21
One of the Skeletons in the M-G-M Closet
BORN ON HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD in 1918, Eleanor Ruth Norris grew up surrounded by the film industry. At age five, she attended the Vine Street Elementary School, a block south of the Keaton studio, while scenes for Sherlock Jr. were being filmed on adjacent streets. Her father, Ralph, a studio electrician, was killed on the job when she was ten, and her mother went to work as a seamstress, doing alterations at one of the big department stores. With her younger sister just starting school, Eleanor had to grow up in a hurry. She had studied dance from an early age and began performing at women’s clubs and parties, doing what she loved while helping to put food on the table.
“I was never young,” she said. “I never went through that giggly teen-age thing; I went from child to adult overnight.”
At the Hollywood Bowl she was part of Theodore Kosloff’s ballet company, at fourteen she got her first movie work by lying about her age, and at fifteen she was in The Gay Divorcee with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. At sixteen, she dropped out of high school and, using her aunt’s passport, toured the Orient as one of the Six Hollywood Blondes. In Bombay, she was scouted for stardom before Bollywood was Bollywood, in Miami she was in the chorus of a lavish revue starring singer Harry Richman, and back in Los Angeles, again with Richman, she was a featured dancer in The Hollywood Restaurant Revels of 1937.
Eleanor Norris was strikingly photogenic, with Hepburnesque cheekbones and blue-gray eyes that would sparkle in Technicolor. Metro put her under contract in 1938. At five three, she was tall for a pony—which is what they called the dancers in the chorus—but she caught the eye of Albertina Rasch, one of the studio’s dance directors, who appreciated her work as a toe dancer and used her in a couple of Eleanor Powell musicals.
“Being under contract at M-G-M was fun,” she said. “It’s like a family. They had, I think it was, thirty-two dancers because they had different productions going on, and sixteen boy dancers, and sixteen or eighteen singers, and we all worked together in different films….You worked pretty much all the time, you almost didn’t get any days off, because all the productions were waiting in line.”
One day, she was standing around a set with a dancer named Art Whitney. “The kids used to sit behind the scenery and play cards all the time in between shots and setups, and I used to watch them play bridge, and it looked fascinating. I said, ‘I want to learn to play that. What is that?’ Because I used to play cards. I’d played cards all my life—goldfish, gin rummy, all kinds of games, pinochle, whatever there was to play.”
Whitney, it turned out, was Harry Keaton’s best friend. “Well,” he said, “I know where there’s a card game and a good teacher all day every day. When we’re through, I’ll take you up there.”
Eleanor had seen Buster Keaton around the studio, knew his name and that he was famous, but had never watched him on-screen. “My first impression of him was before I ever knew him, ’cause we were both at M-G-M. And normally I wouldn’t see him except at lunch in the commissary. He used to have a whole series of slacks and shirts—he had ’em made—in tans and grays. And when he wore the gray ones, he used to sort of blend in—he looked like this little gray thing going by. He blended right in. And that was my impression: I wish he’d put some color on, or some makeup or something, because he blended into his clothes.”
True to his word, Whitney took her to the house on Queensbury Drive, and she was allowed to watch as the others played bridge. “I met the whole family en masse. I imagine Harry was probably there, and I met Louise and Myra at the same time because they were playing bridge. They played bridge all day every day.”
She estimated it took a full year, coming two or three times a week, before she felt confident enough to play on her own without someone standing behind her and kibitzing. Conversation wasn’t encouraged, but she had the chance to observe and form impressions.
“The whole family looked pretty much alike. They all looked like Myra, not Buster, except that the coloring would vary. Buster was hazel eyes and dark hair, and Harry had bright blue eyes with blond hair, and Louise was Buster’s coloring. Louise had dark eyes, and Myra had the hazel eyes like Buster. Joe had dark eyes. Buster and Louise got Joe’s coloring except for the eyes.”
Dining with Dorothy Sebastian at the Beverly Hills Brown Derby, September 1939.
As far as women were concerned, Buster had kept his distance since the debacle of his marriage to Mae Scriven. Those who made the columns were all casual acquaintances, even Betty Ann Logan, who under the name Betty Andre was the briefly seen girl in Jail Bait. Marlyn Stuart, who appeared in all three of the New York Educationals, was an occasional date, as was actress Dorothy Lee, who was brought to Keaton’s Italian Villa for the first time at the age of eighteen. More often than not, a favorite partner was his own sister, Louise, whom he would take to the Cocoanut Grove and throw around the dance floor.[*1] Still, the woman most frequently associated with him was Dorothy Sebastian, who was divorced from William Boyd, by now the movies’ Hopalong Cassidy.
“The reason I was given for that,” remembered Gil Perkins, “was that Bill used to go away to Bishop and Lone Pine on location for Hoppys. He had a beach house as well as the Beverly Hills house. There were always some Hawaiian beach boys around his place there, and he came home and found Dorothy in bed with one of the beach boys. That’s what wound up that marriage.”
Keaton clearly enjoyed Sebastian’s company, and they were spotted together at places like the Grace Hayes Lodge, Slapsy Maxie’s, and the Hollywood Brown Derby. Yet it was hardly a committed relationship. She drifted off from time to time, as did Buster, who generally waited for the girls to come to him. Eleanor’s main interest was in the game and the cards; she never paid much attention to him as an individual.
“He said the first time he ever paid any attention to me at all was [when] I used to have somebody stand behind me to help me when I started, and one day somebody—I don’t know who—was sitting on a chair or standing behind me watching, and I did something and he yelled, ‘That’s stupid!’ Y’know, one of those kind of things. And I reared back and I said, ‘I don’t know this game very well, but I’m damned if I’m stupid!’ And I yelled back at him. And Buster suddenly says, ‘Who was that?’ ”
It wasn’t exactly love at first sight; it had been six months at least. “It was a gradual thing,” she said. “There was no big awakening; it just sort of grew into a friendship. He was aware of it before I was—that he wanted to do something about it—but he’d been with [Dorothy] for two or three years, I guess. And he had to find a new boyfriend for her ’cause he couldn’t dump her. We used to go to the wrestling matches all the time. There was this young, good-looking ‘hero’—not a villain, a hero wrestler—real nice, stupid, good-looking son-of-a-gun, and he had a manager or whatever. We knew a lot of the wrestlers to speak to ’cause we used to go in a group. Five or six of us would go to the matches. So he invited the boy and his manager out for dinner, to spend the afternoon and have dinner, and just let nature take its course. He did find her a new boyfriend, and then he asked me to go out.”
The third two-reeler for Columbia, Nothing but Pleasure, was on a par with Mooching Through Georgia, a contrived but frequently effective treatise on the trials of owning a new car that introduced actress Dorothy Appleby to the series. It was with Keaton’s fourth Columbia short, Pardon My Berth Marks, made in January 1940, that the generic flavor of the Columbia comedies began to overtake whatever distinctive qualities Keaton and Clyde Bruckman could contribute. Berth Marks was the first Keaton comedy into which another Columbia star, such as Charley Chase or Harry Langdon, could easily have been dropped with minimal adjustments. The story, in fact, would be remade in 1947 with radio announcer Harry von Zell in the lead.
“When Buster started,” said Jules White, “after about two pictures he became the old Buster and warmed up.”
Bruckman was the writer on the show, but the man firmly in charge was White.
“Jules was the kind of guy [where] somebody would sit down and jump up, and then he’d take an insert of a pin cushion,” said Harold Goodwin. “That was his idea of a laugh. Well, Buster hated inserts. He said, ‘You’ve gotta show what you’re doing without an insert.’ Charlie Lamont knew comedy pretty well, and he was as different as night and day from Jules White. He would avoid an insert to get a clean shot. Like Buster used to say, ‘Just get me in trouble and let me find a clever way of getting out.’ That’s the way he thought, and it paid off.”
Completed in four camera days, Pardon My Berth Marks was the first Keaton short to finish under budget, and it set the tone for what was to come at Columbia. Around the same time, Keaton completed work on New Moon, an unwieldy costume musical with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy for which he was paid $750 a week to serve up comedy relief alongside actor Nat Pendleton.
“They were like the featured comics all through the film,” said Eleanor, who remembered he was on it for weeks and weeks. “But the picture got away from them, and they were so busy with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald’s songs and everything that they wound up practically being cut out of the picture.”
Though the film was carefully edited to remove as many traces of him as possible, Keaton could still be glimpsed as one of the king’s rebels, particularly in the opening minutes in the hold of the Joie des Anges and during the rousing march in which Nelson Eddy sang “Stout-Hearted Men.”
Nineteen forty was a busy year. Columbia committed to another pair of shorts, the first of which, The Taming of the Snood, was built around an acrobatic dancer named Elsie Ames, who toured vaudeville and worked nightclubs in a knockabout comedy act called Ames and Arno. For Snood, Keaton stepped in for husband Nick Arno, as Elsie, a drunken housemaid, leaped about the room, taking pratfalls, doing splits, and generally bedeviling the innocent milliner who’s just there to make a delivery. Rehearsals for this scene stretched the schedule to five days, but never before had Buster gained a female partner who could match him fall for fall. A delighted Jules White, who loved the sort of broad physical comedy Ames trafficked in, would use her repeatedly over the next couple of years.
In March, Keaton drew another feature assignment, one that reunited him with Eddie Cline for the first time in seventeen years. The film, which was frankly regarded as an experiment, was inspired by a local theatrical phenomenon called The Drunkard, which opened in 1933 and was still running at L.A.’s Theatre Mart. The show itself was an old-fashioned temperance melodrama, The Drunkard: Or, the Fallen Saved, first presented in New York in 1850 by P. T. Barnum. The producers shrewdly re-created not just the original Barnum staging, but also the music hall atmosphere in which audiences of the time experienced it. Free beer and sandwiches were served during performances, people were encouraged to hiss at the villain and cheer the hero, and an olio was offered at the conclusion.
From the beginning, the show attracted the movie colony and won endorsements from the likes of Mary Pickford, Billie Burke, and W. C. Fields, who saw it more than thirty times and incorporated aspects of it into his 1934 feature The Old Fashioned Way. Now an independent producer, Harold B. Franklin, proposed to film the whole thing, camping it up in the same manner as onstage. A longtime theater executive, Franklin had dabbled in production but really didn’t know what he was doing. He gave his son Elbert the job of writing the screenplay, and filled the cast with comics and character actors, all familiar faces but no big stars. Keaton, as the hero’s earnest friend William Dalton, took fourth billing behind Hugh Herbert, Anita Louise, and Alan Mowbray.
Cline approached the job with a what-the-hell attitude that made the actual shooting of the picture more fun than what eventually made its way to the screen. He had his actors take it up big, throwing broad asides to the audience and shamelessly mugging for the camera. The atmosphere was so loose that ad libs and blowups were left in, and Keaton, in the spirit of the thing, quickly learned to tame his impulse to rib the man he always referred to as E. Francis.
With villain Mowbray sprinting away, Buster said to the others, “Come, we must catch him,” only to take off in the opposite direction.
“That’s a great piece of business!” Cline whooped. “It stays in the picture!”
Keaton’s next Columbia short, The Spook Speaks, continued the series’ descent into the commonplace, with Jules White exploring the comedic possibilities of arming Elsie Ames with a polo mallet and strapping roller skates onto a penguin named Orson. Keaton would have been astonished to discover that The Spook Speaks became the most successful of all his Columbia comedies, pulling domestic rentals of $28,500 upon its initial release, and another $24,000 from a 1949 reissue.
“He hated them,” said Eleanor of the Columbias, “but they paid the bills.”
It was Eleanor who proposed to Buster. It was New Year’s Eve, and she and he were out on the dance floor in Palm Springs. “I took the bull by the horns,” she said.
Keaton manages a rare smile for the camera on the occasion of his 1940 marriage to Eleanor Ruth Norris. Superior Court Judge Edward R. Brand, who was himself a comedian before turning to law, presides.
“When are we going to get married?”
“How about tomorrow?”
“Well, maybe not…”
“How about May 28? Because that’s when I was married the first time, and I’ll be able to remember it.”
“Take your May 28 and shove it. I don’t need that.”
As a compromise, she picked May 29, 1940. “He said afterwards that the reason he hadn’t asked me himself was that he was afraid he was too old for me.” But Eleanor Norris had always dated older men: “It wasn’t a boy I went to school with or anything because I didn’t know any of those. So it was probably somebody at least ten or fifteen years older than I was. So the fact that Buster was twenty years older didn’t dawn on me or make any difference. I knew it, but I didn’t care.”
Revisionist texts to the contrary, Keaton, at age forty-four, had weathered the difficult years admirably.
“He was still beautiful. He still had great bone structure and very few wrinkles…he didn’t even look his age.”
Buster’s friends were horrified. Two of them, one a rabid bridge player named Freud, the other Jack Shuman, his doctor, spent hours trying to talk her out of it. “The doctor and the other friend on two separate occasions lectured me severely about how wrong this whole thing was going to be. It wouldn’t last, all of that. And the fact that if I was marrying him for his money—forget that. He didn’t have it. And I, very polite nice little girl, I sat and listened to everything they had to say very carefully, all of it, and ignored them. And then we went and got married.”
He was, she said, “just a kind, gentle, wonderful soul. He never had an enemy. Everybody loved him. And I suppose I just joined the group.” They appeared at the Los Angeles County Clerk’s office on May 22, a Wednesday, and applied for a license. Eleanor, described in the papers as a statuesque blonde, gave her age as twenty-one and said that she lived with her mother and sister in North Hollywood. Buster gave his age as forty-four and listed the house on Queensbury Drive as his residence. To reporters, he admitted the occasion called for a smile. “And I feel like smiling, but the studio won’t allow it—not in public anyway.” He added: “I have not smiled since Dewey captured Manila.”
They were married a week later in the chambers of Superior Court Judge Edward R. Brand, the younger brother of Keaton’s former nemesis, Harry Brand. Eleanor, attended by her sister, Jane, wore a powder-blue chiffon gown with white accessories and an orchid. Buster, whose best man was his brother, Harry, was in a blue serge suit. Others present for the ceremony were Eleanor’s mother, Jessie M. “Dot” Norris, and Joe, Myra, and Louise Keaton, all of whom were conspicuously absent from Buster’s first two weddings.
“I wanted to finish up the ceremony, then take Eleanor for a rowboat ride in Westlake Park, a roller-coaster ride at Ocean Park, and a bridal dinner in a drive-in,” Buster said. “But the folks all turned thumbs down on that idea.”
They went back to the house for a reception, the station wagon packed for a camping and fishing trip to June Lake, about 250 miles away. A few more guests arrived.
“They were all busy getting drunk and having a wonderful time,” Eleanor said, “so we just changed clothes and left. We put the traditional cut in the wedding cake, and I think we took a piece with us.”
When they got back, the Keatons discovered their Saint Bernard pup had gotten onto the dining table and eaten the rest of the cake. She was sick for three days. Myra rescued the little bride and groom off the top; it was the only thing left.
When Eleanor first arrived at Cheviot Hills, Myra, Harry, and Louise were all living with Buster under the same roof. “The only practical thought I had on the whole thing was whether the rest of the family was going to be there the whole rest of my life. As it turned out, Myra says, ‘Up and at ’em, we’re going to move. We’re going back to my house.’ She had people renting, and she gave them notice. They got out, and she moved back and took Harry and Louise with her. She said, ‘They deserve to be alone.’ And she packed them up and took them.”
The new couple settled in, Eleanor making no real changes other than to clean the place up and throw out old bank statements and the like. Built in 1931, the house reflected the solid craftsmanship of the era with tongue-and-groove floors and Spanish tile work—two bedrooms and two baths on a landscaped lot with mature citrus trees in the back.
Times were good. By all accounts, Eleanor was the best thing that ever happened to him. She was beautiful, supportive, a tireless worker, and a bright, plain-spoken companion. The contrast between her and his two previous wives could not have been more pronounced. Yet it was over the summer of 1940, when everything seemed to be going so gloriously right, that Keaton’s five years of sobriety came to an abrupt end. What exactly triggered it is a mystery, but the one dark event that would doubtless have affected him deeply was the sudden death on July 4 of his boyhood chum Lex Neal. As Harold Lloyd’s career wound down, Neal had found it hard to find other work. In 1936, he was diagnosed as an insulin-dependent diabetic, a condition exacerbated by acute alcoholism.
Buster, of course, shared his first bottle of whiskey with Lex. The two of them co-founded the Bluffton sandlot ball team, the Juniors. And it was Lex who was likely the driving force behind Go West. As a writer, he contributed to five of Lloyd’s feature comedies, beginning with The Kid Brother in 1926.
According to Eleanor, he was in and out of their home a lot. “He used to come to our house and pass out on the couch and vomit in the middle of the floor—wonderful things like that.”
He was admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital in a diabetic coma, and died three days later at the age of forty-seven.
Buster, fortunately, was not working at the time, but Eleanor had to figure out how to handle him. It couldn’t have helped that The Villain Still Pursued Her inspired catcalls, wisecracks, and raspberries among the bored participants at its press preview in Glendale. The picture, his first feature appearance since Hollywood Cavalcade, was DOA by general consensus. He didn’t venture out in public again until August 8, when he played in a big charity game at Wrigley Field, the greatest showing of star power yet for Mount Sinai Hospital. He drew a big hand from the crowd of 25,000 as he took the field as catcher for the comedians’ team and obligingly took a stiff pratfall at the sight of Boris Karloff approaching home plate as Frankenstein’s monster.
When it came time to report for Li’l Abner, based on the United Features strip by Al Capp, Louise Keaton was detailed to accompany her brother to make sure he didn’t drink. The character he was to play was Lonesome Polecat, a grim-faced Indian of the Fried Dog tribe who, with his colleague Hairless Joe, was purveyor of Kickapoo Joy Juice, a moonshine of legendary potency.
“We wrote down the description in a meeting of what he should look like,” recounted director Al Rogell, “and after we wrote all the adjectives down everyone agreed [and] said automatically: Buster Keaton. Deadpan, straight-faced, good gags, an athlete—there was no one that could play it like Keaton. So when we called him and asked him to come out, he said, ‘For what role?’ Because he had read the comic strip. We [told him] and he came out just as he was with the pork pie hat, and the only change that he’d made was to put one goose feather in the hat.”
Polecat’s utterances were limited to ceremonial whooping and the pidgin English common to such characters (“Me call great spirit, makeum fire like ances-tor”). Working with a script that left plenty of room for embellishment, Keaton spent as much time on the picture developing gags as he did playing his part.
“He not only did a great deal to help himself with his own situations and gags as a gag writer as well as an actor,” Rogell said, “but if he could contribute to someone else’s success with a good gag or a laugh, he was one of the first to come in with, ‘Hey Al, here’s an idea.’ And he’d play it out, and if it was good we used it and thanked him very much and everyone was very happy.”
Keaton finished with Li’l Abner in September and committed, without enthusiasm, to another three shorts for Columbia, bringing his total to nine for the studio. His Ex Marks the Spot was another for Jules White, a rowdy nightmare of a domestic comedy written by Felix Adler, who was responsible for many of the best Three Stooges comedies. The next, So You Won’t Squawk?, offered a respite from the White school of knockabout by briefly returning Del Lord to the director’s chair. Squawk? recalled the smoother contours of Pest from the West, taking a bewhiskered plotline about a mob of gangsters moving in on a rival gang and invigorating it with an abundance of inventive new gags. Buster unwittingly takes the place of upstart hood Louie the Wolf, and Slugger McGraw’s boys repeatedly try rubbing him out, only to have their increasingly desperate efforts turned against them. For a rousing conclusion, Buster rallies the police in such numbers as to recall Cops from eighteen years earlier, only with motorcycles and squad cars racing after him instead of patrolmen on foot. Enlivened by the clever use of stock footage, So You Won’t Squawk? was completed by Keaton and Lord in just four days.
It was as if the new picture challenged Jules White to up his game, since His Ex Marks the Spot was largely shot on a single set. White’s next Keaton comedy, written in tandem by Adler and Clyde Bruckman, would be a semi-remake of Doughboys, updated to reflect the new realities of the peacetime army. White arranged to shoot the camp exteriors at the Columbia Ranch in Burbank and commissioned three songs from Adler and composer-arranger Paul Mertz for the picture, which carried the working title The Private General. As in Doughboys, Keaton would play a rich twit, in this case Peter Hedley Lamar, Jr., or, more succinctly, Hedley Lamar, a name dangerously close to that of one of M-G-M’s newest stars. The induction exam from the earlier picture was extended and improved upon, and White permitted Keaton and Elsie Ames unusual latitude in developing their flirtatious duet, which comes while Hedley, who lusts after Dorothy Appleby, is stuck polishing spittoons.
“Though you’re low in the rank,” Elsie sings, “you’ve got dough in the bank. That is why I am falling for you.” And then, of course, she literally does.
Keaton got another feature role in April 1941 when he signed on as comedienne Judy Canova’s boyfriend in Puddin’ Head. It wasn’t a large part, but the early scenes director Joseph Santley shot were so impressive, and the chemistry between Keaton and Canova so good, that producer Albert Cohen had the early footage junked and the part of Herman considerably expanded. Keaton was set to resume production on May 9 when he came down with a stomach ailment, possibly the flu, and was ordered to bed for two weeks. There was no hint of alcoholism in the sketchy reports that emerged, and comic Chick Chandler replaced him.
“This was my first good part in six years,” Buster groused. Apart from an unpaid cameo in a picture to benefit British War Relief titled Forever and a Day, his only subsequent work came from Columbia.
May brought word that the play Keaton and Lew Lipton wrote in 1937, Marooned in Mojave, was up for a possible Broadway production under the title Lambs Will Gamble. Director Ralph Murphy collaborated with Lipton on a rewrite, and a deal was brewing for actor Brian Donlevy to star in a production underwritten by Paramount production chief B. G. “Buddy” DeSylva. Fittingly, the entire summer of 1941 was given over to stage work. The so-called straw-hat circuit of rural theaters was a lucrative sideline for a lot of Hollywood figures, and the cumulative roster for 1941 included Harpo Marx, Fay Wray, Ruth Chatterton, Luise Rainer, C. Aubrey Smith, Ramon Novarro, and Elissa Landi. Keaton went east to star in The Gorilla, Ralph Spence’s comedy-mystery featuring a couple of dimwit detectives that enjoyed a brief stay on Broadway in 1925 and a longer life on tour and in stock. The Keatons’ arrival in New York for a few days of theatergoing sparked a flurry of press coverage.
“He giggles,” Eleanor admitted when the subject inevitably turned to the deadpan. “And he nearly rolled out of his seat at Arsenic and Old Lace the other night.”
The Gorilla, with Keaton as Detective Mulligan and Harry Gribbon as his partner, debuted at Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, on July 8, moving to Cedarhurst, Long Island, the following week. “Because much of the talk was dated,” said Keaton, “we cut it out. That left a first act only twenty minutes long, so I filled it out with action.” Guaranteed $500 a week plus expenses, he found business disappointingly thin at first. Yet he and Eleanor enjoyed the jumps they made from town to town in their wood-paneled Ford station wagon, Eleanor gayly likening the experience to a picnic, “making money having fun.” They continued on to places like Marblehead, White Plains, Toledo, and Worcester before heading home in September, where another short for Columbia was in the offing.
Columbia had contracted for another Keaton two-reeler nearly a year earlier as part of a plan to stretch the number of All-Star comedies to eighteen for the 1941–42 season. Keaton, however, was growing weary of working for Jules White, who increasingly seemed to think that all his comics were interchangeable. The nadir of the series was reached with She’s Oil Mine, in which White attempted to turn Keaton, Elsie Ames, and comic Monty Collins into an ersatz Three Stooges with gags that were drawn almost entirely from the Stooges’ playbook. Based to some extent on The Passionate Plumber, one of Keaton’s worst features, the third act of She’s Oil Mine became a lift of the dueling sequence from the conclusion of Plumber, and it’s indicative of Keaton’s antipathy that the picture was finished in just three eight-hour days and nearly $1,600 under budget. Clearly, he could see where this was going.
It was the routine use of stock footage, recycled material, and stuntmen in the Columbia two-reelers that caused Keaton to deride them in later years as “cheaters.” Jules White commissioned another script from Felix Adler, What a Soldier, but Keaton declined to make it. “I just got to the point where I couldn’t stomach turning out even one more crummy two-reeler,” he said. She’s Oil Mine became the forty-fifth and final theatrical short to star Buster Keaton. From now on he would stick to feature roles, stage work, and writing. At the age of forty-six, he was done.
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor brought the entire picture industry into the war effort. Many of its workers were considered serving by just doing their daily jobs creating the entertainment that helped sustain the nation’s morale. Actor Robert Montgomery spent time in England as naval attaché at the American embassy and had earlier volunteered as an ambulance driver in the war zone before the fall of France. Screenwriter Robert Riskin also went to England to serve as public relations counsel to the British Ministry of Information. Writer-director Garson Kanin was drafted, then mustered out when the army discharged those over twenty-eight. So Kanin joined the Office for Emergency Management Film Unit to make civilian defense pictures. John Ford took up duties as lieutenant commander in the naval reserve, making highly classified films with the help of Citizen Kane cinematographer Gregg Toland. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., had a reserve commission in the armed forces and went on active duty. Actor Jimmy Stewart won a commission as a lieutenant in the army. And 20th Century-Fox production chief Darryl F. Zanuck served as a lieutenant colonel in the Signal Corps, in charge of at-cost production of military training films.
Locally, two private organizations were ready for volunteer duty in the Pacific danger zone. The fifty-two men of Victor McLaglen’s light horse troop, based at the actor’s sports center on the outskirts of Hollywood, were sworn in as special emergency police, while the eighty-three members of McLaglen’s women’s auxiliary committed to Red Cross duty. Then there was actor Lewis Stone’s station wagon brigade, established in August 1941 under the aegis of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department for use in civil emergencies. Starting with about sixty privately owned vehicles, the brigade formally became the First Evacuation Regiment of the California State Guard in November. After Pearl Harbor, Keaton was among one hundred new applicants inducted, a group that included actors Raymond Hatton, John Miljan, Jack Holt, and Robert Young. Their vehicles would carry firefighting equipment, medical kits, and stretchers, as well as six to eight passengers in the event of an evacuation. Assuming the rank of colonel, Stone, at age sixty-two, served as commander of the unit. Soon, Donald Crisp was recruited, as were Rudy Vallée and Cesar Romero, both of whom were commissioned lieutenants.
The regiment grew to number more than a hundred vehicles and approximately three hundred volunteers, both drivers and aides. Stone, a major in the last war, conducted training every Tuesday night—foot drills, first aid, driving in the dark, repair work. He turned one of the unused stages at the old Warner Bros. studio on Sunset Boulevard into an armory, equipping it with twenty-four-hour phone service and cots to sleep the entire regiment should the need arise. Women who owned station wagons were welcome to register their cars, but were prohibited from joining themselves.
It was perhaps Keaton’s involvement with the First Evacuation Regiment that convinced him that the house in Cheviot Hills was too close to the ocean for safety in the event of an invasion. In December, nine Japanese submarines had been positioned off the coast, attacking eight American merchant ships and actually sinking two. Myra, meanwhile, was alone in her house on Victoria Avenue, Harry and his wife and child and Louise having decamped to Las Vegas “because there was a big war plant opening up there.”[*2] It was, said Eleanor, “a much safer place to be…because it was a good fifteen, twenty miles inland. He got frightened about leaving his mother alone in her house, and she wouldn’t pack it in and come back and live with us. So he says, ‘Well, we’ll have to go there then.’ So we put our little house up for sale and moved in with her.”
Before moving to Myra’s house on Victoria, Keaton took a job at the nearby Fox studios, where the making of an unusual movie was in progress. The idea for Tales of Manhattan, which follows a formal tailcoat through six otherwise unrelated stories, apparently came from an old German film called Der Frack. Screenwriters Billy Wilder and Walter Reich knew of the film and suggested it, possibly as a joke, to the perennially penniless Sam Spiegel. It took form at Paramount, where co-producer Boris Morros had a two-picture deal, then moved to Fox when projected costs spiraled out of control. The cast was stellar: Henry Fonda, Ginger Rogers, Edward G. Robinson, Charles Boyer, Rita Hayworth, W. C. Fields, Paul Robeson, and Charles Laughton. At one point, Keaton was set to play Hiawatha in the picture, but eventually he was engaged to consult on the Fields sequence. Julien Duvivier, the renowned French director of Pépé le Moko, became attached to the project when Morros abandoned his original plan to have six top directors make the various segments.
After a false start, the Fields sequence was scripted by Bill Morrow and Ed Beloin, two of Jack Benny’s writers, who cast the Great Man as a phony temperance lecturer working the gullible society circuit. Duvivier, who was described by one of his actors as “a humorless man, very serious,” was judged to be the wrong guy to direct a low comedian with a penchant for ad-libbing. Mal St. Clair was asked to take charge instead and, according to Fields, it was St. Clair who brought Keaton along with him.
“Buster was assigned an office next to mine,” editor Gene Fowler, Jr., remembered. “One day, I heard such a commotion I went next door to see what it was. Buster was repeatedly throwing himself against our common wall. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m writing!’ ”
The house on Queensbury was the scene of a signal event in Keaton’s life when he was reunited with his elder son. “I knew where he was all the time,” said Jim Talmadge. He was eighteen when a close friend, who couldn’t understand why he wasn’t in touch with his father, took him over to the house and reintroduced them. They said hello, shook hands, and Buster said it was one of the thrills of his life. Later, Jim brought Bobby, then sixteen.
“From that day on,” said Buster, “I had my own boys back again.”
But Natalie wasn’t yet finished with him. In May 1942 she filed a petition to legally change the boys’ names from Keaton to Talmadge, although they had informally gone by the name Talmadge for nearly a decade.
“Everybody knew the name Keaton, but very few knew the name Talmadge,” Jim said. “At school, nobody knew who my father was….It was a lot easier to get along with the name Talmadge than it was Keaton.”
And so, with the signed consents of both, Joseph Talmadge Keaton became James Talmadge and Bobby Keaton became Robert Talmadge.
That fall, at age twenty, Jim joined the Coast Guard. In July 1943, having achieved the rank of seaman second class, he eloped to Ventura with Barbara Jane Tichenor, an eighteen-year-old student at Santa Monica City College who was also a top-ranked junior tennis champion.
“I had some very strict parents,” Barbara explained. “He was in the service. Everybody was worried about the war. All these boys were going to go fight, and they might not come back.” She kept the marriage a secret while she went east to play as a member of the Whiteman Cup team, the women’s equivalent of the men’s Davis Cup, at Forest Hills. The announcement finally appeared in the Los Angeles Times on October 4, shortly before Jim left for Florida to attend officer’s training school.
Walking away from Jules White imposed a heavy financial penalty. Keaton’s income for the year 1941 was almost $8,000, much of which came from the two Columbia shorts he made that year. But in 1942, without the money from the two-reelers rolling in, his income dwindled to just a few hundred dollars. There were still Eleanor’s earnings as a dancer, and true to her frugal ways, she made sure the proceeds from the sale of the house in Cheviot Hills were set aside for another once the war was over. In September 1942, he went to see his old friend Eddie Mannix at M-G-M.
“I told him how I felt about what I’d been doing and asked if he could put me on the payroll as a gagman and comedy constructionist.” Mannix told him he could put him on at $100 a week. “It’s a deal,” said Keaton.
He went back on salary on October 2, 1942, and was immediately assigned to the Wesley Ruggles comedy Nothing Ventured, already in production.[*3] It was Keaton who devised the film’s snappy meet-cute between Lana Turner and Robert Young in which Turner, working a drugstore soda fountain, bets a colleague she can do the job blindfolded. And, contrary to Keaton’s comedy instincts, she proceeds to flawlessly build a jumbo banana split before getting called on the carpet by her new manager for attempting such a stunt. “When Eddie put me on at $100 a week I thought it was darned nice of him,” Buster said. “We could live on that, and I was sure M-G-M would raise my pay once I started giving them gags and comedy ideas they could use.”
There wasn’t a lot for him to do at Metro, at least not at first. To Lewis Jacobs, a writer in the shorts department, he was a vaguely pathetic figure: “It seemed to me that they were buying off their own consciences—at a hundred bucks a week. He was one of the skeletons in the M-G-M closet.”
One thing that may have affected Keaton’s demeanor was the knowledge that producer Jack Cummings was preparing to remake Spite Marriage as a vehicle for comedian Red Skelton, and no one had bothered to consult him about it. On December 14, 1942, an M-G-M transportation order was issued:
Take Buster Keaton home to 1043 Victoria Ave. L.A.
Drunk per JTR
Keaton passed the war working for M-G-M and volunteering at the Hollywood Canteen, then operating out of an old livery stable off Sunset Boulevard on Cahuenga. (“I was doing magic tricks for the troops,” Orson Welles remembered, “and Keaton was washing dishes.”) Over much of 1943, he was involved in the development of a screenplay for Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy titled The Home Front. The original idea, which came in the form of an eleven-page story from producer-director Sam Taylor, was, in Taylor’s words, “a satire on the present civilian war-time situation in which it is almost impossible to get help of any kind, either business or domestic….The picture will unfold exclusively from the viewpoint of Laurel and Hardy, two likable but very stupid bums who haven’t held a job in ten years, and soon find their services at a premium—with employers fighting madly to give them a job and to keep them on the job.”
Keaton was one of four writers contributing to the draft screenplay, which was completed in July with the notion of simply putting Stan and Ollie into a situation they could screw up. In September, Taylor signed off on a revision in which Keaton had the pair fooling around with their employer’s microcopter, nearly getting themselves killed—but demonstrating the machine’s viability to the extent that it sells to the government. Taylor stepped away as producer in October, and B. F. “Bennie” Zeidman took over. Zeidman, a former publicist, had scant history with comedy, but was presumably considered qualified for having supervised the team’s previous feature for the studio, the sluggish and unfunny Air Raid Wardens. It was on Zeidman’s watch that the device of a boy king whose life needed saving was introduced, a needless subplot that effectively killed any chance the picture had of being good.
Keaton serving drinks at the Hollywood Canteen, circa 1943.
Gamely, Keaton continued to offer material. In April 1944, he fashioned a section of script that had Stan slicing up a beehive with a hatchet as if he were cutting a piece of cake. Another had the boys, as tree surgeons, going from home to home, faking damage and then repairing it. (At the second house, Keaton called for an “iron-jawed character woman.”) By the time Taylor began shooting in June, it had taken the combined efforts of fifteen writers to create one of the weakest scripts Laurel and Hardy ever tackled. Fittingly, it would be Zeidman’s last credit as producer.
Keaton alternated his work on the Laurel and Hardy picture (released as Nothing but Trouble) with Mr. Co-ed, a Technicolor musical starring Red Skelton and Esther Williams. “Buster worked with Red Skelton a lot,” said director George Sidney.[*4] “Skelton did some of the routines that Buster had done in silent films and updated them.”
Keaton also worked out problems left unsolved on the page, such as when Skelton finds himself in Williams’ house and encounters her dog. “Red was trying to get out and the dog wouldn’t let him,” said producer Jack Cummings. “He put on Esther’s clothes. The dog wouldn’t let him out. He had to get out somehow, and we didn’t know how to work it. So I said, ‘Well, call Buster.’ And Buster came down and he looked at it. He said, ‘I tell you what you can do. Just take the pins out of the hinges. As the dog comes inside this way, he can turn around and put the door the other way.’ That’s exactly what we did. But it was like magic.”
When it was decided the picture, with a water ballet as its centerpiece, needed a more marketable title, Keaton helpfully suggested The Fatal Breast Stroke. (Throwing the spotlight on Esther Williams, it went out into the world as Bathing Beauty, making a top star of the twenty-two-year-old competitive swimmer.) In a similar spirit, Keaton proposed a gag for Tay Garnett’s romantic drama Mrs. Parkington in which Walter Pidgeon casually drops a banana peel for Greer Garson to slip on. Later, assigned to the Bud Abbott–Lou Costello comedy Lost in a Harem, he was reminded of his experience with the Marx Brothers and their seeming aversion to anything that smacked of preparation.
Jon Hall, Louise Allbritton, and Keaton share a magical bus ride in San Diego I Love You (1944).
“Abbott and Costello never gave the story a second thought,” he said disdainfully. “They’d say, ‘When do we come and what do we wear?’ Then they find out the day they start to shoot the picture what the script’s about. Didn’t worry about it. Didn’t try to. Well, that used to get my goat because, my god, when we made pictures, we ate, slept, and dreamed them!”
Keaton took a much-needed break from M-G-M courtesy of Ernie Pagano, who had last worked with him at Educational. In 1943, Pagano and his writing partner, Michael Fessier, were awarded contracts as writer-producers at Universal, and their third production under the agreement was San Diego I Love You, a whimsical wartime comedy about civilians caught up in the California resort city’s housing shortage. A running theme of the picture was people breaking out of their everyday routines, so the team tailored the role of a downtrodden bus driver for him, his first on-screen appearance in a couple of years.
The sequence had a charming Capraesque quality, not unlike the famous bus trip in It Happened One Night. Actress Louise Allbritton, cast as a failed inventor’s daughter, goads Buster into deviating from a route he has driven for a decade.
“For ten years I’ve been drivin’ this route,” he tells his passengers, “and for ten years most of you have been ridin’ with me through billy-be-cursed backyards and I’m sick of it. I’m gonna drive along the beach, and the Consolidated Bus Company can go shoot itself!”
At dusk, they cruise along, waves breaking romantically on the shoreline, the soothing melodies of a quartet of handy musicians emanating from the back. At the end of the evening, he drops the two lovers (Allbritton and top-lined Jon Hall) at her family’s house.
“Lady,” he says poignantly, “what happened tonight never happened before, and it’ll never happen again. And I’ll never forget a minute of it.” He takes her hand. “Thanks.” And he smiles.
Scheduled for three camera days, Keaton’s seriocomic turn in San Diego I Love You was completed in just one, Leo Morrison having negotiated a week’s guarantee regardless. At a rate of $1,000, it would take him ten weeks to make as much at M-G-M as he cleared in a single day at Universal. Fessier and Pagano stuck with Keaton as a kind of talisman for their next two productions. In That’s the Spirit, best described as a supernatural musical-comedy, he played the harried proprietor of a heavenly complaint department atop a cloud of spun glass. Clad in a white suit with a white satin band around the pork pie, he is approached by a deceased Jack Oakie, who petitions for a return to earth to make amends with his wife.
“Oh, that’s the trouble with fellas like you,” Buster complains. “You believe your own obituaries. Think the world can’t get along without you.”
When Oakie proves his case, Keaton grudgingly awards him a seven-day pass as a ghost. “I’m going to send you back down there,” he says. “But I warn you—don’t go around clankin’ chains. It’s absolutely forbidden. Besides, it’s corny.”
In the team’s next picture, That Night with You, Keaton’s profile dwindled to a perfunctory cameo as a dyspeptic counterman at an all-night diner, a part that barely required his presence. Back at Metro, he obligingly delivered another cameo—this time gratis—as a bellboy in the feature comedy She Went to the Races. He consulted on Abbott and Costello in Hollywood and developed a running gag with actor Dave O’Brien for a Pete Smith short titled Equestrian Quiz. (O’Brien’s character, Horace, tries different mounts—such as a flying mount—in a catalog of ways someone can fall off a horse.) It was after finishing with the Smith short that Keaton sat for a six-minute radio interview with future film producer Irwin Allen, who was a Hollywood columnist and broadcaster at the time. It must have come as a shock when Keaton found that Allen’s station, KMTR, was located in a rustic mission-style building that stretched along the western edge of what had once been his own studio lot.
“You and I just met before we came to our broadcast booth in here,” ventured Allen. “Didn’t you tell me something about your old studio being right here on this very site?”
“This very site,” said Keaton.
“And if we can believe what we were told just before we came in, some of the old Buster Keaton pictures are buried here in an old vault, somewhere below ground.”
“Well, I doubt that the pictures are,” said Keaton good-naturedly. “You might find some old gags down there.”