“The Best Summers Of My Life”–Buster Keaton’s Boyhood In Muskegon

This is my own post for the Seventh Buster Keaton Blogathon. Enjoy, and please check out all the other wonderful posts, too!

When you love a performer from classic Hollywood, it’s not uncommon to make little “pilgrimages” to the places where they used to live and work: studios, filming locations, former homes, gravesites, and, of course, their hometowns. Seeing where your favorite star grew up can give you insight into what shaped them and their future career. And, of course, it’s just plain fun–some towns are tourist destinations simply by for being the hometown of a beloved performer.

But what of a performer like Buster Keaton? Since he was the child of travelling medicine show performers, his birthplace was a matter of happenstance. Joe and Myra Keaton were travelling through the tiny town of Piqua, Kansas (today its population hovers a little above 100) when Buster arrived. Their stay was necessarily short, so while tiny Piqua had the honor of being Buster’s birthplace it would be a stretch to call it his hometown. (Fun fact: in the 1960s Buster and his wife Eleanor did stop there briefly while they were on his State Fair tour!)

Another fun fact: Piqua’s also home to a tiny Buster museum.

But despite an upbringing spent travelling from theater to theater, there was a spot on earth that Buster considered his true hometown: Muskegon, Michigan. A mid-sized town with the vast waters of Lake Michigan along one side and sparkling Lake Muskegon along another, the Keatons chose it for their summer home in the 1900s. It turned out to be a match made in heaven. In his biography on Buster, written not long before Buster passed away, Rudi Blesh wrote: “Those long-ago summers must have been, in a special way, one of the wonders of his life. Whenever he speaks of them he seems to be turning on the lights of a faraway stage.”

“He Really Can Smile”–A Charming 1921 Buster Keaton Interview

Hold onto your slapshoes, Buster fans! This is one of the most fantastic interviews I’ve seen with the twenty-something Keaton. Unlike some of the more well known interviews with him from the Jazz Age (those published in Buster Keaton: Interviews, up for free viewing in the great Taylorogy site, and circulating in various biographies), this one was not taken while Keaton was in “shy mode” and captures a bit more than his responses to the usual “why don’t you ever smile?” and “how do you come up with your gags?” questions (he answered these approximately seventy-four thousand times). How this one has managed to slip under the radar so much, I’ll never know. It’s a charmer.

Some background: The interview was taken some time in the spring of 1921 while Keaton was recovering in the hospital from the broken ankle he had gotten when a stunt for The Electric House (1922) went awry. Although the interview clearly took place before his May 31, 1921 marriage to Natalie Talmadge, oddly enough it didn’t make its way into Picture-Play Magazine until July 1921, naturally without any context (oh twenties fan magazines, how I love thee).

I could’ve just added a link to the article and gone about my day, but I was so overcome with delight that I decided to feverishly transcribe the whole thing so you can read it here whenever you want. Any punctuation, capitalization and spelling oddities are directly from the magazine, because…why not. Enjoy!

…

HE REALLY CAN SMILE

And strangely enough it was in the hospital that “Buster” Keaton first proved it. There’s a good reason for his smiling, and her name is Natalie Talmadge, soon to be Natalie Keaton.

By Emma-Lindsay Squier

“Well, Mr. Keaton,” I said kindly, “I’m sorry to have to interview you here.”

“Well, Miss Squier,” said Mr. Keaton just as kindly, “I’m sorry to have you.”