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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
Between them they made more than 440 films and became as inseparable in the public
mind as Morecambe and Wise, yet Hollywood never valued Laurel and Hardy equally.
Each was manoeuvred into signing his own individual contract and advantage was
taken of Hardy's relative lack of education. Even as late as 1935, he was conned
into accepting a fee of $86,000, against Stan Laurel's $156,000.
Laurel was the brains of the outfit, the inventor of gags, sometimes effectively
the director. So perhaps he deserved more. But neither was as funny in the rare
movies each made alone. They were a team but over the years Ollie was royally
screwed in Tinseltown. Thats the message that emerges from this engrossing dual
biography by Simon Louvish, who has already done similar service for W. C. Fields
and the Marx brothers.
His problem, never entirely solved, is how to describe comedy without killing
it dead on the page. As each film feature or short is related in detail, the
attention begins to wander. Far more successful are the dialogue exchanges, which
capture the real, undiluted Laurel and Hardy flavour. The author succeeds admirably,
however, in rubbishing suggestions of homosexuality in these artists who frequently
crossdressed on screen. It was a vaudeville convention that the boys simply took
aboard without a thought - as innocent as Charley's Aunt.
Hardy, at least, was Ollie’s real name, although he was officially Norvell
Hardy. Stan, though, was originally a Jefferson from Ulverston, near Barrow-in-Furness
in Lancashire, who didn't formally adopt the name Laurel till 1931. Steeped in
the British theatrical and music-hall traditions, he gravitated to America in
1910, on the same boat as Charlie Chaplin. Stan and Ollie's paths did not crow
until 1921 in the short The Lucky Dog.
They began as silent stars whose trademarks (Stan's blubbering, Ollie's be-twiddling)
defined their characters. Stan was a baby who needed mothering, Ollie a Southern
gentleman masking his embarrassment behind a veneer of savoir
faire. But neither image reflected the real man. In reality, both had endless
trouble with multiple wives and finished by owing them more in maintenance and
alimony than their movies were earning them.
Their love lives, indeed, were a disaster area. Time after time they were drawn
to harpies and Furies. Hardy married thrice and divorced twice. His first wife
was so jealous of his on-screen kissing scenes she attacked him with a knife.
When she went home for her father's funeral in Atlanta, Ollie gave her a one-way
ticket and wired her on arrival not to come back. He had no better luck with
his second wife, who became a chronic alcoholic adept at hiding the hooch behind
the toilet.
As for Stan, he had one live-in lover, four wives, five marriages and, as a precaution,
seven weddings, it never being entirely clear whether the ink had been dry on
the divorce settlements when he remarried. Wife number two became (and unbecame)
Mrs Laurel twice; wife number three, former Russian countess and noted lush Vera
Ivanova Shuvalova, fled when she found Stan digging a ditch in the garden. What
for, she asked. "To bury you in, Shuvalova", came the frank reply.
Their careers petered out in the end because their brand of comedy was overtaken
by something snappier and more sophisticated. Screwball comedy, as epitomised
by Bringing up Baby and The Awful Truth belonged unmistakably to the sound era
whereas Laurel and Hardy were relics of the silent screen.
They gave the talkies a run for their money, unlike Harry Langdon, Harold Lloyd,
Larry Semon and Buster Keaton, all of whom failed the microphone test. None of
these artists, when sound came, said anything as oddly memorable as Ollie's "Here's
another fine mess you've goden me into."
Laurel and Hardy were not radio artists but they peaked in the radio age. The
arrival of television seemed at first to finish them (too old, too fat, too slow).
Yet in the end it gave their vintage work a new lease of life. In the Thirties
and Forties, each new Laurel and Hardy film came and went and was seldom revived.
On television, video and DVD their work has found a new appreciative audience
among younger people. Stan and Ollie (Stanio and Ollio, in Italy to this day)
have proved immortal after all.
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