Modern Screen (Dec 1931 - Nov 1932 (assorted issues))

into it. As you know, he was practically born in a theatre. Did you ever stop to think that being born in a theatre doesn't necessarily make you belong there? Most of our farmers are farmers because they were born on farms. They might be a hundred times happier driving locomotives or selling ribbons in a department store. We're all lazy. We take the easiest way out. Buster was born in the theatre, so he stayed there. His parents' act was a rough-and-tumble comic one, so he became a comic. Really Buster is no more a comedian than you or I. He would be better fitted as a grocer, a shopkeeper, an undertaker — especially an undertaker, perhaps, with that dead pan of bis. Instead, he learned comedy as the son of a bricklayer learns to lay bricks. IT was no easy school. It was the school of Watch Your-Step-Or-Get-Your-Block-Knocked-Off. That is not a figure of speech, but an actual fact. A misstep, a misgauged hand-hold, resulted in falls that made him gasp with pain. Then, sick and dizzy, he had to jump up smiling and go on with the show. Once Buster's dad misjudged a comedy kick, and landed a heavy shoe at the base of the little boy's skull. Buster was unconscious for exactly eighteen hours. Then, travelling about the country, there were freezing depots to wait in through howling blizzards, trains to be caught in rainstorms at four in the morning — a million other inconveniences, annoyances, Devoted friends. Traitorous acquaintances. All the mad rush, the alternate exhilaration and despair, of the life of a trouper. That was Buster's childhood. D ID it make Buster a comedian, that life? Well — does it sound very comic to you? It taught him several things, yes. It taught him, that school of bumps and falls, that hard luck is liable to step up and kick you in the seat of your comedy pants when you least expect it. It taught him, secondly, that no matter how hard the luck there is almost always a way out if you keep your 1S brain working fast. room The dining "Keaton Kennel," the dressing room-dwelling. It is in this house that he has his training quarters in which he keeps constantly fit. And it taught him — amazingly enough — to enjoy that sort of life. Why quit the show business to become a business man, when the show business paid better money and offered so much excitement? Hard knocks there might be, but it was exciting. Humdrum it was not! So, to stay where he was, with the people he knew and loved. Buster learned to lay the bricks of comedy. And the man who ought to be an undertaker or the proprietor of a music store learned that, if you sat down suddenly on the seat of your pants, people would laugh. Sitting down suddenly on the seat of his pants is a business with Buster. There is no roguish twinkle in his eye. He does not have a humorous outlook upon life. On the contrary. It is his means of earning a living, into which he drifted as most of us drift into our lifework. He manufactures and sells laughs as though they were articles turned out in a factory he owned. "I got a lot of laughs in that picture," he says. In the exact tone Buster uses, a business man might speak of a successfully marketed piece of merchandise. He doesn't kid himself. I have heard him come out of a studio projection room, after a preview of one of his films, and say: "That's a lousy picture. It hasn't a laugh in it. It doesn't deserve to make a dime." And he didn't care who heard him, either. How many Hollywood stars would admit such a thing about their pictures? Hollywood loves to kid itself. Buster doesn't. He is a hard-headed, clear-sighted business man. A business man with the seat of his breeches for his stock in trade. Oomph! Down he goes, kerplunk! And we laugh. And pay money at the box-office. Someone ought (Continued on page 113) downright hardships. In a single period of five months, the Keaton family had to leap from bed in the middle of the night and dash from five burning hotels. Buster saw his baby sister tumble from the secondstory balcony of one of these small town hotels, strike the ground on her chin, and bite her tongue in half. (And the baby had her tongue sewed back on, and her jaw set, with no ether or cocaine to deaden the pain.) He learned that balconies — and other things, in the theatrical world —were to be scrupulously avoided if you didn't want to get hurt. It was slam, bang, crash, the Keatons' life, both on and off stage! Uncertain food. Broken bones. Accidents. Lost trunks. Missed sleep. Town to town. Good people. Bad people. Hollywood says: "For a comedian, Buster is a pretty good family man." But how much nearer the truth it would be to say: "For a family man, Buster is a pretty good comedian." 55