Ollie: Go ahead and drink your half. (Stanley drains the entire glass.) Do you know what you’ve done? What made you do it?
Stanley: I couldn’t help it. My half was on the bottom.
—“Men O’ War” (1929)
Born in England, Stan Laurel started out as a stage actor (once Charlie Chaplin’s understudy) but in 1914 moved to Hollywood to pursue film. After many silent shorts, he discovered an onscreen chemistry with a portly funnyman named Oliver Hardy. In 1927, the pair would formally become the famed comic duo Laurel and Hardy. As the thinner, mopier straight man, Laurel starred in no less than 106 films. He is best remembered for The Music Box (Academy Award winner, 1932), Way Out West (1937), and Babes in Toyland (1934)—and for Laurel and Hardy’s now evergreen catchphrase: “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
FANS WERE OFTEN SURPRISED to read that Stan Laurel was the polar opposite of the madcap smarty-pants he played on screen. In interviews, he was a thoughtful, intelligent, soft-spoken man. He would make time for any fan. He did the unheard-of by keeping his phone number listed. He would answer any call, reply to any letter. He seemed a true gentleman.
But when anyone who knew Stan Laurel personally heard this, they would laugh and tell you that that was really his best performance yet. In actuality, Laurel was a total maniac. Especially when it came to women. Laurel was a hard-drinking, chain-smoking reveler, but “impulsive” couldn’t begin to describe his adventures in matrimony. He amassed four wives, one of whom he married twice, and the third of which he had to marry on three separate occasions to avoid charges of bigamy. He invited his first wife on his honeymoon with his third—on a private chartered yacht, no less—and divulged that fact to Wife Three only when Wife One showed up at the dock.
It all seems very difficult to keep track of, even more so when you are drinking a ton of whiskey—which Laurel constantly was. By 1938 his vices and sins reached their apex (or nadir, depending) when a perfect storm crossed his path: this in the form of Wife Three, a “Russian opera singer” named Vera Illiana Shuvalova. A twenty-eight-year-old firecracker who somehow managed to make Laurel seem temperate.
The couple had met the year before, when Shuvalova auditioned at a Laurel and Hardy casting call. They were married on New Year’s Day, 1938. Within mere months, Shuvalova had racked up two DUIs, a few stints in jail, a reputation as the most belligerent woman in greater Los Angeles, and a disorderly conduct charge for the unusual crime of “loudly discussing the Russian situation with herself.”
In actuality, Laurel was a total maniac. Especially when it came to women.
Laurel was hardly the steady hand to guide her. He, too, got pulled over for a DUI that year, and apparently he was dead set on one-upping his wife in a campaign of the ridiculous. He told the cops he wasn’t drunk, just upset about a fight with his new bride, who had “a terrific temper.” Things had gotten so heated that she had assaulted Laurel with the base of a telephone and further threatened to hit him with “a frying pan of potatoes.” This account bore a striking resemblance to the plot of an old Laurel and Hardy movie. He was arrested in short order.
At their inevitable divorce hearing later that year, Vera Shuvalova would state the obvious: Stan’s frying-pan story was just a desperate attempt to avoid public embarrassment and getting fired by the studio. But if avoiding bad publicity was his goal, Laurel failed in a spectacular fashion. Indeed, “another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
A bitter Shuvalova would tell the court and the world, “Hell yes, Laurel was drunk.” He’d been drinking all day. In fact, not only was he drunk, he had beaten her and threatened to kill her. “And was not just any kind of death, your honor.” He dug a grave in their backyard and told her to get in so he could bury her alive.
Naturally, the story made the front page. Stan Laurel’s contract would be terminated by the studio within the year. After the whole mess was done, he built a high wall around his house and posted a sign: ALL ATTACKING BLONDES WILL BE REPELLED ON SIGHT. Then he married Wife Two again.
A mere decade into his career, Charlie Chaplin’s place in the pantheon of film legend was already secure, and he knew it. At the time, most of his films (in fact most films in general) were improvised from a basic idea or a title. Chaplin would simply go through each bit over and over until he found something that inspired him, usually with the camera rolling. But as his fellow directors became more sophisticated, Chaplin felt compelled to keep pace.
Although he’d been directing films since 1914, 1925’s The Gold Rush was, astonishingly, his first feature with anything resembling an actual written outline. The movie tells the story of the 1896 gold rush at the Klondike pass. Chaplin had originally planned to shoot the film on location (another then-novel idea), and indeed, he arrived in Truckee, California, in early 1924 with every intention of doing so. Director Eddie Sutherland was serving as producer and was charged with rounding up extras for a marching scene that would open the film. A relentless perfectionist, Chaplin insisted that these men be the same homeless drifter types that had struck gold at Klondike twenty years earlier.
Sutherland spent a week in Sacramento corralling as many as he could find. He rounded up five hundred of them.
In order to gain the men’s trust (and because Sutherland was something of a boozer), he insisted on drinking with them every night. This gesture the homeless men appreciated, until it became clear the production had not brought nearly enough liquor. Without missing a beat, they were all soon drinking Sterno (Sutherland included), strained through a sock and diluted by water. Sutherland feared he might be dead before they even reached Truckee.
But somehow he survived. The “hobos,” as Chaplin called them, cheered their star when he arrived on location in his tramp costume, and very quickly he subsumed their pathos into his character. It was a stunning performance. And Sutherland’s near-death bonding experience had been worthwhile. Until a few weeks later.
Hotel employees had been whispering about the sixteen-year-old lead, Lita Grey, going into Chaplin’s suite every afternoon for “rehearsals.” (Supposedly Grey was the model for Lolita thirty years later.) Then she became pregnant. With jail as his alternative, Chaplin was forced to both marry her and replace her in the film. The entire movie would have to be reshot from scratch, with a new lead.
When the cast reconvened, it was on a studio lot in Los Angeles, and only a single shot from the first shoot ended up in the final film. Not that the new location solved anything. Soon enough, Chaplin was schtupping both the replacement lead (Georgia Hale, far more age appropriate at twenty) and Sutherland’s girlfriend (eighteen-year-old Louise Brooks). It was a hell of a thank-you.
OPENING IN 1935, just a few doors down from Musso & Frank, the proprietor was a free-wheeling Texan named Stanley Rose. A first-rate storyteller with a face raked by whiskey, Stanley swore he had never read a book, and yet he owned and operated the best bookstore in Los Angeles. This was a man of appetites: for drinking, gambling, and whoring; for hunting and fishing; and quite possibly for literature and the company of the men and women (but mostly men) who created it. His bookstore serviced all the big studios; every name producer, director, and star had a charge account and an open ear for Stanley’s latest bestseller.
But colorfulness and clout aside, what was talked about most was Stanley’s generosity. A disinterested businessman at best, he staked his pals whenever they needed it. Writers not only ran up huge bills at the bookstore, but Stanley would often cover their tabs next door at Musso’s, where all they had to do was sign Stanley’s name.
Not surprisingly, there was a back room at Stanley’s, an art gallery that also served as a clubhouse for Hollywood writers who aspired to be more than hacks: Nathanael West, Budd Schulberg, John Fante, Dalton Trumbo, William Saroyan, Gene Fowler, among others. The gallery featured modernist art, original Picassos and Klees mixed in with local artists like Fletcher Martin. At this home away from home, writers would sit and drink the orange wine Stanley served up by the pitcher. As Budd Schulberg said, “In those pre-hip-expresso-bongo days, Stanley’s was the nearest thing to a Left Bank we had out there.” They talked about politics, about women, about all that was wrong with movie work. In fact, so writer-friendly was Stanley’s back room and the back room next door at Musso’s that together they inspired the title of Edmund Wilson’s, The Boys in the Back Room: Notes on California Novelists.
Sadly, by the time Wilson’s book was published, the Stanley Rose Bookshop had already closed. A victim of Stanley’s laissez-faire accounting style, it was shut down in 1939, little more than a month after the publication of his good friend Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust—a masterpiece that not only mentions the bookstore, but captures so well the seamy underside of Hollywood that Stanley Rose adored.
IN ADDITION TO BEING an art gallery, the back room of the Stanley Rose Bookstore was a place for writers to talk and to drink. The beverage served was orange wine, poured from a pitcher.
That many of the writers who congregated there shared a fondness for booze is widely accepted, as is their dislike of the film business. Raymond Chandler perhaps put it best when he noted, “The very nicest thing Hollywood can think to say to a writer is that he is too good to be only a writer.” Not that they were drowning their sorrows, but it isn’t hard to imagine a lot of pitchers went down.
Harder to know is exactly what the orange wine was.
Today, there are at least three different types of alcohol that are considered orange wine. The first kind of so-called orange wine has nothing to do with oranges. Essentially white wine, it is made by letting the grape juice ferment with the skins after crushing. Also called “skin-contact wine,” it has an orange hue. Popular in the U.S. since around 2009, this orange wine can be found at wine shops and on restaurant menus. Many people consider it a pleasant middle ground between a rich white and a light red, others just an annoying trend. There is no recipe, just buy a bottle, take it home, and drink it.
The second kind of orange wine is again white wine, though with the addition of orange peel—this version has been popularized by culinary personality Laura Calder.
The last kind of orange wine is actually made from the juice of oranges, as opposed to grapes. You can do this with virtually any fruit: blackberries, pears, plums, cherries, pineapples, etc. Somewhat complicated to make, the process can take months. It is hard to know, but easy to imagine, that Stanley Rose and his pals would never have had the patience.
1 BOTTLE OF WHITE WINE (DRY IS PREFERABLE)
1 MEDIUM ORANGE
⅓ CUP OF SUGAR
First, empty out a little of the wine so it doesn’t overflow. Pour it into the sink or into your own wine glass. Then, zest a whole orange, avoiding the bitter white pith. Push the zest into the mouth of the bottle, and pour in the sugar. Recork, then shake by turning the bottle upside down, so as to dissolve the sugar. Refrigerate for one week, being sure to shake once a day. Strain into a pitcher and serve cold.
