedly when Keaton fell from the practice ring and landed on his head. After a few days at home with head and body bruises, he returned to work. He was injured again on February 16 during a scene in which he was to leap back into the ring after being knocked out of it. Strained ligaments in his leg and back forced him to take off even more time. He finished the picture sore and limping.

Though Keaton would select Battling Butler as one of his favorite films, modern-day critics agree it is probably one of his weakest. There are noticeable changes in lighting from one sequence to the next, and mismatched suits during another scene, sloppiness that normally doesn't occur in Keaton's films.

The following summer Battling Butler premiered in New York at the Capitol. It turned out to be Keaton's biggest moneymaker, grossing nearly three quarters of a million dollars. In Life, Robert Sherwood wrote that it was unique, "just as funny as it ought to be." Variety applauded the direction, particularly in the fight scenes, and said that even though Keaton was on camera throughout the entire picture, he was "equal to the prominence."

 

Before Keaton began production of Battling Butler, Clyde Bruckman told him about a book he had read. Set in 1862, it told the true story of a group of enterprising Union officers who drew up a daring plan to infiltrate Confederate territory and cripple transportation and communication lines by hijacking a locomotive at Marietta, Georgia. The wood-burning locomotive, named the General, would be driven back north as the hijackers destroyed track, burned bridges, and cut telegraph lines along the way.

The Andrews Raid failed. In a sixty-mile-per-hour chase, two southern train conductors named Fuller and Murphy apprehended the raiders; nine of them were hanged and the rest imprisoned. One of the survivors, William Pittinger, published Daring and Suffering: A History of the Great Railway Adventure in 1863. Later it was republished as The Great Locomotive Chase, the edition Bruckman had seen.

Here was a story using Keaton's favorite prop. The subject was made to order for the screen because the heart of the tale was a chase. Keaton, nonetheless, thought the problem was that Pittinger told his story from the raiders' point of view; the Yankees were heroes and the southerners villains, which he feared movie audiences would not accept. Not only would the movie scenario have to represent the southern point of view, but to win audience sympathy the rescuers trying to recapture the General must be combined into a single individual. With these changes, Keaton thought the idea was magnificent. While he was willing to buy rights to the book, he was advised it was unnecessary because the material was in the public domain.

By the time Battling Butler wound to an end, Keaton had obtained Schenck's approval, and plans for The General began moving forward. Keaton was determined to be historically accurate. After learning that the original General locomotive was on display in the Chattanooga railroad station, he requested permission to borrow it for the film. A small logging railroad in eastern Tennessee was leased. The deal fell apart when the General's owners, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, realized Keaton's picture would be a comedy. Descendants of some of the participants protested, and the railway hastily withdrew its cooperation.

In April Keaton's location manager, Bert Jackson, found a small railroad in the heart of the Oregon lumbering region, amidst spectacular rustic scenery, quaint covered bridges, and picturesque rivers. The Oregon, Pacific and Eastern Railroad still owned two vintage locomotives just like the original engines used in the Civil War. Keaton and Natalie went up by train to inspect the location. It was exactly what he wanted. At a nearby lumber railroad he purchased a third engine, which would be remodeled into the Texas, the train to be wrecked in the climactic scene. The studio built passenger cars and boxcars on flat cars to match the old engines.

During the weeks before production, enthusiasm for the picture became so intense that it swept along even the usually tight-fisted Schenck, who proposed a budget of $400,000. Clyde Bruckman, with the assistance of two top writers, Al Boasberg and Charles Smith, worked out a scenario that focused on the engineer devoted to his locomotive. Keaton and Fred Gabourie talked of blowing up bridges. Keaton also began letting his hair grow long to play the role of Johnnie Gray.

For Johnnie's girlfriend, Keaton wanted an actress with long curls, a coiffure not easy to find in 1926 Hollywood. Norma Talmadge's hairdresser urged him to consider twenty-four-year-old Marion Mack, a Sennett Bathing Beauty and then a $100-a-week actress at Mermaid Comedies. Mack, who had just bobbed her hair, borrowed a wig. At the audition Keaton's face was expressionless, and he did not utter a word. Finally Lou Anger and Clyde Bruckman turned to him for a decision. Keaton nodded. She would do. Mack was hired at a salary of $250 a week.

 

On May 27, 1926, Keaton's crew rolled into Cottage Grove, Oregon, with eighteen freight carloads of Civil War cannons, passenger railroad cars rebuilt from discarded Pacific Electric Big Red Line trolleys, stagecoaches, wagons, houses built in sections, and a platoon of workmen. Camera equipment included three thirty-five-millimeter Bell & Howells, an Akeley specially made for wide shots, and several still cameras with four or five different lenses. The Bartell Hotel put itself at Keaton's disposal as both hotel and business headquarters and arranged to house the overflow of visitors fourteen miles north in Eugene.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Keaton drove Natalie and the children to Cottage Grove in his big Stutz roadster. He spent the holiday scouting locations with Fred Gabourie while his company went sight-seeing and picnicked along the Row River. On Monday, May 31, construction began on the town of Marietta, Georgia, guided by engravings from the Pittinger book. Almost all the scenes would be shot on location, including the indoor scene at the recruiting office when Johnnie Gray is trying to enlist.

The second floor of the town's biggest garage was leased as a costume and prop room. A commissary, run by Chinese cooks brought in from Los Angeles, was set up to prepare meals for actors and extras. Crowds poured into the casting office looking for jobs as extras. But there were not enough able-bodied youths to fight a war. To obtain soldiers for the battle scenes, the company brought in trainloads of Oregon National Guard units. Keaton photographed the moving trains by setting up the cameras on a rebuilt automobile that was driven along graded roads next to the track. When there were two parallel tracks, he lashed the camera car to a railroad flatcar.

Once filming began, regular train service to Cottage Grove virtually ceased. Every morning at 5:00 a.m. the line was closed down so the tracks would be free for the moviemakers. All day long, the movie trains clacked up and down the line. Despite such inconveniences the town could not have been more understanding. Keaton was spending a third of his budget there and employing some fifteen hundred local people.

On the first evening at the Bartell there was a party celebrating the Keatons' fifth wedding anniversary, and Natalie joined the film crew in the dining room. After that, however, she steered clear of them as much as possible and never ate downstairs again. In the Keaton suite she took care of the children and sewed needlepoint seat covers for the chairs in their new home. Later in the summer, she had company when her mother came up to visit. But generally she had no interest in socializing with other wives and actresses.

Filming began on June 8. Each morning at six o'clock Keaton left for the location by train with Bruckman, Willie Riddle, who was on hand to prepare his boss's hot lunch as always, and Marion Mack. Keaton had nothing to say to her and in many instances did not bother to direct her scenes. She felt "ignored and slighted," she said. "Buster just stuck to the job and to his little clique, and that was all." Sometimes shooting would be delayed for hours because "they stopped the train when they saw a place to play baseball," she recalled. As the weeks passed, Keaton warmed up and began making her the butt of practical jokes, usually an indication that he liked a person. She decided that his coldness was "mostly just shyness."

In the evening he continued with writers' conferences and scheduling for the next day. Every minute was filled with people. On Sundays he organized exhibition ball games that brought out the whole town. One town resident thought Keaton was "one of the best shortstops I've seen. He could have played big league ball. We just loved him because he was full of tricks. Once he loaded his bat with gunpowder and when the ball came across the plate, he took a swing and the bat blew up. The ball went about a mile and a half."

 

In the first week of July, Keaton's father arrived to play a Union officer. Appearing in cameo bits were a number of celebrities, including Glen Cavender, a retired Spanish-American War hero and winner of the French Legion of Honor, who played the leader of the hijackers. According to United Artists press releases, at one time there were about three thousand people on the payroll. While this sounds like an exaggeration, there is no doubt that Keaton's re-creation of the Civil War was adding up to a fortune. Cost of production time was estimated at $400 an hour.

 By midsummer the picture business was buzzing with rumors that The General's costs had passed a half million dollars and now might even total $1 million, a shocking amount for a comedy. Word traveled that Keaton was completely out of control. Unable to find a suitable bridge for the highlight of the film, he decided to build one (a 213-foot-long trestle bridge across Culp Creek). If a river level turned out to be too low, he ordered a dam constructed. And so it went: railroad track laid, covered bridges built, and burned, and rebuilt, and then burned again for retakes.

Schenck went on the warpath, trying to rein in a runaway production. Keaton, struggling to get the shots he wanted, seemed supremely indifferent to Schenck's concern. He had major aggravations of his own. From the start, the production was plagued by accidents and the field hospital kept humming. Keaton himself was knocked unconscious when he stood too close to a firing cannon, and assistant director Harry Barnes was shot in the face with a blank charge. One of the train wheels ran over a brakeman's foot, which led to a negligence complaint and a $2,900 lawsuit.

The greatest problem was fires started by the movie locomotives. They were equipped with safety devices, but even so sparks from the wood-burning trains set farmers' haystacks ablaze, and the business office wound up paying $25 in damages for each stack. Soon there were dozens of forest fires, at least one of them raging out of control near Culp Creek. And each time a fire broke out, production stopped while the moviemakers rushed to douse the blaze. Getting clear, smokeless skies as background became more difficult.

 

At last Keaton was ready to film his most spectacular scene, in which the Union spies on the Texas chase Johnnie Gray in his recaptured General back to the southern headquarters. After the General crosses a burning bridge, the Texas follows, but the bridge collapses and the spy train flips over into the stream.

During the filming of this spectacular scene on Friday, July 23, Cottage Grove shut down as businesses closed their stores and declared a holiday. In the hot sun, an estimated crowd of three to four thousand assembled. The scene was scheduled for 11:00 a.m. Six cameras were in position when Keaton changed his mind and ordered them moved. The crash train then practiced several runs across the trestle while the specifics were worked out by the cameramen and an explosives expert. There would be no second takes.

It was 3:00 p.m. when Keaton finally gave the signal. The engineer who started the Texas rolling leaped down, leaving behind a dummy at the throttle. The timbers of the bridge had been partly sawed, and when the dynamite charge went off, the bridge snapped in half. The engine dropped into a twisted, steaming pile in the river. Because the dummy looked so lifelike, spectators began screaming. The crash set off the train whistle, which continued to screech. Afterward Keaton posed for still photos standing on the wreckage. He was as "happy as a kid," reported the Cottage Grove Sentinel.

The train-crash cost came to $42,000 ($1.7 million at 1995 price levels), making it the most expensive single shot in all of silent films. That figure did not include disposal of the wreckage. Not until World War II would the Texas's rusty carcass be salvaged for scrap metal.

Over the weekend, Keaton filmed battle scenes that would be compared to Mathew Brady's Civil War photographs. In a belated effort to save money, he used his Oregon guardsmen for both Union and Confederate soldiers: "And put 'em in blue uniforms and bring 'em goin' from right to left, and take 'em out, put 'em in gray uniforms, bring 'em goin' from left to right. And fought the war."

During the battle scenes special precautions were taken to prevent forest fires: a stationary pump, portable equipment, and a water tank on a flatcar. Still, a huge fire, the biggest so far, brought shooting to a halt. The crew and guardsmen, nearly six hundred of them, fought side by side for hours. The equipment proved inadequate, and the troops were forced to battle the flames with blankets and the jackets of their uniforms. Keaton, in his underwear, used his pants to extinguish tiny brushfires. Natalie, coaxed out of the Bartell Hotel for her first public appearance in weeks, served refreshments to the firefighters. The total cost of the fire came to nearly $50,000.

By the following week, filming had become impossible. Thick gray smoke hung over the area. Because the interior scenes—the enlistment office, Anabelle's sitting room—were still to be shot, Keaton decided to leave. His purchasing agent, Al Gilmour, remained in Cottage Grove while the rest of the company returned to California on August 6. Less fortunate were the townspeople. Having no escape from the smoke, they could only pray for rain.