The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 263

wily bw IT il inn r. 1 'W I I dl 1 vT i 1 1 "Vfi File Photo Fim National COMIC GREAT: Keaton, in "Sherlock Jr." (1924) above left, and "Cops" (1922) once modestly told an interviewer, "No man can be a genius in slap-shoes and a flat hat." it happen on screen. "He'd talk about what a delicate operation it was having the whole side of a building fall on him in 'Steamboat Bill Eleanor Keaton says. "He had 2V4 inches of clearance on each shoulder and four inches clearance on his head for his body to get through an open window. His mark was a brass nail pounded in the dirt.

If he didn't hit it, that would be all she wrote." An added factor in Keaton's uneasiness with acclaim was ''if" 4 personal. "He was extremely shy, he did anything to keep away from the his widow remembers. "He especially couldn't stand mobs of people coming at him. At a showing of his films at the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, the lights went up and he took off up the aisle in as close to a dead run as he could get. When I finally caught up to him, he was in an alley, upchucking his dinner." Part of Keaton's shyness came from embarrassment at his almost complete lack of formal schooling; he had lasted, half of a single day, and later was taught to read and write by his mother.

A child of knockabout vaudeville, Joseph Frank Keaton was almost literally born in a trunk Oct. 4, 1895, and officially joined the family act when he was 4. His father soon billed him as "The Little Boy Who Can't Be Damaged" and his nickname, Buster, was related to his ability to take the kinds of daunting falls the act demanded. It was an old vaudeville pal, Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle, who introduced Keaton to two-reel comedy in 1917, and he took to it immediately. Within four years he was starring in his own two-reelers and, in 1923, Keaton began a remarkable string of a dozen silent features in seven years, including such classics as "Sherlock "The Navigator," "Seven Chances," "Go West" and Keaton's personal favorite, "The General." What Keaton and the team of gagmen he never worked without brought to these films was a lifetime of experience in humor that led to surprisingly sophisticated methods of engaging viewers.

"I always wanted the audience to outguess me," he told one interviewer, "and then I'd double-cross them." Equally important was Keaton's exceptional physicality, a preternatural grace and agility that the actor, who never used a double in his prime, refused to fake. His astonishing stunts were often as dangerous as they looked. Keaton broke his neck in "Sherlock Jr." but didn't know it until years later. How close he came to being drowned doing a stunt in "Our Hospitality" can be seen in the finished film: his cameramen were told to keep shooting no matter what. unlikely wedding of surrealism and Yankee pragmatism." And James Agee, whose 1949 essay in Life magazine, "Comedy's Greatest Era," began the Keaton revival, was even more lyrical: "In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler's effortless, uninterested face." What is even more remarkable is that, alone among the silent clowns, the spareness of Keaton's work has an exquisitely modern feeling about it.

None of his contemporaries, and that definitely includes Chaplin, has managed to remain as outside of time as he does. No matter what happened to Buster's character, and extreme scenarios were his specialty, he never got over-emotional about things, never rolled his eyes or pleaded for the audience's sympathy. Rather, like a comic philosopher of despair, he accepted the world and his lot in it and tried to make the best of an increasingly preposterous situation. "Everything was so clean and pure and mathematically correct, there was never anything sloppy," says Eleanor Keaton of her husband's work and its continuing appeal. And Patty Tobias, -president of a Keaton appreciation society with members in nations as distant as Iceland, Pakistan and New Zealand, says film professors prefer to use Keaton to introduce the genre to students because "his films don't do what people stereotype silent comedies as doing." If Keaton could be around to see all this fuss, says Eleanor Keaton, "he would be in total shock.

He wouldn't believe it in fact he didn't believe it when his films first started coming back." She says Keaton was similarly indifferent to efforts by a zealous entrepreneur named Raymond Rohauer to preserve his silent comedies: "He just didn't know what good it would do." To understand this point of view, Eleanor Keaton emphasizes, you have to understand the attitudes prevalent when Keaton was in his prime. Movies were a new form considered as ephemeral and disposable as Kleenex Even Buster's Joe, an old vaudevillian, had contempt for the medium, telling people: "You're not going to put my act on a bedsheet for 10-cent admissions." Keaton's films were originally created, his widow emphasizes, strictly to make money for the short period it took until the next one would be ready, "and that would be the end of them. This kind of interest, Buster couldn't visualize it." Keaton was similarly uncomfortable about the post-Agee critical fuss that examined him in rarefied terms, memorably telling one interviewer, "No man can be a genius in slap-shoes and a flat hat." "He didn't have a big ego, he was never impressed with himself, he'd performed from the time he was 4 years old and this was all in a day's work for him," Eleanor Keaton remembers. "Geniuses were great thinkers to him; he thought calling him that was unreliable information." Still, Keaton took considerable pride in the craft aspects 1 i i I 4 iff 'l 1 Then everything changed. At roughly the same time that sound came in, financial reasons led Keaton to forsake his independent status and sign a contract with mighty MGM.

The studio neither understood nor particularly appreciated his talent, and the frenzy for talking pictures made it impossible for executives to let Keaton be purely himself. "He was bitter at MGM he just hated it so much being there," Eleanor recalls. "He said they'd put as many as 17 writers on one of his films, all of them working on jokes for him. That drove Buster up the wall. 'You can talk, I can talk, anybody can he'd say.

Please see Page 86 ANACLETO RAPPING Los Angeles Times 'He didn't have a big ego, he was never impressed with himself, he'd performed from the time he was 4 years old and this was all in a day's work for Eleanor Keaton of his work, in knowing what was funny and how to make Ik LOS'ANCEUIS TIMES' SUNDAY, OCTOBER 29. W95.