TWENTY-FOUR

 

BOTTOM OF THE NINTH

 

 

He was at his favorite New York hotel, the St. Moritz—on the twentieth floor facing the park—trying to watch a ball game on WPIX television and sip a can of beer. Now that the Giants and the Dodgers, his pet New York clubs, had abandoned the city, he mostly watched the Yankees, or whomever. He was not particular.

But now he was distracted because visitors wanted to talk. One of them was a fifty-eight-year-old Irish playwright with a leathery face, the other a Broadway director who had made a special trip to Woodland Hills a few months earlier to meet him. The director was a high-strung man who had not impressed him, at least not after he wondered aloud why Keaton was playing four-handed poker by himself. When Keaton answered tongue in cheek that it was an imaginary game with the likes of Irving Thalberg and Nick Schenck and had been going on since 1927, Alan Schneider failed to laugh. Keaton explained that Thalberg owed him over $2 million. Schneider still didn't crack a smile.

At the St. Moritz, Schneider recalled asking Keaton, "Did you have any questions about anything in the script, Buster?"

"No." He wanted the money: $5,000 for three weeks' work. As for the picture, its market would be limited to art houses in Albania and Bulgaria, as Ben Pearson had once wisecracked about Limelight. Keaton did not imagine this pretentious film would do well even in those countries. Privately, he and Eleanor referred to it as "the art picture."

Schneider said, "What did you think about the film when you first read it?"

"Well ..." He paused, as if searching for the right words. In his opinion, the twenty-one-page script that the Irishman had cooked up was hopeless. And despite his forty-seven years in the business, he hadn't the slightest idea how to fix it. He kept his eyes glued to the television screen.

Then Samuel Beckett tried talking to him but concluded that Keaton wasn't listening, which may have been in part true because his hearing loss had grown worse. "It was no good," recalled the author of Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp's Last Tape in a 1986 interview with Kevin Brownlow. "He was absent. He didn't even offer us a drink, not because he was being unfriendly but because it never occurred to him."

Initially Keaton was flattered when he was approached by the legendary Irish writer. Not only would it be Beckett's first and only work for the screen, but it was to be directed by prominent Broadway director Alan Schneider, whose hits had included Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Samuel Beckett had given his movie a generic title, Film. A twenty-two-minute black-and-white virtually silent picture (except for one character who whispers "Shhhh") without music, its main character is an old man, O, who never utters a word. What's more, his back is to the camera and his face hidden until the closing frames, when there is a quick shot revealing a patch over one eye. The other eyeball reflects horror.

A decade earlier Keaton had been approached about the role of Lucky in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. As always, he handed the script to Eleanor, and it made no sense to her. Relying on her judgment, he turned it down. But months later when Godot turned out to be one of the most successful plays of the 1956 season, he blamed her for steering him wrong. So when he was contacted about doing a Beckett film, Eleanor kept her mouth shut, even though the film made no more sense to her than the play had.

Neither Beckett nor Schneider was familiar with Keaton's silent films, though they pretended to be. They knew he was an actor but did not know his work as a director and had no inkling of the profoundly absurdist vision of such sophisticated films as The Paleface. In fact, nothing that Beckett dreamed up in the sixties would have mystified Keaton. All they wanted from him was a performance, and as an actor he had been their fourth choice after Charlie Chaplin, Zero Mostel, and Irish actor Jack MacGowran.

On Monday, July 20, 1964, location filming began on Gold Street in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. By afternoon the temperature was 90 degrees. Throughout the entire filming temperatures regularly soared into the nineties with typical midsummer New York humidity. Keaton was decked out in a smocklike overcoat, pancake hat, baggy black trousers, eye patch, and red suspenders. In the bridge scene, he was supposed to run along Gold Street, whose sidewalk had been strewn with broken glass and rocks.

In addition to a flotilla of reporters, celebrities stood around squinting in the simmering heat: French director Alain Resnais, actress Delphine Seyrig, poet Kenneth Koch. Sitting on a construction beam, legs dangling, were the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and his roommate, Peter Orlovsky. Ginsberg, inspired by Keaton in his red suspenders, went home that afternoon and wrote "Today," a poem about seeing Buster Keaton under the Brooklyn Bridge and about the hairy bum who asked Keaton for—but did not get—drink money.

Roberta Hodes, the script supervisor, thought the project "was ass backwards, written by a great poet who knew nothing about film, directed by a man of the theater who knew nothing about film, starring a man who knew everything about film. They were just using Keaton's name. Anybody could have played the part."

To Beckett's surprise, Keaton never inquired what the film was about—"he wasn't interested"—and so Beckett didn't tell him. Keaton was prepared to improvise, but when he suggested comedy bits for O, Beckett and Schneider ignored them. Soon communication ceased altogether.

When reporters from the New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post came up to Keaton on the set and asked what the picture was about, he talked articulately about O and how "a man may keep away from everybody but he can't get away from himself." His explanation wasn't too different from Beckett's: "It's about a man trying to escape from perception of all kinds—from all perceivers—even divine perceivers."

It was only to be expected that Film drew widespread attention from the creative community. It was Beckett's first visit to the United States; Schneider came trailing clouds of glory from his Broadway hits; cinematographer Boris Kaufman had won an Oscar for photographing On the Waterfront, and Sidney Meyers was a gifted film editor who had collected awards at Venice and Edinburgh. Accordingly, flurries of hype surrounded the experimental film.

In his autobiography, Schneider would repeatedly suggest that Keaton was a lowbrow who did not get Beckett's symbolism. "What Buster didn't get," said James Karen, "was their goddamned amateurism. These were people who didn't know how to make a movie, who had given him a script that didn't make sense. It was anti-film. He saved their asses, shot after shot." Even though Schneider insisted on handling Keaton as if he were an amateur, afterward he would admit that his star had been patient, imperturbable, and "magnificent."

 

That summer Keaton returned, accidentally, to the place of his birth. During the cross-country drive to New York City, he and Eleanor were speeding along the highway through Kansas. Looking out the window of the Cadillac, they noticed a road sign for Piqua.

At the Piqua railway depot, the Keatons pulled up. The place appeared deserted, not a car or truck parked outside the creaky station, not a single soul in sight, not even a stray dog. Eleanor snapped a picture of him tramping along the railway tracks in straw hat, white T-shirt, and rumpled pants, beneath the Piqua sign dangling from the depot's sloped roof. The snapshot, still in the family photo album, shows an uncomfortable and hot Keaton, his shirt stuck to his stomach. His face wears the expression of an unhappy old poker player.

Keaton stepped into the station and introduced himself to the agent on duty. Then he hopped into the Cadillac and they left.

When Piquans learned that their most famous native son had actually returned and then silently departed, all in less than ten minutes, they were hurt and insulted. Keaton, according to the Piqua centennial book, "in a chauffeur-driven car, came through the town of his birth, but he evidently did not want to see much of the town or talk to anyone. He stopped at the depot and talked to the agent, Dick Miller, and drove off."

 

Now close to seventy, Keaton had become the Willy Loman of movies, slogging year after year through international departure lounges: Rome, Venice, Toronto, New York, Paris. No question, he worked on some of the cheapest films of the decade, but he never stopped moving. As he got older, his obsession with work became more pronounced. Some of his friends believed he flogged himself with the zeal of a twenty-year-old in order to leave Eleanor a nest egg.

The following year Film had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival. One critic described it as twenty minutes of chic boredom; others thought it a depressing waste of Keaton. Critic Andrew Sarris described Schneider's direction of Keaton as "nothing short of catastrophic" and correctly supposed that the only reason Keaton could have agreed to play O was a very tasty salary.

After nine days among the New York literati, Keaton gratefully returned to Woodland Hills for a break. But being a man who didn't know the meaning of the words time off, he soon found easy ways to rustle up a buck or two. Between his return from New York in August and the following January, he appeared in four films for James Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff's American International Pictures. Arkoff, best known for inventing a new genre of such teenage monster movies as I Was a Teenage Werewolf, was now pioneering another genre, beach-party movies. Keaton stumbled into the cast of Pajama Party, costarring Annette Funicello and Tommy Kirk, in which Keaton plays an Indian chief who chases a bosomy blonde in a bikini. "Somehow he had dignity even though they had him rigged up in a ridiculous Indian outfit," said Tom Kirk, who played a Martian in the picture.

Keaton undertook three more Arkoffian epics: Beach Blanket Bingo, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, and Sergeant Deadhead. Shot on location at Malibu or on a soundstage filled with tons of sand, the beach pictures took fifteen days to make and all of them had cookie-cutter plots. Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Mickey Rooney were also hired for cameos. Annette Funicello waxed rhapsodic about the chance to work with "older, established actors." Not that the youngsters had ever seen this older actor in anything, except maybe Mad, Mad World. "We all knew who he was," said Irene Tsu, who first met Keaton dressed as a tropical-island witch doctor in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. "But off-camera we didn't talk much to him. He was old and sick, and when he wasn't working he would be resting or sitting with his wife. Nobody wanted to bother him." Tom Kirk figured that Keaton's reasons for being there were similar to his own. "It was work. But I still felt sorry for him."

Keaton connoisseurs watched in dismay. By this time, nothing could destroy Keaton's reputation, but the beach-party movies were pushing it. The New York Times reviled Wild Bikini as the worst film of the last two years, and maybe the next two. Jim Kline writes in The Complete Films of Buster Keaton that the AIP pictures feature "some of the worst acting, writing, directing, camera work, choreography, and music ever recorded on film."

Keaton had already lined up his next film, the eighty-seventh by his own calculation, and was preparing to rough it in the Canadian wilderness. In July, while he had been staying at the St. Moritz, he had a visit from a young British animator, Gerald Potterton, who had been pursuing him for months about making a travelogue for the Canadian National Railways. He wanted Keaton to go from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific on one of the tiny motorized railway handcars used by track crews.

Keaton looked at the kid director and rolled his eyes. "Sounds crazy," he said. Suddenly a racket down on Central Park South sent him clomping to the window. He pulled it up and stuck his head out. "Quiet!" he bawled at Manhattan. Then he closed the window and turned back to Potterton. "I'll do it. When do we start?" He never could resist trains.

It was September by the time that The Railrodder began shooting. Already the weather was getting chilly, and nobody wanted to think about what conditions might be like once they hit the Rockies. Gathered in Montreal to meet him were Gerry Potterton and his crew of five, plus a second, smaller crew led by director John Spotton, who would be traveling along with them and filming a backstage documentary about Keaton. For the next five weeks the group would trundle across Canada from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to White Rock, British Columbia, on a private railroad car with sleeping compartments, a lounge for relaxing, and their own chef and steward. Keaton could not have felt more at home.

The Railrodder is a one-joke commercial for Canada. In England, Keaton, costumed in his Buster coat and hat, reads a newspaper ad—"See Canada Now"—and jumps into the Atlantic. Wading ashore in Canada, he notices a sign that says "Pacific Ocean, West 3,982 1/2 miles" and starts down some railroad tracks, then climbs on an abandoned handcar. Suddenly the handcar takes off down the track. Whizzing through the Canadian countryside, Buster is pleased to find in the car's storage trunk all of life's necessities—including a formal tea set.

At the beach on the opening day of shooting a low-flying sea gull made a bombing run on Keaton. Potterton, delighted with the bird poop, proposed to use this unrehearsed business. "No, no," Keaton told him, "you leave those kinds of jokes to Peter Sellers."

John Spotton's documentary on the making of The Railrodder captures a little-seen side of Keaton. One of the most revealing scenes is a clash between Potterton and Keaton over a gag, the kind of fight that must have erupted countless times in Keaton's earlier career. The Railrodder was Potterton's film, but Keaton figured he knew what was best. On a windy day, he wanted to cross a two-hundred-foot-high trestle bridge enveloped by a map (his newspaper gag from The High Sign). When Potterton had other ideas, Keaton gave his director a lesson in filmmaking. "The bridge is not your gag. The bridge is only suspense." The argument grew heated. When Potterton insisted, Keaton did the scene Potterton's way before stomping off to his compartment. Later Spotton's camera caught him looking for consolation from Eleanor, who agreed with Potterton. The shot was too dangerous.

"I generally know what I'm doing," Keaton barked. "That's not dangerous. It's child's play, for the love of Mike."

The next day the scene was reshot.

"Let's face it," Potterton said. "He was Buster Keaton, and who the hell was I to tell him what to do. The bridge didn't worry him at all. He thought it was sissy stuff. We ended shooting the gag his way, with the map wrapped all around his head."

At his sixty-ninth birthday party, the company presented him with a toy locomotive and a cake. Urged to make a speech, he said, in an Irish accent, "I'm not very good at public speaking, but to show you my heart's in the right place, I'll fight any man in the house."

By the middle of October, the Canadian weather was getting "bloody cold," Spotton recalled, and Keaton's coughing provided an ever-present soundtrack. "But he was a tough son of a bitch. If there was anything wrong with him, he kept it to himself."

A few months later, when Potterton visited his star in Woodland Hills, Keaton marched him around to the corner hardware store and spent an hour showing him screws and chisels. Then, having promised to introduce his young director to Stan Laurel, they drove to Santa Monica. Laurel, jolly and smiling in his wheelchair, seemed enormously pleased to see Keaton, who began describing how he had just crossed Canada from coast to coast in The Railrodder.

"And guess who directed it?"

"Who?" said Laurel.

Keaton pointed a finger at the kid sitting on the couch. "That," he said.

"That" held a 7-Up in his hand as he listened to the two masters talking shop. "It was terrific," Potterton recalled. "There was no sadness in either of them."

On May 29, 1965, the Keatons celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, though the marriage had been given only a few months. To columnist Hedda Hopper, Keaton joked that "there's a night club here in Woodland Hills, with a bowling alley connected. Maybe I'll take her there."

That summer he had commitments to shoot two films in Europe and another in Canada, requiring an extended stay away from home. He was having coughing spells that left him out of breath, so before leaving home he got a complete physical. Once again, the report came back: bronchitis.

 

He spent most of the summer shooting War Italian Style, a low-budget Italian film in which he played a wacky German general. It was the sixth film he had made in the last twelve months. As soon as the picture was finished, he was scheduled to join Zero Mostel and Phil Silvers in Spain for the movie version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, receiving third billing after the two stars. But in August Raymond Rohauer called him from Italy where the Venice Film Festival had just gotten under way. At the last minute Rohauer had fast-talked the festival director into screening Samuel Beckett's Film and inviting its star. Within hours Rohauer had turned the showing of the twenty-two-minute film into a special tribute to Buster Keaton. Now his star was refusing to cooperate.

Keaton resisted appearing at a film festival. "You know how much I hate them."

Rohauer began pleading. He reeled off names of film luminaries who were attending the festival: Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, all the important film critics, press from all over the world.

Keaton finally said that he would show up on one condition: He would not do more than two or three interviews.

Rohauer met the Keatons at the Venice airport. Instead of going to their hotel, he guided them to the main entrance of the film festival.

"Just go through those doors," he told Keaton.

Keaton was suspicious. "What for?"

When Rohauer swung open the door of the grand salon people were cheering. Keaton refused to enter. Rohauer pushed him.

As Rohauer would recall, "Eleanor looked at me. She was furious."

It was a twenty-minute standing ovation. Films in Review reported that "even the most sedate journalists stood on their chairs to cheer." In the end, Keaton had no choice but to walk inside. Poker-faced, he slowly went down the aisle, climbed onto the stage, and seated himself at a table. But as the pandemonium continued, with people shouting “Caro Buster!" and paparazzi clambering over the stage, Keaton softened and his face betrayed emotion. "Glad to see you," he said with a smile. Then he began answering questions from the audience.

A few days later he arrived in Madrid and checked into the Hilton, where he met Richard Lester, director of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Lester was a flashy young American expatriate who had won international fame in England, primarily as the director of two Beatles films, A Hard Day's Night and Help! He had a reputation for creativity and bold technical innovations. Lester regarded Keaton's silent films "with true envy and respect. He had an extraordinary ability to make the space around objects seem funny. And there was never anything wasted, not a shot that you could take out of a Keaton film. He was a bit like Mozart, effortless."

A successful Broadway musical comedy set in ancient Rome, Forum was being transferred to the screen with its original star, Zero Mostel. A blacklisted actor, Mostel had been absent from the screen for some fifteen years. The other principal repeating his Broadway role was comedian Jack Gilford. Lester jumped at the chance to hire Keaton for the character of Erronius, a man who searches for his children, who were stolen in infancy by pirates. Unlike Alan Schneider and Samuel Beckett, Lester honored him as a master. He had seen all of Keaton's features and could remember individual frames—the cow and the bucket from Go West, for example—that he considered perfection.

Despite his top billing, Keaton's role was tiny. He runs through the film as a moving sight gag. "I wasn't aware of his health problems until he got to Madrid," said Lester. "He still had a marvelous physique and the legs of an athlete. But any movement produced a shortness of breath." Erronius is supposed to race around the Seven Hills of Rome seven times, but it was clear that Keaton was incapable of running. Jockey and stuntman Mick Dillon was hired to double Keaton in the long shots. The most startling scene, showing Erronius smashing into a tree, is Keaton himself. "It took everyone's breath away," Dillon recalled. "He ran straight into the tree with his head. Bang. We thought he hadn't seen it."

In Madrid the weather was cold and rainy. "It was terrible for healthy people," said Madeline Gilford. "The outdoor shooting involved many different locations, which was very strenuous. And it was also a long day because the company operated on Spanish time schedules." Each morning a car arrived at the Hilton before 6:00 a.m. Midafternoon, shooting would stop for siesta, then resume for several more hours. "They would shoot quite late, and then by the time you ate it would be ten o'clock," said Madeline Gilford. Although Keaton's stamina impressed his coworkers, he would be utterly exhausted by bedtime. On Sundays, when Mostel and Gilford were out tramping through the Prado Museum, he rested. His health, Eleanor Keaton recalled, "wasn't good, but he was coping." In fact, he was coping well enough to shoot a Pepsi commercial in his spare time.

Keaton ignored the disharmony on the set. Lester refused to hear arguments from his actors. Mostel, who had a reputation for rubbing people the wrong way, was submissive while at the same time complaining that Lester was ruining the film. Keaton found the shoot a welcoming environment. Everyone treated him like royalty, including fifty-eight-year-old Jack Gilford, who had begun his career in vaudeville doing imitations of Keaton and Chaplin.

With Dick Lester, Keaton felt comfortable offering directorial sympathy. When Lester one day expressed dissatisfaction with a certain scene, Keaton remarked, "You'll know better when you preview it."

"I don't think so," Lester replied, a gentle reminder that filmmaking had changed since Keaton's day.

"We previewed everything," Keaton told him.

At the Venice Film Festival, Keaton had told columnist Rex Reed that "I have so many projects coming up I don't have time to think about kicking the bucket." Nevertheless, by the end of September the coughing spells sometimes left him blue in the face. Keaton then flew to Canada. In May, when his health had been better, he had promised to do a film for $10,000. He could not back out now.

 

In Toronto in 1965, he began filming The Reporter (released as The Scribe), a thirty-minute industrial film for the Construction Safety Association of Ontario. He plays a janitor who wants to be a newspaper reporter and visits a construction site to get a story on unsafe conditions. Director John Sebert was surprised to see Keaton smoking three or four packs of Winstons a day. "He always had a cigarette in his hand," he remembered. "He used to smoke like a stove. Then he'd go into these coughing seizures that lasted four or five minutes. The racking that poor guy went through was terrible. But he looked fine and physically seemed quite agile."

Since the entire film was a chase, a local actor had been hired to double Keaton in several scenes that required strenuous running. The fact that almost the whole shoot took place out of doors did not help Keaton's coughing. The weather was cold and wet.

John Sebert was completely in awe of Keaton, who advised the novice on how every scene should be played. "You didn't direct Buster too much," he said. "The Scribe is not much of a film. It's a young guy's first film." The young guy's first would be the old guy's last.

On October 18 he boarded a plane for home.