In the spectacle they made of themselves, these clowns brought with them unexamined emotional baggage, which was part of their droll and poignant aura – a shadow which neither they nor the society they entertained could quite name. Their bewilderment took their capering beyond merriment into metaphor. In my father’s case, his role as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz condensed both his stage prowess and his panic, and ensured his place in the nation’s collective unconscious. Keaton’s stoic stone face and the 24 hours of peerless silent comedy he built around it as actor, writer and director went even further. (His oeuvre includes thirteen features and more than thirty shorts.) Keaton had been on the stage longest, risen the highest, fallen the furthest, and, thanks to the medium of film which preserved his artistry, left the most indelible legacy. ‘He was,’ Orson Welles said, ‘as we’re now beginning to realise, the greatest of all the clowns in the history of the cinema.’
Keaton’s comic outline was as carefully judged as his pratfalls. On his first day in front of a camera, to separate himself from the other slapstick Merry Andrews, Keaton – ‘The Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged’ as he was sometimes billed in vaudeville – chose a pork-pie hat, which he fortified to signal the same immutability. ‘I took a good Stetson and cut it down, then I stiffened the brim with sugar water.’ His comic formula was equally crisp and canny: ‘Think slow, act fast,’ he said. Books about him generally reverse that equation. Walter Kerr’s The Silent Clowns (1975) tried to match Keaton’s torrential invention with his own prolix showboating; Rudi Blesh’s Keaton (1966) had the imprimatur of the master as well as his collaboration but no equivalent grace. Both Blesh’s biography and Tom Dardis’s Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down (1979) are flat-footed. Keaton, who had only one day of formal education, was a man of few words, many of them mumbled. Even his own so-called autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (1960), co-written with Charles Samuels, bowdlerised the evocative sludge of his talk and his harrowing, sodden years in the wilderness. Keaton couldn’t explain himself or his context. Words weren’t his language; he spoke in action. In one of many piquant anecdotes in James Curtis’s encyclopedic new biography, on hearing the thumps as Keaton repeatedly threw himself against their common office wall at Twentieth Century Fox, the film editor Gene Fowler stuck his head into Keaton’s room. ‘What are you doing?!’ ‘I’m writing,’ Keaton replied.