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Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy
The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy.
Faber & Faber, London 2001; paperback 2002
St Martins Press, New York, 2002
Another fine biography we’ve got into.
To READ the opening chapters of Simon Louvish's exhaustive joint biography is
to be plunged into a bizarre but oddly recognisable world, crammed with megalomaniacal
film directors, picturebook female leads and beetle-browed heavies, at once turned
in on itself and infinitely expansive - the world of fledgling Hollywood. Take
away certain points of bitter realism- the lost millions and blown careers -
and what remains is the atmosphere of P. G. Wodehouse's 1920s American stories.
Farce and limitless possibility come neatly combined, wanting only the presence
of the freshfaced English idiot to give it substance.
Or perhaps the English idiot was already there. Stan and Ollie - Arthur Stanley
Jefferson and Oliver Norvel Hardy, to give them their baptismal names - arrived
in this world, if not by accident, then via an extremely circuitous route. Hardy
(born 1892) came from Georgia, where his father had worked as a plantation overseer
in the ante-bellum days; Laurel (born 1890) from Ulverston, Cumbria. The ancestral
roots were all Stan's. Jefferson senior was a theatre owner and impresario, and
Louvish's account of his son's early life provides a kind of gazetteer of turn-ofthe-century
English music hall.
In an era of split-second celebrity, the boys' ascent was painfully slow. As
Louvish points out, possibly a bit too exhaustively for the non-cineaste, their
eventual coming together in The Second Hundred Years (1927) followed a couple
of decades of solitary apprentice work. Stan had crossed the Atlantic as early
as 1910 with the legendary Fred Karno comedy troupe and spent years on the vaudeville
circuit. Shoehorned into "heavy" roles by dint of his physique (later
his weight went up to 300 1b), Hardy made hundreds of silent shorts before the
two turned up on the Hal Roach lot to await a casting director's inspiration.
The real proof of their talent - apart from the sheer visual oomph of the early
reels - lay in their ability to survive translation to the talkies. Having started
as universal comic archetypes, they soon found themselves dubbing dozens of foreign-language
versions of the same feature. Whatever the topicality
of the subject, though - in Below Zero, for instance, their 1930 Depression feature
- the initial impetus remained. Fumdamentally, Laurel and Hardy were a slapstick
variety act transferred to film. Stan, the pair's "creative" half,
was quite capable of reworking material devised by his father for the Lancashire
audiences of the 1890s.
As for the life offstage, some familiar routines present themselves. Stan was
the brains, originally directing Ollie before joining him on screen. Ollie modestly
asserted that "There's very little to write about me. I didn't do very much
outside of doing a lot of gags before the camera and playing golf the rest of
the day". A pageant of alimony hungry wives trails doggedly in pursuit (Stan
married his third, Virginia Ruth, three times), suits are filed and miseries
drowned. Perhaps the most poignant moment comes in the anniversary cards fervently
exchanged by Ollie and his alcoholic second wife, Myrtle, in the early 1930s
("Valentine greetings to the sweetest little Baby in the world"). Mve
years later, Myrtle was sticking out for $2,500 a month in maintenance.
What made Stan and Ollie funny? As well as arriving onscreen fully formed, so
that their characters needed no further development, they also contrived constantly
to subvert the accepted formats of lead-man and stooge, each capable of turning
the tables. But, in the end, a combination of creative exhaustion and changing
styles brought them down. By the time of Atoll K (1951), their curious final
feature about a refugee community on a desert island, they were physically past
their best: Stan a diabetic, Ollie showing the heart condition that would kill
him six years later.
A huge posthumous cult survives. In the manner of cinematic labours of love,
Louvish's study occasionally descends into whimsy and is rather too fond of plot
recapitulation. But, unlike many another book about professional comedians, it
has the singular advantage of never forgetting that its subjects were funny.
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