Happy Birthday Buster Keaton

Happy Birthday Buster Keaton!  He was born 130 years ago today.

For the past two days, I have been attending the Annual Convention of the International Buster Keaton Society in Muskegon, Michigan.  It has been an incredible experience.

Two days ago, a group of us took a tour of the Bluffton neighborhood on the shores of Lake Muskegon.  This is where Buster Keaton spent every summer of his boyhood from 1905 until 1917, when his family's vaudeville act broke up.  Here he could leave the pressures of performing and constant travel from one city to another behind and for two or three months play baseball, pilot his motor boat around the lake, fish, devise elaborate practical jokes, chase girls, and spend time with his family -- his father Joe, mother Myra, sister Louise, and brother Harry.

The Keatons bought property in Bluffton on a hill overlooking the lake in the summer of 1905.  America was still a half wild nation.  The frontier had just recently been settled.  Millions upon millions of acres of open land stretched in great expanses across the heaving continent, much of it still incredibly cheap.  A decade earlier, Buster's father had participated in the land rush at Oklahoma's Cherokee Strip to stake a homestead claim.  And a decade before that the United States Cavalry had been fighting Native American tribes on the Great Plains.

By 1905 Joe Keaton no longer needed to homestead.  He was a headliner in vaudeville -- then the dominant form of popular entertainment -- and had entered the ranks of the middle class.  After buying the lakeshore property in Bluffton, he became a real estate promoter for the area.

Within a few years hundreds of vaudevillians had settled here.  Why Bluffton?  Respectable white Protestants regarded actors as undesirables.  Most fine hotels refused to rent them rooms.  Instead, actors and performers had to accept being segregated in theatrical boarding houses.  Just as the Irish had settled in Boston and the Jews in Brooklyn, and the Polish and Germans in Pittsburgh, the actors now settled on this undeveloped beachfront to build a community of their own.

The modest wood bungalows that lined the unpaved streets housed magicians, comedians, singers, animal trainers, and acrobats.  Since they were not welcome in the Wasp yacht clubs of Muskegon, the actors opened their own yacht club in Bluffton, and their own nightclub, and their own baseball field.  They had their own taxi service, which consisted of an elephant owned by one of the animal trainers.  The pachyderm gave drunken revelers rides home from the saloon, or the ball field, or the beach.

The Keatons and other actors had their own boat docks and their own vessels, which ranged from small ten-foot skiffs to huge yachts.

Today, a surprising number of those houses still stand.  Bluffton remains a bucolic vacation town, quiet and filled with friendly people.  Many of them threw their doors open for us and proudly told us about the history of their homes and their neighborhoods.

The Keaton house was torn down decades ago, but a new house with an almost identical footprint sits on the same lot, along with the original retaining wall that still has the names of Buster's parents carved into its aging cement.  They were engraved there in 1914.

As a teenager, Buster invented all kinds of elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions.  When a neighbor who lived just up the hill complained about tourists using his outhouse without his permission -- indoor plumbing was decades in the future -- Buster rigged a trip wire that caused the walls of the outhouse to collapse and expose the interloper for all the neighborhood to see.  I had read about this many times, but it was something to actually stand on the hill and look at the spot where the trick outhouse once stood.

There were many other outlandish inventions.  A trick fishing pole that was connected to pulley underneath a dock to fool a tourist into thinking he'd hooked a massive underwater creature while Buster and his friends urged him to keep reeling in the monster.  Elaborate alarm clocks that went through fantastic mechanical chain reactions before snatching the covers off of snoozing neighbors, and so on, and so on.

But two stories I heard the other day affected me more than the comedic ones.  Like one of my other heroes, Sam Peckinpah, Buster Keaton populated his movies with layers of references from his private life.  This was more than an inside joke.  It was a way of personalizing his films, which gave them an aura of truth that made his comedies both funnier and more more poignant.

We heard two such anecdotes the other day.  One of Buster's neighbors in Bluffton was a vaudevillian named Big Joe Roberts.  Roberts had a yacht that tied up to his personal dock.  It was called "Damfino."  Keaton gave that name to his doomed ocean-going vessel in his classic short comedy The Boat.  It conveyed Keaton's stoic attitude toward the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.  At the end of The Boat, Buster and his family end up marooned on a desert island in the pitch of night, surrounded by a void of inky black darkness.  When Keaton's wife asks him where they have landed, he shrugs and mouths the words, "Damned if I know."  Or Damfino, which was also the name of the doomed vessel that brought them to this limbo.

It summed up a fatalistic attitude that Keaton maintained in his personal life and as the stoned-faced character he played in his movies.

The other story we were told was about a boating accident that occurred in the waters right below the Keatons' house.  It happened after Buster left there for good to go to New York to break into the movies.  Kids racing a speedboat lost control of it and two people were thrown out of the boat and drowned.  Keaton knew the victims and was filled with remorse when he heard the news.  He told friends he wished he had been there because he felt he could have saved the victims.

Years later, Buster staged an almost identical boating accident in the thrilling climax to his film The Cameraman (1928).  But in the movie -- shot in Newport Harbor, south of Los Angeles -- Buster saves a young woman.

The tragedy he failed to stop in life was averted in the fictional world of film.  This is what Keaton taught me: using art as a vehicle for healing your personal wounds.  And when you do that, it's a sure bet you are addressing the wounds of your readers or audience.  Art helps us come to terms with the emotional conflicts we fail to solve in life.