25
The Worst Thing Ever Made
“ELEANOR PHONED US,” said Barbara Talmadge, “and he was at the VA hospital there in Sawtelle. They couldn’t stop the bleeding and they needed blood for transfusions. Could Jim come down? Jim got there, and they told him they didn’t have enough of the blood [type] for the transfusion.” Jim Talmadge wasn’t eligible to give blood himself because he contracted dengue fever, which is similar to malaria, during the war. “So he called, possibly, four of the fellows that he’d been overseas with in the OSS. They all went, and what [the doctors] told him was that they were trying to stop the bleeding before they started the transfusion. It took six orderlies in the hospital to hold Buster down, he was so strong, because he was fighting. He wasn’t really conscious [of] what was going on and they were trying to get this tube down his throat and, finally, to [inflate a balloon] down there and get it up against the bleeding and stop the bleeding.”
The headline in the Los Angeles Examiner was stark: “BUSTER KEATON FIGHTS FOR LIFE.” The accompanying copy summarized his career as would an obituary. On December 7, 1955, he was still on the critical list but “slightly improved” and conscious enough to recognize Eleanor. He showed a slight gain the next day, and by December 12 he was “improved and feeling much better.” His room was flooded with messages and good wishes from the likes of Clara Bow, Louise Dresser, and Mrs. Darryl F. Zanuck—the former Virginia Fox. On December 14, Jesse Lasky visited his bedside with an AP photographer to again present him with his George Eastman Award. Buster, clad in his robe and slippers, made newspapers around the country. He returned home two days later, and was formally discharged on December 23.
“Yes, it was a tough time,” he acknowledged. “But I didn’t know anything about it. I was fighting the anesthetic when they put me under. Every time I started to come out of it, I’d be fighting again. So they kept me out cold for four days. They pumped ten pints of blood into me in fourteen hours. Ten pints—that’s as much as I had in me, so you can see how much I lost. They cut a hole in my trachea so I could breathe and were feeding me intravenously in my ankle. At one time I had six tubes stuck in me….I had nine doctors working on my case and the best of equipment and facilities. It was the kind of care I couldn’t have begun to pay for. That’s what saved my life.”
The night before he was discharged from the hospital, Keaton was once again before a national audience as the star of “The Silent Partner,” an episode of NBC’s Screen Directors Playhouse. Heading a cast that included Joe E. Brown, ZaSu Pitts, Snub Pollard, and, in a cameo, Bob Hope, he played Kelsey Dutton, an anonymous little man who stops at a bar in Hollywood on the night of the Academy Awards. Nursing a beer, he watches as a veteran director accepts an honorary Oscar and recounts the time the two men met in 1916 and began making comedies together. Flashbacks return them to the days of their youth, and at the climax they’re reunited with the prospect of once again working together. Directed by George Marshall, “The Silent Partner” was one of the best received episodes of the series and a poignant showcase for Keaton at the end of an eventful year.
It is not clear what initially brought actor James Mason and Buster Keaton together—or if, in fact, they were brought together at all. What is known is that when the estate on Hartford was built in 1926, a film vault was included in the plans. Specifically, there was a garden shed on the property, and hidden behind a wall of shelving inside that shed was a concrete vault built into the side of a hill. It’s been speculated that Keaton used the small structure as a cutting room, and that the vault held work prints as well as copies of all of his shorts and features. After he left the house in 1932—and Natalie disposed of it—it passed through an assortment of owners and tenants. Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton leased it prior to her marriage to Cary Grant, and Marlene Dietrich and actor Jean Gabin occupied it for a time. In 1949, James and Pamela Mason acquired it from the widow of John Raymond Owens, son of glass industrialist Michael J. Owens, who leaped at a lowball offer of $86,000 for what was widely considered to be a white elephant.
“Buster Keaton called once,” said Pamela Mason, “and asked if he might come to see the house and show it to his new wife. And I said no because I thought it would break his heart to see what we’d done to it. I had corked the floors, the halls and the marble, because we had children—and eighteen cats—and I had done everything to make it convenient and comfortable for a lot of children.” They had also auctioned off some of the custom furnishings and subdivided the property to create three additional parcels, consigning the great swimming pool and its majestic staircase to another owner. “Everything was horrific by his standards.”
In a way, though, Eleanor had already seen it. “It was about 1938, I think. Buster and I were out for a drive. We had just started going out together. Maybe he wanted to impress me a little. Suddenly, Buster drove up the driveway to the front of the house and said, ‘I used to live here.’ We sat for a moment, looking at the house and the grounds…Buster pointed out where he raised his prized pheasants. Then he just put the car in gear and back down the hill we went. Buster wasn’t a big talker, and he was pretty quiet on the way home. But he did say one thing: ‘It took a hell of a lot of pratfalls to build that dump.’ ”
If the film vault was indeed concealed behind shelving, nobody would have tried opening it in the intervening years because no one would have known it was there. The late Bart Williams, an actor who inspected it in 1998, described the surrounding structure, then in an advanced state of decay, as “a sort of gardener’s cottage, part greenhouse, potting shed, hothouse, and tool shed. This white-painted building, made of lattice, glass, and wood, was set against the original cement retaining wall on the east side of the property.” The vault itself, which was the size of “a small basement room,” resembled a bank vault. “A combination dial lock and large chrome door handle worked a thick, vertical lock bar on the inside of the door.”
Keaton spoke on the record about it twice. In an interview with Joe Hyams of the New York Herald Tribune, he said he had been asked by the Museum of Modern Art if he had a print of Sherlock Jr.[*1] According to Hyams, Keaton called at the house and requested permission to go into the vault and retrieve the cans. The Masons’ butler relayed the message and the answer came back: “No.” Keaton explained to the butler that it was for the museum, and thereupon Mason relented. With plans for The Buster Keaton Story going forward, Hyams suggested that Keaton must now have “everything he wanted” out of life.
“Not everything,” Buster returned. “I won’t feel I’ve really arrived until I can go to my old house and get permission to go into the film vault for my own films from Mr. Mason himself, without mentioning the Modern Museum.”
Two months later, Keaton told much the same story to Jim Cook of the New York Post, and this time he was quoted directly: “He sold off most of the ten [sic] acres, and the crowning indignity came when I went to the house…to get one of my old films which was still in the vault there. Mason wouldn’t come to the door and the maid said I couldn’t get the film. But I played a trump card—I told her to tell Mason that the Museum of Modern Art in New York wanted it. I got it then.”
James Mason, who would later claim he was out of town when Keaton appeared at his door, apparently summoned a locksmith to open the vault. Inside were nine of the ten features Keaton made for Joe Schenck, and seven of his best two-reelers. Mason was conflicted, since technically he was the legal owner of the abandoned films.
“A dilemma presented itself,” he wrote. “Should I make a respectful humane gesture towards this great artist? Or should I guarantee the preservation of the films? I knew that Keaton could not use the films to his personal advantage and that he did not command the facilities for preserving them. Anyway, right or wrong, I chose [to donate the films to] the Academy.” And so in January 1956, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took delivery of the entire contents of Buster Keaton’s former vault, which included 35mm prints of The General, The Navigator, Three Ages, Go West, Cops, The Boat, and Sherlock Jr.[*2] For his trouble, Mason awarded himself a $10,000 deduction on his federal income taxes.
While the largest single collection of Buster Keaton’s films in the world was being inventoried and examined in Los Angeles, the long-dormant holder of the copyrights of those films was continuing to move ahead in New York. In July 1955, Leopold Friedman requested a complete report on Buster Keaton, covering his picture history prior to M-G-M, his two-reelers produced by Comique, the shorts and features made by Buster Keaton Productions, his pictures as a salaried actor, summaries of all his M-G-M employment agreements, and his assignments of all rights. In October, Friedman also asked for a summary of Keaton elements on hand, both negatives and prints.
In time, a fuller picture developed of what existed and where. Metro’s rights to The Saphead had lapsed in 1930, but the Academy had a print. M-G-M had a negative and print on the silent version of Spite Marriage, and an incomplete negative on Battling Butler. Studio records showed they had destroyed the negatives of Three Ages, Our Hospitality, The Navigator, and Seven Chances, presumably after distribution rights to those titles had lapsed. They claimed no elements whatsoever on Sherlock Jr., Go West, or The Cameraman. Over at Fox, where Joe Schenck’s personal prints were stored, there were copies of Our Hospitality and Battling Butler. The Museum of Modern Art had Sherlock Jr., Go West, and The General. Their print of The Navigator, about which Walter Kerr had written so passionately in 1952, was thought to be the only one in the country. (M-G-M’s print had come from this.) George Eastman House held a 16mm print of Go West made from the M-G-M negative in 1952. The British Film Institute distributed The Navigator and The General in the United Kingdom.
Of the trove of reels donated to the Academy, many were in a state of decomposition since they had all been printed on nitrate film stock. When stored under less-than-ideal conditions, nitrate stock tends to decompose, generally through shrinkage and discoloration, then with the emulsion and its base becoming a gummy, flammable mass, sticky, runny, and beyond rescue. In the final stages of decomposition, all that remains is a rusty brown powder. Of the Keaton features received from Mason, only Battling Butler, The General, College, and Steamboat Bill, Jr. were intact. Three reels of Sherlock Jr. survived, but a fourth reel had to be destroyed. One reel of The Navigator also had to be junked. Three Ages, Go West, and Seven Chances were total losses.
With Myra Keaton’s death in 1955, her elder son could finally divest himself of the house at 1043 South Victoria. Louise Keaton, then working as a bookkeeper, moved out and got her own apartment, but Harry Keaton never acknowledged the plan and remained steadfastly entrenched.
“There was a bar up the street where he used to spend his evenings,” said Eleanor, “and that’s the way he lived.” Several months passed until The Buster Keaton Story was set up at Paramount. Keaton’s first payment would amount to $19,000, enough, combined with savings, to buy the modest house he had always wanted.
A family gathering at 1043 South Victoria, circa 1952. From left: Melissa Talmadge, Louise Keaton, Eleanor Keaton, Buster, Barbara Talmadge, and Myra Keaton.
It wasn’t the first time the Keatons had yearnings for a place of their own. In 1949, Eleanor had managed to put enough money away to build a house near Culver City, where they found a four-acre lot for $10,000. They began by planting a row of pine trees across the back, drenching them with water during their weekly visits. Then a friend, John S. “Jack” Fredericks, who had been a star fullback for UCLA and was at one time the owner of the Los Angeles Bulldogs, offered to go in with them, taking half the acreage for himself and giving the Keatons the wherewithal to start construction. After the foundations were laid, Buster and Eleanor had to go east for Three Men on a Horse. In their absence, they asked Fredericks to keep up the payments on the land, promising to square everything when they got back. But unbeknownst to anyone, Jack Fredericks was terminally ill. No payments got made that summer, and by the time the Keatons returned, the property had been lost to foreclosure. Less than a year later, Fredericks was dead of a brain tumor at the age of thirty-nine.
When the money from Paramount came through on April 16, 1956, Keaton knew exactly what he wanted—a small, manageable place with enough land to plant trees and keep animals. Hal Goodwin, who was working in real estate when not before the cameras, took him around.
“When I sold him this house [in Woodland Hills], he was ready to settle down. What he wanted [was] a farm. Well, that was a pretty big place, you know—a hundred and twenty feet by three hundred feet with barns in the back for horses.”
One of Buster’s criteria was that he wanted a semi-rural setting, away from the noise and density of Los Angeles. The bedroom community of Woodland Hills was at the southwestern edge of the San Fernando Valley, running up along the northern slope of the Santa Monica Mountains. There Buster took a fancy to a ranch house built in 1947, two bedrooms, one bath.
“I walked him through the house and into the den, and there was a pot-bellied stove in the den. That sold the house. I took him, put him in the car, and he says, ‘Where you going?’ I said, ‘I’m going to show you some more houses.’ He says, ‘I want this one.’ So he had made [up his mind]….He paid cash, $29,000.”
Eleanor was fine with the house. They moved in June, she remembered, “and Harry stayed, hanging on to the bedpost until the day we moved the furniture out from under him.”
There was a surge of biographical pictures in Hollywood as The Buster Keaton Story made the rounds. The Eddy Duchin Story, with Tyrone Power as the late bandleader, and Somebody Up There Likes Me, starring Paul Newman as the middleweight champ Rocky Graziano, were awaiting release. Also shooting or in development were Man of a Thousand Faces (Lon Chaney), The Wings of Eagles (Commander Frank “Spig” Wead), The Spirit of St. Louis (Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh), The Helen Morgan Story, and The Best Things in Life Are Free (songwriters Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson)—more than thirty such properties in all. Robert Smith and Harry Essex had settled an original western called The Lonely Man at Paramount, and both men were seeking deals for separate biographical subjects, Essex with The Benny Leonard Story, concerning the former lightweight champion, and Smith with Keaton. The studio already had several other biographical stories in the works, including Beau James (with Bob Hope playing Mayor Jimmy Walker), The Five Pennies (Danny Kaye as jazz cornetist Red Nichols), and The Joker Is Wild (Frank Sinatra channeling nightclub comic Joe E. Lewis).
Smith, whose writing and producing credits tended toward low-budget independents like Quicksand, 99 River Street, and Invasion, U.S.A. pitched Academy Award–winning screenwriter Sidney Sheldon, who was already under contract to Paramount, in order to get the Keaton story off the ground. Sheldon, who had moved into directing with the Cary Grant misfire Dream Wife, wanted another picture to direct when Smith, whom he didn’t know, showed up at his office one day. Sheldon took the idea to production head Don Hartman, who embraced it and suggested Donald O’Connor for the title role. Keaton himself had been thinking of TV’s George Gobel, but readily approved of O’Connor playing the part. “Gobel would get more laughs,” he said, “but O’Connor would be better for the action. He’s a dancer and could handle my kind of knockabout comedy.”
Buster, according to Eleanor, didn’t particularly care how the script turned out. “It all boiled down to the fact that they had just made the Lillian Roth story about a drunken woman [I’ll Cry Tomorrow] and it was very successful. It made a lot of money, so they said, ‘Okay, if one drunk is good, a bunch of drunks will be fine. So they came to Buster and said, ‘Can we film your life story?’ And Buster said, ‘Be my guest,’ because, you know, he got that twice a week [and] nothing ever happened. And darn if they didn’t go through with it. They never asked him question one, they never talked to him, they didn’t do anything until they were ready to shoot, and then: ‘Here’s the script and we’re ready to go.’ He never read the script….He said, ‘I’m not going to like it, and the fact that I have script approval is not going to make any difference. They’re not going to change anything no matter how loud I scream, so I see no reason to grow a new ulcer.’ ”
Smith and Sheldon had some Keaton films shipped in from MoMA, dug up others through private sources, and built their script around spectacular physical gags they felt could be re-created with Buster’s help.
“Some of the prints were in terrible condition,” Smith lamented. “A shameful waste of great art.”
After the screenplay was finalized, Smith, with a straight face, assured The New York Times that Keaton was “very pleased with the script.” In the run-up to the start of the picture, Buster assumed the role of personal trainer for their twenty-nine-year-old star, holing up with him in the studio gymnasium and practicing moves from some of his cleverest comedies as Fred Astaire might do in rehearsing a number.
“You’ve got to learn how to fall,” Keaton told him. “I never take the impact of a fall on the back of my head, the base of my spine, my elbows or my knees. That’s how you break bones.”
Donald O’Connor regretted the fact that the budget wouldn’t permit some of Keaton’s most spectacular gags, such as the house fall from Steamboat Bill, Jr. or some of the traveling shots in The General. “I said, ‘Why don’t we grain down the film?’ And they said, ‘What are you talking about?’ ” What O’Connor was suggesting was to use actual clips of Keaton from the original pictures, with O’Connor entering and exiting the scenes as he might before handing them off to a stuntman. The new footage would be shot to match the grain of the old footage as closely as possible.
“Get me walking into a scene,” he said, “and then you show Buster, because we did look an awful lot alike at the time….They didn’t understand what I was talking about, but that would have helped open it up.”
What they began filming on June 25, 1956, bore little resemblance to Buster Keaton’s actual life, even though Donald O’Connor had insisted on at least some rudimentary adjustments. “Donald did so much screaming that they did change two or three basic things,” said Eleanor. “First of all, they thought it would be more colorful if he was born and raised in the circus and he was a trapeze performer. And Donald screamed like a maniac until they put that where it belonged.”
As conceived from the outset, the highlights of the film would be the Keaton gags re-created for the high-resolution wide-screen process known as VistaVision. Deprived of the size and scale of some of Keaton’s signature stunts, the filmmakers fell back on smaller moments of comedic virtuosity. Scenes from the shorts and features were sprinkled throughout: the game with the wet playing cards from The Navigator, the soda fountain business from College, the attempt at ice fishing from The Frozen North, the part from The Paleface where the Indians attempt to burn him at the stake. Keaton liked to say the launching of The Boat cost Paramount more money than it took to make the whole film back in 1921.
Buster oversaw all the comic action in the picture, effectively directing much of it and making sure it was all staged correctly. When re-creating a portion of Cops, he grew dissatisfied with how a stuntman was doing a 108—a pratfall where the comic goes straight up and then lays out flat as he hits the ground. And, as he had done so often back in the silent days, Keaton donned the uniform himself and, running straight into another cop, got the shot. The chase from Cops was augmented with the magician’s vanishing act from Steamboat Bill, Jr. and the blind alley escape into thin air from Sherlock Jr.
Donald O’Connor, Cecil B. DeMille, and Keaton during the filming of The Buster Keaton Story. DeMille played himself in a cameo.
For the latter, Keaton had to reveal the secret of the trick to Sidney Sheldon and his crew, and coach Donald O’Connor on how to make the precision leap into the void. In the original, actor Ford West posed as an old woman peddling neckties from a display case. Cornered, Buster leaped through the case West was holding in his hands and seemingly disappeared. The secret, O’Connor learned, was that an opening in the wall behind him permitted the actor holding the case to be suspended parallel to the floor while his head and arms remained visible inside the costume. With the man’s body out of the way, O’Connor could leap through the opening in the case and disappear behind the wall. The man’s body is then lowered back into position, allowing him to walk away while leaving no visible trace of the escapee.
“I worked with Buster on that,” O’Connor said, “and they brought in three stuntmen to do it. And I guess I was more nimble because I’m the one who finally did it. The stuntmen couldn’t get through that hole….The wall was made of rubber and there was a T [opening]. The ‘lady’ was supposedly a hawker on the street holding a cigarette tray—cigarettes and candy and what have you—and that’s what I dove through. But the legs were up into this black hole behind the wall, so as I went through this box…I disappeared. They put the legs of the feller down, the stunt man, and he walked away. And they had buckshot in the skirt at the bottom to make it look like it was on the ground….It was a marvelous trick, and it was very dangerous. [The person doing the jump would] have to go from sunlight into this dark hole and lay out straight—there was no way to tuck in and roll out of it—and worry about catching the back of your head going through the hole. But we did it and there was no problem. Because with Keaton around, standing and watching you, you had this feeling nothing’s going to happen to you.”
Toward the end of production, the company put out word that Buster wanted to gather his leading ladies for a luncheon at the studio. The idea was actually put forth by Sybil Seely, who heard about the movie and sent Keaton a box of orchids and a note wishing him luck. She was, of course, married to screenwriter Jules Furthman and living in Culver City. Virginia Fox’s whereabouts were also well known, since she was married to Zanuck. Keaton, however, wasn’t sure what had become of some of the others and specifically mentioned Anne Cornwall (College), Marion Mack (The General), and Kathryn McGuire (Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator). Cornwall, it turned out, was divorced and playing bit roles in films like Destry and The Search for Bridey Murphy. Unlike the others, she needed the work, and so Sidney Sheldon awarded her a speaking part in the picture as a fan from Elmira, New York, who, accompanied by her husband, encounters Buster on the street and asks for his autograph.
When The Buster Keaton Story finished on August 8, it was ahead of schedule and under budget. Keaton went over to Sheldon and said, “I want to thank you.”
“What for?”
“I was able to buy a house.”
As part of his deal with Paramount, Keaton was committed to supporting the release of The Buster Keaton Story with a ten-city tour and as much press as he could squeeze in. Neither Buster nor Eleanor looked forward to this, as they both knew the picture was a dud, a suspicion only confirmed when they attended a Glendale preview.
“For God’s sake,” exclaimed Eleanor, “it’s the worst thing ever made….My stomach turned over, it was so awful! We sneaked out of the theater practically on our hands and knees. It was just trash. It had nothing to do with him. Of course, he knew ahead of time that was going to happen. The only things that were halfway decent were the comedy sequences that he and Donald had re-created and copied.”
The publicity push kicked off on April 3, 1957, two weeks prior to the film’s gala opening in New York City. That evening, at a couple of minutes past seven, an elevator door opened at the NBC offices in Burbank, and Keaton stepped out into the harsh lights of a remote television hookup. Host Ralph Edwards took his hand, shook it, and told him he’d been a big fan of his from way back. “You’re on television coast-to-coast,” he explained as Buster hurriedly moved to button his collar and cinch up his tie. “America’s waiting for the story of one of the immortals of the silent screen—you, Buster Keaton—for tonight, This Is Your Life!”
Ralph Edwards, Buster, and Eleanor Keaton during the live telecast of This Is Your Life on April 3, 1957.
As per the show’s usual format, the subject was ushered into NBC’s Studio 1, where a parade of old friends and family paid tribute. First was Louise Dresser, his sister’s namesake, remembering him as a child, and seventy-nine-year-old Mush Rawls, representing the old actors’ colony at Muskegon. When Louise and Harry Keaton emerged from the wings, Buster wrapped his hands around his sister’s neck and pretended to throttle her. “Did you help them frame me?” he demanded.
The glory days in Hollywood were represented by Eddie Cline and Donald Crisp, a bad case of bronchitis having forced Virginia Fox to cancel at the last minute.
“Say, do you remember the time she saw the smoke coming outside her dressing room window?” Cline prompted. “And she yelled, ‘Fire!’ And she tried to get out the door and it was locked. She went to the phone—no answer. And you rescued her before she really fainted? Then she found out about you lightin’ those smoke pots out there?”
Keaton nodded broadly, warming to the memory. Typical of the period, the clips were atrocious—murky fourth-generation dupes so washed out the hurricane action from Steamboat Bill, Jr. had to be narrated by the unctuous host.
Then came the talkies, and Edwards tried to draw out the details of a career on the rocks and the why of it all.
“Oh, it just came to a stop,” was all Keaton, clearly uncomfortable, would volunteer.
For the years spent behind the scenes, a jovial Red Skelton was summoned, making some dubious claims about not realizing what Keaton had contributed to his pictures. The wrap-up brought a beaming Eleanor to the stage, Donald O’Connor in full drag as the subject of the new picture, and sons, Jim and Bob.
“Well, this is your life, Buster Keaton,” Edwards concluded. “You gave the world the sunshine of laughter. Better still, through good luck and bad luck you were able to laugh at yourself and at the comedy of life. Keep on making us laugh, Buster, and God bless you.”
According to Eleanor, Buster was “dumbfounded…and then pleased.” There were portions of the program where he appeared to be close to tears. Helping to arrange it all while keeping it a secret was a monumental undertaking. “I went through six weeks of hell,” she said.
Five days later, Dorothy Sebastian, fifty-one, died of cancer at the Motion Picture Fund’s hospital in Woodland Hills, a distance of less than three miles from Keaton’s new home. Sebastian had played her final movie role, a bit in The Miracle of the Bells, in 1946. The same year she married a hospitality executive named Herman Shapiro, and together they ran a small hotel in Miami Beach. As far as anyone knows, the last time she and Buster were together was in February 1950 when they reprised their famous drunk scene from Spite Marriage for a benefit at the Shrine Auditorium. Keaton was in New York when her funeral took place at a Catholic church in Playa del Rey on April 11, 1957. The industry she had known was represented by actor Monte Blue and actresses Ena Gregory, Yola D’Avril, Greta Granstedt, Mona Raye, and Lorrie Larson. Eddie Mannix and M-G-M publicity director Howard Strickling were among the pallbearers.
The Buster Keaton Story opened April 20 at the Mayfair Theatre in Times Square with the Keatons in attendance. The next night, Buster once again appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, where he successfully demonstrated the blind alley escape from Sherlock Jr., an astonishing feat for a sixty-one-year-old man.
“Of course, it is no camera trick,” he said. “You do it in full view of the audience and on a full-lit stage. There’s no lighting effects, no mirrors or anything. And it’s really a great trick and it shocks an audience. And after the show was over, Sullivan sent for me. And I went up to his dressin’ room and he says, ‘So I can sleep tonight—how’d you do it?’ I wouldn’t tell ’im.”
The reviews of the Keaton Story were mixed, generally with praise for the gag re-creations and groans for the phony plotline. And as good as he was, Donald O’Connor proved a poor substitute for the real thing, his acrobatics more like a slick dancer’s moves than the work of the hardscrabble genius whom the film was about. “He taught me how to do a lot of the things he did, falls, tumbles, and so on,” O’Connor said, “but nobody has his comic timing. Nobody can do Buster the way he did.”
Business was tepid, even as the picture moved into wider release after two lackluster weeks at the Mayfair. In speaking to the press, Keaton did his best to avoid talking about the film, deflecting instead with anecdotes, reflections, and occasional thoughts of the future.
“I’m a little dizzy,” he admitted as he met up with Mel Heimer of the King Features Syndicate at a saloon called Danny’s Hideaway. “This is quite a merry-go-round, isn’t it?”
Heimer recalled the lean, youthful Keaton of The Cameraman and thought the 1957 version, a bit thicker around the middle, resembled somebody’s uncle. He suggested it must have been unsettling to have reporters, due to the movie, constantly asking him about his meteoric rise and fall.
“It’s funny,” Keaton responded, sipping an orangeade. “I’d just about dropped out of circulation before all this.” He lit a cigarette, his hands a little unsteady. “I drank myself right out of pictures. I guess it’s as simple as that.”
In Oklahoma, where they claimed him as a native son, the Keaton Story was booked to open in a hundred theaters following a “world premiere” in Perry on May 7. The local chamber of commerce threw itself into preparations, the city council declaring Buster Keaton Day, and the Keatons were driven around town in a new Oldsmobile sedan provided by the local Olds dealer. Buster was silent for the most part, leaving it to Eleanor to be the outgoing one, and confided to their host he didn’t remember much about living there.
“I was interviewed in almost every town,” Eleanor said. “The ladies’ department would come and interview me, y’know, while Buster was being interviewed, and it was awful to sit there with a straight face and not say, ‘For God’s sake, it’s the worst thing ever made, and don’t go see it.’ You don’t dare say the truth. You’ve gotta sit there with a smile on your face. It’s hard work.”
The morning after the event in Perry they were gone, headed back to California and their spread in Woodland Hills. “I’m just a farmer now,” Keaton told Mel Heimer. “I’ve got this little farm in the San Fernando Valley with nine walnut trees…” And as he trailed off, he leaned back comfortably and he smiled.