EPILOGUE

Going Bye Bye

The Church of the Hills in Glendale, on 27 February 1965, must have looked like a house full of live ghosts. Buster Keaton was there, and Andy Clyde and Clyde Cook, and the studioless Hal Roach, and Roach stalwarts Patsy Kelly and Babe London. Joe Rock and Leo McCarey stood by as the second half of the grand act was eulogized. ‘The halls of Heaven must be ringing with divine laughter,’ said Dick Van Dyke.

Others had already departed. Jimmy Finlayson died on 9 October 1953, also of a heart attack. He lived alone, but breakfasted every morning with an old friend, actress Stephanie Insall, at her home. When he didn’t arrive one morning she called, to find him dead. A fellow Mason, his funeral rites were held at the same Masonic Chapel as Oliver Hardy’s. Old stalwarts Mack Sennett, Billy Bevan, Hank Mann and ‘Snub’ Pollard were on hand to say farewell to Fin. Of them, only veteran Keystone Kopper Hank Mann was alive at Stan Laurel’s death. Hank outlived Stan by six years.

Jimmy Aubrey, the oldest of all the old-timers, born in 1887, lived on till 1984. Billy Bletcher, another great survivor, of Vim vintage, died, aged eighty-five, in 1979. Of the ladies, Dorothy Coburn, who made Babe fall in the mud hole in Putting Pants on Philip, and Anita Garvin, peerless at chasing a cherry round a plate, were long lived, the former checking out aged seventy-two, the latter handing in her plate at the ripe age of eighty-eight in 1994. Billy Gilbert died of a stroke aged seventy-eight in 1971. Charlie Hall had preceded Stan, departing in 1959. Edgar Kennedy had bowed out even earlier, aged fifty-eight, in 1948. Tiny Sandford, the cop with the triple takes and the useless notebook in Big Business, checked out in 1961. Charlie Rogers succumbed to a traffic accident in Los Angeles in 1960. Leo McCarey survived Stan by four years. Joe Rock died in 1984.

Of all the survivors, Hal Roach was the most stubborn. Like Adolph Zukor, the Hollywood pioneer who clung to the vital force until 1976, aged a hundred and three, Roach battled on, to have many a last word. When the press announced that Roach had died, aged one century, in 1992, it might equally have proclaimed, ‘Hal Roach Resumes Production’, or ‘Hal Roach Set to Break New Flight Record.’ The man who had started out driving trucks in Alaska in the kind of environment Charlie Chaplin was to lampoon in The Gold Rush had survived almost to the threshold of the twenty-first century, to the brink of the Internet age. He was single-minded, ambitious, politically naive, but in tune with the mass audience’s hunger for comedy. His was, indeed, a fabulous life, in the course of which he had created a consistent world, a comic legacy that has not been surpassed.

As for the personal partners:

Lucille Hardy remarried, to a retired business man, Ben Price, and lived on until 1986. Myrtle Hardy, despite her continued alcoholic condition, survived to the age of eighty-six, and gave up the ghost in 1983. Of Madelyn Hardy’s date of death we have no verifiable record, as she faded out of the tale with her plaintive telegrams of the late 1930s.

Virginia Ruth Laurel appears to have remarried three times since her marriages to Stan Laurel, hitching up with Messrs Block, Gates and White (consecutively); the last named signed on in 1960. She died in 1976, Stan’s daughter Lois remaining close to her to the end. According to John McCabe, Mae Dahlberg, still calling herself Laurel, died at the Sayville Nursing Home in New York State in 1969. A year earlier, he had interviewed her and received the tale of the laurel leaves of Scipio Africanus. ‘That’s how he got his name,’ she insisted. ‘It was that simple.’

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Ida Kitaeva Laurel died in 1980, aged eighty-two. She had continued living in the Oceana apartment in Santa Monica, standing guard over Stan’s memory.

Stan’s first wife, Lois, was the last to depart, at the age of ninety-four, in 1990. She was resident with her daughter at the time.

The merry-making Illiana’s fate is less certain. Where she went, whom she married, divorced, remarried, drove crazy, remains outside our tale. A San Francisco death certificate records the decease of a Vera I. Ivanova on 7 February 1994. Her birth is noted as 6 November 1897, which would make her just over ninety-six years of age, another strange affirmation (which might have delighted W. C. Fields) of the preservative powers of alcohol.

And so they have all departed, both stars and supporting cast, leaving behind the usual jigsaw puzzle of memories, oral and inscribed. But beyond the memories there are the works, the living art of the movies, which the actors, technicians and producers churned out for fun and profit. Just two-reelers, Stan Laurel insisted, and a dash of feature films, made in the exigencies of ongoing business. At most, he would concede, a craft.

All the comedy practitioners of old saw it the same way. Working men and women, they turned up in the morning for their call and did the job they knew best how to do. None – not even Chaplin – aspired to the pretension of an Eisenstein or a Stanislavsky who would write books explaining the methodology of the film director or the actor. At most, they would propose some general rules of thumb, like a brief exchange between Stan and Oliver quoted in a Sight and Sound article by film historian David Robinson in 1954:

 

STAN: Keep a semblance of belief, however broad. Let your gags belong to the story: you must have a reason to motivate everything.

OLIVER: The fun is in the story situations which make an audience sorry for the comedian. A funny man has to make himself inferior …

STAN: Let a fellow try to outsmart his audience and he misses. It’s human nature to laugh at a bird who gets a bucket of paint smeared on his face even though it makes him miserable.

OLIVER: A comedian has to knock dignity off the pedestal. He has to look small – even I do by comparison. Lean or fat, short or tall, he has to be pitied to be laughed at.

STAN: Sometimes we even feel sorry for each other. That always gets a laugh out of me – when I can feel sorry for Babe. OLIVER: Me too, when I can feel sorry for Stan.

 

In our day, we have become very wary of that emotion – pity, an old centrepiece of the idea of compassion which has been philosophized into an out-dated oblivion. We are not allowed to feel pity for our fellow humans, lest we be accused of feeling superior to them. In a world that worships equality – in theory, if not in practice - the object of pity now more often rejects it, demanding not an emotion, but the delivery of a material compact. This may well be the apt shape of our political requirements in the ‘global village’. But the clowns have always frolicked in that part of our existence that material needs alone cannot satisfy. Unlike priests, rabbis, mullahs, or any kind of pastor, the clowns offer no succour in certainty, no solution or balm in an afterlife. In the here and now, they offer themselves, as sacrificial spirits, as objects of that part of our compassion that can realize the common flaws in us all. In Stan and Ollie we can pity ourselves without the reproach of self-aggrandizement. A king can look back at a cat. None of us can be totally certain that we can walk down the street without falling in the manhole. It’s funnier if it happens to them than to us. Cruelty, too, is a part of comedy, but it is cauterized, with comedy’s fire. It is no wonder that the early Christians forbade the sacraments to actors, who usurped the role of spiritual mentors. Nor that comedy is the most proscribed form of social comment in any dictatorship, past or present. Chaplin’s lampoon of Hitler might have been disproportionate in the light of the horrors unveiled after the act, but it was a necessary element of the removal of fear. Once a tyrant is laughed at, and booed in the street, as Romania’s Ceauescu was in his last day of power, nothing is left but retreat and the fall.

If I appear to have made extravagant claims for comedy, it is because, in my own life, as, I am sure, in many others’, comedy has had a major part in buoying up the spirits against the inevitable setbacks of life. Like Preston Sturges’s ambitious but innocent movie director, Sullivan, my travels take me back to those earliest moments when funny things happened on a silver screen, and could be relied on to continue happening.

They appear to be trivial, and the comic practitioners, as always, eschew anything other than the urge to amuse and entertain. But remember that the great artists of our age, who are garlanded with radiant and detailed tributes, the Picassos, the James Joyces, the Pinters and Becketts, have all lauded, and been touched by the movie clowns of our times. In Samuel Beckett’s seminal modern play, Waiting for Godot, first performed in 1955, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting along a country road –

ESTRAGON

I told you I wasn’t doing anything.

 

VLADIMIR

Perhaps you weren’t. But it’s the way of doing it that counts, the way of doing it, if you want to go on living.

 

ESTRAGON

I wasn’t doing anything.

 

VLADIMIR

You must be happy too, deep down, if you only knew it.

 

ESTRAGON

Happy about what?

 

VLADIMIR

To be back with me again.

 

ESTRAGON

Would you say so?

 

VLADIMIR

Say you are, even if it’s not true.

 

ESTRAGON

What am I to say?

 

VLADIMIR

Say, I am happy.

 

ESTRAGON

I am happy.

 

VLADIMIR

So am I.

 

ESTRAGON

So am I.

 

VLADIMIR

We are happy.

 

ESTRAGON

We are happy … What do we do now, now that we are happy?

 

VLADIMIR

Wait for Godot.

Stan and Ollie knew all about waiting. Waiting on street corners, on park benches, on the wharf, in cramped boarding rooms, in customerless shops, at the employment office, in jail. Opportunity, and prosperity, is always just around the corner …

Battered by an incomprehensible world, Stan and Ollie may be burdens to each other, but they are yoked together by the mysterious force of friendship. As they dance off into the sunset, realizing that all they were waiting for was each other, we can hear the echoes of Ollie’s plea in Towed in a Hole: ‘Here we are, two grown men, acting like a couple of children. Why, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves … Let’s put our brains together so we can forge ahead! Remember: united we stand; divided we fall!’

And let the pratfalls go on.