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.

Then Buster came along.

At three years old, he was allowed to stand in the background during his parents’ act as window dressing, just as a way to keep an eye on him while they were busy on stage. But it wasn’t long before the little squirt began imitating his father’s dancing and tumbling behind his back, inspiring gales of laughter from audiences. Seeing how easily his son took to performing — and how appealing he was to paying customers — Joe Keaton began dreaming up of ways to integrate him into his act.

All of the other kids in vaudeville were crafted by their parents into “cute and charming Little Lord Fauntleroys” and “Dolly Dimples types with long, golden curls.” Joe Keaton, therefore, endeavored to make his boy, in Buster’s words, “the only little hell-raising Huck Finn-type boy in vaudeville.”

Experimenting with different storylines and testing them against audience reactions, Buster’s father finally hit upon a winning formula. ““They got the idea,” Buster later explained, “of trying to show the audience how to bring up children correctly. And every time I did something he didn’t like, he’d either take me by the back of the neck and throw me through a piece of scenery or kick me clean off the stage, through chairs, tables, or anything else that would be in the way.”

Frank Cullen, author of Vaudeville, Old and New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America, provides details of the act culled from contemporary newspaper reports:

Joe and Buster were dressed as stage Irishmen, with skullcap wigs that simulated a bald pate with curly hair around the edges leading into their chin whiskers. They wore baggy pants, short coats over white vests and spats over their slap shoes. . .

Buster played the mischievous imp to his father’s put-upon and often explosive character. . . While Joe attempted to sing a comic song or render a recitation, little Buster, dressed identically, would be stalking imaginary flies upstage and swatting them with a small broom, edging nearer to his dad until he “accidentally” thwacked Joe. From that point onward the violence escalated. Myra had sewn a suitcase handle onto the back of Buster’s coat so that Joe could pick him up and tote him about like luggage or toss him into the wings, up against the backdrop, or, occasionally, into the audience. Joe got as good as he gave: one resounding whack from Buster with his broom regularly sent Joe headfirst over the edge of the stage so that he was hanging into the orchestra pit. . . audiences unfamiliar with the act were aghast at the way Joe kicked and tossed his son about the stage. . .

For a closing, Myra came on dressed in her finery . . . Borrowing a gag from burlesque, for their call at the end of the act, Joe hitch-kicked Myra’s hat off her head while Buster yanked a cord that stripped Myra of her gown, leaving her standing in an Irish costume like Joe and Buster’s.

Soon Buster was being referred to as “The Human Mop,” due to the amount of time he spent sliding across the stage and slamming through props. “The Little Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged!” the ads read. “A revelation in eccentric juvenile talent, properly directed to produce the lasting comedy effects! The most unique character in vaudeville! A miniature comedian, who presents irresistible comedy, with gigantic effects!”

And the clincher: “Making the ladies hold their sides, too.”

“It was the roughest knockabout act that was ever in the history of the theater,” Keaton would later brag with familial pride. “As I grew older, our act became progressively rougher. For one thing, we never bothered to do the same routines twice in a row. We found it much more fun to surprise one another by pulling any crazy, wild stunt that came into our heads.”

One night his father might send him sailing across the stage and smack through a large drum sitting in the orchestra pit. On another, he might toss him headfirst into the audience itself. By the time the act wound down in Buster’s late teens, his Dad’s right arm was twice as big as his left from all the years of hurling his ever-growing boy.

Various child-protection groups, of course, did their best to shut down the act. “Reformers in New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois, among other states, were tireless in their efforts to stop us all from going to hell via the stage.” Keaton remembered. “I guess they meant well, but like so many other sincere do-gooders they were a pain in the neck, particularly to those they were attempting to rescue.”

Luckily for The Three Keatons, the very strangeness of their act often allowed them to skirt such roadblocks. “The law,” Keaton explained in his autobiography, “said that no child under the age of sixteen can walk wire, juggle, do acrobatics, roller-skate, play musical instruments — all of those — an awful list of things. But none of them” he added with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “said that you couldn’t kick him in the face.”

When the little moppet would careen through chairs, over tables, and into brick walls, audiences didn’t know whether to laugh or rush to save the child from a horribly abusive father. “The people out front were amazed because I did not cry,” wrote Keaton. “There was nothing mysterious about this. I did not cry because I wasn’t hurt. All little boys like to be roughhoused by their fathers.”

Similar misconceptions would plague Buster’s career later in life as well. “Because of the way I looked on the stage and screen,” he wrote in his autobiography, “the public naturally assumed that I felt hopeless and unloved in my personal life.” The impression was buttressed when audiences saw him, aged and forlorn-looking, playing cards with other washed-up silent stars in Sunset Boulevard (1950), or performing a last silent-era tribute routine with Charlie Chaplin in Limelight (1952). In those films it was easy to look at his solemn, wrinkled face and imagine that all of his troubles — the alcoholic binges, losing his M-G-M contract and stardom, divorcing his first two wives — left him a tired, depressed, and bitter man in his elder years.

“Nothing could be father from the fact,” he assured everyone who would listen, “As long back as I can remember I have considered myself a fabulously lucky man. . . the bad years, it seems to me, were so few that only a dyed-in-the-wool grouch who enjoys feeling sorry for himself would complain of them.” And over that lifetime of fortune and fame, Keaton insisted that, “My parents were my first bit of great luck.”

The skills, athleticism, and genius of the singularly gifted physical comedian who made The Cameraman just didn’t come to him out of thin air. When you’re laughing at that movie’s hilarious pratfalls, breathlessly dangerous stunts, and inspired comic hi-jinks, you’re not just witnessing the end of silent film, but the swan song of one of the keepers of the lost and vanished art of vaudeville. The art of his Mom and Dad.

Previous posts in the series “Buster Keaton and The Cameraman”

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Notes on The Cameraman by Kevin Hagopian: A nice article on Keaton and his last great film, worth a read.

Debunking the Buster Keaton myths: Keaton scholar Patricia Eliot Tobias analyzes some of the more common tall tales that have grown up around the comedian’s legend, creeping even into some of the biographies.

Buster Keaton stunts: A quick video montage of just a few of Keaton’s amazing feats of derring-do, which cemented his reputation as the most physically gifted and fearless performer of the silent era. We don’t have any film of Buster as a boy getting tossed around a stage by his Dad, but when you watch this video you get the next best thing: an adult Keaton performing essentially the same sorts of tumbles he perfected when he was three years old.

Buster Keaton: My Wonderful World of Slapstick: A lighthearted autobiography filled with stories of life in vaudeville, silent film, and early television.

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.”

As it turned out, the rigid assembly-line strictures of working at M-G-M (front-office approved scripts only, generic Hollywood casts and crews, no improvisation or dangerous stunts allowed) — combined with the onset of the Great Depression, the blitzkrieg adaptation of sound, his own increasing age, and the debilitating alcoholism brought on by a failed marriage — conspired to rob him of the longstanding moviemaking methods which once enabled his spontaneous brand of physical comedy to thrive. By the mid-1930s, Buster Keaton was as anachronistic and out-of-style as disco was by the mid-1980s. Reduced to taking bit parts in movies and creating gags for the new crop of comedians behind-the-scenes, it would take film critic James Agee’s 1949 essay to spark a revival in his fortunes and reputation.

But back in 1928, during his initial honeymoon phase with M-G-M, he had no way of knowing any of that. All he saw was a glorious new phase of his career stretching out before him. In the past he often swung for the fences, ever trying to top himself with more outrageous gags. But The Cameraman was, in Keaton’s words, “one of my pet pictures. It’s the simplest story that you can find, which was always a great thing for us if we could find it.” That simplicity brought out an element in his work heretofore unseen, namely a romantic sentimentality and a more languorous pace, both stemming from the emotions and humanity of the characters.

In June, Buster provided M-G-M with the idea of a lovelorn New York photographer striving to become a movie cameraman in order to impress a kindly girl working at a local newsreel company. Months later, the studio proudly presented their new star with an enormous script compiled by over twenty writers and filled with a bewildering array of clichéd characters and tired Hollywood plot-twists. After a half-hearted try at filming the behemoth in New York, Keaton called the studio and begged them to “for God’s sake, authorize me to throw this cockeyed script in the ash can and shoot from the cuff from here on.”

Freed from the strictures of a screenplay, Keaton proceeded to engage in his usual method of working: boundless creativity borne of rigorous improvisation. At one point his character arrives at Yankee Stadium to film a newsreel, finds it empty, and proceeds to charmingly engage in every fan’s fantasy: miming a game on the renowned field, playing all the positions by himself with childlike enthusiasm. In another, his efforts to break open a simple piggy bank end up destroying half his apartment. In still another, he takes an exhausted staple of romantic movies — dropping a telephone and rushing off frantically down a busy street in pursuit of a loved one — and makes it hilarious by sprinting so fast that he reaches her apartment and skids to a stop right behind her before she’s realized he’s no longer on the other end of the line. The film’s big set-piece, an explosive tong war between rival gangs in Chinatown, features him inventing ingenious ways to dodge bullets, knives, and bodies while simultaneously filming the works, all while his pet monkey tags along and takes full part in the mayhem.

Among this cavalcade of comedic delights, Keaton later revealed that, “The sequence that furnished the longest laugh in the picture was found at Venice, California, which was dressed up — or down — to look like New York’s Coney Island. Its gags were invented on the spot by [director Edward] Sedgwick, myself, and our two writers, Lew Lipton and Clyde Bruckman.” At base, the idea was simple: Keaton takes his girl to a public swimming pool for their first date. But the number of titters, yowls, belly-laughs, and boffos he manages to wring out of that scenario is extraordinary. Each new development flows organically into the next, the laughs so earthbound and genuine that it comes as a surprise to learn how much hard work and inventive genius went into them.

Take the centerpiece of the scene: Keaton attempting to change into a swimsuit before his poolside date gets snapped up by one of the many muscular college jocks prowling the area like sharks. Looking over the dressing rooms at the real-live Venice location, Buster decided that his poor character would find himself forced to share one with a much burlier fellow. To make the predicament even more funny, he had an extra-small mock-up of the real room built, one that would force the two actors to squeeze, contort, and fumble with every attempt to remove their clothes. The seasoned comedian’s eagle-eye left no detail unexamined in his quest to build the scene into a comedic gem. “Each bathhouse had six hooks on its walls,” Keaton later remembered, so “we removed four hooks, because a couple of men struggling to hang all of their clothes on one hook apiece could be very funny.”

Initially, the director suggested that a hulking actor should be found to serve as Keaton’s dressing-room nemesis, but Buster saw that as too unrealistic. “What I wanted was a fellow about my size who looked like a grouch but not the sort who dares start a fight.” With such a character mentally improvised on the spot, and no time to go back to Hollywood to hunt down an appropriate actor, they turned to the balding, scowling unit manager on his crew. “He filled the bill on looks,” Keaton decided, “although he had never done any acting. . . As usual, we did not rehearse the scene. . . rehearsed scenes look mechanical on the screen.”

By rolling the camera and inventing as they went along, they were able to create something that audiences still remember eighty years later. “The scene ran for four minutes,” Keaton later marveled in an interview, “which is a very long time on the screen for a string of gags worked by just two men in a single ridiculous situation. [M-G-M Producer Irving] Thalberg almost had hysterics when he saw that day’s rushes in a projection room.” The unit manager who had acted in the scene alongside Keaton, Ed Brophy, generated so much laughter among audiences that it propelled him into a long Hollywood career as a crowd-pleasing grouch — you can see him in The Champ (1931), Freaks (1932), The Thin Man (1934), and the musicals Varsity Show (1937) and Gold Diggers in Paris (1938) among many others (you can even hear him as the mouse in Disney’s Dumbo).

As the famous “changing room scene” in The Cameraman shows, it wasn’t plot-twists or clever writing that drove a Keaton picture, but physical gags: spontaneous comedy derived from setting and characters, visual stuff more reminiscent of vaudeville than a theatrical play. For Buster Keaton was a product not of cinema, but of a lost stage art which cinema had destroyed decades earlier. . . .

Previous posts in the series “Buster Keaton and The Cameraman”

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

A tour of the real-life locations for The Cameraman: See some of the still-existing and recognizable Los Angeles buildings that Buster Keaton used to film The Cameraman in 1928.

TCM notes on The Cameraman: Here’s TCM’s mini-essay on the film, written by James Steffen. Just like the standard TCM video introductions by Robert Osborne, these little written exposes on their website are always interesting and worth a read.

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.

Unlike so many other stars who grew tired and cynical under the pressures of the frantic pace of production, Esther genuinely delighted in the hard work and was, by all accounts, well liked by everyone.

Well, almost everyone.

In her modest but hugely revealing memoir, Some Day We’ll Laugh, and years later in conversation with silent film historian, Anthony Slide, Esther vents about an unpleasant breach, professional and personal, with director Dorothy Arzner.

Publicity photo of Esther Ralston for Ten Modern Commandments, the film in which director Dorothy Arzner sexually harassed the young star.

Open about her homosexuality, director Dorothy Arzner, during production of Fashions for Women and Ten Modern Commandments, 1927, is in the habit of dragging Esther into her lap and groping her breasts.

Esther rejects Arzner’s crude advances and Arzner takes revenge by browbeating Esther, making her perform take after take of a single scene. Ironic, because Esther was known as One-Take Ralston.

Furious, Esther storms into Adolf Zukor’s office and announces that she will never again work with Arzner.

Esther Wants a Baby

Broke, with Hollywood re-gearing for the new era of talkies, George proposes that Esther go on the road with a vaudeville act. It is notable that George himself never once considers going to work. No, the structure of their dysfunctional relationship dictates Esther as breadwinner and George as, um, parasite.

Like the veteran trouper she is, Esther puts together an act billed as the “Golden Girl of the Silver Screen… in Person.”

Esther opens in 1929 at the Orpheum in Los Angeles. Playing to enthusiastic audiences, the tour moves to Chicago and then The Palace in New York. A month later, playing three shows a day, four on Saturday and Sunday, Esther is worn down, depressed.

Although it was a thrill to see people lined up for a block and a half waiting to get into the theater to see my act, I just wanted to go home to have a baby. George kept urging me to be patient, saying that having a baby might make me lose my American Venus figure, that I was still young and there would be plenty of time to start a family.

A crude manipulator, George threatens to commit suicide if Esther insists on abandoning the tour. Torn by her desire to start a family, and her husband’s control over her life and career, Esther sinks into silence and starts to lose weight. Alarmed at seeing his meal ticket in meltdown, George makes an appointment for Esther with a “Park Avenue specialist.”

I was thoroughly examined and, after I had dressed, I came out to the office where the specialist was talking with George. They both stared at me so solemnly that I was frightened. “What is it?” I almost screamed. “Why are you looking at me like that. Is something wrong with me?”

“Better sit down, my dear,” the doctor said quietly, then he told me the bad news. Evidently, my strenuous acrobatic dancing, my high kicks and so forth, had left me with one ovary completely damaged and the other only halfway intact. “I’m sorry, Miss Ralston, but I’m afraid you can never have children. I’m so sorry.” He said.

I was numb with shock. It just couldn’t be true. All I wanted out of life was to have children. Who cared about a career? What price being a movie star, here today gone tomorrow? No babies? Not ever? I wanted to die.

What is going on here?

I presented Esther’s narrative to a close friend, a distinguished physician. He pointed out that female athletes, and dancers—usually ballerinas—through endless training, rehearsals, and extreme diets, frequently lose their menstrual cycles, which leads to temporary infertility.

But Esther does not present as that kind of dancer or dieter. No, it seems that Esther was the victim of a cruel manipulation designed to keep her on the road and insure a cash flow.

I’m fairly certain that George Webb greased the palm of the Park Avenue specialist to offer the heart-breaking diagnosis thereby breaking down Esther’s defenses and making her even more dependent on her husband.

Esther agrees to finish the tour.

The Case of Lena Smith, 1929, directed by Josef von Sternberg. Released just as sound was coming in, this film, according to Esther, was her very best work. No copies are known to exist. Lena Smith is one of the most sought after lost films of the silent era.

Esther might be gullible, and she is most certainly uninformed about female biology, but she has true grit and faith in G-d.

Raised an Episcopalian, Esther confesses that for years she has been an earnest student of Christian Science. Convinced that G-d wants her to have a child, Esther summons a Christian Science Practitioner for prayer sessions.

In the days before antibiotics, when the most ordinary infection could result in death, scores of the Hollywood colony flocked to Christian Science. The great director King Vidor was one of the most visible adherents.

A few months later, her vaudeville tour ended, back in Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer offers Esther a long-term contract worth $100,000.

Esther turns it down, explaining that she is, yes, pregnant.

With all due respect to Christian Science, I still believe that George Webb and the Park Avenue specialist conspired the false diagnosis to keep Esther working.

Esther and the Miraculous Turtle Cream

Meanwhile, George discovers a “scientist” who has invented a miraculous “turtle cosmetic cream” guaranteed to make women look years younger. In 1930, using the money Esther earned on her vaudeville tour, George opens “Esther’s in Hollywood” a spa on Yucca Street in Los Angeles.

In 1931 Esther gives birth to a daughter, Mary Esther, and Ralston looks forward to a quiet life in her mansion as a mother and wife.

But business and money management at “Esther’s in Hollywood” is not what it should be—big shock—and George arranges for another grueling vaudeville tour.

Playing to sold-out audiences, Esther is invited to England to deliver a Command Performance at the Palladium, the largest theater in the world.

Rather than be separated from her child, Esther hires a Nanny to help care for baby Mary on the tour.

Esther and the anti-Semites

Checking into the Mayfair hotel in London, Esther discovers that Eddie Kay, her musical conductor and arranger, and his wife Tessie are not registered.

“Why not?” I said. “All my company are to be registered here at this hotel. “But Madame,” answered the clerk, “I’m sorry, but we couldn’t register Mr. Kay. He is a Jew.”

“Restricted” hotels were an accepted part of the social landscape in Europe and America all through the 1950’s.

Esther immediately checks out of the Mayfair and rents a luxurious apartment directly across from the Marble Arch where Eddie, Tessie and Esther’s entire staff stay for the duration of the London tour.

Esther does not deliver a tedious lecture about fighting injustice and prejudice. She doesn’t make any grand claims for her righteousness. She does the right thing, and moves on with her story.

Admirable.

Esther is exhausted and homesick, for America, for her lovely mansion, and the golden California sunshine. But George books weeks of further engagements in Scotland and Wales.

We had been almost a year in England by now and I began to fret with homesickness. We had received a cable from our receptionist at “Esther’s in Hollywood” requesting an immediate five thousand dollars for new hair dryers. It seemed to me that our salon was beginning to cost more than it was bringing in.

I complained to George that it just didn’t seem fair that his mother, Mrs. Frey, his nephew Mac, and his youngest daughter, Marion should all be living in our “castle,” enjoying the California sunshine, swimming in my beloved pool, being waited on by Sing [the cook] while my baby and I were so far from home and I had to work so hard for every penny.

So badly has George mismanaged Esther’s finances that on February 27, 1933, Esther’s mansion and all its contents are put up for auction. Esther does not provide details of George’s financial mismanagement, but between bad investments, various swindles, and George’s degenerate gambling we can well imagine how another fortune is lost.

Esther makes a list of each creditor and accepts every job that Hollywood has to offer. Dollar by dollar, Esther pays off her considerable debts.

Quarreling all the time, George and Esther are bound in a loveless, dysfunctional marriage.

Esther Gets on the Very Bad Side of L.B. Mayer

Thirty-one years old, Esther is no longer the devastatingly beautiful ingénue who lit up the screen in the silent era. But Louis B. Mayer, the most powerful studio head in Hollywood, is still anxious to bring her to MGM.

He offers her $750.00 a week, a steep decline from the days when she was pulling in $2,500 a week, but Esther is more than grateful to sign the contract.

But there’s a catch. And it’s classic Hollywood.

L.B. Mayer has a massive schoolboy crush on Esther, and when she realizes that the powerful mogul expects, um, favors in return for roles, Esther spurns Mayer’s advances.

When I arrived at the studio the next morning, I was told to go at once to Mr. Mayer’s office. He wanted to see me.

“Good morning,” I said cheerfully as I entered his office.

Mr. Mayer glared at me and, shaking his finger at me furiously, he shouted, “Think you’re pretty smart, eh? Think you fooled me? Let me tell you, I can have any woman on this lot — Joan Crawford and…”

I stood up indignantly and interrupted his tirade. “Perhaps you can — any woman but Esther Ralston.”

“Just who do you think you are?” he sputtered.

“I thought, Mr. Mayer, I was hired as an actress, but evidently you had other plans for me.’

Getting up from his chair, Mayer paced up and down the room, shouting, “You sing your psalms, young lady, and see where you get! I’ll blackball you in every studio in Hollywood, and what’s more you’ll get nothing here!”

Mayer makes good on his promise. MGM sells Esther’s contract to Universal for a group of less than stellar projects which do nothing for her career, and as everyone knows if you’re not on an upward trajectory in Hollywood, you’re probably in a downward spiral.

Esther Ralston and Joan Crawford in Sadie McKee.

Esther’s one MGM film during that period is the Joan Crawford vehicle, Sadie McKee, 1934.

It is director Clarence Brown—Garbo’s frequent helmer—who insists on casting Ralston as the theatrical femme fatale, Dolly Merrick.

Esther’s part is small, but she sparkles in every scene. Even as a slinky tramp, Esther brings warmth to the character that keeps you off-balance. You want to hate this vaudeville villainess, yet at the same time there is the urge to melt into her arms.

Here’s a brief clip of Esther Ralston singing I Looked In Your Eyes with Gene Raymond. As you can see, Esther is magnetic, with a richly-toned voice. As Dolly Merrick, Esther plays a vaudeville femme fatale who steals Barry from good girl Crawford. Sadie McKee is not one of Crawford’s better known vehicles, but it happens to be one of my favorites. And Esther Ralston’s presence is one of the reasons this film has such appeal for yours truly.

–

In March of 1934, Esther finally sues for divorce from George Webb. True to form, Webb counter-sues, demanding $75.00 a week in alimony. The judge denies Webb’s claim and hands Esther full custody of their child Mary Esther.

Esther Rebuilds Her Life—Sorta

At last free from George Webb, a liar, a gambler, and swindler, Esther is free to rebuild her life and career, and hopefully choose her next relationship through the prism of hard earned experience.

However, the day after her divorce—the very next day—at a Hollywood party in Brentwood, Esther clamps eyes on Ted Morgan, a smooth crooner with a pleasing baritone.

Chatting intimately, Esther learns that Morgan’s wife has just run off with another man.

Reflects Esther:

I guess the fact that we were both unhappy victims of divorce brought us closer together, for I brought him home to Mama’s the next day for dinner.

In the meantime, Esther comes to the conclusion that though she can always earn money, she can’t seem to hold on to it. Thus, Esther engages a high-profile money manager who claims that his clients are a who’s who of Hollywood talent. Confident that, at last, she has found financial salvation, Esther turns over her entire savings to her new money manager. He puts Esther on a weekly allowance and —

— and if your stomach is churning as you read this, well, you have guessed correctly.

The money manager blows town, conning Esther out of all her money.

For those keeping a scorecard, this makes three fortunes Esther has earned and lost.

Esther Ralston is once again broke, adrift in a cocoon of bafflement and betrayal.

It is under these circumstances in June 1935—betrayed by a man she trusted, and forced to drastically downsize—that Esther accepts Morgan’s marriage proposal.

Admits Esther:

During these months, Will Morgan and I were seeing each other constantly and though it seemed that he was drinking an awful lot, I refused to see the danger signals. We were so in love.

Esther with Bill Morgan husband #2.

Really, at this point in the narrative I ‘m slapping my forehead like a Dexedrine fueled lab monkey.

Esther, baby, what are you thinking?

Of course, Morgan can’t buy a job in Hollywood and so he convinces the pliable Esther to combine their talents.

The Ralston-Morgan Vaudeville Act goes on a mildly successful tour across the U.S. No doubt, if it was just Esther head-lining, the box office would have been better.

Forced to leave daughter Mary behind, the pain of their separation is almost more than Esther can bear. And so when Esther’s agent tells her that she has several film offers back in Hollywood, Esther cancels the tour and hurries home.

Resenting Esther’s success, Morgan climbs into a bottle—a case of bottles.

One day, on location for The Girl From Mandalay, Morgan, a sloppy drunk, staggers on the set and disrupts production:

After this final humiliation, I took Mary and went to stay with Mama. I told Bill I’d had it with his drinking and I was leaving him for good. A few nights later, I drove back to our apartment in North Hollywood to pick up my belongings. I parked the car in front and as I got out, saw Bill waiting for me. He was drunk again, and as I turned to go back to the car, he grabbed me by the throat and tried to drag me to the apartment door, yelling, “You aren’t going to leave me, I’ll kill you first.”

Okay, kids, pull out your trusty scorecard: check off two husbands who have threatened murder.

Esther’s life, her dreadful choices in love, is like a Kabuki performance where movement and emotion are ritualized. Esther and the men in her life play their assigned roles to grim perfection.

Esther and Bill are divorced in 1938. Again, Esther is almost penniless and the sole support of her daughter.

What to do?

Esther drives cross-country to New York seeking work in radio and summer stock.

The American Venus is determined to get a fresh start.

But on her very first day in New York, in an agent’s office, Esther meets a young, well-connected show biz columnist who immediately sets his sights on Ralston.

Coming soon, Part III, and yup, husband # 3 also wants to murder Esther.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech