Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat
by Edward McPherson
Newmarket Press, 288 pp., $26.95
While it’s bad form to judge a book by its cover – stunningly iconic in this case – Edward McPherson’s glancing Buster Keaton biography, Tempest in a Flat Hat, betrays its shortcomings by its page count. One can hardly do justice to one of cinema’s immortals in 288 pages. The introduction winks with promise, McPherson amongst a convention full of Damfinos, the International Buster Keaton Society. His affection for his subject, as well as his gliding prose, is sincere, the author admitting, “This book is merely a fan’s notes.” By the time McPherson recounts young Stone Face’s 1895 Kansas birth, vaudevillian rearing, and the beginning of a “lifetime of odd occurrences, fantastic mishaps, and propitious near calamities,” 24 pages have blown past at a Keystone pace. Harry Houdini, the invention of Charlie Chaplin’s dance of the dinner rolls, and Keaton’s slogging through France during the War to End All Wars dot the comedian’s when-the-century-was-boundless backstory. It’s not until McPherson blows through the notorious downfall of Keaton’s early mentor and brother-in-arms Fatty Arbuckle in a two-page sleight-of-hand that Tempest in a Flat Hat begins reading like a DVD primer; Sherlock, Jr., The Navigator, Steamboat Bill, Jr., and The General (1924-1928), Keaton’s genius unbound, get lustrous write-ups from McPherson. There’s just enough on MGM, Irving Thalberg, and the precipitous fall of Hollywood’s indie beginnings and later the studio system to leave the reader badly starved for more. The final four decades of Flat Hat’s life whistle past in 14 pages. Not even Keaton, the soul of brevity and wit, danced that fast.This article appears in May 27 • 2005.
