All featured products are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Vanity Fair may earn an affiliate commission.
As if by destiny, Buster Keaton came into the world in 1895, the same year the Lumière brothers screened the first publicly shown motion pictures. After a childhood spent as the juvenile star of a family slapstick act reputed to be the most violent in vaudeville, he moved with remarkable seamlessness to even greater success in the still-new medium of film as a director, star, stuntman, and editor.
Ahead of his time in myriad ways, Keaton was unfortunately very much a product of the ambient racism of the Jim Crow era, as discussed in an entire chapter of Camera Man on the use of blackface, redface, and other ethnic “humor” in his films; indeed film historian Daniel Moews counted 18 instances of jokes in Keaton’s oeuvre related to skin color or ethnicity. That said, Keaton spent the 1920s as the all-around mastermind of some of the greatest silent comedies ever made, including Sherlock Jr., The Cameraman, and The General.
In the 1930s, the coming of sound to motion pictures, combined with Keaton’s disastrous drinking problem and crumbling first marriage, put his career and life on the skids for a few years. But by midcentury, after a decade and a half as a behind-the-scenes gag writer at MGM, he was reinventing himself as an innovator in yet another new medium just beginning to discover what it could do: television.
The year was 1951. The setting was a meeting for a forthcoming film, Limelight, to be directed by Charlie Chaplin. And when Keaton sat down with Chaplin for the first time in decades, the first thing the film comedy giants talked about was…. TV.
As they exchanged pleasantries, the 62-year-old Englishman marveled at how fit the 55-year-old American was looking. “Charlie, do you look at television?” came the unexpected reply. “Good heavens, no,” said Chaplin, explaining that, like many a high-minded parent in the decades to follow, he did not permit his children to so much as look at the “lousy, stinking little screen.” Chaplin then again observed what fine form Keaton was in and asked what he did to stay in shape.
“Television,” answered Keaton, his career then in the midst of a revival thanks to the rise of the new medium. This teasing exchange, recounted in a tone of playful malice in Keaton’s memoir, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, neatly sums up the differences between the two: the populist and the aesthete, the mechanically minded futurist and the nostalgic technophobe, the pragmatic craftsman and the idealistic artist.
Keaton liked everything about television: appearing on it, watching it, describing it, talking about advances in TV technology to whomever would listen. In 1948, his son Jim, by then a 26-year-old Coast Guard veteran with young children of his own, got a TV set as a gift from his aunt, silent-era superstar Norma Talmadge. It was the first set anyone in his neighborhood had owned, a GE with a ten-inch screen that, as Jim remembered it, “weighed a ton. My dad came over the first weekend we had it. All afternoon he sat mesmerized in front of this thing. At dinner I remember him saying, ‘This is the coming thing in entertainment.’ ”
A question put to Keaton in one interview—about the cost of TV production—set him off on an unrelated tangent comparing the picture quality of American and European TVs: “Their sets are beautiful, and the French have the number one, the best television. I believe we have, what is it, five hundred lines in our picture? There’s 750 in the French. They got a much finer grain on their picture than we do.” In another interview, he even seemed to foresee the coming world of cable TV and on-demand streaming services, though he imagined an economic benefit to the consumer that has failed to materialize in our age of proliferating subscriptions:
Soon after encountering TV for the first time, Keaton bought a set for the home he and his wife Eleanor then still shared with his mother and siblings. Thereafter, to visit the Keatons was to hear the TV in the background, always at high volume to compensate for the hearing loss he had suffered since an ear infection during his service in World War I. In between film jobs, he would sit in front of it for hours, playing solitaire, smoking, and offering a running critique of whatever was on to whoever passed through. Actor James Karen recalled Keaton watching a show while shouting instructions at the screen as if he were directing it: “Cut! Now move that camera!” Visitors to the San Fernando Valley house he bought with Eleanor in 1956 remembered him in the converted garage he called his “den,” keeping one eye on a tiny black-and-white screen while he held up his typically laconic end of the conversation. “The man never left his den,” one of his grandsons stated in an interview. “He loved television. And he watched everything.”
Though Keaton never mentioned it by name, among his favorite shows during the 1950s must surely have been the pioneering sitcom I Love Lucy, starring his old friend and onetime MGM protégée Lucille Ball. When asked to name the best comedians of the up-and-coming generation he would often cite Ball as one of his “pets,” calling her timing “impeccable.” In fact, Keaton had had a behind-the-scenes role in getting I Love Lucy on the air. In 1950, when CBS was trying to convince Ball to star in a sitcom based on her successful radio series My Favorite Husband, she agreed to sign on only if the show could costar her real-life husband, the Cuban-American bandleader Desi Arnaz—a narrative reenacted in the new feature film, Being the Ricardos. The network balked at the idea of a domestic comedy centered around a couple of mixed race, so the two worked up a live vaudeville routine to be filmed as an experimental pilot. Keaton coached Ball in the big physical comedy scene, an act borrowed from the Spanish clown Pepito that involved Ball as a dimwitted but resourceful cellist auditioning for a spot in Arnaz’s orchestra. This pilot never aired at the time (and was lost until 1989, when it was finally discovered and aired on CBS as part of a Lucille Ball tribute special). But it was funny enough to convince CBS to give Ball and Arnaz their own prime-time series, which would run for 180 episodes and become perhaps the most influential of all early situation comedies. A pared-down version of the cello sketch found its way into a first-season episode, so although Keaton never guest-starred on I Love Lucy, he is nonetheless there as an influential presence.
As had happened before with both vaudeville and silent film, Keaton’s career on the small screen happened to coincide with the medium’s golden age. His long association with MGM ended around 1949, when he found that he was getting enough work as a performer for hire not to need the advisory day job he had held at the studio for 13 years. A short promotional film made for the studio’s 25th anniversary that year, easily viewable on YouTube, offers a glimpse into Keaton’s relationship to the institution where he had worked in some capacity for most of the previous two decades. Just before a typically fulsome speech from Louis B. Mayer, the camera pans across table after table of stars seated for a formal luncheon, some still in costume from whatever movie they were shooting. At the end of one long table sits Keaton, between the juvenile actor Claude Jarman Jr. and—at a small separate booth with her own dish—Lassie. These deliberately comic seating arrangements reinforced the notion that the comedian’s place at the studio had always been akin to that of a mascot.
Most of the celebrities on view in this ten-minute short seem engrossed in eating or conversation; they are either unaware of the moment the camera passes by them or acknowledge it with a quick fourth-wall-breaking smile. Ava Gardner and Clark Gable share a laugh with Keaton’s old screen partner Jimmy Durante, while Judy Garland, seated next to Fred Astaire, leans over the back of her chair to chat with someone at the table behind her. But the moment the camera comes to a stop at Keaton’s end of the table, he is not only “on,” his face professionally blank as it always was when he knew he was being filmed, but already engaged in an improvised bit of prop comedy. He takes a bite of celery, appears to dislike the taste, makes a move as if to spit it out in his hand, and then—playing on his and our awareness of the camera’s presence—reconsiders the rude gesture, his eyes darting away from the all-seeing lens in mock shame. It’s over in seconds, a micro-performance in a context that didn’t require one. Is he doing the bit for his own amusement, or fulfilling his longtime MGM mandate to supply bits of comedy business wherever he can? Either way, the subtext of the celery gag is clear: he is out of place at this stuffy studio function, he knows it, and he knows we know it, too.
By the early 1950s Keaton had started to get small but highly visible roles in big-budget films like In the Good Old Summertime and Sunset Boulevard. But as he had foreseen in his son’s living room, appearances on the big screen no longer represented the pinnacle, much less the cutting edge, of recorded entertainment. In fact, by the time Keaton began starring in his own weekly TV series in late 1949 the motion-picture business was in a full-blown panic. The following year, alongside a review of that show’s second incarnation, The Buster Keaton Comedy Hour, Variety ran a story with this typically alarmist headline: “MUST REVIVE WANT-TO-SEE HABIT.” The unnamed author goes on to fret that “with the national B.O. suffering another sinking spell, industry execs are concerned that ‘going to the movies’ has become increasingly less routine to the American family and is rapidly moving into the category of ‘something special.’ How to combat that tendency—and whether it can be successfully combated at all—is seen as the problem facing the industry.”
In 1949, the year the first television set appeared for sale in the Sears, Roebuck catalog, 14 states in the union were still without television service. As the century passed its midpoint, only nine percent of American households owned a TV; the primary home entertainment device remained, as it had since the 1930s, the family radio. In many places people intrigued by the new technology gathered to watch in whatever local saloon had splurged for a set.
Owning a television in the late 1940s, as Jim Keaton and his father did, was akin to owning a personal computer in the early 1980s: it was a luxury product for early adopters, a technology recognizable to almost everyone yet affordable (or even useful) to relatively few. But with the increased availability of manufacturing materials, advances in function and design, and the ramping up of the consumer economy after World War II, the TV screen soon became the “electronic hearth” it would remain for the rest of the century and well into our own.
By the late 1950s something like 90 percent of American households owned a TV set, and the medium was becoming associated with consumerism and conformity—the “boob tube” image that would cling to it until the arrival of prestige television around the turn of the 21st century. But in that short span of time when its future was still uncertain, television had the chance to experiment with new forms, some avant-garde, some so retro they harked back to a time before the invention of motion pictures. And Buster Keaton wanted a piece of it all.
In 1949, he helmed his own program. He appeared as a guest star on The Ed Wynn Show, the first live-broadcast series to be taped on the West Coast (in the early days of television, most shows were produced in New York). He did “vaudeo” bits—programs reminiscent of vaudeville. He was featured with prominence and frequency on The Ed Sullivan variety show.
In 1954 he was cast in one of the television anthology dramas gaining prestige and popularity at the time. He played the lead in a half-hour teleplay that was a loose adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Overcoat. Titled The Awakening, it was a vaguely Orwellian allegory about a timid clerk in a bureaucratic dystopia who scrimps and saves to replace his shabby coat with an expensive custom-made one. The Awakening, though ham-handed even for its era, gave Keaton a new platform: his performance is not only credible and sympathetic and serious, but startlingly modern. In watching the episode today, it’s remarkable how clearly Keaton seems to understand the genre he’s performing in, even though starkly symbolic two-act dramas written for the small screen were a new form that bore little relation to his stage or screen experience.
There was hardly a television trend of the 1950s or early ’60s that Keaton didn’t get in on at some point. Continuing his long run as a family-friendly entertainer, he appeared twice on the domestic sitcom The Donna Reed Show. He did a slapstick bit on the children’s program Circus Time. On Candid Camera, he pranked onlookers at a lunch counter with a routine involving an ill-fitting toupee and a bowl of soup. In a comic episode of The Twilight Zone, he played a time-traveling janitor from 1890 who, after some mishaps in the present day, decides to go back to his own era.
Between TV, commercials, and small movie roles and cameos in features from Beach Blanket Bingo to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Keaton wasn’t hurting for work when, in the spring of 1964, he was approached by a young theater director named Alan Schneider about starring in a short art-house film called, simply, Film, the first and, as it would turn out, last movie to be scripted by Samuel Beckett. The Irish modernist playwright had, as a boy, admired Keaton’s silent films; indeed, he had offered the comedian the role of Lucky in the first American production of Beckett’s ground-breaking Waiting for Godot, a role Keaton had turned down. This time around, Keaton would accept the job, showing that from the turn-of-the-century vaudeville stage, to the heyday of the silent screen, to the golden age of the TV sitcom, to midcentury absurdist drama, Buster Keaton would remain the coming thing in entertainment.
Adapted from CAMERA MAN: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century by Dana Stevens. Copyright © 2022 by Dana Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
All products featured on Vanity Fair are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
— TV Star Sarah Wynter’s Battle With Postpartum Psychosis
— Caitríona Balfe’s Celtic Conquest, From Outlander to Belfast
— The Best Movies and Shows Streaming on Netflix This Month
— 21 Wardrobe Winners Inspired by And Just Like That…
— What Vivian Vance Didn’t Love About I Love Lucy
— The Life and Death of Rosanne Boyland, a Capitol Rioter
— Insecure’s Natasha Rothwell Can Do It All
— From the Archive: Joan Didion, Our Lady of L.A.
— Sign up for the “HWD Daily” newsletter for must-read industry and awards coverage—plus a special weekly edition of “Awards Insider.”
