THE SECOND time Buster Keaton entered my life, he was young, athletic, wildly creative and daring. He was also dead. This paradox – between the screen actor and the living man – haunted Keaton from a very young age. Born in 1895 in Piqua, Kansas, to theatrical parents always on the road, he first appeared on the vaudeville stage at the age of three, became a celebrity within a few years, and knew illusion and fantasy and applause as normal, and the world of school and boredom and institutionalized authority as abnormal. The stage was life. Everything else simply got in the way. No wonder, then, that the great illusionist Harry Houdini was responsible for giving Joseph Francis Keaton, aged six months, the name the world would always know him by. Houdini, working at the time with the Keaton
