The Heavy Bear

Chapter 2

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 family in a travelling medicine show, saw the infant Keaton fall down a flight of stairs in a boarding house. Rushing up, he cried out, “What a buster that kid just took!” According to legend, Keaton père – a long, lean Irishman of dubious talent also named Joseph and noted mostly for his violent high kick skills – responded, “Buster. That’s what we’ll call him then.”

It’s a cute story, and very likely only a promotional gimmick dreamed up long after the fact (once Houdini was famous and worth capitalizing on), but it nonetheless makes a critical point: the world of make-believe claimed Buster Keaton for its own almost from the start, and he would both star and suffer under that claim, like a mortal favoured by the gods of Olympus (or, in his case, the movie moguls of Hollywood).

But to return to paradox: the flesh-and-blood Keaton died on February 1, 1966, in Woodland Hills, California, not quite a year and a half after his visit to White Rock to finish filming The Railrodder. In the summer of 1969, in the sleepy fishing village of Ladner, one town over from White Rock, I saw several of the two-reel short comedies that Buster Keaton made in the early 1920s projected onto the mossy wooden side of a neighbour’s house.

Imagine it. A sloped lawn, twilight dissolving to darkness, the scents of fresh-cut grass and brine and salmon mingled on the warm air, and a dozen wide-eyed children whispering excitedly as a genial middle-aged neighbour in horn-rimmed glasses arranges a giant praying mantis of a projector on the cracked sidewalk and sets it whirring. And there, at the far end of the shimmering, dusty swathe of light, running away from the police, in lifelong permanent retreat from the world inimical to joy and freedom, is a uniquely handsome, unsmiling, white-faced figure of madcap fun and something else, something a child of five would not understand but might very well intuit, a strange, intensely modern kind of angst, a furious helplessness of the kind that an insect exhibits in the hands of that unfeeling five-year-old. This figure, funny as he is while swinging over rooftops and diving through windows to escape his pursuers, is not funny in the same way as the Little Tramp of Chaplin, who also animated the side of our neighbour’s house that summer, not adorable like Shirley Temple and not downright buffoonish as his co-star Fatty Arbuckle (who was nonetheless, like Keaton, a toy of cruel fate). There is something thoroughly original about this daredevil mime in the porkpie hat and slap shoes, and yet my child self recognizes him immediately as a kindred spirit. The world happens to him, and much merriment ensues, but he himself doesn’t laugh; he doesn’t even smile. Deep down in every child is an absolute sympathy for Buster Keaton’s deadpan face, perhaps, again, because children intuit the real reason for it: that in the world as grown-ups construct it and know it, we are all outcasts.

The story of Keaton’s stoic expression goes like this: on those early twentieth-century vaudeville stages, when vaudeville – that bustling mélange of live acts, everything from Shakespearean thespians to dog trainers to opera singers to ventriloquists – was the king of American entertainment, the child Keaton soon learned that audiences found him much more hilarious when he showed no emotion upon receiving his father’s physical a***e. For The Three Keatons, as the family act became known, had quickly won a reputation as vaudeville’s most riotous, rough-and-tumble turn. In brief, the gist of the show was mischievous son, aggravated father, innocent bystander mother. In even briefer brief, it was ad lib mayhem. Keaton’s most thorough biographer, Rudi Blesh, describes a typical performance as “David and Goliath in the nursery,” a violent farce that ended with little Buster literally being flung across the stage and into the wings.

Keaton himself in the late 1950s recalled one of the worst results of this type of planned but unpredictable violence. After one matinee, his father misjudged the distance when he kicked, and caught Buster in the head, knocking him unconscious, a state in which the boy remained for eighteen hours until the tireless doctors finally revived him.

On another occasion, Buster’s father actually picked him up and hurled him at a heckler in the front row, breaking three of the man’s ribs. Buster’s slap shoes struck the man in the neighbouring seat, and broke two of his front teeth. As was normally the case, Buster went uninjured, mostly because he had trained himself on the right way to break a fall.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this father-son roughhousing, which did indeed attract the unwanted attention of child welfare societies from time to time (because of his unbelievable comic talent, Buster was sometimes believed to be a midget, which helped legally and morally), the young Keaton learned the value of withholding his own expressions of mirth. He noticed that whenever he smiled or showed the audience any pleasure, they didn’t laugh as much. So, on purpose, he started looking haunted and bewildered. Over time, he realized that other comedians could derive an advantage from laughing at their own gags, but that he simply couldn’t. The public hated it when he tried. That was just fine with Keaton. He always claimed to be happiest when the folks watching him said to each other, “Look at the poor dope, wilya?”

The jury remains out – a long way out, in fact – on the relationship between Keaton’s impassive mask and the a***e he endured at the hands (and feet) of his often-drunk father. How much of Keaton’s legendary deadpan, for example, was the result of pure comic instinct and how much the result of his father’s fierce onstage instructions? If you are six years old and being pummelled for laughs, and your towering father in a bald Irish wig and sidewhiskers hisses at you, “Face! Face!” in order to keep you from showing any emotion, how does this experience, repeated night after night until it’s no longer necessary, affect your relationship to your own genuine emotions? Keaton himself always sidestepped the question. His parents loved him, he loved the stage: case closed. He would respond the same way when Joseph Schenk, his producer and friend who basically sold him out to MGM in the 1930s and effectively ruined Buster’s creative life, was criticized for having been disloyal. Buster would have none of it, even though, as an intelligent man, he knew he’d been cheated and misused by Schenk. It was simply too painful to accept the truth. Face! Face!

Even by 1950, when Buster made a cameo appearance in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard as one of the “waxworks,” the deluded Norma Desmond’s forgotten bridge players, he didn’t openly blame anyone for what had happened to his career. Face! Face! But he drank, so heavily that at one time he wound up straitjacketed in an institution. What his features showed then are not part of the legend. The experiences Keaton lived between his father’s hissing of “Face! Face!” and the two words he speaks in Sunset Boulevard – “Pass,” and then, softly, as in final and permanent defeat, “Pass” – are the truth that contributed to the particular nature of his genius.

In short, Keaton’s vision was darkly comic, almost entirely without popular sentiment of the kind found in Chaplin’s work. And the darkness, without question, was allied to the deadpan.

Of course, I knew none of this in the summer of 1969 on the neighbour’s lawn sloped like whaleback under the buttery stars as I watched, spellbound, the quick, lithe figure walk, then walk faster, then sprint and leap from one calamity to another. All I understood then was the hilarity, but some part of me must have registered the melancholy and tragic vision. Why else should Buster Keaton haunt me nearly a half-century later? Middle age, the death of loved ones, the challenge to stay positive in a world awash in cynicism, materialism and grotesque sentimentality. Who whispers “Face” to us, and what face should we reveal before we look glumly into our hand and mutter, “Pass”?