Eyes. Enormous eyes, the size of headlights. They belong to a waif, a very waiflike waif, barefoot, button-nosed, a large tear spilling down her cheek. The waif has evidently wandered into an archetypal waifish haunt, here, a claustrophobic alley; she looks at the viewer with a presentiment of abuse.

Little Miss Goggle Eyes is not a teratological specimen that escaped from a pathologist’s pickle jar. She is Keane’s Runaway, and like the other big-eye Keane oils that achieved such monumental popularity from the 1950s to the early 1970s, the style is thrift-store expressionism. As for the content…well, according to art critic Kenneth Baker, “Keane paintings are just as manipulative and just as formulaic, and also as impervious to irony as most pornography is.”

But as cultural archeologist Jim Morton points out in Pop Void, Keane kids were the true pop art, much more a mass phenomenon than Warhol’s Brillo boxes or Lichtenstein’s exploded comics. Keane waifs appeared on collectible plates, were re-created as “Little Miss No Name” dolls, sold by the million as greeting cards, and hung inside the United Nations as well as the salmon-colored bathroom walk of the booboisie. Spurious big-eye prints sprouted like toadstools. A hack named Gig specialized in moony-eyed mongrel and alley cats; Eve transformed big-eye kids into precocious go-go dancers.

Now the saucer-eye orphans have lost their paternity. For more than 30 years, ex-realtor Walter Keane sold himself as the progenitor of the Keane kid. But as a result of several acrimonious trials, Walter’s ex-wife Margaret has been judged the true and lawful originator of the kitsch creations. If Margaret Keane and the judicial system are right, Walter Keane has perpetrated a humbug of monumental proportion. The legally disgraced Walter Keane vows that he is the victim of an international ring of art forgers, a devious religious organization, and a crooked and spiteful ex-wife.

Throughout the 1960s, Walter Keane was wealthy and famous, the toast of entertainers and politicos with sublime aesthetic aspirations. Hardly a week passed by without Walter Keane devising a way to get his name and photograph in the news. An old “school chum” from United Press International would hurry by Keane’s home to pose Walter, five brushes in hand, in front of a half-completed big-eye canvas or play paparazzo as Walter hobnobbed with Joan Crawford, Dinah Shore, the Beach Boys, Dean Martin, Eve Arden, Jerry Lewis, Kim Novak, Natalie Wood David Rose, Don Defore, Wayne Newton, Red Skelton, and Nelson Rockefeller — all proud owners of Keane kids.

Today Walter Keane lives alone in a rented La Jolla cottage, a rheumy-eyed and arthritic 76 years old (a self-published art book erroneously puts his age five years younger). He intersperses winking remembrances of “painting, drinking, and loving” with vitriolic accusations against ex-wife and nemesis Margaret Keane.

“I knew all the big shots, Dali, Picasso, they were all my friends. One time in Paris, Picasso was throwing a big party and I was there. I took a canvas and put it up on an easel and I laid down ten 100 dollar bills. I said, ‘Master, that’s for you and your girlfriends. All I want you to do is put X, Y, Z on there and write Picasso.’ He thought I was making fun of him. Joan Crawford, she introduced me to one of my first great loves, Miss Chivas Regal. And she threw parties for me, introduced all the Hollywood stars to my work.

“I had this long bar in my Woodside [California] home, it came around the horn; Red Skelton tried to buy it for 4000 bucks once. Seventeen people could sit around my bar room. The Beach Boys, Maurice Chevalier were guests there. Howard Keel and all those guys. We’d have parties until four in the morning. Dinner, drinks, anything they wanted. Always three or four people swimming nude in the pool. Everybody was screwing everybody. Sometimes I’d be going to bed and there’d be three girls in the bed. I took a photo once of three of the girls there. Crazy, wild!”

Although he claims a nagging shoulder injury prevents him from painting, Mr. Keane has spent the last decade writing and rewriting a yet-to-be-published memoir he has titled The Real Love of Walter Keane. The manuscript is an extraordinary mixture of sexual braggadocio, mystical communications with the dead, monumental self-pity about the torments of the artist, and astonishingly delusional patches of self-inflation, culminating in Michelangelo’s necromantic election of Walter Keane to the Elysian Gallery of Artistic Immortals.

Autohagiography of a Defeated Man

The following summary of the manuscript The Real Love of Walter Keane reflects only Walter Keane’s version of his life story, a version that contains plagiarism, bizarre supernatural episodes, faulty chronology, and certain claims that have been successfully challenged in court.

The Real Love of Walter Keane begins in rural Nebraska during Walter’s childhood, as he vies for parental attention among 14 siblings. He fondly remembers his grandmother, who instructs Walter at the age of five in how to paint a rose. The autobiography suddenly skips 30 years — barely a mention of Walter’s schooling or ten-year career in real estate speculation, except for his epiphany away from the world of business signaled by the onset of crippling stomach pain.

As I listened to the birds sing, staring fixed-eyed and watching them fly freely away, I lifted my arms toward them and cried out, “Please wait; I am one of you!” I closed my eyes. Then came the spark. My dazed, feverish request was answered. I realized that my innate artistic talent had been locked in my brain and my body for all these years. Feeling a sudden strength and conviction, I knew that a new life had begun.

Walter flees like a bird to Paris in 1946 with his first wife Barbara, who soon returns to the familiar comforts of California, leaving Walter to pursue a bohemian life of drinking, loving, and painting. On a significant side trip to Berlin, Walter discovers the sight of “frightened, neglected, and often abused children.”