One day in early 1896, a toddler barely able to walk accidentally tumbled head-over-heels down a long flight of stairs. People gasped and rushed to help, but when they reached the bottom of the landing they saw the little boy sitting up, a bit dazed but without serious injury. “That’s some buster your kid took!” someone exclaimed to the boy’s father, and with that the crowd dispersed, murmuring their collective astonishment that the tot hadn’t killed himself.

Hearing this, and looking down at the little stinker crawling around his feet, vaudevillian Joe Keaton decided that his young son would be called “Buster” from then on.

(In later years, Buster created the myth that it was family friend and fellow vaudevillian Harry Houdini who had witnessed the fall and bequeathed the nickname. Not true, but as far as can be discerned Keaton is the first person ever to take “Buster” as a given name — the comic strip Buster Brown didn’t debut until a few years later.)

Buster’s pop, Joe Keaton (1867-1946), was a tall, gangly, acrobatic flip-flop expert. “The Man With a Table” he called himself — placing a wooden chair on a sturdy table, he would stand atop them and perform a series of precarious falls, tumbles, handstands and dives, careening to the ground and then bounding back up again. “[My father] was the most gifted man at taking a fall I ever saw in action,” Buster would later say. Meanwhile his mother, Myra Keaton (1877-1955), sang songs and played a wide variety of musical instruments — harmonium, cornet, even a newfangled brass contraption called a saxophone.

Together the Keatons performed in turn-of-the-century “medicine shows”: small groups of itinerant performers traveling the country, performing skits, tricks and plays in between sales pitches from fake doctors selling snake-oil elixirs to gullible small-town rubes. (Judging from the modern proliferation of vitamins, bodybuilding powders, and exotic eastern herbal remedies, little has changed in the intervening century.) For years they were nondescript, just one of the thousands of similar acts out there dancing, singing, and clowning for their daily bread. (more…)

The Cameraman marks an exact crossroads in the career of Buster Keaton. It was his last genuine silent film, made after his previous three pictures (all now hailed as classics) had underperformed at the box office. Coming at the very pinnacle of his career, it represents the last chapter of his prime “Golden Age” years, and the final opportunity to see him at the very top of his game, expertly doing what he did best.

At the same time, it was his first picture made with mighty Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who in 1928 had lured him out of the independent wilderness with a lucrative contract and promises of big budgets for production, advertising, and distribution. The Hollywood studio with “more stars than there are in heaven” sought to add a genius comedian to that celestial firmament, and who better to fill that role than the guy whom critic James Agee would later credit with bringing “pure physical comedy to its greatest heights”?

Keaton initially thought that his new deal, the richest in M-G-M history up to that time, would ensure his stardom for many years to come. “This was still before the stock market crash,” he said years later in an interview. “There was money everywhere. . . I was successful, I was famous, I was free. Hell, I was sitting pretty and didn’t have enough sense to know it.” (more…)

Esther Ralston at the height of her fame, mid-twenties.

To read Part I of this series, please click here.

Blessed with a lovely, melodic voice, it’s something of a puzzle why Paramount dropped Esther Ralston’s option in 1929. Esther was a rising star who, between 1924 and 1929, starred or co-starred in twenty-five films. She would seem a natural for talkies.

But the mystery is soon cleared up as Esther explains:

Since I had only a year to go on my Paramount contract, the studio sent me a new contract with a talkie clause to sign. Knowing I had been brought up in the theater before going into pictures, George decided I should ask for a hundred thousand dollars to sign this talkie clause. He sent me alone to talk to Mr. Lasky and Mr. Zukor. They were courteous as always, but explained that the new talkie panic had them worried and they didn’t feel they should have to increase my salary until they were sure I would be adequate in talkies.

Once again, the destructive Svengali-Trilby relationship asserts itself as the guiding principle of Esther and George. (more…)