Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down

Scribner, 1984. First Edition. Hardcover. Like New. 9x6x1. 1979 FIRST PRINTING hardcover with dust jacket. Well-preserved UNREAD COPY with bright, unmarked, crisp-edged, well-bound pages. Jacket is clean, bright, and glossy. Very nice copy! 340 pages including index, thoroughly photo-illustrated. "'The Great Stone Face' was a superb actor, unique in his haunting comic gloom, and a great film maker. He was a man of paradox who, though shy and withdrawn, entertained weekly at his fashionable 'Italian Villa' with his wife, Natalie Talmadge, and her two famous sisters, Constance and Norma -- their guests included Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, and many more. Keaton had boundless energy and strength, yet became a severe alcoholic. This intriguing biography brings us closer than ever to the man himself. Tom Dardis brings to life an entire world -- the early vaudeville days when, as part of his family's traveling act, Keaton was bartered around the stage by his drunken father; the great years in the twenties when, on his own, he created his masterpieces; and the later years at MGM, with his loss of independence; his tragic decline and ultimate triumph. We see him through the eyes of his closest friends -- Fatty Arbuckle, Douglas Fairbanks, Louise Brooks -- his three wives, and the beautiful women he knew throughout his life. Dardis is the first biographer to have access to the files of the Buster Keaton Production Company, Twentieth Century Fox, and MGM, where he saw all of Keaton's sound films, including two which now cannot be shown commercially. With a thorough knowledge of the field, he looks closely at Keaton's work, the economics, structure, mood, and technique. Keaton was a perfectionist who insisted that everything in his films be real, no matter how dangerous: it is an actual train in THE GENERAL that crashes to the river below. Dardis reveals the startling fact that THE GENERAL was a financial failure in 1927, and it cost Keaton his creative independence. Here also are many previously unpublished photographs and the most complete filmography to date. Keaton, his legend, and his films have fascinated such men as Samuel Beckett, Edmund Wilson, and Luis Bunuel. Here, for the first time, we begin to see why.