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Laurel and Hardy - Stan and Ollie The Roots Of Comedy
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Laurel and Hardy - Stan and Ollie The Roots Of Comedy
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Michael Fenton Stevens
Done While here on Radio 4 FM, our book of the week and Although by the late 1940s Laurel and Hardy's film career had more or less ground to a halt, the team enjoyed new success on the stage, with their live shows proving especially popular here in Britain. By the mid-1950s, however, ill health was beginning to take its toll. Michael Fenton Stevens reads from Simon Lewisch's biography of Stan and the Roots of Comedy.
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Narrator
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 the great names of the past had on their audiences. David Garrick, the Clown, Grimaldi, Herbert Beerbone Tree, Sarah Bernhard, Dan Leno, Little Titch. Though of the last of these we have some flickering snippets of the motion pictures in their infancy. 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. A somber sample of this retreat into the gloaming is Stan Laurel's and Oliver Hardy's last dedicated public appearance in Ralph Edwards television show this Is yous Life, aired live on 1st 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. 50 million of your fans are eager to see your lives unfold, verbals 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 director Leo Macary and Stan's daughter Lois. 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 Dennis 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 that same year 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 Jr. Who took over his father's studios in Culver City. The absolutely final public appearance by Stan and Ollie was as a filmed insert in a 1955 BBC program celebrating the British variety organization the Water Rats. Stan and Dolly 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 paralyzed 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 360 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 recognisable, 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 doctor's orders. And with his vanished poundage, gone too, were any prospects of a revival of the act that depended so strongly on the physical contrast between the two. Biographer 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. Babe's last few months of mobility were spent in a kind of seclusion, with only his wife Lucille, Stan and Ida, lawyer Ben Shipman and a handful of close friends seeing him. On the morning of 14th September 1956, he suffered a massive and crippling cerebral stroke, the press announced. Ex film comedian Oliver Hardy, 64, was admitted to St Joseph's Hospital Burbank early yesterday after having suffered a stroke at his 5429 Woodland Avenue home in Van Nie's 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 the 7th of 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. Moni L Jones's home in North Hollywood. He was totally paralyzed apart from minor movements of his left arm and leg and could not speak. 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 flattering 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 7th August 1957 at 7:25am Cause of death was recorded as acute cerebral vascular accident and a great silence falls in the Californian summer as the survivor gathers his thoughts. In the summer of 1957 Stan and Ida moved to a one bedroom apartment in Malibu Road, 40ft from the ocean waves. From this address and from the Santa Monica apartment of which he would spend his Last years from 1958, 849 Ocean Avenue, a complex named Oceania. Stan sent out a massive 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 Babes 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 12 years. In 1957 the shorts sent Stan a photograph of one of the old theatre royals and stan answered on the 17th of 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 floor, cement stairs to the gallery. Gas was the only lighting it had. It used to play old time melodrama and was nicknamed the Blood Tub. 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 have surfaced from his earliest days. Stan's letters, unlike those of WC 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, the swelling department has finally gone away, but I'm still bothered by 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. St. 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 thought 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 K. Peter Sellers, Dick Van Dyke, Dick Cavett, Jerry Lewis, the French mime artist Marcel Marceau was another adoring visitor. Ordinary people as well as celebrities would be received cordially in the Oceania 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 hemorrhage in my left eye a few months ago. I still have sight, but of course it's weak. Anyway, I'm 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 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. But even the old routines of music hall have their mortality. On 23rd 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. 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 doctors names for the dark angel who wielded the scythe were Myocardial infarction, Massive posterior arteriosclerosis, atherosclerosis, advanced 12 years. Also diabetes mellitus. Brittle. You took your time, Ali might have said, sighing. 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. As they dance off together into the sunset, realizing that all they were waiting for was each other, we can hear the echoes of Ollie's plea in Toad in a Hole. Here we are, two grown up men acting like a couple of children. Why we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. Put our brains together so that we can forge ahead. Remember, united we stand, divided we fall.
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Michael Fenton Stevens
That was the final extract from Stan and Ollie the Roots of Comedy by Simon Lewish. The reader was Michael Fenton Stevens and.
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