TWENTY-ONE

 

SCHENCK REDUX

 

 

Raymond Rohauer kept nagging Keaton to visit Joe Schenck. If the old man knew about the legal fight his executors were waging against Keaton, perhaps he might call off Leopold Friedman.

Schenck's reign had spanned motion picture history from Norma Talmadge and Roscoe Arbuckle to Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones. Despite his conviction for income tax evasion and the subsequent perjury indictment, Schenck was released from prison and returned to 20th Century-Fox, no longer as chairman of the board but as an executive producer. If anything, imprisonment had enhanced his mythic position in the industry. Now, in his late seventies, Schenck was revered as a pioneer and elder statesman. In 1952 he had received a special Academy Award "for long and distinguished service to the motion picture industry." "All brain and iron," Frank Capra wrote admiringly in his autobiography.

Schenck lived like a Lotus Land Dalai Lama in a showy estate situated on six acres in Holmby Hills. In the living room of his Spanish stucco mansion hung a larger-than-life oil painting of Norma Talmadge. As one of Hollywood's most clubbable hosts, Schenck continued to hold court with his fabled high-stakes poker games, in which the pot sometimes contained $100,000 for a single hand.

As a younger man, paunchy but redolent with the sexy aroma of power, he had gotten along without physical appeal. He had since become impotent. Seeking a miracle cure, he discovered a doctor who had developed an injection designed to restore potency, but the effects lasted no more than a minute or two. Still, a stable of gorgeous women were eager to barter artful fellatio for professional favors. The cream of the movie-starlet crop gathered like deer to a salt lick.

The most memorable of Schenck's women was a plumpish, custard-faced brunette named Norma Jean Baker, whose mother had worked as a film cutter on several Norma Talmadge pictures and named her illegitimate daughter after the actress she considered the most beautiful woman in the world. In 1946, prior to getting a contract at Fox and the new name Marilyn Monroe, Norma Jean lived in Schenck's luxurious guest house, in order to be right there should the miracle shot work. Norma Jean and the impotence doctor synchronized schedules because "this stuff can't wait for a studio limousine to drive me across town," she said. She also entertained attractive young men, whom she regaled with stories of Schenck's condition and the special services required.

In 1957 Schenck had a stroke and lost the power of speech. Confined to bed, his mind eventually unraveled into senility. Throughout this period, Keaton was a frequent visitor at the royal bedside. Sometimes his calls resulted in a handout of few hundred dollars, with Schenck claiming he just happened to sell some long-forgotten asset of Buster Keaton Productions. At such times, Keaton pocketed the money, though he never liked to take anything that didn't belong to him.

Louise Keaton, speaking about her brother's relationship with their father, once remarked that "Buster always thought he owed him a lot." Likewise, Keaton believed he owed Schenck a lot, even though his initial handout back in 1918—sending Joe and Myra $25 a week while Keaton was in the army—had amounted to only some $800, a spit in the wind for a man of his wealth. "He would never say a rotten word about Schenck," recalled James Karen. "Once I blew up and said what was on my mind: 'Look, he made a fortune off you and then he destroyed you!' Buster got up and walked away from me."

By the late fifties, discussion of Keaton's films—or of practically anything—with Joe had become out of the question. Schenck died in his sleep, at the age of eighty-one, in October 1961. At the funeral Variety counted four hundred mourners at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple waiting to pay their respects. Among the early arrivals was Keaton. (Although Schenck's will contained numerous bequests, nothing was left to Buster.) To the end, Keaton followed the script he had first written for Schenck in 1917. His ego never permitted him to acknowledge that he had written the wrong character into the wrong movie.

 

In the years that followed, Keaton was closely involved with Rohauer, who had insinuated himself into his professional life. Even so, Keaton showed little personal interest in him and denied him entree, except as a business flunky, into his life. He did not like his angel very much. Since Rohauer understood this, he was forever trying to ingratiate himself and always failing.

Under the right circumstances, Keaton enjoyed being fussed over. He was delighted when he was recognized by Las Vegas maitre d's and escorted to a ringside table. What he did not find comfortable was the adulation of overwrought fans. He mistrusted compliments, which he dismissed as "that genius bullshit." Carol De Luise, a friend of the Keatons, said, "He believed he was an average man." He preferred to simplify events: Filmmaking had been a job. He had done his work and collected his wages, like everybody else. Whenever aficionados began aggrandizing his past life, he was desperate to escape.

"Christ!" he once growled to Jim Karen, "Why do people want to see pictures that were made fifty years ago?"

Like it or not, he found it necessary to meet those people. He would vent his complaints to Rohauer, whom he held responsible for his new fame.

Sensitive to Keaton's feelings, Rohauer was careful never to gush. Inwardly, he remained the world's foremost Keaton fan, and this was obvious to almost everyone. "He got crazy on the subject of Buster," said Eleanor Keaton. "Raymond was a fighter, but he was greedy and grabbed every still and poster he could find. Some of it was trash. But he didn't want anyone else to have it."

Rohauer took pride, understandably, in his efforts to resurrect Keaton's reputation and rescue the films. Long before it became a matter of urgency for the film industry, Rohauer understood the importance of film preservation—and not only because preservation went hand-in-hand with making money. "Raymond's reputation didn't bother me," said Joel Goss. "Because despite all the talk, he was the guy who had worked with Buster to save the films and win his rights back. Others profited but didn't do a thing for Buster."

"It was his one good deed," said Stan Brakhage, "and it was so huge and so offsetting" that Rohauer could be forgiven a great deal.

The more Keaton tried to reduce Raymond to a prop in his life, the more Raymond hungered for his idol's approval, or at least gratitude. "Buster tolerated him," said Jane Kelly. "But as far as liking him, forget it. For one thing, Buster didn't have much use for anyone who didn't play cards."

Rohauer liked to point out that even those closest to Keaton never received verbal thanks. "Eleanor Keaton told me several times that in all the years they'd been married she doesn't remember his ever saying 'I love you' once," Rohauer told Kevin Brownlow and David Gill in a 1986 interview for a documentary on Keaton's life.

Just as meeting Roscoe Arbuckle in 1917 was the pivotal moment in Keaton's artistic life, so encountering Rohauer at the Coronet Theater was the second luckiest. As critic Walter Kerr put it, "Before Rohauer there were no standing ovations at film festivals for Buster Keaton." But Keaton would never give Rohauer credit. Keaton's autobiography does not mention the fact that some of his films could be seen again for the first time in nearly forty years—and that he had one person to thank.

 

Shortly after the Christmas holidays in 1954, Clyde Bruckman stopped by. He was planning a motor trip to Montana and wanted Buster to loan him one of his guns for protection. Keaton gave him a .45 Colt automatic.

Bruckman then visited Columbia Pictures in the hope that Jules White would give him work on a Three Stooges picture, but the only writing assignment that White had available was promised to another writer.

Bruckman had been sliding downhill professionally for years. It had been more than a year since his last job, an Abbott and Costello picture for which he supplied gags, mostly recalled from Keaton's old films. Though in his glory days he directed two W. C. Fields classics, The Fatal Glass of Beer and The Man on the Flying Trapeze, now he had a reputation for borrowing freely from earlier films, usually without artistic or legal right. He was sixty, and nobody would hire him.

After borrowing Keaton's Colt automatic, Bruckman returned

home to Santa Monica and dragged through New Year's weekend. On January 4, after typing a note for his wife, he drove to Bess Eiler's Cafe on Wilshire and ordered a meal. When he finished, he went into the men's room and shot himself through the head.

That evening, Santa Monica police called Keaton and described the gun, which appeared to be his. In this way Keaton received word of his friend's death.

Keaton had seen Bruckman regularly. He was in a better position than most to notice ominous signs, so thought Bruckman's family. They believed Buster should not have handed over his pistol; Bruckman's father had also shot and killed himself. Keaton knew this, just as he knew that Bruckman was depressed and drank heavily. Unfortunately, there was nothing unusual about desperate people in Hollywood, where unemployment and alcoholism were facts of life.

Keaton and Bruckman went back thirty-four years. The moonfaced writer-director, the last remaining link to Keaton's old gang at the Keaton Studio, had first joined him in 1923 as "outfielder and writer." In the twenties Bruckman visited his house four or five nights a week to think up gags. At midnight he would troop into the kitchen and sit on the sink while Buster fried hamburgers. In the 1950s Gladys and Clyde Bruckman still came to the house to play cards.

Although Keaton shrank from expressing grief, Bruckman's suicide rattled him.

 

Keaton had moved into the Victoria Avenue house to ensure the safety of his mother in case of a Japanese invasion. Thirteen years later he remained there, and so did all his relatives. Although Myra was hardly an ideal mother, especially during Keaton's childhood, he always felt close to her and accepted her idiosyncracies as simply part of her personality. After the breakup of his first two marriages, their emotional bond became stronger than ever. His worries about her welfare transcended any family obligations. There was never any question that Myra, seventy-seven, was entitled to his support. It was a different story with Louise and Harry, who were, in the eyes of one family member, "pure parasite," whose attitude basically amounted to '"You're rich. We're not. Take care of us.'" 

Louise, in her midforties, had ventured out into the business world. Long ago she had given up hoping for a shining knight. Once she had taken a holiday in Hawaii and met a man in a bar, but the romance, which may have been platonic, lasted only a short time. In the 1930s, while attending Monday-night wrestling matches with Buster and Dorothy Sebastian, she developed a crush on one of the wrestlers, and one evening her brother arranged for the man to fall accidentally into her lap. She had put up with endless teasing about the wrestler, just as she continued to be a good sport when people referred to her as "Buster's spinster sister, Louise."

Louise did clerical work—filing and rudimentary bookkeeping—for an insurance company. Harry, who finally managed to shed his unlikely nickname, continued to dream. "He always had some crack-brained scheme, until Buster put his foot down and said no more schemes," said Jimmy Talmadge. The only time he had worked for any extended period was during the war. Since his return from Las Vegas he had been lying around, and now he was fifty and overweight. Perhaps the only one who understood him was Louise. "He always held Buster's coat," she said. In 1948 his wife had left him and taken their seven-year-old son with her. When she remarried, Ernestine, like Natalie Talmadge, changed her son's name. Baby Jingles was growing up as Harry Moore.

Once a week Harry Keaton did the marketing. Eleanor Keaton wrote a blank check to cover the cost of groceries, and Harry would tack on an extra fifteen or twenty dollars for his pocket money.

That summer Buster was itching to hit the road. Since 1947 he spent several months each year in Europe, where his popularity continued strong and the money proved substantial. "He never flew over, but always took the boat," his grandson Jim Talmadge recalled. "It wasn't a fear of flying. Usually he found someone like Charles Goren with whom he could play bridge. He could pay for his whole trip on the crossing."

Keaton refused to return to the Cirque Medrano. In a money dispute the previous year, the owner had impounded the Keatons' luggage. Instead in June he and Eleanor sailed for England, where he was to begin work on a pilot for a television series called The Adventures of Mr. Pastry, with Richard Hearne, a popular music-hall comedian. Keaton had agreed to be technical adviser for a series of thirty-nine half-hour shows, in addition to directing and acting in the pilot. Hearne, forty-seven, played a character called Mr. Pastry, an old man who keeps falling down. In contrast, Keaton, at sixty, was to portray a much younger man, the owner of a drama school. As it turned out, he stole nearly every scene in which the two of them appeared, which may have irritated Hearne. Whenever Keaton took a fall, he would respond with a double somersault. To Keaton's keen disappointment the pilot turned out to be a banal, low-budget effort. It was never sold.

 

All day long Myra Keaton sipped straight bourbon out of a shot glass. Her only real meal was breakfast. Each morning she had a bowl of oatmeal, then ate snacks for lunch and dinner.

By the middle of July, Myra was virtually on a permanent fast. After contracting an infection, her strength began to decline. On Wednesday, July 20, 1955, Harry drove her to Midway Hospital on West San Vicente Boulevard, where the doctors diagnosed pneumonia and malnutrition. The next morning at eight o'clock she died.

Harry took charge of funeral arrangements. Some years earlier, while working as a bartender in San Fernando, he had gotten a bargain deal at a newly opened cemetery. Keaton returned to California to find his mother buried up in Harry's cut-rate plot in the hills above San Fernando. Later he purchased a lovely stone marker adorned with a rose. Eventually both Harry and Louise would be interred in the same grave with their mother.

Myra's sudden departure was not completely unexpected. To Harry, who had not been separated from his mother except briefly during his marriage, the loss was overwhelming. Keaton also was unprepared.

 

After Myra's death, Keaton decided to liberate himself from the Three Keatons. As year had followed year, he stopped trying to make himself believe that his brother might actually get a steady job. He thought of him as a leech. Mostly for their mother's sake, he had continued to offer his support but now he quickly cut Harry off.

"Either Buster said it or I said it," Eleanor Keaton remembered. "Now we can go out on our own." Never again would they live with Buster's relatives. After fifteen years of marriage, it was time to look after themselves.

 

Keaton appeared to take his mother's death in stride, but he quietly eased the pain of loss by drinking too much. "A lot of people never knew he was drunk," said his sister-in-law. "He never lost control of himself or his tongue." Nor did his work suffer, but the shadow of alcohol began to hover over his life once more.

That summer of 1955 Ben Pearson had been unusually busy scheduling guest shots for Keaton. Ahead lay a busy fall television season that included appearances on Arthur Murray, Ed Sullivan, and many other top-rated variety shows. He also was offered a number of amusing dramatic parts. One was the Eddie Cantor Theater, on which he played a travel agent who never has traveled.

His most important dramatic role that fall was a forgotten star who watches the Academy Awards ceremony on a barroom television set and sees his former partner being honored for all of his achievements. In The Silent Partner, produced by Hal Roach, Keaton re-created some of his two-reeler slapstick routines by playing both the elderly and the youthful star. Keaton's acting was fine. However, in long shot he looks like a kid doing acrobatic falls and somersaults, while the close-ups reveal an old man's head on the agile body. The overall effect is quite alarming.

In midautumn he left for a three-week job in the fresh mountain air and wooded tranquillity of Durango, Colorado. Around the World in 80 Days, a film version of the Jules Verne novel, is a splashy, star-cluttered $6 million travelogue about a Victorian adventurer who wagers £20,000 that he can circle the globe in eighty days. First-time movie producer Michael Todd showed off Hollywood's latest technological miracle, a glittering sixty-five-millimeter wide-screen process that he had developed in partnership with Joe Schenck.

In Phileas Fogg's sprint across America, Keaton would be a frontier train conductor. His scenes were to be filmed in the Rockies aboard a historic, narrow-gauge railroad running between Durango and Silverton. Keaton said, "I must have been on the screen a minute and a half, and I was three weeks in Colorado on location to do it."

The wily Todd financed 80 Days as he went along and kept just a step ahead of his creditors. Some people were forced to plead and threaten to extract their salaries, while others had to be satisfied with barter gifts. Noel Coward got a small Bonnard painting and £100, but Keaton insisted on being paid in cash.

Arriving in Durango, he was pleasantly surprised to learn that he had been assigned a private trailer, an amenity normally provided for the expensive talent. Even more remarkable, it looked to Keaton as if his dressing-room accommodations were every bit as elaborate as David Niven's and Shirley MacLaine's. Perhaps even more so. Surely, a mistake had been made and he would be asked to switch. He decided to seek out Todd and report the mix-up right away.

Todd was as squat, ugly, and bull-necked as a middle-aged fighter. Frequently hysterical, he hopped around screaming like a five-year-old. One of his writers on the film, humorist S. J. Perelman, called him a "psychopathic little bastard" and a "sinister dwarf."

When Keaton brought the trailer situation to Todd's attention, Todd waved his words away with the Flor de Magnifico cigar that always protruded from his mouth. "There's no mistake," he declared. "You're the biggest star in the picture."

Nothing could have been further from the truth, of course. Twenty-four hours earlier Keaton had rated so low with Todd's production people that giving him a trailer of any kind had never even occurred to them and they assigned him an ordinary dressing room. When Todd heard about it, he raised hell. Like everyone in a Todd picture, Buster Keaton was entitled to first-class treatment.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, Keaton traveled to Rochester, New York. George Eastman House, an important research center that owned valuable archives relating to the history of film, had asked three hundred silent-film actors, directors, and cameramen to choose those who had made the most distinctive contributions to American cinema between 1915 and 1925. Keaton was selected as one of the ten most distinguished living actors, along with his former sister-in-law Norma, Charlie Chaplin, Richard Barthelmess, Ronald Colman, Harold Lloyd, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Lillian Gish, and Mae Marsh.

Not every winner planned to attend the awards ceremony. Chaplin was unable to reenter the U.S., and Norma, practically an invalid now, sent regrets from Las Vegas. Keaton was determined to enjoy his sudden elevation to celebrity status and collect his Eastman Award in person. He considered it more prestigious than an Oscar, because it was a onetime award.

Mary Pickford, who was to deliver the keynote address, had a well-known drinking problem and was notorious for falling on her face in public. As it turned out, she gave a charming speech and spent the weekend completely sober. The same could not be said for Keaton, though Eleanor was doing her best to keep him in line, and in addition he was suffering from a bad chest cold.

By the time the Rochester weekend ended and Keaton got home to the balmy weather of Los Angeles, it was Thanksgiving. His cold continued to linger, accompanied by painful coughing spasms. One afternoon he began coughing up blood, and Eleanor called his doctor, John Fahey, who prescribed medication and instructed Keaton to go to the hospital if his condition had not improved by 8:00 p.m. The hospital Fahey selected was the Veterans Administration Hospital on Sawtelle Boulevard, which was not particularly convenient to their home but provided excellent free care for veterans.

That evening veins in his esophagus ruptured and he began to hemorrhage. Eleanor drove him to the emergency room at the Veterans Hospital, where he was rushed into surgery. The next morning she was advised to summon Keaton's sons and Harry and Louise, because the doctors could not be sure how much longer he would live—not more than a few days, they estimated. It would be twenty-seven hours before the bleeding could be stopped. On the fifth day he finally showed signs of significant improvement.