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Buster Keaton: Harry Houdini
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Biography: Joseph Frank (Buster) Keaton was born into a family of vaudevillians. Joseph, his father, did an eccentric dance act and his mother, Myra, danced and played the saxophone. He was the oldest of three siblings; he had one brother, Harry (Jingles), and a sister, Louise, both of whom would later appear with the rest of his family in some of his movie shorts. Buster joined his parents' act at a very early age. It soon developed into the roughest act on vaudeville, with Buster's father hitting his son with brooms and other objects and throwing him around the stage. This is where Keaton learned his amazing falls and stunts.
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Keaton was born into a vaudeville family. His father was Joseph Hallie Keaton, a native of Vigo County, Indiana. Joe Keaton owned a traveling show with Harry Houdini called the Mohawk Indian Medicine Company, which performed on stage and sold patent medicine on the side. Buster Keaton was born in Piqua, Kansas, the small town where his mother, Myra Edith Cutler, happened to be when she went into labor.
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Joseph Frank Keaton was born on October 4, 1895, in Piqua, Kansas. He was the eldest of three children, including a younger brother and sister, born to two vaudevillians, Joseph Hallie Keaton and Myra Cutler. Shortly after his son's birth, Joseph Keaton changed his son's name to Joseph Francis Keaton. He received the nickname "Buster" while still an infant. Allegedly, Keaton suffered a nasty fall, but displayed a nonchalant reaction to it. This was witnessed by the magician Harry Houdini (or, some say, actor George Pardey), who christened the hearty boy Buster.
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Keaton credited Harry Houdini, who was his godfather, with dubbing him "Buster" after seeing him, at the age of six months, tumble down a flight of stairs without injury. At the time, the word "buster" either meant "bronco-buster" or a fall. It was only after Keaton was nicknamed the word became a name — one example of this early use is the comic strip character Buster Brown.
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Joseph Francis Keaton [W]as born on October 4, 1895, the year in which cinema, too, was just beginning. His parents were members of the Mohawk Indian Medicine Company, a travelling vaudeville show, along with Harry Houdini, escapologist extraordinary, and were in Kansas when the baby arrived. Joe H. Keaton was Irish (although maybe with some Indian blood) and a former Wild West adventurer and journalist, whose stories lost nothing in the telling. With his tiny wife Myra, the pipe-smoking, card-playing, musical daughter of a travelling showman, he presented a knockabout acrobatic comedy act into which their son was absorbed shortly after the baby crawled on stage one night to the delight of the audience.
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Keaton acquired the nickname "Buster" in his youth. Popular legend has it that one day before a vaudeville performance, a very young Keaton was walking down a flight of stairs, but tripped and fell down the entire flight and broke his nose. Keaton got back up. On seeing his courage, Harry Houdini, who was present, said to Keaton's mother that he was "quite the little buster". Although Houdini did tour with the Keatons, he did not join up with them until Buster Keaton was well beyond infancy, and it is likely that the nickname was given by some other fellow vaudevillian.
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