Simon Louvish, Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennet
(FABER AND FABER, INC.)
—Mack Sennett (1960)
merican movies—who can resist them? They are simultaneously mirrors in which we can see some of our deepest tendencies reflected and windows on nothing—pure modes of fantasy, escape from any manifestation of selfhood, escape from history. I come from a generation which made an attempt to snobbishly prefer "foreign films" to "American movies," only to discover that the makers of the foreign films were using American movies as their models.
Simon Louvish—born in Glasgow, Scotland, raised in Jerusalem, and now living in London—has produced a wonderful book on the "King of Comedy," Canadian-born "Mack Sennett" (originally Michael Sinnott), father of the quintessentially American "Keystone Kops." (Cf. "Krazy Kat.") Sennett is described in a brief online biography as " a singer, dancer, clown, actor, set designer and director." Louvish adds, with considerable justification, "shameless liar": "As with so many showbiz personalities, we are in the presence of a prodigious mythmaker, a man intent on reinventing his past and, not to mince words, a shameless liar."
Louvish is something of a specialist in "comedians" who are "shameless liars." Asked by interviewer Kathie Biehl whether he came upon items which "surprised" him as he researched the life of the Marx Brothers, he answered,
Did I come across anything that surprised me? Not any more, after the [W.C.] Fields research had shown me that nothing anybody says can be believed. I've developed researcher's paranoia: I don't believe oral stories...The case was blatant with Fields, as he had made up his life, and through his tales to Gene Fowler, this had become "fact" through the 1948 book by Robert Lewis Taylor.
("Why Monkey Business: An Interview with Simon Louvish" by Kathie Biehl, http://www.whyaduck.com/other/louvish.htm )
Keystone does a fine job of tracing the trajectory of this Irish-Catholic (rather than Jewish) movie mogul as well as what Louvish calls "Sennett's ... America, contagious, nervous, always at high speed." One of the ancestors of Keystone is John Dos Passos' great trilogy, USA, in which individual lives and history penetrate and in which "high speed" is always important.
Michael Sinnott was born in Quebec, Canada in 1880, but in 1897 his parents immigrated to the United States. The boy's mother, whose motto was "never step on my dreams," encouraged her son to sing. Having studied, and hoping to sing in opera, the young man entered show business and found employment in traveling chorus shows, singing quartets, burlesque, and in the male chorus of Broadway musicals. In one of the grand transformative gestures of the immigrant, he changed his name from "Sinnott" to "Sennett."
In 1908 Mack Sennett joined the Biograph film company along with another young man, D.W. Griffith. Their first acting appearance together was in May, 1908; the first film for which Griffith received credit as a director was in June, 1908. Sennett acted in Griffith's films—usually playing oafish, rural parts—then was allowed to direct a film of his own, Comrades, released in March, 1911. In 1912, Sennett began to direct comedies for Biograph. In the same year he formed the Keystone company with partners Adam Kessell and Charles Baumann. The first "Keystone Kops" movie, The Bangville Police, was released in April, 1913. In November, 1914, Tillie's Punctured Romance was released; it was the very first comedy feature ever made—and Sennett's first feature film. "The overall strategy" of the films, writes Louvish, "in keeping with the whole idea of American capitalism, involved never standing still": "the Kops were an inevitable outgrowth of catering to immigrant and working-class audiences...Initially a rural, rube kind of force, they seemed incapable of coming through a door without collapsing in spectacular pratfalls...[T]heir entire existence seemed to be one huge, contagious nervous twitch."
In time, Sennett's very name became virtually synonymous with movie comedy. Initially, he remarked, "Anything on film made money." Among the actors he featured were Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Mabel Normand ("the screen's first great comedienne," with whom Sennett had a complex, off-and-on-again amorous relationship), 1 Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Ben Turpin, and many others. "There is no American," Sennett declared in 1918,
who, as a boy, has not dreamed of caving in the helmet of a cop with a mighty swat that will send it around his ears. Most of us have never gotten over the feeling. Nearly every one of us lives in the secret hope that some day before he dies he will be able to swat a policeman's hat down around his ears. Lacking the courage and the opportunity, we like to see it done in the movies.
Violence and self-assertion become here synonymous, though Sennett is no revolutionary. Louvish is surely right that the director's work embodied a kind of "freedom"—particularly freedom from some of American's deeply-entrenched sacred cows: "freedom to abandon convention; freedom to be vulgar; freedom to kick the rich man in the tummy; freedom to drive at high speed, wreck cars and demolish property...." But this "freedom" is also the excuse for the expression of dark, sadistic impulses which get themselves glossed over, ignored "through the catharsis of comedy." Sennett, Louvish points out, deeply understood "the anarchistic, anti-authoritarian impulses of [America's] working-class audiences," and he portrayed these impulses again and again in the "harmless" medium of film, simultaneously expressing them and defusing them.
Louvish sees D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett as the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of early film. Griffith's "clever experiments in cutting, composition, and dramatic acting," he writes, "are of little use to comedy, which favours character, situation, gags and plot. Griffith had no interest in gags, but Sennett did." "In the unwieldy world of early sound movies," however, "nothing could move as fast as it had before, and the wisecrack, not the sight-gag, was king."
Sennett's connection with Fatty Arbuckle meant that he had a front-row seat for the great scandal of 1921: the death of Virginia Rappe at a party hosted by Fatty Arbuckle. Henry Lehrman's remarks, made at the time, give some indication of the depths of the rage directed against the more or less innocent Arbuckle:
That's what comes of taking vulgarians from the gutter and giving them enormous salaries and making idols of them...Such people don't know how to get a kick out of life, except in a beastly way. They are a disgrace to the film business. They are the ones who resort to cocaine and the opium needle and who participate in orgies that surpass the orgies of degenerate Rome. They should be swept out of the motion picture business.
Louvish points out that Mack Sennett could in many respects be counted precisely among these "vulgarians." His "ethnic comedies, appealing to immigrant audiences, [were] played with a minimum of intertitles, to an audience still unfamiliar with English...." Sennett made some statements in support of Arbuckle, but he could do little. "During the entire period of Fatty's trials," Louvish goes on, "Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand had been reduced to the level of helpless onlookers at a train wreck."
In 1922 there followed still another Hollywood scandal, the never-solved murder of director William Desmond Taylor—an event which is examined exhaustively in Bruce Long's "Taylorology" web site. "The first, and almost only, fact agreed upon by most commentators," writes Louvish, "is that Mabel Normand was the last person known to have seen William Desmond Taylor alive." In a drunken moment, Sennett actually confessed to the murder—though upon sobering up, he denied any knowledge of it. Such scandals called forth Will Hays and the mighty hand of Censorship on Hollywood films—a fact to which Sennett had to adjust despite his freewheeling style.
The coming of sound in the transition year 1928—The Jazz Singer was released in October, 1927—and the Wall Street Crash of 1929 were also among the factors which removed Mack Sennett from his central position as moviemaker and mogul. The Barber Shop with W.C. Fields, released in July, 1933, was the last title formally put forth by Mack Sennett Studios; the film, now a classic, seemed lackluster to audiences and critics of the time. In 1936, Sennett began what Louvish calls "his long retirement." The filmmaker lived until 1960 and was occasionally honored and feted, but he made no more films. His filmmaking career stretched from 1911 to 1933: twenty-two years. His retirement stretched from 1933 to 1960: twenty-seven years. For a time he returned to Canada to live with his mother. (He had become a United States citizen in 1932, at the age of 52.) After her death, he returned again to California, where he could be seen "walking up and down Hollywood Boulevard, tipping his hat to old ladies and cops on the beat, attending anniversaries, receiving awards, eulogized as the icon of an age that had died out long before his own demise." With Cameron Shipp he produced a lying if enjoyable autobiography, King of Comedy, published in 1954.
A man of his time, Mack Sennett thought of himself as "self-made," a rugged individual. "All creative intellectual work consists of the development of individuality," Sennett declared in 1917:
The very essence of motion picture making is to encourage originality. To bring out individual characteristics. The famous stars of the stage, film and literature have been great because, at some point, they differed from everyone else. They had a flavour all their own.
At the same time, change, movement (movies move) was central to the experience of both life and film. Again from 1917:
There is no form of American industry which experiences such rapid and sensational changes as the motion picture business. There is no other business that has made such enormous strides in so short a time...Henri Bergsen [sic], the noted French philosopher...gave out one mighty thought that we can all understand and take to heart: that life is the process of changing. And when you stop changing you die and decay.
Note the appearance of a "French philosopher" in the prose of this Quebecois immigrant; but note even further that, for him, the entire movie industry seems like a metaphor for the upwardly mobile immigrant, whose world was often one of "rapid and sensational changes." For Sennett, movies not only depicted the American Dream: they were the American dream: "There is no other business that has made such enormous strides in so short a time." This emphasis on change, on what Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan have called "the unsettling of America," reminds me of two texts. The first is by Alexis de Toqueville, whose Democracy in America appeared in the mid nineteenth century. In America, writes de Tocqueville, "Continual changes are...every instant occurring under the observation of every man"; there is "universal tumult," an "incessant conflict of jarring interests"; "everyone is in motion." De Toqueville's remarks sound like a description of a Keystone comedy! The second text is the passionate affirmation of change Miles Davis makes in his autobiography, Miles:
The synthesizer has changed everything whether purist musicians like it or not. It's here to stay and you can either be in it or out of it. I choose to be in it because the world has always been about change. People who don't change will find themselves like folk musicians, playing in museums and local as a motherfucker.
"Them is changes being made," Fats Waller remarked, chording. For Sennett too, as for these others, "the world has always been about change."
In dealing with this complex "individual," Simon Louvish understands that a biographer must adopt a kaleidoscopic approach—must see his character as the momentary center of a number of forces, both internal and external, political as well as personal. He deliberately takes a historical view:
When [in 1917] Sennett wrote these words, the United States was entering into its major engagement with the global trauma known today as the First World War. And changes continued, for good and ill, throughout the decade of the 1920s. Today, in another era of dynamic change, opportunities and dangers, great hopes and setbacks, it may be salutary to look back on another era in which anything seemed possible, and to look at the world that Mack Sennett built in a small corner of Los Angeles, Calif. The world of the Keystone Comedies, the first enterprise in movies dedicated to comedy alone, in which chaos was order, action was non-stop and a host of multi-talented, eccentric and sometimes near-deranged people ran, jumped, cartwheeled, pratfalled, leaped off tall buildings, plunged down waterfalls and fell off a multitude of speeding vehicles on to the backs of their necks in the performance of their daily duties.
Keystone does a fine job of tracing elements we need to have in order to understand something of the complexity of both Mack Sennett and his times—as well as his "clowns." The book is well-written and funny (there is at least one made-up word: "confuddlement") and it moves quickly—if not quite as quickly as a Sennett film. A couple of small matters: Louvish might have examined Sennett's Quebecois origins a little more deeply: at times Sennett reminds you of another Canadian/American with a deep devotion to his mother: Jack Kerouac. Louvish briefly mentions the possibility that Sennett's mother may have been "la femme la plus importante dans sa vie," but he doesn't explore the possibility that this may have been a cultural rather than a psychological fact. And Sennett's Irish roots might have been delved into a bit more as well. This is the conclusion of the famous Irish ballad which gave James Joyce the title of his book, Finnegans Wake:
Maggie O'Connor took up the job "O Biddy," says she, "You're wrong, I'm sure" Biddy gave her a belt in the gob And left her sprawlin' on the floor. And then the war did soon engage 'Twas woman to woman and man to man, Shillelagh law was all the rage And the row and eruption soon began. Chorus: Whack fol the die do, dance to your partner Welt the floor, your trotters shake; Wasn't it the truth I told you Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake Then Mickey Maloney raised his head When a noggin of whiskey flew at him, It missed, and fallin' on the bed The liquor scattered over Tim! Tim revives! See how he raises! Timothy rising from the bed, Says, "Whirl your whiskey around like blazes Thanum o'n Dhoul! Did you think I'm dead?" Chorus
Doesn't that sound like a Keystone Comedy? Was Sennett's product still another instance of "shillelagh law," that noisy, disruptive force that constituted Irish-American sensibility at the turn of the century? The Irish connection—"I can lick any man in the house!"—is surely not the only one to be made, but it is clearly there. Sennett was not only, as Louvish says, "a prodigious mythmaker," he was a man who was molded and shaped by the intense American myths into which he found himself plunged when, unknowing—an innocent—he entered the United States at the very beginning of the twentieth century. 2
"Like Sennett," Louvish writes, W.C. Fields "considered himself a self-made man."At what point does the "self-made man" become the "self-invented man"? It is Simon Louvish's interest in "liars" such as W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers and Mack Sennett that gives his books their particular relish. These books suggest that "comedy" adheres in a state which is neither this nor that, self nor other, history nor fiction: a state of pure possibility—so that the "comedian" is similar to what Keats said of the "poet": he is everyone and no-one; he has no "identity." Yet identity must be had, and an identity which is pure fabrication may be preferable to one which has been thrust upon you by others—so that instead of "no identity" one arrives at a position of pure egotism: pure self-assertion, pure self-invention—"lying." "I've been fighting people like you my whole life long," says Bert Lancaster to the skeptical Lloyd Bridges in The Rainmaker (1956), "and I always lose." Comedy, theater becomes a way for the imaginative person to win—but only for the space of time while the comedy continues. The stage can be an affirmation of everything the comedian wishes to believe, but once the stage has vanished, "reality" and the deconstructing biographer set in with a vengeance. One does not know, Louvish quotes W.C. Fields' famous remark, "where Hollywood ends and delirium tremens begins." The comedian's life isn't necessarily tragic—it may even be a good life—but "whether he knows it or not," wrote Fred Allen, he
is on a treadmill to oblivion. When a...comedian's program is finally finished it slinks down Memory Lane into the limbo of yesteryear's happy hours. All that the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of forgotten laughter.
(Treadmill to Oblivion, 1954)
That, and perhaps a book. And money. 3
1. Sennett insists that his love for Mabel Normand (1892-1930) was the central event of his life: "The most important thing in my life was a girl." Louvish regards this statement as still another of Sennett's fictions—the Mack and Mabel myth. It is interesting that one of the most important things about Mabel Normand for Mack Sennett was the fact that, like the movies, she moved: Sennett writes, "[S]he never held still and it is difficult to kiss a girl who won't stand still for it...Mabel was frisky, as skittery as a waterbug...." Sennett describes Mabel as "French-Irish," like Sennett himself.
2. Among the classic sources of authority and livelihood for the Irish immigrant were the police force, the fire department, and the priesthood. Sennett attacks both the police and the firemen but leaves the priests alone. That would remain for filmmakers such as Luis Bunuel.
3. Mack Sennet's book, King of Comedy (as told to Cameron Shipp) is well worth reading—beautifully written and full of interesting stories. Here are some samples—the second one is a bit of Keystone comedy:
You will probably remember many of the funny people who worked for me not so long ago. They set about all over the place with slats and pies. They made fun of everybody and everything. They rolled audiences up and down the aisles. They would exhaust the people with nonsense, inducing a state of hysteria and even semiconsciousness. Then they would top their foolishness with something zanier before the money-paying victims could catch their breath. This was just to get warmed up. My boys and girls would then go to work in dead earnest. The result was always the same: pandemonium and chaos. Restraint, logic, and inhibition took flight and roosted on Cloud Seven with their sides aching. This kind of motion-picture making relaxed the people and was good for them. Only the furniture industry suffered. There was no demand for secondhand psychiatric couches.
What's happened to laughter? There used to be so much of it.
Now and then Mabel [Normand] was the victim of my too merry Andrews. It was a wet day in Southern California and the pavement in front of Keystone was half an inch deep in mud and water. Chester Conklin spied Mabel across the street, wondering how to get across, and made a fancy gesture. He bowed like a headwaiter expecting a fifty-dollar tip, snatched off his coat, and spread it in the mud for Mabel to step on. She stepped, and disappeared into a manhole.
© Jack Foley