30
Something Like a Genius
BEING RELATIVELY NEW ON THE SCENE, the night nurse didn’t want to wake Eleanor the next morning. Instead, he phoned Chick at home and asked him to do it. So Chick dragged himself out of bed, got dressed, and came in an hour early.
“He’s gone,” said Eleanor before Chick could utter a word.
It was Tuesday, February 1, 1966. The doctor had given Buster Keaton three months at the outside, and he surpassed that prognosis by two weeks. For one final time he had double-crossed his audience.
Eleanor called Jim Talmadge; his brother, Bob; and Louise Keaton. Buster’s death was not unexpected, but in the confusion that followed, others were left to get the news over the radio. Jane Earl was in Fresno with her husband, composer-arranger Dee Barton, when she heard, and she phoned her sister, Ruth, who was with their parents in Whittier, to say she was on her way.
“My gosh…,” Ruth said when she reached Eleanor, because she had been planning to visit. “Buster had said, ‘Come out and I’m going to teach you how to play bridge.’ He threatened us for years, and I hadn’t learned to play bridge. It would have taken three or four days or a week, and I had my bags packed.”
As Buster Keaton’s final director, John Sebert felt an understandable pang of guilt. “I think we shortened his life somewhat,” he admitted in 2014. “We had no idea how sick he was. He was willing to do anything, and when people are willing to do it, you take advantage of them. So I do feel kind of badly. I was in Mexico when I heard he died, and I thought: Jesus, did we do that?”
Raymond Rohauer was in England on business and had the news broken to him by a British critic who had heard it on the radio. “I’m sorry to tell you that Buster is dead,” was the way he put it.
“Is it confirmed?” snapped Rohauer.
James Karen was living and working in New York and his son, Reed, heard it first. He left a message for his father to call him when he was finished at the studio. “Reed was eight years old,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Reed, what is it? I’m through.’ He said, ‘You really through?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Are you comin’ home?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, I have terrible news. Our Buster, we lost him today.’ ”
Ruthie made it to Woodland Hills in record time and was first on the scene. Eleanor had already decided that Buster should be interred at Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills, and the cemetery sent a limousine. On the ride over, the two women brainstormed the kind of music Buster would want.
“Gracie Allen had only died about three weeks before,” Eleanor remembered, “and George [Burns] had spent something like $25,000 on the funeral, the mausoleum, the crypt….And we talked about how outrageously stupid something like that was, even if they were wealthy.”
So when she faced the “mingy little mortician” she called Mr. Whipple, she was loaded for bear: “Now I’ll tell you one thing right off the top. We are not going to spend one penny over $3,500. I don’t care how you do it—that’s the top I will blow on this thing because I think it’s so stupid.”
The man remained professionally solemn throughout. “He takes us up to this big room with all the caskets and says, ‘Now I will leave you alone to browse.’ I said, ‘We’ll take that one,’ and I walked out before he could.” On the matter of music, he was suitably distressed when they specified Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Hello, Dolly!” He gave them a list of more appropriate selections, and on it they found three or four, such as the Lord’s Prayer, that weren’t, as Eleanor put it, “too objectionable.” But various renderings of Jerry Herman’s hit tune remained mandatory, and on the way home the women smiled, knowing that it was what Buster would have wanted.
Jimmy Karen phoned Eleanor when he got home: “She was very businesslike. She had taken care of everything, and she was all set. It was another chapter. That’s the way she was. I mean, she adored him. She would do anything for him. But she was cut-and-dry. She said, ‘We’re going to take care of Father, give him a good sendoff. Can you get out?’ I said, ‘I can’t get out.’ I was working; I was in a show at the time.”
Director Jack Donohue, a good friend from the M-G-M days, asked Eleanor’s permission to bring a rosary to the mortuary, and she said, “Of course.” And Eleanor’s sister, Jane, wanted to take a deck of cards, so Eleanor gave her one.
“When he was ready to be buried,” Eleanor said, “he had a rosary in one pocket and a deck of cards in the other. So he was set for whichever direction he was going.”
Every major media outlet in the world carried the news of Buster Keaton’s death. The New York Times printed a formal obituary as well as two separate appreciations by Bosley Crowther. Life reprinted James Agee’s words. The San Francisco Examiner mourned him on its editorial page as “a genius of the slapstick; a glum-visaged toy of events that picked on him; a brilliant star.”
One voice that could not come forth was Keaton’s old friend and co-star Hedda Hopper, who died suddenly of double pneumonia, aged eighty, on the same day as he. In England, Dilys Powell said she had never loved another star as she had loved him. “There was a kind of purity in the line of all his movements; I don’t know how else to describe it. To my grief I never saw him in the flesh, never spoke to him.” And in the pages of The Observer, Kenneth Tynan recalled the young, beautiful Buster Keaton. “If Chaplin was the greatest lyrical comic, this was the greatest stoic; and we live, of necessity, in a stoical age.”
The funeral took place on Friday, February 4, at Forest Lawn’s Church of the Hills, a colonial affair that was filled to its 158-seat capacity. Notable attendees included Donald O’Connor, Benny Rubin, Andy Clyde, Chester Conklin, Babe London, and Faith Holden. The eulogy was again given by Dick Van Dyke, who framed Keaton as a man who “manufactured the sweetest sound in the world—laughter.” He spoke of Keaton’s love for his modest plot of land in Woodland Hills, his garden and dogs and the chickens he kept. “Buster Keaton was possessed with the comic spirit. Comedy was not his profession. It was his point of view….Who else is there now? What other face can have the look of Buster Keaton?”
Interment followed in the cemetery’s Court of Valor. The will, which left everything to Eleanor, was entered into probate on June 24, 1966. Apart from the property in Woodland Hills and a collection of rentals, all of which they owned jointly, the estate, including a 1966 Cadillac sedan, anticipated royalties on My Wonderful World of Slapstick and the Rudi Blesh book, residuals on reruns of Route 66, Donna Reed, Twilight Zone, and Greatest Show on Earth, and all cash on hand, was valued at $18,590.
Eleanor Keaton is escorted from Forest Lawn’s Church of the Hills by funeral director Gene Westlund on February 4, 1966. Robert Talmadge walks behind them.
“You know, Buster was amazing,” Richard Lester said in an interview with Film Quarterly. “He was dying in Spain and he knew it. I guess we all knew it. His part in Forum is mostly running. We had to shoot in short takes. He’d finish a sequence racking and coughing, looking a hundred years old. But his legs were magnificent. Once we had the stunt man do a scene where a chariot just misses Erronius. Something went wrong and the stunt man was knocked down. That blow would have killed Buster. After the stunt man was taken away to the infirmary, Buster said he wanted to do the scene. I held my breath, but Buster went through the maneuver in one take and did it perfectly. That was a loss. A very big loss.”
Following its first public showing at Venice, where it received the Film Critics Prize, Film was given its American premiere at the New York Film Festival, wedged in between The Railrodder and Seven Chances. From his balcony seat at Philharmonic Hall, Alan Schneider dreaded the experience. “The professional film festival audience of critics and students of film technique started laughing the moment the credits came on, roaring at that lovely grotesque close-up of Buster’s eyelid. I could hardly stand it. A moment later they stopped laughing. For good. All through the next twenty-two minutes they sat there, bored, annoyed, baffled, and cheated of the Keaton they had come to see. What the hell was Beckett? At the end they got up on their hind legs and booed. Lustily. I thought of Godard and Antonioni and a few others at Cannes; wept, and ran.”
Its best audiences came with European festivals, and it did receive a measure of respect in France and Germany, where it was awarded special prizes just for being the strange and awkward thing that it was. In comparison, The Railrodder and its companion piece, Buster Keaton Rides Again, fared much better. Keaton saw The Railrodder when Gerry Potterton brought a print to Toronto while he was shooting with John Sebert. “We showed it at a private screening for him,” he said, “and at the end of it he said, in that gruff voice of his, ‘Beautiful scenery.’ That’s all he said.”
Buster, Potterton could tell, liked it a lot, but, according to Eleanor, he didn’t like Keaton Rides Again. “It caught him laughing and kicking up a storm, and he didn’t think that kind of thing should be in the film. They caught him being him instead of the character, and he didn’t think the world should see him like that….He didn’t squawk about it to anybody but me. I thought it was great; I loved it.”
The Railrodder was shown theatrically in Montreal in December 1965, and more widely beginning September 1966 when it was paired with such varied fare as Goldfinger and Born Free. On the festival circuit, it won awards in Montreal, Brussels, Berlin, Locarno, and Philadelphia, and was warmly received in Moscow, New York, and San Francisco. Buster Keaton Rides Again made its Canadian television debut on October 16, 1965. While intended primarily for TV, the NFB’s Grant McLean was so pleased with it he ordered 35mm blowups for possible art house bookings in the United States and Europe. At the San Francisco International Film Festival, it picked up a silver trophy in the Factual category, and gathered similar awards in Milan, Melbourne, Venice, New York, and Montreal, where it collected both a Genie and, later, a First Prize at the Montreal International Film Festival.
Keaton didn’t live to see his final performance in the picture that became known as The Scribe, but in a tribute to him, a clip from the film was shown publicly for the first time on the CBC public affairs series This Hour Has Seven Days. Aired on February 20, 1966, this glimpse constituted the most exposure it would receive in any form for decades. In March, it was one of twenty-three films accepted for the Directors Guild of Canada’s annual festival, and by September it was available for rental from Association Films, but few prints managed to circulate or, for that matter, survive. Even the Construction Safety Associations of Ontario disposed of its single print once a mediocre video transfer had been made. Occasionally someone would ask John Sebert if they could watch his copy, but it was in such poor condition he denied even having one. It wouldn’t be until the film’s video release as an extra on Kino’s 2013 edition of College that it would finally gain a substantial—and appreciative—audience.
Keaton’s final suite of commercials, which he found time to make while in Spain, were for a lemon-lime soft drink called Teem, Pepsi-Cola’s answer to 7-Up in the sixties and seventies. Assembled into sixty, twenty, and ten-second spots, they were part of a campaign to position Teem as a cocktail mixer, but were only seen in scattered markets in the Midwest. By then, Keaton had appeared in so many TV commercials that the ad industry’s Clio Award for Best Spokesman was renamed in his honor. The winner of the first “Buster” that year was Keaton’s old friend Bert Lahr.
As Buster Keaton’s life wound down, Rudi Blesh finally got serious about finishing his book. “You know those boxes of typewriter paper that are this deep?” asked Eleanor, holding her hands apart. “He brought it to the St. Moritz in New York—single spaced! The box was so full he couldn’t hardly get the lid on. And every word’s a gem. He would not allow an editor to cut one word. And they said, ‘Okay…’ So he took it home and sat on it for ten years until he got really hungry, and then he allowed an editor to cut it down to size. Because God knows it probably would have been a book that thick.”
Blesh found a willing publisher in Macmillan and did a long-distance phone interview with Eleanor to sketch in the final years. (“He wasn’t interested in sound pictures,” she said, “he was only interested in silent pictures.”) In a miracle of timing, the New York–based publisher announced the book, titled simply Keaton, on January 31, the day before its subject died on the opposite coast.
“He made me read the galleys,” said Eleanor. “I read ’em, I made what corrections I could find, like correcting dates and wrong spellings. And there was so much trash in it. He took liberties. Buster would sit and tell him a story, with a smile, and by the time he got through putting it on paper it wasn’t funny anymore. That kind of thing. Well, there’s no use starting to argue when it’s in galleys. So all you do is the best you can with the corrections.”
Keaton was published in May 1966 and sold out an initial printing of twenty-five hundred copies. The reviews were solid, and the publisher got behind it with display advertising when it was sent back to press for a second time and then a third. At about the same moment the Blesh book was making its appearance, a last interview with Keaton, done at Venice with John Gillett and James Blue, surfaced in the winter issue of Sight & Sound, an event celebrated by David Robinson in the Financial Times.
“A few weeks ago at seventy he cheerfully crashed headfirst into a tree and did a beautiful backward fall to create a gag for Dick Lester. Through this sort of single-mindedness he made gags and films and his own sort of poetry. He was something like a genius. But he was a sweet clown as well. Buster was one of the great filmmakers; but he was also that short, slight figure, stumping around with the funny walk in which his feet seemed to strike the ground with the dubious challenge of a blind man’s stick; or breaking into a run that turned him into a complex of little piston rods. His face was formal and beautiful, but not quite inscrutable, for there was not a thought went through his ingenious head that did not flicker there for a fraction of a second. He had grown older, of course, and stouter, and his smooth face had turned to crumpled leather; but at seventy not much else had changed….At the end of his life he was once again appreciated at his rare worth.”
With Buster Keaton’s passing, another Buster Keaton replaced him—the immortal one captured so perfectly on film in the dizzying years of his youth when the movies were new and the horizons infinite. If the middle years represented times of struggle, there was a sense of contentment to the third act of Keaton’s life, the awards and festivals and the gradual rediscovery of the Keaton canon as prints surfaced and audiences celebrated. Wherever he went in the last decade of his life, he was respected, honored, and acclaimed. All that needed to happen now was to put the films back before the public, a body of work virtually unique in the annals of film, and let them make their own eloquent case for the man who made them.
Keaton’s death also changed the dynamic between his widow and Raymond Rohauer. Formerly in the background, Eleanor Keaton now assumed her husband’s role in the functioning of Buster Keaton Productions and whatever moral authority that passed to her as the next in line of succession. She had the Keaton name, but she was not Buster Keaton, nor had she been present at the creation of the films Rohauer sought to control. As far as business was concerned, she and Rohauer found themselves joined at the hip, both wishing to be free of the other but bound by a series of decisions made back when the path to preserving Keaton’s legacy was first set. They were, in other words, stuck with each other and would make the best of it, Eleanor for Buster’s sake, Rohauer for his own.
Rohauer had long since established a reputation for being a slippery character, someone who always saw to his own interests above all else. And it helped that he looked the part of a doughy, second-rate accountant who inspired a level of distrust from the very first handshake.
“He was a slithery person,” said James Karen. “He had the wettest handshake I’ve ever had in my life. I shook his hand one time—the only time I ever shook his hand—and I actually took rubbing alcohol after and washed my hands. There was something dreadful about the touch of his skin. But look what he did. He was mad as a hatter about film, he was over the edge. He would show up in a snowstorm to a house where he thought they were showing a picture, dressed all in his long, black coats and stuff, but the Keaton pictures would not exist today were it not for him.”
Had Rohauer and Keaton never met, it would have been up to Leopold Friedman and Robert Youngson to gather and curate Keaton’s silent comedies and put them out before the public—not a promising prospect. Even Keaton himself, at least initially, couldn’t see the value of thirty-year-old movies. That it took a degree of chicanery on Rohauer’s part to make that happen doesn’t diminish the importance of what he accomplished. Was he using Keaton to legitimize his own ambitions toward power and ownership? Undoubtedly. Was Keaton nonetheless an unwitting beneficiary? Considering the scope and permanency of his reputation more than half a century after his death, the answer would have to be yes.
Rohauer’s struggle with Leopold Friedman and the heirs to the various stockholders of the original Keaton organization continued during Keaton’s final illness and long past his death. In October 1965, while Keaton was completing work on The Scribe, Herbert Schwab of Bautzer, Irwin & Schwab presented Friedman with a proposed agreement that specified the transfer of all rights to Rohauer for the sum, to be paid within one year, of $250,000. Complications arose and the one year stretched to several, forcing Friedman and Rohauer into an uneasy alliance in which Friedman and his associates would share in revenues derived from the promotions Rohauer engineered, an arrangement that would bring them $100,000 as their share of a deal with Specta Films, which had also agreed to pay $75,000 for the rights to The Navigator and Seven Chances in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
This didn’t mean that Friedman stopped asserting his rights over the films that were still under his control until Rohauer was paid in full. In 1963, he had written to the Motion Picture Academy and demanded the return of the prints acquired in the James Mason donation, the resulting back-and-forth continuing until after Keaton’s death. In November 1966, Margaret Herrick finally decided to turn everything that remained over to Friedman’s attorneys since the films were in such generally poor condition. The transfer, effected in March 1967, included complete prints of The Saphead, The Play House, The Blacksmith, Battling Butler, The General, College, and Steamboat Bill, Jr., and partial prints of Sherlock Jr., The Boat, My Wife’s Relations, and The Paleface.
Keaton’s deal with Rohauer was that the younger man stood all expenses and Keaton took 50 percent of the profits. But in his quest to gain full control of the entire Keaton library, Rohauer reported no profits because he kept plowing revenues back into attorney fees, lab costs, and the purchase of Friedman’s interests. And so with no guarantee of income or compensation, Eleanor climbed aboard the bandwagon in her husband’s stead, traveling to Philadelphia in October 1966 to make the first of countless personal appearances, this one to bolster attendance for a four-matinee Keaton homage at the city’s Museum of Art. That same month, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was released, once again putting Keaton in front of first-run audiences, his presence, in the words of Variety, summoning “nostalgia for the silent master, already assuring the film a slot in the archives.”
Originally set to go out to theaters on August 10, 1966, War Italian Style was instead paired with another weak American International release, Trunk to Cairo, and the dual bill was held until January 1967, giving War the unintended distinction of being Buster Keaton’s last feature-length motion picture. In playing his Rommel-like role in silence, with the exception of a single “Thank you” at the end, Keaton came off as disengaged and unnatural, the poorly dubbed soundtrack keeping the audience at arm’s length throughout. The one advantage to the five-month delay for War Italian Style was that virtually no one saw it, not even Eleanor, who was unaware of the two lonely Southern California drive-ins that gave it a week’s booking apiece in the dead of winter.
The year 1967 also marked the release of Charles Chaplin’s final film, the misbegotten A Countess from Hong Kong, which he wrote and directed, and in which he played a memorable cameo. Chaplin was severely wounded by the critical and commercial failure of the film, which starred Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, and withdrew to his home in Switzerland. “The reaction to A Countess from Hong Kong was very, very bad,” said his daughter Geraldine. “At that age [seventy-eight] he just didn’t have the energy to bounce back. I know from my mother’s diaries that he was completely devastated, and so was she.
“I came to the house once with [the Spanish writer and director] Carlos Saura, who was very taken with Buster Keaton. So at dinner he started to go on and on about Keaton, how wonderful he thought he was, what a great filmmaker. My father got smaller and smaller in his chair. He was so hurt, it looked as if someone had stabbed him. He became very quiet, didn’t say a word through the rest of dinner. Afterwards, we’re sitting by the fire and talking about other things now. My father was looking at the fire, still not talking. Then he looked Carlos in the eyes and said, ‘But I was an artist….And I gave him work.’ He’d been thinking about it all during dinner.”
In January 1968, a retrospective season of Keaton’s films opened at the National Film Theatre in London, where it continued for nearly a month. The organizers, who boasted it was the first comprehensive showing of his silent works, were reportedly presenting it in an anti-Chaplin spirit, which the Morning Star’s Nina Hibbin considered a pity: “Their campaign to prove Keaton ‘greater than Chaplin’ strikes me as decidedly quaint.”
The New York Times reported audiences that were large and enthusiastic. “Crowds are pouring to the National Film Theatre,” Eric Rhode reported in the BBC’s Listener, “making every performance of the Buster Keaton season look like a gala; predictably, it’s turned out to be one of the great film events of the decade.”
The NFT’s season was sanctioned by Raymond Rohauer, who had developed a knack for attention-grabbing promotions, abetted by a growing demand for Keaton’s pictures as the stark reality of his death settled in. It was a demand fed equally by discovery and regret, and the reappraisals came from all directions. Rhode wrote about him repeatedly, as did Andrew Sarris, Dilys Powell, and Penelope Gilliatt. Briefly, Robert Youngson contemplated a film on the order of his Laurel and Hardy compilations called The World of Buster Keaton, and David Robinson wrote an entire book on Keaton’s films, the first of its kind, for the influential Cinema One series.
Meanwhile, Rohauer’s forced alliance with Leopold Friedman resulted in Friedman growing more aggressive, the two men pursuing a scorched-earth policy against perceived infringers. In April 1967, Friedman filed suit against the Museum of Modern Art and its film library, seeking “estimated” damages of $2,900,000 and the return of prints the collection had held for decades. A few months later, Rohauer warned the newly constituted American Film Institute that if it didn’t take steps to protect the rights of the owners of copyrights, literary rights, negatives, and prints in assembling its collection, its archives program “may fall on its face.” By then, Friedman was threatening the National Film Board for using an unauthorized clip from The General in Buster Keaton Rides Again, a legally unenforceable matter given the film’s copyright history that nonetheless caused Rohauer to fly to Ottawa in October 1968 to meet with the Film Board and the Canadian Department of Justice. Rohauer was also threatening to sue the British Film Institute based on the prints they held, and was anticipating yet another suit against New York’s Channel 13, which had televised The General in 1965 using MoMA’s print.
Raymond Rohauer and Leopold Friedman in a rare moment of comity.
Rohauer was, by this time, film curator and program director for Huntington Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art in New York. Still, he doggedly worked toward his goal of owning the complete catalog of the Keaton pictures Joe Schenck produced, and in 1970 he finished paying the sum of $250,000 plus interest and got the assignment of rights he had long coveted. In celebration, he mounted a comprehensive five-week festival at New York’s Elgin Cinema, lacking only the two shorts that had escaped his grasp, Hard Luck and The Love Nest. Announcing his intention of touring the festival nationwide, Rohauer scored prime coverage in both Time and Newsweek.
Friedman turned his attention to disposing of the only remaining asset of the dissolved corporation, the 25 percent share of the profits due him and the other stockholders on The Cameraman, Spite Marriage, and the seven talking features Keaton made for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer between 1930 and 1933. Friedman went to M-G-M and offered to buy the films, two of which were in the public domain, for $300,000 or, if preferred, Metro could buy him out for $100,000. This went nowhere until Rohauer offered Friedman $50,000 for all his rights as “trustee in liquidation,” meaning for the 25 percent owed annually by M-G-M and, after conferring with the former stockholders, Friedman agreed. So in April 1971, thirteen years after he first met Buster Keaton, and five years after Keaton’s death, Raymond Rohauer owned the works.
More books and retrospectives followed. With full ownership now his, Rohauer proceeded to cement his grip on the Keaton materials, deliberately circulating poor prints of the ones in copyright so that they would yield bad copies if surreptitiously duplicated, and altering those in the public domain so that he could claim protection for his “revisions.” In fact, trims and alterations became so habitual to him that, over time, they afflicted every Keaton two-reeler he owned. Whole scenes were removed, intertitles rewritten, gags eliminated or rendered ineffective, all toward the goal of being able to identify the source of an unauthorized copy. “Rohauer used to tell me that he appreciated having ‘some decomposition’ in films,” said Edward Watz, “since this was like fingerprints that identified the ‘Rohauer version’ in the event someone duped his print.”
Rohauer was also derided for the cheap soundtracks he imposed on the Keaton films, new elements he could copyright that also made them more viable in commercial settings. During a festival that took place in New York in 1981, philosopher and author Douglas P. Lackey wrote to the Village Voice in exasperation. “What was perhaps most impressive about the new soundtracks was the incredible variety of devices called forth to sabotage Keaton’s work,” he complained. “Some of the prints (High Sign, One Week, and—so help me—The General) were accompanied by a mad assortment of pops, crashes, squeaks, and toots which perpetually interrupted the flow of images and shattered the dreamlike universe created and the world lost with his move to M-G-M and the onset of sound. Others (Sherlock Jr., etc.) blared forth a succession of old jazz 78s, one after the other with no reference to the action. Still others (Steamboat Bill, Jr.) sported newly commissioned pseudo-Dixieland scores which produced, after half an hour, that peculiar vibrating nausea which I have previously experienced only when riding the Seventh Avenue IRT.”
As if the desecration of Keaton’s art weren’t enough, Rohauer also developed a way of portraying himself as the white knight in the sad story of Keaton’s final years. “Rohauer wanted to be known as the man who made Buster Keaton a star again; he told me as much,” said Watz, who was in his employ from 1977 to 1981. “Rohauer often told people that Keaton was illiterate, didn’t communicate well, was glum, had little self-worth, and lost his creative ability due to an alcohol-soused brain. I heard him say this many times whenever we’d meet someone who asked him what Buster was like. The effect on listeners was supposed to be a ‘Thank God you came along!’ response.”
Rohauer’s assertions were frequently met with pushback, privately if not publicly, intimidation being his primary weapon of choice. Eleanor Keaton disliked and feared him, but never said anything against him on the record. After a typically self-aggrandizing interview published in 1970 in Variety, Rohauer’s nemesis, Paul Killiam, requested equal space for a response: “Rohauer actually owns only the merest handful, at best, of clean-cut original silent film ‘copyrights’ (no Fairbanks, no Griffith, few Keatons, and maybe one Sennett, for example), but simply keeps making these claims and having lawyers write threatening letters. We thought the industry was beginning to catch on….Despite the skills of the long and constantly changing list of lawyers he has retained, Rohauer has never, to the best of our knowledge (and we know the field well), actually gone to court, as he again pledges to do in the Variety interview, against such alleged ‘violators’ of films to which he holds ‘copyrights.’ ”
Over the years, other takedowns appeared. In 1975, critic and historian John Baxter published “The Silent Empire of Raymond Rohauer” in the Sunday Times Magazine. “If an Oscar is ever given for the greatest achievement in infuriating the motion picture community,” it began, “its first recipient will almost certainly be a pudgy fifty-year-old New Yorker named Raymond Rohauer. In the eyes of most fans of the cinema, Rohauer is to the movies what Dr. Jekyll is to medicine.” Somewhat more kindly, William K. Everson titled his own essay for Grand Street “Raymond Rohauer: King of the Film Freebooters,” crediting his subject with a “certain cavalier charm” that others might dispute. “Basically,” Everson explained, “Rohauer operated under the principle of the Big Lie. He bent and used every loophole of the law to his own advantage—and when business opponents used the same loopholes, he descended on them with wrathful press releases and a battery of lawyers.”
By the time of his death from AIDS in 1987, Rohauer had gained control of not only the Keaton library but those of Harry Langdon and Douglas Fairbanks, as well as nearly two hundred musical and comedy shorts distributed by Paramount Pictures, the Pendennis library that covered such British titles as Forever and a Day, Storm in a Teacup, and St. Martin’s Lane, and the Tele-Pac library that boasted independent productions like Hangmen Also Die!, It Happened Tomorrow, and Lured. At the peak of his business activities, Rohauer claimed to own as many as twelve hundred movies, although his legitimate holdings were doubtless much fewer.
Eleanor Keaton moved on after the death of her husband, but he was never far from her thoughts. She leased out the place in Woodland Hills, not wanting to bother with gardeners and pool people, and moved into one of their rental properties, which suited her better in terms of space. Within a year she sold all her properties with the help of Harold Goodwin and moved to Costa Mesa, where, at the age of forty-nine, she opened a kennel and began raising Saint Bernards. At various other points she co-owned a pet shop in the San Fernando Valley, managed a bail bonds office with her sister, Jane, and volunteered as a docent a few days a week at the Los Angeles Zoo. In 1992, she became an honorary member of the Damfinos (later the International Buster Keaton Society), founded on Buster’s ninety-seventh birthday by two sisters, writer-editor Patricia Eliot Tobias and actress Wendy Jolicoeur, and artists’ representative Melody Bunting. In 1995 Eleanor presided over the Buster Keaton centenary and attended celebrations in Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, New York, and Los Angeles, and conferences in Iola, Kansas, near Buster’s birthplace of Piqua, and in Muskegon, an annual event that continues to this day.
“As soon as I feel like it,” Buster Keaton mused in 1963, “I’ll turn the movies over to television. I don’t know when this will happen, but one of these days I will. And let them stay on TV forever. I can think of no better way of letting the world know how much I loved it when I was around.”
In 1995, it became possible to walk into a Barnes & Noble or a Tower Records and purchase a set of all of Buster Keaton’s silent classics on home video, a remarkable development considering how difficult many of these films were to see during Keaton’s lifetime. Collected as box sets under the title The Art of Buster Keaton, the nineteen shorts and ten features Keaton made for Joseph Schenck (plus The Saphead) were issued on VHS by Kino and on laser disc by Image Entertainment. (The Cameraman and Spite Marriage had already been released in the same formats by MGM/UA Home Video in 1991 and 1992, respectively.) The Schenck films made the transition to DVD in 2005, and to Blu-ray in 2011. Fulfilling Keaton’s vow, all are also viewable, in differing versions and shades of quality, to audiences worldwide at no cost whatsoever, on YouTube.
Natalie Talmadge died in 1969 at the age of seventy-three. She had grown reclusive in her later years, lost in a haze of cigarette smoke and alcoholism. She suffered a stroke, and her son Bob moved her to a convalescent hospital in Santa Monica, near where he and his family were living at the time.
“I remember that when she was real ill she was in a rest home,” said Melissa Talmadge, “and she did call me up and ask me if I would bring some Four Roses over to her. Nobody would let her have any, but I wasn’t even old enough to buy liquor! We’d just go visit her when she was ill. I think my dad was very sad when she passed away; she was his mother. He was probably sadder than the kids, because we liked going to her house, but I don’t think she was a real dynamic presence in our childhoods.”
Natalie’s remains were entombed in the Talmadge room at Hollywood Memorial Park, leaving the ebullient Constance as the only surviving sister.
After her last brief burst of notoriety in the late fifties, Mae Scriven disappeared from the scene, never to be heard from again. She still had plenty of time left, but exactly how she spent it is unknown. Did she keep her room at the Stratford Arms while working as a beautician? Or was she institutionalized as she once had been, lost to the scourge of dementia? Or did she settle down on a pittance of Social Security, talking occasionally of her past to whomever might listen and dropping the names of two of her erstwhile husbands, the other being Sam Fuller, who went on to a notable career as a director? Apparently she wasn’t in touch with her family in California, and would not have known of the death of her twin brother in 1987. Still living under the name Jewel Steven, she died in Jamaica, Queens, in 1990 at the age of eighty-four.
Louise Keaton died of cancer in 1981. When she fell ill, Eleanor moved her out of her tiny Berendo Street apartment and into a board-and-care facility in the Valley, where she could visit two or three times a week.
“When Louise died,” said Barbara Talmadge, “Eleanor phoned the mortuary to finalize plans for Louise’s burial. The mortuary said, ‘She’s not here.’ ‘So what do you mean, she’s not there? She was sent there.’ ‘We didn’t receive her.’ Now the search is on for Louise….Louise is somewhere down near Redondo, somewhere over near the coast. They finally found her in a mortuary over there. Sent her back. Louise was cremated. Louise always wanted to be buried with her mother, so they bore a hole in the coffin, put a funnel there, and they poured Louise in with her mother. I remember Jim laughing his head off when Eleanor finally told him.”
After the house on Victoria was sold in 1956, Harry Keaton transitioned to living on the streets of Los Angeles. “He had a lady friend [who] used to give him like one meal a day, or at least a couple of times a week she would give him a big meal,” said Eleanor. “And he literally almost starved for a year or more.”
Harry eventually relocated to San Diego, where, in 1959, he began tending bar at the El Toreador Motel in San Ysidro, three blocks from the Mexican border. When he turned sixty-five, Harry moved to the other side of the bar and, for tips, would sip a beer and regale tourists with stories of his famous brother and their times in vaudeville. In May 1983, he tripped while exiting a restaurant across the street from the motel, cracked his skull, and died at the age of seventy-eight. When his son, Harry Jr., arrived to clear out his father’s room at the El Toreador, he found the old man had thirty-six hundred dollars in cash squirreled away in a Crown Royal pouch, more than enough to cover his cremation and burial in the plot to the left of his mother.
Eleanor Keaton was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1998, and the cancer spread to her back. James Karen and his second wife, actress-producer Alba Francesca, got her into the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, and it was there that she died on October 19 at the age of eighty. “Eleanor was not a lady ever to go slowly,” said the Earl twins at her memorial service. “She dashed every place she went. Every time we’d go to the hospital with her, the doctors and the nurses would say, ‘Would you slow down?!’ We’d practically have to sit on her and say, ‘Eleanor, now cut it out!’ ”
In 1993, Eleanor took a visitor from New Zealand to Forest Lawn to see the grave of Buster Keaton. “I never come up here,” she commented, “because he is not there.” And she faced death with equanimity because she had the unshakable belief that she would be with him again. “Wherever he is, I’m going to join him,” she said. “I’ll join him wherever he went.”
Did she see herself as a part of Buster? she was asked. “Yes,” she answered. “He was the greater part of my life. So why not rejoin him?”
With her healthy contempt for the funeral industry, she specified that she wanted her remains to be cremated and her ashes scattered. She saw no point in slipping into the same grave as her husband—maybe funneled into the box as his sister Louise had been.
“Eleanor,” wrote Kevin Brownlow, “was the least self-centered person I have met. And certainly the bravest. When cancer hit her, she behaved just like that heroic character from the Old West. I dropped in at her home in North Hollywood last October [1998] to say a quick goodbye on my way to the airport; she did a soft-shoe shuffle and whipped off her wig. It turned out to be a permanent goodbye—but it left a fond memory of a magnificent woman.”
On a whim one day in 1986, Eleanor Keaton and Raymond Rohauer took a drive around the Seneca Heights section of Los Angeles where the Buster Keaton Studio once stood. Eleanor thought back to that day almost thirty years earlier when Ralph Edwards surprised her husband at the NBC studios in Burbank and ran through the story of his life on national television for the collective benefit of Comet Cleanser, Ivory Soap, and Crest Toothpaste. As he always did, Edwards brought the pageant to a close by enumerating all the loot they were giving the honoree for being a good sport. In Buster’s case it started with a 16mm kinescope of the night’s broadcast and a Bell & Howell projector on which to run it. Also thrown in was the 16mm movie camera Eleanor would use to photograph Buster’s film within a play for Merton of the Movies. Then for her, a gold charm bracelet custom designed by Marshall Jewelers of New York “with each charm holding a memory you both share,” as well as custom cuff links and a money clip for Buster. A Magnavox color television set would go to the Elks Lodge in Muskegon, and a small Wheel Horse tractor would be delivered to the Keaton farm in Woodland Hills. And then: “The Buster Keaton comedies made valuable contributions to the forward march of the motion picture industry. So, on Lillian Way in Hollywood, at the exact site of the old Buster Keaton Studio, Crest will have installed a bronze medallion to mark that spot for all time to come in your honor.”
Edwards had come through with everything else on that list, but Eleanor had never personally gone to see the medallion Buster was promised. And after having combed the area, both she and Rohauer came to the conclusion that it had never been placed. True to form, Rohauer wrote a letter to Edwards, who was still in business and whose company, Ralph Edwards Productions, was the producer of the current syndicated hit The People’s Court. But, after thirty years, nobody in the office had any recollection of it.
“Now!” Edwards wrote in a memo to associate producer Dresser Dahlstead. “We must get a medallion on that property. Let’s find out (1) who owns the property, (2) and then let’s discuss the approach. I would think that any owner would allow us to insert a medallion somewhere, then get Eleanor and have some press on it. There has got to be a proper reason why the medallion was not placed, but it may not be too late yet.”
The drive to have the medallion placed was long and frustrating. A marker was designed, various fees paid to the Board of Public Works, and insurance coverage was arranged. Then the city council failed to approve the project because the report was sent to the wrong district office. The whole thing was still in progress when Rohauer died in New York on November 10, 1987. Dahlstead kept at it, gaining written consent from Pacific Title and Art to install it on what was then a grassy plot between the sidewalk and the curb near the entrance to their parking lot. The approved wording went as follows:
BUSTER KEATON STUDIO
1920–1928
SITE OF THE ORIGINAL BUSTER KEATON
STUDIO THE BIRTHPLACE OF A UNIQUE
TYPE OF MOTION PICTURE COMEDY. HERE
THE GENIUS OF BUSTER KEATON MADE
HISTORY WITH PICTURES WHICH BROUGHT
LAUGHTER TO THE WORLD.
The placement ceremony took place at 12:30 p.m. on June 29, 1988. The city was represented by Rodri Rodriguez, vice president of the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission, and a representative from Councilman Michael Woo’s office. Eleanor was there in a dramatic royal-blue dress and sunglasses, posing for pictures with the new monument in the foreground. So were Bill Welsh, president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce; Johnny Grant, honorary mayor of Hollywood; Edwards, of course; Donald O’Connor; James Karen; Alba Francesca; Jane Dulo; and Leonard Maltin. The event went according to plan, although there was a quiet discomfort among some of the local historians and silent-film aficionados who were present.
It was only later that Eleanor learned what all the whispering was about, and she shook her head in dismay and laughed. It was the kind of well-meaning fiasco at the basis of many of the great Keaton comedies produced at the studio. It may even have been that Buster himself, from his perch in another dimension, engineered on a grand and lasting scale one final gag to leave the world with a laugh, a wink of the eye to anyone knowledgeable enough to know what they were seeing. For the new Keaton studio marker, three feet by four feet, with its two hundred bronze letters and numbers, installed in terrazzo and cement at a cost of more than $7,000, had been permanently and inalterably sunk…into the wrong corner.
God bless all clowns.