The New Yorker has a nice article about the enduring appeal of Buster Keaton's work. Adam Gopnik wrote it reviewing two new books on Buster and it's worth reading but some of us are puzzled by this one passage…
In 1933, he was fired by Louis B. Mayer, essentially for being too smashed, on and off the set, to work. Keaton's M-G-M experience, despite various efforts by Thalberg and others to keep his career alive as a gag writer, ruined his art. The next decades are truly painful to read about, as Keaton went in and out of hospitals and clinics, falling off the wagon and then sobering up again. His brother-in-law, the cartoonist Walt Kelly, recalls that "nobody really wanted to put him under control because he was a lot of fun."
Walt Kelly was Buster Keaton's brother-in-law? I consider myself something of an authority on both men and I never heard that. I checked with Walt Kelly's son Peter and he never heard it either. You'd think he'd know.
One might also note that during the period discussed — the years Keaton was in and out of hospitals and clinics — he was in Los Angeles and the cartoonist Walt Kelly who drew the Pogo comic strip was in Connecticut and/or New York. And nowhere in Kelly's voluminous writings have I seen any mention of Buster Keaton. So what's the deal here?