6
Getting Restless
ROSCOE ARBUCKLE’S The Cook, a slick reworking of his late Sennett comedy The Waiters’ Ball, was destined to be the last Comique short made at the Balboa studio. Financially, the Horkheimers were unable to weather the drop in cash flow that accompanied America’s entry into the war. Suddenly, they found themselves with more product on hand than they could possibly place. Finally, on March 25, 1918, while Moonshine was being filmed out on location, the sole owners of the Balboa Amusement Producing Company—the two Horkheimer brothers and their sister, Florence—surrendered to voluntary bankruptcy, and control of the studio passed to the Los Angeles Wholesalers Board of Trade. Besides Comique, the production companies of actresses Kathleen Clifford and Anita King were still in residence, as was an obscure outfit called the Mona Lisa Company. Essential purchases had to be made on a cash-only basis, and things got so bad that Arbuckle was forced to issue a statement in mid-April emphasizing he had no ownership stake in the company but was merely a tenant renting space—sometimes for as much as $4,500 a week.
In February, while Arbuckle was shooting The Bell Boy, the chamber of commerce of the city of Santa Ana, where both Roscoe and Al St. John spent their boyhoods, made a formal proposal to lure the Comique production team eastward. There was also interest from Glendale and Culver City, but Arbuckle, who was married in Long Beach in 1908, had a sentimental attachment to the place, owned a house there, and liked having the ocean nearby. Despite the undeniable quality of The Cook, a malaise settled over the company, in large part because they were about to lose Buster Keaton just as he and Arbuckle had settled into working as a precision comedy team, not simply as star and support.
With the first part of The Cook set in the kitchen and dining room of an upscale restaurant, Fatty the cook and Buster the waiter toss around cups of coffee, bowls of soup, plates of stew, and glasses of milk as gracefully as if they were handling billiard balls. Keaton adroitly trades steps with the dancer in the floor show, Arbuckle picking up the rhythms of the band in the kitchen and fashioning a risqué costume, something other than plain drag, from the cookware at hand. It’s all jazzy and joyous, the sort of action that comes from a pair of comics in perfect sync with each other, something wondrous that only happens organically. Seamlessly, Arbuckle slips into a parody of his Long Beach neighbor Theda Bara, melding her Cleopatra from the previous year with the Salome she was then filming, the head of St. John the Baptist delivered to her in the form of an enormous cabbage, the asp that takes her life a handy string of sausages.
The story in its final minutes shifts to the seashore and the Long Beach Pike, with its concessions, its goat carts, and its landmark roller coaster, the Jackrabbit Racer. When these scenes were made, Keaton was literally on borrowed time and the company was working feverishly to get the film in the can. A woman journalist visiting the location observed an Arbuckle “like an island entirely surrounded by children,” a sprinkling of adults visible only upon closer examination. Roscoe, seated in a lifeboat with his pit bull terrier Luke at his side, is stressed, describing himself as “in the midst of a sea of troubles.” When pressed, he is vague: “Oh, one thing or another. Some props have to be fixed up—some spoiled film—just the usual lot of a film actor.” He soon takes her off to a boat shelter where there is little escape from the crowd, which surges and ebbs, and where Keaton and Al St. John are solemnly clustered with Lou Anger. “In a corner sat little Alice Lake, peach-like, diminutive, blissfully negotiating a Liberty steak sandwich as big as her hand.”
The Cook was completed on Saturday, July 6, 1918, and the night was devoted to a farewell party thrown in Buster’s honor at Gus Mann’s Jewel City Cafe, a swank waterfront nightspot in neighboring Seal Beach. The entire Arbuckle company was there, as were spouses, girlfriends, and business associates from Los Angeles. The highlight of the event was an impromptu minstrel show in which Roscoe served as interlocutor. The end men, in addition to Buster, were Al St. John, Lou Anger, and Sennett director Eddie Cline, whose Keystone comedies were also distributed by Paramount. Keaton, clad in a tablecloth, a napkin hanging from each ear, performed his snake dance from A Country Hero while wielding a string of hot dogs. At the end of the evening, Roscoe presented him with a new wallet containing $100 to defray camp expenses. Keaton reported to the draft board in Long Beach the following day.
Arbuckle, Al St. John, Keaton, and Luke pose on the sand at Long Beach during the filming of The Cook (1918).
Natalie Talmadge lived in Joe and Myra Keaton’s extra bedroom while working for Roscoe Arbuckle, but once the Keatons returned to Muskegon and Buster’s induction was imminent, there was little to keep her in California. Spring visits from her sisters convinced her she might have a future in pictures after all, and so when Dutch traveled east in early July, just days prior to the completion of The Cook, Nate went with her. In Chicago, she made time to visit Jingles Jungle, where she showed Myra Keaton a signet ring she was sending Buster for good luck. Decades later, Myra would remember thinking: A ring will soon be going the other way, looks like to me.
Camp Kearny, a massive tent city on a mesa north of San Diego, was where Joseph Frank Keaton formally entered the U.S. Army on July 8, 1918. After a few days in quarantine, he was vaccinated in double doses and subjected to ten days of rudimentary drills with the aim of shipping him and the rest of the Fortieth Division off to France as quickly as possible. A new German offensive was under way, and the Allied response was to be overwhelming manpower. On July 24, he was assigned to the 159th Infantry, Company C, the company Roscoe Arbuckle had adopted as “little brothers” just two months earlier. The Fortieth Division was famously known as the Sunshine Division because it was assembled from the California National Guard and those of other western states.
Keaton, who took the responsibility of soldiering as seriously as he did his comedy, felt ridiculous in the oversize uniform he was issued. “My pants were too long, my coat looked like a sack, and wrapping army puttees around my legs was a trick I never mastered.” He studied Morse code, map reading, and semaphore signaling when no one else seemed to care about such things. “On mastering these subjects I discovered I was the best-informed private in my outfit. I never met an enlisted man, including some who had joined up during the Spanish-American War, who had more than glanced occasionally at an Army training manual.”
They left Camp Kearny by rail on July 28, arriving at Camp Mills, Long Island, a week later. There they were subjected to more inoculations and equipped for overseas duty. Natalie, it turned out, was only ten miles away, staying at her sister Norma’s place in Bayside. Buster finagled a phone call to the Schenck estate, and she grandly arrived at the camp’s Hostess House in the family’s chauffeured Packard as might a visiting dignitary. Confined to base, her entrance gave Buster an idea. Due to the summer heat, officers weren’t wearing their jackets, and their khaki shirts and black knit ties looked the same as everyone else’s. “If I rolled out of camp with my girl in that eye-popping car I might easily get by the sentries, it seemed to me. I would not, after all, be wearing my private’s overseas cap or my oversize jacket. Unless one of the sentries looked over the side of the car, he would never see my baggy pants and clodhopper hobnailed boots.”
In what could have been a scene from one of his later movies, Keaton got into the car and, languidly saluting as officers did, passed through both the inner- and outer-sentry stations completely undetected. Having successfully cleared the perimeter of the camp, he and Natalie headed south to Long Beach, where a restaurant and dance hall called Castles by the Sea awaited. “We had a wonderful eight or ten hours together that day. My girl paid the check as I didn’t have enough money on me.” Then they drove back to Camp Mills, where the sentries saluted him smartly.
Keaton shipped out a day or two later on the HMS Otranto, a Royal Navy troopship that had earlier seen passenger service. The wartime sleeping arrangements were spare: hammocks strung three across and stacked in four claustrophobic tiers. (“The cooties we were to know so intimately later were already on board.”) At Liverpool, they were walked to a rest camp, where they were served yellow cheese, hardtack biscuits, and unsweetened tea, then sent via rail to Southampton, where they were staged for transport across the English Channel into France. The boat was packed so tightly, he remembered, they had to endure the cross standing up. When they reached Le Havre, they were marched eight miles to another camp, where Keaton got his first taste of sleeping in the Gallic elements and, later, on the chilly floors of old mills, barns, and stables. “There is always a draft close to the floor of such farm buildings, and I soon developed a cold which imperiled my hearing. In that war we saw little but rain and mud.”
Moved by rail in the French boxcars known as forty-and-eights (because they were designed to carry either forty men or eight horses), they spent the next two months in and around the French village of Nérondes. “Because of my size,” said Keaton, “I was the last man in the last squad. When we were marching down French roads there would be a crowd of kids watching us. I’d stump my toe and fall down…make it look like an accident, you know. Then I’d run to catch up with the file and fall down again. After a while there would be another regiment of kids following us.” He proved himself as a team leader, his mime skills enabling him to communicate effectively with the locals, and was eventually promoted to the rank of corporal. The regiment, now part of the Sixth Depot Division, sent four-fifths of its personnel to the front line as replacements, many of whom were subsequently killed or wounded. Miraculously, Keaton never saw any actual fighting: “[I got] just close enough to hear it, but by the time I hit the front, the Germans were in retreat, which was a great thing. I was tickled to death at that.”
With the war winding down, they were moved at the end of October to Saleux, near Amiens, where the regiment became part of the Second Corps, which had suffered heavy losses in the pivotal Battle of St. Quentin Canal. The armistice with Germany was signed at Compiègne eleven days later.
Joe Keaton’s retirement from the picture business was the subject of a June article in the Muskegon Daily Times. “Buster is fast winning his way to a stellar position,” the paper reported. “He and ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle have done their best to make a movie actor of Joe, but Joe quit. You could never make Joe believe in a hundred years that there is any sense in that movie game.” Now referring to himself as “Captain Joe Keaton, campaign manager of William Flemen for commodore of the T.C.Y.C.,” he was eager to get home to Bluffton in time for the start of the summer season. “If you see anyone on the stern of the Goodrich boat on the morn of June 7 trolling, it will be me.”
It wasn’t long after Joe’s reappearance at Edgewater that his pal Flemen got him a job at the Linderman Machine Company, where some year-round residents of the theatrical colony, such as Pop Millard and his daughter, Mildred, were contributing to the war effort. Put to work in munitions, Joe personally signed every shell he produced with the chalk inscription “GIVE ’EM HELL BUSTER!” According to Joe, it was while he was working at Linderman that a telegram came from Will Rogers:
I HEAR YOU ARE WORKING IN A FOUNDRY STOP WHAT WAGES DO YOU GET
BILL
The Keatons had known Rogers since 1905, when he was doing a fancy roping act on a bill they shared in Pittsburgh. Joe, in fact, claimed he was present when Rogers uttered his first words on a vaudeville stage: “A feller up here doesn’t have such an easy time. If he misses a trick, he can’t cuss.” Rogers was on his way to New York, and Joe referred him to Carl Ehrich on Thirty-Eighth Street, scribbling an endorsement on a 3 Keatons business card. Years later, when Rogers’ wire arrived, he responded:
THIRTY FIVE CENTS AN HOUR STOP FAMILY ALL RIGHT STOP BUSTER IS IN THE TRENCHES AND I AM MAKING THE CANNONS FOR HIM
JOE
Rogers’ reply:
I WILL PAY YOU FIFTY CENTS AN HOUR TO QUIT COME ON TO NEW YORK
BILL
Rogers went so far as to scratch out an employment contract, but Joe didn’t need the money so much as a way to do his patriotic duty. He and Myra still owned a number of properties, and Joe Schenck was sending them twenty-five dollars a week while Buster was away in the service. When Rogers was next in Chicago with the Ziegfeld Follies, he threw a party at a place known as Madame Gaufanti’s, and Joe made his entrance just as things were getting started. “Joe hooks his foot around Bill’s neck,” Billboard columnist W. H. “Bill” Rice recounted, “much to the horror of Mrs. Rogers. Joe said: ‘Mother and I are over at Muskegon making bullets and the boys are in France shooting them.’ Will had sent him $50 for a Christmas present and he came over on the boat to thank him. I had the pleasure of taking him back to the boat in a snowstorm and locked him in his cabin.”
All that remained for Joe’s elder son was the part about getting home. The war ended sooner and more abruptly than anyone thought possible, and planning for such an unprecedented demobilization was far from complete. Overcrowding, bad weather, and the threat of influenza were common to all the camps. Abruptly, priorities shifted to education and entertainment for thousands of restless troops eager to leave. “Our division did a lot,” Buster said, “same as the other divisions. Headquarters troop sent out to find what talents you’ve got throughout the division, assembled them all at headquarters, put them under command of a chaplain, gave them a regimental band to travel with them in trucks, and tried to produce a show—just to entertain the different places around your section—while we’re all waiting for boats to go home. There was no money donated, no scenery, no props, no nothing. And a division in the first World War ran around thirty-eight thousand men, almost double what it was in the second one. So out of that they managed to find around twenty-two men that could sing or dance or do something. We organized a minstrel show. Oh, we’d probably play about three camps a week and always get back to our own base.”
Corporal Joseph F. Keaton (center) in France as a member of the Sunshine Players.
They called the troupe the Sunshine Players and titled the loosely organized show they gave AWOL To-night. Arthur Penney of the 115th Train Headquarters wrote and produced the minstrel sketch and sang bass solos. Otto Pincher, also of Los Angeles, did a monologue. Keaton told jokes and perfected a version of his snake dance, which came to be known in the Fortieth Division as “Princess Rajah.” Draped in dog tags and mess kits, he made the bit so popular he was asked to perform it at private functions, including at least one dinner given for a brigadier general. After having made a hit with the brass that night, he was offered a ride back to camp in the general’s official car. Once on the road, he induced the orderly driving to make a detour to the town square in Bordeaux and the Hotel Grand. “None of the carousing privates, corporals, sergeants, and young officers there had seen a general for six months, and they all jumped to their feet as the car stopped before the hotel.” The crowd fell silent as the orderly, with considerable fanfare, got out, hurried around, opened the door, and stood at attention. After a pause, Keaton, bedraggled in his sagging trousers, knotted puttees, shrunken cap, and outsize boots, stepped into view and airily said, “I won’t need you anymore this evening.” He got about fifteen feet toward the entrance to the hotel before he was recognized and showered with bottles, eggs, apples, and curses.
In December, he was assigned to a train carrying some nine hundred wounded men to a redistribution center at Le Mans. As the only noncommissioned man on the trip, he was supposed to make the return connection to Amiens at Paris—a connection he conspired to miss. Paris was out of bounds, making him technically AWOL, but having just been paid, he was able to treat himself and some buddies to a good meal and a room at the elegant old Hotel Brighton. It was a welcome respite from months of sleeping on hard, chilly surfaces, and it underscored just how bad his hearing had gotten. “Before I was overseas a month my superiors had to shout orders at me.” Now he was almost stone-deaf, the result of a lingering low-grade infection, and the fear of remaining so was driving him crazy. “The army doctors said they had never seen a case like mine, and I guess they were telling the truth, for none of them were able to do anything for me.”
On December 27, the regiment was moved from Amiens to Cadillac, south of Bordeaux, to await transport back to the United States, and on February 20, 1919, Keaton was transferred to an embarkation camp. A month later, on March 22, he finally sailed for home aboard the USS Edgar F. Luckenbach, a commercial cargo ship that had been chartered by the army as a troop transport. Loaded down with nearly 2,300 troops, 2,036 of whom were the officers and men of the 159th Infantry, the Luckenbach took two full weeks to make the crossing to New York.[*1]
Upon landing in Brooklyn, Keaton was sent to a debarkation hospital on Sixth Avenue in what had formerly been the Siegel-Cooper building. Specialists told him he would have to remain under observation for a while, but that with proper treatment his hearing would be restored. As soon as he could, he called Natalie on Long Island. Joe Schenck’s Times Square office was closer, so she asked him to hurry over.
“You look terribly peaked, Buster,” Schenck said sadly. “You’ve lost so much weight. I never saw you look so sick and miserable.”
“Why shouldn’t I look miserable—with my beauty gone forever?”
Schenck ignored the wisecrack. “Of course you haven’t any money,” he said, handing over all the bills in his wallet.
The first thing Keaton bought with the money was a new uniform and shoes that fit. He wore them the night he had dinner with Nat (as he always called her) and Peg Talmadge in their apartment at the Hotel Savoy. (“He used to come home with her for dinner now and then, and all three of the girls were quite devoted to him,” Peg commented, “but I cannot remember that I ever thought of his comings and goings as of any special import.”) After ten days in New York, he was transferred to the three-thousand-bed receiving hospital at Fort McHenry, Maryland, where his hearing and general health were judged to be much improved. One day, the doctors at the hospital okayed a walk, and Buster headed for the Maryland Theatre on Franklin Street, the house the Keatons always played in Baltimore. “I walked through that stage door and the house manager, the crew, the orchestra boys, and the acts greeted me like a long lost pal.” To his delight, tenor Artie Mehlinger, an old friend, was on the bill with his partner George Meyer, and he watched their act, a “musical mélange,” from the wings.
After a few days, Keaton was returned to New York. He should have been mustered out with the rest of the Fortieth Division at Camp Kearny, but on some paperwork he had given Muskegon as his home, so he was instead sent to Camp Custer at Battle Creek, Michigan, about a hundred miles southeast of Bluffton. At Custer he was processed, discharged, and issued a cash payment of $220.75 that included a $60 travel bonus. “The mistake enabled me to see my folks and our old neighbors, but I was so eager to get back to work that I stayed in Muskegon only three days.” He boarded the California Limited in Chicago on May 2, 1919, and arrived back home in Los Angeles on the sixth. He had been gone almost exactly ten months.
A lot had changed for Roscoe Arbuckle in the interim. By the time he bid farewell to Buster Keaton, he had already lost Joe Keaton, Natalie Talmadge, and scenario editor Herbert Warren, and would soon lose publicist Paul “Scoop” Conlin as well as Alice Lake. The pleasant Balboa studio was no longer tenable as a base of operations, and it’s significant that while neither of the Horkheimer brothers was present for Buster’s party at the Jewel City Cafe, W. A. S. Douglas, president of the Diando Film Corporation, was. Diando was where Baby Marie Osborne landed when she left Balboa, her father, Leon T. Osborne, being vice president and co-owner of the new concern. Douglas and Osborne took over the former Kalem studio in Glendale, thirty miles north of Long Beach, and when Arbuckle announced on July 17, 1918, that he was leaving Long Beach “for purely business reasons,” he indicated that he and his staff would be moving “temporarily” to Diando.
The arrangement lasted all of one picture, a western titled The Sheriff, in which a Black child called Snowball and Arbuckle’s dog, Luke, did their best to compensate for Buster’s absence. The next one, Camping Out, was shot on Catalina Island and served as Alice Lake’s swan song before moving into features. By the time of Love, Arbuckle’s third as a transient filmmaker, the company had set up shop at the old Bison Pacific Coast Studios on a stretch of Allesandro Street that was home to a number of early studios, including Selig Polyscope, where Roscoe appeared in some of his earliest comedies, and the Mack Sennett lot where he gained fame as Mabel Normand’s frequent co-star.
Following the completion of Love, Arbuckle, bound for New York, converged with Joe Schenck and Adolph Zukor in Kansas City to sign contracts that had been in the works for eight weeks. The new agreement was valued at $3 million over thirty-six months, a figure Zukor confirmed in a wire to Famous Players-Lasky, which would continue to distribute the Fatty Arbuckle comedies under the Paramount name. Two months later, with some of that money burning a hole in his pocket, Arbuckle closed a deal to buy the Vernon Tigers of the Pacific Coast League, something he admitted he did just to please Lou Anger, a baseball bug who would act as the team’s general manager. When Buster reappeared in May, having turned down offers from both William Fox and Warner Bros., he was put to work clowning with Roscoe and Al St. John at the season opener, suiting up in team colors and wielding a bat and ball made of plaster. Arbuckle’s replacement for Alice Lake, an actress named Molly Malone, served as the team’s mascot, and those in the stands included stage and screen star Bessie Barriscale, actors Jack Pickford and Lew Cody, and Fox cowboy hero Tom Mix.
Keaton later said he was offered $1,000 a week to jump ship, but his loyalty to Schenck and Arbuckle trumped money, and he stuck with the $150 a week he was getting when he left for Camp Kearny. He knew that big changes were afoot, because Arbuckle was keen to move into features and play more sophisticated roles. Al St. John was also getting restless, and it would be only a matter of time before he went out on his own.
In June, work commenced at Pacific Coast on Back Stage, the second comedy owed under Arbuckle’s new agreement with Zukor and Famous Players. Fatty is stage manager of the Hickville Bijou, where Buster and Al St. John are stagehands contending with the week’s arrivals: Julius Hamlet Omelette, a pompous actor; Clarence Marmalade, an eccentric dancer and high kicker in the tradition of Joe Keaton; and a malevolent strongman, Professor Onion, who lords it over his diminutive assistant (Molly Malone). Given the simplicity of the setup, the picture didn’t come together easily. Roscoe fell ill with what was feared to be appendicitis, and filming extended into August, something of a record for an Arbuckle two-reeler. The second half of the picture became a performance executed by Fatty and his stage crew when the real actors walk out, Keaton again falling back on a drag dance routine, this time acting Fatima to Arbuckle’s King Murad.
A troubled production redeemed by its acrobatics, Back Stage drew a mixed reception from audiences and exhibitors, due in part, no doubt, to the shooting of Molly Malone by an enraged Professor Onion. Left for dead amid the climactic slapstick, she is visited in the hospital by Fatty at the fade-out, but the cold-blooded attack made for a dark, unsettling turn to an otherwise lighthearted story. Back Stage was the last film Arbuckle would make on Allesandro Street, a new plant having been secured in Culver City. The move to the Henry Lehrman studio[*2] on Washington Boulevard, with its commodious stage and modern amenities, was announced in July while Back Stage was still in production, and came just a day after the news that Al St. John had been signed to a five-year contract by Warner Bros.
When they were working at Balboa, Keaton lived for a while with Arbuckle in an ocean-view home he owned near the studio. Roscoe hated being alone, and always wanted people and a certain level of commotion around him. (When he first hit town, he had scenario editor Herbert Warren and his wife, Valerie Bergere, sharing quarters with him, while Buster took an apartment on Third Street.) The two men were inseparable. They socialized together, traveled together, worked together.
“Arbuckle was that rarity,” said Keaton, “a truly jolly fat man. He had no meanness, malice, or jealousy in him. Everything seemed to amuse and delight him. He was free with his advice and too free in spending and lending money. I could not have found a better-natured man to teach me the movie business, or a more knowledgeable one. We never had an argument.”
Back from the war, Keaton saw that Arbuckle was in a state of flux, unsettled at work and in search of a new place to live. At the Hollywood Hotel, Buster shared a room with an actor named Ward Crane, who was a protégé of Allan Dwan’s, but he was just as liable to end up on someone’s couch for the night.
“Buster was probably the original man who came to dinner,” said actress Viola Dana, who had a house she called Heartsease in Hollywood Heights. “My brother-in-law [director Bernard Durning] brought him home for dinner one night and he stayed for [months]. And, of course, Buster became one of the family. My mother was crazy about him—he was like a son to her—and wherever we moved, we figured on Buster. I think the extent of his wardrobe was a toothbrush, which he carried in his pocket.”
Viola Dana, née Flugrath, was two years younger than Buster but entered show business at around the same age, dancing at Coney Island for tossed coins at the age of three. She was in “The Littlest Rebel” when it was a vaudeville sketch and, with her younger sister, Leonie (later the actress Shirley Mason), in a 1905 revival of Rip Van Winkle. She acted in road companies with such stars as Dustin Farnum and William Faversham, and made her screen debut in 1910 in a four-scene version of A Christmas Carol for the Edison Company. She alternated between the stage and screen, and at fifteen was cast by producer Arthur Hopkins and playwright Eleanor Gates in The Poor Little Rich Girl, a role that followed her well into adulthood. It was at the Edison studio that she met her future husband, the casting office’s John Collins, who would go on to direct a number of her films. Collins died in the influenza pandemic of 1918, leaving her a widow at the age of twenty-one.
Actress Viola Dana and Keaton shared a great affection for each other. Into her late eighties she was still speaking fondly of him.
“Vi” Dana was a striking screen beauty, a vivacious four-eleven with big green eyes, thick brown hair, and a ribald sense of humor. Principally a tragedian, she was making a move into comedies when she met Buster Keaton, and the two of them hit it off instantly. “I like you,” she said to him. “We like us,” he responded. Buster thought her funny and game in the same way Alice Lake was, willing to try practically anything. She pitched for the Metro ball team in high heels, bobbed her hair before it was fashionable, and could do backflips and cartwheels, and walk on her hands.
“The four of us,” she said, “used to go out together: Buster and myself, Roscoe and Alice. Buster and I were what the fan magazines used to call an item. It was all harmless fun, really.”
Natalie Talmadge was still on the East Coast, playing supporting roles in her sisters’ movies—The Isle of Conquest with Norma, A Temperamental Wife and The Love Expert with Dutch. She and Buster kept in touch with letters and postcards, but except for the few days they shared in New York, they hadn’t seen each other in more than a year. Meanwhile, Baron Long’s Ship Cafe in the seaside resort town of Venice became a second home for Keaton, Dana, Arbuckle, and their circle of friends.
“Venice was what we called a ‘wet’ town,” Vi said, recalling it as the west side’s answer to Seal Beach. “You could drink there, and many of us got drunk there. A lot of cash flowed across the counter….Roscoe loved to play the host, to circulate amongst the tables, have a few laughs, and pour a few drinks. By the third trip around, we saw that he was beginning to get a little tipsy. He would start to complain about the sea breeze, and how it was making him dizzy.”
A new picture began in Culver City, but now there was just Arbuckle and Keaton to do the heavy lifting, with rubbery Jack Coogan brought into the fold to play Al St. John’s parts, Coogan having essayed the role of the eccentric dancer—a “sis” in contemporary parlance—in Back Stage. The film was called The Hayseed, yet another story set in the rural equivalent of Jazzville, where Fatty works out of the general store and delivers the mail with Buster’s assistance. Coogan is the heavy, a crooked sheriff after the hand of Molly Malone, while Arbuckle’s dog, Luke, saves the day, drawing nearly as much screen time as Keaton himself. The result was well received, as thorough an Arbuckle subject as any produced under the Comique label. Buster brought the knockabout and some clever broom work, but the picture emerged as Fatty’s from start to finish, reflecting Arbuckle’s determination to play a more rounded character, even when shading took precious screen time away from the usual horseplay. Paramount headlined an ad aimed at exhibitors with the words “He’s Human” and accompanied it with a shot of the star giving Luke a big, fervent hug. “That’s one reason millions crowd to see any Fatty Arbuckle picture. And he’s funny!” Mentioning the comedy in The Hayseed came almost as an afterthought, yet Variety, in catching a showing at New York’s Rivoli Theatre, calculated a laugh every forty-five seconds.
“You only star in movies from picture to picture,” Arbuckle said. “If two or three pictures are bad, you’re not a star anymore. It’s a constant worry. That’s why movie people are temperamental. It’s a terrible strain!”
In August, he and Keaton traveled north to entertain ahead of a match between the Tigers and the San Francisco Seals, but even the recreational game of baseball had begun to wear on him. “It makes me too darn nervous,” Arbuckle complained. “After two and a half hours of that, I can’t do anything else I want to. The excitement makes my stomach feel bad.”
Buster could sense the weariness in the man and knew the great days of the Comique two-reelers were drawing to a close.
A new picture called The Garage was a kind of summing up of the brand and how it had blossomed over the course of the series. Once more, Keaton was a full partner in the action, not merely an accessory as he had been in The Hayseed. Molly Malone was again the love interest, Jack Coogan a supporting player, and Luke dependably gave chase to Molly’s unwanted suitor and, ultimately, to Buster himself. The opening moments even offered a reprise of the first scene Keaton ever played before a camera, Fatty letting fly with a missile—in this case a wet sponge—that knocks Buster off his feet. And, as he does in The Butcher Boy, Buster responds by hurling a pie.
Keaton and Arbuckle appropriate a gag from The Garage for this publicity shot, marking the end of their historic collaboration.
Reed Heustis, a features writer for the Los Angeles Herald, visited the set in late October as those early shots were being made. Arriving at the Lehrman studio, Heustis first comes upon Lou Anger, then discovers Roscoe in his upstairs dressing suite, which, Heustis notes, “reminds one strongly of Atlantic City and the bathhouses there.” He watches as Arbuckle prepares a shot in which he is knocked into a tub of water on top of actor Dan Crimmins, who is playing the boss. “No entrances nor exits to these pants,” Heustis observes of Arbuckle’s costume. “When Roscoe’s in, he’s in. Sewed up for the day, so to speak. With Roscoe will be Buster Keaton, also sewed up. Buster is the pleasant-faced young acrobat who will rise to stardom some time in April, and who truly, beyond the mere laudations which are so easy to write and which so seldom ring true, is of big league timber.” And it is with this last line that Heustis became the first to announce to the world that Buster Keaton would soon be the star of his own line of comedies.
“It is a chill October morn, but never mind that. The three boys must be wet, and wet they get. Each in turn dives into a big vat of water standing on the stage and then go into their ‘gag,’ which consists largely of resuscitating Dan, nearly drowned, by a means of a garden hose and a flow of ice water. Earn their salaries! Thrice over. Then Buster and Roscoe warm up, go through a sort of clog dance—not for the camera, but for the corpuscles—which ends in the familiar thunk, de thunk, thunk, thunk, the last two thunks when Roscoe and Buster do a fall which shakes even the stage and many a stout heart.”
Production on The Garage continued through most of November, the action moving out into the streets of Culver City, where the building catches fire, trapping Molly on the upper floor, smoke billowing through the window as the townspeople scramble to save her.
“Arbuckle was one of the worst rough-houses in films,” Keaton said. “We were doing a fireman scene in Garage. I made a flying leap for the brass pole and started down head first, did a turn, and continued on down with my head up. I saw Arbuckle, two hundred pounds, coming down toward me. He looked down, gripping the pole, then landed square on my head!”
Molly leaps into a life net, only to bounce up and land on a set of utility wires stretched high over the street. Then the noontime whistle blows and everyone walks off to lunch, leaving her stranded with just Fatty and Buster left to rescue her. They climb the telephone pole and work their way out to her, forming a human chain, Fatty dangling by his feet and handing her down into the waiting arms of her father. Then, just as Buster loses his grip on his partner, Molly rolls around the corner in an open car, affording them a safe landing in its cushioned seats. Fatty pulls her into the back alongside him and calls “Home, James!” as Buster assumes the wheel. And the three of them drive happily off together, drawing the Arbuckle series to a satisfying close with what, in Keaton’s estimation, was the best picture of the lot.
“It was a honey,” he said, relishing the memory. “It was a pip.”