Trechos de My Wonderful World Of Slapstick (1960), de Buster Keaton e Charles Samuels.
In June 1918 I was drafted into Uncle Sam's World War I Army as a thirty-dollar-a-month private and assigned to the infantry. My salary by that time had been raised to $250 a week, and Joe Schenck generously sent my parents twenty-five dollars a week during all of the time I was in the Army.
My future wife went back to New York. My folks returned to Muskegon where Pop quickly got a job in a munitions plant that was making artillery shells. Ignoring the fact that I was in the infantry Pop wrote in white chalk on every shell he worked on:
"Give 'em hell, Buster."
Our outfit was the Fortieth Division, which was nicknamed the Sunshine Division. I was sent to Camp Kearney, near San Diego, where I had one of the briefest spells of boot training in American military history. After a few days in quarantine I was given shots in double doses. We were to be shipped to France, everyone said, as soon as transportaion could be provided. They weren't kidding. I had only ten days of drilling on the Awkward Squad, or just long enough for me to learn to obey the commands of "Salute!" "Halt!" and "Forward March!" This with arms benumbed by those high-powered injections.
I was then put in with my regular squad. I might have done fine there if some impulsive officer had not given a command I had never heard of. It was: "To the rear, march!" I went forward as everyone else turned and went backward. Immediately I got hit on the chin and knocked down by somebody's gun butt. I wasn't unconscious, but I might as well have been - because I couldn't get up. While I lay there in a dazed condition, my brothers-in-arms, my dear buddies, either had to jump over me or step to one side to avoid kicking me.
Unable to understand what was causing all that jumping and stepping aside several officers came running up along the side of our company. Only after bending down and looking through the legs of the men were they able to see my small crumpled figure.
"Company, halt!" the most alert of the officers shouted. They then ran in, dragged me to my feet, and asked, "Are you hurt?"
Hurt! I was far ahead of them. I imagined I had been wounded and downed in battle with the German Army. "Did we win?" I asked.
I spoke in all seriousness. But nobody knew that, and everyone laughed, which is the sort of thing that often gets a man an undeserved reputation for being a wit.
I was not amused at all to find slapstick flowing over into my new life in the Army. I took being a soldier quite seriously, studied the Morse code regularly, also map reading and semaphore signaling. On mastering these subjects I discovered that I was the best-informed private in my outfit. While in the Service, in fact, I never met an enlisted man, including some who had joined up during the Spanish-American War, who had more than glanced occasionally at an Army training manual.
We were shipped East and quartered at Camp Upton, Long Island. There we were kept up for three days and three nights while being equipped for overseas duty. We also received additional medical shots.
It was not always possible to take that war seriously. In the first place I could not understand why we, the French, and the English were fighting the Germans and the Austrians. Being in vaudeville all of my life had made me international-minded. I had met too many kindly German performers - singers and acrobats and musicians - to believe they could be as evil as they were being portrayed in our newspapers. Having known Germans, Japanese jugglers, Chinese magicians, Italian tenors, Swiss yodelers and bell-ringers, Irish, Jewish, and Dutch comedians, British dancers, and whirling dervishes from India, I believed people from everywhere in the world were about the same. Not as individuals, of course, but taken as a group.
I also resented my uniform which made me look and feel ridiculous. Apparently, the Quartermaster General had never anticipated that anyone five feet five inches tall would be allowed to join the United States Army. My pants were too long, my coat looked like a sack, and wrapping Army puttees around my legs was a trick I never mastered. The size eight shoes handed me were far too big for my size six and one-half feet. The shoes also were hobnailed and made of leather as tough as a rhinoceros's hide. Old-timers in our outfit had long given up hope of ever getting uniforms that fit them. They had theirs altered at civilian tailor shops. They also bought sturdy workmen's shoes, which they managed to disguise well enough to pass inspection.
All of this may explain the few times when I forgot my determination to be a good little soldier. The first of these lapses occurred the day I phoned my girl, and she came to Camp Upton to see me.
She arrived at our Hostess House in her family's oversize Packard at about one that afternoon. The Packard was driven by a liveried chauffeur and had a Victoria top. She looked gorgeous. So did the Packard. The combination gave me ideas. We noncommissioned nothings were restricted to the camp, but our officers were not. However, because it was hot at Camp Upton, those exalted beings were not wearing their jackets, and their khaki shirts and black knitted ties looked exactly like ours.
If I rolled out of camp with my girl in that eye-popping car I might easily get by the sentries, it seemed to me. I would not, after all, be wearing my private's overseas cap or my oversize jacket. Unless one of the sentries looked over the side of the car he would never see my baggy pants and clodhopper hobnailed boots.
I planned to salute the sentries as casually as our officers did. [...]
If I had been able to imitate Houdini, jabbering Chinese, and Pop on the stage, I figured I ought to be able to get away with imitating an officer saluting a sentry.
[...] We got out all right. The inner sentry and outer sentry both saluted me smartly as we rolled through the gates. In return I gave them my languid and indulgent officers salute.
In those days Long Beach was still a fashionable seashore resort. It had a fine eating and dancing place, "Castles in the Air." This was one of the many enterprises started by the late Vernon Castle and his wife, Irene, at the height of their fabulous vogue as a dancing team.
I cannot deny that I felt rather foolish walking into that imposing dine-and-dance palace in my baggy pants and clodhopper boots. But we had a grand time. It was a relief to be eating educated food instead of Army chow, and to drink coffee that tasted like coffee. We had a wonderful eight or ten hours together that day. My girl paid the check as I didn't have enough money on me. Then we drove back to Camp Upton where both the inner sentry and outer sentry saluted me smartly.
A day or two later we left on a transport for France. I must say I have traveled in more comfortable style. We slept in hammocks that were hung three abreast in four tiers, one above the other. The cooties we were to know so intimately later on were already on board.
We got off at an English port - which one is still a World War I secret as far as I am concerned. From there we were walked to something which the British called a rest camp, their greatest case of mistaken identity since Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde. After two days there we were moved to another rest camp. At both camps the English fed us the same stuff three times a day. The trouble was we didn't like it the first time. The meal consisted of a bit of yellow cheese about the size of two dominoes, one hard-tack biscuit, and a cup of tea without sugar, milk, or lemon. After a day at the second camp, we boarded a transport that carried us across the English Channel to that beloved France which is always so jolly a place except when a war is going on.
The Channel boat was so crowded that we crossed standing up. There was room on the boat to sit down, but it was being used by other soldiers who were standing up. On debarking we were marched eight miles to another camp. There was one thing I never could figure out about the French terrain in that war. Wherever we marched in France we seemed to be going uphill. This was true whether we were leaving camp or coming back to camp. Walking in oversized hobnailed boots may have a stronger effect on the human brain than psychologists realize.
In the French rest camp we slept in circular tents, our feet in the center and our heads close to the drafts from the great out-doors. We were told not to open our packs except to get out our blankets. This, it was believed, would enable us to get to a shelter more quickly in case of an air raid. This was the beginning of an experience I have never forgotten.
During my seven months in France as a soldier I slept every night but one on the ground or on the floor of mills, barns, and stables. There is always a draft close to the floor of such farm buildings, and I soon developed a cold which imperiled my hearing.
In that war we saw little but rain and mud. But this is not the reason I recall so clearly the first day that the sun shone. I found some blackberries along a road that afternoon, and climbed up on a low stone wall to pick them. While bending over I became aware that someone was behind me. Looking through my legs I could see the leather puttees of an officer and the end of his little swagger stick. I straightened up, turned around, and came to attention. He was a major.
[...] Instead of saying something witty, he hit me over the bottom with his swagger stick. Caught off balance I fell head first into the prickly blackberry bushes.
Before I could get up, the major started down the road. I yelled after him, "I hope your war's a failure!"
- - -
I remember the day a mob of us tumbled off an over-crowded train. We were filthy and felt the cooties were eating us alive.
- - -
The Army delayed for quite a while before giving us any part of our thirty-dollar monthly pay. Doubtless, General Pershing did not want us to waste it on riotous living. Until that first payday came we thought of nothing but food, for we'd been given nothing but Army rations - beans, canned corned beef, and hot liquids of mysterious origin. That first payday we jingled the francs in our pockets and hurried to get all of the food possible into our bellies.
The rations had brought out the long-dormant executive side of my character. Weeks before a pal and I had dickered with the keeper of the nearest French tavern for the franchise on two plates of steak and French fried potatoes. We had been dreaming about how that steak would taste every night since.
[...] The steak was about a quarter-inch thick, but it tasted better than all of the chateaubriands I've had since.
- - -
After the Armistice we were shipped from Amiens to a little town near Bordeaux. Along with our infantry division, two others - engineers and machine gunners - were quartered in that town whose population was about 12,000. That meant 45,000 American soldiers. We waited there for months to go home and again had to sleep on the ground or on the floors of barns, mills, and cellars.
We organized a few entertainments built around our regimental band. I did a burlesque snake dance and other routines in these hastily thrown together shows.
- - -
Another payday had just rolled around which meant everyone not crippled would be there, singing, drinking that good French wine straight from the bottle, and kissing any French girls within kissing distance.
- - -
Later on I was assigned to a train that was carrying about 900 wounded men to the redistribution center at Le Mans. I was the only noncommissioned man sent on the trip. It proved a complicated job. We had to get the wounded men all of their equipment and rations, then settle more than forty of those poor fellows in each of twenty-two 40-and-8 boxcars.
On our way back from Le Mans we were to make connections at Paris for the train to Bordeaux. We could have made them but preferred to miss them and stay overnight in Paris. As Paris was out of bounds, that meant technically being AWOL [absent without leave], but it also meant we'd sleep in beds for one blessed night and could enjoy a real dinner. I had thirty-five francs for that big feed.
- - -
On getting back to New York I was sent to a receiving hospital which originally had been the Siegel-Cooper Department Store. Specialists told me I would have to remain under observation for a while. But they assured me that with proper treatment my hearing would be restored.
I prayed they were right.
The moment I could get to a telephone I called my girl at her home. Joe Schenck's office was nearer the receiving hospital so she asked him to hurry over. When he saw me Joe looked as though he was going to cry.
"You look terribly peaked, Buster," he said. "You've lost so much weight. I never saw you look so sick and miserable."
- - -
While I was in New York I had found it impossible to believe I was really home. Then one day in Baltimore the doctors let me take a walk. I headed straight for the local Keith Theatre which Pop, Mom, and I had played dozens of times in the old days.
I walked through that stage door, and the house manager, the crew, the orchestra boys, and the acts greeted me like a long lost pal. Then I knew I was indeed safe home at last. On the bill was one of my best friends, Artie Mehlinger, the singer. I stood in the wings and watched his act - Step, Mehlinger, and King - hoping with all my heart that I would never again have to leave show business and its bubbling, joy-filled, gifted people.
- - -
I sometimes wonder if the world will ever seem as carefree and exciting a place as it did to us in Hollywood during 1919 and the early twenties. We were all young, the air in southern California was like wine. Our business was also young and growing like nothing ever seen before.
Nobody suspected that the World War just ending would prove to be merely the first one. Had not President Wilson proclaimed it the war to end all wars - if we jumped in and did the dirty job?
There were bad times elsewhere in the country for a while. And there were other troubles: strikes, race riots, a Red scare. But everybody said that was to be expected with millions of men getting out of uniform and trying to find civilian jobs.
- - -
War industries had put money into the pockets of millions of Americans who never before had money to pay for entertainment. Everywhere magnificent theatres seating thousands of persons were being built. These were designed to make the movie fans feel like kings and queens.
- - -
But the golden age of comedy was just beginning. The whole world wanted to laugh as never before, and Hollywood had the clowns to do the job. There were soon to be years when the pictures of Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and myself would outdraw the pictures of most the screen's romantic stars. Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops and Bathing Beauties were still popular. But that king of comedy makers was soon to be overshadowed.
Mais:
http://www.militarymuseum.org/Keaton.html
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list= PLrWPsj6fVbeXMvWEH9BYVlymZTuuHq_8e
My future wife went back to New York. My folks returned to Muskegon where Pop quickly got a job in a munitions plant that was making artillery shells. Ignoring the fact that I was in the infantry Pop wrote in white chalk on every shell he worked on:
"Give 'em hell, Buster."
Our outfit was the Fortieth Division, which was nicknamed the Sunshine Division. I was sent to Camp Kearney, near San Diego, where I had one of the briefest spells of boot training in American military history. After a few days in quarantine I was given shots in double doses. We were to be shipped to France, everyone said, as soon as transportaion could be provided. They weren't kidding. I had only ten days of drilling on the Awkward Squad, or just long enough for me to learn to obey the commands of "Salute!" "Halt!" and "Forward March!" This with arms benumbed by those high-powered injections.
I was then put in with my regular squad. I might have done fine there if some impulsive officer had not given a command I had never heard of. It was: "To the rear, march!" I went forward as everyone else turned and went backward. Immediately I got hit on the chin and knocked down by somebody's gun butt. I wasn't unconscious, but I might as well have been - because I couldn't get up. While I lay there in a dazed condition, my brothers-in-arms, my dear buddies, either had to jump over me or step to one side to avoid kicking me.
Unable to understand what was causing all that jumping and stepping aside several officers came running up along the side of our company. Only after bending down and looking through the legs of the men were they able to see my small crumpled figure.
"Company, halt!" the most alert of the officers shouted. They then ran in, dragged me to my feet, and asked, "Are you hurt?"
Hurt! I was far ahead of them. I imagined I had been wounded and downed in battle with the German Army. "Did we win?" I asked.
I spoke in all seriousness. But nobody knew that, and everyone laughed, which is the sort of thing that often gets a man an undeserved reputation for being a wit.
I was not amused at all to find slapstick flowing over into my new life in the Army. I took being a soldier quite seriously, studied the Morse code regularly, also map reading and semaphore signaling. On mastering these subjects I discovered that I was the best-informed private in my outfit. While in the Service, in fact, I never met an enlisted man, including some who had joined up during the Spanish-American War, who had more than glanced occasionally at an Army training manual.
We were shipped East and quartered at Camp Upton, Long Island. There we were kept up for three days and three nights while being equipped for overseas duty. We also received additional medical shots.
It was not always possible to take that war seriously. In the first place I could not understand why we, the French, and the English were fighting the Germans and the Austrians. Being in vaudeville all of my life had made me international-minded. I had met too many kindly German performers - singers and acrobats and musicians - to believe they could be as evil as they were being portrayed in our newspapers. Having known Germans, Japanese jugglers, Chinese magicians, Italian tenors, Swiss yodelers and bell-ringers, Irish, Jewish, and Dutch comedians, British dancers, and whirling dervishes from India, I believed people from everywhere in the world were about the same. Not as individuals, of course, but taken as a group.
I also resented my uniform which made me look and feel ridiculous. Apparently, the Quartermaster General had never anticipated that anyone five feet five inches tall would be allowed to join the United States Army. My pants were too long, my coat looked like a sack, and wrapping Army puttees around my legs was a trick I never mastered. The size eight shoes handed me were far too big for my size six and one-half feet. The shoes also were hobnailed and made of leather as tough as a rhinoceros's hide. Old-timers in our outfit had long given up hope of ever getting uniforms that fit them. They had theirs altered at civilian tailor shops. They also bought sturdy workmen's shoes, which they managed to disguise well enough to pass inspection.
All of this may explain the few times when I forgot my determination to be a good little soldier. The first of these lapses occurred the day I phoned my girl, and she came to Camp Upton to see me.
She arrived at our Hostess House in her family's oversize Packard at about one that afternoon. The Packard was driven by a liveried chauffeur and had a Victoria top. She looked gorgeous. So did the Packard. The combination gave me ideas. We noncommissioned nothings were restricted to the camp, but our officers were not. However, because it was hot at Camp Upton, those exalted beings were not wearing their jackets, and their khaki shirts and black knitted ties looked exactly like ours.
If I rolled out of camp with my girl in that eye-popping car I might easily get by the sentries, it seemed to me. I would not, after all, be wearing my private's overseas cap or my oversize jacket. Unless one of the sentries looked over the side of the car he would never see my baggy pants and clodhopper hobnailed boots.
I planned to salute the sentries as casually as our officers did. [...]
If I had been able to imitate Houdini, jabbering Chinese, and Pop on the stage, I figured I ought to be able to get away with imitating an officer saluting a sentry.
[...] We got out all right. The inner sentry and outer sentry both saluted me smartly as we rolled through the gates. In return I gave them my languid and indulgent officers salute.
In those days Long Beach was still a fashionable seashore resort. It had a fine eating and dancing place, "Castles in the Air." This was one of the many enterprises started by the late Vernon Castle and his wife, Irene, at the height of their fabulous vogue as a dancing team.
I cannot deny that I felt rather foolish walking into that imposing dine-and-dance palace in my baggy pants and clodhopper boots. But we had a grand time. It was a relief to be eating educated food instead of Army chow, and to drink coffee that tasted like coffee. We had a wonderful eight or ten hours together that day. My girl paid the check as I didn't have enough money on me. Then we drove back to Camp Upton where both the inner sentry and outer sentry saluted me smartly.
A day or two later we left on a transport for France. I must say I have traveled in more comfortable style. We slept in hammocks that were hung three abreast in four tiers, one above the other. The cooties we were to know so intimately later on were already on board.
We got off at an English port - which one is still a World War I secret as far as I am concerned. From there we were walked to something which the British called a rest camp, their greatest case of mistaken identity since Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde. After two days there we were moved to another rest camp. At both camps the English fed us the same stuff three times a day. The trouble was we didn't like it the first time. The meal consisted of a bit of yellow cheese about the size of two dominoes, one hard-tack biscuit, and a cup of tea without sugar, milk, or lemon. After a day at the second camp, we boarded a transport that carried us across the English Channel to that beloved France which is always so jolly a place except when a war is going on.
The Channel boat was so crowded that we crossed standing up. There was room on the boat to sit down, but it was being used by other soldiers who were standing up. On debarking we were marched eight miles to another camp. There was one thing I never could figure out about the French terrain in that war. Wherever we marched in France we seemed to be going uphill. This was true whether we were leaving camp or coming back to camp. Walking in oversized hobnailed boots may have a stronger effect on the human brain than psychologists realize.
In the French rest camp we slept in circular tents, our feet in the center and our heads close to the drafts from the great out-doors. We were told not to open our packs except to get out our blankets. This, it was believed, would enable us to get to a shelter more quickly in case of an air raid. This was the beginning of an experience I have never forgotten.
During my seven months in France as a soldier I slept every night but one on the ground or on the floor of mills, barns, and stables. There is always a draft close to the floor of such farm buildings, and I soon developed a cold which imperiled my hearing.
In that war we saw little but rain and mud. But this is not the reason I recall so clearly the first day that the sun shone. I found some blackberries along a road that afternoon, and climbed up on a low stone wall to pick them. While bending over I became aware that someone was behind me. Looking through my legs I could see the leather puttees of an officer and the end of his little swagger stick. I straightened up, turned around, and came to attention. He was a major.
[...] Instead of saying something witty, he hit me over the bottom with his swagger stick. Caught off balance I fell head first into the prickly blackberry bushes.
Before I could get up, the major started down the road. I yelled after him, "I hope your war's a failure!"
- - -
I remember the day a mob of us tumbled off an over-crowded train. We were filthy and felt the cooties were eating us alive.
- - -
The Army delayed for quite a while before giving us any part of our thirty-dollar monthly pay. Doubtless, General Pershing did not want us to waste it on riotous living. Until that first payday came we thought of nothing but food, for we'd been given nothing but Army rations - beans, canned corned beef, and hot liquids of mysterious origin. That first payday we jingled the francs in our pockets and hurried to get all of the food possible into our bellies.
The rations had brought out the long-dormant executive side of my character. Weeks before a pal and I had dickered with the keeper of the nearest French tavern for the franchise on two plates of steak and French fried potatoes. We had been dreaming about how that steak would taste every night since.
[...] The steak was about a quarter-inch thick, but it tasted better than all of the chateaubriands I've had since.
- - -
After the Armistice we were shipped from Amiens to a little town near Bordeaux. Along with our infantry division, two others - engineers and machine gunners - were quartered in that town whose population was about 12,000. That meant 45,000 American soldiers. We waited there for months to go home and again had to sleep on the ground or on the floors of barns, mills, and cellars.
We organized a few entertainments built around our regimental band. I did a burlesque snake dance and other routines in these hastily thrown together shows.
- - -
Another payday had just rolled around which meant everyone not crippled would be there, singing, drinking that good French wine straight from the bottle, and kissing any French girls within kissing distance.
- - -
Later on I was assigned to a train that was carrying about 900 wounded men to the redistribution center at Le Mans. I was the only noncommissioned man sent on the trip. It proved a complicated job. We had to get the wounded men all of their equipment and rations, then settle more than forty of those poor fellows in each of twenty-two 40-and-8 boxcars.
On our way back from Le Mans we were to make connections at Paris for the train to Bordeaux. We could have made them but preferred to miss them and stay overnight in Paris. As Paris was out of bounds, that meant technically being AWOL [absent without leave], but it also meant we'd sleep in beds for one blessed night and could enjoy a real dinner. I had thirty-five francs for that big feed.
- - -
On getting back to New York I was sent to a receiving hospital which originally had been the Siegel-Cooper Department Store. Specialists told me I would have to remain under observation for a while. But they assured me that with proper treatment my hearing would be restored.
I prayed they were right.
The moment I could get to a telephone I called my girl at her home. Joe Schenck's office was nearer the receiving hospital so she asked him to hurry over. When he saw me Joe looked as though he was going to cry.
"You look terribly peaked, Buster," he said. "You've lost so much weight. I never saw you look so sick and miserable."
- - -
While I was in New York I had found it impossible to believe I was really home. Then one day in Baltimore the doctors let me take a walk. I headed straight for the local Keith Theatre which Pop, Mom, and I had played dozens of times in the old days.
I walked through that stage door, and the house manager, the crew, the orchestra boys, and the acts greeted me like a long lost pal. Then I knew I was indeed safe home at last. On the bill was one of my best friends, Artie Mehlinger, the singer. I stood in the wings and watched his act - Step, Mehlinger, and King - hoping with all my heart that I would never again have to leave show business and its bubbling, joy-filled, gifted people.
- - -
I sometimes wonder if the world will ever seem as carefree and exciting a place as it did to us in Hollywood during 1919 and the early twenties. We were all young, the air in southern California was like wine. Our business was also young and growing like nothing ever seen before.
Nobody suspected that the World War just ending would prove to be merely the first one. Had not President Wilson proclaimed it the war to end all wars - if we jumped in and did the dirty job?
There were bad times elsewhere in the country for a while. And there were other troubles: strikes, race riots, a Red scare. But everybody said that was to be expected with millions of men getting out of uniform and trying to find civilian jobs.
- - -
War industries had put money into the pockets of millions of Americans who never before had money to pay for entertainment. Everywhere magnificent theatres seating thousands of persons were being built. These were designed to make the movie fans feel like kings and queens.
- - -
But the golden age of comedy was just beginning. The whole world wanted to laugh as never before, and Hollywood had the clowns to do the job. There were soon to be years when the pictures of Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and myself would outdraw the pictures of most the screen's romantic stars. Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops and Bathing Beauties were still popular. But that king of comedy makers was soon to be overshadowed.
Mais:
http://www.militarymuseum.org/Keaton.html
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list= PLrWPsj6fVbeXMvWEH9BYVlymZTuuHq_8e
