Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett

A biography of pioneer comedy mogul Mack Sennett and the tale of his Keystone studio and comedians.

Faber and Faber, London, November 2003
Faber and Faber/Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, February 2004

Prologue: That Ragtime Band.

In Hollywood did Mack Sennett a stately pleasure dome decree: It was to be, in his own words, “the greatest monument in the world… Lasting, made of granite and marble, and as big as all outdoors.” 304 acres on a mountaintop east of the Cahuenga Pass were purchased in 1925, and a top Los Angeles architect, John De Lario, was commissioned to prepare the plans. A blueprint and drawings were produced, and then a model, of a great mansion, in the Spanish style, with white stucco walls and tiled roofs. A series of courtyard loggias were to be paved with handmade tiles, and the patio would have a stone fountain and brightly coloured Mexican tiling.

The sloping hillsides on either side were to be landscaped into hanging gardens, with terraces, statues, waterfalls and paved walks. An ingenious irrigation scheme would utilize the water from the fountains to flow into the lower gardens and the 40 by 75 foot swimming pool. The interior of the estate would consist of a vast two-storey living room with full projection facilities, a library, dining room, conservatory, kitchen and servants quarters, with four guest rooms, each complete with its own fireplace, private bathroom and porch.

There would be a special apartment for Mr Sennett’s mother, Catherine Sinnott, of Danville, Quebec, who would move in, if not permanently, during the long Canadian winter months. The house was to “look well from all sides – there is no front of the house, and it can be seen from the entire San Fernando Valley and the country surrounding.”

This was perfectly befitting a Hollywood legend, a man who had risen from the lowest ranks to become the master of the largest movie studio in Los Angeles, employer of hundreds of actors, film directors, camera and sound men, crew and staff, inventor of the most popular comedy brand in the world, producer, director, writer and, in the early days, actor in his own productions, possessor of a personal fortune claimed to be as high as fifteen million dollars in the mid-1920’s. A man who had acted on the maxim he had declared in February 1917:

“All creative intellectual work consists of the development of individuality. 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.”

The very epitome of the American Dream, as it shimmered, in the first and second decade of the twentieth century, an era of enormous change and dynamism, when cities rose in tiered skyscrapers, transport, subways and trams proliferated, the Model T introduced the affordable personal car, technology took to the skies with the Wright Brothers, women smoked in public, played tennis and agitated for equal suffrage, immigrants continued arriving from all corners of the globe, and a new medium, which had crept its way into the bottom half of vaudeville programmes in the last years of the previous century, leapt forward to become the nation and the world’s most popular entertainment, the motion picture business. In 1917, it seemed at the height of its development both as an industry and an art form, and Mack Sennett was at its apex, having formed, in combination with two of the movies’ biggest operators, D.W. Griffith and Thomas Ince, an amalgamation which was intended to dominate the entire industry, and tie up the country’s stage and film talent in an unbeatable cartel, the Triangle Film Corporation.

All was flux and flow. Wrote Mack Sennett, in his house journal, the Mack Sennett Weekly, in April 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.”

Just as Sennett was writing this, 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 1920’s. Today, in another era of dynamic change, opportunities and dangers, great hopes and setbacks, it may be salutory 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, Ca. 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, leapt off tall buildings, plunged down waterfalls, and fell off a multitude of speeding vehicles onto the backs of their necks in the performance of their daily duties.

Some of these men and women became famous – and notorious – beyond the confines of silent comedy, like Charlie Chaplin, “Fatty” Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Gloria Swanson, Harry Langdon. Others were as well loved in their day, the ubiquitous “clown princes” and “princesses” of comedy: moustached Chester Conklin, cross-eyed Ben Turpin, clumsy Louise Fazenda, Charles Parrott (later to be Charley Chase), Phyllis Haver, Mack Swain, Charlie Murray, Andy Clyde, Billy Bevan, Larry Semon, Al St. John, Slim Summerville, Hank Mann, Jimmy Finlayson, Fred Mace and the Big Chief of the Keystone Kops themselves – among his many masks – Ford Sterling. Many were stars in their own right, in Keystone’s prime, while others cavorted as eternal sidekicks, comic foils, kops and kaperers in the Sennett follies. Cigar in mouth, their employer and tormentor watched from his high tower, in the midst of the lot, or often lay, buck naked, in his office bathtub, thinking up new ways to make comedy pay and build up that great personal fortune.

The monument to his endeavours, alas, was never built. While Mr Sennett dawdled over architect De Lario’s blueprints, dreaming his fond dreams of setting his life in stucco, the money drained away from his enterprise, as, in Hollywood’s Bergsonian flux, it lost ground to competitors in the changing fashions and appetites of more sophisticated audiences than he had ever tried to please. Then, in 1929, the stock market crashed, and the fifteen million dollars gladly invested in the unstoppable future of American capital suddenly melted into thin air. The master dodged and weaved and manoeuvred to save his business, clawing his way back for a short while in the world of Talking Pictures before the market waves washed over his head once and for all, and bankruptcy finally beckoned. By 1933 there was nothing left of the empire that had been Mack Sennett’s Keystone, and then Triangle Pictures, and then Mack Sennett Comedies.

The house on the hill remained a paper palace. All that remains atop the mountain today is a television transmission range and a sign, first erected in 1924 as an advertisement for real estate developers Woodruff and Shoults to highlight their new planned neighborhood – “HOLLYWOODLAND.” The sign was constructed of letters 50 foot high, covered with four thousand 20 Watt light bulbs. By 1949 it had become a ruin, and all the lightbulbs had been stolen or smashed. It was rebuilt, with the last four letters shorn off, and then, in 1978, renovated again to attain its present iconic status.

“HOLLYWOOD” abides. But Mack Sennett’s true monument lies hidden in history’s shades.

 

 

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