worked as a real estate salesman and painted on the side. He would later tell reporters, however, that he had given up his "highly successful real estate career" in 1947. Margaret found him "suave, gregarious and charming." The two married in 1955 in Honolulu. Margaret said that he began selling her characteristic "big eyes" paintings immediately, but unknown to her, claimed it was his own work. The principal venue for his sales was the Hungry i, a comedy club in San Francisco. When she discovered his deception, she remained silent. She later explained her behavior: "I was afraid of him because he [threatened] to have me done in if I said anything." Margaret even publicly acknowledged him as the artist, while later claiming it was "tortuous" for her. She rationalized the situation on the ground that "[a]t least they were being shown." In 1957 Walter began exhibiting the "big eyes" paintings as his own. In February the work was shown on a wall of the Bank of America in Sausalito. He took nine paintings to New Orleans, which he claimed to have sold during Mardi Gras. That summer Walter arranged for a showing at the Washington Square Park Outdoor Art show in New York City. Displaying his talent for promotion, during that trip he arranged for a showing in August at the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago and another in a small East Side gallery for the same month. Walter began developing a myth about himself and to a lesser extent Margaret. He eventually began promotions of "The Painting Keanes." In the 1960s, Keane became one of the most popular and commercially successful artists of the time. Andy Warhol said "I think what Keane has done is just terrific. It has to be good. If it were bad, so many people wouldn't like it." A large painting commissioned for the 1964-65 World's Fair had a procession of doe-eyed waifs from the horizon to the foreground, where they lined up on a staircase. Art critic John Canaday described Keane as a painter celebrated "for grinding out formula pictures of wide-eyed children of such appalling sentimentality that his product has become synonymous among critics definition of tasteless hack work. [The painting] contains about 100 children and hence is about 100 times as bad as the average Keane." Robert Moses, stung by the resulting criticism, prevented the painting from being displayed at the Fair.