Intersecting Parallels: Keaton and Kovacs

In the early 1960s, the careers of comedians Ernie Kovacs and Buster Keaton crossed paths. This despite the maxim that two parallel lines can never intersect. It occurred literally at the concluding note of both men's lives, though Buster's journey to Griffith Park in 1962 had taken thirty years longer than Kovacs.

Buster began in Vaudeville, and graduated to the movies, the world that all but eluded Ernie – who had started in radio, the only medium Keaton never mastered. The nexus point was television.

Buster became a TV star almost as a last resort. Ernie had arrived intentionally, on a fast track.

He had ignored red lights before, with a certain cocky impudence, and once with a mildly startled Jack Lemmon riding shotgun. It may have been precisely why he did it.

In the first rainy Los Angeles hours of January 12, 1962, there was nobody in the passenger seat to playfully – perilously – agitate. Ernie Kovacs was alone. And distracted.

Unclear is why he arrived at this particular intersection, supposedly trailing home after his wife, actress-singer-ingenue Edie Adams, who'd driven ahead in another car – it was not the route she had taken.

Maybe he felt one more nightcap beckoning. He was after all, alone with his thoughts, perhaps for the first time in several days, or even weeks. His favorite watering hole, PJ's, was not conveniently near his opulent home on Coldwater Canyon Drive. Or given a dark, drizzly morning after a day just a bit too crazy, even for him, his dulled senses may simply have gotten him lost.

The day before had begun hundreds of hours ago, it seemed. He'd been up before dawn – a steambath to shore up the horizontal and vertical holds of his low-ebbing energy. Giving a friend a lift to the airport. Then down to Griffith Park for a morning-long shoot on a show that wasn't his own, which likely meant he hated it – all but for the chance to work with a particular legendary co-star. A late afternoon editing session for his own network show, that would broadcast weeks later, posthumously. A productive day, but not really a relished one.

Sitcoms were among the televised fodder he'd once vowed never to do, but circumstances had pressured him into taking the gig – he needed money.

Gameshows were another personal taboo he'd compromised to embrace for a badly needed wallet boost. At least they'd given him liberty to turn "Take A Good Look" (a playful rip-off of "What's My Line") into a nonsensical catch-all of Kovacsian chaos. Much like his fellow mustachioed, cigar-trademark comedian, Groucho Marx, Ernie was a natural at quiz-mastering. One would never guess from his cordially feisty on-camera demeanor, that the everything-but-logical half hour disgusted him.

He'd often reveled in spoofing shows like it – now he was saddled with the real thing, and forced to make it work. Like teasing the poorest girl in school, and then having to take her to the prom.

He loathed the gameshow's confined format, so he robbed it of all sense. The taped skits were supposed to disclose clues about the identity of the contestant, for the celebrity panel. He made them intentionally vague, so that anyone – a milkman in full white uniform, a dog catcher with a torn net and a spotted mastiff clamping down on his wrist – could come on the show and stump the famous-folk.

Ernie stumped the panel for them – so that they, like himself, could accept a pocket full of quick cash courtesy of Dutch Masters Cigars.

He'd stood in the eye of winter, shirtless, to film the predicament of a lovable snake-oil villain, for a comic-western something called "Medicine Man" – the pilot episode was titled "A Pony For Chris." His co-star shared more with him than just billing on this wretched mortgage-payer.

Like Kovacs, ancient icon Buster Keaton needed the paycheck. The show was only slightly more dignified than the Beach Party movies he'd been paid to wander through. Like notches on the handle of an old gunfighter's pistol, every hard-earned laugh of a tumultuous career was etched somewhere on his now frail body – a scar here, a permanent bruise there, a whelp, a discoloration – even a broken neck that he'd learned about fifteen years after it happened, when a veterans hospital doctor showed him a telling x-ray. A wrinkled, sad-eyed Father Time of show business, he was four short years away from death. Ernie would hardly imagine he was mere hours from his own.

The show's whirlwind shoot made the type of cosmic summit meeting some might envision between Ernie and Buster hellishly difficult, if not impossible. It is perhaps pleasant to contemplate them acknowledging each other, even confidentially. Getting some quality time between takes with Buster was reason alone to endure what must have been an otherwise joyless project, garnished in post production with canned laughter – another unpardonable sin Ernie silently tolerated in animus.

Critic John Barbour once summed up Kovacs with a review as powerful as it was concise: "Ernie Kovacs, the Charlie Chaplin of television." The compliment was great, and accurate, but on a stylistic level, Kovacs was more in tune with Keaton. And moreover, on this final day of his life, Kovacs found himself in an inner place not unlike where Keaton would wind up as he neared his own finish line.

In his senior years, Buster's trademark caricature had become marketable again in the movies, for its novelty appeal. But Buster the human being underneath the pork-pie hat was otherwise a persona non grata; a dogfaced geriatric answering a casting call. He would never helm a motion picture again, despite his silent era canon consisting of classic after classic – a body of work rivaled only by Chaplin's.

His legacy would have been lost forever had not actor James Mason discovered stacks of film canisters in a gardening shed of the southern California residence he purchased, which was formerly Buster's. Keaton had been certain that nobody past 1940 would ever watch a silent movie. So he hid them away. He intended eventually to use his cinematic gems like "The General" and "Cops" as packing tape.

He considered his past to reside in another Hollywood, an alternate universe that existed only in the memory of those who'd survived it. There weren't many left.

Based on that, he spent a number of years drinking himself into obscurity, becoming less and less employable – and more and more diluted. Hollywood's new younger casting agents and directors were clueless about who he had been.

One quick and dirty production actually had him in clown make-up, and its oblivious director tried to make him smile. Keaton dropped out of Hollywood not long after walking out on that grievous turn. His career, if not his liver, found a bit of renewed life in foreign films – where he was still considered the "Buster" of old – even if the poor quality of production materials and preservation methods, or a lack thereof, left those years irretrievable, even in the modern age of digital mastering.

Hollywood rang Kovacs supposedly due to his uniqueness, because of how different and larger than life he had been on television. Then as it had to Keaton, it merrily attempted to homogenize him. Ernie's handful of films contain only his presence, and a sample of his competent acting ability, but lack any hint of the substance of what made him Ernie Kovacs.

Back home that evening, drooping, worn out, yet stubbornly relentless, he was due at a party. A christening for Milton Berle's adopted son, Michael, at Billy Wilder's house. He'd promised Edie that he would show. As he busied himself dressing, the weight of the day finally cracked his veneer – in front of one of his children, yet. It was vile, but not directed at her. He told her so, mid-rant.

On the way he detoured by PJ's, and had a couple quick ones for a relaxer. As if an insomia-plagued 24 hours wasn't enough.

At the gathering he was, of course, on.

Bags under his eyes and all, he was Ern. Everyone loved Ern. Later, they'd all claim he'd been the life of the party. Lucille Ball's husband, Gary Morton, would deliver the obligatory "the Kovacs trademark cigar was in great evidence." Predictable, patented PR pabulum. So had the Berle trademark cigar, and probably the Burns trademark cigar, and the cigars of other well-knowns who kept them a private trademark. Kovacs was running on fumes. He got a giggle out of Dean Martin's wife, Jeanne, with his secret of eternal life: "cigars, steambaths and one hour of sleep a night." Finally homeward bound after midnight, Ernie asked the French movie star Yves Montland if he needed a ride. He said thanks, but no.

The Ernie Kovacs headstone, at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills cemetery – a two-minute walk from Keaton's, which bears only a name and a date – is inscribed with the legend "Nothing In Moderation." It was the motto of Ernie's coat of arms. Even with creditors dogging his ankles, Kovacs settled only for things he could less and less afford. His unpaid tab at PJ's was scary – and why he had to keep showing up, lest they think he'd skipped town.

Emerging from Berle's party, Kovacs did something most curious. Living beyond his means was exacting a huge toll on his health, his marriage, and his work quality – but sudden, impulsive frugality would come at a premium. He and Edie had driven to the party in separate cars; he in the Rolls and she in their grocery cart, a '61 Corvair Lakewood stationwagon. For the trip home, he switched with her – one documented instance when Ernie decided to break conspicuous form – and it cost him his life.

Was he cavalier? Was weariness eating him? Or did he just want an hour to himself? A quick return to PJ's for another mellow-maker, in a ride that wouldn't attract attention.

A light rain fell. His driving was a bit lubricated, and unfocussed.

The peck of the rain drops on the Corvair's thin metal hull, the damply hypnotic twitch-twitch of the wipers, the glow of a Los Angeles midnight, and his aloneness – Kovacs was perhaps for the first time in three days, silent. Eugene at the wheel. If he had told Edie that he'd be right behind her, he wasn't. It was not necessarily a lie – perhaps once behind the wheel, things changed.

In the last phase of his life, Buster Keaton had transformed into a shriveled little paperwad who just still resembled, vaguely, the American silent cinema's Van Gogh. He'd been adored and then rejected by Hollywood, both with such magnitude, that up to his dying afternoon, he'd remained stone-like and defiant. Even if it was only in his mind.

In a dream marriage to an ex-dancer many years his junior, Keaton nevertheless retreated to a private cell of self-containment – a bare-walled, gray little room in a merely average suburban dwelling, that he'd bought with the fee from his "consultation" on the movie of his life, "The Buster Keaton Story." They had ignored him, but still paid him.

The most sublime insult of all – they'd cast cherubic Donald O'Connor to play Keaton. O'Connor had the physical magic to ape most of Buster's mesmerizing stunts of a past lifetime, but he was the very antithesis of the stone-faced stoic, and made no attempt in the film to hide it. The level of indirect mockery Keaton endured from the biopic's inaccuracies was sadly garnished by O'Connor's indelible grin. An extra twist of a an already deeply lodged dagger.

To catch Buster Keaton smiling on film is akin to spotting a UFO over the White House. Only in his earliest films, along side the mentor he surpassed, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle – Keaton curled his lips only when the script called for it, and never, ever, ad-libbed even a smirk. He'd learned it from his boyhood, in the most violent act in Vaudeville, the Three Keatons.

O'Connor's face was a child on Christmas morning, etched in blond oak.

Ironically, O'Connor was the only person associated with this cinematic donnybrook of Keaton's life to actually take an interest in the truth, and spend time with the man himself.

In the film, a brave young Buster witnesses his father's death from the circus high-wire. When O'Connor asked him how he'd dealt with such a blow, Keaton duly informed him that it didn't happen. The Keatons were never a circus act. Buster's father, Joe, had actually appeared as an extra in many of Keaton's early films, and passed away after Buster was himself past 40.

Nobody cared. O'Connor, oddly, never complained.

By the time Keaton was done – in his heart – with Hollywood, his one true joy had become cards; Rummy, Bridge, Solitaire... and his most sacred remaining possession, his solitude. Even a visit by hot young comic Bill Cosby could not roust Buster from his comfortable self-exile.

In his mind, Buster lived on an island. With his past. He seemed uninterested, distant.

In his final hour, the damn burst. The human monolith of silent clowns would not shut up!

He'd begun a game of Bridge with his wife and two guests... suddenly he was marching restlessly about the house, allowing 60 years of repressed energy and frustration – the volcanic ash of his life as exiled Hollywood royalty – to issue forth in a pauseless torrent. Stories of the old days... long pent-up complaints about Louis Mayer and the rest of those sons of bitches... the years lost away from his children (whom were smuggled out of his life by his first wife Natalie, in a way similar to how Ernie's first wife, Bette, kidnapped their own daughters). A stroke finally quieted him... and once calmed, he did not lay down, but sat upright, on the gurney, and once safely at the hospital, died.

In Ernie's final hour, he too was feeling used up. His final comedy special for ABC seemed to show a man frustrated by the enigma of his situation. He faced the only thing on Earth seemingly larger than his talent: his debt.

Tired. The show was not up to his usual standard for what turned out to be the end run. The wick that once burned brightly, was now charred and bent, the melted wax rising like an oily tide, to snuff the flame.

Hollywood was slowly devouring him, using his one great weakness – an addiction to extravagance – against him. He wasn't the first to be applauded while perched on the gangplank.

To be a fly on the barroom wall, and listen to Ernie share a drink with an Orson Welles, or more surreally, an Erich Von Stroheim.

The Ernie Kovacs presiding over that last broadcast was a man caring less than ever before. Not carefree, but careworn. Gone was the suit and black razor tie. Instead, he sat and spoke at the camera, hunched upon a console in a nameless editing room – in a pull-over golf shirt that looked like it hadn't seen an iron lately, of either kind. The makeup was a token gesture – Kovacs looked dimmed, running on auxiliary since yesterday.

The cameras were switched on. He needed it in the can a week ago.

He was at the point to which a tipsy midnight drive would be enough to do him in. He held on just a few days longer.

The last show Kovacs guest-starred on, was also the last in which Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball appeared as a couple.

"The Desi & Lucy Comedy Hour" was not so much a sitcom as it was a business deal, to keep rolling the gravy train that had been "I Love Lucy," after the two leads admitted they were pedal-to-floor for divorce court. As with Kovacs's pokerface smile on TAGL, however, on camera Lucy and "Ricky" were still seemingly holding it together.

The show was fraudulent from opening credits to final fade, and subliminally illustrated just how Hollywood could not get its head around an Ernie Kovacs – and how it had decided to quick-fry him, in a way that Buster Keaton could probably relate to.

The final Desi-Lucy episode, entitled "Lucy Meets The Mustache" was about a powerful Hollywood TV comedian named Ernie Kovacs helping out a Cuban ex-bandleader named Ricky Ricardo, who is desperate for work, whose marriage is stressed.

In real life, Desi Arnaz was the epitome of Hollywood financial godhood – the once mighty RKO Studio now wearing his "Desilu" logo; an empire that Lucy herself would helm after the dust had settled. Even the affected marriage angle was partially inaccurate – the marriage had been over for years. The two were now just business partners.

Ernie Kovacs was anything but the network power player he portrayed. He was in fact the one flat broke, with a troubled marriage. Hosting a low-on-the-dial gameshow – keeping just two skips ahead of the IRS and other creditors.

The show's final gag was one that must have irked Kovacs right to the core; it mocked his every triumph of a decade reinventing TV comedy – an exploding cigar. A doubletake that every Vaudevillian knew by heart. The laugh that Kovacs wanted least, all his life.

Even a pie in the face was only acceptable in the Erniverse if hurled at a spoof of someone real... like Loretta Young, or a June Taylor dancer.

Like Keaton, Kovacs braved the clueless insult of an industry he had helped birth.

An exploding cigar? Typical dim-bulb sitcom-think. Do it just this once, Ern. It's a natural gag since you smoke cigars n' all that. Don't it just kill you? (Pick nose here.)

Like "The Buster Keaton Story," "Lucy Meets The Mustache" proved just how soon and how much Hollywood could forget, about someone it owed so much.

The light was green or red, yellow or lavender – when he made the intersection of Santa Monica and Beverly Glenn.

It didn't matter – he didn't see it. Some imagine he took his hands off the wheel to grab a cigar from his inside breast pocket, or already had it out and was lighting it – allowing the car to drive itself. Or it was something simpler, after the preceding marathon of unrest – even an insomniac must slumber some time – a nod that lasted a moment too long.

When the car didn't auto-pilot the left turn, Ernie bolted to grab the wheel and correct the car's trajectory, and likely overcompensated, given the wet road, and his lubed reflexes. The turn became a spin – once, counter-clockwise. A power pole at the corner stopped it, horseshoeing the thin-shelled Corvair. The impact might have been less, and survivable, had the car's engine been in the front – or even merely anecdotal if he'd been in the Rolls, the car he'd driven to the party.

No car in the early 60s came equipped with an airbag. Kovacs was knocked across the Corvair's front bench seat by a forty-foot steel ballbat. His head glanced off the steering wheel in the process.

The split-second mangling burst his aorta. What did he see in that instant – in essence punched out of his own body? Were his eyes even still registering images?

Some reports said he died instantly, but certain clues indicate something terribly different. Ernie Kovacs experienced a few unimaginable seconds after his moment of death. He crawled. His last cigar still clamped in his fingers, he scooted himself out the blast-open passenger door. He made it to the asphalt, then blipped out, into the unknowable. The cigar freed itself and rolled a few inches from his hand.

The 1963 movie "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" starred, among an avalanche of the day's most popular comedians, the two Kings of TV Clownery, Milton Berle and Sid Caesar. Ernie would have made it the comedic triumvirate, had he been alive. Ernie's widow instead played the wife of Caesar's character, maintaining Ernie's presence in spirit, in a cinematic blockbuster he had deserved to share, after too many films that are now merely footnotes of other actors' careers.

Buster Keaton, incidentally, had a bit part in that picture.

Both Keaton's and Kovacs's final bows were to serve scripts that cared nothing for their respective legacies. Both had first wives who stole their children; Keaton's boys and Kovacs's girls. Each took the conventional wisdom of his era's comedy and defied it, forced it to reveal its full potential, even with still-primitive tools.

When one man's career is summed up, it eerily mirrors that of the other.

"He" left a successful career in an established medium, to pioneer an experimental one – and wound up virtually reinventing it. Buster abandoned a star spotlight on Broadway, something most actors would kill for, to follow a sudden compulsive fascination with the motion picture camera. Ernie left the well-oiled radio industry for the new game in town, television.

"His" most productive years, containing his greatest achievements, were the first ten.

Both Buster and Ernie created forms of comedy that were unique and exclusive to their own respective mediums. Verbal humor was neither man's style. Kovacs made videotape itself his straight-man, as Keaton had with celluloid.

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This article is also located at my blog "Laughter Wax." (Click article title.)