I wondered in a previous post about the time overlap between Buster's doing these Columbia shorts and working as an MGM gagman, and I think we agreed that he was doing both at the same time. As far as I can tell he was certainly working at MGM on Go West and maybe even some Red Skelton films right around this time.
What I'm trying to do now is nail down when he stopped drinking alcoholically. He's obviously sober and in great physical shape for the Columbias, no human could be drinking to any kind of excess and still pull off that kind of physical comedy. Granted his dialog is always a beat behind the rest of the cast, but I would suggest that he does that on purpose as part of the Dumb Elmer act. But no middle-aged drunk could pull off that physicality the way he does, and believe me when I say that as a professional musician I know a whole bunch of middle-aged drunks. No way, just no way.
Too, right around the time of Squawk, 1940, he married Eleanor, and everything I have read indicates he was clean and sober by then. All available reference work tells us that Eleanor, a beautiful, smart, and classy lady, wise to the ways of Show Business, would not have hitched her wagon to a drunk twice her age. Twice her age, maybe. Drunk, no. Indeed, she remained his champion for the rest of her life.
O K, no news so far, but stay with me: I was surfing the other night, and came across Grand Slam Opera, one of Buster's Educationals, and Buster was obviously as physical and with-it as he was in the Columbias. This too was not the work of a guy who was shit-faced. Now, let's deal with the series of stills taken of Laurel and Hardy, Durante, and Buster in 1932. I love them. Buster is hammered, and I mean hammered, in all of them, to an obvious, almost grotesque degree. You've all seen them, I'm sure. You're tempted to think it's a parody, except in shot after shot he's in the same condition.
But that was 1932 at MGM, when Buster had lost everything, personally, financially, and professionally. After such a precipitous fall you and I would certainly be having a quart or two a night as well, or at least I would, especially if we had been veering that way for a few years anyway, and had had from birth the ( let's say ) volatile genes of Joe Keaton.
My point being that I think Buster sobered up between the time those stills were shot and his being hired at Educational, a lot earlier than has been
estimated. Educational took him on in, I think, '35 or'36, and Columbia in, I think, '39. I'm postulating that as bad shape as Buster was in in 1932, he had cleaned up his act by 1936, because Educational, maybe, and certainly Columbia, would never hire a down-and-outer for a starring series, even a starring series of shorts. That's not just bad business, it's corporate imbecility. Both studios would have done more homework than that.
THE ONLY EXCEPTION BEING ( I'll stop soon, I promise ): If Buster had turned into a binge drinker, one who could go months on the wagon and then crash completely, thus demolishing all studio schedules. The only reason I bring this up is one sentence in Tom Dardis's Keaton book which says that even after Buster's marriage to Eleanor, there were "troubling episodes". Those episodes may have been benders. Buster may have had the physical strength in those years ( and god knows he had physical strength ) to hold off the benders until the filming was done. In any case, after his marriage to Eleanor, he seems to have cut down eventually to nothing. If he had stopped smoking, ( he died of lung cancer ) he was so tough he might be with us yet.
