BiographySilent film director Mack Sennett called himself the King of Comedy, and he ruled a country where everything happened at breakneck speed, a land of gurning grotesques and gorgeous bathing beauties, of spectacular pratfalls and custard pies in the kisser, of exploding Tin Lizzies and, of course, of armies of inept, insane, indestructible policemen.
And when Sennett's parade had gone by, he spent 30 idle years haunting Hollywood Boulevard and planning the grand comeback that never happened, a reproachful reminder of an age that was essentially more innocent, and a warning to Tinseltown's new royalty about hubris and a reluctance to change with the times.
Not that the maven of movie mayhem was himself an innocent. In the 1920s he ran with a fast crowd of hard-drinking, coke-snorting hedonists and was thought to be, in some mysterious way, involved in one of Hollywood's greatest scandals, the never-solved murder of director William Desmond Taylor in 1922. On his deathbed in 1960 Sennett confessed to the killing, although this was probably yet another provocative fantasy from an inveterate teaser who lied about almost everything as a matter of course.
From Rex Ingram and Maureen O'Hara to Liam Neeson and Colin Farrell, Ireland's substantial Hollywood presence has been proudly documented over the years. Rather less attention has been paid to those movie personalities who, though born in the US (or, in Sennett's case, Canada), came from pure post-Famine Irish stock and displayed traits that are popularly accepted as being Irish. James Cagney, with his playful charm and strutting dance style, would top any such list, with Sennett not far below. He was born in 1880, his grandparents - Sinnotts and Foys - arriving in Richmond, Quebec, in the mid-1840s from Co Wexford. In 1897, his family moved to Connecticut and soon afterwards Michael Sinnott became Mack Sennett, vaudeville singer and comedian. In 1908 D.W. Griffith's Biograph studio hired him as a movie performer, scriptwriter and director, but Griffith had little interest in comedy and Sennett launched his own studio, Keystone, in 1912.
Keystone gave Charlie Chaplin his first movie break, and Sennett's roster of clowns included Fatty Arbuckle, Ford Sterling, Harry Langdon, Chester Conklin and the fantastic cross-eyed acrobat, Ben Turpin. His most enduring leading lady - in life, according to legend, as well as in his films - was tomboy Mabel Normand, who was also implicated in the Taylor mystery (it was known that he had been supplying her with drugs, perhaps giving Sennett a motive for the killing). Normand and Sennett never married, and while their supposed romantic relationship was the subject of a 1974 Broadway musical, Mack and Mabel, biographer Simon Louvich suggests that Sennett was discreetly homosexual.
Sennett stripped comedy down to its barest essentials and his films anticipated the animated cartoons that came into vogue just as he was becoming unfashionable. Leading ladies were dewy-eyed, heroes brave and foolish, villains dastardly moustache-twirlers. Racing to the rescue, the Keystone Kops suffered multiple pile-ups, were dragged along the road as human daisy-chains and wrapped themselves around lamp-posts, but were seldom injured, let alone killed. A typical Sennett gag would be a man pushed off a cliff, falling hundreds of feet, and then getting up to dance around with rage and shake his fist at his assailant. There is a streak of Irishness in this kind of macabre "impossible" humour; just a few years ago Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan killed off Father Larry Duff in grotesque accidents in most episodes of Father Ted, resurrecting him unharmed the following week.
As movie comedy became more subtle and open to Freudian interpretation in the mid-1920s, Sennett's world fell apart, and his work was seen as raw and naive. He was, says Louvich, incapable of acknowledging "the hidden power of sex, the shadowy impulses of the soul and the spirit, moral ambivalence and the self- destructiveness of desires".
Piecing together the true facts of Sennett's life was no easy task. The secretive old showman wrote a boastful and revisionist autobiography, King of Comedy, in 1954 that is almost complete tosh, and all the friends and co-workers from his days of glory are long dead. So Louvich had to be as much a detective as a biographer, painstakingly sifting through the lies and making deductions based on clues he amassed, a remarkable way to present a portrait of someone who died only 43 years ago.
Much of Louvich's theorising is very entertaining, but Sennett threw up so many smokescreens that by the end of the book he still remains elusive, a flickering black-and-white shadow of a man. And I'm sure that's what he would have wanted. There is one curious omission: Louvich fails to mention Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Cops (1955), a dreadful film notable only for the iconic appearance of Mack Sennett in one scene - white-haired and sprightly and, if I remember correctly, disdainfully throwing a custard pie. It is a moment that says plenty about what he had represented all those years before, and what he had become.
The enigmas and contradictions of Sennett's life inevitably stay mostly unexplained - a studio boss who was also a terrible businessman, a sophisticated and educated man who thrived on the lowest kind of comedy, a lover of beautiful women who was probably gay, a wild success who became an embarrassing failure, a creature of the light with, perhaps, a heart of darkness.
Stephen Dixon is a journalist and artist
Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett By Simon Louvish Faber and Faber, 352pp. £20