Curing the Wild West with Buster
The Houdinis slid a few rungs even further down the showbiz ladder as 1897 closed. The manager of a Milwaukee theatre cheated them out of their pay and, when Harry tried to recoup their losses by getting into a crap game, another $60 went down the toilet. It was no wonder they signed on with a travelling medicine show.
This was the “mudflap” circuit, ambling around smalltown America behind a horse, or maybe a donkey. In the scheme of things it was beneath the beer halls, which were beneath the dime museums, which were far, far beneath the vaudeville playhouses. Scrabbling for coins in the mud of the cowboy states was Dr Hill’s California Concert Company, but the good doctor was willing to pay the Houdinis $25 a week. They shook hands on the deal in Garnett, Kansas.
With flowing hair and beard, Hill looked like Jesus, but he drank like a demon, as did several of his players. The troupe would roll into an outback town in its wagons and start to make some noise to draw a crowd, Bess singing, Harry on tambourine and Hill’s partner Dr Pratt at an antique organ. Next, Hill would start flogging his miraculous herbal remedies, good for any ailment under the western sun, and with the rubes on the hook, Houdini went around collected money. Only then would Hill announce that there’d be a show that night, usually at the town hall.
They’d offer a mixed variety bag, heavy on the mini-dramas, and if someone was too soused to get into character, another would step in, often with comical results. Harry did acrobatics and worked his magic and escape routines into the proceedings, and when Dr Hill correctly prophesied that a spiritualist act might spice up business, he became “The Celebrated Psychometric Clairvoyant”. To read the citizens’ minds he relied on overheard gossip and the sham medium’s old “Blue Book” trick — family information was gathered at the local cemetery before the show and then meted out with spooky accuracy.
Harry also obtained a coin from someone in the audience and Bess, blindfolded, announced the date it was minted, or guessed the serial number on a dollar bill. They used a code that matched common words with the numbers 1 to 10. Harry just arranged the right words into his instructions to her. This was the code that would loom so large in the decade following Houdini’s death.
Among the California Concert Company players who came and went were Joe and Myra Keaton and their son Joe Junior, who would soon become Buster. His father specialised in crazy dancing and his mother danced and played, according to one source, the saxophone, according to Buster, piano, bass fiddle and cornet.
Columbia University has Buster Keaton’s charming reminiscences online and he confirms what biographer Harold Kellock had to say about the origins of his nickname.
“I was six months old, in a little hotel we were living at in some town. I crawled out of the room, crawled to the head of the stairs, and fell down the whole flight of stairs. When I alit at the bottom and they saw that I was all right, I wasn’t hurt badly, [Houdini] said, ‘It sure was a buster,’ and the old man said, ‘That’s a good name for him.’ I never lost the name.”
Keaton says nothing about another episode featured in Kellock and Ruth Braden’s Houdini biographies, in which the adults were onstage at the theatre while Buster was sleeping at the hotel. Bess heard there was a fire at the hotel and rushed over in time to rescue him.
Buster had a somewhat different version of the medicine-show link-up between these performing families. He recalled that his mother had been part of her own father’s medicine show since she was 12. When she was 17 this troupe played Perry, Oklahoma, and in the audience, quickly falling in love with her, was Joe Keaton, who’d come from Indiana with the Sooner land rush. Joe joined the Cutler company as a stagehand and was soon part the show.
“He was a natural dancer, a great pair of legs for eccentric work and high kicking, and a natural clown. After he was with the show about six months, he and my mother were married. I was born on a one-night stand in Kansas, in a little town called Pickway.”
As Buster remembered it, by the time he was born his father had left Cutler and joined forces with Houdini in “the Harry Houdini and Keaton Medicine Show Company”. The name sounds implausible, but we’ll forgive Buster because what he went through as a child deserves nothing if not abject sympathy. He was part of his parents’ act from age four, “wearing grotesque clothes with a bald-headed wig and Irish beard”, and mom and pop’s very popular shtick was batting him about for laughs.
“From the time I was seven or eight we were the roughest knockabout act that ever was in the history of the theatre,” Buster said. Despite lying about his age in states that frowned on children appearing in theatres, his parents were often arrested, sometimes on suspicion of cruelty. Doctors searched their son for bruises and broken bones in the offices of the mayor of New York City and governor of the state but never found any.
“The law read that a child can’t do acrobatics, can’t walk a wire, can’t juggle — a lot of those things — but there was nothing said in the law that you can’t kick him in the face or throw him through a piece of scenery. On that technicality, we were allowed to work, although we’d get called into court every other week, see.”
But, of course, this is where Buster Keaton learned to fall down in such hilarious fashion and still keep a straight face. “The deadpan got more laughs,” one commentator has written. “It also hid the pain.” By 1917 he was making movies with Mack Sennett and earning a permanent place in audiences’ hearts. He kept on doing films — right up to “Beach Blanket Bingo” — until his death in 1966.
One of the first of Harry’s celebrated “prison breaks” took place at the Kansas City Jail in April 1900, the travelling magician publicising his local stage show by challenging the police to try and keep him locked in a cell. 
The slammer in question was likely the Wyandotte County Jail, pictured here, which stood on the corner of 7th Street and State Avenue from 1880 to 1949. It was turned into a hotel and, according to one online source, is now a retirement centre. 
