20
I’ve Got Lots of Time
“BUSTER KEATON is suffering from a nervous breakdown brought on by family and financial worries,” Dr. John Shuman explained in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. “His condition is very grave, and it was necessary to remove him from his Los Angeles home to a hospital for complete isolation.”
With the press carrying news of Keaton’s condition nationally, it took exactly one day for Mae to emerge from hiding. She told the Universal News Service she was ready to forget the past and go to his bedside. “I know I can help him,” she said. “I nursed him through a similar collapse three years ago and I can do it again. If he is worried about financial matters I’ll take care of him until he can return to his studio. I’m able to do so. I want to tell him I love him and that the divorce was too hasty. I know I can help him.”
She appealed to Colonel Thomas A. Mattison, medical director at the soldiers’ home, but was told Buster was under sedation and could only be seen by the two attending specialists. (Myra and Harry Keaton were told the same thing.) She left a note: “Darling—Please tell the nurse when you feel like seeing me. Elmer and I are waiting. Oodles of love, Mae.”
Buster Keaton had always exhibited remarkable recuperative powers, and on October 24, 1935, he was reported as improving. “Buster spent a comfortable night,” Mattison said, “and during waking moments is rational. He sleeps quietly most of the time.”
The daily condition updates subsided. Seven days into his hospitalization, Keaton was up and around, eating well and submitting to tests. “They won’t release you out of that until they’ve x-rayed everything you’ve got,” he told Kevin Brownlow in 1964. “If you’ve got dandruff, they’ll keep you there. The doctor calls me in and says, ‘When did you break your neck?’ I said I never broke my neck. He said, ‘Look at this x-ray. This callus has grown over the crack; it’s next to the top vertebra.’ I didn’t know it. I said, ‘How long ago was this?’ ‘That looks like it could be somewhere between ten and fifteen years ago.’ That’s how old the scar was. I started thinking back. ‘I know when it happened. It’s that goddamn fall on the track [during the making of Sherlock Jr.]. It cracked this vertebrae.’ I never stopped working, never knew it. Well, that’s luck. No nerve pinched or anything in the healing—and I never knew it.”
On October 31, ten days into his hospitalization, Keaton was temporarily released so that he could belatedly celebrate his fortieth birthday. The house on Queensbury was festively decorated; Myra had baked a cake and was roasting a chicken. Joe was present, as were Harry and Louise. By design it was a quiet, private affair. And at the end of the evening, Buster was driven back to the hospital, where he would submit to an exit exam in the morning.
Mae never did get to see him but told the Times she was ready to go to him in her capacity as a nurse. “It all depends on him. If he wants help I’ll go to him. I know he needs me. I know I can help him.”
Keaton, however, told the paper his marital troubles had contributed to his breakdown. “I’m not interested in marriage anymore,” he said. “I’ve got to go to work next week. I just folded up on account of all my troubles hitting me at once. Mrs. Keaton is a nice girl, but patching things up is out of the question. They’ve got me on a milk diet and I feel one hundred percent better. There’ll be no more sickness if I can help it.”
Mae, who had offered to drop her alienation-of-affection suit against Leah Sewell, didn’t take the news well. “Apparently Buster wasn’t suffering as much from worry over domestic troubles as I had been led to believe,” she said tartly. “He hasn’t seen fit to acknowledge my visit to the hospital or the friendly note I sent him. So things inevitably remain as before, and I intend to go ahead with the alienation suit which I had been willing to drop if it would ease his condition. But I’m grateful that he is well again, and I wish him every success in his work.”
Two months later, Mae skipped over the border to Tijuana and married a publicist and aspiring screenwriter named Sam Fuller, who was seven years her junior. In this, history repeated itself in that it would take another nine months for her divorce to become final. In the papers, both she and Fuller vowed to occupy separate homes.
In Grand Slam Opera (1936), Keaton hijacks Colonel Crows’ Amateur Night while bandleader Harold Goodwin gently attempts to restore order.
Keaton was still not out of the woods. For the picture he went back to make, Three on a Limb, he was drunk through much of the shoot. He was, however, among friends—Charlie Lamont and Hal Goodwin were both on the picture—and the film turned out well, its chaotic climax, an ever-shifting combination of bride and groom, being one of the best farcical turns he ever pulled off. He held himself together for Grand Slam Opera, his final film of the season, a minor masterpiece of comedy in which he delivered an inventive parody of Major Edward Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour, which had become a national obsession on network radio. People were traveling from all over for their chance at stardom, so Keaton, who shared a writing credit with Lamont, envisioned a musical opening to the tune of George M. Cohan’s “So Long, Mary” with the townspeople forcibly loading him onto the back of the Western Limited, eager to get rid of him.
“Awfully good of all you boys to see me to the train…,” he sings.
“So long, Elmer!” they respond.
“I didn’t think you’d care should you ne’er see me again…”
“You’re right, Elmer!”
Keaton was so tickled at the prospect he paid $300 out of his own pocket for the rights to the song. Later in the film, he performed a parody of Fred Astaire’s “No Strings” number from Top Hat, the phonograph blaring as he clambers around his tiny room, leaping onto a bureau, a chair, a side table, up onto the mantel, where he manages a clumsy tap routine, then crashing down onto the bed, anticipating in some respects Astaire’s own ceiling dance (“You’re All the World to Me”) from Royal Wedding. When the picture was finished, Keaton came away knowing he had to get serious about drying out. Despair at Metro was one thing, but Educational had been more than good to him, and he loved the work he was doing. So in December he submitted once again to the so-called Keeley Cure, this time with a renewed sense of purpose.
Keaton’s modest home looked out onto the California Country Club, where a converted ranch home served as the clubhouse. “After taking that cure the second time,” he recounted in his autobiography, “I was taken home and immediately went for a walk on the golf course. I walked over the entire eighteen holes and, on reaching the clubhouse, I walked to the bar and ordered two manhattans. I drank them one after another. They not only tasted great, they stayed down. That was in 1935 and, after proving to myself I could drink if I felt like it, stop if I felt like it, I did not touch a drop of whiskey or any other alcoholic drink for five years.”
It was on Christmas Day 1935 that Keaton took the pledge. Once he regained his health, he made a renewed commitment to filmmaking, signing for six more comedies with Educational and two proposed features for independent producer I. E. Chadwick. Concurrently, he was on the nation’s screens in The Timid Young Man, Three on a Limb, and a Technicolor confection from Louis Lewyn titled La Fiesta de Santa Barbara, which afforded him particular prominence among “a galaxy of screen stars” that included Robert Taylor, Harpo Marx, Gary Cooper, and the singing Garland Sisters. Then Film Daily caught a preview of Grand Slam Opera and pronounced it “a laugh riot,” building industry and exhibitor anticipation ahead of its February 21, 1936, release date.
Somewhat poisoning the well amid all this good news was the long-delayed appearance of The Invader, the Sam Spiegel epic Keaton had filmed in England in 1934. Released in its country of origin by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, it was widely seen—and derided—as the second feature on a bill with The Hands of Orlac, an American-made thriller starring Peter Lorre and Colin Clive. The problem, according to director Adrian Brunel, was that the completed film was deemed too short by its distributor, and so a new editor was hired to put back “every cut-out piece of film she could find until the picture was 6,000 feet in length,” thus yielding an even more sluggish result than the movie’s deliberate pacing alone could achieve. “The staging is cheap, and the direction obviously handicapped,” concluded The Kinematograph Weekly. “It is impossible to assess the entertainment value of this film—there is none.”
Control of The Invader fell to a broker called Interworld Films, the head of which, E. R. Gourdeau, brought it to New York in January 1936 with hopes of finding an American distributor. In the end, there was little interest, and the movie was picked up by J. H. Hoffberg, who specialized in foreign product and vintage silents. Hoffberg proceeded to offer the Keaton picture, retitled An Old Spanish Custom, on a state rights basis, placing it in such regional markets as Georgia, Texas, Ohio, and Kansas. The closest it ever got to New York was a Skouras house in Newark, where it was one of four features holding down the bill for a single week.
Once again Keaton was at the head of the Educational lineup with Grand Slam Opera, which debuted at the Roxy in support of the Gaumont-British feature Rhodes. “This is a wholly funny two-reeler,” said Variety, “showing Keaton as a small town lad from Arizona who juggles and wants to make good on the air. He finally gets on Major Crow’s [sic] program, gets the gong quickly but refuses to take it, and winds up nearly wrecking the studio. There’s a stock shot of the RCA Building in Radio City to cinch the resemblance just in case audiences don’t get the ‘Major Crow’ billing. It’s pretty near good enough to be sold as a baby feature.”
As the new season’s schedule was taking shape at Educational, the decision was made to base all future production at the Eastern Service Studios (formerly Paramount) on Long Island, effectively severing ties with Hollywood at a time when more filming than ever was taking place in California. Keaton arrived in New York by air in May, where he discovered he wouldn’t have the support to which he was accustomed in Los Angeles. The threadbare script for The Fourth Alarm, his eleventh comedy for Educational, was the work of one of the top radio writers of the day, David Freedman. It was Freedman who pioneered the technique of compiling extensive joke and situation files, and combining those resources with an assembly line of “assistants” who could turn out custom material for individual clients and agencies on demand. In Keaton’s case, the Freedman contribution tended to be dialogue rather than action, the overall idea being little more than a simple setup with a predictable payoff—Keaton as Elmer, an incompetent firefighter, who triumphs despite his ineptitude. Raymond Kane, a former production manager who had been with Al Christie since his days as an independent producer, was an efficient director who lacked Charlie Lamont’s gift for gags and plot turns. Keaton, in other words, was pretty much on his own.
The result was a comedy more situational than usual, with stock clips and exteriors shot on streets proximate to the Astoria complex giving the film a New York flavor. Once Elmer’s bleak future as a firefighter was established, Keaton, free to take as many risks as he pleased, took a spectacular fall off the back of a racing fire engine as it rounded a corner, the kind of stunt neither Freedman nor Kane could ever envision, but one that clearly declared the star’s independence from the banalities of the script.
Retitled Blue Blazes, the picture was finished in time for Keaton to spend Independence Day in California and fulfill a commitment to play in a charity baseball game. Around town, he was no longer a figure of dread, turning up, for instance, at a party thrown by Eddie Mannix and doing his waiter routine for an appreciative audience. Usually at such affairs he was accompanied by Betty Ann Logan, a blond bit player to whom he was rumored to be engaged. He returned to New York just ahead of the Labor Day weekend to tackle two more Educational two-reelers, a Freedman story titled The Chemist, directed by Al Christie, and another for Raymond Kane, Mixed Magic, in which Elmer, nicknamed “Happy,” makes a shambles of a sideshow magic act. The three films made in the east weren’t bad, but they lacked the level of inventiveness apparent in the comedies made in Hollywood, where Keaton had Charlie Lamont as his principal collaborator.
It was during the filming of The Chemist that Natalie Talmadge brought an action in the Supreme Court of the County of New York to attach Buster’s earnings for the picture, claiming the amount of $4,500, the aggregate of fifteen missed support payments of $300 each. Yet when she applied to the Superior Court in Los Angeles to collect the money, Keaton and his attorney responded by pointing out that when the original order was made in 1932, she was, without his knowledge, in possession of $12,000 she had taken from a joint bank account, community property she never disclosed in the settlement. He therefore maintained that he was not in arrears at all, but rather due $6,000 from the plaintiff as his share of the money. He also took the opportunity to ask that the monthly child support payments be reduced to $100 a month, given that his employment situation had changed dramatically since 1932, and that he had earned just $15,000 since January 1, 1936. Finally, he asked that he be given custody of their two boys, alleging that Natalie had not maintained a home for them, but “has kept, and continues to keep, them in a boarding school, which is expensive and beyond the means of affiant to provide, and that affiant, at all times, has been willing, and is now willing to support said boys to the best of his ability…so that they may attend the public schools and higher educational institutions of this county and state.”
The matter of the boys had long stuck in his craw, since he had made repeated attempts to see them at the Black-Foxe Military Institute and take them out for weekends, only to have them ordered not to go at—he believed—Natalie’s direction to “further embarrass” him. (The institute’s president, actor Earle Foxe, went back a long way with the Talmadges, having played a featured role in Norma’s breakout picture, Panthea.)
“The boys adored Buster,” said Louise Keaton. “He was upset when Natalie wanted to put them in pictures. He tried to get them back. He wanted them to have a normal childhood, but he didn’t have the money to go against the Talmadges in court.”
It was as if Natalie wanted to clear her life of all reminders of her marriage to Buster Keaton, including the children who were the products of it. “My mother was very vindictive,” Jim Talmadge said. “She had nothing but the worst things in the world to say about him. He never said anything bad about her in his life.” Jim and his brother, Bobby, hated Black-Foxe, as did the sons of other famous figures who parked their kids there, such as Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., Charles and Sydney Chaplin, and Harry Carey’s son, Dobe. “That was a prison as far as I was concerned. I escaped from there five times.”
Following one particularly bold attempt, the boys were sent to live for a year with their aunt Norma in West Palm Beach, where Jim was permitted to drive her Rolls roadster at the age of twelve. Meanwhile, their mother was seen out on the town with Charlie Chaplin and was courted by the likes of Randolph Scott and Howard Hughes.
In his motion to vacate the warrant of attachment in New York, Keaton said he was a poor man whose reversals had rendered him unable to live up to the terms of the original settlement. “It is my belief that the persecution tactics indulged in by the plaintiff have been motivated by her sister, Norma Talmadge, who for years has evidenced a violent dislike for me. The plaintiff has always been dominated by the advice and guidance of her sister.” He estimated that he gave Natalie allowances totaling $254,800 during their marriage, as well as the house and furniture, the yacht, and other California property valued at $30,000. Since the divorce, he said he had lost $30,000 on his investment in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and another $30,000 in the Talmadge residential development in San Diego. “There is a claim against me by the United States government for $28,000 in income tax arrears. I now live in a small six-room bungalow in Culver City, California, with my mother, sister, and brother. I have no servants, cooks, valets, or chauffeurs.” By comparison, Natalie lived in a town house she rented for $470 a month, and had multiple servants on her payroll. The kids, he added, were each beneficiaries of $35,000 trust funds. She waited, he charged, until he came to New York to bring about the present situation, which left him struggling to raise money to cover his hotel expenses and his fare back to Los Angeles. “In this action I am being persecuted by a wife who is attempting to make it appear to the public, from which I must make my living, that I have failed to support her and her two sons. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”
The battle continued into December, when Natalie filed a lengthy affidavit in response to her ex-husband’s. She disputed his claim that he had “no regular means of livelihood” and provided details of his income for the years 1932 through 1936. For his last full year on salary at M-G-M he was paid $145,200 by the studio and another $2,100 as his share of the profits from Buster Keaton Productions. For 1933, the year he was fired, his income from Metro, personal appearances, and Aubrey Kennedy dropped to $47,400. In 1934, he had income from Educational of $17,500, the $15,000 payment for appearing in Le Roi des Champs-Elysées, and another $12,000 fee from British and Continental for The Invader. For 1935, his compensation from Educational amounted to $42,500, and the estimated total for 1936 was $15,000 for the three pictures produced in New York, with another $15,000 coming in 1937 for the balance of the contract.
She recounted his problems with the Internal Revenue Service, which, having signed a joint return, affected her as well, and denied that she lived as extravagantly as he claimed. The only real estate she owned was a three-story house on Las Tunas Beach, between Santa Monica and Malibu, which she received as part of a trade for the estate on Hartford Way. Yet the waterfront house had turned out to be a liability, as it could only be rented in the summer months and stood vacant much of the year. With upkeep and taxes, she cleared only a few hundred dollars a year in rentals. She was also the beneficiary of a trust established by her younger sister, Constance, that paid her $200 a month, which amounted to all the income she had. She drove a 1934 Packard coupe, a gift from the same sister, and employed only one maid, who was paid $25 a month. The monthly rent for the apartment she lived in was $85, and it had an extra bedroom for her sons when they came to stay over weekends and holidays. In terms of savings, she had $3,700 and change left from the divorce settlement. The trust funds for her kids were established by their grandmother. She disputed the business about the $12,000 in unreported community property.
The gambit over the kids didn’t work, and Keaton admitted he was mistaken about the $12,000. In a stipulation between the parties dated December 8, 1936, Natalie agreed to dismiss the attachment of the funds in New York, and Buster agreed to pay back and future child support totaling $5,900 on a scheduled basis over a period of seven months. Natalie would take no more actions against him, and the court would continue the matter of reducing the monthly support payments until July 1, 1937. Thereafter, whenever the kids came for a court-ordered visit, they were accompanied by an armed guard.
Buster Keaton’s next two shorts for Educational were made in December 1936 at the General Service Studios in Hollywood. Reunited with Charlie Lamont and producer Ed Allen, he secured the services of writer Paul Gerard Smith, who dated back to Battling Butler with him and knew his formula as well as anyone. Together, they produced a model of economy called Jail Bait, condensing enough material for an entire feature into nineteen compact minutes. In Smith’s story, a newspaper copy boy is persuaded to confess to a murder to help a pal, but can’t get himself arrested until he’s caught walking on the grass. He confesses, is sentenced to death, then discovers his friend has been killed in a plane crash. He busts out during a jailbreak, intent on finding the real killer and proving his innocence. With Hal Goodwin as the doomed friend, the film is full of morbid plot turns and rich in clever gags.
“He had a subtle way of getting suggestions in,” Goodwin remembered. “He’d say, ‘Oh, how about…Let me try…’ ”
Jail Bait was quickly followed by Ditto, which took advantage of the availability of identical twins, eighteen-year-old Gloria and Barbara Brewster, who had been scouted by 20th Century-Fox. Given the opportunistic nature of the picture, it played more like a sketch than a story, as far removed from Jail Bait as it could possibly be. Keaton had earlier explored the notion of unwittingly courting twin girls, and here the farce played itself out between a pair of duplex apartments. The idea quickly ran out of steam, and the ending, recalling the surrealistic turn of Hard Luck, was set fifteen years into the future, where planes fly with teardrop trailers attached and the next girl he meets turns out to be one of a set of quintuplets.
As the final film of Keaton’s contract came due, it was clear with the tightening shorts market that Educational couldn’t afford its costlier stars any longer, the most expensive of whom, at $5,000 a picture, was Buster himself. For his sixteenth and final two-reeler for the company, he brought his series of Educational comedies to a close with Love Nest on Wheels, based on a story by William Hazlett Upson of Earthworm Tractors fame. For Keaton, it would be a kind of farewell to the two-reel comedies in which he began exactly twenty years earlier. With him would again be his family, in a sort of reprise of the Diltz clan from Palooka from Paducah, Myra as the corncob-puffing matriarch, Louise as her indolent daughter, and, in lieu of Joe, Harry Keaton as Elmer’s younger brother. In form and substance, Love Nest would emerge as a hillbilly remake of The Bell Boy, with many of the same gags incorporated into Upson’s story. This time, the elevator in the dusty Van Buren Hotel is powered by an old mule, and Bud Jamison, who holds the mortgage on the place, gets his head caught between floors when the car stalls, prompting Elmer to try and dislodge it with a wooden plank. And like Alice Lake before her, Louise Keaton seesaws twelve feet into the air, landing on a moose’s head overlooking the hotel lobby. Adding to the valedictory tone of the film is the presence of Al St. John as Elmer’s bewhiskered Uncle Jed, a turn not unlike the scruffy sidekicks he was playing in B-westerns.
Ahead for Educational would be a gradual lessening of its output, with figures such as Iris Adrian, Willie Howard, and Tim and Irene Ryan starring in place of the likes of Keaton and Bert Lahr. The company would file for bankruptcy in January 1940, leaving a mixed legacy that included a body of work by Buster Keaton in which he demonstrated precisely how well he could do in talkies when permitted the autonomy he was largely denied at M-G-M.
With the completion of Love Nest on Wheels, Keaton was again at liberty. Briefly, he was up for a part in an Eddie Cantor feature at 20th Century-Fox and, more substantially, Leo Morrison was dickering with Hal Roach, who was planning to put him into a feature called Road Show with Oliver Hardy and Patsy Kelly. Nothing came to pass, though, and he filled his days spinning story ideas with Lew Lipton, one of which, Marooned in Mojave, was registered with the Copyright Office in April 1937. Still, no money was coming in.
Joe Schenck was now chairman of the board of 20th Century-Fox, having partnered with Darryl F. Zanuck in 1933 to form 20th Century Pictures. “Schenck knew Buster was in a bad way,” said Harold Goodwin, “because every nickel that Buster would make, Natalie would grab….Schenck told him to come over to the studio, that he wanted to see him. He got over there, and Schenck had a check, a blank check for him. He says, ‘Fill that in.’ Buster says, ‘I don’t know how much.’ He says, ‘Well, is a thousand dollars enough?’ Well, a thousand was a lot of dough. But Schenck always loved Buster.”
The money was deeply appreciated, but it wasn’t a job. In desperation, Keaton phoned Eddie Mannix at M-G-M and asked about prospects. Irving Thalberg was gone, having died of pneumonia the previous year, so Mannix connected him with Jack Chertok, who ran the short-subjects department and was amenable to bringing him on. The job paid $200 a week—a far cry from the $3,000 he was getting just four years earlier.
“Buster Keaton, former star of the slapstick school, and who in the days of silence was one of Metro’s luminaries in comedy features, is returning to that lot as a director,” The New York Times reported. “According to an agreement reached today…Keaton will be assigned to the two-reelers with the hope that he will be handed features after his initial endeavors.”
Keaton went back on the M-G-M payroll on June 24, 1937, joining the ranks of shorts directors David Miller, Leslie Fenton, Jacques Tourneur, and Fred Zinnemann, all of whom would advance to features. What happened after that is unclear, for three months later he was still without an assignment. A clue emerged in October, when it was reported that he, Ted Healy, and Buddy Ebsen were being groomed to replace the Marx Brothers, who had been brought to M-G-M by Thalberg, and who were moving to RKO after fulfilling a two-picture commitment. For Keaton, the good news was that their first picture was to be produced by action specialist Nat Levine, whose background was in serials, and not Larry Weingarten. By the end of the month, Ed Sedgwick had been added to the mix, and it seemed likely that production would get under way before the end of the year.
Keaton was preparing to direct a short for Chertok titled Life in Sometown, U.S.A., a catalog of obsolete laws to be shot silent and dryly narrated by Carey Wilson. He worked with writers Richard Murphy and Carl Dudley in visualizing how such laws could be portrayed on-screen, and even dug up a few examples of his own. Filming began on December 18 with a cast that included silent stars Francis X. Bushman, Betty Blythe, King Baggot, Phillips Smalley, and Jules Cowles. When queried about his own work in silent pictures, Keaton feigned indifference, even though The Navigator had just been shown by the Museum of Modern Art as part of a series of screen classics.
“Well, I guess that stuff kind of got passé,” he said. “But it will come back. It always does. I’m going to stay off the screen until my kind of comedy is good again. In the meantime, I hope to turn director. This little picture, Sometown in the U.S.A., is a step toward feature comedies. I’m a young man—only forty-two—so I’ve got lots of time.”
Keaton finished the picture in the six days allotted, but the feature comedy with Ted Healy and Buddy Ebsen never materialized. On December 21, while Sometown was in production, Healy died following a drunken altercation outside the Trocadero nightclub, forever scotching such plans. The following year, the Marx Brothers rejoined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after making just one picture for RKO.
Keaton directed two additional shorts for the studio in 1938, both for Louis Lewyn and both showcasing songwriter Leon Rene’s Original Sing Band, a black vocal group that mimicked the instrumental sounds of a small jazz ensemble. Hollywood Handicap, released in May, cast the ten Originals as stable boys at Santa Anita, while Streamlined Swing, released in September, had them turning a private railcar into a Hollywood nightspot. Both were rich in “the music of tomorrow” but Keaton’s boredom was evident in the straightforward staging of the numbers. In between shorts, he occasionally consulted on features. For Love Finds Andy Hardy, he showed Lana Turner how to get a laugh by spilling coffee on Mickey Rooney. And on a Weingarten show called Too Hot to Handle, he worked out the mechanics of an opening that had a cynical newsreel cameraman, played by Clark Gable, faking war footage with miniatures.
In September, with just three one-reelers to show for fifteen months’ employment, Keaton left M-G-M for 20th Century-Fox, where he joined producer Sol Wurtzel’s B-picture unit at a rate of $300 a week. Under Wurtzel, he was assigned to work with associate producer John Stone on the Jones Family pictures, which were among the few comedies issuing forth from a studio that seemed to lose its funny bone with the death of Will Rogers. Helping to develop stories for the ongoing series, Keaton received screen credit on The Jones Family in Hollywood and Quick Millions. He was clearly out of his element though, and the arrangement didn’t last six months.
In February 1939, Leo Morrison approached Jules White, who was by then in charge of short subjects at Columbia Pictures, and told him that Keaton was available.[*]
“Well,” said White, “I grabbed him. I just sent a wire to New York and said, ‘I’m signing up Buster Keaton. Are there any objections?’ Quite the contrary.” The item in Variety was headlined “KEATON’S COMEBACK.”
White, who assumed the post at Columbia in 1934, had built the studio’s short comedies program to twenty-six two-reelers a year, eight with the Three Stooges, many of which he directed himself. Charley Chase and Andy Clyde contributed six each, and an All-Star series served as a catch-all for other prominent comics—Harry Langdon, Smith and Dale, Walter Catlett, and now Buster Keaton. White initially contracted with Keaton for two pictures, with options for more. Compensation would be $2,500 a picture—half of what it had been at Educational—but the market for short subjects had continued to narrow.
“All the shorts were in trouble,” White said. “This was the double feature and vaudeville era. It was hard to get a short booked into a theater because they had to have double features, and they had to have vaudeville acts, they didn’t have to have the short and it cost them money for a rental and extra projection time.”
For Keaton’s first Columbia short, which came to be known as Pest from the West, he was paired once again with Clyde Bruckman, who had been writing comedies for Columbia since his run as a director ended in 1935. Together, they tackled the missed opportunity of The Invader, which was essentially a two-reel story stretched to a sixty-one-minute feature. The resulting twenty-seven-page script was in the established house style with the gags written out in considerable detail, leaving little room for improvisation. Still, this was a do-over for Keaton, a remake where he knew exactly what had gone wrong the first time. Moreover, the director assigned to the picture was Del Lord, who was White’s best man at Columbia.
“Del, at Mack Sennett studios, had progressed from stunt man to stunt driver—he drove the Mack Sennett paddy wagon and did crazy gags with it—and progressed to director,” said Ed Bernds, whose sound crew was also on the film. “When Frank Capra worked at Sennett’s as a gagman in the pre-sound era twenties, he described Del as Sennett’s top director….I worked as sound man on a couple of the pre-Del two-reelers [with the Three Stooges] and on many that Del directed later. In my opinion, Del was the man responsible for the Stooges’ success.”
Keaton’s first two-reeler for Columbia, Pest from the West, was a superior reworking of The Invader, written by Clyde Bruckman from Keaton’s original story and directed by Del Lord.
With contract player Lorna Gray cast in the role played by Lupita Tovar in the original, waterfront filming began March 29, 1939, at Balboa. A running gag had Keaton repeatedly dashing from his yacht to the dock and plummeting into the cold water, each time in a different costume. “He was playing the ukulele and singing,” Gray remembered, “and it broke me up watching him. What also broke me up was watching him fall in the water. He’d look like he was walking on air for a while, then he’d just fall straight down.”
The company repaired to the studio for the remainder of the shoot, which was scheduled and budgeted at four days. “Buster gave every indication of being dedicated to making the film as good as he and Del Lord could make it,” said Bernds. “They got along very well.”
Compared to the Educationals, the slapstick was of a crasser nature, with sound effects carried over from the Stooges films. Overall, it was a snappier take on the material, a superior job in every respect.
“Buster was not chummy with the crew—not standoffish or snobbish as some actors and actresses were—he was just immersed in his work,” Bernds added. “But on one occasion I did tell him that I thought that The General had probably the greatest sequence of thrills and gags ever filmed, or ever would be filmed. That great stone face broke into the warmest smile you ever saw and he said, ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’ ”
Keaton confers with Groucho and Chico Marx during his brief tenure as gagman on At the Circus (1939).
It was producer Mervyn LeRoy’s idea to hire Keaton as a writer on At the Circus, the new Marx Brothers picture at M-G-M. Keaton began work on May 3, drawing $300 a week, but found it a frustrating experience. “The Marx Brothers—it was an event when you could get all three of ’em on the set at the same time. The minute you started a picture with the Marx Brothers, you hired three assistant directors, one for each Marx Brother. Get two of ’em, while you went to look for the third one and the first two would disappear….They never worried what the next setup was going to be or what the routine…or anything else. ‘We’ll ad lib it when we get there.’ Chico always had his bookie on the phone. Groucho had some other excuse to be missing. Harpo was visiting the other sets to see who was workin’.”
Since Groucho and Chico were essentially verbal comedians, Keaton spent more of his time devising business for Harpo, the silent one, which may have aroused Groucho’s ire. “You think that’s funny?” he demanded after Keaton described a particularly inventive gag in which a single straw causes a camel’s knees to buckle. Another idea had Harpo selling helium-filled balloons with the assistance of a midget who found himself airborne whenever he took charge of the inventory. Keaton’s stretch on At the Circus lasted ten days.
He returned to Columbia for the second of his two-reelers, a Civil War comedy with echoes of The General titled Mooching Through Georgia. This time his director was Jules White, whose style was so firmly influenced by the Three Stooges he could direct no other way. Although written again by Bruckman, many of the knockabout gags suggested the essential brashness of the Stooges rather than the cool polish of Keaton at his best. As with Pest from the West, it was scheduled for four camera days and budgeted at $15,000, but the process of shooting it wasn’t as smooth as with Del Lord, who made few changes and only minor eliminations. White fussed over the script a lot more, making many cuts and changes. What emerged was a good picture, just not as good as the first.
Meanwhile, over on the Fox lot, Darryl F. Zanuck was developing an idea that was near to his heart but stubbornly resisting the transition to screenplay. It was a comedy-drama covering the early days of Hollywood, centering on composite characters drawn from actual personalities of the time. One of those was Mack Sennett, on whom the protagonist was loosely modeled, and whom Zanuck envisioned Spencer Tracy playing. Then he fixed on Alice Faye as the female lead and began reimagining the story as a dramatic musical. After assigning and rejecting multiple treatments, he trashed one by a writer for the fan magazines named Hilary Lynn: “Lousy—finish hoke of the worst sort—if we are to make a film of our own industry let us at least be honest and legitimate.” The story finally began to gel when poet and playwright Ernest Pascal was brought on and the title became Falling Stars.
Zanuck’s concept was to salt the cast with real faces, such as Ben Turpin and Sennett himself. Keystone veterans Chester Conklin, Hank Mann, and Jimmy Finlayson were added, but Zanuck also wanted someone easily recognized by modern audiences as the principal comedian in the picture. In notes dictated on April 26, 1939, he said: “We are going to write Buster Keaton into the picture—if we can get him—and he will play himself. He will appear in the following episodes: (1) PIE EPISODE. Keaton is the bashful boy, with the turned-up hat, whom Mike bawls out, etc. (2) SANTA MONICA ROCK. Keaton is the “messenger” who tells Mike [that] Stout wants to see him right away….(3) COPS. Keaton featured. He can be the one that Molly carries down the ladder. (4) ANNIVERSARY PARTY. Keaton makes the speech.” Filming in Technicolor began on May 31 under the direction of Irving Cummings, with Alice Faye and Don Ameche in the leads. By the time Keaton joined the cast in mid-June, the title had been changed to Hollywood Cavalcade and Mal St. Clair was directing most of the footage in which he would be appearing, particularly a sequence establishing him as one of the originators of the pie fight—an innocent fiction that would dog him for years.
“I had the studio’s bakers make the pie according to our original 1917 recipe,” Keaton said. “No custard was used, and with a blonde the target the filling is a mixture of blackberries, flour, and water, garnished with whipped cream….Two crusts are cooked, one inside the other, until brittle. The double crust prevents crumbling when your fingers slide across the bottom….The shortest throw, across a distance of from three to six feet, is called a shot putt, and this was the custard pie surprise I was to heave at sweet-faced Alice Faye.”
St. Clair deferred to him almost completely in the shooting of their scenes, and Keaton had a wonderful time on the picture. Surviving outtakes reveal a party-like atmosphere on the set, black and white footage shot silent with Faye giving as good as she got, Buster and she breaking up as they drip with crust and filling.
“She,” said a friend, “was crazy about him.”
Pest from the West was released on June 17 to wild praise from the trades, particularly Film Daily, which rated it a wow. “One of the funniest shorts of the season. In fact, of any season….When a comedy shown cold in a projection room can make trade press crits howl in their seats, you can bet your mortgaged theater that it’s FUNNY.”
Once the film got out into the marketplace, exhibitors chimed in as well. “Here is a comedy that is a comedy,” came a report from Indiana. “Why not give us more of this type? Has anything skinned a mile that Columbia has made this season. Just a knockout that had them in stitches the entire performance. Excellent.”
Pest accrued domestic rentals of $23,000 in its initial release, and a 1948 reissue would surpass even that figure. Mooching Through Georgia was released two months later, and while the notices were more restrained, the two pictures together more than justified White’s commitment to another pair for the 1939–40 season.
The Columbia shorts were still in circulation when Hollywood Cavalcade had its gala premiere in October. Despite leaden dialogue and Cummings’ sluggish direction, most reviewers gave it a pass on good intentions, many praising the slapstick sections in which Keaton was prominent. The pie throwing sequence with Alice Faye was a crowd-pleaser, even though it has Don Ameche talking Buster through a scene, as ludicrous a notion as the depiction of him stunting in front of a process screen.
“After all these years, Mr. Keaton still has a way with a custard pie,” Frank Nugent commented, “and we never guessed that Miss Faye could make such a perfect target.”
Faye also took Keaton’s place on the handlebars of a driverless motorcycle, a necessity of plotting even as the real story, minus the aforementioned process screen, would have been infinitely more interesting. “They were making a picture about the old days of pictures,” said Hal Goodwin, who had a small part in the film, “and so many of these people were new. They didn’t know that we didn’t have slates with numbers on them then. One side said NG and the other side said OK. They let the cutter worry about putting the picture together, and I had told the prop man that. He said, ‘Mind your business.’ ”
The greatest value of Hollywood Cavalcade was as a showcase for old-timers, principally Mack Sennett, but it was Keaton who got more favorable exposure from the picture than anyone else. “The biggest surprise of the year was the way the fans all over the country applauded Buster Keaton in Hollywood Cavalcade,” Louella Parsons said in her column of October 25, “proving what I’ve said so many times—that the public does not forget old favorites. What Darryl Zanuck did for Buster when he gave him that break cannot be overestimated. It’s brought him back with a vengeance. Today the deadpan Keaton conferred with Boris Morros, who is trying to get him to do a talkie of The Navigator, his greatest silent success.” And so with Parsons’ benediction the “comeback” of Buster Keaton was official.