Authors: Jerry Stahl
I left the car at the stadium so we could ride home on the Red Line. I thought he'd get a kick out of the trolley. But he didn't care much for trolleys, either. His only reaction was to ask why all the paddy wagons were lined up at Sixth and Main. "Lot of folks get a little excited when my fellas win," I told him.
Buster was grateful for how I'd helped him deal with his own father, so he offered to come along for part of my outing with mine. Of course Buster had to do it his own way. He showed up at the Red Line stop behind the wheel of my car, dressed like a 17th-century footman. "I, sir, am your son's chauffeur," he announced. "I worship him!" With this he kneeled and kissed my brogans, which alarmed my father to no end. Then, after helping him into the car, Buster offered to shine Daddy's shoes with his forehead. "Secret buffing technique," he said, with that straight face of his. Daddy would not let himself react, which drove Buster to further heights.
But that reminds me. I have to say something here. (Should I stick my hand out when I make a left?) See, Buster could have been a leading man. He was that kind of handsome—whenever he smiled. In
Fatty at Coney Island,
we had a gag where Buster was supposed to swing the mallet at a strong-man gong. He was trying to show what a brute he was and smack the rubber ball up to the ringer. Originally, the gag was that the ball barely moves when he whacks it. But, during the first take, he reared back and accidentally beaned me with the hammer. Buster was so startled he turned around and laughed. Dead into the camera. He made me shoot another take. I stuck with the first one in the movie. Just to show him what kind of face he had on celluloid. But Buster insisted he didn't want to admit what a looker he was. The handsome bastard.
"I can make love to a leading lady anytime," he explained when I nagged him about it. "But if I take her clothes and hit her with a pie, she's going to report me." From that day forward, you never saw Buster Keaton onscreen when he didn't look like his dog ate the baby and died.
Okay, okay, so I'm not supposed to talk so much about Buster. Well, what was I talking about? Daddy? Fine. We were talking about Daddy. The Scotch is starting to affect me. Not like the old days, when a couple gulps flipped the off switch on my worry gland. Those switches don't work anymore. They got switched.
Anyway .
. . After we took Daddy to eat at Musso and Frank's, introducing him to Mary Pickford and Valentino—"Never did like greaseballs," was all he had to say about Rudy—we drove him back to the hospital. The whole ride, Daddy acted like he'd finished some much-dreaded and unsavory chore. When I said goodbye at the door to his ward, he even hesitated before shaking my hand. Like either he was afraid he'd catch something, or he just couldn't bear to touch me. I was staggered, which Buster seemed to sense. Walking out the front gate of the hospital, Buster pulled out his flask and stuck it in my hand. "You sure showed your Dad a good time."
"That's not how it felt to me," I confided. "I tried too hard to impress him."
Buster adjusted his cap, ready to resume chauffeur duty like it was the most normal thing in the world. That's what I loved about him. He had to keep that serious look plastered on his face because all he ever did was play. He scooped some ice from the chest behind the passenger seat, dropped it into a tumbler, then grabbed a bottle from the Pierce-Arrow bar and, holding the ice-filled glass behind his back, poured a perfect two fingers of Scotch right into it.
"Well, did you?" he asked, taking a sip of his drink.
"Did I what?" I was still marveling at his over-the-shoulder pouring move, but it would have been unprofessional to make too much of it. "Did I what, Buster?"
"Impress him," he said.
I almost had to pull over. We were driving to Echo Park, where Sunset Boulevard ends, to Buster's apartment. All the New York theater types lived around there. Buster occupied the bottom half of a rooming house on Alvarado. A trio of budding comediennes shared the rooms above him.
"Do you believe what that bastard said," I blurted, "every time a fan came up to ask for an autograph?"
"Didn't notice," Buster replied, and waited for me to explain. He was the greatest waiter in the world. That was the secret to everything he did.
"Well, let me tell you," I continued, my voice cracking a little. "This Mexican fella comes up and says he's a fan, could I sign something for his little boy. That's a nice thing, but before the guy even gets my John Q and turns away, Daddy shakes his head and says, 'Don't his kind have jobs?' 'His kind'!
Right in front of the guy!"
Buster thought that was funny.
Oh, oh, but wait.
Wait.
This will really get you! Did I mention taking Daddy to a test screening of
Reckless Romeo}
People thought I was nuts for showing my movies in public before they came out. But I figured, the freshest eyes you're gonna get are total strangers. So why not corral a few, loiter in the back, and see where everything goes dead? Daddy knew how much this meant to me. But did he so much as chortle, perk up, or at least stop talking when the guffaws rocked the rafters? No sir. No. Not a-tall.
Dad was too busy telling me about the magazine article he read that said I spent half a million dollars on clothes a year. Before I could tell him a lot of that stuff was studio hooey, he stuck his elbow in his homely wife's ribs and chuckled, in his mouthful-of-broken-marbles way. "For all the money those fools make off you, you'd think they could afford to buy you a girdle!"
Buster nearly dropped the flask when he heard that one. He
did
drop it the day he found out he was drafted. Not only was future Private Keaton shy one trigger finger, his feet were flat enough to heat up and iron shirts. Am I jumping around? Well, you'd be jumpy, too.
I kept Buster in front of the camera till five minutes before he shipped off with the 40th Infantry. He was heading to Camp Kearney, outside San Diego, to make $30 a week and learn how to make his bed. That last film,
The Cook,
was our 17th. We shot down on Sixth and Alamitos in Long Beach, at the old Balboa Studios. Schenck said we could make more money working like hermit crabs, moving from studio to studio, than we could if we actually built our own place.
Maybe it's because none of us knew what was going to happen next, because Buster didn't know if he was going to live or die, or because the whole world was skidding off the tracks. But that last afternoon, Keaton inspired me to come up with a comic sequence that gave us both goose bumps. I started slicing salami with an electric fan, then stuck a fork in a couple of breakfast rolls and did a bun dance. Eight years later, Chaplin lifted the whole routine for
The Gold Rush.
But by then petty theft was the last thing I had on my mind.
I tried to enlist, myself—don't laugh—but not even the Courtesy Corps would take a hunk of suet 100 pounds overweight with a leg that looked like it had already taken shrapnel. I'd done a couple of advertisements, lending my name to the glories of Murad cigarettes, for which I received a bargeful of that very product. So one Saturday I rented a truck and went down with a load of smokes to pass out to the Marines on Mare Island. The last bit of America those boys would see before being shipped out.
While I visited the base, I played tug of war, and single-handedly held off 20 jarheads. They couldn't budge me. I did a couple of cartwheels in the mess hall, which got some choice spit takes. Nothing a private likes more than seeing his sergeant spray beans in his lap. Then I marched everybody into the gymnasium to demonstrate reverse somersaults and the art of falling on my keister. "I've got a lot of keister to fall on, fellas, so I understand if you're jealous." Big laugh for El Fattopotamus.
There were a lot more lads than I'd anticipated, so I ordered a gross of Bull Durhams—more to the fighting man's taste than Murads—and had the brass pass them out before I headed back to Hollywood. All anonymous, of course. Don't want to showboat. So maybe I was trying to impress the unimpressible Daddy in my fat head. The fighting men would get their extra tobacco ration. That's what mattered.
Does that sound right?
Crazy Money
The more you read the papers about what was going on everywhere else, the more you realized Hollywood was like a crazy island, where the natives were off on a spree while the rest of the world crawled through war, inflation, influenza, and food shortages. By now I had to have a brand-new garage built to hold my cars. All five of them. There was a pearl-white Caddy, the Renault (a Frog ride I got as a gift), the Rolls (so lush I used to sleep in it), a Stevens-Duryea I kept for the gardener to drive, and on the way from the manufacturer a 25-grand custom-made Pierce-Arrow.
But just indulge me here. One more Daddy thing and I'll shut up, okay? When Daddy walked up the flagstone path to my house, I said, "Guess how much this front door cost?" He said, "I don't know . . . 50 bucks?" To him 50 was extravagant. When I told him 15,000,1 thought he was going to be sick. The Japanese bridge in my garden probably cost more than Daddy made in his life. But I couldn't stop myself.
I dragged the old man, sick as he was, out to Venice, where I'd snapped up another little mansion, 1621 East Ocean. We did so much shooting in Long Beach, it made sense to be closer, save on drive time . . . All right, that's not the only reason. Venice was also a "wet" town. Which, for all you lucky lappers who weren't around for Prohibition, means a city where a man could still get his lips around a whiskey bottle without a fuss.
Round white man buy 'em firewater easy.
You could drink, and get drunk, and the cops were okay with it if you patted their palms a little. And the Sunset Inn was a hop-step-and-tumble down the road. Buster and I spent so much time there we were on the menu.
I'll
have the Mammoth Olives a la Roscoe Arbuckle and the Shrimp Cocktail a la Buster Keaton. Thank you. And bring me some breath mints, honey.
The Sunset Inn was the scene of many an epic bender. Something about that beach air. Whenever we wandered the sand with drinks in our hands, and I started feeling tipsy enough to need a lie-down—generally flat on my face—I'd look at Buster, stroke my chin, and declare, "That darn ocean breeze. It
does
something to me." That was everybody's signal to catch me when my knees buckled. There was no better place to pass out than on the beach. As long as the tide was out.
But what I really loved about my Venice place, aside from the fresh air and fresh hooch, was the tunnel. My private tunnel. Who else had one of those? The President? Underneath our property, somebody'd built a tunnel all the way down through the cliff right out to the surf. Rumor had it this was a bootlegger's drop. Or maybe a smuggler's. The last occupant of the house died under mysterious circumstances. Who knew?
Goodbye, Daddy, Goodbye
My father's last night before going back into the hospital I threw a party for him out at the Venice house. When I led him through the tunnel Daddy kept eyeballing the ceiling, like it was gonna collapse any second. I plopped him on a horse on the beach, between Mary Pickford and Bebe Daniels. I think the old child abandoner got flirty with 'em, because his wife stalked back to the house more stone-faced than usual.
I guess Daddy's visit made me think about things. Before he left, 10-grand check from Yours Truly in his hand, he made that jiggered-up face he always made when he wanted to let me know what he thought of me. "Funny," he said, in his cracked-glass cancer voice, "you used to hate when anybody called you fat. Looks like you're making a pretty decent livin' at it."
No
"Thank you."
No
"I'm proud o' you, son."
Nothing. Which may be what inspired me to do
Out West.
See, when I was clowning around for the soldiers, I could tell how impressed they were. Not just impressed, but surprised. Like, they pretty much had the same view of me that Daddy did. I was some glorified carny act. The male equivalent of the Fat Lady. Nobody seemed to understand how strong you had to be to do what I do. How physically sound and coordinated.
Twenty marines
I held off in a tug of war. Could you do that? I rest my crankcase.
Seriously, in my secret heart, I knew I could be Douglas Fairbanks. And after getting that last, disgusted goodbye look from Daddy, I decided to demonstrate that fact on celluloid—to put my strength and agility front and center. If not for Fairbanks's—or my father's—benefit, then for mine.
Understand, Doug-Doug was a friend of mine. We'd shared more than a few "Is it eight in the morning or eight at night?"s together. He was the Action Hero—the man women wanted and other men wanted to be. But look at what he did in every movie: the roof jumping, the balcony hopping, the swan dives into choppy waters. It was the same stuff
I
did. Except he looked better in tights. So, since Buster was gone, and I figured I'd have to carry things on my own, I got the bright idea of doing a parody of a Fairbanks film.
The gag in Hollywood was that D.F. wouldn't even read a script if the plot did not involve a couple of balconies to bounce off of. So, in
Out West.
I squeezed in as many leap scenes as I could think up. I didn't play them for yuks, either. I just performed 'em, almost like a demonstration. Did I scramble up church steeples? Did I make bad guys cower? Did I shimmy onto the porches of beauties who got all goose-pimply at the sight of me? Yes. Why? Same reason a dog laps his genitals.
Because I could.
(Not lap my genitals, though later on Mr. Hearst would accuse me of worse. I meant, I shimmied onto porches.) Sure, the audience was laughing, but they also realized something: just cause he's called Fatty doesn't mean he's not an athlete. I was doing this for fat men everywhere!
Out West
wasn't the first movie where I was required to show off my physique. (Now be quiet, ladies!) After Jack Dempsey creamed Jess Willard, I asked the new champ if he wanted to do a movie together. What gave me the idea was an item I read in the paper. The Dempsey fight was the first one Willard's wife ever attended. She didn't even show up when Jess beat Jack Johnson to become heavyweight champion in the first place.