5
I Cast My Lot with the Pictures
ONCE HE REALIZED what had happened, Joe Keaton made his way back to Muskegon, where, as Buster figured it, he had pals, money, and two of his three children at hand. (“Pop wasn’t going to die in Muskegon of either hunger or loneliness.”) Meanwhile, the eldest scion of “fun’s funniest family” traveled on to New York and Ehrich House, where he arrived, according to his datebook, on January 18, 1917.
When settled, Buster called at the offices of Max Hart, the top vaudeville agent of the day, who was in the process of transforming a $300-a-week single named Eddie Cantor into the $3,500-a-week star he would become for Flo Ziegfeld. Hart, forty-two, had a legendary nose for talent, and could see past the trappings of a bad act in mining what was good and valuable in a performer. So he was not bothered in the least when Buster told him he had broken up The Three Keatons and wanted, for the first time in his life, to work on his own. “I’ll get you all the work you want,” Hart told him, and he marched him over to the Forty-Fourth Street office of J. J. Shubert, who was assembling his annual summer revue, The Passing Show.
“This is Buster Keaton,” Hart said to Shubert. “Put him in your show.”
Shubert looked him over and said, “Can you sing?”
“Sure I can sing,” said Buster, somewhat amused at the question since he was infinitely more valuable as a comedian than as a singer. Shubert, fortunately, engaged him without asking him to croon.
Starring DeWolf “Casey at the Bat” Hopper, comedic acrobat Jefferson De Angelis (to whom Buster was sometimes compared), singer Irene Franklin, and actor-comedian Chic Sale, The Passing Show of 1917 was set to open at the Winter Garden on April 26 following a week’s shakedown in Pittsburgh. Rehearsals hadn’t yet begun, and Buster was to have a voice in determining what he was to do in the show. Still, with time on his hands and a wait of nearly three months until the first performances, he was fidgety and nervous, unsure of what to do with himself. After ten days in New York, which he filled mostly by seeing shows, Keaton returned to Detroit to visit his mother, who, on his twenty-first birthday, had given him a membership in the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. From there he traveled to Muskegon, where, on February 2, he was inducted into Elks Lodge #274 with his proud father at his side.
Joseph M. Schenck.
The Keatons briefly regrouped in New York City, where Joe told the Telegraph he was lonesome for his family. According to the Clipper, he tried to persuade Myra and Buster to go back out on the road with him, but it was no good. Myra never had any particular love for the stage, and Buster felt the old act had run its course. However, Myra took pity on her husband of twenty-four years and rejoined him in Bluffton, even though the Keatons’ summer cottage had no plumbing, heating, or insulation.
It was sometime in March, just prior to the start of rehearsals for The Passing Show, that Buster encountered someone he knew on the streets of Manhattan. In the early 1950s he told biographer Rudi Blesh it was an old vaudevillian named Lou Anger, and he repeated the claim in his 1960 autobiography. But in 1928, and again in 1930, he said it was Joseph Schenck, the booking manager for Marcus Loew and the man who introduced The Three Keatons to small-time vaudeville. Schenck, who had started producing his own movies, told Buster he was making some two-reel comedies. “He wanted to know,” said Buster, “if I wanted to try the movies.”
Moving pictures, or “flickers,” as Joe Keaton dismissively called them, had been on the bills of vaudeville houses since the very beginning of Buster’s career. At Dockstader’s it was Siegmund Lubin’s Cineograph; Keith’s had the large-format Biograph; Tony Pastor’s longtime choice was the Vitagraph (which made its public debut there in 1896); and George K. Spoor’s Kinodrome was an attraction along the Orpheum trail. Other brands proliferated—Lifeograph, Kinetograph, Casinograph, Cineomatograph—most offering thrilling scenes of fires, races, demolitions, beauty pageants, and occasional story pictures like The Great Train Robbery. Gradually, movies gained in importance, and in 1916 the Telegraph suggested the record business at Loew’s American Roof wasn’t due to the Keatons or the other live acts on the bill, but rather Charlie Chaplin’s The Floorwalker, which was shown at the conclusion of the program.
“I had no more idea than anyone else at the time what the growth of pictures was to be,” Buster said. “One feature of the films did appeal to me, and that was that it would mean staying in one place for a while. I had been traveling on the road for over twenty years. I took my gamble and cast my lot with the pictures.”
Schenck was new to the movie business, having produced his first film, a feature titled Lost Souls, the previous year. He had the instincts of a gambler, though, and lured actress Norma Talmadge away from Triangle with the lavish promise of $1,000 a week, her own production company, and 25 percent of the profits. The result was his second picture, Panthea, which opened on Broadway at advanced prices and began Talmadge’s impressive climb to stardom. By then, Schenck had married her and contracted with comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle to make a series of comedy shorts. Contemplating a production slate that called for six features a year from his wife and eight to twelve shorts from Arbuckle, Schenck secured a four-story plant on East Forty-Eighth Street, the former home of the Paper Novelty Manufacturing Company, and poured $100,000 into equipping it for moviemaking. The result was two vast stages, each 100 by 125 feet, reputedly making it the largest such facility in the East. The cost of lighting gear alone was said to have run $35,000. Nevertheless, to writer Anita Loos it was “ramshackle to a degree,” a place seemingly thrown together on the fly.
Keaton had seen some of Arbuckle’s comedies for Mack Sennett and told him that he greatly admired them. Arbuckle, in turn, had seen the Keaton act onstage and returned the compliment, allowing as how he had “always liked it.” He had full creative control of his pictures and could easily have nixed Keaton’s addition, but instead he embraced the younger man as a kindred spirit, an apprentice of sorts in the relatively new trade of making films that were funny.
A tax assessment photo, circa 1940, of the 20th Century Garage at 320 East Forty-Eighth Street in New York City. In 1917, this building housed the Norma Talmadge Studio where the Comique comedies The Butcher Boy and The Rough House were produced.
“Roscoe—none of us who knew him personally ever called him Fatty—took the camera apart for me so I would understand how it worked and what it could do. He showed me how film was developed, cut, and then spliced together.” A supremely inventive man with a grace and dexterity that belied his great weight, Arbuckle didn’t so much write his films as work them out laugh by laugh.
“Not a scrap of scenario paper in my studio,” Arbuckle said. “I wouldn’t know what to do with a manuscript in my hand. I plan out the pictures, and we rehearse them—that’s all.”
When they began shooting The Butcher Boy on the morning of March 19, 1917, Buster had already worked out business for the first half of the film, which was to take place in the bustling interior of a general store. “You only had to turn me loose on the set and I’d have material in two minutes, because I’d been doing it all my life.” Dressed in overalls and a pair of slapshoes, he makes his entrance sporting a pork pie hat with an impossibly flat crown and similarly abbreviated brim. “In those days, almost every comedian you saw affected a derby hat,” he explained. “Even Harold Lloyd, when he was playing his Lonesome Luke character in 1917, wore a derby—which he later deserted for his signature straw hat and horn-rimmed glasses. So I decided to get a hat that was my very own. I knew straw was too fragile for my kind of antics, so I chose felt and designed this particular pork pie. I took a good Stetson and cut it down, then I stiffened the brim with sugar water.”
In a nod to his earliest days onstage, Buster is immediately attracted to a display of brooms stuffed into a couple of barrels. He selects one, hefts it, yanks off a few straws, casts it aside. A second leaves him similarly unimpressed, and after returning it to the barrel, he uses a foot to retrieve the first off the floor and return it as well. With Arbuckle, whose dexterity with small props—particularly a butcher knife—is on full display, Keaton explores the comedic possibilities in a pail of molasses, virtually cementing himself to the floor with it. The slapstick highlight of the sequence is a rowdy fight with bags of flour primed to explode on impact, Keaton taking a direct hit from Arbuckle that literally knocks him off his feet.
“Roscoe explained the technique in pictures was different from the stage,” he said, “particularly in taking a pie or a pot of molasses in the face, because the toughest thing is to keep from flinching when you see it come. We’re doing a scene in a bakery and there are a lot of three-pound sacks of flour lying about. Fatty picks one up and throws it at the baker who ducks, and I get it. So he explains: ‘Now, Buster, you just keep looking over in that direction until I say turn. When you turn, it’ll be there.’ So I do just like he says and look away until he says turn. Bowf! I get it. I thought my neck was broken. It exploded just like a bomb. That Arbuckle was a dead shot, and that sack came with all his three-hundred pounds behind it. My eyes, nose, and ears were filled with flour—but it got the laugh.”
A still posed on the set of The Butcher Boy (1917). Al St. John wields the pitchfork while his uncle, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, reacts at the prospect of being impaled. Josephine Stevens looks on, as does Arthur Earle, who plays her father, the store proprietor. Keaton, in his motion picture debut, attempts to pull Arbuckle to safety.
In the film’s second half, set in a girl’s boarding school where Josephine Stevens, playing the shopkeeper’s daughter, has been sent to keep her and Fatty apart, Keaton enlivens the action with a display of acrobatics he perfected over a lifetime in vaudeville. He takes a variety of spills, tumbles roughly down the front steps of the store, and in one spectacular shot is sent hurtling through the doorway of a bedroom, where he pulls a backward somersault, spinning on his head so as to land facing the opposite direction.
“From the first day on I hadn’t a doubt that I was going to love working in the movies. I did not even ask what I’d be paid to work in Arbuckle’s slapstick comedies. I didn’t much care.” Buster’s usual share of the Keatons’ weekly take in vaudeville was $300, and the Shuberts had agreed to pay him $250 for The Passing Show. Yet on his first day of filming for the Comique Film Corporation (pronounced, according to Arbuckle, Co-meek-ee) Keaton’s datebook shows that he was being paid $40 for the week. And, as he said, he didn’t much care. “I’d fallen in love with the movies—with the cameras, with the rushes, the action, the slam-bang—with all of it.”
The Butcher Boy took three weeks to work out and shoot. Then Arbuckle invited Keaton into the cutting room to observe the editing process. “By the time I’m through,” Arbuckle said in an interview, “I have about 15,000 feet of film—and all I need is 2,000 feet. I’ve got to skim the cream off that milk. I go over all the films and pick out the best scenes. Then is the time I write the story. I make out the scenario from the scenes I intend to use. In this scenario every scene is numbered. When I have it finished, I take the reels, find the scenes I want, cut them out, and put them in numbered pigeonholes. I write the titles that connect up these scenes and then everything is in shipshape order for making up the necessary two reels.”
Schenck arranged to distribute the new Arbuckle comedies through Paramount, which was asking $35 a day in first run—top dollar for a two-reeler that didn’t star Charlie Chaplin. Released on April 23, The Butcher Boy was an immediate critical and commercial hit, playing more than three hundred theaters in its first week alone. Ben Grimm, in a notice for Moving Picture World, praised the film’s free-for-all as “one of the best comedy battles” yet staged. “The main ammunition is flour, and what don’t happen in that store when the flour bombs begin to fly is hardly worth mentioning….Buster Keaton does some excellent comedy falls.” With a new picture set to start, Keaton’s salary was bumped to $75 a week, a measure of the added value he brought to the movie.
To help fill the pipeline, Schenck acquired an Arbuckle short made for Keystone that went unreleased when its star left the company. Filmed the previous summer, A Reckless Romeo was passed off as the second entry in the current series, though reviewers instinctively saw it as a throwback to Arbuckle’s Sennett days. Released just a month after Butcher Boy, A Reckless Romeo bought Arbuckle and his company some badly needed time and put Paramount on course to releasing eleven Arbuckle comedies for the 1917–18 season. So great was the anticipation for a second picture that contracts to show it reportedly outpaced those for the first by some 35 percent.
Keaton’s second movie with Arbuckle was titled The Rough House, and it took no less time to make than the first—about twenty camera days for an eighteen-minute subject. Advance publicity hinted at a troubled shoot, with opening scenes set at Churchill’s famous Broadway cabaret abandoned at a cost of $10,000, along with almost any hint of a story concerning Mr. and Mrs. Rough, whose house by the sea is invaded by Fatty’s mother-in-law. What remained was a relentless slapstick assault on the senses, substituting frenetic action for what the film lacked in inventiveness. Making his entrance on a bicycle and catching his neck on a clothesline, Keaton was called upon to execute no fewer than twenty falls during the course of the action, conclusively demonstrating that he could handle without injury practically anything in the line of physical comedy. At the completion of Rough House, he was raised to $100 a week.
By the time of his third Arbuckle, His Wedding Night, the company had relocated to the former Biograph studio in the Bronx. Keaton liked to say the move was due to all the noise they made on Forty-Eighth Street, which interfered with the shooting of the Norma Talmadge pictures, but it was more likely Schenck’s need to improve the bottom line. Producer-distributor Pathé took a six-month lease on the space Arbuckle vacated, while George Backer, president of Foursquare Productions, rented another portion of the building. And Talmadge herself would soon begin shooting The Moth, her fourth feature under Schenck’s management. The Biograph, on the other hand, was a spacious and well-appointed facility built expressly for the making of motion pictures—four floors of offices, dressing rooms, a kitchen and dining room, even an on-site power plant and film-processing lab. And atop the building a large glass-roofed studio that could be seen for blocks around.
“Everyone there was doing drawing-room pix,” Buster remembered. “Tails and evening gowns were all over the place. If you spoke American out loud, monocles dropped by the dozen.”
The Arbuckle company settled into a comfortable production routine. Schenck, focused on his wife’s films, was a hands-off producer, leaving the day-to-day of running the studio to Lou Anger, the former Dutch dialect comic who served as his general manager. It was the affable Anger who persuaded Arbuckle to leave Sennett to make pictures for Schenck in the East, and who was subsequently charged with keeping the operation running smoothly and within budget. Al St. John, Arbuckle’s lanky nephew, lacked Keaton’s hard-earned skills as an acrobat but was seemingly fearless in the stunts he’d attempt for the camera. And Roscoe acquired a lively new comedienne in the person of Alice Lake, who had appeared in A Reckless Romeo and lent some continuity to the series after the departure of Josephine Stevens. William Jefferson, son of actor Joseph Jefferson, was one of the company’s supporting players. Herbert Warren, longtime leading man for French-born actress Valerie Bergere, was the company’s chief scenario writer, and Frank Williams, Arbuckle’s cameraman at Sennett, had come east to continue working with him.
“He was one of the greatest friends I ever had,” Keaton said of Arbuckle. “I was only with Arbuckle about three pictures when I became his assistant director. It wasn’t a case where he came up and said: ‘From now on, you’re assistant director.’ You fall into those jobs. He never referred to me as the assistant director, but I was the guy who sat alongside of the camera and watched scenes that he was in. I ended up practically co-directing with him because he was considered one of the best comedy directors in the business.”
Keaton may have been moved behind the camera for His Wedding Night because he was needed less on-screen than in either of his previous films. The result was a more inventive, less frantic comedy than its predecessors. When Buster sidles up to the soda fountain and hints at wanting an illicit beer, Arbuckle obliges, adding a small footrail, a spittoon, and sawdust on the floor. Later, an effeminate man enthuses over a perfume display, and Fatty hauls out a sponge, a long-handled brush, and a small tub so the customer can literally bathe in the stuff while being drenched with seltzer water. Then Buster, having delivered a wedding gown to the proprietor’s daughter, puts the dress on to model it, and the screen in her bedroom drops for a dramatic reveal, complete with spotlight, then magically rises up again as he steps forward and strikes a pose. “I didn’t know it at the time,” said Keaton, “but I turned out to be Arbuckle’s whole writing staff for gags.”
His Wedding Night was made during some of the hottest days of summer, forcing Arbuckle to limit shooting under the Biograph’s glass canopy to just thirty minutes at a stretch. He turned out two more shorts in as many months, a further step forward titled Oh! Doctor in which he abandoned his usual costume of ill-fitting trousers and an undersize derby for street clothes and a comparatively adult persona, playing a henpecked husband with Buster filling the role of his bratty child, and Fatty in Coney Island, in which the Arbuckle unit invaded Brooklyn’s Luna Park for a tour of the attractions that would serve in future years as a sort of time capsule of the famed amusement resort in its prime. Coney Island, in particular, was made quickly for an Arbuckle comedy, as if a measure of fatigue had crept into the process. (“We just went down there, went on the concessions at Luna Park, and got in trouble,” Keaton said dismissively. “That was all there was to that.”) The critical reaction was somewhat muted, with the Exhibitors Herald going so far as to accuse Arbuckle of vulgarity. “There are many comedy points in Fatty at Coney Island [sic] which are clever, original, and funny, and some that do not reach the objectionable, but for the exhibitor catering to the high-class audience, this production should be taboo.”
Seeking new territory and a fresh jolt of inspiration, Arbuckle petitioned Schenck for a move back to California, where he preferred the climate and could more easily shoot outdoors in winter. “We made about six pictures in New York,” Buster said, “and then moved…to the [West] Coast because we were too crippled and too handicapped in the East trying to do exteriors. Those type of pictures, at least seventy-five percent of all our pictures, would be exteriors.”
Veteran director Allan Dwan would vividly recall the experience of shooting Panthea with twenty-two-year-old Norma Talmadge. Dwan had already made a picture with her at Triangle and knew what to expect. “She was a very good worker, never late,” he said, “but one morning she didn’t show up at 9:00 when we were supposed to start. At 10:00 she finally came in, and I was a bit concerned—thought maybe she’d been ill or something. I went to her dressing room and she was crying. ‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘What’s happened to you?’ She said, ‘I’m married to Joe Schenck.’ I said, ‘That’s fine. When?’ She said, ‘This morning.’ ”
In the opinion of some, the eldest of the three Talmadge sisters had made a calculated move to secure both her career and her financial future by marrying a man old enough to be her father. “During the few weeks of their courtship,” Norma’s watchful mother, Margaret L. “Peg” Talmadge, wrote in her 1924 book The Talmadge Sisters, “Mr. Schenck had come to be a sort of big father to all of us, and to this day, Norma always calls him ‘Daddy.’ ” Mrs. Talmadge, who lived with her daughters and prized a close-knit family, was against any of them marrying anyone at the time and was skilled at getting rid of the suitors who invariably came around. Norma, it’s been suggested, had a low boredom threshold when it came to men, and her mother had subtle ways of making them seem dull and—occasionally—ridiculous. The Russian-born Joe, with his slight accent and his immigrant’s fondness for an unflattering derby, was an easy target, but in his case Peg was mindful that he was the gifted Norma’s most convenient ticket to fame and great fortune.
“Joe was no Rudolph Valentino,” said Anita Loos. “His hearty appreciation of Jewish dishes was a constant hazard to his waistline. I think of Joe with the fondest memories, but they also bring forth the aroma of a special sort of smoked sturgeon that came from Barney Greengrass’s delicatessen on West End Avenue.” An industrious man with a knack for math, Schenck was still in his teens when he landed a job in a New Jersey wire factory paying $4 a week. He took night courses, and was a licensed pharmacist at the age of nineteen. In 1899, he went to work at Hornick’s at 111th and Third and persuaded the druggist to put his brother Nicholas, two years younger, on the payroll. In 1901, they bought out the store with a down payment of $1,500 and went looking for other enterprises. On a summer Sunday, the Schenck brothers took the Amsterdam Avenue trolley to the Harlem River to beat the heat and saw crowds swarming with little to keep them amused. Before returning home that day, they deposited $150 on the rental of a modest beer concession called the Old Barrel and turned a $1,200 profit in just three months. The following year they added free entertainment to the bill of fare and cleared $16,000 for the season.
In 1905, Joe and Nick, in league with a partner named William Mundt, incorporated the Fort George Amusement Company and began construction at the trolley terminus in Washington Heights. The result was Paradise Park, an attraction that charged no entry fee and boasted a roller coaster at ten cents a ride, a Ferris wheel of Nick’s own design, and a music hall offering nine acts of vaudeville. Along about this time, they made the acquaintance of Marcus Loew, who already owned a small collection of theaters and nickelodeons and who would take the brothers to the Harlem Casino after hours and quiz them on their prospects. In time, Joe took charge of the People’s Vaudeville Company, which Loew had established in 1904 with a capitalization of $500, and installed his brother Nick as manager of the company’s theater in New Rochelle. By 1909, People’s controlled twelve houses and would eventually morph into Marcus Loew’s Enterprises, with Joe as general booking manager and Nick overseeing its real estate interests. When the vogue for Paradise faded, the Schencks took over Palisades Park on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River and poured some $500,000 into making it the biggest amusement park in or around greater New York City.
The wedding of Joe Schenck and Norma Talmadge was a low-key affair but hardly a secret, as legend would have it. Variety carried news of the marriage license in its issue of October 20, 1916, and the following week reported October 27 as the date set for the civil ceremony in Stamford. Then, so that Peg Talmadge could attend, they pushed it back to the morning of October 31, Joe letting it be known that presents were unnecessary and that a dinner would likely take place at a later date. The honeymoon was put off until the completion of Panthea, and Joe was back in his Times Square office by noon.
“He was nineteen years older than his bride,” wrote Loos, “but it seemed possible that she was in love with him—many a Broadway baby had been. I could understand being in love with Joe, because I’ve always been a pushover for power that’s governed by gentleness. I hoped that Norma would appreciate that rare combination and I waited with curiosity to find out.”
Panthea, which was to be released through Lewis J. Selznick’s Select Pictures, was filmed at the Biograph. It was well known around town that Joe Schenck was overextended, and he later said he never worked so hard on another production in his life, going so far as to sleep on a cot at the studio in order to keep the picture on track. “I knew very well that I could borrow enough money to make a picture with Norma,” he said, “and that the picture was bound to make money.” Once Panthea was in the can and Arbuckle under contract, Schenck purchased the building on Forty-Eighth Street and set about assembling his own organization, commencing with Lou Anger, who in turn hired Norma’s younger sister Natalie as his assistant.
Unlike her two sisters—the youngest of the three being Constance—Natalie Talmadge had little interest in being an actress. “She was the serious type, of studious bent,” wrote her mother, “with contemplative eyes and soft voice.” When she graduated from Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall, rather than go on to college or embrace the drama, Natalie enrolled in a business course, polishing her typing skills and mastering the basics of bookkeeping and stenography. Then she pitched in helping her mother with her sisters’ fan mail, bringing a level of organization to the task that soon made her indispensable. She became their financial and executive secretary, a salaried post she held until Anger lured her away.
Buster Keaton met Natalie Talmadge, whom everyone seemed to call “Nate,” the first day he was on the set of The Butcher Boy. At age twenty, she was six months younger than he, reserved and competent and a bit grim at times. A brunette, she lacked Norma’s distinctive profile, nor was she as cheerfully sexy as her younger sister, Constance, a blonde whom their mother nicknamed “Dutch” because of her childhood chubbiness. Still, Natalie had the Talmadge genes and was in the process of growing into her looks, which would prove somewhat more durable than Norma’s. “I was attracted to her at once,” Keaton wrote. “She seemed a meek, mild girl who had much warmth and great feminine sweetness.” A relationship developed, and according to Minta Arbuckle, Roscoe’s wife, they took to spending weekends at a beach house on Sheepshead Bay, where Minta’s husband was having an affair with Alice Lake. Nate and Alice, with their shared roots in Brooklyn, became the closest of friends, and when Comique decamped for California, she went along in her capacity as Lou Anger’s assistant and the company’s financial manager. And so, as it turned out, did Joe and Myra Keaton.
From a humble beginning in 1913, Herbert M. Horkheimer took a $7,000 inheritance and created the Balboa Studio complex out of a single building once occupied by the California Motion Picture Company and, for a brief spell, Edison. Four and a half years later, when Roscoe Arbuckle and Comique arrived to claim space at the facility, Balboa had grown into the largest single employer in the city of Long Beach, some thirty miles south of Hollywood. Horkheimer, who partnered with his brother, Elwood, was a showman of the old school who considered his compact studio complex as much a product as the films that emerged from it. The score of buildings that housed its various departments were uniformly painted green with white trim, and the grounds were fully landscaped to give the campus a cohesive look, even as it occupied all four corners of a major intersection. A new enclosed stage had doubled the studio’s production capacity, while the largest glassed-in stage in the industry was nearing completion. “There are larger studios in Southern California than Balboa when it comes to the ground space utilized by several,” commented a midyear article in Motography, “but none of them begin to own the amount of equipment that the Horkheimer Brothers have assembled.”
The Horkheimers churned out serials for Paramount and Pathé, Jackie Saunders comedies for Mutual, dramas starring Anita King “The Joyous Outdoor Girl,” Knickerbocker Star Features, Fortune Photoplays, and a series of movies featuring Gloria Joy, vaudeville’s reigning “Child Wonder.” Baby Marie Osborne was probably the biggest star the Horkheimers brought forth, but none compared in stature to Fatty Arbuckle, who was widely considered second only to Charlie Chaplin in popularity. Arbuckle’s arrival at the bustling studio at Sixth and Alamitos was a big deal, a cause for celebration and a shot of prestige for the perpetually struggling Horkheimers. The fact that Buster Keaton, Al St. John, and Alice Lake accompanied him was nearly lost amid all the ballyhoo.
On the grounds of the Balboa Studio complex at Long Beach, California. From left: General manager Lou Anger, scenario editor Herbert Warren, Roscoe Arbuckle, Alice Lake, Luke (the star’s dog), Keaton, and Al St. John.
Buster actually arrived a few days ahead of the others and immediately sent for his parents with the notion of putting Joe in the movies. The Man with the Table never thought much of the idea, and had summarily rejected a proposal from William Randolph Hearst to make a series of two-reelers based on the popular comic strip Bringing Up Father. (“You want to show The Three Keatons on a bedsheet for ten cents?” he erupted.) But now he was retired, itchy and restless, and Buster thought he’d do well in pictures if he’d give it a try. The first Arbuckle to be made in California, A Country Hero, would be rich in location work, and if Joe got over and stuck around he and Myra would spare themselves the torments of another Muskegon winter. There was also the likelihood that Buster actually missed his parents, the old man in particular. “I never had that thing: At what age did I hate my father?” he said in a 1963 TV interview. “Oh, no. We were the best of friends.”
Arbuckle conceived A Country Hero as taking place in a small rural village, and spent his first days in California scouting locations. Unable to find anything suitable, he decided to build the burg he called Jazzville on the Balboa lot, utilizing a patch of ground set aside for exterior sets. Just a mile from the seashore, the studio was cooled by ocean breezes, and the pleasant smell of salt air was ubiquitous. Scenes at the beach could be made with a three-minute trip by automobile. Other handy locations included the Pike amusement arcade, the canals in the neighborhood of Naples, and a large field near Orange and Alamitos Avenues. “In Long Beach I have discovered through observations there is a greater percentage of sunshine,” Arbuckle said in an interview, “and this is a big factor in making pictures.”
Filming began on October 17, an open call bringing 250 respondents to fill 150 spots as “country village inhabitants.” About fifty were promptly put to work, populating the street built out behind the new Balboa stage, Arbuckle playing the village blacksmith and Joe Keaton essaying the role of Cy Klone, the garage owner and Fatty’s rival for the affections of schoolteacher Alice Lake. Joe didn’t adapt to filming easily and immediately disliked the common practice of shooting out of sequence, complaining that he didn’t know what he was doing half the time. Then in one scene he was instructed to kick Buster, which would normally have come as easily to him as breathing, but the shot was composed so that Joe was at the right of the frame, and for the gag to read properly he’d have to use his left foot instead of his right. “No, sir,” he declared. “I’ve been making a living for twenty years kicking my son around, and I’ll be damned if any cheap movie stage manager is going to start in now to teach me to do it.”
A raucous moment from A Country Hero, the first Comique short to be produced in California. Joe Keaton, as Cy Klone, is dunking Arbuckle, Buster, and Alice Lake in the water trough outside Fatty’s blacksmith shop.
Al St. John, a city dude, comes motoring into Jazzville at the wheel of a Ford Model T, up to no good. He soon finds himself dunked in a water trough out front of Fatty’s place, a fate awaiting multiple cast members as the story unfolds. Al joins in at the annual village ball, where Fatty, in drag, impersonates a Spanish dancer, and Buster, in a veiled send-up of dancer Fatima Djamile, wriggles his way through a Coochee-Coochee number in which a long black stocking produced from a cigar box stands in for a venomous snake. Al, intent on luring Alice to the big city, is thwarted when his car stalls in the path of an oncoming locomotive.
“Look!” Fatty says proudly amid the wreckage of Al’s vehicle. “I saved the crank!”
Along with the cost of hiring the Southern Pacific, whose tracks ran alongside the studio grounds, Arbuckle acknowledged wrecking two identical automobiles in getting the shot.
“What we did to Fords!” exclaimed Buster. “Whatever kept Henry from suing us all for libel?”
The finale was a boisterous free-for-all in a crowded restaurant in which Fatty fights off five adversaries with dinnerware, breakaway chairs, and an upright piano he uses as one might a cudgel. (Two of the chairs aimed at Arbuckle failed to break properly, landing him in the studio infirmary with a concussion.) Alice Lake gets flung clear across the room, Three Keatons–style, once Al’s slicker character has been vanquished, leaving Fatty with both the girl and the money at the fade-out.
A Country Hero was released on December 17, 1917, making it the seventh Arbuckle comedy in eight months—a prodigious output for a major comedian. Joe decided he liked picture work well enough as long as Buster was involved, and settled into a rented house near the studio with his bull pup, some Black Minorca chickens, and Myra.
“No more tips to stagehands,” he vowed. “No more to porters, bellhops, hall boys, hat boys, or the like. I’ve finished bribing myself through life. A barber in Long Beach shaved me the other day and through sheer force of habit I tipped him, and so far was he from expecting a tip that he wanted to shave me all over again.”
By Buster’s own account, he was responsible for co-directing Fatty in Coney Island, and doubtless served in the same capacity on A Country Hero. It is possible, in fact, to see an artistic progression in the Arbuckle comedies as Keaton began stationing himself alongside the camera, moving them away from what Harold Lloyd once called “the hodgepodge of slapstick.” He had a natural sense of where the action needed to go, although he was slow to question the older man’s instincts.
“You must never forget,” Arbuckle had told him, “that the average mentality of our movie audience is twelve years.”
Such advice didn’t sit well with Buster, who started taking films seriously after seeing Tillie’s Punctured Romance, Sennett’s pioneering 1914 feature, then thrilling to D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which he considered a masterpiece.
“I thought that over for a long time,” he said of Arbuckle’s pronouncement, “for three months in fact. Then I said to Roscoe, ‘I think you’d better forget the idea that the movie audience has a twelve-year-old mind. Anyone who believes that won’t be in pictures very long, in my opinion.’ I pointed out how rapidly pictures were improving technically. The studios were also offering better stories all the time, using superior equipment, getting more intelligent directors…‘Every time anyone makes another good picture,’ I said, ‘people with adult minds will come to see it.’ ”
In time, Arbuckle came around to Keaton’s way of seeing things, and the epiphany may have occasioned their first true collaboration. Oh! Doctor, their fourth film together, broke the formula Roscoe had seemingly established for his Schenck productions. Coney Island moved the series outdoors, where the unusual surroundings took the menu of gags in a new direction. The move to Long Beach brought them the scenic features of Southern California and gave them the world of Jazzville in which to work, but all these films were episodic affairs—in “two parts” as it was commonly stated. That changed with their next picture, a deft parody of cowboy dramas titled Out West.
The film’s opening sequence was to take place aboard a freight train, Fatty a stowaway avoiding capture by the conductor and his henchmen. Since Buster wasn’t required on camera for any of this, it’s likely Arbuckle left it to him to visualize and direct the chase, a monumental task given that the action would be staged on the Salt Lake Route through the Mojave Desert south of Las Vegas. Joe Keaton would play the conductor, and there would be a limited amount of time to capture the footage they needed. (Joe would ruefully count three days away from the “Anheuser-Busch pond.”) The sequence would have to be thoroughly worked out in advance, and the process would yield what arguably is the first great Keaton gag devised for the screen.
Fatty is hiding inside the engine’s near-empty tank, which conceals him until the train stops to take on water. (The introductory title card: “Fatty, a drifter drifting from prairie to town…”) Having saved himself from near drowning, he makes his way to the caboose, where Joe and his two cohorts are eating lunch. Spying from above, Fatty uses his necktie and a safety pin to fish meat, a coffeepot, and bread from under their noses, but when the pot comes splashing down, they scramble and the pursuit is on. With the four men racing atop the train, Keaton artfully undercranks the action. Losing his grip, Arbuckle tumbles to the desert floor, where, collecting himself, he pauses to have a quick smoke. Here is where Keaton frames a gag on a scale that would become familiar in his later films as a director: With the train racing along in the background, Fatty rolls himself a cigarette, casually striking a match on a passing car. He takes a couple of drags, tosses the butt aside, then gracefully reboards the train as the caboose whizzes by.
Unlike the intimate bits of business Arbuckle often embraced—things he could easily have done in vaudeville—here was a gag that could have been contrived only for the screen. “On the stage, even one as immense as the New York Hippodrome stage, one could show only so much,” said Keaton, explaining the very real excitement he felt. “The camera had no such limitations. The whole world was its stage. If you wanted cities, deserts, the Atlantic Ocean, Persia, or the Rocky Mountains for your scenery and background, you merely took your camera to them. In the theatre you had to create an illusion of being on a ship, a railroad train, or an airplane. The camera allowed you to show your audience the real thing: real trains, horses and wagons, snowstorms, floods. Nothing you could stand on, feel, or see was beyond the range of the camera.”
As Fatty is pushed off the train, Joe and the others waving a cheerful goodbye, the scene switches to Mad Dog Gulch, the nearest settlement, where Buster is Bill Bullhorn, the cigar-smoking, brandy-guzzling proprietor of the Last Chance Saloon. Steely-eyed—after a little 80-proof eyewash—Bullhorn shoots down a man cheating at poker, examines both hands, and informs the deceased’s opponent, “You would’ve lost anyway.” He opens a cellar door, neatly kicks the body through it, dropping a flower from his lapel in after it and doffing his hat respectfully, then pulls the door closed with a lithe foot. As a caricature of the villainous Jack Rance from Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West, Keaton instantly takes command of the picture, establishing himself as a star in the making, an eventual challenger to Arbuckle’s preeminence and perhaps even Chaplin’s.
“[Arbuckle] would turn you loose,” he said. “Because he didn’t care who got the laughs in his pictures. He wanted ’em in there.”
Roscoe made the point himself in a contemporary interview: “I am interested in making good pictures, not pictures good only for self-exploitation.”
Wandering the desert, his mouth as dry as cotton, Fatty is spotted by Indians.
“Look! Big fat Paleface!” says one.
“Catch him,” orders another. “Plenty food for winter!”
In a hail of arrows, he rolls into the Last Chance, where, guns blazing, he foils a raid by the villainous Al St. John. Fatty, it turns out, is quite the shot in a frenzied sort of way, keeping Bill’s top hat aloft with his six guns. (“It has to be an old hat,” Keaton said of the bit. “You couldn’t use a new hat. Otherwise, you don’t get your laugh. Audiences don’t like to see things getting spoiled.”) Fatty applies for the late bartender’s job, quickly developing an attraction to Sue, the Salvation Army girl played by Alice Lake.
Al returns with some local rabble-rousers and drunkenly attempts to take advantage of Sue, prompting Bill to order him out. When he is not so easily dissuaded, Fatty suggests they send him on “a visit to the cellar.” Bill opens the cellar door welcomingly as Fatty proceeds to smash at least twenty bottles over Al’s head. Then he tries shooting him half a dozen times, all to no effect. Desperate, Fatty discovers Al’s Achilles’ heel—he’s ticklish. Finally ejected, Al angrily declares, “They’ll pay for this!” Presently, he and his gang are back, and Sue is abducted as Fatty and the others give chase. A chaotic gun battle ensues. Al drags his captive to his hilltop hideout, with Fatty, on horseback, in hot pursuit. Having once again subdued Al by tickling, Fatty finishes the job by shoving the entire cabin down an incline and into the ravine below, leaving the building utterly destroyed and Al in a heap. Back at the summit, Fatty and Alice embrace for the fade.
As the deadly Bill Bullhorn, proprietor of the Last Chance Saloon, Keaton stole the show from Arbuckle and Al St. John in Out West (1918), a picture he also co-directed.
Not only was Out West a wonderfully cohesive film, it was also unlike anything Arbuckle had ever done. As with Oh! Doctor, he completely abandoned his default character of an overgrown child, coy and calculating, and Keaton commendably kept him out of a dress, a device that followed him from vaudeville. “Once you’ve got your realistic character, you’ve classed yourself,” Buster once remarked. “Anytime you put a man in a woman’s outfit, you’re out of the realism class and you’re in Charley’s Aunt.”
The shoot wasn’t without its mishaps. The chase Buster staged atop the moving train ended abruptly when Al St. John lost his footing and was thrown fifteen feet to the ground—a fall that could have killed a less durable man. (The Los Angeles Times considered his survival “miraculous.”) “He was hard as a brick wall and fast on his feet,” said Buster admiringly. “No man that size ever took such falls.” Alice Lake fell from a horse, Roscoe was injured when a gun fired at close range sent a piece of wadding into his hand, and Keaton himself muffed a jump off a cliff that earned him three days’ bed rest.
In a letter to a pal back in Bluffton, Joe Keaton admitted he liked the climate and his new work but bemoaned the fishing to be had in California. “Our latest picture is ‘Fatty Out West.’ I haven’t any part to speak of, but Buster has—it’s a scream. I am the conductor on a railroad train. I am glad you liked my first picture, ‘The Country Hero,’ where they say I handled my daughter pretty rough when I took her out of the water trough. When they told me I was too strenuous, I told ’em that was what they got for sending to Pigeon Hill for a man to play the part who had been fed upon Muskegon Lake walleye, Frank Pascoe’s fried perch and with ‘Best’ to wash it all down. Muskegon climate makes a man feel his powers and stays by him in far countries, and when I rescued the child from the depths of the trough I may have forgotten myself for the moment.”
Released nationwide on January 21, 1918, Out West enjoyed the best reception of any Arbuckle picture since The Butcher Boy. The film, said Variety, “hits a better comedy tempo than any of his recent productions.”
Billboard: “Nothing of the usual stuff of which comedies are made is to be found in Fatty Arbuckle’s new western film. Out West is new. And from the moment when Fatty is first shown, hiding in a locomotive tank, to the final fade-out it sparkles with fun and action and originality.”
Motography: “This is bound to be a sure fire hit. It is a departure from what the big comedian has done in the past, and its burlesque on the familiar western dance hall with its two-gun man made even the sometimes hard-hearted and unrelenting reviewers and critics laugh.”
Exhibitors, normally the toughest of audiences, were equally enthusiastic.
“The star’s best yet,” reported a manager from Payson, Utah. “Fatty takes the first seat for this. Brought more laughs than any other picture I’ve run.”
Another from Viroqua, Wisconsin: “About the best Arbuckle comedy to date. Business big. Many stayed for the second show.”
Arbuckle was contemplating the start of his next picture when Charlie Chaplin, accompanied by his manager Alf Reeves, stopped by the Balboa lot for a visit with his Sennett colleague, whose old trousers he supposedly used in building his famous tramp’s outfit. Roscoe was vacationing in San Francisco, however, and it fell to the rest of the company to welcome the world’s most popular comedian.
Charles Chaplin tours the Balboa Studio on January 5, 1918. From left: Keaton; Alf Reeves, general manager of the Chaplin Film Corporation; Chaplin; studio executive H. O. Stechan; H. M. Horkheimer; Al Gilmore (later to become Keaton’s assistant director); and Lou Anger.
Chaplin, whom Keaton loved but had never met, was riding high: Having built a new studio complex in Hollywood, a quaint affair designed to look from the street like a row of English cottages, he had just completed his first production, A Dog’s Life, under a million-dollar contract with First National. The contrasts between the two men were stark: Arbuckle, a salaried employee of Comique, was turning out ten comedies a year in rented space at an annual cost of $300,000. Chaplin, as his own producer, was committed to eight pictures a year for First National, each bringing an advance of $125,000 and a 50 percent share of the net profits. Keaton, who lacked Chaplin’s business acumen, could admire the independence he achieved without envying the money. All that mattered to Buster was having the wherewithal to put his increasingly elaborate ideas on-screen. As Arbuckle once observed, he “lived in the camera.”
Normally, the Arbuckle comedies were budgeted at $30,000 apiece, but costs for both Country Hero and Out West approached $35,000. According to Arbuckle, it took $1,000 just to hire a train, extras cost $5 a head (plus costuming), and then there were the exterior sets for Jazzville and, for Out West, Mad Dog Gulch, which was built at nearby Signal Hill, where the Horkheimers controlled eleven rustic acres. In an apparent effort to offset cost overruns, the next Comique short, The Bell Boy, was conceived as an interior job, the action taking place largely inside the Elk’s Head Hotel in the village of Ouch Gosh, Pennsyltucky. A redressed Jazzville would serve as the background for incidental exteriors and, in place of a train, an old horsecar would trundle along a makeshift track. In such a contained environment, Arbuckle was truly in his element.
The Bell Boy was packed with inventive miniatures. Doubling as the hotel barber, Fatty trims “Jassrutin the Mad Monkey” (a grotesquely bearded customer) in stages, turning him into a succession of historic figures—General Grant, complete with cigar, Abe Lincoln, and finally the Kaiser, who gets finished off with a quartet of custard pies. The hotel elevator is powered by desk clerk Al St. John’s old horse, who stands at the ready in the street outside. Joe Keaton, playing a top-hatted banker, engages in an energetic kicking routine with his son that is probably as close as they ever came to committing a flash of their vaudeville act to film. As Fatty’s sidekick, Buster gets his head caught between floors when the elevator stalls, and his pal tries dislodging it with a wooden plank. In the confusion, Miss Cutie Cuticle, the inn’s new manicurist, seesaws twelve feet into the air, landing on the elk’s head overlooking the hotel lobby, and Buster gets himself caught on the antlers trying to rescue her. All the while, he and Fatty compete for her attention.
“The funniest-looking accident we ever had was when [we were] making The Bell Boy,” said Alice Lake. “A crazy old elevator we were using fell to pieces and I was dangling in mid-air on the end of a rope. One of the boys was inside of what was left of the elevator and I was left whirling around in space while he was being rescued from the debris.”
She added: “I’ve noticed this about comedies: The gags that seem funniest at the studio will often look dead on the screen, while something that hasn’t made you smile on the set will make you shriek with laughter when you see it in the picture.”
If indeed The Bell Boy was conceived as a budget job, the plan went awry when the picture’s scope predictably expanded for the second half. Fatty hatches a plot to gain Miss Cuticle’s notice by having Al and Buster stage a bank robbery he can foil, but he doesn’t count on a crew of real crooks knocking over the Last National at the very same time. The furious clash between the pretend bad guys and the real ones has Keaton bounding over walls and partitions while Al tries clobbering the various perps with anything at hand, frequently missing his targets completely and scoring direct hits on Fatty. The spectacular climax comes when the crooks commandeer the horsecar and make their escape, running it up a steep ridge on Signal Hill.
“The big moment was supposed to come near the top of the hill when the traces broke, jerking the driver through the air so that he landed squarely on the horse’s back,” Buster related. “Meanwhile, the horsecar with the bandits still aboard rolled downhill right into the bank they’d just held up. But the driver missed the horse’s back the first time he tried it. When the driver proved a bit shy about repeating the jump, I offered to double for him. It was a tough jump to make because the horse had to be kept four and a half feet ahead of the car. This prevented his kicking the front of it with his hind hoofs. I had the prop man put a box in the car for me to stand on. This enabled me to make a better take-off. I also wound the reins tightly around my wrists so they couldn’t slip.”
Without blinders, the horse could see Buster coming, and the moment he jumped, the animal bolted, dragging him nearly the length of a city block before anyone could stop them. Unhurt, Buster accomplished the impressive stunt on the second try, sending the car hurtling backward down the hill toward the bank and the hotel beyond it. Moments later, it smashes through the wall of the Elk’s Head and rolls to a stop in the middle of the lobby, sending guests scattering amid all the dust and the wreckage as Fatty and the others descend upon the criminals. Amply rewarded for his bravery, he claims the girl and a tidy reward at the climax.
Also in The Bell Boy was Natalie Talmadge, who had transitioned to the role of Roscoe Arbuckle’s private secretary. Nate had appeared briefly in His Wedding Night, Fatty in Coney Island, and A Country Hero and was, with her rainbow-colored knitting bag, a constant presence on the Balboa lot. Released on March 11, The Bell Boy was greeted with a level of excitement normally reserved for the Chaplin comedies. Variety praised it as “excruciatingly funny” and went on to report the “rapid, acrobatic comedy of these three slapstick comedians had the audience in hysterics at the [New York] Rialto Sunday afternoon.”
A hardened exhibitor in Michigan pronounced it “the best comedy Arbuckle has ever made,” while another in Omaha went even further: “I never saw a better comedy in my life than The Bell Boy with Fatty Arbuckle, yet it’s clean, full of action, and MAKES YOU LAUGH.”
As Peter Milne in Motion Picture News concluded, “A better comedy than The Bell Boy would be hard to find, and this statement may be taken to include the Chaplins and the Sennetts.”
If The Bell Boy wasn’t quite the exercise in cut-rate filmmaking it was originally intended to be, Arbuckle’s next, Moonshine, was bargain basement, a minimalist goof on movie melodramas that drew its scenery not from the carpentry shop but from the natural splendor of the San Gabriel Canyon forty miles northeast of Long Beach. Spring rains complicated the shoot, but the result was another unusual comedy, one in which the conventions of screen drama were held up to ridicule, an insider’s take that threatened at times to fly completely over the heads of Arbuckle’s devoted audience.
The film opens with a “rehearsal” of a scene with two bootleggers, the mechanized entrance to their hideout “the director’s idea.” An actor’s dive into a river is celebrated in an intertitle as a great stunt. “His paycheck is well earned.” Fatty is the captain of the revenuers and Buster his faithful lieutenant. The call for reinforcements triggers a memorable sight gag—the emergence of fifty deputy agents from the same car in which Fatty and Buster arrived, a basic split-screen effect for which the car was stabilized with jacks and a portion of the image blocked off. Al St. John appears as Alice’s persistent suitor and mugs ferociously into the camera. She fights him off, gets the better of him, then her father (Charles Dudley) comes on the scene.
“Calm yourself, my child,” he says. “Wait until you’re married to hit him as much as you wish.”
Alice gets spanked, choked, and tossed into the river and endures it all in high style, declaring her love for Fatty.
“This is absurd,” complains Dudley. “You abuse my daughter and she embraces you.”
Fatty explains, “This is only a two-reel short. No time for preliminary love scenes.”
Dudley responds: “In that case, go on…I don’t care. I don’t want to ruin your masterpiece.”
Too clever for its own good, Moonshine proved a disappointment to some exhibitors after the high-water marks of Out West and The Bell Boy. Yet all reported big business, with some theaters billing the Comique two-reelers over the feature films they accompanied. With Moonshine in distribution, the last Arbuckle of the season became Good Night Nurse, another location job filmed at the Arrowhead Hot Springs resort at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains. After opening with an imaginative drunk sequence, the picture reverts to the old Sennett mainstays of slapstick and drag as Fatty’s wife ships him off to a drying-out clinic to kick the habit. Unduly impressed, Variety’s Josh Lowe pronounced it “the best of Arbuckle’s current Paramount series” after viewing it alone in a New York projection room. “The doctor who operates is Buster Keaton and the intern is Al St. John. No one say more?”
In late April, while Moonshine was being readied for release, Joe and Myra Keaton motored up to Los Angeles to replenish the home bar, the one critical disadvantage to living in Long Beach being that it was a dry city. Joseph Furness, their host at the Continental Hotel, knowing that Joe was a devoted Elk, subjected him to a Red Cross benefit performance that sent him fleeing the scene at half past nine, insisting that Furness at least find him somewhere he could get his feet wet. Patsy Smith of Variety caught up with Joe long enough to ask how he liked working in pictures.
“Oh, it’s all right,” he conceded, “if Arbuckle wouldn’t try and tell me how to kick my boy. Hell, ain’t I been kicking him all his life?”
The great days of making comedy shorts in Long Beach couldn’t last. The United States declared war on Germany the same month Buster Keaton first stepped before a camera, and he registered for the draft in June 1917. Now, with the Selective Service Act supplying American soldiers at the rate of more than six thousand a day, the war in Europe was threatening the smooth-running Comique assembly line. Roscoe Arbuckle himself was safe, his draft board having determined that he was “a little overweight to do private duty.” Buster, however, was classified 1-A in April 1918 and called to duty in June. Transferred from New York to the local draft board in Long Beach, he sought, and was granted, a two-week delay on induction so that he could complete the first picture of the 1918–19 season, a brilliant return to form for Arbuckle and company titled The Cook.
In late May, Patsy Smith had a gloomy letter from Joe Keaton, who let her know he was giving up on the movies. “Buster has joined the submarine service at San Pedro,” she reported in her “Among the Women” column, “and Joe’s ‘War Garden’ at Long Beach is all shot to pieces. He can’t even laugh at the practical joker who planted garlic among his sweet-smelling vegetables and flowers. Joe’s mother died in Sacramento a few weeks ago and his heart is pretty full of sorrow just now. Back to Muskegon for Joe and Myra to join Jingles and Louise.”