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Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy

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Simon Louvish's epic-length biography Stan and Ollie plays like one of those Laurel & Hardy comedies that were padded to feature-length by the inclusion of romantic leads nobody cares about. Like those movies, one has to wade through a lot of guff to get to the really good stuff.

Louvish has done his research (as he all too eager to convince the reader), and it pays off most admirably when debunking previous tales of the Laurel & Hardy history. The most compelling example is the chapter detailing Oliver Hardy's first marriage. Hardy and film historians have long maintained that he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, to pursue a film career, and there was where he met and married first wife Madelyn. Louvish detailingly reveals that Madelyn was in fact Jewish, that Hardy met her in Georgia at the time of an infamous Jewish lynching, and that Hardy and his wife exited Georgia as a result, never to return.

Such dramatic payoffs are alone worth the price of the book. Louvish also often gleans much enlightened insight into Laurel & Hardy's film work (as well he should--Louvish in a part-time film teacher). To cite just one example, his analysis of the finale of L&H's penultimate Hal Roach film A Chump at Oxford is as insightful and moving as the finale itself.

Along the way, though, the reader must endure the obstacle courses that plagued Louvish's previous bios of W.C. Fields and The Marx Brothers (both of which tomes are shamelessly plugged throughout this book). For one thing, Louvish lards his writing with enough precious verbosity to make L&H biographer John McCabe look like an illiterate slacker by comparison. (Prime example: "Babe's inner life has always been a...mystery wrapped in an enigma, hidden behind those folds of flesh.")

My final complaint with the book is that when it gets into Laurel & Hardy at their prime, it quotes other, far superior sources (most notably Randy Skretvedt's) to the point of [being word for word]. And even then, accuracy is not Louvish's strong suit. Louvish quotes a Skretvedt interview with Hal Roach in which Roach, by way of contrasting L&H with other comedy teams, states that "Abbott and Costello worked at our studio, and they used to fight like hell. But with Laurel and Hardy, when I fired Hardy, Laurel cried." This quote has almost as many errors as it has words: A&C never worked for Roach, and Roach never fired Hardy (Roach had Stan and Babe on concurrent, separate contracts and often suspended Laurel or let his contract lapse during certain disputes).

For all of its faults, Louvish's genuine appreciation for Laurel and Hardy's comic artistry makes a considerable amount of Stan and Ollie worthwhile writing for the fervent L&H buff. Just make to sure to avoid Louvish's verbal land mines in order to reach the real meat of the book

Laurel and Hardy are not mean to each other, like Abbott was to the unfortunate Costello, and neither would conspire to seduce away a pretty girl from the other, like Hope and Crosby did. They didn't get mawkish or act as spokesmen for the downtrodden, as Chaplin did. On screen (and, let us be grateful, off screen, as well) they were friends. They may have dumped paint buckets over one another's heads or sat on one another's hats, and they caused an enormous amount of set destruction wherever they went, but there was kindness and caring between them. A fine, big dual biography now places the two within cinema and world and comedic history, _Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy_ (Thomas Dunn Books) by Simon Louvish. The author, who has done previous biographies of W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, has an intellectual appreciation for Laurel and Hardy films, but his book is relatively free of theorizing about what made the pair such classics. He has not forgotten the main virtue of the team: they are funny.

Laurel was born in Lancashire in 1890, of a theatrical family. His father was a minor stage star and author of some literally melodramatic plays (and though he turned out proud of Laurel's success and fame, never really took pride that it was done outside of the legitimate theater). He came to America with the same troupe that brought Chaplin. Hardy was a southerner from Georgia. He was fat all through his life, and like so many "different" kids, he learned to be entertaining as a way of diverting others from mocking him. He was a gifted singer, and would sing in the theater, his theater when he ran a small-town movie house. It was his entrance into show business. The two performed in a film together in 1921, but didn't become a team until 1927. Unlike many silent film performers, they had little difficulty making the transition to sound. They were lucky to have as a frequent director the great Leo McCarey, and Louvish pays compliments to the straight men who played with them, like James Finlayson and Edgar Kennedy. When the depression came, their roles as forgotten men who were ready to take on any work that came their way easily caught the mood of the time. The splendid _The Music Box_ of 1932 was a version of the Sisyphus myth, with "The Laurel and Hardy Transfer Company - Foundered 1931") trying to deliver a crated player piano up a ridiculously steep set of outdoor steps.

The friendship of Laurel and Hardy is the theme of all their films, and Louvish takes us through all the major ones. They are childish men in many ways, and they damage each other's pride and step on each other's toes repeatedly, but the friendship always works and continues beyond every exasperation. "Here's another fine mess you've gotten me into" is known as their tag line, but the plaintive "Why don't you do something to _help_ me?" means much more, even though the help might have turned out to be much worse than no help at all. Louvish gives us plenty of details of the lives of these unforgettable clowns, and it has to be said that their off-screen lives were pretty ordinary. Perhaps Hardy was right, for instance, when he modestly said, "There's very little to write about me. I didn't do very much outside of doing a lot of gags before the camera and playing golf the rest of the day." But Louvish shows that those gags before the camera, and the friendship on screen and off, have made Laurel and Hardy far more than just geniuses of slapstick.

Just as he did with Monkey Business, his biography of the Marx Bros, Simon Louvish once again defeats his excellent research skills with his horribly corny and dated writing style.

Louvish's efforts to be as clever and funny as his subjects are embarrassing; good writing doesn't need to call attention to itself. Every page bristles with old medicine bottle sentences like, " To Stan, of course, art was not the issue so much as work and the remuneration therof," or, "This fact alone should provide a vital clue for the constant conundrum - the disentangling of the claims of authorship to Laurel and Hardy, the characters, the lines, the movies, the plots."

Editor!

Of course, any book with TWO subtitles is suspect. Louvish should stick to his terrific detective skills (and they are truly impressive) and get some talented grad student to do the writng.

To see what a good showbiz bio is like - well researched AND well written - check out "W.C. Fields: A Biography, " by James Curtis.

How does one do justice to two of the greatest comedy legends to have ever have graced the screen? A daunting task, but one that Simon Louvish (biographer of W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers) accomplishes with great aplomb and thoroughness. "Stan and Ollie" covers all bases as it explores the individual lives of the duo and the eventual pairing of two great screen comedians.

Louvish begins by examining the respective early life of Stanley Jefferson and Oliver Norvell Hardy. Born and raised in England, Stanley Jefferson was the son of a theatre owner and performer, whose children were destined for the stage. But his namesake would take his father's love of acting much farther than the stage and onto screen, a journey that took him half-way around the world to California at the dawn of the movie era. Meanwhile, in small town Georgia, Oliver Norvell Hardy was born, months after his father's death, raised by a mother who ran boarding houses, her perpetually chubby son a constant watcher of the guests. His love of movies hit its stride when he ran projections for the local movie house and decided to test his fortunes on the screen.

Each comic tried to make it on his own - Louvish devotes the first half of his biography to their early lives and the movies they made before they became a popular duo. Stanley's rise was perhaps a bit more difficult due to his theatre training (and his being pegged to impersonate his former roommate, Charlie Chaplin). "Babe" Hardy took easily to the ways of the screen, despite his bulk that haunted him his entire life, which was counteracted by a grace and ease that seemd contradictory to his size. These two very separate beginnings were inevitably paired up in Hollywood at the Hal Roach studio, where these vaudevillan trained actors somewhat reluctantly became Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, a disparate image of perfectly paired clowns.

Louvish traces the years and the films that Laurel and Hardy made together with Roach, intermingling the myriad marriage and divorce affairs that plagued each man, weaving in history of supporting players and screen moments as their story unfolds. He debunks some of the stories that have floated about these two, all the while recognizing that memory is not the strongest recorder of events years after the fact. The subtitle "The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy" refers not to any lurid details, but to the men behind the faces on the screen. Laurel and Hardy were screen personas, not the men who lived and breathed off-screen; while their real lives were sometimes mirrored by what they chose to enact, clowns cannot be funny all the time. Louvish does an admirable job of weaving the good with the bad, the tremendous success while at the pinnacle of their careers, and the sad, dwindling end that included forgettable movies and studio disputes.

"Stan and Ollie", while long and a sometimes wandering read, is a wonderful portrait of two men who were friends until the very end. It is amazing to consider their output of film, and to lament what has forever been lost of their early days and solo work. Louvish truly loves Laurel and Hardy but is able to paint them in an unbiased light, moles and all, revealing the minds behind two comedic geniuses who made it big for not being the brightest bulbs in the story. This book will make fans fall in love with Laurel and Hardy all over again.

By the time I was old enough to appreciate adult comedies shown on TV, i.e. in the late 50's, Oliver "Babe" Hardy was already dead (1957) and Stan Laurel was on the final downslope of his life. Yet, it was Laurel & Hardy, along with Abbott & Costello, that tickled my embryonic sense of humor before "graduating" to Red Skelton, Bob Hope, and Jackie Gleason.

Here, in STAN AND OLLIE: THE ROOTS OF COMEDY, author Simon Louvish draws from even more compulsively detailed books on the duo to yield a satisfyingly comprehensive overview of The Boys' professional lives, both solo and paired. I never thought of Stan and Ollie as being anything other than a team. Yet, the first eighteen chapters of this 40-chapter volume reveal that each had a successful career before being eternally cemented together in the 1927 silent movie, "Duck Soup". Each began life separated by the Atlantic, Stan being born in the north of England in 1890, and Oliver in Georgia of the American South in 1892. Before their fateful pairing by Hal Roach in Hollywood in 1927, Laurel worked his way up through the ranks of U.K. and U.S. vaudeville and U.S. film, while Hardy appeared in 200+ silents on his own beginning with "Outwitting Dad" (1914), a release coming from the then-booming Florida film industry. For both, it was a long and tortuous road to Tinseltown and destiny.

I need to stress that STAN AND OLLIE focuses on their professional lives. If you're looking for a detailed inside peek at their personal existences, look elsewhere. OK, sure, the reader learns, as narrative asides, that Ollie bet on the horses and Stan had a weakness for Yorkshire pudding, chocolate candies, and ocean sport fishing. Both enjoyed golf. And, moreover, both had rocky domestic lives with multiple, mostly failed marriages - Hardy totaling three wives in as many marriages, and Laurel amassing four wives in five marriages, plus one common-law relationship. But, I finished the narrative not really having a feel for the men behind their famous on-screen personae. This skewed exposition is exemplified by the choice of photos included in the text; there are virtually none of Stan and/or Ollie outside of stills from their screen roles. Weren't there pesky paparazzi in those days? There was one photo taken of Hardy towards the end of his life that I particularly wanted to see out of morbid curiosity. As Louvish describes it:

"In 1956 ... (Ollie) reduced his weight by 150 lbs ... 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."

My distinct impression was that, throughout the composition of STAN AND OLLIE, the author worked overtime to protect the image and memory of his heroes. That's fine, but it results in a somewhat one-dimensional piece, albeit otherwise excellent as far as it goes.

One rarely sees any of the old Laurel and Hardy movies on TV anymore. Maybe it's just because I don't stay up into the wee hours. STAN AND OLLIE compels me to re-visit their screen appearances on DVD rentals to remind myself of the laughter of childhood memory.

Laurel and Hardy are the eternal image to many of down-on-their-luck individuals struggling just to get by in this world, and in his book "Stan and Ollie" author Simon Louvish explains why they appeal to us after almost a century has passed since their first film together. In an exhuastive and well-paced dual biography of the world's greatest comedy duo, Louvish provides insights into the two men who jointly comprised a team that was embraced the world over.

Stan Jefferson (Laurel) and Oliver Hardy could not have come from more different backgrounds: Laurel's father was a North England theater manager who dabbled in play-writing, and his son became an actor on the stage just as vaudeville was on its way out and films on their way in. Hardy never knew his father, a Civil War veteran and local celebrity in their part of the state of Georgia. Both men took long routes towards the inevitable pairing, as Louvish demonstrates in what can be felt as a "teaser" of near-misses and almost-rans between the two when they both arrive in Hollywood in the mid-teens. But in 1927, they finally teamed up and started what would become the most celebrated partnership in film comedy.

Throughout it all, Louvish gives us a portrait of the men behind the image that is all the more important to know. Hardy, the jolly fat-man, was actually self-conscious about his weight and struggled to keep it under control. Laurel, the simple child-like companion, was something of a ladies man, and the tales of his multpile marriages (including a series of ill-timed weddings to the same woman over the course of years) make for an interesting glimpse into his troubled private life.

Laurel and Hardy, together briefly during the last days of the silent era, were able to transcend the barrier of sound, and they may well have been meant for the new entertainment form. Louvish details how they not only survived in the wake of other silent performers (Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd) falling out of favor, but indeed prosper and contribute some of their best material in the early Thirties.

Throughout the book, Louvish intersects accounts of the films they made together with some of the personal details that helped to shape their time together. He also addresses the odd fact of their embrace by the gay community, and Hardy's troubled Southern heritage and what it may have meant to the era of the Thirties (when openly racist portrayals of the black race ran rampant and unchecked). Stan Laurel emerges as a particularly harried figure, as his constant marital troubles become the fodder for Hollywood gossip mavens (a precursor of the current swath of "celebrity marital trouble" stories circulating in today's entertainment-obsessed media).

In the entertaining way he critiques their work (first the golden years at Hal Roach's studio, then later the Twentieth Century Fox and MGM films), Louvish comes off not as a grumbling critic but a genuine fan, one who has sat through the dreck as well as the highlights. He can be trusted to give the straight story on the flops as well as the classics ("Sons of The Desert", "The Music Box", etc). Louvish's style is not the dry, bare-bones approach of more "scholarly" approaches to film, but he has the right amount of reverence to make up for any percieved flippancy towards his subjects. After all, his profile is that of a comedy duo, not an auteur like Kubrick or Godard.

Louvish successfully argues, what's more, that the films of Laurel and Hardy (while not meant to be artistic statements) are worthy of close study and even analysis for their place in easing the country through the Depression and the Second World War (a claim that he puts forth for the lesser Fox pictures, though acknowledging their flaws). What's more, the friendship between Laurel and Hardy is genunine, unlike so many comedy partnerships that seem fraught with tension.

The book is probably the closest we will get to knowing the real Laurel and Hardy, as well as understanding their most memorable films together. It will definitely be the first thing I recommend for L&H neophytes, and for diehard fans as well. Put simply, this is the book to read if you want to know about the greatest comedy duo of the film age.

When I first began to read Simon Louvish's book about "our boys," I found the style a little awkward and strange. But after a chapter or so, it started to go more smoothly. This was the comedy team I had read about before -- the greatest movie comedy duo, in my opinion.

Louvish writes at a chatty gallop which I suspect sounds a little different to an American at first because he is English. But once you've tuned your -- well, inner ear -- to it, his prose becomes quite captivating. Here is the slim, soft-spoken north of England comic who lived, breathed, ate and slept in terms of gags and bits of business. There is the rotund, musical, amazingly graceful Georgian who was such a consummate actor, made his comedy look easy, and left it all at the office when he went home, so that he could be an amateur chef, Hollywood's finest golfer, and a ballroom dancer par excellence. Their personalities were as different as their physical appearance -- but they fit together without a seam when it came to making comedy.

Why did Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy form a superb whole out of two disparate halves? Louvish tells us how they never had a serious quarrel -- although Laurel, the creative one, had plenty of them with their boss, studio head Hal Roach. He describes how Hardy took no offense when Laurel was paid considerably more than he -- after all, Stan Laurel spent untold hours on gag creation, being the "director behind the director," cutting the final product, and so forth, while Oliver Hardy did virtually all his work before the camera. They got along swimmingly at work -- but seldom socialized until their later years after their movie careers were over.

Louvish also discusses an aspect of their movies that many fans are not aware of: How Laurel and director Leo McCarey deliberately put elements into a number of their stories that suggested a homoerotic relationship -- without anything ever being overt, either through word or deed. As funny as the team is, and none were funnier, including the Marx Brothers, when you become aware of this homoerotic suggestion, and learn to look for it, there are scenes that can make you uncomfortable.

By the way, in real life no one ever suggested that either Stan Laurel or Oliver Hardy was anything but enthusiastically heterosexual. Laurel was married to four different women; Hardy to three.

This is a superior double biography, written in a unique, very recognizable style by a man who has specialized in the lives of great comedy kings.

Laurel and Hardy were the yin and yang of comedians. Thrown together at the Hal Roach studios, they were one of (if not the) greatest comedy teams of all-time. Their message was very consistent over the years. They understood their ceiling in life, yet held their friendship sacred over every circumstance. This formula worked for them, no matter what plot contrivance they were confronted with.

They achieved wild popularity in the United States, and perhaps even bigger popularity in Europe.

One reason for their greatness is that they honed their craft in literally hundreds of films in the early days of film. Early studios did not demand a pedigree from acting school, or a resume, an actor only needed to show up to get work. It was this that allowed early actors to find their screen personas, and Laurel and Hardy almost instantly melded.

Moviegoers of the 30's and 40's took to the pair, and their films were legendary. Television was not available, and reruns were rarely shown, so audiences literally craved upcoming films.

This book traces their early years, in Georgia and England, respectively, and moves to their filmography, analyzing each plot and performance. Their personal life was a little sad, Stan having a weakness with women, taking four wives, and remarrying a couple of them, one twice.

Oliver battled weight, had a marginal self-image, and believed himself hindered by a lack of education. The two held a special, life-long friendship.

Simon Louvish has picked some wonderful subjects to write about. Among them, Mae West, the Keystone Cops and WC Fields. In this book, as well as the others, Louvish does exhaustive research on the films, and takes the time to envelope the subjects psyches.

He also makes some salient observations at many times, such as his statement that pity was an emotion Laurel and Hardy put out on the screen for us to laugh at, and that this is no longer tolerated by audiences of this age.

However, Louvish's writing can be methodical, and he tames what should be a raucous and hilarious subject by being a little too dry and analyical. This could have been a joyous book celebrating two geniuses of comedy, while still telling us of their personal foibles.

The book does such a good job of painting the men's portraits that the very oddity of the famous comedians as real people soon dissipates. After all, few people- outside of fans, would guess that Laurel, born Stanley Jefferson, was an Englishman who toured with Charlie Chaplin in Fred Karno's music hall revues (the British equivalent of Vaudeville), and that his father was a famed theater manager and lowbrow playwright. Louvish does a good job of contrasting Laurel's selfless written accounts of his days abroad with Karno with Chaplin's self-aggrandizing accounts. Nor would they know that Hardy was a Southerner, from Georgia, whose father (whom he never knew, due to early death), was a Civil War hero in his local town, wounded in the Battle Of Antietam. Louvish also notes that, like Judy Garland, the duo have been hailed, since their deaths (Hardy in 1957, Laurel in 1965) as gay heroes for what is seen as thinly veiled homosexual references throughout their work.

Louvish details the two men's friendship, even as Hardy was almost always making far less than Laurel, due in part to their signing separate contracts. The pair made about 440 films between them (together and separately), with Hardy making far more films alone than Laurel; yet most have not survived. He also debunks some myths about the men, most notably Hardy's claims about his past, such as the fact that he never starred in a traveling minstrel show across Dixie. Yet, along with who was the straight man, Louvish, like many other biographers, cannot pin down when and why Stanley Jefferson ever became Stan Laurel, and resorts to merely reiterating disproven prior claims.

Louvish does, importantly distinguish between several of the `firsts' in the duo's history, aside from the manifest first pairing of the team, as a team, in the 1926 Hal Roach silent film, 45 Minutes From Hollywood. However, the first officially billed film, with `Laurel And Hardy' as a team was 1927's The Second Hundred Years. To show how well researched the book is, though, Louvish goes even further, and nails the first film that both men ever appeared in, although not as a team, was 1921's The Lucky Dog. Louvish also pins the fortuitous comic pairing on director Leo McCarey, not Roach, as widely believed. He also is wise to discern that Oliver Hardy's filmic persona in the duo took longer to develop than Stan Laurel's. While Laurel went through phases as a Chaplin imitator- ala Billy West, and a pale echo of Harold Lloyd's go-getter persona, once he was paired with Hardy, his sob-happy schlemiel was pretty well set. Hardy, on the other hand, went from being the bullying villain to West, ala Chaplin's early tormentor Eric Campbell, through a series of bumbling fat men personae that never quite meshed. Even after pairing with Laurel, it took a dozen or more films for the iconic `This is another fine mess' slow boil Hardy to appear.

Yet, the minuses in this book are far outweighed by the major pluses, and Stan And Ollie, The Roots Of Comedy, The Double Life Of Laurel And Hardy is- if not the definitive work on the pair, certainly the best yet. And, as for who was the straight man, my money says it was Laurel, since Hardy seemed to suffer far more physical abuse, even though the laugh quotient was split equally. If you disagree, read the book, and you just may be right. Sort of like Laurel, or Hardy, always were about each other.

It is a great book for getting an overall view of these two comic geniuses. Their relationship and dedication to each other, as well as to their craft, is a touching and inspiring story. I have gone back to watch a lot of their early work and have a greater appreciation for each of them - What a team!