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

Original manuscript text of essay published in The Guardian, 12 October 2001:

STAN AND OLLIE -
“ TALL OAKS FROM LITTLE ACORNS GROW.”
By Simon Louvish.

(Laurel and Hardy, in these dire times? Surely not! Or might it be that, precisely in hard times, the old familiar clowns can deliver the balm that politicians, pundits, clerics of all stripes, wise visionaries and seers fail to provide? )

The place is Harlem, Georgia, on the first Saturday in October. A small town about twenty miles from the Southern city of Augusta. Founded by railwaymen who wished to live in a town which would observe the Christian Sabbath and ban all hard liquor, it is still today a quiet place, akin in some ways to the mythical Scottish town of the musical Brigadoon, in that it seems to slumber through most of the year and come awake in a sudden dynamic burst for one day, to celebrate the annual Oliver Hardy Festival.
The first sight of Harlem from the road tells you all you need to know – emblazoned on the white water tower, the smiling face of our hero and the legend:

HARLEM, BIRTHPLACE OF OLIVER HARDY.

As you slow down for the traffic lights at the turn into Main Street a great multi-coloured mural greets you: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy wearing their signature bowler hats, beside a smaller picture of them leaning against the grand-piano crate featured in their classic movie short, The Music Box.
In fact the house in which Harlem’s most famous son was said to have been born is embarassingly missing, as the building on 125 South Hicks Street was torn down, some decades ago, to be replaced by “OLLIE’S LAUNDRY.” Unabashed, Harlem’s nearby Town Hall is happy to guest the jamboree: Thirty thousand people descending on the town to watch a regular old-time style parade: Vintage motor cars, the local fire brigade, Georgia cadettes and majorettes, stilt-walkers, the Civil War re-enacters, Boy Scout Pack 105, Thomson town Shriners, Master City Cloggers, Country Kickers, the mayor on a float with the Oliver Hardy lookalikes. Sons of the Desert, the loyalists of the largest fan club in movie clowndom, are on hand in their short pants and fezzy hats. Craft booths, Laurel and Hardy t-shirts, the Miss Oliver Hardy scholarship pageant, and a chicken barbecue in the fire station.
Oliver Hardy would certainly have been tickled pink. It was his kind of South that was being celebrated – open-hearted, fun-loving, friendly, with a warm welcome for strangers who’ve come from afar to honour the Favourite Son. But the stronger the sunshine, the deeper the shadows, and this was not always a happy place…

Standing in a Harlem graveyard, among green lawns, in a neat plot, urns of fresh flowers beside two old tombstones. The inscription is faint, barely readable:

OLIVER HARDY – born December 5 1844 – died November 22 1892.
CORNELIA E. MAGRUDER 1846-1888

And therein lies a tale:
Oliver Hardy, senior, was a Southern farmer of English stock, whose father owned thirteen acres and nine slaves in Columbia County, Georgia, at the time of Oliver’s birth. In 1861, when war broke out with the North, the farmers of Columbia County mustered to defend their way of life as Confederate soldiers, fighting sixteen battles of the Civil War, culminating in Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Oliver Hardy was wounded at Sharpsburg, Maryland, on 17 September, 1862, in what became known as the Battle of Antietam. Of the hundred odd soldiers who mustered, almost half did not return home. Hardy’s comrades in arms, the two Magruder Brothers, sons of the local plantation owner, both died in the war. In 1870, Hardy married their sister, Cornelia, who lies buried beside him at Harlem.
Nevertheless, Oliver senior prospered, and became a politician, the Tax Collector of the town in Harlem, captured in print in the pages of the Columbia Sentinel, of 25 April 1885, in an image startingly similar to that of his famous son to be:

“…Oliver Hardy, Columbia (County)’s active and efficient Tax Collector… It is hard to resist that good open, jolly, funful face, round as the full moon, and covered all over with smiles, and a form as far from the idea of consumption as one ever saw, but evincing a very decided penchant for the consumption of the good things of the table, I think I have heard the boys say that Oliver was a good feeder. I do not know whether he `lives to eat or eats to live,’ but I do know that, with all this avirdupois, this Falstaffin figure, he is as polite and graceful as a French dancing master, a popular ladies’ man and is quite sure to kiss the babies about voting time..”

Two years after Cornelia died, Oliver Hardy married the widow of a railwayman, Emily, nee Norvell, the mother of four children from her previous marriage. On January 18, 1892, they were blessed with issue: an unusually large baby, whom they named Norvell Hardy.

Norvell was born at his mother’s folks’ house, in Harlem, but his father now owned a hotel in Madison, Georgia: the Turnell-Butler, OLIVER HARDY, PROPRIETOR: RATES $2 AND $3 PER DAY – SPECIAL RATES FOR PERMANENT BOARDERS. This sinecure did not, alas, last long, for on 22 November, with Norvell only eight months of age, Oliver Hardy senior dropped dead, probably of a heart attack, just three days short of Thanksgiving. The widow Emily had to leave the hotel, and turned to the managament of a series of boarding houses, moving from Madison to the town of Milledgeville, closer to the capital, Atlanta.

Childe Norvell therefore never knew his father, but his mother’s tales of the old Civil War rebel and stalwart county citizen must have sunk in deep, for as soon as he could proclaim his independence, at the age of eighteen, he changed his name to add that of his father, and became Oliver Norvell Hardy. In his boyhood, hanging about his mother’s boarding houses, he watched the travellers, vaudevillians and salespeople who passed through, observing their gestures and their foibles, the subtle body language that was to provide him with the prima materia of his later acting career.
From the first, this boy was fat. By his teens, he towered over his classmates, tall and wide, and had to endure the taunts of “Fatty,” the chidings that were inevitable for anyone seen as different in a small southern town, in a time of resegregation.

Laurel and Hardy fans have mostly steered clear of the implications of Ollie’s childhood in a racist environment at a time when racial killings and lynchings were everyday news. He never spoke of such matters. His few recollections in interviews revolved around his early love of music, his ambitions of being a singer, and the saving grace of the cinema, which entered his life when he took the job of projectionist/manager of Milledgeville first’s movie house, the Electric Theatre, in 1910.

There Oliver Norvell Hardy viewed hundreds of the mainly short dramas, educational films and comedies that spewed out of the plethora of movie studios, including D.W. Griffith’s ground-breaking Biograph films. There he would have seen the screen’s first major American comedy star, the rotund John Bunny, providing an unexpected role model. Three years later, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle proved even more powerfully that fat was not an obstacle to success – in the movies.

In 1912, several movie studios opened up nearby, in Jacksonville, Florida, rivalling the new studios in California, far from the industrial conflict in the east known as the “Edison Patent Wars.” Previous accounts have Hardy moving there directly from Milledgeville, but new research reveals that he moved first to Atlanta, and took a job as a singer at a variety hall, the Montgomery. There he met a Jewish lady pianist, seven or eight years his senior, Madelyn Saloshin, whom he married, in 1913.

The marriage to Madelyn Saloshin provides our only clue to Oliver Hardy’s inner self, his ideas and responses to the environment in which he was reared. The lore has it that mother Emily waxed wroth at this marriage, due to the difference in ages, and this caused the couple to elope and marry in another town, Macon, on November 13th. The history of Georgia reveals, however, that there was a more troubling aspect to this elopment, for, in August 1913, the State of Georgia put on trial a prominent Jewish factory owner of Atlanta, Leo Frank, for the rape and murder of a Catholic female employee, fifteen year old Mary Phagan.

The Leo Frank case has become known as the worst anti-semitic incident in American history: Every day, headlines lambasted the accused, whose Jewish identity was emphasized. Frank was convicted and sentenced to death, but appeals dragged the process on for two more years, until, in 1915, amid ferocious anti-semitic incitement, Frank was dragged from the penitentiary at Milledgeville and lynched before a baying crowd estimated at a thousand.

By 1915, Oliver and Madelyn had long left Georgia, for Florida, and, as far as I can ascertain, Oliver never set foot in Georgia again, until his dying day. The significance of his eloping to marry a Jewish wife, at the height of the publicity surrounding the Frank trial, seems clear: Oliver was sending a signal, to his family, and his town, that, as an outsider, he would choose an outsider’s mate. He would make his own life, in another place, redefining, and re-inventing himself. (And, in the process, divorcing Madelyn and marrying Myrtle Reeves, ill-fated to become a lifelong alcoholic and the burden of Ollie’s life until his third, happy marriage in 1940).
Nevertheless, Ollie never forgot his father, the “Falstaffin” figure of the defeated South, and, years later, when the character he was to play with Stan Laurel crystallised, lo and behold – Oliver Senior rises again: the genteel, Southern gentleman fallen on hard times, mindful of a lifetime of disappointments and setbacks, who despite it all, still preserves his dignity, however deep the muddy hole he might fall in…

In the interim, there would be a long learning process. Entering the film making business as an actor in Florida, in 1914, Oliver Hardy was to appear in over 270 short films (and some long ones), as a solo actor, before his serendipitous teaming with Stan Laurel, at the Hal Roach Studio, in 1925.
In September 1910, while Oliver was watching movies in Milledgeville, a passenger ship, the SS Cairnrona, was traversing a choppy Atlantic Ocean to land a troupe of British Music Hall artists in Quebec, from where they would take the train to New York, to begin the annual tour of the Fred Karno Company. The troupe included two young men who would transfer the germs of British Music Hall comedy to the American screen: Charles Chaplin and Stanley Jefferson.

Stan, too, was strongly marked by his father. Not, in his case, a tantalising absence, but a ubiquitous presence, a model both to emulate and to rebel against. Arthur Jefferson, who sired Arthur Stanley Jefferson, in 1890, in Ulverston, England, was a Manchester born actor on the “legitimate” stage, who became both a minor Victorian playwright and a major benefactor of the theatrical arts in the north of England. Opening and managing a string of theatres, A.J., as he was familiarly known, and his wife, actress Madge nee Metcalfe, brought London plays to a working class audience. A team of indefatigable energy, A.J. and Madge powered around the north, leaving young Stanley in the care of his maternal grandparents. The family later moved to North Shields, and thence to Glasgow, where A.J. took over the Metropole Theatre. He had already, curiously enough, experimented with a new medium, the moving pictures, having bought a projector – the “Royal Randvoll” – as early as 1901, to aid his productions on screen. The boy Stan, however, showed no interest in this gadget, fixated as he already was on the stage.

Stan’s debut, according to legend, was on amateur night at Glasgow’s Brittania Theatre (aka Pickard’s Museum) in 1906, when he donned his Dad’s castoffs only to find his father watching him from the front rows. A paternal tot of whiskey sealed Dad’s grudging approval, but A.J. was far from happy to see his son veer towards the frivolities of Music Hall. A.J. had given up his full length play-writing to concentrate on his managerial duties, but he still dabbled in short comedy sketches. It may have been in one of these, Home From the Honeymoon, that Stan made his first stage bow, even earlier than the Pickard experience. This was a piece of vintage flim flam about two honey-mooners who take up residence in the wrong house, unaware that two burglars have moved in after the owner, Colonel Pepper, has gone on safari to Africa. The two crooks have to dress up as servants, and one silly thing happens after another.

So taken was Stan with his Dad’s frothy sketch that it turns up twice in the Laurel and Hardy ouevre: Once as the script of the very first Stan and Ollie short, Duck Soup, in 1927, and again as a Talkie remake, Another Fine Mess, in 1930. This latter version attracted a sour response from its original writer, who told the British Magazine Picturegoer Weekly, in 1932: “I sent him a little sketch of my own, which they filmed under the stupid title of Another Fine Mess, and I didn’t like the American angle they got on it one bit.”
A.J. never completely reconciled to his son’s adoption of America as his new home, or of comedy as a lifetime career. He had tried to find Stan berths in “legitimate” theatre, Christmas pantomimes such as Levy & Cardwell’s The Sleeping Beauty, in which Stan appeared in 1907 as Golliwog Number Two. But Stan had his eye on the wilder shores of Music Hall, and the shows of Fred Karno.

“ Karno’s Speechless Comedians,” as they were called in the last decade of the 19th century, presented pantomime sketches that delighted audiences with a choreographed mayhem that mocked authority, police, and society. Jail Birds presented anarchy behind bars. Early Birds enacted the seedy criminality of London’s East End in a manner which Charles Chaplin, who joined Karno in 1908, recaptured in his famous 1917 short, Easy Street. The Wow Wows guyed upper class twits sixty years ahead of Monty Python. The most famous sketch of all, Mumming Birds, renamed for its American tours A Night at an English Music Hall, mocked the cruelty and vanity of audiences themselves, with its play within a play featuring the drunk – played first by Billy Reeves and then by Chaplin – who climbs on stage to disrupt the performance.

Chaplin was the star of the shows that Karno presented across America in 1911 and 1912, while Stanley Jefferson was very much a junior actor. When Chaplin left the troupe to sign with Mack Sennett’s Keystone films, late in 1913, Stan remained behind, in a crippled show which soon ran out of steam and disbanded, leaving the young comedian to form a succession of threesome acts with partners swept up along the way.
While Oliver Hardy was learning his craft as an actor, with a string of movie companies that took him from Florida to Hollywood in 1917, Stanley Jefferson eked out a fragile living in American vaudeville. He might have been tempted to return to England, but for the prospect of being swept up in the carnage of the First World War. America was a better bet. By 1915 his colleague Charlie had become world famous, his tramp character inspiring street songs and merchandising. “I’m as good as him,” runs the thought behind young Stanley’s ambitions.

Stan, however, failed to find fame and fortune on the vaudeville stage. The Keystone Trio, in which he imitated Chaplin, had a brief mainstream run. Another act, the Three Comiques, has left no record. A third, the Stan Jefferson Trio, was short lived. But in late 1916, or early 1917, Stan met a vigorous Australian comedienne, Mae Charlotte Dahlberg, with whom he formed his next act. As the lady had left a husband behind in the antipodes, they could not travel together under the Jefferson moniker. They therefore came up with a new name both for their act and themselves: Stan and Mae Laurel.

And so Stan Laurel was born, presenting, with Mae, a sketch called, among many titles, The Nutty Burglars, probably based on another of Arthur Jefferson’s old sketches. In 1917, Stan also appeared in his first movie, a vanished short entitled Nuts in May. Stan played a young man who thinks he is Napoleon, a role he reprised in a remake, Mixed Nuts, in 1925. But thinking it and being it were two different things: Over 90 solo Stan Laurel films were to follow, made for various producers (and shedding Mae along the way), in which Stan twists and turns as he attempts to escape from the shadow of Chaplin and create his own singular character. In due course, he found a long-lasting home at the Hal Roach Studios, which was overtaking Mack Sennett’s factory as Hollywood’s Comic capital.

Stan and Ollie first met on the screen in a curiosity, a two-reeler called The Lucky Dog, made in 1921. They then moved apart again, but, in 1925, both were signed to Hal Roach, in separate roles. Roach was building his comic repertory company, with such stalwarts as Edgar Kennedy, Tiny Sandford, Mae Busch, Anita Garvin, Thelma Todd and many others who were to support Stan and Ollie once they had hit their stride.

Stan’s early task for Roach was as director and writer, diligently honing his technical skills. Often Hardy appears as an actor in films directed by Stan, as in the bizarre Madame Mystery, starring the once-screen-Goddess, Theda Bara, as the carrier of a city-busting bomb (!), alongside that staple to be of Stan and Ollie pictures: Scottish Jimmy Finlayson – whose frustrated expletive, “Doh!” preceded Homer Simpson by sixty years.

When Stan and Ollie finally teamed, brought together by director Leo McCarey in 1927, the character Stan was labouring to create in his solo films, the frenetic, often Chaplinesque zany, disappeared, to be replaced with the amiable if stubborn fool whose goodwill is an engine of infinite disaster. Oliver Hardy, who had played a cornucopia of comic types, from standard beetle browed villains to fat drag ladies and even blackface butlers, discovered, in the folds of his own personal past, the gentle Southern man of affairs who knows that “there is always the right way and the wrong way to do things,” and then proceeds, for all the best reasons, to do the wrong. His sorrowful stare gazes at us directly from the screen, pleading: Why does life have to be so ornery?

Minor figures when separate, Stan and Ollie seemed to gel into a single organism, a perfect stand-in for all our own failures to live up to the way we know we should function in our own lives. “Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!” “Why can’t you be more careful?” and the most poignant: “Why don’t you do something to help me?!” speak for our own despair at things turning out the way they ought to be. Like all show people, once they had found an act which worked and was popular with the public, they locked it in, and kept their masks intact, give or take some minor efforts to kick over the traces now and then. And so Stan and Ollie remained constants, while the world changed around them: the silent movies gave way to the Talkies, the stock market crashed, the Depression came, war loomed and broke in Europe, and still Laurel and Hardy stayed the same. Generations turned, but they retained their charm. “From the moment they walked on screen,” said Chief Goon Spike Milligan, “I knew they were my friends.”

In You’re Darn Tootin’, made in 1928, supervised by master-director Leo McCarey and directed by Roach stalwart Edgar Kennedy, Stan and Ollie reprise the general human condition, and foresee the coming Depression, as sacked musicians who are thrown out of their apartment. They stumble down the streets, falling serially into manholes and making even a watching drunk guffaw at their poor efforts to stir up a lucrative tune. Frustration boils over in a long mutual bout of eye poking and shin kicking which culminates in one of their most spectacular acts of communal destruction: the tearing of trousers off every passer by, including the cop who rushes to the surreal scene of citizens debagging each other and pants flung wildly in the air. At the end Stan and Ollie walk off, packed into one outsize pair of pants, which they have ripped off a passing fatty, tipping their hats to us as they waddle off screen. Life is eternally absurd, and Man liable to revert at a moment’s notice to the naked ape he always was.
As Stan commented, with the eternal foolishness of the wise: “As ye cast your bread upon the water, so shall ye reap.”

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