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Along Came Television
AND SO IT BEGAN.
If James Agee’s 1949 essay was a broad historic appraisal tinged with nostalgia, Walter Kerr’s 1952 bookend was a hard-nosed reconsideration wrapped in a clarion call to action. To Kerr’s understanding, one of the great treasures of the silent screen was on the verge of extinction, and something had to be done. There were small, imperceptible moves at first, but they were important first steps in an effort that would, over time, snowball.
Buster Keaton Productions, Inc., successor to the Comique Film Company, was dissolved in 1940, two years after Keaton himself signed away all rights and claims for the sum of $1,000. At that time, all the holdings, which consisted mainly of copyrights and the residual rights to stories and plays, were transferred to Loew’s executives David Bernstein and Leopold Friedman, two of the original stockholders, as trustees under a trust agreement. Bernstein, vice president and treasurer of Loew’s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and a hundred subsidiaries, died in 1945, leaving Friedman, Loew’s general counsel and secretary, the sole surviving trustee.
The last distribution to the owners and their heirs had taken place in 1944—based on the sale of some old equipment—and the trust that resulted from the liquidation of Keaton Productions and its assets came to life only once thereafter when, in 1948, M-G-M briefly contemplated remaking The Navigator and sought Friedman’s permission to copy the Museum of Modern Art’s print, the one Walter Kerr feared was unique. Around the same time, Joe Schenck advised Friedman that Buster Keaton was hopeful of selling Warner Bros. on the idea of remaking the same property with Danny Kaye.
“I gave Buster an option on Navigator for $5,000 for 6 months,” Schenck wrote. “Know it’s low, but want to give him an opportunity to make some money.”
Friedman, possibly out of loyalty to M-G-M, promptly put the kibosh on the deal. “I cannot consider giving Keaton an option on The Navigator,” he responded, “as there is no provision for the stockholders.”
On September 4, 1952, five months after Harper’s Bazaar hit the stands, Friedman made an inquiry regarding pictures he hadn’t given a thought to in years. In a memo to M-G-M attorney Mark Avramo, he asked about the status of the copyrights to the Keaton features distributed by the studio. Four days later, Avramo responded with data “gleaned from the copyright cards in our files.” Three Ages, he reported, had been registered with the Copyright Office in 1923 but not renewed when it became eligible in 1951.[*] Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr., and The Navigator had all been renewed, and Seven Chances was currently eligible for renewal. For all the others, Avramo provided the dates they would become eligible.
Friedman then asked assistant secretary Harold Cleary to assemble “all of the information regarding Buster Keaton pictures and what the rights are of the corporation as well as Buster Keaton individually.” It was Cleary who turned up documents showing that pictures made by Buster Keaton Productions and distributed by Metro reverted to Keaton Productions after five years. He also discovered that Keaton was personally entitled to 25 percent of the profits, although he wasn’t yet aware that Keaton had signed away all rights in 1938. As Buster and Eleanor sailed for Europe to fulfill a three-week engagement with Cirque Médrano and attend the London premiere of Limelight, they were completely unaware that any of this was happening.
Buster Keaton’s uneasy relationship with television continued. He adored the live broadcasts, particularly the ones with audiences that took on the look and excitement of theatrical turns, but hadn’t yet solved the puzzle of delivering a weekly half hour of physical comedy.
Keaton with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz on the set of I Love Lucy. In 1950, he helped Ball get an act together that she performed during a brief vaudeville tour with husband Arnaz. The routine, in which she played a “loaded” cello, was incorporated into the show’s unaired pilot as well as episode six of the series’ first season.
“With a million writers in Hollywood, there aren’t two left who can write for me,” he lamented. “When sound pictures and radio came in, they switched from situation writing to joke telling. Pantomime writers are a vanished breed.”
Consolidated Television Productions had ceased operations after reportedly sinking $500,000 into twenty-six weeks of children’s programming and The Buster Keaton Show. Mercifully, the filmed series received scant exposure. Yet from a business standpoint, it refused to go away. After Consolidated folded as a production entity, another firm, Crown Pictures International, came along and bought all thirteen of the Keaton films, with the idea of mastering a relaunch. Under its former name, Exclusive Distributors, Crown had been one of the pioneers in bringing theatrical features to TV. Now the company wanted to develop original filmed product for video and saw the Keaton series as a bridge between distribution and production. It was an audacious plan. Rather than merely picking up the series and giving it wider distribution, Crown would pretend the earlier series, under the title The Buster Keaton Show, never existed, and that the old episodes were, in fact, new episodes. Freelance editor Stuart O’Brien was assigned the job of repackaging the films, which he did by giving the series a new name, Life with Buster Keaton, and coming up with rudimentary titles for the individual episodes. Once the initial thirteen were successful, Crown would seek financing to make another twenty-six.
Keaton, meanwhile, thought he had a better idea for a series that could inspire a full season’s worth of material. Earlier, he had scribbled out a concept for a show called School of Acting, which would be done in the style of The Drunkard. The host would be a combination director–leading man who would select a cast from the studio audience and have them perform a one-act melodrama. Now he massaged that idea into a format for himself. He would be the actor-manager of a little theater company in the San Fernando Valley and play the lead roles in parodies of old stories like Count of Monte Cristo, Human Hearts, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Ben-Hur.
“I will, of course, play Ben-Hur,” he said. “We’ll put the chariots on treadmills. I’ll race either Ed Wynn or Jimmy Durante.”
Crown’s gambit with the old Keaton series almost paid off. Under the title Life with Buster Keaton, the show was picked up by the Du Mont network affiliate in New York, where it premiered on December 4, 1952. The pilot episode was given the title “The Collapsible Clerk,” and the trades obligingly reviewed it as if it were brand-new. But the show proved to be an even tougher sell the second time around, and markets that formerly had the series under its original title wouldn’t bite again. Keaton was more widely seen in the early weeks of 1953 in Paradise for Buster, a thirty-eight-minute industrial he made at the old Essanay Studios in Chicago for the John Deere company. Directed by Del Lord, it was the sharp and funny story of a city dweller adjusting to farm life after inheriting a spread from his uncle, and it delighted rural audiences gathered for the company’s annual showcase known as John Deere Day.
Life with Buster Keaton was such a flop for Crown Pictures International that the company attempted to recoup its investment by using the footage to cobble together a short feature titled The Misadventures of Buster Keaton. Released by British Lion, Misadventures was widely shown in the United Kingdom during the latter half of 1953 and was nominally released to television in the United States. For the rest of Keaton’s life, the series that began as The Buster Keaton Show would pass through multiple owners and keep popping up on TV. It became, in fact, one of the most frequently seen things Keaton ever did, a dubious introduction to generations of film enthusiasts who might otherwise have been exposed to some of his silent classics.
Keaton’s times with Cirque Médrano opened the whole of the European market to him, an audience more responsive to his work and seemingly more eager to see him than the domestic audience he once saw as primary. Buster and Eleanor began spending more time there, sometimes making multiple trips in a single year. In July 1953, they arrived in Italy for a series of dates, starting with a summer revue at Milan’s Teatro Manzoni and working their way down to Livorno, a three-month tour in all. And the year 1954 began on the Île de France bound for Paris.
“He clowned spontaneously on the ship during a dance one evening out of sheer exuberance,” the author Paul Gallico, a fellow passenger on the voyage, recalled. “Suddenly we saw him pantomiming the washing of the great plate-glass doors to the lounge. Then he continued on and polished the empty space where there wasn’t any door. Such perfection of pantomime is rarely seen anymore today. With one accord, the passengers stopped dancing and burst into applause.”
Buster was headed to his third stand with the Cirque Médrano, and then on to the Cirque Royal of Brussels. As they settled in at the George V, a reporter from the Evening News requested a short interview. Eleanor confirmed they would be staying a month, then moving on to Belgium. “After that, nothing is definitely decided, and we’ll see what turns up.”
She also seemed surprised to find that it was winter in Paris: “We haven’t had time to see much of it, but I find it mighty cold.”
Buster concurred: “Do you know when we got into Le Havre it was snowing? Not so funny.”
Keaton opened on Friday, January 8, doing a “park bench” act, a sort of miscellany of bits kicked off when he entered the ring carrying a black evening suit on a hanger. The pompous red-coated ringmaster was in the midst of singing a song and ignored his attempts at making the delivery. As he continued, Buster circled him, receipt pad in hand, trying to get his attention. Soon, the garment was in a dusty heap on the ground, and the audience was choking with laughter. A window box full of flowers appeared. As Buster bent over to pick one, he was confronted by a menacing policeman. He tried to hide an enormous stolen balloon from the cop, then did battle with a gumball machine and an octopus of a newspaper. When he sat at the edge of the ring and attempted to watch the performance of another song, a burly stagehand motioned for him to move.
“The ringmaster chased him,” remembered Billy Beck, an American-born clown at the Cirque, “and then the stagehands got into the chase, and Keaton began to run—first of all a circle-circuit of the ring, then out one of the entrance ways. One, two, three, four entrances into the ring, and that meant that he would run through the corridor, round underneath the seats, and come in through another entrance way to the stage. This went on, back and forth around, in and out entrance ways, into the seats, sitting in the seats, hiding behind the people in the seats while the stagehands were supposedly looking for him and couldn’t find him. He finally disappeared and ended up among the [players in] the band, which is situated above the principal entrance where the artistes come in—which meant he had to run back through the corridors again and up a rickety old spiral staircase to where the band was situated….When they discovered him in the band, the stagehands went up there and actually manhandled him from one to another down to the ring and then booted him out.”
Gallico made a point of catching a performance: “I shouted with laughter for this was the Buster Keaton of my youth, now sixtyish, who could still fall backwards off a bench or trip on the ring’s edge and end up in a flying forward somersault. This was my deadpan boy, hero of a hundred movies, frustration’s mime, pursued, put upon, persecuted by humans as well as by objects suddenly possessed of a malevolent life and will of their own. The oldsters in the audience of Frenchmen laughed too, a double compliment because of what he had been and what he was. But there was another sound that rose above it all, the joyous screaming of children, and I thought that this was the greatest achievement for this wholly American clown in a foreign circus. For the small fry had never seen him or heard of him before, and wave upon wave of love and laughter went out from their hearts and throats to him.”
Again he was a hit for the Cirque, filling the house twice daily. Yet when Jerome Médrano learned about the subsequent engagement in Brussels, from which Keaton would be collecting no traveling expenses and would be accepting less money, he was incensed. “He suggested I get off the hook by reducing my salary to the Brussels figure,” Keaton recounted. “When I refused, he offered to book me for two weeks more on the condition that I cancel the Belgian engagement. This, of course, I could not conscientiously do, and monsieur’s next move was to go to the police.”
Médrano alleged breach of a 500,000-franc-a-week contract and had the Keatons’ luggage impounded. “It was my agent’s fault,” Buster explained. “I was booked two places at once. When the case came up, I was given a woman lawyer who figured it would be smart if I pleaded I was broke.” He went to court the next day, saying he had received 100,000 francs on arrival but nothing since. “I have not got a cent to my name.”
Médrano’s leverage was a one-month contract with an option for an additional month. He had never exercised the option before, but this time he said that he would.
“I think he sued, or wanted to sue, or was going to sue the Cirque Royal in Brussels for stealing Buster,” said Eleanor. “I don’t know. It was a whole drama; it was terrible….Médrano was a bastard. He always was.”
Keaton got out of the scrape by reducing his rate to what Médrano demanded, but the resulting publicity paid an unexpected dividend. In England, the press coverage the incident provoked alerted Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., to the fact that Buster Keaton was nearby. He sent Keaton a telegram:
I AM MAKING A BIG SERIES OF HALF-HOUR FILMS FOR TV. WOULD LOVE YOU TO PLAY THE STAR PART. DEADLY SERIOUS. NO COMEDY BUT LOTS OF PATHOS.
“I’ll do it,” Keaton responded. “Of course I’ll do it. But why does he tell me it’s ‘deadly serious’? Have I ever been anything else?”
The Keatons flew into London on March 8, 1954, and were immediately driven to the British National Studios at Elstree, where Buster would spend five days making an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s influential short story “The Cloak.” The syndicated anthology series produced and hosted by Fairbanks was in its second season, and Keaton’s casting was serendipitous in that most episodes featured, with the exception of Fairbanks himself, British actors.
“It struck me as a beautiful idea, a novel idea, to put him in a straight part,” said Fairbanks, “because he was such a beautiful actor and a great talent. It worked out very well; he gave a marvelous performance.”
Larry Marcus’ script, titled “The Awakening,” took the premise of the aging bureaucrat whose life is transformed by a newly tailored overcoat and gave it a totalitarian setting with an Orwellian figure known as the Chief at its center. The clerk doesn’t die as he does in the original, but instead dreams of confronting the Chief, whose supposed benevolence cloaks a brutally regimented society. The Chief’s solution to the citizen’s loss of his coat is to purge the officials of the departments dealing with the case.
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., welcomes Keaton to the British National Studios, March 1954.
“Successful action has already been taken,” he announces.
“And they’ll still say my report has been properly filed and duly processed,” Keaton’s nameless character charges. “You can keep dismissing them, stripping them of all power, disgracing them, and replacing them until the end of time, and it still won’t get my overcoat back. And when I protest they’ll still throw me into prison—because it’s not ‘they.’ They’re just part of a machine, a machine that was to give us so much happiness. This machine that reduces a broken heart to a number in a catalogue, that says a hungry child is nothing more than 26583-Y. A machine that’s forgotten what kindness, warmth, and pity mean…”
Keaton delivers the speech with startling intensity, the character’s words and demeanor fitting him so well it was as if Marcus had written it expressly for him. Eleanor thought both he and the film great, but she didn’t consider Buster’s first serious part to be much of a stretch.
“He’d done a lot of TV,” she said. “It was easy. In comedy he had to create everything. In drama you just learn your lines and let someone else do the worrying. Buster always had a dramatic quality about his work. He was always very serious.”
Buster and Eleanor Keaton were stopping at the Hotel St. Moritz on New York’s Central Park South when, on October 6, 1953, a man named Rudi Blesh paid a call. Blesh was primarily known as a jazz critic, having served in that capacity for the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Herald Tribune. He was also the author of two books on the subject, Shining Trumpets, published by Knopf in 1946 and, with Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime, published in 1950. Now, possibly inspired by the Walter Kerr essay, Blesh proposed to write a third—a full-scale biography of Buster Keaton.
“B. met me,” Blesh recorded in a composition book, “shy and reticent at first—looks older, but still slender—hair only slightly gray but has bald spot at back. Came around to idea of book slowly, but when he did said, ‘This won’t be a book about the movies, but about vaudeville…K. said he only knew 1st run vaude. Played best houses—openings (?) of B. F. Keith’s $1 million theatres, Boston and Philey (about 1902). Says, ‘People say they would like to see vaude. come back—but it can’t come back because there’s no school anymore. Vaude. isn’t just standing on the stage getting chummy w/the aud. (monologue)—it is variety (then named a variety of top acts).’
“ ‘Why did all those wonderful old minstrel shows go out?’ he cont. ‘Because vaude. could pay better + draw off the best talent from the minstrels. Then musical comedy began drawing off the best vaude. talent [about 1912 on—Fannie Brice, Bert Wms., Cantor, Jessel, Ed Wynn, W.C. Fields, etc.]. Then about 1917, the movies took the rest. That’s what happened to vaude.’ ”
Offering 25 percent of the author’s royalties for Keaton’s cooperation, Blesh would proceed to research and write a biography he would come to call “The Two Worlds of Buster Keaton.” He’d spend endless hours sitting with his subject in the breakfast nook of the house on Victoria, even living with the Keatons for a time. He’d interview Myra Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, Al St. John if he could find him.
“I hesitated a long time,” Keaton said. “I’ve never wanted to make my life an open book. But now that I’ve finally decided to have a biography, it’s no holds barred.”
The ranks of those closest to the story were thinning at an alarming rate. Lou Anger and Mal St. Clair were already dead, as were, of course, Arbuckle, Lew Cody, Ward Crane, Jean Havez, Ed Sedgwick, Al Boasberg, and Gabe Gabourie. Blesh would work hard, cranking miles of microfilm and poring over papers and scrapbooks, but the book would never see publication—at least not in its subject’s lifetime.
From the challenge and prestige of “The Awakening,” Keaton did a one-eighty and opened at the Silver Slipper Gambling Hall in Las Vegas, where he was slipped into an ongoing revue hosted by house comic Hank Henry. He was so well received that his residency was extended to four weeks, but the big hit of the show was vocalist Gogi Grant, whose chart-topping single “The Wayward Wind” would follow in 1956. There was more TV in the fall of 1954, principally in New York, where Keaton was added to the all-star cast of The Man Who Came to Dinner and did guest shots on shows like Life Begins at Eighty and I’ve Got a Secret. (His secret on the latter: “I’m sitting on a custard pie.”)
When he wasn’t on television, Keaton was dreaming up sketches and ideas for pilots, often with Hal Goodwin, who had replaced Clyde Bruckman as his principal collaborator. Bruckman had gone off to write for Abbott and Costello on a syndicated series of their own, but by the end of 1953, work on the second season of The Abbott and Costello Show was over and there would be no third. Bruckman tried stirring up work by writing spec scripts for the likes of Danny Thomas and Stu Erwin, and he approached Stan Laurel about doing a filmed Laurel and Hardy series to alternate with new Keaton episodes. But his efforts were tainted by a history of alcoholism and the loss of a plagiarism suit filed by Harold Lloyd that made everything he wrote suspect. Bruckman had, said Eleanor, written himself out. “He had long since given up trying to think of anything. All he did was remember back and pluck and steal….He never once ever came up with anything original or new.” In November 1954, Bruckman was reduced to borrowing money from director George Stevens, who had been his cameraman back in their days with Hal Roach.
Along about New Year’s, Bruckman phoned Keaton and told him he was driving up north to do a little fishing. He knew Buster had a gun permit and asked if he could borrow his army .45 automatic for protection. Keaton lent him the pistol and thought nothing more of it. On the afternoon of January 4, 1955, Bruckman drove to Bess Eiler’s, a restaurant not far from the Santa Monica apartment he shared with his wife. He went inside and ordered a drink in the lounge. A few minutes later, he disappeared into the men’s room, settled into a stall, and shot himself in the head. In a note tucked into his jacket pocket, he asked that his body be donated to “some medical school for clinical examination because I have no money to provide for my burial.” Clyde Bruckman was sixty years old. The Keatons learned of his death when the police traced the gun back to Buster. They tried to return it, but he didn’t want it.
Shaken by Bruckman’s suicide, Keaton didn’t work much over the first half of 1955. He spent the month of July and part of August in England, where he consulted on—and appeared in—a pilot for a commercial TV series titled The Adventures of Mr. Pastry. The bumbling Mr. Pastry was the invention of stage and film actor Richard Hearne, a natural acrobat whose working methods were not unlike Keaton’s. The American-born producer Hannah Weinstein, who had settled in London in 1952, conceived of bringing the two men together for a string of thirty-nine episodes, having previously created the series Colonel March of Scotland Yard and The Adventures of Robin Hood for the U.S. market. With Keaton initially proposed as co-director, the matter had to be put to the General Council of the Association of Cine Technicians, but there was no trouble about it. “ACT welcomed so distinguished a person as Buster Keaton working here,” the council’s report said, “and would not oppose a permit for the pilot, especially as an ACT member would co-direct.”
Keaton’s co-director turned out to be Ralph Smart, whose feature credits included Bush Christmas and an episode of W. Somerset Maugham’s Quartet. The resulting collaboration was slick and funny, with Mr. Pastry arriving for the first time in London to try out for the International School of Drama and finding its proprietor, the threadbare Colin Dingle, contemplating suicide. It’s not Pastry’s audition that excites Dingle so much as his pension, and the two become roommates. The business of Dingle trying to sneak out of his boardinghouse, Pastry steadying the ladder and then losing control of it, became one of the show’s comic highpoints, as did the chaotic ending in which Keaton and Hearne as supernumeraries lay waste to a performance as Buster once did in Speak Easily. Hearne, for whom Keaton had tremendous affection, tended to dominate the action when it came to the rough stuff while Buster graciously deferred.
“It didn’t sell,” said Eleanor, “so that was it.”
While Buster and Eleanor were in Britain, word came from California that Myra Keaton had died at the age of seventy-eight. Having contracted pneumonia, Myra was admitted to a hospital the day before she passed. “Just bones,” said Eleanor, who estimated Myra’s weight at sixty-three pounds. “She practically died of malnutrition. She used to get to the point where she wasn’t interested in food. You couldn’t get her to eat.”
In her final years, Buster’s mother subsisted primarily on whiskey. “She drank a pint of Four Roses a day,” her grandson Jim Talmadge recounted, “rolled her own Bull Durham cigarettes, had a little gold cigarette holder that fit on her finger, and she drank and smoked ’til the day she died. And under her bed, after she died, was a pint of Four Roses.”
Stuck in England in the middle of production, there was little Buster could do. “We sent a cable,” Eleanor recalled, “and said, ‘It’s impossible. Do as you see fit. Do what you need to do. We’ll pay the bill when we get home.’ ” Louise’s best friend from school, who came from a large family, stepped in and helped with the arrangements. Harry Keaton got a deal on a couple of plots at a new cemetery in Sylmar, leaving Joe Keaton, still at Inglewood, permanently separated from the rest of the family. At the time of her death, Myra had three grandchildren and six great-grandchildren, of which only one, Melissa, was a girl. “She was Buster’s favorite,” said her mother, Barbara Talmadge. “Whenever we went over to play bridge at their house, which was every Sunday night, we’d have dinner and play bridge and the kids would go to sleep on Eleanor and Buster’s bed. And then we’d pick them up and put them in the car and take them back home. He had to carry her. Nobody else could carry her out to the car except Buster.”
Prior to leaving for London, Keaton had been approached by a screenwriter named Robert Smith, who proposed to write and produce a film of his life. Keaton gave Smith an option for $1,000, never thinking it would come to pass, and left for the United Kingdom. While he was gone, Smith announced to the trade that he planned to make the picture as an independent production. By the time Keaton returned, Smith had acquired a partner in fellow screenwriter Sidney Sheldon, and the two men had formed a production company to make the picture with Smith producing and Sheldon directing.
Eleanor was dubious from the start. “From the moment they came over, and whatever they said at the house, [Buster] knew it was going to be a disaster….They didn’t know what they were talking about. You know when you’ve got a couple of idiots in the place, you know that. You don’t have to wait for eight days to find that out. And Buster could spot those things.”
Had Eleanor seen the pitch document, which put forth the idea of making a movie of her husband’s life, her worst fears would have been confirmed. “This is the story of a man who made the world laugh,” it began, “who lived in fabulous times among fabulous people, who made millions and then did something much worse than die broke—he lived broke…Most of it is true in fact, and all of it is true in spirit.” Then came one of the first lines in the story itself: “Buster grew up in the circus.”
In September 1955, the Keatons traveled to Durango, Colorado, where Buster would play one of the twenty-four star cameos in Mike Todd’s production of Around the World in 80 Days. His casting in the picture was the idea of Michael Todd, Jr., who became a tremendous fan of Keaton’s pictures while a student at Amherst.
Keaton talks with Mario Moreno, better known to the world as Cantinflas, while on location in Colorado for Around the World in 80 Days.
“Mike Todd called me up one night from RKO, told me what I would have to do,” Keaton recounted. “He was so enthusiastic that I agreed right away and without a signed contract.”
When they arrived on location, Eleanor observed that the three stars—David Niven, Cantinflas, and Shirley MacLaine—had their own trailers, while the character people, a group which included John Carradine, Keye Luke, Philip Van Zandt, and Buster, were left to fend for themselves.
“It was bitter cold,” she said. “Each day you’d almost expect snow. It didn’t quite make it, but it was down in the twenties every morning.”
In the middle of the first day, they were sitting around in the weak sun, huddled together, when Eleanor heard the explosive Todd giving somebody hell. “My big ears are hanging out. I like to pick up all the little tidbits I can. He says, ‘I don’t give a goddamn where you have to go, [even if] you have to go to Denver and have it flown in. He will have the trailer here by tomorrow morning, or I will know the reason why.’ ”
The next morning, a fourth trailer, bigger and more richly appointed than the other three, appeared—and it was assigned to Buster Keaton. Quietly, Keaton caught the head man’s attention.
“Mr. Todd,” he said, “I think there’s been some mistake. I’ve been assigned the biggest trailer.”
“There’s no mistake,” Todd replied. “You’re the biggest star in the picture.”
Humbled by Todd’s largesse, Keaton threw open the doors to Van Zandt and Luke, and all three men proceeded to use it. His role as a conductor on the Denver & Rio Grande Western’s narrow-gauge train must have reminded him of shooting The General some thirty years earlier, particularly when the engineer is goaded into crossing a spindly bridge he doesn’t think will hold, and it collapses as the last car clears the span. “For a bit part, it certainly took a long time,” Keaton remarked. “We were in Colorado three weeks for just the part I played on the train.”
Scenes of Phileas Fogg and his man Passepartout in the American West had to be made without benefit of rear projection, as no equipment could yet accommodate the Todd-AO wide-screen system that required 65mm film running at thirty frames per second.
“There was no process,” said director Michael Anderson, “so the whole side of the train had to come off. The cameras had to be put on platforms, and the actors had to be put on the open train. You’d get the train up to forty or fifty miles an hour, bring the actors in, and start rehearsing with the train going at full speed and the camera crew hanging on for dear life.”
Keaton turned sixty on October 4, 1955, and observed the occasion by preparing a nostalgic nod to The Three Keatons for an all-star TV spectacular. “Just give me enough money for a couple of acres in the valley and I’d chuck the whole works,” he told the AP’s Bob Thomas. “You really can’t make much out of European tours. I’ve done more TV guest shots than most stars. I’ve been on Ed Sullivan’s show four times, the Comedy Hour five times, and I’m the only one who has been on What’s My Line twice. But you do a shot and then lay off two months. You can’t save money that way.”
In “Show Biz from Vaude to Video,” which originated live from NBC’s new Color City studios in Burbank, Buster was an inept janitor trying to clean up the stage while a magician (Harold Goodwin) is attempting to do his act. They quickly get in each other’s way and begin trading blows, Buster whacking the magician on the backside with a broom while his adversary hits him over the head with a big roll of paper. They quickly fall into a rhythm and, of course, the orchestra strikes up “The Anvil Chorus.” It was an exceptional appearance, energetic and funny, and for a finale, the entire cast, including Groucho Marx, Bert Lahr, and Buster, joined Eartha Kitt in singing “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”
On November 19, Keaton appeared in Rochester, New York, to accept the newly instituted “George” award given to industry veterans by George Eastman House. A committee chaired by Jesse L. Lasky conducted balloting among players, directors, and cameramen to select five each of actors, actresses, directors, and cameramen from a roster of more than four hundred who were active during the formative period 1915 to 1925.
“Comedy is comedy,” Buster told a reporter for the local Democrat and Chronicle. “The same things get laughs no matter what the setting. You remember those old chases we used to have in the silent picture days? They’d still knock ’em dead. The only trouble is that it would cost just about eight times as much to prepare and film them today as it did in the old days.” Asked about television, he said it had “put greasepaint back on me. I was spending my time for the last fifteen years as a writer for some of the modern comics. Along came television and I was back in business.”
Other recipients attending the First Festival of Film Artists at the Eastman Theater were Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Mae Marsh, Ronald Colman, Harold Lloyd, Richard Barthelmess, director Marshall Neilan, and cameraman Hal Rosson. Gloria Swanson sent regrets from Paris, Charlie Chaplin, in England, didn’t reply at all, and no one, it seemed, could locate Norma Talmadge. A duplicate ceremony was scheduled for Los Angeles on December 7, 1955. Immensely proud of the award, Keaton was planning to join his contemporaries once again when, fighting a chest cold he caught on the trip, he ruptured two varicose veins in his esophagus during a coughing fit. Medicine had no effect on the hemorrhaging, and the doctor told Eleanor to get him to the hospital if he wasn’t better by eight that evening. He was still coughing up blood as he was wheeled into surgery at the veterans’ hospital on the night of December 3, but the doctors could do nothing to stop the bleeding. He fell into a coma, and on December 5 his condition was reported as “very grave.” Eleanor was advised to gather the family. Two nights later, after clips from some of his greatest films flashed on the screen during the Eastman event at the Screen Directors Guild, Mary Pickford appeared onstage and asked the audience to pray for Buster Keaton.