But their contracts were no worse than those of others, and better than most. If he is unprosperous, it is not entirely Ben Shipman’s fault; it is not really Ben Shipman’s fault at all.
He and Babe could have become independent producers.
As Chaplin did.
He and Babe could have controlled all aspects of their work.
As Chaplin did.
He and Babe could have owned their own pictures.
As Chaplin does.
But he is not Chaplin, and Babe never wished to be. Again and again it comes back to him. It will be the refrain that carries him from the clamor of this world to the oblivion of the next. They will carve it on his gravestone.
Not Chaplin.
Chaplin understood money. From the start, Chaplin was careful with it.
But he never understood money, no more than he understood women. He married unwisely, and too often. This is no one’s fault but his.
What can be done? he asks.
—About television? Nothing, unless we crawl to Hal Roach’s door and beg for a share.
He will not do this, not even if he were living rough under a bridge. He knows a dog that goes to Hal Roach’s door seeking scraps will leave hungrier than when it arrived.
You could go back to England, says Ben Shipman. Then:
—Why are you smiling?
193
At the Oceana Apartments, he reflects on circularity.
A.J. would have laughed.
A.J.’s son, the big Hollywood star, returned once more to the stages that birthed him.
A.J.’s son, forced to grub for shillings in these father-haunted halls.
A.J.’s son, back to England with his tail between his legs.
194
No London this time, no Palladium, no Coliseum.
They play provincial theaters.
They play Dublin.
They play Belfast.
A year later, they are back, and the cathedral bells at Cobh sound a song of greeting for them, but the Audience is sparser now, and no television cameras record their presence in blighted towns. A summer season in Blackpool fails to materialize. The tour is to be cut short.
Even here, he thinks, we are not as we once were. Even here, we are being forgotten.
We are witnesses to our own evanescence.
Babe is slower. Babe sleeps. Babe struggles for breath. Babe is short-tempered. On stage, Babe labors.
Ben Shipman joins them in England. Together, they watch Babe scale the hotel stairs, helped by Lucille.
And Ben Shipman says:
—Maybe it’s good that Blackpool didn’t work out.
195
Babe stands at the window of his hotel room. Babe stares out at the rain driving hard upon the gray Humber estuary.
What place is this? Babe asks.
Cleethorpes, he says.
—How did we end up here?
—It’s on the schedule.
—No, how did we end up here?
And he knows that they will not be coming back.
On May 17th, 1954, they give their last performance together.
On May 18th, 1954, Babe has a heart attack.
196
They arrive in Europe with more than a thousand fellow travelers on board the America, the most beautiful liner yet built in the United States, their appearance heralded by bells.
They depart Europe on the Manchuria, a merchant ship bound for Vancouver with ten passengers on board, their departure unnoticed.
This is how it goes.
This is how it ends.
197
At the Oceana Apartments, after the evening meal, Ida touches his hands.
Your fingers are cold, she says. You’re shivering. What have you been doing?
—Remembering.
—You should go to bed. You’ll be warmer there.
—I will, in a moment.
I am almost done.
198
The heart attack makes him fear for Babe.
I am like a lost soul without him, he tells the newspapers after the retreat from England.
I am completely lost without him, he repeats.
I am lost.
He has grown to need Babe more than he ever did when they were making pictures together on Hal Roach’s lot. In those years, he was distracted by his capacities, by his appetites. He had a career, and a future. He had women. He would direct. He would create until the end. He would mature as an artist, like Chaplin.
But that is the past. Now he has only Ida, and Lois, his daughter.
Now he has only Babe.
He wants to tell Babe so much. He wants to say that he is sorry for using him as a pawn in his battles with Hal Roach.
For manipulating their partnership.
For threatening its termination to suit his own ends.
For besmirching his own reputation with foolishness and infidelity, and sullying Babe’s in the process.
For not making them both wealthier men.
Most of all, he wants to say: Stay.
Ben Shipman understands this, Ben Shipman who loves them both above all other men, Ben Shipman with his shock of white hair, and his thick glasses, and his inability to be as good a lawyer to them as Ben Shipman is a friend.
Babe knows, says Ben Shipman.
—How can you be sure?
—Because Babe sits in that chair, just as you do, and Babe talks to me, just as you do, and Babe is sorry, just as you are.
—What has Babe to be sorry for?
—For being unable to hold on to money any better than you could. For his impatience with you. For sometimes preferring the golf course and Santa Anita to the set of a picture. And for not being better. Isn’t that what it all comes down to, in the end? You both wish that you’d been better men. Maybe you could have, if only because that’s true of each of us. But I’ve been by your side longer than anyone, and I do not believe that I have ever been privileged to call two better men my friends. You have frustrated me; you have anguished me; you have infuriated me; you have ignored me; but you have never disappointed me. I have never known either of you to commit a base act, and in the wrongs that you have done, you have hurt yourselves more than anyone. You are beloved men, and beloved by none more than each other. Allow yourself some forgiveness.
But still he frets about Babe, and so busy is he fretting that when he suffers a stroke he can only express surprise, like a corner man urging on his fighter only to be caught by a mistimed punch. Now it is Babe who is calling him, and Babe who is by his side, and Babe who is making him laugh. The stroke leaves him with a limp, and slurred speech.
He has been working on scripts for a television show. He puts the scripts aside.
And Death begins its binding.
199
At the Oceana Apartments, he takes down from the shelf, for the final time, his copy of Chaplin’s memoir. He tells himself that he does so to reread the sections about Chaplin’s early life, and this is true, in part. He remains astonished by the obstacles Chaplin has overcome. He has never disputed Chaplin’s greatness.
He reads a little, but listlessly. He realizes he cannot deny the hurt he feels, because he can only conclude that Chaplin sought to cause him pain.
Not to be mentioned by Chaplin, not to be mentioned at all.
He wants no praise from Chaplin for his work or his acting, or even a testimonial to their former friendship. But to be denied the fact of his existence by this man whom he adored, to be excised entirely from the history of Chaplin’s life, is incomprehensible to him in the scale of its callousness.
He wishes, as he so often does, that Babe were here, so that he might ask of him:
How can a great man be so small?
200
Death does not come quickly for Babe. Death pilfers Babe piece by piece, pound by pound.
But not before Babe conspires with Death in his own dissolution.
Babe opens the door, and Death steps through.
And Babe loathes his appearance. Babe was ever unable to descry his own beauty. Mirrored, Babe sees only an obese, unlovable man.
In 1956, on the advice of a quack, Babe starts eating beets.
Nothing but beets.
Babe’s weight drops.
Three hundred pounds.
Two-eighty.
Two-fifty.
Two-twenty.
Two-ten.
Babe is pleased at this unburdening, even as his system reels in shock, even as his acquaintances cannot bear to look upon him because Babe no longer resembles the man they have cherished. When Babe sees how they react, Babe sequesters himself. Only he is allowed to visit, and Ben Shipman, and a handful of other old friends.
Two hundred pounds.
One-seventy.
One-fifty.
A cancer sets in.
Death has Babe now.
September 1956: another heart attack.
Stroke.
Paralysis.
Babe’s power of speech
stolen
away.
When Babe wants Lucille to come to him, his desire must be communicated by crying. Babe’s eyes, once so expressive, perhaps even the aspect that made Lucille first fall in love with him, are clouded by sickness. Lucille struggles to remember Babe as Babe once was. Babe is no longer recognizable to her as himself.
Lucille takes Babe to her mother’s home. Lucille will not allow Babe to be sent to a convalescent facility. Lucille hopes that Babe’s condition may improve, but if it does not, she will not permit him to die among strangers. Myrtle sends another process server to pursue her vexatious claims, but the messenger is too ashamed to serve the papers on a dying man, and so departs.
Babe drifts. Babe cannot always identify faces. But the encroaching silence is the worst. In moments of lucidity, Babe struggles to form words. Babe still has so much left to say.
He visits whenever Babe’s mind is clear. Lucille summons him, and he comes. He ignores his own pain. He sits by Babe’s bedside, and he listens. He takes Babe’s hand, gathering it gently up as a man might cup the body of a bird, and replies to every word, every phrase, that Babe manages to whisper. He does not wish to leave. He does not wish to miss a moment. When Babe finally lapses into unconsciousness, he replays on the journey home all that has been said, Babe’s every gesture, consigning each exchange to the treasury of his memory.
And when, finally, Babe can no longer speak at all, he elects not to speak either, and so their last hours together are spent in silence. Lucille and Ida leave them alone, and they are as they once were on the screen: two men using only their eyes to communicate everything that they feel, and have always felt, about each other.
He leaves, and he cannot stop crying. In the car, he sheds every tear he has for Babe.
All those times, he tells Ida. All those times I could have been with him, and chose not to be.
All those moments that might have been.
On the night of August 6th, 1957, Babe endures stroke after stroke, and his body is contorted by spasms. Lucille climbs into bed beside her husband, and cradles him in her arms, this child of a man, the frailty of him, heedless of the stink of mortality as she buries her face in his scalp and his skin, knowing only that this is his essence, the best of him in noble rot, and each aspect particulate is to her a transference, and she does not relinquish her hold until Babe dies the next morning, and she feels his passing as an exhalation, an exclamation, as though Babe, in his agonies, has at last comprehended a matter elusive but long guessed.
He does not sleep on the night Babe dies. He thrashes in his bed while Ida comforts him, and he wants to say to her that he would do this for Babe, that he would lie beside him, if it were permitted, and he would seek to receive Babe’s torment as his own, so that Babe’s suffering might be lessened in the acceptance; and he would whisper that he loved him, and would not be without him; and he would ask to whom shall he speak in Babe’s absence, knowing that the unsaid infused every word, and to whom shall he not speak, knowing that in silence he would be understood?
He does not wish this catalog of errors to be termed a life.
201
The call comes.
He knows what it portends. His hand hovers above the receiver, as though by resisting its summons he might keep Babe with him. And even in this he is mimicking Babe: Babe, who would not answer a telephone for fear of what might be communicated; Babe, who was too much hurt by the world.
He listens to the message.
He hangs up.
He cannot speak. No words are adequate.
Seconds pass. Minutes.
To utter is to make real. To articulate is to accept.
Ida approaches, and by her presence unlocks his tongue.
—My pal is dead.
202
Alone in his office, lit by a banker’s lamp, his door closed, the drapes drawn against the emptiness of this new age, against all the dull days to come, Ben Shipman sits, his face in his hands, his spectacles on the desk before him, and Ben Shipman cries for two men, and for all that Ben Shipman has done and all that Ben Shipman has failed to do.
Then Ben Shipman, the lawyer, takes the first of the documents from the file on his desk, and prepares to turn into paper this passage from life.
Ben Shipman will guide Lucille.
Ben Shipman will handle the details.
Ben Shipman will look after everyone.
And none will speak to Ben Shipman of his loss.
None, save one.
203
At the Oceana Apartments, at the closing of the last days, in the pale moonshine of memory, Babe is with him and of him, as Babe has always been, even in the days before they met, when Babe was an unnamable absence; even in the days after Babe’s passing, when Babe was the void in the heart, just as one was ever destined to be for the other because their characters were fixed, and nothing could change this, not even death, and there is no plot because there is no reason, and there is no resolution because there can be no alteration, only the sand-slip of moments and the fading of light, and the smoke ascending through flickering beams of luminescence, and footsteps moving in slow cadence, slipping inexorably into accord, and he feels only gratitude that he did not have to dance alone, that each tread had its echo, each shadow its twin, and as the journey from silence to silence is completed, as the lens closes and the circle shrinks, he knows that he loved this man, and this man loved him, and that is enough, and more than enough.
And the waves rush in: applause, applause.
Author’s Note
The seeds of this book were sown in 1999, when Sheldon McArthur, who was then the manager of the Mysterious Bookstore in Los Angeles, invited me to stay at his home in the course of my first promotional tour of the United States. Shelly now runs a book and antique business in Oregon, but even back then his house in Malibu was filled with curios, some to be sold and others to be kept.
During the course of a conversation, if the years have not caused me to misremember entirely, Shelly mentioned that one of his greatest regrets was losing a derby hat given to him as a youth by Stan Laurel. Now, I had long loved Laurel & Hardy—they were a part of my childhood, and my affection for them had not dimmed in adulthood—yet it seemed impossible to me that someone I knew might not only have met one of them, but have been bequeathed a hat in the process. To me, these were figures from a distant past, moving through a monochrome world, yet Stan Laurel did not die until 1965, only three years before I was born, and he kept his telephone number in the Malibu directory because he enjoyed being visited and had no fear of those who might make their way to his door.
But he no longer worked. He would not work without Babe. And
I wondered about these two men, and the grief of the one who was left behind. Gradually I began to accumulate research books, and make notes, although I had no clear idea of what I might write: a monograph, perhaps, or some other form of non-fiction. But the more I read, the more I felt that so much of these men’s lives had already been documented: by biographers; by fans; by those, like Stan Laurel’s daughter Lois, who had known them personally; and by Stan Laurel himself, who was a prodigious correspondent and whose letters may be found at the wonderful Stan Laurel Correspondence Archive Project, LettersFromStan.com. Yet behind this great weight of words, and concealed by Stan Laurel’s own reserve—for despite his apparent openness, he was a product of Victorian times, and his letters reveal no more than he wished them to—there seemed to hover a more elusive presence, a being of great emotional complexity, of pain and loss, of love and regret. This book is an attempt to capture that presence.
Once I had decided that he was to be a novel, the basic structure was determined by Stan Laurel’s life, and I turned, at various points, to the work of four authors in particular. The first was John McCabe, who wrote the original serious studies of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy: Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy: An Affectionate Biography (Doubleday, 1961); The Comedy World of Stan Laurel (Doubleday, 1974); and Babe: The Life of Oliver Hardy (Citadel Press, 1990). The second was Simon Louvish, whose Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy (Faber and Faber, 2001) remains, I think, the best general introduction to the actors and their work for the casual reader. The third was A.J. Marriot who, in Laurel & Hardy: The British Tours (A.J. Marriot, 1993) and Laurel & Hardy: The U.S. Tours (Marriot Publishing, 2011), painstakingly followed the paths taken by the actors on their promotional duties.
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