Now is the winter of our discotheque. Last night I finished Simon Louvish's Keystone, chronicling the rise, fall, and eventual demise of Mack Sennett, a most tragic Hollywood figure once revolutionary then rendered mediocre by the passing of time--a fate that befell many of his silent-film contemporaries. For those not familiar with the name, Mack Sennett was one of American cinema's first successful comedy producers/directors, and certainly the most prolific of his time. His Sennett Studios launched the Keystone Cops, the Sennett Bathing Beauties, and the film careers of Charles Chaplin, Ben Turpin, Chester Conklin, and Mabel Normand (who herself was the victim of scandal then neglect, then early death). Sadly, his juvenile slapstick irreverence proved no match for evolving tastes, and by the sound era, he was finished. Add to that an unrequited love for Ms. Normand (a character trait Louvish disputes), and you've got the standard tear-wrencher, meticulously researched. For added entertainment I heartily recommend Sennett's own memoirs: short on truth, long on fantasy, but with a flow like Chardonnay and a punch like Pabst Blue Ribbon.

One question I was left with after Keystone is: What is this strange preoccupation British biographers have with sexual orientation? Last year I read Kenneth Lynn's Charles Chaplin And His Times, and I swear ta God the author couldn't get enough of weighing the evidence. Chaplin? Gay? Hello? Where have you been? The dude's heterosexuality has been well documented not only in interviews but also in frikkin' FBI files and court transcripts! The man was a sexual beast; no barely legal pigtail was safe once it bobbed past his crosshairs. He lived in a world fascinated by the scandalous adventures of his aging dick. Simon Louvish is no different, contemplating Mack Sennett's peccadiloes, all unproven (Mack is not known to have ever lived with a woman other than his mother, though he was witnessed squiring actresses about town) or mere teases made ambiguous by the passing of almost a century and the cattiness of the anonymous storyteller's tongue. Louvish devotes the book's entire coda to an exploration of Mack's sexuality. Did he really love Mabel Normand, as he repeated often in his own memoirs, where even the contemporary reader can feel the aching of his heart, or was it just an interesting chip that he added to his legend, to mask the fact that he loved the cock? Lovish's conclusion: Who cares? Exactly. Who cares? Why the hell give it a whole chapter?

There's something seriously wrong with the English. Except Sue Ellicott. She wouldn't judge Mack Sennett too, would she?