Eleanor Keaton

Eleanor Ruth Norris was born in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1918. Her father, a studio electrician for Warner Brothers, died in a fall from a scaffold in January 1929, aged 37. Her mother raised her and her sister on a small pension from the studio. Norris later said that she matured quickly after her father's death and became "a pretty direct and straightforward young lady". Norris took dance lessons as a child and dropped out of school at age 15 to join a nightclub act called Six Blondes from Hollywood, which toured internationally. At age 17, she worked as a dancer in the New York nightclub of Harry Richman, and also became a contract dancer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studios. She appeared in the chorus of several MGM musicals, including Born to Dance (1936) and Rosalie (1937). ==Marriage to Buster Keaton==

Norris became acquainted with Buster Keaton in 1938 when she was looking to improve her bridge game. Keaton was known as "one of the best bridge players in Hollywood", and a friend introduced her to the game at Keaton's house in Cheviot Hills. Norris later said that she sat at Keaton's bridge game a few nights a week for over a year without interacting with her host. One time, however, she snapped back at another player who "made a nasty remark" about a card she had played, and Keaton raised his eyes and noticed her. They dated for about a year before he proposed marriage. With his independent filmmaking career taken from him, two failed marriages, most of his money gone, and a history of alcoholism, Keaton, 42 years old when they met in 1938, was quite the opposite of the pretty and popular Eleanor, then aged 19. Keaton was working at MGM as a gag writer, producing comedy routines for the Marx Brothers and others at a salary of $200 a week. He spent his free time playing cards with friends. Though at first glance he seemed "old and sad and forbidding", Norris discovered that he was kind, gentle, and patient. She sensed that she could give Keaton what he needed: not just a wife, but "a combination valet, cook, housekeeper, bill payer, and constant reminder". John C. Tibbetts noted in his interview with her that she possessed "the kind of sturdy independence, inner reserve and genuine caring nature that must have appealed to Buster". Friends of both Keaton and Norris warned her against the marriage; she recalled: "They said he had had enough trouble in his life without adding me; and that I should go away and leave him alone". In his autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, Keaton wrote that his friends were more worried about him than Eleanor. But the couple went ahead and married on May 29, 1940. The couple moved into Buster's mother's home and Eleanor ran the household for the three of them. In a few years' time, Buster began supporting his sister Louise and brother Harry, along with Harry's wife and two children, who also moved in with them. Eleanor said that neither she nor Buster wanted to have children, explaining, "I figured I'd raised him and that was enough". Eleanor told Tibbetts that Buster was generally good about controlling his drinking, and that together they decided that he could have a "cocktail hour" before dinner. She said he drank two beers before dinner for the rest of his life. ==European tours==

As theater attendance decreased after World War II, MGM laid off its chorus members, including Eleanor Keaton in 1953. Eleanor accompanied Buster to all of his engagements and location shooting for his films. He performed in state fairs in Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Tennessee, and Alabama; in fact, it was on a return trip from the Kansas State Fair that Eleanor, driving while Buster dozed, stopped the car when she realized they were in Piqua and introduced him to the place he had been born while his parents were touring in a medicine show. The couple also traveled nearly across Canada for the filming of The Railrodder and the accompanying documentary Buster Keaton Rides Again. Eleanor was widely credited with rehabilitating Buster's life and career. In his authorized biography, Keaton, Rudi Blesh praised Eleanor for having buoyed her husband through career setbacks and encouraging him to keep plying his talents on television and in film. He wrote: [S]he has seen Buster Keaton through a long period of painful adjustment, relapse, and readjustment and a dozen partial comebacks. She has carried him, content and at times happy, across the threshold of his seventies. She has lived with the most difficult and tragic of human beings, the exiled and estranged artist. Through it all she has retained both love and admiration for him". In their leisure time, the couple played bridge, basketball, and went camping together. In 1957, Buster received $50,000 () from Paramount Pictures for the rights to his life story. Though The Buster Keaton Story (1957) was more fiction than fact, the money enabled Keaton to buy a ranch house on in the San Fernando Valley. ==Later life==

Buster Keaton died on February 1, 1966. After his death, Eleanor worked to ensure his legacy. She attended film festivals and film screenings celebrating his work around the world. Her presence at the second and third annual Buster Keaton Celebration in Iola, Kansas, in 1994 and 1995 helped legitimize the event. She was later honored as a recipient of The Buster, an award given by the International Buster Keaton Society. In 1995, the centenary of Buster's birth, film retrospectives and conferences were held in the U.S. and Canada. Eleanor attended events in Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Los Angeles, Muskegon, Michigan, and Piqua, Kansas. In June 1998, Keaton donated more than 900 items of her husband's personal memorabilia from 1938 to 1966 to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the urging of biographer Jeffrey Vance, who argued that these materials should be preserved in an archive rather than in the hands of private collectors or sold at auction. This memorabilia included "very early original vintage photographs from Keaton's infancy, childhood, and vaudeville days, as well as a Keaton family photo album of snapshots dating from 1909 to 1917". Keaton also gifted film stills and other memorabilia to the Buster Keaton Memorial Museum in Piqua. She contributed many stories and personal photographs to Vance for his 2001 coffee-table book Buster Keaton Remembered. Keaton also owned a pet shop and bred St. Bernard dogs descended from one of Buster's pets. Some of these dogs appeared in the Beethoven film series. After closing her shop in 1983, she volunteered as a docent at the Greater Los Angeles Zoo. She also served as a gag consultant for Hollywood filmmakers such as Mel Brooks, and was invited to speak at silent-film screenings, such as the annual Last Remaining Seats film series at the Los Angeles Conservancy. ==Memberships and affiliations==

Keaton was an honorary member of the International Buster Keaton Society and The Sons of the Desert, a Laurel and Hardy appreciation society. ==Death==

In October 1998, Keaton was hospitalized at the Motion Picture Relief Fund Hospital in Woodland Hills suffering from emphysema and lung cancer. She died on October 19, 1998, aged 80. Her remains were cremated. ==Filmography==

Eleanor Keaton's relationship with Buster Keaton is the subject of the 2022 semi-fictionalized novel Third Act by Kevin Mori, in which the two narrate alternating chapters. ==References==