Twilight of the Vauds
Old actors never die, if their images remain. Before the cinema enabled us to preserve their best moments – as well as their worst – we could only guess at the impact great names of the past had on their audiences: David Garrick, the clown Grimaldi, Herbert Beerbohm-Tree, Sarah Bernhardt, Dan Leno, Little Tich, though of the last of these we have some flickering snippets of the motion pictures in their infancy. The past is still the most distant of countries, even though the movies have enabled us to view some of its quaint and outlandish customs. As for what happened off screen, we still have to grope away from the limelight, in the often misty memories of oral testimony, and into the archival records. As the story advances towards us in time, our heroes themselves step back into the shadows, celebrated as a kind of majestic absence.
A sombre sample of this retreat into the gloaming is Stan Laurel’s and Oliver Hardy’s last dedicated public appearance, in Ralph Edwards’s television show, This Is Your Life, aired live on 1 December 1954. A particularly ghostly apparition, preserved on fuzzy kinescope versions, this shows Stan and Babe being ambushed by the camera in their room at the Knickerbocker Hotel – to which they were inveigled by Bernard Delfont and Ben Shipman – and invited over to the El Capitan Theater on Vine Street, a block away, from where the show was being transmitted.
In the event, it took longer than expected to get the slow-moving Oliver Hardy to the theatre, causing one of those embarrassing moments of live television in which a desperate presenter all but dies on air as he attempts to ad lib his way through a faux pas. ‘Fifty million of your fans are eager to see your lives unfold,’ burbles Edwards, though Stan and Babe seem noticeably less keen, having looked forward to a quiet night in their hotel room. A bedraggled crew of old acquaintances is then trooped on, the most lively of whom are Leo McCarey and Stan’s daughter Lois. Stan graciously receives one Roland Park, who posed with him in his first public
photograph at the celebration of the relief of Mafeking in Dockwray Square in May 1900, and who reminisces about Stan’s first comedy appearances in his Dad’s ill-fitting long-tailed coat. Babe fails to recognize an elderly lady who is introduced as Mrs Horne, aka Alicia Miller, but she remembers him as a permanently happy and singing child in Milledgeville: ‘Instead of carrying my books, I carried his so that he could dance and sing all the way [to school].’
Stan and Babe were rewarded for their graceful patience, and a spot of on-screen hat switching, with a book of the proceedings, a 16mm sound projector, two pairs of cuff links, and some gew-gaws for the wives, who turn up at the end, to round off the surprise. It is, all in all, a depressing sight, and Stan was said to have complained, afterwards, about being caught unawares. As ever, he was well aware that in order to be the Stan Laurel the fans called for, Stanley Jefferson had to prepare his act.
Plans to revive Laurel and Hardy were still not completely abandoned. A BBC radio show, entitled Laurel and Hardy Go to the Moon, was scripted by British writers Denis Gifford and Tony Hawes, but this launch fizzled out when Babe’s ill-health forced the curtailment of the 1954 tour. A series for television was suggested in 1954, and in 1955 a series of one-hour colour films, under the general heading of Laurel and Hardy’s Fabulous Fables, was proposed for production with Hal Roach junior, who took over his father’s studios in Culver City. Roach senior had been transforming his studio for television production since 1950, and was an early prophet of its eventual dominance, but he could not compete with the networks. The best deal he could get in television was from his son, who bought the whole shebang from his Dad for a reputed $10,000,000.
The absolutely final public appearance by Stan and Ollie was as a filmed insert in a 1955 BBC programme celebrating the British variety organization, the Water Rats. Stan and Ollie reminisced about music-hall and ended with a farewell to their fans. It was, indeed, the last goodbye.
In June 1955, before the BBC recording, Stan suffered a minor stroke, which temporarily paralysed his left side. Although he was to make a good recovery from this setback, any further TV projects were shelved.
The vital organs were a major concern for Babe too, since his
British illness. In 1956, he became so worried about the impact of his excess weight on his heart, that he underwent a crash diet, which reduced his weight by 150 pounds. From a massive 350 pounds, he shrunk to 210, with the result that, apart from having to shop for new outfits, he was physically completely transformed: The last photograph of Stan and Babe together, in 1956, shows a recognizable smiling Stan, but beside him stands a stranger, relatively trim, with flabby flesh replacing his double chins, thin silvery hair and a rictus of a smile. The Ollie that we knew for so long has disappeared completely, in accordance with doctors’ orders and, with his vanished poundage, gone were any prospects of a revival of the act that depended so strongly on the physical contrast between the two.
John McCabe reports that friends of Stan and Babe who attended the last photo-shoot were so visibly upset by the total change Babe had undergone that he was terribly perturbed by their reaction, and became a virtual recluse from that day.
It is mightily ironic that Babe, who was always so self-conscious of his own weight and self-perceived ugliness, would suddenly appear shocking to his friends when he had, after a lifetime, suddenly shed the obesity that was the source of his pain. He must have been deeply touched, on his foreign tours, by the adulation with which both he and Stan were received, particularly in Britain and in Ireland. But it probably never occurred to Oliver Hardy that his fans actually considered him beautiful. Our classical standards of beauty are, of course, difficult to shake, but many might agree, I think, that Oliver Hardy’s inner qualities, that intangible charisma that makes us empathize with his long, despairing gaze at us in his moments of humiliation and folly, rendered him enchanting in body as well as soul. It is far from the sexual allure of a James Dean, but it still works its charms. Babe, the professional actor, was so used to the camera pointing at him, that he took it for granted as a tool of his trade. But it is, as it has ever been, a magical lens, which transforms frogs into kings.
Babe’s last few months of mobility were spent in a kind of seclusion, with only Lucille, Stan and Ida, Ben Shipman and a handful of close friends seeing him. On the morning of 14 September 1956, he suffered a massive and crippling cerebral stroke. The press announced:
Ex-Film Comedian Oliver Hardy, sixty-four, was admitted to St Joseph’s Hospital, Burbank, early yesterday after having suffered a stroke at his 5429 Woodland Avenue home in Van Nuys. Hospital physicians have termed his condition ‘poor’.
In the following days the newspapers reported a slight improvement, but he remained in the hospital for the next month. On 7 October, he was ‘taken off the critical list’, and, on the 13th, he was released in the custody of Lucille and a team of special nurses. Lucille brought Babe to her mother’s, Mrs Monnie L. Jones’s, home in North Hollywood. He was totally paralysed apart from minor movements of his left arm and leg, and could not speak. At some point, according to letters Stan later wrote to one of his regular fan correspondents in England, a cancer set in, which shrunk the once great frame even further, to less than 120 pounds, and he had ‘no hope for recovery’.
Even in this terrible time, with death hovering, the mundane troubles of the clown did not cease. Lucille related that a process server, sent by Myrtle in her incessant campaign for an acceptable alimony settlement, came one day in January 1957 to the door. On being informed of the circumstances of the ‘defendant’, the appalled man withdrew with apologies.
Stan himself was still in recovery from his own stroke, and his distress can be easily imagined. He asked to see Babe if he ever became lucid, and Lucille called him whenever hope beckoned. But Stan could only sit by Babe’s bed, trying to communicate in pantomime, trying to respond to the ever-so-slight fluttering of his partner’s eyes and fingers. The two wives left them to conduct whatever telepathic moments could be conjured up from the past.
Babe died, after a series of convulsive strokes, on the morning of 7 August 1957, at 7.25 a.m. Cause of death was recorded as ‘Acute Cerebral Vascular Accident’. Lucille told the press:
It was a blessing for Oliver. He is finally out of his suffering, and he did not suffer at the end. Oliver suffered another stroke Sunday, and a third, Tuesday, sent him into a coma from which he did not emerge. His heart just stopped beating.
An anonymous cutting in the University of Southern California’s Doheny Library files preserves this tribute, from the day after:
We mourn the passing of Oliver Hardy as the loss of a great American artist in that most difficult and rare of all dramatic achievements: the ability to make people laugh.
His medium was slapstick, in which the authentic masters are very rare indeed. For here the comedian must understand deeply the pathetic smallness of the human ego, its unconquerable vanity and extreme fragility.
To do this demands insight, humility and creative impulse. Performers without these qualities often succeed in what passes for sophisticated humor. But the supreme talent for generating the curative tonic of guffaws is reserved to the great clowns alone.
Oliver Hardy was unquestionably one of these.
He has left us the priceless legacy of resounding ridicule – devoid of malice – at pretension, false pride and conceit.
We accept it with the strange feeling that this is the first time Oliver Hardy couldn’t make us laugh.
A freethinker to the last, Oliver Hardy was given full Masonic rites at Pierce Brothers Beverly Hills Mortuary, at 1 p.m. on 9 August. The body was then cremated and the ashes interred in the Garden of Hope, the Masonic section of North Hollywood’s Valhalla Memorial Park.
Stan did not attend the funeral, apparently on doctors’ orders. The press quoted him as stating, ‘What is there to say? He was like a brother to me. This is the end of the history of Laurel and Hardy.’
Ida and Lois junior attended, to support Lucille, along with Ben Shipman, and a small group of old-timers: Jimmy Aubrey, Joe Rock, Dick Cramer – the hard-faced judge from Scram – Babe London – Ollie’s fiancee in Our Wife – Clyde Cook and Andy Clyde. Cameraman George Stevens joined Hal Roach and producer Harry Joe Brown, along with Babe’s Hollywood friends Adolphe Menjou and Wallace Ford. It was a select crowd, which represented two generations of Hollywood’s old guard.
And a great silence falls, in the Californian summer, as the survivor gathers his thoughts. Stan had moved from the small house he had bought with Ida in North Hollywood to a large house in Santa Monica (at 1111 Franklin Street), with seven rooms and twenty-four windows with venetian blinds, lawns and gardens. This house turned out to be too much to manage for two elderly retired people (Stan’s daughter Lois had married an actor, Randy Brooks, in
1948), and in the summer of 1957, Ida and Stan moved to a one-bedroom apartment at 254061/2 Malibu Road, forty feet from the ocean waves. From this address, and from the Santa Monica apartment at which he would spend his last years from 1958, 849 Ocean Avenue – a complex named ‘Oceana’ – Stan sent out a mass of letters to fans far and wide, but with a particular soft spot for those in his old home region.
Since 1952, during the British tour of that year, Stan had been corresponding with a Mr and Mrs Short, in Northumberland, England, who had caught Stan and Babe’s act at the Empire Theatre, Newcastle. The Shorts had sent Stan and Ida carnations, and he replied directly from the Empire, Nottingham, and kept writing them for the next twelve years. In 1957 the Shorts sent Stan a photograph of one of the old Theatre Royals and Stan answered, on 17 May:
I remember the old theatre that was on the same site which my Dad was running, it was a very run-down affair – benches instead of chairs, sawdust on the floors, cement stairs to the gallery, gas was the only lighting it had, it used to play old-time melodramas and was nick-named ‘The Blood Tub’. Anyway it used to do a wonderful business and the place was always packed … [Later] he invested a great deal of money & the new Theatre Royal was erected, the most modern theatre of its time – electric lighting, the floors were carpeted, tip up red velvet chairs etc … . Even had a nursery with nurses in attendance to take care of the children so the parents and others in the audience wouldn’t be disturbed during the performance …
These memories, and the echoes of the old days of music-hall, are recurring themes in many of these letters, some written to very old friends who had surfaced from even pre-Karno days. Trixie Wyatt, who had shared the stage with Stan in his first paid theatrical performance as the Golliwog Ebeneezer in Levy and Cardwell’s The Sleeping Beauty, in 1907, was the recipient of one of Stan’s responses to a Babe Hardy condolence letter, dated 26 August 1957: ‘Thanks for your sweet letter 18th inst. Yes, it was very sad about my dear partner Mr Hardy passing on … I shall miss him terribly … God bless him.’ Stan adds a comment about the situation in England, as seen from Los Angeles: ‘My sister told me about all the strikes going on over there – the world is unsettled, trouble everywhere, it’s shocking, everybody so restless & unhappy &
fighting each other. Things have sure changed from the happy times we knew.’ Stan was blotting out, nostalgically, all those shoeless miners’ children his Dad had to clothe out of his own pocket, but it was certainly a happier time when one was seventeen rather than a health-battered sixty-seven.
On 16 May 1959, Stan wrote again to Trixie Wyatt, replying to her information about one of the old Empire theatres being up for sale: ‘Yes, I’m afraid Variety is a thing past now. The TV medium of entertainment has taken its place, it costs less than going to the theatre & you avoid bad weather conditions & having to queue up possibly to see a poor show …’
Stan’s letters, unlike those of W. C. Fields or Groucho Marx, were not vintage samples of the clown’s wit seeping into the private as well as public life, but casual affairs, friendly notes to people who made contact with him as person to person, devoid of pretension or affectation. To another corresponding couple:
Dear Vic and Gladys,
Enclosed: Tape – symphony orchestra – thought you’d enjoy it … Got a big kick out of Tommy Gibson’s gag re the Castor oil – incidentally, it’s possible your dog is troubled with ‘WORMS’ not piles … You should check on this right away Vic.
The swelling dept. has finally gone away but am still bothered with the diabetic business – I finally decided to go into hospital for a thorough examination – the cost of the room alone is $35 per day, so can only afford a few days – am hoping no more than a week … This ‘Digitalis’ I understand is very fine medicine – frankly don’t know what it is but it sounds to me like an Indian Magician – ‘THE GREAT DIGITALIS’ who eats a bale of hay with the aid of a toothpick!! … Take care – God bless. As always –
STAN
This letter was written in July 1964, and Stan had already vented to the Shorts his sad thoughts about the assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963. So much had occurred and was occurring that was strange and alien to the jobbing comedian who had set out with the Fred Karno company to the ‘New World’ on 22 September 1910. In 1910 the Model T car was only two years old, and its wooden body was not replaced by metal until 1911. Demonstrations were taking place for women’s suffrage, which would not be granted till 1919. Broadway star Marie Dressler moved hearts with her song, ‘Heaven Will Protect the Working
Girl’. The Ziegfeld Follies of 1910 featured new recruits Fanny Brice and Bert Williams. William Howard Taft was President. Hollywood was a sleepy town, and even D. W. Griffith’s Biograph company had barely began shooting some motion-picture shorts in California. Far from the madding crowd, the young ‘electrician’ Oliver Norvell Hardy was goggling at his nightly movie diet at the Electric Theater in Milledgeville, Georgia. Life was indeed simpler then, if as precarious for many people.
Facing the perils of modernity, Stan and Ollie had given us their view of a planet-busting bomb in their Fox feature, The Big Noise: an eight-inch round ball which can be hidden inside Stan’s concertina, a thing of musical fakes and alarums. The Manhattan Project, Trinity, Hiroshima, Bikini Atoll (rather than Atoll K) and the H-Bomb were matters far beyond the purview of Laurel and Hardy. How would Oliver have greeted the Civil Rights movement of the mid-1960s, the battle for emancipation of those his father had fought and bled to hold down? Certainly the New South today claims him as its own, and we might be sure Babe, with his longing for reconciliations, would have embraced the New South. The saga of Laurel and Hardy is nothing if not the tale of everyman’s survival amid the twists and turns of fortune.
Stan Laurel lived the twilight years that illness had not granted Babe Hardy. Many of his contemporaries came to pay homage to the man who lived modestly in a Santa Monica apartment and was listed in the phone book like any other citizen. Some who came calling felt he was a forgotten figure, embittered at the way fame had touched him but not left much in the way of the recognition that should have been his due. Others found a man full of life and fun, with that infectious giggling laugh that was his trademark, happy to be alive in the face of the ailments that fate had thrown like so many banana skins to trip up his fragile body.
Comedians and celebrities who felt they owed him a great debt visited and paid court to their crown prince – Danny Kaye, Peter Sellers, Dick Van Dyke, Dick Cavett, Jerry Lewis. The French mime Marcel Marceau, whom Stan had seen in Paris in 1950, during the preparation of Atoll K, was another adoring visitor. Randy Skretvedt reports that Jerry Lewis offered Stan $100,000 a year to be his comedy consultant, but Stan politely declined. Though not wealthy, between his own bank balance and Ida’s, he had enough
for his needs – although the above letter of 1964 does show that by then he was counting the dollars, if not the pennies. Most likely Stan knew he could not fulfil the professional needs of a hungry performer in a new, perturbing age.
Nevertheless, his mind continued to turn over, thinking about new ideas, new gags, innovations found in unlikely places. In a 1963 letter to his friends Vic and Gladys he writes:
Glad you got a few laughs out of ‘MAD’ magazine. Interesting about the ‘TARZAN ROPE’ idea – should be attractive to the kids if you can find some means to demonstrate it to them … Enclosed some more gadget ideas (was in the Sunday paper ad section) …
From one generation to another – one can see how Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. (Wot Me Worry?) Neuman could have been a cheeky child of Stan Laurel … Earlier on, in 1961, two events gave Stan a well-deserved feeling that the world had not entirely passed him by. John McCabe’s long gestating book, Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy, was finally published and enabled the new generation to read about the clowns they were enjoying on their TVs. Stan had maintained contact with McCabe, delighted that someone was interested in writing about his art, not just his troubled private life. In the 1950s, and into the 1960s, however, there remained many difficulties in finding prints of the pre-talkie Laurel and Hardys. Another enthusiast, Robert Youngson, who specialized in restoring old newsreel footage and silent films, produced a compilation film, in 1960, entitled When Comedy Was King, including segments from films starring Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon, Fatty Arbuckle, the Keystone Kops and a host of others, and ending on Stan and Ollie’s Big Business. This was a precursor of several more compilations, but the first to concentrate on Stan and Ollie’s œuvre, Laurel and Hardy’s Laughing ’20’s (1965), appeared too late for Stan to appreciate.
The second event that gave Stan satisfaction in 1961 was the vote of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to award him an honorary Oscar for his life’s work. Stan was not well enough to attend the ceremony – his eyes were suffering from a periodic haemorrhaging – and Danny Kaye accepted the award for him.
Another 1961 landmark was a business deal for a television animation series, based on the Stan and Ollie characters, to be produced by Larry Harmon. This was far from the first time Stan and
Ollie had been cartooned – four Mickey Mouse shorts of the 1930s had featured their caricatures, and Mickey’s actual creator, Ub Iwerks, also drew them in four separate works. (The earliest Iwerks were Movie Mad (1931) and Soda Squirt (1933). The first Disneys were Mickey’s Gala Premiere (1933), and Mickey’s Polo Team (1936). Full cartoon details can be found in Glenn Mitchell’s The Laurel & Hardy Encyclopedia.) Stan and Ollie dolls were already rife throughout the land. The Larry Harmon series was to become one of television’s most oft repeated shows.
Ordinary people, as well as celebrities, would be received cordially in the Oceana apartment, overlooking the sea. A cat can look at a king, and can surely share a bowl with the court jester, whose legacy belongs to the world. This classless approach was certainly something Stan inherited from his egalitarian father.
In 1962, Stan wrote to the Shorts:
Thanks for your nice letter 9th inst. The news report that I lost an eye is greatly exaggerated, I had a haemorrhage in my left eye a few months ago … I still have sight but of course it’s weak – anyway am not discouraged – if it was good enough for Lord Nelson, it’s quite good enough for me!!!
Lord Nelson, of course, looked out to sea through his blind eye and said he did not see the signal to cease battle. Stan sat in his chair and looked out to the Pacific Ocean, thinking what thoughts we cannot tell. Certainly his nostalgia for things gone by suggests he thought a lot about the old times. Many would like to think that he was mulling over and over in his mind new ideas for comic situations and gags that could be used in Laurel and Hardy movies, movies that could no longer be made, except inside the clown’s still fertile brain. Although the drugs he was taking, and his illnesses, affected his moods, there is no evidence that his mind was anything but alert, well up to the end. He surely followed the rancorous events that overtook his old stamping ground, the Hal Roach Studios, which went into terminal crisis during 1962. In December the entire lot was sold to a real-estate company, and soon after the studios themselves were completely demolished. Everything was torn down, the administration buildings, the screening rooms where so much work in progress was viewed, the sound stages where Charley Chase, Thelma Todd, Jimmy Finlayson, Max Davidson, Clyde Cook, Stan and Babe and a host of others had
cavorted, where such as Leo McCarey and George Stevens had learned their trade. All fell to the wrecking ball of development, and crumbled into dust.
It was perhaps no wonder that the blood rushed into Stan Laurel’s eyes and refused to let him see. The clown who could not comprehend why the world was full of anger and strife would not have wished to look on at the full-scale war that a Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson, would unleash on far-off Vietnam. On the other hand, he missed the satisfaction granted to his contemporary, Groucho Marx, in seeing his old work widely revived and enjoyed by young and old alike – the old clowns rediscovered as prescient imps of a perverse and absurd cosmic flow. He might have looked on amazed as the boys and girls beat their tambourines in the jingle-jangle mornings of their self-declared ‘Age of Aquarius’, of which he and Ollie too would be among the patron saints. And he would have been astonished and bemused at persons, such as myself, who claimed him for art, despite his oft repeated statement: ‘I mean, we were just two-reel comics. That wasn’t art.’
Oh yes it was!
But even the old routines of music-hall have their mortality. On 23 February 1965, ‘The Great Digitalis’ finally failed to deliver his regular magic trick. At 1.45 in the afternoon, felled by a massive heart attack, Stan Laurel died. Like his partner, he had also been stricken by a cancer, of the palate, in his last months. Later press reports said his last words were a joke, to the nurse who was preparing an injection. ‘I’d much rather be skiing than doing this.’ The nurse: ‘Oh, Mr Laurel, do you ski?’ Stan: ‘No, but I’d much sooner be skiing than what I’m doing now.’
Right at the end, Stan’s fears were those of a small child, befitting the clown who most preserved the child’s world to his end. The doctor’s names for the dark angel who wielded the scythe were ‘Myocardial Infarction, Massive (Posterior), Arteriosclerosis, Atherosclerosis (Advanced 12 Years); also Diabetes Mellitus – Brittle.’
The shell was indeed brittle, but the content remained. In the corporeal world, no one was left to say to Stan, ‘Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.’ And he was no longer there to respond with the cry, the puckering of the face and the plaintive lament of ‘I couldn’t help it!’ But as he flew up, flapping those
flying deuces’ wings the special-effects men had put on his partner twenty-five years before, we can be sure there was a familiar, large-bodied spectre to meet him, up above, tapping his great feet and shaking his head with a fatalistic resignation.
‘You took your time,’ Ollie might have said, sighing.
‘I was coming straight away, but something happened …’ says Stan.
‘Well, come on and help me get through this gate,’ says Ollie. ‘It’s so simple, even you can do it.’
And one might add the final notation of Stan and Ollie’s last sketch: ‘All take it big. Very loud chirping sounds. Pandemonium reigns.’
And CURTAIN.