Books: Hard Knocks

KEATON: THE MAN WHO WOULDN'T LIE DOWN by Tom Dardis Scribners; 340 pages; $12.50

Buster Keaton's comic mask was nearly indistinguishable from the one most actors don for tragedy. To have seen a Keaton film is to remember his thin, straight mouth, its corners barely holding their own against gravity. The eyes are equally memorable; Spanish Poet Federico García Lorca described them as "sad infinite eyes, like those of a newborn beast of burden." No matter what madness swirled around them, they remained wells of loneliness in the pale landscape of Keaton's face.

The comedian turned this stoic face not only toward the camera but to the world at large. Biographer Tom Dardis traces this response back to Keaton's childhood. Not long after his birth in 1895, he joined his parents' vaudeville act. The routine evolved by the Three Keatons consisted chiefly of father kicking and bashing son around the stage. One reviewer in 1905 complained about the "tiresome use of the child's body for the wiping of the stage floor." As Buster grew, so did the level of showtime violence, and the only way to keep audiences entertained without frightening them was for the little boy to look utterly removed. Keaton described his education: "In this knockabout act, my father and I used to hit each other with brooms, occasioning for me strange flops and falls. If I should chance to smile, the next hit would be a good deal harder."

This school of hard knocks made Keaton a superb physical comic. It also drove him inward, to a place where neither friends, wives nor biographers could succeed in following. He was a passive, gentle, largely inarticulate man. His Hollywood career flourished as long as he had a producer, Joseph M. Schenk, who gave him independence and financial protection. Under such conditions, Keaton made at least two films, The Navigator and The General, that are unquestioned classics of the silent era. Unfortunately, Keaton's comedies did not show the profits of Chaplin's or of Harold Lloyd's, and he became vulnerable to a takeover. His career was not killed by the advent of the talkies, as is often assumed. It began to die when he signed a fat contract ($3,000 a week) at MGM and became answerable to accountants and better business methods.

Keaton's decline was ghoulishly documented by the industry that caused it. He appeared as increasingly deteriorating versions of himself in Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Beach Blanket Bingo (1965). He turned his anger inward and drank himself to distraction. Yet he also lived long enough to become the somewhat puzzled darling of academics and film historians. Samuel Beckett sought him out and wrote a screenplay, Film (1964), in which Keaton starred. When the two met for the first time, they discovered that they had almost nothing to talk about.