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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
Catch ‘em when they’re young – as the Jesuits know – and
they’re yours for life. If your first memory of comedy is the lovable double-act
of Laurel and Hardy (‘Senor Thin’ and ‘Senor Fat’ to
their Mexican fans), as in my own experience and that of the author of this sympathetic
study, then it tends to be indelible. When I was young, thin, baffled and dreamy,
I imagined that I was Laurel; now that I am old, fat, crotchety and struggling
to keep my dignity, I know that I am really Hardy.
Those of a younger generation may not have been quite so fortunate in such early
exposure. So this exhaustive, if never less than entertaining, examination of
the lives and work of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy is a timely reminder of their
supreme status. Indeed it deserves to spark a revival. The BBC has already made
this Book of the Week on Radio 4 and there was a brief season of Laurel and Hardy ‘shorts’ on
television over Christmas – which is at least a start.
Every child should be given the opportunity to discover afresh the eternal joy
of their sheer friendliness. As Spike Milligan recalled: 'From the moment I saw
them on screen, I knew they were my friends.' Friendship is the key to Simon
Louvish's perceptive understanding of their genius. In film after film, as he
says, 'the evidence reveals the high artistry of the fine delineation, the multifold
variations on the theme of the endurance of friendship against every possible
encumbrance'.
Hold on, you might say, ain't this a bit highfalutin? But Louvish catches himself:
'Not all of us can be as dumb, and as smart, as Stan Laurel at one and the same
time.' And, as the author explains, it took a long time for Stan himself to achieve
this paradox. An Englishman, he was born Arthur Stanley Jefferson, the son of
an itinerant actor-manager, at Ulverston in North Lancashire in 1890, and trod
the boards from an early age. Initially, he recalled, 'I wasn't sure what sort
of comedian I wanted to be'. This head-scratching hesitancy dogged him for years.
Early in his career as a knockabout solo comedian, Stanley was billed as 'He
of the Funny Ways'. In Fred Karno's troupe of British comics that set out to
conquer America in 1910, Stan was overshadowed by the egocentric Charlie Chaplin.
Disillusioned, he returned to the English variety circuit.
When one of Karno's managers bumped into Stan in London, he asked him if he was
starring in the West End. 'Starving in the West End, more like it,' came the
reply. Soon, he was back in America and gradually making a name for himself in
films. One of his finest gags had the meek Stan being defenestrated twice by
a couple of Western tough guys; on the third occasion he duly dived out of the
window without being thrown.
In 1921, in a film called The Lucky Dog, he bent over to tend to the canine m
question and his bottom happened to come into contact with a portlier
posterior. It was a suitably basic introduction to 'Babe' Hardy, as he was then
known. Babe was from the Deep South. His father, a tax collector turned hotelier
who had been wounded with the Confederate Army in the Civil War, had died in
1892, before his son's first birthday. A photograph of the infant bears the unmistakable
Hardy hallmarks: the charming moon face, cheerful if quizzical eyes and just
a hint of the celebrated catchphrase to come - 'Here's another fine mess you've
gotten me into.' Without overdoing the pathos, Louvish shows how the echoes of
the derisive cries of 'Fatty' in the playground would not fade for Hardy. As
the author says: 'We should never underestimate the desperation of the fat'
Happily, though, the book is largely free of psycho babble. We learn that Hardy
began his career as manager of a small cinema before switching to front-of-camera
work as a comic'heavy'. His partnership with Laurel did not really take off until
1927 - almost the end of the silent era, though their rapport with each other
and the audience made the transition to talkies seem effortless. The statistics
of their careers are staggering: Between them they made more than 440 films,
including 32 silent shorts, 40 short talkies and 24 features as a team.
Louvish wears his intensive research lightly, and is satisfyingly
sceptical about the selective memories of romancing old codgers such as the producer
Hal Roach who, having managed to outlive all his contemporaries, revelled in
rewriting Hollywood history. Yet though Roach may have exploited Laurel, who
was the brains behind the whole operation, the 'creative tension' between the
two of them yielded the vintage Laurel and Hardy classics of the Thirties.
How delightful it is to be reminded of such masterpieces as Big Business (in
which Stan and Ollie wreak mayhem upon their manic, moustachioed foil, Jimmy
Finlayson, for refusing to buy a Christmas tree), Our Relations (ere the boys
ingeniously played two sets of twins) and my own favourite, A Chump At Oxford,
featuring Stan's Wodehousian turn as Lord Paddington. The pair's comic adventures
on screen are so absorbingly evoked that they seem to represent the real story,
whereas the chaotic entanglements of their private lives appear to be some absurd
fantasy. I found it easy to lose track of the eight (or was it nine?) marriages
between them and all the messy divorce suits.
Laurel, for example, was divorced twice from the actress Virginia Ruth and in
between formed an unwise alliance with Iliana Shuvalova, an erratic Russian 'Countess'.
Her lawyers claimed she had discovered Laurel digging a hole in their backyard.
When she asked him what the hole was for, he is supposed to have replied: 'To
bury you in, Shuvalova.' It was counter-claimed that Shuvalova had tried to sock
Laurel with a skillet. Eventually police had to be. called when she caused a
disturbance in a theatrical agent's office. 'She just keeps on singing,' the
agent complained. 'That's a lie,' said Shuvalova before bursting into When Irish
Eyes Are Smiling.
Hardy fared little better. According to the divorce lawyers, his first wife attacked
him with a knife and on one occasion kept him up all night with her nagging after
he had apparently been 'wrestling all day with a cow'.
Setting aside such shenanigans, my affection for Laurel and Hardy never wavered.
It is reassuring to know that, although they didn't see much of each other off
the set, they were true and loyal friends and remained utterly free of airs and
graces. As Louvish points out, Stan and Ollie were essentially childlike. Like
the great clowns they were, they showed us 'the terrified infant in us all'.
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