Here Comes the Bride in a Pork Pie Hat: Epithalamium with Buster Keaton
By Kelsey Ronan
Some brides might want to don a bedazzled sash and coordinating tiara while they down shots with their bridesmaids, but for my bachelorette party, I wanted to be alone with Buster Keaton. I didn’t have bridesmaids anyway: my fiance and I were flying to Las Vegas for a chapel wedding officiated by an Elvis tribute artist who was profiled in a New Yorker article about the dying art of Elvis impersonation. Dylan and I had been living together nearly a decade and, two bookwormy introverts, wanted something sweetly, unfussily our own. But still I felt compelled toward this ritual: something to mark my last weekend as an unmarried woman.
How serendipitous then that we were getting married in mid-October. Each year around Keaton’s birthday (he’s a Libra: October 4th, 1895) the International Buster Keaton Society convenes in Muskegon for three days of nerding out about silent movies. For the grand finale, one of Keaton’s twelve feature films is screened at the Frauenthal Theater, a gilded 1920s movie palace and the first theater in Muskegon to show talkies. IBKS members call themselves Damfinos, taking their name from Keaton’s boat in a 1921 two-reeler.
I wasn’t a Damfino but I was enthralled with Buster Keaton, and zealous in the usual way of the newly converted. At the Senate Theater, Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! hooked me on silent films. Dylan laughed at me as I gasped and clutched his arm, watching the suited man with the glasses scale the department store. As soon as we got home I YouTubed the behind-the-scenes for the famous skyscraper-scaling scene, watching Lloyd dangle off the clock hands, feet kicking above a mattress. I discovered that so many silent films, aged into the public domain, are freely streamable. Enjoying Harold Lloyd cheating death? Here’s Charlie Chaplin rollerskating through a department store; here he is again eating a shoe. Here’s Buster Keaton somersaulting down a hill, pursued by an avalanche.
It was a little benediction from the algorithm and I received it gratefully. The arts organization I directed was being gentrified out of existence and I was going through an especially bad season of migraines. On the precipice of unemployment, an abundance of free entertainment appealed, but silent movies also felt like all the entertainment I was constitutionally capable of enjoying. In bed in the dark, one palm pressed to the misery throbbing behind my eye, the other fixed on my laptop screen, silent movies helped the hours pass.
Made before the Vaselined lenses of Hollywood’s Golden Age and the moral sanitizing of the Hays Code, the brutality of silent comedies, their awareness of social inequity and the crush of capitalism, is jarring. Chaplin is perhaps most famous for this; he channeled the Dickensian poverty of his youth to create the Little Tramp, who is by turns resourceful, mischievous, and tender. His romances are often unrequited, demanding self-sacrifice and subterfuge. But in the Buster Keaton films that fast became my favorites, his poverty and his suffering are faced with bewildered resilience. In Go West, for instance, Buster is so poor he sells everything he owns except for a picture of his mother. He ends up on a cattle ranch where his quest is to make enough money to save the life of the cow who’s become his sole friend, and who is doomed for the slaughterhouse. As in all his films, his expression shifts from suppressed panic to grim determination to a kind of stoic melancholy. The quest is always the same: to still a spinning world, to get the girl, to make a home.
Learning that Buster Keaton was a Michigander also excited me. He’s not a native: he was born in a hotel in Piqua, Kansas and grew up traveling in a family vaudeville act (the story’s likely apocryphal, but Houdini gave him his nickname after seeing him tumble down a flight of stairs, exclaiming “That kid’s a real buster!”) In the summer off-season the Keatons stayed at the actor’s colony in Muskegon. Later Keaton said that Muskegon was as close to a hometown as he ever had and that, “The best summers of my life were spent in the cottage Pop had built on Lake Muskegon in 1908.”
I found the Damfinos at the defunct train station that now serves as a visitor welcome center. A mannequin of Buster stands next to a stand of pamphlets on state parks and day trips to Holland and Grand Rapids. With pork pie hats tilted precariously on grey heads, the few dozen Damfinos ate cinnamon donuts and upended creamer into their coffee. There were fewer Damfinos than I’d imagined and they all seemed to know each other. I introduced myself to other women who seemed to have traveled there solo. I didn’t tell them they were now at my bachelorette party, but told them I was newish to Buster, and asked how they’d found him. One told me she’d discovered Keaton in the 80s, after Phantom of the Opera star Michael Crawford spoke admiringly of him in a TV interview, and hadn’t missed a convention since. Another, with a retired professor chic, told me I had to go to the Silent Film Festival in San Francisco someday.
Then we headed to the theater of the Muskegon Art Museum and began our weekend of wrangling with the noise of the museum’s renovation and a cascade of technical difficulties. After watching a selection of Keaton’s 1960s commercials for Alka Seltzer and Milky Way, the HDMI cord stopped working. The buzz and hammer of power tools drowned out lectures on Irish stereotypes in vaudeville. Appropriate jokes were made; Buster’s movies are full of improvisations— houses collapsing around him, boats sinking, tracks buckling under trains—and yet he sprints and tumbles on, with, as James Agee writes, “an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood… always floating, above this frenzy, the untroubled, untouchable face…”
By the second day of the convention I was, I regret to say, bereft of patience, foggy with migraine and sinus meds, and very much troubled. While the Damfinos were staying at the swanky Shoreline Inn downtown, I’d gone the budget option with an Airbnb. I’d failed to notice in the listing, because who would think to look, that there was no bathroom but a camp toilet in the kitchen behind a flimsy screen. As a kitchen it wasn’t worth much anyway. I bought salad (though my wedding dress was essentially a drapey white bathrobe, I was observing the bridal ritual of obsessing over it fitting) only to find in the cupboards there were neither bowls nor cutlery. I sat on the bed and ate salad from its plastic shell with my hands, watching Buster on my laptop.
Not to be a bridezilla, I bellyached to Dylan, but I’d like dry shoes and access to a toilet.
On the second afternoon, consummate Buster Keaton historian Ron Pesch met the few Damfinos undaunted by the rain at Pere Marquette beach. A thin, energetic man with a distinct Michigan accent, Pesch has been documenting Keaton for decades and his tour of the old actor’s colony at Bluffton is worth the convention price. While he pointed out brightly colored cottages, telling anecdotes about their former inhabitants, I found myself powerwalking under an umbrella with a filmmaker from Sweden and a woman who’d driven to Muskegon alone, though across the country rather than across the state as I had. Between points of interest, passing around Ron’s laminated photos of long-gone fields where Buster played baseball, the three of us talked about how handsome Buster was.
The woman said she thought she was the only person on earth who was hot for Buster Keaton, but I already knew there were others. In Dana Stevens’ delightful study of Keaton, Camera Man, she writes of his “Mind-bending acrobatic skill and knee-buckling good looks;” how, when she first encountered Keaton’s film, she marveled, “Who was this solemn, beautiful, perpetually airborne man?” To again quote one of my favorite writers, James Agee, “Keaton’s face ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny.” Should the reference to the famously homely Great Emancipator throw you here, Agee elaborates, “Beneath his lack of emotion he was also uninsistently sardonic; deep below that, giving a disturbing tension and grandeur to the foolishness, for those who sensed it, there was in his comedy a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia. With the humor, the craftsmanship and the action there was often, besides, a fine, still and sometimes dreamlike beauty.”
What bachelorette party is complete without the beefcake.
At the Keatons’ former home (they called it Jingles Jungle after Buster’s brother, Jingles) a woman came out onto her porch to permit us to take pictures of her home and to offer us the last of the raspberries from her garden. We ate, thanking her, and asked her if her house was haunted (sadly, no). Soaked and shivering, we dashed behind Ron back to the beach and our cars. I’d only brought this jacket and these shoes and everything was soaked through.
My husband texted me Check your email. He’d forwarded a booking reservation from the Shoreline Inn. He knew I would protest the money spent. Before I could respond he texted again, You deserve it.
Dana Stevens describes the classic Keaton short “One Week,” where newlyweds attempt to build a house from a kit, as “a startlingly wise vision of marriage as the shared endurance of endless, cyclic disaster.” You could say this too about another Keaton short, “The Boat,” where the Damfinos got their name. In it, Keaton builds a houseboat named the Damfino and after a series of catastrophes, when the storm-tossed boat is finally sunk, the couple washes up on a dark shore. His wife asks, “Where are we?” Keaton’s final line is silent but clearly mouthed: “Damned if I know.”
My husband and I had been engaged for six of the ten years we’d been together. Our wedding was postponed first for a move across the country, then a new job, then to take care of my sister through chemotherapy and radiation. My hometown, Flint, was poisoned in a collision of bureaucratic incompetence and apathy I have never psychologically recovered from. Trump happened. COVID. My husband’s MS diagnosis. Trump again. My father’s death. Now my chronic pain and uncertainty. The world was whirling and tilting deliriously around me– where are we? Damned if I know– and I wanted to be anchored.
In my room at the Shoreline Inn, I took a delicious bath. I slung my wet clothes over the door to dry and aimed a hair dryer at my shoes. I skipped the last morning session of the convention, luxuriating in bed with coffee until housekeeping knocked on the door.
After the screening of Three Ages, the Damfinos gathered on the stage of the Frauenthal Theater, singing “Happy Birthday” to an unearthly, curiously handsome man who would have been 128 years old. The convention had begun with playful pork pie hats but now the Damfinos were dressed for a gala, in suits and drop waist flapper dresses, dripping beads and feathers. A rogue man from Midland had dressed as Harold Lloyd, in round lensless glasses. (Dylan had warned me there’d be cosplaying and I’d scoffed.) I milled around the stage in my stained sweatshirt, eating marble cake thick with buttercream off a paper plate and allowing myself a whiskey ginger, migraine triggers and wedding dress be damned. I wished safe travels and see-you-next-years to the women I’d dashed through the rain with, but mostly I hung around with my cake, watching, sometimes texting my husband. Back in Detroit I loved the classic film community in the same sort of enthusiastic introvert fashion. I like when there’s no line at the concessions counter and I can ask the moviegoers their favorite Bette Davis roles, their favorite Kubrick film, their thoughts on David Lynch. Once, at a Senate screening of Jesus Christ Superstar, the woman behind me sang along, whisper-soft, every word. More recently, at a screening of Roman Holiday, the person introducing the film described how Gregory Peck demanded Audrey Hepburn receive top billing with him. The woman beside me said, “What an ally.” My husband beside me, with his buttered popcorn and Red Bull, whose shoulder I press into when my head aches, anchors me in a spinning world, but there’s a unique feeling of affirmation, being witness to the unabashed enthusiasm of people you don’t know, of sharing even a fraction of it. The brutal world feels gentler in a movie theater.
I’ve since been lucky to see most of Keaton’s films in theaters across Michigan, including my favorite, Go West, twice (at Detroit Film Theatre and at the Frauenthal, for our second anniversary). This will be my first time seeing Our Hospitality on the big screen. I jump at any opportunity. On YouTube, the gags delight; in a theater, in a roomful of strangers communing, we flinch together when Buster does things our own aching, flawed bodies can’t possibly do; we exhale together when Buster survives again. The house falls, the boat sinks, the solemn man stands. The girl stands too, there at the edge of the shot.