9
Spooling Comedy
THE MANSLAUGHTER TRIAL of Roscoe Arbuckle commenced on the afternoon of November 18, 1921. Two days of medical testimony outlined the deceased’s physical condition at the time of her death, and constituted, in the assessment of Otis Wiles, staff correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, a sort of Cook’s tour through all the organs of the human anatomy. Arbuckle, Wiles noted, sat restlessly, seemingly perplexed by all the terminology. “His position was that of the bad boy in school, a sort of a painful expression emphasized with a wrinkled brow whose thoughts were of the old swimmin’ hole or the fish that awaited the dip of his hook and sinker in the spring creek.”
Maude Delmont was not called as a prosecution witness, leaving the dirty work to a pair of uninvited showgirls who attended the party at the St. Francis. Yet the resulting testimony seemed in the main to favor the defense. Arbuckle appeared downright cheerful as the day drew to an end. As the court adjourned for the Thanksgiving holiday, Variety’s San Francisco correspondent said the case was expected to be in the hands of the jury no later than the Monday of the following week. “It is the consensus of opinion here Arbuckle will be acquitted of the charges against him.”
On November 28, Arbuckle himself took the stand as the defense’s last witness. His testimony, which brought mobs of the curious to the hall of justice, was characterized as sober and consistent, and he proved to be his own best witness.
“What was the first thing you did in room 1219?” he was asked under cross-examination.
“I closed the door and locked it. I wanted to dress.”
“Was there no other reason?”
“No. No other reason. I went straight to the bathroom and opened the door. The door struck Miss Rappe, as she was lying on the floor. She was holding her stomach and moaning. She looked sick, as if she was short of breath.”
The case went to the jury of five women and seven men on the afternoon of December 2, and thirty-one hours later there was still no verdict. The first ballot had shown nine for acquittal, and after twenty-two ballots the count stood at ten for acquittal and two to convict. The judge in the case polled the jurors individually and then excused them as hopelessly deadlocked on December 4.
“Arbuckle appeared greatly disheartened,” the Times reported. “His wife broke down and wept.” A new trial was set for January 9.
“This case has put quite a crimp in my pocketbook,” Arbuckle admitted upon his return to Los Angeles. “I resent the damage it has done me because I know I am a victim of circumstances. If I had had any connection with the death of Virginia Rappe I would have said so. That is the kind of man I am. All of the dirt in this case was brought in by Mr. [District Attorney Matthew] Brady. The evidence consisted of what certain persons thought they knew—not what they were sure they knew. I have always tried to be a good scout and to treat people in the right way.
“I do not know whether I will ever appear in pictures again. Of course, I want to. If the public wants to see me then I will go back to my work. If they don’t I’ll do something else. I won’t act again unless the public shows that I will be well received. At present I have no position, no contract, and am not financially interested in any of my pictures, released or awaiting release. I have spent some very unhappy days, but my conscience is clear and my heart is clean. I have nothing to apologize for.”
In the run-up to the second Arbuckle trial, Buster Keaton was dealing with a crisis of his own. The Village Blacksmith, retitled simply The Blacksmith, had been previewed for James Quirk, the influential editor of Photoplay, and Quirk had excoriated the picture in the magazine’s January issue. “It’s a sad day when one of our comedians fails us,” he wrote. “Buster Keaton is guilty this month. There is hardly a smile in his latest comedy, if such it can be called. The situations are forced and his work laborious. His scenario writer should consult Webster and discover that the words silly and funny are not synonymous.”
It was by far the worst notice a Keaton comedy had ever received—and Photoplay was the top movie magazine of the day, boasting a circulation of two million. The people at First National were alarmed, and Keaton knew he had to do something to salvage the picture. The Boat was hastily advanced to fill the hole in the release schedule, and as soon as Cops was finished Keaton set about fixing The Blacksmith. Judging from the changes he made, he decided there wasn’t enough slapstick in the thing, and that too much of it played out within the confines of the blacksmith shop. He removed a tedious scene in which he got oily handprints all over Virginia’s white horse, business that made the later trashing of a white Rolls-Royce seem repetitious. He also moved the film outdoors with an inventive chase sequence in which Big Joe takes off after Buster when he is inadvertently hit by his car. The result was a livelier, faster-paced comedy—no masterpiece but certainly an improvement over the first version.
“It’s heartbreaking work, that’s all I have to say,” Keaton, in a black mood, said as he rested between shots. “We gave up trying to follow a script months ago, because the gags that looked funniest on paper flopped cold on the screen. Now we make up our laughs as we go along, and the going is tough!” He shook his head dolefully. “Look at me—I’m getting gray-haired.”
Eddie Cline tried stirring him up, but Buster was having none of it.
“The future?” he echoed when asked about his plans. “Who knows? I don’t. I’ll keep on spooling comedy until the fans get fed up on my stuff, then I’ll go back to vaudeville.”
When finally released in July 1922—an entire year after the first scenes were made—many exhibitors billed The Blacksmith ahead of the five-reel feature, an increasingly common practice as Keaton was often considered the bigger draw. “Buster Keaton, of the lugubrious countenance, has some of the funniest tricks of his career in this conglomeration of incidents,” raved Stuart Gibson in Motion Picture News. The notice in Exhibitors Herald similarly proclaimed it “one of his funniest.” And although it turned a respectable profit, Keaton regarded The Blacksmith as “a dud,” an attitude he maintained for the rest of his life.
Ahead of the second trial of Roscoe Arbuckle, Joe Schenck addressed a gathering of the First National Exhibitors’ Circuit of Northern California, deploring the treatment accorded the defendant. “Wild rumors that thousands and thousands of dollars are being spent in defense of Arbuckle are without foundation,” he said. “As a matter of fact, the cost of the first trial was only $35,000, and this includes the amount paid attorney Gavin McNab.[*1] I ought to know something about this matter, as I put up the money to foot the bills.”
The new trial got under way on January 11, 1922, with a notable decline in interest on the part of the public. Maude Delmont, who had been arrested and convicted on bigamy charges the previous month, was again not called upon to testify, leaving the two showgirls from the first trial to continue to act as the key witnesses for the prosecution. Fred Fishback returned as a defense witness, and Arbuckle’s full testimony from the earlier trial was read into the record. The case dragged on until February 1, when it was finally sent to the jury. Fourteen ballots later, the judge again declared a hung jury. Surprisingly, the split this time was ten to two in favor of conviction. Minta Arbuckle once again broke into tears, while the defendant and attorneys on both sides reacted in stunned silence. Jurors who spoke out afterward said the case for the defense was weak.
While the jury was deliberating, Hollywood was rattled by another scandal, the murder of Paramount director William Desmond Taylor. Arbuckle began to tear up in court when he got the news. “Taylor was the best fellow on the lot,” he said. “He was beloved by everybody and his loss is a shock.” As the lurid details of the Taylor case emerged in the press, they added another layer of debauchery to American perceptions of how those of the film colony conducted themselves. Ten days after Taylor’s body was discovered in a Westlake bungalow, thirty members of the Independent Screen Artists Guild met in Los Angeles to issue a statement asking for fair play from the moviegoing public.
“We are not rampant with vice….We are law-abiding citizens, and we rear families,” it said in part. “And yet William Taylor’s death has resulted in aspersions being cast upon this industry and upon us, for we are striving to make the world a better place to live in through the screen. And we, who have accepted that responsibility placed upon us by the public through their patronage, feel it a personal affront to assume through innuendo that we are not worthy of that honor.” Among those authorizing the statement, which ran in full in most major American newspapers, were Joseph M. Schenck, Charles Chaplin, Thomas Ince, Mack Sennett, Louis B. Mayer, Norma Talmadge, Constance Talmadge, Ben Turpin, director King Vidor, and Buster Keaton.
Coming up with fresh ideas was always the hardest part of moviemaking for Keaton. “Each day I put in a certain number of minutes on the story,” he said. “Ideas are given and either accepted or rejected. Old ideas are worked over in the hope of finding a new angle. New ideas are considered and built up. Everyone at the studio suggests and everybody’s suggestion gets consideration.” It was a hectic way of working, and not all writers fit into the process. Clyde Bruckman adapted and seemed to have a natural talent for it. Others over the years couldn’t abide the egalitarian nature of the process and quickly moved on.
The next two comedies from the Keaton studio were considerably different from those that came before, doubtless reflecting the influence of Broadway humorist and Variety columnist Thomas J. Gray, who arrived in December 1921 and, working with Joe Mitchell and Clyde Bruckman, brought the writing team to three in number. The author of the Greenwich Village Follies and two Music Box Revues, Gray had a background similar to Mitchell’s in that he specialized in funny vaudeville and revue sketches, but he was also an accomplished playwright and song lyricist. In New York, Gray had written briefly for Roscoe Arbuckle but played the fish-out-of-water card in Los Angeles, where he denied having come west just to avoid the benefit season.
The first film reflecting Gray’s participation, My Wife’s Relations, was firmly set in “the foreign section of a big city,” possibly Greenpoint, the portion of Brooklyn known as Little Poland. Said Keaton, “My Wife’s Relations—that is, the hazy idea of it—was born when Eddie Cline and I saw a postman in the East, unable to read the inscription on a letter in a foreign settlement, compare it to the lettering on a sign board.” With Buster, for once, was no ingénue but a substantial character actress named Kate Price, who was twenty-three years his senior and nothing at all like the wispy Virginia Fox. In the film’s opening, he gets framed for breaking a window, then, due to the language barrier—the judge doesn’t speak a word of English—finds himself married to the daughter of a family of Irish roughnecks. Buster has a hard time fitting in until they mistakenly think he’s due for a big inheritance and decide to put on the dog. His escape from the liveried digs they’ve all moved to has him climbing out a top-floor window and descending four flights by swinging from awning to awning, a breathtaking stunt he performs in a single shot, typically refusing to cut or cheat the effect in any way.
An aerial view of the Keaton lot showing the dark stage added in 1921. Exterior sets constructed for My Wife’s Relations and The Frozen North are visible at the right.
Staged largely on interior sets, My Wife’s Relations was the first two-reeler Keaton shot in the new enclosed stage, effectively avoiding rain delays during what was historically the wettest time of the year. Moving on, he embraced the elements in his next picture, shooting two weeks of exteriors in snowbound Truckee, a former logging center and ski resort some five hundred miles north of the studio in the Tahoe National Forest. At an elevation of nearly six thousand feet, the town was a favorite location for movie companies, and there were no fewer than five working locally when Keaton and his crew arrived. The local Southern Pacific Hotel, in fact, was permanently outfitted with a cutting room and screening facilities.
The idea for The Frozen North may have come from an experience related by Paul “Scoop” Conlon, Arbuckle’s former publicist, who was on the job when Keaton was drafted in 1918. After the war, Conlon joined Famous Players and went to work for William S. Hart, the stoic western star whose features were released through Paramount.
“He had a big snow story to do,” Conlon remembered. “Needed a storm and heavy fall, more than enough for dog teams. Every precaution was taken to insure success. Weather looked fine for the purpose, according to our advance man at Truckee. Bill bought the story and engaged a cast on so many weeks guarantee. Even had our trunks packed and entire studio equipment ready for the train. A few hours before train time we were astounded to get the news that a change had set in and the snow was melting fast. We waited. But the snow never came back. It was near the end of the season, but the snow broke early. The catastrophe cost Bill Hart nearly $25,000—and he never produced the story.”
With The Frozen North, Keaton burlesqued the kind of northwestern drama Hart had attempted, skewering the former Shakespearean’s pretensions in a send-up that just got wilder as it progressed. Hart, who was from New York but spent a portion of his childhood traveling the West, was known for the gritty realism with which he invested his films. His characters were complicated antiheroes who started out bad and sometimes stayed that way, but he was at heart a stage actor whose signature role was Messala in the original Broadway production of Ben-Hur. Keaton drove the point home with the picture’s first gag, making his entrance into the snowy wilderness by exiting a subway station, the last stop on a line that presumably passed directly through Times Square on its way to the Arctic.
Keaton resembled Hart, a quality that made the film’s centerpiece all the more shocking. Walking in on his wife and her lover, seated with their backs to the door, he sees them nuzzle, reacts melodramatically, even sheds a glycerin tear. Then they kiss and it’s too much for him to stand. Unholstering his revolver, Buster shoots them both dead, walks over to examine the bodies, and gives a start.
“I’ve made a mistake,” he says. “This isn’t my house or my wife.” Sheepishly he takes his leave, reflexively tipping his hat as he goes.
Keaton claimed to admire Hart’s early work in pictures but felt he had “gimmicked up” his later performances. “For some reason he turned ham on us. He was a great actor, but he got hammy at the end of his career. He always looked for the opportunity to cry—even with two guns strapped to his side out in the desert. If the girl turned and looked at another man, tears ran down his cheeks. There’s nothing you could do about it. He was his own producer.”
Buster’s actual wife in The Frozen North is once again Sybil Seely, but she has little to do once she manages to knock herself out with a pot jostled off a high shelf. He, meanwhile, is fixated on the married neighbor lady and goes courting. Taxis get hailed, cops give chase, and Buster visits Joe Roberts in his spacious igloo. The two go ice fishing, but Buster is soon back pursuing his neighbor with seduction—and possibly even rape—on his mind. (This point is underscored when Keaton briefly morphs into Erich von Stroheim as the phony aristocrat from Foolish Wives.) As he grapples with the woman’s husband, Sybil appears at the window and shoots her philandering man in the back. The neighboring couple are reunited, but Buster levels his gun at the pair and is about to fire when he is awakened by Eddie Cline, playing the janitor in an empty movie theater. It was, after all, a bizarre dream.
The Frozen North was a sharp stick in the eye of William S. Hart, who justly regarded it as a merciless parody. “I had a little trouble, but I tried my best to be Bill Hart,” Keaton innocently recalled, “so much so that Bill Hart didn’t speak to me for a couple of years after I made it. He thought I was kidding him. I said, ‘I didn’t kid you, Bill. I was just trying to be an actor like you, and I didn’t quite make it.’ ”
The third Arbuckle trial began on March 6, 1922, and was longer than either of the previous hearings, consuming nearly five weeks. As before, there was expert testimony on the state of Virginia Rappe’s health on the day of the party, the defense once more contending that the cause of her death was the result of chronic bladder troubles and had nothing to do with any actions taken by the defendant.[*2] Arbuckle, who turned thirty-five during the trial, was put back on the stand, the defense conceding that having his testimony merely read into the record during the second trial was a tactical error. In all, jurors heard the testimony of nearly seventy witnesses before retiring to render a verdict on April 12, a process, based on the two previous trials, that was expected to take at least two days. In fact, they were out exactly six minutes, the actual deliberation having taken less than sixty seconds.
The verdict, rendered by acclamation, was for acquittal. Arbuckle let out a great sigh of relief. Then, for the benefit of the press, the entire jury, including the two alternates, took the extraordinary step of issuing a statement. “Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle,” it read. “We feel that a great injustice has been done him. We feel also that it was only our plain duty to give him this exoneration, under the evidence, for there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime….We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and women, who sat listening for thirty-one days to the evidence, that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.”
That evening, Jesse L. Lasky, vice president of Famous Players-Lasky, said that a new Fatty Arbuckle feature would be released immediately. “Our contract with Arbuckle expired at the time of his trouble. Whether or not this contract will be renewed will depend on the public. The public makes or breaks all stars.”
Around the same time, Arbuckle issued a statement of his own: “For this vindication I am truly grateful to God and my fellow men and women. My life has been devoted to the production of clean pictures for the happiness of children. I shall try to enlarge my field of usefulness so that my art shall have a wider service.”
The Arbuckle picture that opened the next day at the New Garrick in Los Angeles was Gasoline Gus, the film Sid Grauman prematurely yanked during its premiere engagement at the Million Dollar. The response was encouraging; Arbuckle reportedly drew heavy applause at every performance. On the East Coast, a small theater on Long Island booked one of the old Comique two-reelers and saw turn-away business. Yet, a few days later at a theater in Detroit, an Arbuckle short was pulled within two hours of opening due to complaints from female patrons.
Any groundswell of interest in Arbuckle’s comedies was nipped in the bud on April 18, when Will Hays, the newly installed head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, officially banned them, at least temporarily, as his first move in an announced campaign to “clean up” the motion picture industry. He did this, he stated publicly, after consulting with Nicholas Schenck, acting on behalf of his brother, and Adolph Zukor, who he said agreed to cancel all showings and bookings of Arbuckle films at his request. “They do this that the whole matter may have the consideration that its importance warrants, and the action is taken notwithstanding the fact that they had nearly ten thousand contracts in force for the Arbuckle pictures.”
In Los Angeles, Arbuckle was stunned when given the news by a reporter for The New York Times. “Gosh,” he said. “This is a complete surprise and I might say a shock to me. It is the first I have heard of it. I don’t know what it is all about, for I thought I was well started on my comeback. You see, it’s this way. Joseph Schenck of New York, who produced my pictures, will be in Los Angeles tomorrow. He will know all about this matter. As I am entirely at sea, as far as being able to explain it goes, I shall content myself with remaining silent.”
Schenck, it turned out, had been boxed in by Zukor, who didn’t want the Paramount brand tarnished by its continued association with Arbuckle. The company had already taken a $700,000 write-off on the three completed Arbuckle pictures left on the shelf, and Zukor now saw a threat to the entire program. Years later, Hays admitted as much in his memoirs, revealing that it was Zukor who insisted on Arbuckle’s banishment. “So far as he was concerned, the outrage was very real. Arbuckle had let him down—he had let the whole industry down no less than his fans—and Zukor was prepared to take the loss.” Hays recalled asking Zukor to issue the necessary statement, but the studio president didn’t want his fingerprints all over the murder weapon. “No, Will, let the Association give it out. That will show that the Association means business.”[*3]
When cornered by the press, Hays refused to comment on the ban in view of Arbuckle’s acquittal and the jury’s subsequent statement, but others were more than willing to speak out on his behalf.
“Of course [Arbuckle] is innocent in the eyes of the law,” said Dwight Harris, chairman of the Kansas Board of Film Censors. “The baseball players of the Chicago White Sox, who were accused of throwing the World Series in 1919, were acquitted in court, but you don’t read of any of them playing in organized baseball.”
Added Mrs. B. L. Short, a member of the Kansas board: “I hope that Arbuckle will not try to force his pictures on a disgusted public very soon.”
Similar statements came from exhibitors’ groups, women’s clubs, and religious leaders across the nation.
Significantly, Joe Schenck had already taken steps to distance himself from Arbuckle, retiring the Comique name and establishing Buster Keaton Productions, Inc., in its place. As with Comique, the principal stockholders were the two Schenck brothers, who jointly owned 40 percent of the corporation, followed by Loew’s Incorporated treasurer David Bernstein, Irving Berlin, Sophye Anger, Lillian S. Ullman, David L. and Arthur M. Loew (the sons of Marcus Loew), production executive Albert A. Kaufman, and attorney Leopold Friedman. No apparent effort was made to make Buster Keaton an owner of Buster Keaton Productions; Roscoe Arbuckle never had any ownership stake in Comique. In both cases the men were nothing more than employees, albeit well-compensated ones.
Tommy Gray went back to New York in March, calling it a season after just three months on the West Coast. Having been at least partially responsible for two of Keaton’s oddest comedies, he arrived home just as The High Sign was making its long-delayed debut on Broadway. Variety’s Abel Green, in finding the picture “interesting,” seemed to validate its maker’s own lukewarm assessment. The Film Daily recognized the picture as a Metro release, thus distinguishing it from the more recent First National offerings. “Keaton spent considerable pains on his newest, but it lacks the punch that has put over his newer series. The High Sign is much weaker than Keaton’s last one, The Boat.”
With his writing staff back down to two, Keaton opted to return to The Electric House, the two-reeler he was making when he fractured his ankle. “We shelved everything I had shot on it,” he said in 1958, “and then later on…I remade the picture.” The task of working out a fully automated version of Ed Gray’s old house at Bluffton fell to Fred “Gabe” Gabourie, a former stage carpenter who got his start in New York with George Ade’s 1904 comedy The College Widow. Gabourie arrived in Los Angeles in 1913 with a touring company of Everywoman and decided he liked the climate. In pictures he worked at Inceville, Thomas Ince’s sprawling production complex in the Pacific Palisades, and for the Fox Film Corporation. After two years as technical director at Jesse D. Hampton’s Fleming Street studios, he moved to Metro as a stage technician and was put in charge of exteriors for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, building a French village and the story’s Marne Valley castle at the Metro ranch and overseeing the film’s depiction of the devastated countryside along the western front. Gabourie joined Keaton when Comique was leasing studio space from Metro and eventually established an independent scenic shop on the property with partner Edward Cushing.
Gabourie must have started with a laundry list of mechanized conveniences, and may even have suggested a few of his own. The setup was simple enough, an accidental mix-up of degrees at the commencement exercises of a state university. The dean (played by Joe Roberts) announces that he needs a technician to electrify his house, and the ideal man for the job presents a diploma in cosmetics and manicuring. The girl next to him has Buster’s degree in botany. And Buster himself innocently presents the other guy’s sheepskin in electrical engineering. Granted the job, Buster begins to protest, then takes full note of Virginia Fox, the dean’s fetching daughter, and relents. As the family pulls away on vacation, leaving Buster to do his stuff, Virginia slips him a copy of the book Basic Manual of Electricity.
Finding the dean’s house was no trouble at all. Early in the new year, after it was discovered that Natalie was pregnant, Peg Talmadge moved herself in, joining two of her three daughters under Buster’s roof. “By April,” said Keaton, “the walls were bulging. Nat had said, ‘This Westchester Place house will be big enough for anything.’ Perhaps it wasn’t Sanforized. It had certainly shrunk.” Soon the hunt was on for Natalie’s “castle of dreams,” the home she described in her essay for the Evening Herald, something big and roomy with grounds for a vegetable patch and a flower garden. With her sisters and mother pitching in, a three-story Tudor-style mansion was located in the exclusive Westmoreland Place development, a gated community in East Hollywood where Mack Sennett was one of the residents. This rental property conveniently served as the dean’s home for Gabe Gabourie’s purposes.
The interior sets, fabricated at the studio, were built to reflect the general look and dimensions of the place. The treacherous staircase was reworked from scratch. An electrified bookcase was wired to select and dispense books with a retractable arm that extended six feet into the room. Virginia’s suite was tricked out with a mechanized Murphy bed and a traveling bathtub that rolled along on tracks. Sliding doors opened and closed on command. A pool table in the library was served by a conveyor that recovered and reracked the balls automatically. The swimming pool out back instantly drained and refilled with the yank of a lever. The kitchen was equipped to wash and shelve dishes with a minimum of human intervention. And the dining room was serviced by a model train routed through the kitchen and out onto the table, where it would pause and deliver servings at each individual setting. The Electric House was the quintessential Keaton invention, a tinkerer’s paradise in which every contrivance was blessed with the potential for comedy should anything go wrong.
The first time Buster demonstrates the stairs for the dean, the control sticks and the contraption propels the hapless homeowner through a landing window and into the pool below. At dinner, the track comes undone, causing the train to dump the evening’s entrées into the lap of the dean’s wife. Then the real electrical engineer sneaks in to take his revenge, crossing the wires in the basement and causing the automated house to take on a life of its own. At the end, Virginia rejects Buster and he ties a rock to his neck, leaping into the pool in another dark climax. Alarmed, she pulls the lever to drain the pool, only to have her father reverse the control, happy to see the cause of the day’s mayhem drown at the bottom of one of his own inventions.
The Electric House marked the final appearance of Virginia Fox in a Keaton comedy. At its completion she announced her resignation, weary of being a prop whose principal talent was obedience. “If I was hanging from an elk’s head and they said, ‘Hold it,’ I held it—even if they went to lunch,” she said. “I did whatever I was told.” Intent upon starring in a series of her own comedy shorts, she managed to make only one, and after a poorly received feature titled Itching Palms, she retired from movies altogether. In 1924, she married Darryl Zanuck, Mal St. Clair’s writing partner, who was later to gain fame as vice president in charge of production at 20th Century-Fox. The Zanucks had three children, one of whom, Richard, in partnership with producer David Brown, was responsible for a number of successful films, including The Sting, Jaws, and Cocoon. Late in life, in responding to a fan letter, Virginia Zanuck wrote: “Of all the movies I made, I liked best working for Buster Keaton.”
“Nate is beginning to look like a small popover,” Peg Talmadge fretted in a letter to Anita Loos, “and methinks it’s a boy. If so, out it goes hot or cold.” Peg’s middle daughter, who was now seven months along, accompanied her husband to San Francisco in the waning days of the third Arbuckle trial to lend moral support as well as to privately screen My Wife’s Relations and The Frozen North for a conference of First National exhibitors. Reactions to the films were mixed, causing Variety to report that “some trouble between Keaton and First National is said to have arisen.” The tensions came at a time of consolidation in the world of film comedy. The elfin Larry Semon, whose studio ball team was trounced regularly by Keaton’s, was negotiating to end his contract with Vitagraph so that he could produce his shorts independently. Bidding was expected from First National, which would soon be losing Charlie Chaplin to United Artists, as well as Fox. It was known that Chaplin intended to make a serious picture once he had freed himself of First National, a move that would leave just three first-rank comedians in the field—Semon, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton.
Roscoe Arbuckle’s three trials for manslaughter left him owing more than $100,000, including a $50,000 payment reportedly due to lead attorney Gavin McNab. Having lived on cash flow for so long, Arbuckle had little in reserve to meet these obligations and began the dispiriting task of dismantling his former life, selling anything of value for as much as he could get. In May 1922, he was said to be flat broke, having sold his Cadillac touring car to Keaton and his Cadillac speedster to Eddie Cline. He deeded his house on West Adams, which he purchased in 1920, to Joe Schenck as security on loans Schenck had made to cover his legal expenses.
In a statement to Lanning Warren of United Press, Arbuckle said he was so heavily in debt that he had no hope of coming back in any line of work until he could once again make pictures. “I’m not sobbing, however. Hays has said my pictures are banned pending an investigation, and I’m sure he’ll find I’m the victim of persecution. But until he makes his decision, I’m making no plans for the future.” Keaton’s first impulse after the Hays edict was to give Arbuckle work behind the camera, and that, it appeared, couldn’t happen soon enough. A forlorn, almost ghostlike figure, Roscoe had taken to hanging around the United Studios where he had made his Paramount features. “He has nothing to do,” Warren’s article reported, “and walks around the studios watching the people who used to work for him. Since his arrest last fall he has had no income whatever, except a check recently received from the Buster Keaton company for a scenario Fatty wrote.”
The scenario was titled The Vision, and as of June 2, Buster was actually shooting it under Arbuckle’s direction. Actress Renée Adorée, who would go on to prominence as leading lady to John Gilbert and Lon Chaney, was the girl in the picture, and in an interview with the French journal Cinémagazine she identified Arbuckle as the film’s director (as did items in Variety and the Oakland Tribune). Yet the premise was familiar to followers of Keaton’s work: Buster asks a father for the hand of his daughter, and the old man wants to know if he’s even capable of earning a living. “I think so,” he replies. “To prove it, I’ll go to the city and achieve success. If I fail, I’ll come back and shoot myself!”
What follows is a series of letters in which Buster paints himself as hugely accomplished, when the reality is something quite different. First, he writes that he is working at a hospital where he cares for two hundred patients. “You wouldn’t believe some of the operations I’m performing.” Renée imagines him as a great surgeon; then the scene fades in on the gate of a dog and cat hospital. Buster opens it and is greeted by Luke, who accompanies him on his rounds.[*4]
The next letter: “I now work in the financial district, where I am cleaning up in a big way.” And Renée imagines him as a prosperous Wall Street tycoon. Fade in on Buster the public sanitation worker. After losing control of a firehose and making a watery mess of politician Joe Roberts’ rally, he is summarily dropped into a manhole.
The third segment has him appearing in a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Renée envisions him, skull in hand, taking bows for a masterful performance. He is, in fact, a supernumerary in a cheap musical. Costumed as a Roman soldier, he is thrown out by stage manager Eddie Cline and quickly runs afoul of the law.
His fourth letter: “The audience response was so overwhelming, I have been summoned to appear before a police assembly.” She pictures him in a reviewing stand as hundreds of blue uniforms march past. In reality he is brought before a judge, but manages to flee before sentencing. The resulting chase quickly mushrooms into a reprise of Cops, set this time amid the hilly streets and cable cars of San Francisco. It concludes with Buster leaping onto a ferry leaving port, only to discover it is actually pulling into dock, delivering him back into the hands of his mob of pursuers. Desperate to escape, he hops over a railing and finds himself atop the paddle wheel, momentarily safe until the boat starts moving. Soon trapped inside the thing, he must race like a hamster until he is thrown clear. In the end, a bruised and bedraggled Buster is returned to Renée via parcel post, and her father helpfully offers his pistol so that he can make good on his pledge.
“I used to daydream an awful lot,” Keaton once said. “I’ve done that so often in pictures. I could get carried away and visualize all the fairylands in the world.” Buster’s natural propensity may have been the reason he settled on Day Dreams as the title of the film, his ninth for First National. And, along with the participation of Arbuckle and his dog, Luke, Day Dreams also marked Joe Keaton’s return to the company as Renée’s intimidating father. The year 1922 had kicked off with a family portrait of all five of the Keatons in Photoplay, Louise looking winsome, Myra wary, Harry slightly pugnacious. Buster is assuming his trademark deadpan, leaving Joe alone to display a proud smile. But not long after the photo was taken, Joe left the house on Ingraham and moved in with his son and daughter-in-law, an arrangement that was doomed not to last. By the time the Talmadge invasion was complete, Joe had taken a room at the Continental Hotel on South Hill Street, a favorite stopping place for actors and vaudevillians along L.A.’s unofficial Rialto. Downstairs, the walls of the lounge were covered with hundreds of autographed photos of famous guests who had stayed there since the place opened in 1907. Pershing Square was just down the block, the Pantages was right across the street, Bullock’s department store was next door, and the Hillstreet Theatre building housed the new clubroom of the National Vaudeville Association, where scores of members congregated.
Buster was shooting Day Dreams when Natalie gave birth to a boy at L.A.’s Methodist Hospital on the evening of June 2, 1922. It was an event that brought the entire family together, Norma and Dutch insisting he’d call neither of them “auntie.” According to Peg Talmadge, her first grandchild was born at seven minutes past seven and weighed exactly seven pounds. “What’s more,” said his father, wincing as he walked the floor with the screaming infant, “he was born with seven lungs.” There was little debate over what he’d be named. Extending back to Buster’s great-great-great-grandfather, the eldest Keaton son was always named Joseph. So the formal birth name was quickly determined to be Joseph Talmadge Keaton. There was pushback on the matter of his nickname, though. None of the Talmadge women would countenance Buster Jr., and after a standoff lasting several weeks, they got their way. The baby, who scowled in the first picture of him released to the press, would be known as Jim.
When First National exercised its option on a second series of six Buster Keaton comedies, the advance due for each film jumped from $70,000 to $85,000, while worldwide rentals were showing a steady decline.[*5] Keaton, it appeared, was a critics’ darling, popular with both exhibitors and audiences, but his pictures weren’t as profitable as the company—particularly J. D. Williams, co-founder and general manager—thought they should be. Charlie Chaplin, who would soon be completing his contract with First National, thought Williams and his cohorts “inconsiderate, unsympathetic, and shortsighted.” Keaton, too, had grown to dislike them, although he didn’t have to directly deal with them as much as Chaplin did. Launching into the fourth film of the second series with an absurdist take on The Sea Wolf, Keaton left to shoot exteriors in the waters off Catalina Island, dispensing with the usual leading lady and focusing his attentions on Joe Roberts, who had just signed a year’s contract with Fox. Big Joe’s whaling ship is incongruously named Love Nest, and he makes Buster the steward after tossing his predecessor—followed by an obligatory funeral wreath—overboard. In fact, so many crewmembers hit the water at the hands of the menacing captain that a supply of such wreaths is kept close at hand. Buster eventually manages his escape by knocking a hole in the hull of the ship and then patiently waiting in a lifeboat until the water reaches it.
Keaton had completed The Love Nest and started on his next picture when he learned from Joe Schenck that First National wouldn’t commit to a third series. The telegram from Williams, as Buster remembered it, contained the line WE CANNOT BE BOTHERED WITH HIS SHORT SUBJECTS. “Schenck showed this to me. ‘Okay,’ I told him, ‘I will do them an additional favor. I won’t make the last picture for them.’ ” It was a rare burst of artistic temperament from a man not known for such displays.
“Buster,” pleaded Schenck, “your contract calls for you to make twelve pictures. I can handle this situation—but not if you refuse to make the final picture for them.”
Keaton was unmoved. “But if they say they can’t be bothered, my answer is, ‘Fine, then I’m doing you a favor in not bothering you with a twelfth picture.’ ”
He equated what Williams had done with what Martin Beck had done to his father from the wings of the Palace Theater. “How can I make a man laugh who tells me he can’t be bothered with my comedies?” he asked. “Why should I want to?”
Williams had chosen to make his move just about the time Cops opened on Broadway, drawing lavish praise from all quarters.
“It would take something a lot better than the feature photoplay at the Rivoli this week[*6] to take the honors of the program away from Buster Keaton’s new comedy, Cops.” (The New York Times)
“Buster Keaton is traveling high again, scoring a knockout, as it were, with a funny comedy entitled Cops.” (Motion Picture News)
“Don’t fail to wait for Cops, the Buster Keaton comedy.” (Evening Mail)
“Buster Keaton is irresistible and you can make no mistake if you show him to your audience. His popularity has grown and is on the ascent.” (Film Daily)
“A great many kindly people express sincere sympathy for the editor of this department,” Robert Sherwood acknowledged in Life, “because he is called upon, in the course of his daily duties, to see so many movies.”
“ ‘Don’t you get tired of them?’
“ ‘Can’t you write your reviews without actually seeing the films themselves?’
“ ‘How do your eyes stand the strain?’
“These are samples of the well-intentioned queries that pour in. As a matter of fact, the sympathy is wasted. I am perfectly willing to sit through fifty dull feature films if I know that, at the end of that session, I shall be allowed to see a Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton comedy. In Cops, Keaton develops the old police chase idea to the nth power by staging his antics in the midst of a police parade, and the resultant mob effect is as stupendous as anything in Mr. [William] Fox’s spectacles. What is more, it is actually funnier—and that is no faint praise.”
J. D. Williams, who retained distribution rights to the Talmadge features, later admitted to Schenck that the wire was merely a ploy intended to counter an expected demand for more money. “That being the case,” said Keaton in his autobiography, “Mr. Williams outsmarted himself, for I never did make that twelfth little movie for First National. Just about that time Loew sent word that he wanted me to make full-length features for his company, Metro, to release.”
Keaton and crew on location at Truckee during the filming of The Balloonatic, his final two-reel comedy of the silent era. Co-director Eddie Cline is seated directly behind his star, while actress Phyllis Haver, center, poses with her arm around assistant director Al Gilmore.
Keaton finished The Balloonatic, his eleventh short for First National, with the knowledge it would be his last. Appropriately, the film took on a languid, dreamlike quality that belied its slapstick roots. Creatively, it’s Buster putting his feet up, allowing the girl in the story to drive the action for a change. Phyllis Haver, a bright, talented comedienne on loan from Mack Sennett, turned out to be the most boisterous of all of his female leads. He meets her at an amusement park, but the encounter doesn’t go well.
“Comedy is best when it arouses the curiosity of the audience,” he said, describing the scene to a newspaper reporter shortly after the film’s completion. “As an example of the kind of thing I mean, take this situation. A man sees a pretty girl get into one of those ‘Old Mill’ boats at Coney Island. He gets into the same boat and it passes out of the picture. The action progresses with no sign of the boat for many feet of film. When it reappears, the man has a black eye and other damages. It is simple, but there is nothing that requires more knowledge and has a greater number of rules or technical stunts than comedy slapstick or the other kind.”
Buster happens upon a balloon launch and gets trapped on top of the thing after agreeing to attach a banner. In flight, he makes himself at home, and from there the film becomes an idyll. He manages to puncture the balloon while shooting at ducks and lands in a tree. The next morning, he decides to go fishing and comes upon Phyllis doing the same thing. She also swims, chops wood, throws rocks, grills fish, and wrestles a steer to the ground. Rural exteriors, Haver remembered, were shot on the banks of the Truckee River. She described the town itself as having one old wooden hotel, several saloons, and little else. One night she was awakened by shouts of “Fire!” and escaped with her makeup kit and costumes, leaving everything else, and scrambling down stairs “with sheets of flame all around.” The fire destroyed the old hotel in fifteen minutes, forcing the company to move to “miserable accommodations” over the Southern Pacific station.
After a scary encounter with a couple of bears, Buster and Phyllis float contentedly down a river in Buster’s canoe, unaware that they are rapidly approaching a steep waterfall. Unexpectedly, the boat takes flight, gliding effortlessly on past the edge of the rushing water, Buster having whimsically attached the old patched-up balloon to it. He leans into her, she embraces him, and off they fly into features, leaving the merciless world of two-reel comedies behind.