Whenever he sobered up, he was stricken with delirium tremens. In the nightmarish hallucinations that typically accompany this condition, he was attacked by bloodthirsty squirrels. According to rumor, he escaped from his straitjacket while in a psychiatric hospital, performing the great trick he had learned from Harry Houdini as a boy. In 1933, somebody sent him to dry out in the seclusion of Arrowhead Springs in San Bernardino, a nurse called Mae Scriven in tow to supply “the right amounts of whiskey so I wouldn’t go nuts and hypodermics to put me to sleep.” After a week of enforced temperance, he absconded to Mexico and married Scriven in accordance with some drunken, japing impulse. (Marrying your nurse must always be a sign of full-scale psychoanalytic catastrophe.) They soon divorced.

The screwball humor that came in the dust of the Depression and after the end of silent cinema often revels irrepressibly in the sound of speech itself: puns, comic accents, wolf whistles, sly one-liners, devilish loquacity, seductions sung with tongue in cheek, anarchic contortions of flirtatious, professorial, and gangster talk. You can find all of this friskily embodied in the verbal shenanigans of Groucho Marx and even in the to-and-fro routines of lesser lights like Abbott and Costello. Against that, Buster’s humor can look glassy, slow, and luminously strange, like ballet.

Dreaming of Buster’s voice is a natural activity. Some peculiar flutter in the mind always makes you lend voices to silent things. A sudden pall of sadness is perhaps natural, too, on hearing it for the first time, as he doesn’t produce the angelic mumble you might imagine but the parched groan of something that lives in the dark. In a high-spirited moment from Doughboys (1930), he sings and plays ukulele with two other soldiers before lights out, providing a basso punctuation of rhythmic gibberish while one of his pals takes the lead with an utterly bewildering and ecstatic outburst of half-drowned scat singing that suggests the yowling of a hungry cat.

If you collect photographs of Buster, you soon notice how rare it is to see him in color. In those you can find, he looks as if he’s the subject of one of those fin-de-siècle hand-tinted portraits of a dead body that Victorian families cherished so intensely. There’s a ghoulishly thrilling painted snapshot from 1930: clown make-up drools exuberantly over his tragic face while Lon Chaney (who died that year) looks at him askance from his own portrait like a mean-spirited saint. In another shot from the same sequence, Buster appears in a vest—athletic, aglow, like he’s escaped from the pages of a fantasia by Jean Genet.

Between jobs during this bleak period in the 1930s, he was taking pratfalls on the streets for cash and drinking with tramps. In another sanatorium, he was subjected to “a reasonable facsimile” of the Keeley Cure: “Nurses and doctors do nothing but pour liquor into you, giving you a drink every half-hour on the half-hour. You get your favorite snort all right, but never twice in a row. Instead they start you off with whiskey and on succeeding rounds give you gin, rum, beer, brandy, wine—before they get around to the whiskey again. … When you plead, ‘Oh, no! Take it away please!’ all you get from your bartenders and barmaids in white coats is a friendly smile. ‘Please take it away,’ you repeat, ‘it hurts my stomach.’ ‘Just one more,’ they say, for their purpose is to make the hurt in your stomach grow until it becomes unforgettable.” There’s a blackly comic rhythm to this episode of aversion therapy that’s uncannily close to the circumstances in some of his films. All those doctors recall the hundreds of policemen pursuing poor Buster in Cops (1922), the wicked two-reeler that concludes with him locked up and his porkpie hat lying on a tombstone. In Hard Luck (1921), heartbroken and penniless, he repeatedly attempts to kill himself but always fails. On a darkened road he lies in the path of two looming headlights only for it to be revealed that the beams belong to a pair of motorcycles. In a rich man’s kitchen, he spies a bottle marked “Poison,” not knowing that a crafty dipsomaniac waiter has filled it with whiskey. As soon as he guzzles down that favorite snort, he swaggers off, then gets lost in the wilderness. The lurid horrors of his round-the-clock drinking in the sanatorium acquire an extra brutal kick when you learn that drenching the patient in alcohol was meant as only one part of the Keeley Cure, a turn-of-the-century treatment that seems to have been concocted in a medicine show performance of vulpine promise and pharmacological make-believe.

Leslie Keeley’s “Gold Cure” was struck upon as a commercial enterprise in 1879, claiming to conquer tobacco habits, opium addiction, alcoholism, and neurasthenia. “Fatty” Arbuckle might have submitted to a similar treatment when he beat his morphine addiction during World War I. The cure was a tonic of mysterious provenance that contained “Double Chloride of Gold,” strychnine—commonly purveyed as rat poison—and apomorphine. This mixture supposedly replenished the cells that had grown dependent on the addict’s favorite substance. The tonic could be purchased through mail order for patients who wished to kick their habit at home, but it was more often administered by injection, four times a day, at a Keeley Institute. By the end of the nineteenth century, every state in America had one of these institutes for the treatment of addiction and some had as many as three.3 Upon admission, alcoholic patients were supplied with as much drink as they could stomach before being inducted into a four-week program of temperance and strictly regimented calm that forecasts the pastoral conditions of modern rehabilitation centers.

But Buster was subjected to a maimed version of the cure that sounds especially sadistic and effectively dragged him through the wild terror of a waking nightmare. Aversion therapy attempts to infect the patient’s memory with dark associations between what they crave and its effects so that, eventually, out of sheer revulsion, the desire might be conquered. Rates of relapse were high among those who underwent the Keeley Cure in its proper form, even if contemporary accounts sound breezily triumphant or like so much circus barking: “They went away sots and returned gentlemen!”4 Buster was obliterated by the warped version of the cure he received twice in quick succession, and the second attempt was successful but not in the supernatural fashion that Keeley’s huckster advertising often claimed. Straight out of the sanatorium, he performed an act of private significance: “I walked to the bar and ordered two manhattans. I drank them one after the other. … I did not touch a drop of whiskey or any other alcoholic drink for five years.”