3
Big Frog in a Little Puddle
“THE OLD MAN would never let us out of work,” Buster Keaton once lamented. “I wanted to go to school, and he wouldn’t let me.” It is a fact of Keaton’s early life that his exposure to other kids was limited to professional children, many of whom, like Elsie Janis, were older by several years. A 1903 account in The Indianapolis Morning Star has him gleefully mixing with boys his own age during a stop at that city’s Imperial Hotel, turning handsprings on the statehouse lawn and racing others around the square until a collision with a large dog sends him headlong to the pavement. “In his spic-and-span clothes he impressed them when his mother allowed him to run and play in the street, but Buster soon made himself one of the boys.”
Joe’s decision to put Buster in a public school, according to one version of the story, was inspired by the backstage challenge of a fellow performer, almost in the form of a dare. The more likely version has Joe’s mother, Lydia, raising the subject during a monthlong retreat to Perry in May 1902. Buster was six at the time, the age at which most children entered kindergarten, but Myra had to admit there were no immediate plans for the boy’s education. Mortified, she bought some basic textbooks and supplies, and once they had cleared September engagements at Pastor’s and Proctor’s 23rd Street, the Keatons settled in for a week’s stand at the Bon Ton Theatre, across the Hudson River in New Jersey. Buster had just passed his seventh birthday, and the plan was for him, armed with a letter from the New York Department of Education, to enter the first grade.
“One morning, I tried it in Jersey City. They sez I can go to school there and, every town that we played, attend school in the morning and leave around two o’clock to go to the matinee. My first morning in school, well, I played with a lot of school acts and I knew all of the comedy lines. And from the minute I recognized something that the teacher said, like, ‘What’s an island?’ Hand up: ‘It’s a wart on the ocean.’ And they asked for silly things like, ‘Give me a sentence with the word DELIGHT.’ I sez, ‘The wind blew in de window and blew out de light.’ So I had an answer for darn near everything she asked and the kids go into hysterics. Then I got a note: ‘Don’t send this boy back here again.’ So I got kicked out of school the first morning.” It then fell to Myra, who’d only completed the eighth grade herself, to give Buster his lessons. “Later, we hired a governess from Massachusetts, a nice old maid who wanted to travel and see the country. She saw it, all right.”
Keaton was asked by a TV interviewer if he enjoyed working all through his childhood, day after day. “Oh sure,” he responded. “Every show’s a different show with us.” Once he was fully integrated into an act that had originally been a two-hander, he developed an easy onstage rapport with his father that naturally led to improvisation and a boisterous kind of one-upmanship. “He frequently surprises his father by springing new gags and bits of business on him without previous warning or rehearsal,” a cover story in the Dramatic Mirror revealed, “and manifests an interest in his work that is really remarkable in one so young.” A review in the same publication of a January 1904 performance at Keith’s Union Square judged Joe, Myra, and Buster Keaton the laughing hit of the program. “It is seldom that such hearty laughter is heard in a theater as that which greeted the efforts of Buster, who is an exceptionally clever lad. Every word and action set the house in a roar, and his imitations of [English-born actor] Dan Daly, [Irish serving girl impersonator] James Russell, and [sketch comedian] Sager Midgley brought him so much applause that it is a wonder his little head is not turned completely around.”
Mayor Seth Low left office at the end of 1903, but the “special license” he gave Buster continued to provide cover well into the George McClellan administration. Joe took care not to antagonize the Gerry Society, but the act onstage at Keith’s was now more or less the same as what municipalities outside of New York got to see. “After I was seven,” Buster recalled in his autobiography, “Pop would punish me for misbehaving while we were working on stage. He knew I was too proud of being able to take it to yell or cry. I don’t think my father had an ounce of cruelty in him. He just didn’t think it was good for a boy as full of beans as I was to get away with too much.”
Joe would tell the audience, “It just breaks a father’s heart to be rough.” Then he’d blithely send Buster sailing across the stage or through a flat in a manner that would have any ordinary kid screaming bloody murder. Once, during a matinee performance, he innocently slammed the boy into scenery that had a brick wall directly behind it. Given his druthers, Joe seemed more inclined to kick his son in the pants—“a hell of a wallop”—with a number twelve slapshoe. “[Buster] had a persistent habit of getting in his father’s way,” noted the reviewer of a Brooklyn performance, “and each time his irate parent would gently push him aside, sometimes pushing him the entire length of the stage. Each time the human rubber ball would arise, and approaching his athletic pater would meekly say ‘I’m so sorry I fell down’ in a manner that would get upon the risibilities of an incurable dyspeptic.”
“I rode the punches or got hurt,” Buster said. “Now a strange thing developed. If I yelled ouch—no laughs. If I deadpanned it and didn’t yell—no laughs. ‘What goes?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t a kick funny?’ ‘Not by itself it ain’t,’ said Joe. So he gives me a little lesson: I wait five seconds—count up to ten slow—grab the seat of my pants, holler bloody murder, and the audience is rolling in the aisles. I don’t know what the thunder they figured. Maybe that it took five seconds for a kick to travel from my fanny to my brain. Actually, I guess, it was The Slow Thinker. Audiences love The Slow Thinker.”
In Portland, Maine, as Joe told a reporter for the Daily Advertiser the story of how Buster got into the act, the object of discussion was tumbling around the hotel room “much as all children play.” At first, Joe explained, Buster didn’t have much to say onstage, but his part got bigger as he grew older. “Yes, and I am still learning jokes,” the boy interjected, having by then mastered impressions of the Russell Brothers, Daly, Midgley, monologist Press Eldridge, and comic Jim Morton (who did what was politely referred to at the time as a “nut” act).
“I was just a harebrained kid that was raised backstage,” Buster explained in a 1958 interview. “He tries everything as he grows up. If there is a wire-walker this week, well he tries walking a wire when nobody’s looking. If there’s a juggler, he tries to juggle—he tries to do acrobatics—there’s nothing he don’t try. He tries to be a ventriloquist—he tries to be a juggling fool, a magician—Harry Houdini. I tried to get out of handcuffs and straitjackets.”
For Christmas 1901, “Santa Clause” brought Buster an autograph book, and he eagerly began filling it with inscriptions from the actors and managers he encountered on the road. Of the scores of signatures he collected, which included those of Louise Dresser, monologist Fred Niblo, and Tony Pastor, he was proudest of a bit of doggerel composed by W. L. Dockstader, the first man to put him on a vaudeville stage:
Buster, you’re a dandy,
Buster, you’re a brick,
Buster, you can make
all juveniles look sick.
Someday you’ll be a great one,
me captain of the crew.
But don’t forget old Wilmington
the place of your debut.
Joe was so taken with the inscriptions, many in carefully wrought verse like Dockstader’s, that he began quoting them in his ads. He proudly positioned his son as the star of the act, often having his name set in larger type. The Keatons worked the summer parks in June and July, then laid off for the balance of the summer at New York’s Ehrich House, a professional boardinghouse on Thirty-Eighth Street that Joe and Myra considered their permanent address.
“The food was good,” said Buster, “the atmosphere was friendly, the rooms were large and comfortable with lots of storage space in case you wanted to leave a couple of trunks behind while you went on the road.” He got to know the whole neighborhood, and all the kids especially. “So I was in ball teams and everything else. And I joined the YMCA and got into basketball teams and everything else that there was.”
The Three Keatons were reported to be on a “long rest” that summer, but the fact of the matter, carefully hidden from crowds in places like Lowell and Newport, was that Myra was pregnant with her second child, the first of what Buster came to refer to as the Pullman babies.
Family acts were a staple of vaudeville, and Joe had visions of expanding the original threesome to four, five, six, or more, a sort of comic version of the Cohans. “I am proud to inform you of a new arrival,” he grandly announced in a letter to the Clipper, “born to us night of Aug. 25. Another Buster. Mother and boy doing finely.” The baby, who, after Houdini, was named Harry Stanley Keaton, kept Myra out of the act when commitments to the Keith circuit came due toward the end of September. Yet she was hardly missed when Joe and his elder son opened a stripped-down version of the act in Boston on September 26. All the same, Myra was soon back onstage, costumed in a bandmaster’s uniform that somehow seemed to go with the saxophone, occasionally even appearing—in quick change fashion—as a carbon copy of her husband and son. Ever an eye on the future, Joe ended the year with a new signature line for his ads: “Keep your eye on H. Stanley Keaton.”
Joe, by now, was refusing to make application to the Gerry Society for any of Buster’s New York appearances, leaving it to the resident managers of the individual theaters to do so if they saw fit. E. Charles Hoffmeister, the superintendent of Proctor’s 23rd Street, did so for a late January engagement that came off without incident, as did manager Howard Graham, who made application to the mayor’s office ahead of a booking in Albany at Proctor’s Pearl Street theater. The Keatons, who hadn’t played the state capital since 1901, opened to standing-room-only business on February 13, 1905. The following morning, possibly alerted by a news item that referred to Buster as “the human rubber ball,” the superintendent of the Mohawk & Hudson River Humane Society, which saw after the welfare of children as well as animals, called on Graham to accuse him of violating the child labor laws by permitting Buster to perform “acrobatic stunts.” Graham told the man he was doing nothing of the kind: the father playfully tossed the boy about the stage. The father also jumped over a table several times, and the child mimicked him on a chair. He did not regard these crude tricks as “acrobatic.”
Three days later, Graham found himself hauled before a judge who, like the mayor, was unfamiliar with the Keaton act. Graham’s counsel said it was Mr. Proctor’s intention to carry the matter to the highest court so that a final decision on child performers might be secured. Still, the humane society wanted the boy produced so that the court could determine his age, and the case was sent over until Saturday morning, when both Buster and Joe could appear. The “argus-eyed” agents of the humane society, snarked a local paper, “undoubtedly thought the father and mother had so little regard for this youngster that they would kill him in their act. Of course, the boy was bound to be injured by being in company with his mother and father. He should be on the street selling papers.”
The following morning, father and son were duly in court, and the alleged victim at the center of it all proved himself “a little man and a wonder.” Dapper in a sack coat, vest, white shirt, and stand-up collar, Buster had topped himself off with a black derby and was sporting a gold watch chain from which hung a diamond locket. “He told the court he was eleven years old and laughed over the proceedings. When he looked at the usual crowd of spectators in Police Court, he said, ‘Gee, that crowd looks like the gallery.’ ” The judge asked if the society’s superintendent had actually witnessed the act, and the man had to admit that he hadn’t but “had a representative there.” Buster, the defense pointed out, worked just thirty minutes a day—fifteen at the matinee and fifteen at the evening performance. Manager Graham effectively prevailed when the matter was adjourned until the following Thursday, by which time the Keatons were 150 miles away in New Haven.
The experience left Joe seething, and he impulsively announced the family would leave for England as soon as he had cleared sufficient time. In April, Buster, sans makeup, appeared on the cover of the Clipper, serene and heavy-lidded, a true prince of the vaudeville stage, the accompanying copy, in a rebuke to the Gerries, going on about how happy and healthy he was. “He enjoys his work on the stage thoroughly, and is such an expert little gymnast that no matter how his father throws him he lands in a safe position.” Officially, Buster was now eleven and boldly singing two popular songs in the act, “Listen to the Big Brass Band” and “I’ll Be Your Dewdrop, Rosey.” The Keatons returned to Dockstader’s in May, played the summer parks in June, then disappeared off the grid in July, not to Perry, where temperatures were pushing 100 degrees, but rather to an idyllic summer retreat they first sampled in 1902.
At the turn of the century, Muskegon, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, was a city in transition. Coming off the heady days of the great timber harvest of the 1870s and ’80s, when it supplied the wood that earned Grand Rapids, forty miles southeast, the nickname Furniture City, it was now in a push toward industrialization that would make it the home of Continental Motors, Shaw-Walker office filing equipment, the Amazon Knitting Company, Brunswick Bowling Products, Chase Brothers pianos, and dozens of others. Given its location, it was also a prime distribution point for the western coast of Michigan, one of the top fruit growing regions in the nation. It wasn’t the plentiful work that attracted summer visitors from Milwaukee and Chicago, who made their way across the Great Lake on the majestic Goodrich ferries, but one of the country’s few clearwater beaches that abutted the neighborhood of Bluffton, some four miles south of downtown. Temperatures rarely climbed into the eighties, recreation was plentiful, and refined vaudeville could be enjoyed twice daily at the Lake Michigan Park Theatre.
The Three Keatons had made their way to Muskegon during a tour of the summer parks, opening at the spacious wooden pavilion on June 29, 1902. Streetcars delivered crowds from the city center, following a route along the lakeshore and trundling through a residential area wedged between Lake Michigan and Muskegon Lake known as Pinchtown. The bill that first day consisted of five acts, the headliner comedienne Wenona Winter starring in a sketch with her father, an old-time minstrel favorite named Banks Winter. After turns by a trombone soloist named Katie Roth, a pair of talking comedians, and a “tramp equilibrist” who called himself Spaulding, the Keatons closed the show in high style, earning praise from The Muskegon Morning News as “one of the brightest and funniest comedy acts.”
Joe loved the relaxed atmosphere of the place, a complete departure from life on the road, and regretted not having more time to enjoy it. Three years later, after carving out a break in the schedule that left the entire month of July free, he returned with the family that now numbered four, determined to take a well-earned rest. They sunned, swam, hiked, went boating, and fished, cooking up the mounds of perch they caught in an open skillet. The last week of their stay, before hitting the road for Ohio, they again played the Park Theatre, this time as the undisputed headliners. Although billed as The Three Keatons, little Harry (under the nickname “Jingles”) was brought onstage in a go-cart and did a take-um of sorts, ogling the family’s antics just as his older brother had when he was just starting out.[*1] “At that time we had to have a lantern to get to the theater from Verette’s Boarding House,” Buster said, fondly recalling the undeveloped nature of the place, “and Frank Pascoe was called ‘The Man in the Woods.’ ”[*2]
With Jingles expected to turn the act into The Four Keatons, Joe ratcheted up his public contempt for the Gerries. “What most burned up Pop,” said Buster, “was that there were thousands of homeless and hungry abandoned children of my age wandering around the streets of New York, selling newspapers, shining shoes, playing the fiddle on the Hudson River ferryboats, and thousands of other small children working with the parents in the tenement sweatshops on the Lower East Side. Pop couldn’t understand why the SPCC people didn’t devote all their time, energy, and money to helping them.”
To Joe Keaton, the situation must have been mystifying. Why in the world would he do anything to injure the boy? Buster was the star of the act, rightly so, and if he couldn’t work, The Three Keatons couldn’t work. Besides, the entire act was a travesty of modern child rearing, corporal punishment carried to a ridiculous extreme. Audiences could relate, because in the early 1900s the vast majority of parents whacked their kids when they got out of line and saw nothing wrong with it.
“Neither Mom nor Pop was demonstrative,” Buster said, “but not many children expected that of their parents in those days. You were supposed to please them. When I disobeyed orders I got a good clout over the backside. Nobody expected me to like it, or cared whether I did or not. The clout told me, in the one way a normal and mischievous boy understands, to behave himself. When I failed to get the point, I got another clout.”
The Keatons slipped into New York to play Proctor’s 58th Street location in March 1906, and Joe once again balked at obtaining a permission slip, maintaining that he was in full compliance with state law. Epes Sargent, now with the newly established trade paper Variety, took notice, assessing the Keaton act alongside that of the week’s headliner, former heavyweight boxing champion James J. Corbett. “Another strong hit is the Three Keatons, including ‘Buster,’ the human mop. The way the youngster is thrown about the stage without damage to else than his clothes is a thrilling sight, and yet Keaton declares that he has to moderate the act here in town on account of the Gerry Society.”
Apart from that single week at Proctor’s, the Keatons stayed out of Manhattan. Exile seemed to sharpen Joe’s appetite for publicity, and in Maine he and the press agent for Portland Theatre manager Jim Moore hatched a plot to have Jingles kidnapped off a city street in broad daylight. The idea was to run up an hour or two of anguished suspense, get the local papers involved, then have the boy discovered happily parked on a bench at Union Station, gnawing on candy. The plan went sideways when the prearranged snatch took place in plain sight of a crew of workmen excavating a foundation for the new Keith’s theater on Preble Street. A score of men and boys, Joe among them, gave chase, and the hapless prop man recruited to play the bad guy hailed a cab to make his escape. At the station, Jingles was placed where an officer could easily find him, and the man beat a frantic exit through the smoking room, never to be seen or heard from again. Relying on a detailed description of the perpetrator, Joe told the Advertiser he was obviously the same guy who had been following them from city to city, adding for good measure that Buster himself had been abducted five years earlier. Coverage of the event reached as far as New York, where the Morning Telegraph ran with it as a special dispatch.
In Cleveland, Buster gave an interview to the Plain Dealer denying he ever got hurt onstage and claiming he endured more pain in a Philadelphia barbershop than he ever felt at the hands of his old man. “The barber put the snippers, or whatever you call ’em, on the back of my neck an’ gee! they pulled. I yelled as loud as I could, an’ that’s pretty loud.” The article, headlined “BUSTER LAUGHS AT HIS BUMPS,” served as an announcement of sorts: “In a couple of weeks, Papa an’ me are goin’ to go out in a stock company for a short time. He thinks it would be good trainin’ for me. Mama says probably in some plays they’ll want to put curls on me an’ make me play little girl parts, but just let ’em try it! Not for Buster! Not for Buster!”
The real reason Joe Keaton sought the ease and security of a stock tour at a time when the family would normally be working the summer parks was that Myra was seven months pregnant with their third child. After much dickering Joe reached an understanding with George M. Fenberg, who had eastern, western, and northern companies under his management and promised his audiences “a change of play at each performance.” The understanding was that Myra could appear as health permitted, and that Buster would be available for children’s parts as well as the olio. Fenberg had a vast repertoire of plays at his disposal, melodramas and broad comedies aimed at working-class audiences with titles like In a Woman’s Power, Dangers of New York, Beware of Men, and Sporty Mr. Davis. Engaged as leading man for the company of twenty was Charles H. Stevens, who had recently toured the Northeast in Monte Cristo with James O’Neill. The specialties on the tour included cornetist Marie McNeil, singer-dancer Tommy Schearer, and comedian Harry Jenkins.
With the Keatons headlining, Fenberg’s eastern company began its preliminary season in mid-August with stops in Rhode Island and Connecticut. At New London, Connecticut, Myra was unable to appear opening night, and Joe and Buster managed to hold the stage—and a standing-room audience—for nearly half an hour. After three weeks, the company opened its regular season in Worcester, Massachusetts, drawing well despite competition from three other shows and the heat hovering around 100 degrees each day. And as he had done during the Keatons’ 1902 tour with the Harcourt Comedy Company, Buster hosted a candy matinee, giving the kids in the audience a chance to meet both him and Jingles, now two years of age.
Buster in costume for Little Lord Fauntleroy. He once described the part as “the longest role, except Hamlet, in the English-speaking theatre.”
Before long, he was pressed into service for the first time as an actor, nearly fulfilling his mother’s prophecy of having to play “little girl parts.” The play was Little Lord Fauntleroy, and he did indeed portray the title character in shoulder-length curls, red velveteen, and lace. “My part alone was seventy-five solid typed pages,” he said. “In between, when I wasn’t Little Lord Fauntleroy, I was little Willie in East Lynne. East Lynne was four acts long, like most of the tear-jerkers in those days. Little Willie died in the third act. As the curtain went down, I’d rush backstage, slap on a Johnny Ray wig—that’s a bald-headed wig and some galways—and run back on stage again to do a rough and tumble with my father.” Despite the Herculean effort it took to learn his lines, Buster got bored with the role of Lord Fauntleroy and began injecting slapstick into what was otherwise a charming period drama, much to the fury of manager Fenberg.
It was during a stop in Lewiston, Maine, on October 30, 1906, that Myra presented Joe with a daughter, who was named after family friend Louise Dresser. Predictably, Louise Josephine Keaton was welcomed in the press as the fifth Keaton, and by year’s end, at the tender age of two months, she was already being included by name in her father’s trade ads, where the act was being touted as “The Man with a Wife, Three Kids, and a Table.”
The Keatons closed with the Fenberg company on December 23. Back in New York, Joe told Variety’s Burt Green he was tired of being a big frog in a little puddle, and that henceforth the act would work only the larger cities, giving the smaller ones suitable to the Fenbergs of the world “a good long rest.” The new year was to have started out at Proctor’s Fifth Avenue, a house the Keatons had played numerous times, but Mayor McClellan’s office denied permission for Buster to appear because the theater was now permitting smoking. Other Keith-Proctor houses with smoking balconies were similarly canceled, and Joe began incorporating the following statement in his ads: “Important to Managers—Buster will be 16 years of age October 4, 1909.”
In Boston, the Keatons appeared on a bill with Harry Houdini for the first time in a decade, and Buster tagged along one morning after the mail. “A big xylophone was standing in the wings,” he remembered, “with a leather cover strapped over it and cinched with a heavy Yale padlock. [Houdini] says, ‘Now look at that.’ (He’s only got an audience of one—me, a kid.) ‘They think that’s safe and nobody can touch it.’ He grabs the padlock with one quick movement and instantly hands it to me open. I looked at it and felt dizzy for a minute.” When the Handcuff King was late to the stage one night, Buster was sent out to hold the audience with some impressions. “Mr. Houdini may not be able to appear tonight,” he announced. “He lost the key to his dressing room.”
In Newark, Jingles managed to impress audiences as well as a reviewer for the Evening News, who described a reception “that must have intensified the family pride in him.” In Buffalo, Joe exhibited seven-month-old Louise as well as Jingles, and the Courier had them both doing “some Keatonesque stunts” on the stage at Shea’s. “It is a treat to witness the ‘art’ of Mr. Keaton’s two and one-half-year-old child. For knockabout acrobatic comedy work the Keatons are unequaled.”
Still, neither child rivaled their older brother as the principal attraction. In St. Louis, Joe reported a big hit, Buster stopping the show. “His act runs from twelve to fifteen minutes overtime each night.”
In his six years on the two-a-day, Joe Keaton had deftly avoided getting caught in the skirmishes that frequently erupted between players, managements, and the various circuits, beginning with the debacle of the White Rats strike of 1901. Contrary to Buster’s assertion in his autobiography (which may have been an assumption on the part of co-author Charles Samuels), Joe wasn’t a member of the Rats (“star” spelled backward) and openly disparaged the union’s tactics in a letter to Harry Houdini. “Vaudeville is very rotten here[,] nothing doing. The Rats has put it on the Burn for fair[.] Proctor has put in stock company in all his houses. Jake Wells two houses puts in stock. So has Chases two house[s, and] Keiths Providence. So you see Vaudeville has had its day unless there’s a change soon. I send you under separate cover a copy of the White Rats damable sheet as the actors call it. As I thought it would be interesting to you.”
But in fulfilling his pledge to work only the larger cities, Joe fell into the middle of one of vaudeville’s ugliest episodes, in which the Klaw and Erlanger legitimate theatre trust joined forces with the Shuberts to go up against vaudeville’s Keith-Albee, a practical monopoly, in a big way. Klaw and Erlanger would supply the talent, the Shuberts would furnish the theaters, and agent William Morris would book the circuit. Scores of acts signed on, in part because Morris was so well liked, but also because E. F. Albee, the general manager of the Keith organization, was so widely despised. Among the acts gathered under the new “Advanced Vaudeville” banner were George Fuller Golden, founder of the White Rats; comedian Joe Welch; emcee James J. Morton; tramp juggler W. C. Fields; and The Three Keatons. In fact, so many top-line acts signed with the new concern that Keith-Albee and the affiliated United Booking Office forced a circuit-wide boycott of any act that aligned with Morris.
On Labor Day 1907, Advanced Vaudeville was offered at seventeen theaters stretching from Boston to Kansas City. Now blacklisted at the Keith and Proctor houses they had played since 1900, the Keatons found themselves at the Garrick in St. Louis, playing the K&E time in the company of some 140 other acts. They jumped to Louisville, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, where the headliners were Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Cohan, parents of the great George M., in a tab version of their son’s Running for Office. Up in Boston they shared the bill at the Tremont with headliner Joe Welch, a gentile who made a career of portraying mournful Jews, W. C. Fields, and an all-animal sketch aimed at kids titled “Dogville.”
“Buster Keaton is growing to be a sizable sort of boy,” the Post observed, “and his energetic father has to work hard nowadays in flinging his young hopeful around the stage….In a couple of years he will be able to lick the old man.”
Louise Keaton passed her first birthday during a stand at Montreal’s Academy of Music, but the new circuit was rapidly unraveling. Klaw and Erlanger weren’t really interested in challenging the dominance of Keith-Albee in vaudeville, but rather in forcing Albee to buy them out using Morris and the acts he booked as pawns in a high-stakes game of chicken. The gambit paid off, and in November 1907, Albee’s United Booking Office began honoring all outstanding contracts held by Klaw and Erlanger, part of a settlement that called for K&E to abandon vaudeville, netting them a profit of between $1 million and $2 million. And while the fallout for the Keatons was minimal, it was Louise’s simultaneous appearance at a New York theater that gave the Gerry Society everything they needed to finally close in on her father.
New York’s blue laws, which prohibited everything from Sunday liquor sales to baseball games, dated to the seventeenth century. (A colonial version from 1695 legislated “no traveling, servile laboring and working, shooting, fishing, sporting, playing, horseracing, hunting, or frequenting of tippling houses” on the Lord’s day.) Over time, workarounds came into play, and for vaudeville these assumed the form of “sacred concerts” that took the place of regular weekday performances. By 1907, there were nineteen theaters in New York City, including all the Keith and Proctor houses, giving afternoon and evening shows that varied little from what they offered the rest of the week. In a nod toward piety, some dispensed with scenery and went easy on costuming, but in general a Sunday concert was as sacred as a circus.
One of the venues that gave regular Sunday performances was Chelsea’s Grand Opera House, a sturdy neighborhood institution at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street. Having just returned to Ehrich House for a brief layover, the Keatons were at liberty when the Grand’s manager, John Springer, invited them onto his bill for Sunday, November 17. It was being framed as a benefit, Buster remembered, and that Springer asked for all five of the Keatons. Joe warily consented after Springer gave his assurances there would be no trouble from the Gerry Society, and the matinee went without incident. The Keatons were set to go on last at the evening performance, but in the audience were Officers Robert Cosgrove and Obadiah Cunningham of the NYSPCC. Cunningham, in his report, noted that the Keatons went on at about 10:45 p.m., and that Myra played the trombone and did “lightning change acts” but no acrobatic stunts. Buster, he reckoned, was about fifteen years old.
“The older of the three Keaton children wheels a baby carriage on stage; the carriage contained a child about three years old. After some horseplay indulged in by the father and the son, the latter wheeling the baby carriage in front of him to prevent the father from catching him, they return to the wings and immediately the three-year-old child appears alone and runs across the stage. Keaton follows and catches its clothes and the dress of the child falls off, leaving him in a gymnastic suit. The father then seizes the child and holds the child’s head between his legs while he attempts to put the dress on. The fifteen-year-old boy returns to the stage and then kicks the three-year-old child gently in the buttocks. The father finally succeeds in getting the dress on [the] child. The father and the older boy then go through a series of acrobatic and comic feats, turning flip-flaps and somersaults. The three-year-old child imitates the father and the older son. They are on about three minutes this time. All three then leave the stage, and in answer to an encore the father returns with an infant about one year old in his arms and he places this child on the floor of [the] stage giving the impression it is about to dance, but the child is unable to stand alone and fell down. The father then said, ‘I guess it is too slippery.’ Father and child then leave the stage, and in answer to applause the whole family appears and bows to the audience.”
The next morning, court warrants were issued for the arrest of Joe Keaton and John Springer. A Gerry officer found Joe at home “in one large furnished room” at Ehrich House and took him into custody. “Keaton admitted that he had placed his three children on [stage] at the Grand Opera House last night, that he knew it was a violation of the law for him to do so, but that the Dramatic Mirror representative was anxious to write up the whole family and Keaton put them all on to oblige him.” Joe also showed the arresting officer a postcard from Springer telling him not to fail to put Jingles on during their Sunday performances. Later that same morning, Springer himself was arrested and admitted to bail at the Seventeenth Precinct Station House. He did not say anything to the Gerry officer.
On Monday afternoon, the two men appeared before Magistrate Peter T. Barlow. Springer promptly asked for an adjournment, but Keaton wanted to plead guilty so as not to conflict with a booking the following week in Mobile, Alabama. Magistrate Barlow set bail for the two men at $500 each and scheduled an examination for the following day. On Tuesday, Springer, who had a history of violations stretching back to 1900, denied knowing anything about the appearance of the Keaton children at his theater, claiming the postcard regarding Jingles had been written by his son, John H. Springer. This didn’t wash with Barlow, who told him that as the manager and proprietor of the theater, he was responsible regardless of what he did or didn’t know. With Myra and the kids looking on, Joe was uncharacteristically quiet, eager to put the whole matter behind him and not jeopardize the family’s upcoming tour of the South. Both defendants waived further examination and were admitted to bail at $300 each for trial the following week at the Court of Special Sessions. With his bail covered by William Morris, Joe skipped town to make his date in Mobile, forfeiting the money and causing a bench warrant to be issued for his arrest. Springer, who pleaded the fifth, was found guilty of exhibiting the children and fined $150. Keaton, found guilty in absentia for consenting to the same, was fined $75.
Taking his leave, Joe vowed to keep the act—and Buster specifically—out of New York until the boy was officially sixteen, some two years hence. It meant playing a lot of the smaller cities he had intended to eschew, as well as the so-called Death Trail of two- and three-night stands between New York and Chicago. The risk of more fines and possible jail time made it the only real course of action. Then, on October 4, 1909, there would be a triumphant return to Gotham for Buster Keaton and his family—and a round of collective nose-thumbing at the dreaded Gerry Society.