NONFICTION - Jan. 21, 1996

BUSTER KEATON: Cut to the Chase by Marion Meade (HarperCollins: $27.50; 384 pp.). Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton was a cipher on the big screen--and in real life too, or so it seems from this new biography. Marion Meade, author of “Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?,” recounts well the facts of Keaton’s life but can’t get behind the stone-face mask; like many actors, he adopted a celluloid image that became first-nature to him, not merely second. Although considered a comic genius today, Keaton was underappreciated for most of his career, despite a successful childhood career in a violent vaudeville act (he starred as “The Little Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged”) and a succession of popular silent shorts, often in collaboration with his best friend, Fatty Arbuckle. Many filmgoers and filmmakers weren’t quite sure what to make of Keaton’s droll sensibilities, however; his ambitious classic “The General” (1927) was “the ‘Heaven’s Gate’ of the ‘20s,” according to Meade, and by the mid-1930s the star was a twice-divorced alcoholic has-been, at one point carted off to a psychiatric hospital in a straitjacket. Keaton would work frequently over the following four decades, often in terrible cinematic and television vehicles (“How to Stuff a Wild Bikini,” “Candid Camera”), making it easy to read this biography as a story of wasted talent. By then at least, said Keaton’s third wife, his artistic ego “might be the equivalent of a house painter’s”--a description that indicates both why he took on so much mediocre material and why this biography is often listless.