Brief Encounters

by Dick Cavett

  It was signed “Alec Guinness.”

  I told him how it irritated me in reading Charlie Chaplin’s recent and redundantly titled My Autobiography that there was no mention of Laurel. And yet we learn in a photo caption that the two of them arrived on the same boat from England with the Karno troupe. I said, peevishly, “I guess the great man didn’t want his historic entrance to America diluted by sharing it with another great comedian.”

  His sweet reply: “I don’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with Charlie.”

  Neither he nor “Babe” Hardy, as he always referred to him, got a cent of the millions raked in on their movies on TV. Stan—and he had insisted I call him that—said he didn’t mind the money, but it killed him to see the films cut up to sell peanut butter and used cars.

  “I hated to see the interruptions hurt the gags. I wrote to the distributor and offered to recut the films for them for free, but they never answered my letter.”

  “Were you never hurt? Amidst all those explosions and car wrecks and floods and crashing through floors and falling bricks and—”

  “Only once. Between takes, I was talking and stepped backwards off a curb and twisted my ankle.”

  An eon after making their last films, Stan said the mechanism still hums. “I still dream up gags for Babe and me. The other day I thought of having a doorbell ring in the other room and Babe says, ‘Stanley, go get the door.’ And I come back with the door.” We laughed.

  Another one. Stan has had a profound thought and Ollie asks what it is. “You can’t strike a match on a cake of soap.” We agreed the door gag was better.

  Stanley Kramer, he said, had offered him “a nice chunk of money” to appear for just a couple of quick shots in the movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

  Stan declined. “I just didn’t want the kids to see how different I look.”

  The phone rang and he apologized for having to deal with some business. I picked up a magazine, pretending to read, while trying to fuse the screen Laurel with the well-spoken, businesslike figure on the phone. Where in that body was the dim-witted, bleak-faced, haplessly gesturing silly we know so well?

  The closest you yourself can get to this contrast is in A Chump at Oxford. Stan, at Oxford, is bumped hard on the head by a falling window and instantly reverts to a time in his life when he was a British lord. He plays the subsequent scenes with a faultless upper-class accent, complete with dressing gown, monocle, and long cigarette holder. He could be doing Noël Coward’s Present Laughter. (Hilariously, he repeatedly refers to Oliver, now his manservant, as “Fatty.” Ollie winces.)

  He liked that I singled this out. “It’s the only place people could see that maybe I’m not a total buffoon.”

  I asked about stories that he and Hardy never saw each other offscreen. He said rumors of feuds and coldness were phony. But there was a priceless and somewhat revealing story.

  He said he dropped by Hardy’s apartment with a present on Christmas morning and it was instantly clear that Hardy had gotten nothing for Stan.

  “Babe sort of frantically looked around under the Christmas tree and spotted an unwrapped, very expensive bottle of bourbon. He picked it up, looked at it fondly, and apparently realized that it was in fact a very fine bottle of bourbon. He held it out toward me. ‘You can almost never find this brand here in Los Angeles,’ he said, putting it back.”

  Stan laughed heartily.

  He told me he learned early on in directing Babe to save his “burns”—that great, full-screen, exasperated, direct-to-camera stare of Hardy’s—until the end of the day, “when he couldn’t wait to get out of his costume and out to the golf course before it got any later. I got some great burns that way.”

  Stan would stay at the studio, working into the night, editing.

  A sensitive point: In my maturity, I’ve had to agree with Woody Allen that Hardy is the finer screen comedian. His precision of movement and delicacy of gesture are things of beauty. His work is scaled perfectly to the screen. Stan, coming from the vaudeville stage, is sometimes a bit too broad for the camera.

  There is a sad quote from Hardy somewhere, wondering if he had had a valuable life, “just pulling silly faces for a camera.” Oliver Hardy was an artist to his fingertips. But the affection goes to Stan.

  During my visit, as he took another brief phone call, leaning back in his desk chair with his back to the sea, I noticed that the sun was beginning to set. The symbolism was a bit too much. We parted. I said good-bye, and he said, “Let’s make that ‘au revoir.’” What a class act.

  Back at the studio I told Jack Paar where I’d been and he asked me to quickly write a brief tribute to Stan for that night’s show. It played well, and Stan was delighted.

  Some years later, while I was working for Johnny Carson, Stan was in the hospital for a time, and I got a letter from him that included the line, “Johnny Carson came to the hospital to visit me. Gave me quite a lift.” I gave Johnny the letter; too dumb even to copy it.

  Over time, more visits and letters followed right up until the time in February 1965 when I walked into Johnny’s office with that day’s joke submission. “You, too?” he said, dabbing his eyes. We’d both just seen the news of Stan’s death come over the wires.

  “Write me something, Richard,” he said. I did, and with a minute to go at the end of that night’s show, he did it. “A great comedian died today,” it began, and a picture of Stan filled the screen. I don’t remember the rest of it, but Johnny did it beautifully. His voice broke at the end.

  SEPTEMBER 7, 2012

  Can You Stand Some More Stan?

  You overwhelmed me, dear reader, with your reaction(s) to the piece I did last time about Stan Laurel. I’m particularly moved by the number of you who were touched, using phrases like “I misted up,” “I shed a tear,” and even “I wept.” I didn’t mean to upset anyone.

  I feel a little funny about admitting that, rereading the piece days later, I did at least one of the above.

  At the risk of anticlimax, I can add here a few things that swam back to mind in the interval. Things I had forgotten about my golden few visits with the great man. And an event that just recurred recently.

  I was in Hollywood last week working on a TV project, a pilot idea concocted by the remarkably talented John Hodgman. On my first visit with Stan, he had told me that The Steps still existed—the daunting 131 concrete steps up which he and “Babe” Hardy backbreakingly struggled and heaved the crated piano, losing it a few times, in the Oscar-winning short The Music Box. A classic of team comedy that bears watching at least once a year. (Get Laurel and Hardy: The Essential Collection.)

  Several commenters on the column had a favorite moment from that film: the one when the generally sweet Stan is moved to a rare display of rage when the fuming Billy Gilbert—the intended recipient of the piano—insists they get themselves and the giant crate out of his way as he descends the stairs from his house at the top of the hill.

  Stan swats his top hat off. Gilbert steams and bellows as it bounces and tumbles its way to the very bottom of the steps and rolls into the street. A truck runs over it. Stan insisted the truck move very slowly. It makes it funnier.

  An iconic moment in film comedy.

  So last week, in a break from the stuff I was shooting, as a treat for me, my dear wife arranged for a friend of ours to drive us on a pilgrimage. We found The Steps.

  (The location is hardly a secret, but just for fun let’s pretend I’m giving you a bit of inside information. You can find the steps yourself at the corner of Vendome and Del Monte in the Silver Lake district, just south of Sunset. There’s a little grassy triangle nearby that’s been named Laurel and Hardy Park. The magic numbers: 923–937 North Vendome Street.)

  At first the steps look wrong, somehow, and you wonder if you’ve been misled. In the 1930s, they stood virtually alone; now, houses and low apartment buildings and high shrubbery surround them. Much has changed, but worshippers are rewarded b
y the fact that the house across the street, where the hapless boys parked their horse-drawn wagon, survives. A plaque on the bottom step reading STAN LAUREL AND OLIVER HARDY “THE MUSIC BOX” reassures you you’re in the right place. I assumed it had been put there by the Laurel & Hardy–adoring organization Sons of the Desert, but in fact seems to have been placed by an impressive list of sponsors, including Hollywood Heritage Inc., the Society of Operating Cameramen, the Silent Society, the Hollywood Studio Museum, and perhaps others.

  It was like visiting a holy place.

  For trivialists: there are exactly 131 steps. We climbed them as an act of homage.

  Don’t be disappointed to learn that there is in fact no house of Billy Gilbert’s at the top. There never was. It was a studio set.

  Another bit of arcana. The same steps were used by the boys for a 1927 film called Hats Off! Alas, the search for this lost gem goes on.

  Stan recalled a favorite moment in The Music Box: “Remember the baby nurse lady who’s pushing the baby carriage who laughs at us? And how when she turns her back, I kick her in the butt? And she tells a cop and he says, ‘He kicked you?’ I asked for another take and added a line for her that might have been thought vaguely naughty, but I knew the kids wouldn’t get it but the sharper adults would. I had her say: ‘Yes, officer. He kicked me. Right in the middle of my daily duties.’”

  We laughed.

  How I could have temporarily forgotten a certain revelation by Stan I can’t imagine. He talked about the time when he and Hardy were suddenly surprised by the oleaginous Ralph Edwards and lured, live, on the spot, onto his This Is Your Life TV show. Rudely surprised by Edwards’s crew and suddenly flooded with light while peacefully chatting with their wives and a friend in a hotel lounge, they were to be spirited quickly to Edwards’s studio a few blocks away for the live show, but Hardy rebelled.

  Stan: “Babe was livid. He was halfway into his car to go straight home, leaving poor Ralph sweating in the studio with half a guest list. Babe reluctantly relented.”

  It’s their only live television appearance and should have been wonderful. It’s around, but it is infuriating to watch. The endlessly yakking Edwards—phony as his hairpiece—does all the talking. He raises a subject and, instead of saying to the pair, “Tell us about that”—he tells us.

  You wish Stan would treat him like Billy Gilbert and swat his rug off.

  You long to hear them talk. Edwards allows them each a few words while repeatedly attempting witless jokes about the life-threateningly obese Hardy’s girth. Babe plays along with faux pleasantry as surprise guests like Hal Roach, their former employer, and a few relatives are awkwardly trotted out. Eventually and mercifully the travesty ends.

  It should be avoided as ardently as—and I apologize for this dirty word—the “colorized” version of The Music Box, which is still floating around. Miraculously, the cheesy colorizing practice—now junked—manages to extract all humor from the great film. A subject for an essay on the inferiority of color to black-and-white. (Sorry, young folks who boast of watching no movies not multihued. There really are a few good black-and-white ones.)

  This is interesting: One reader pointed out the coincidence that when my first column ran, the BBC radio was airing a show about L&H. I listened to it online. Somehow I joined it in the middle and a man was talking. The voice was not familiar. He was talking about how Babe Hardy took no responsibility for the films, had no interest in the editing, and wanted out as early as possible so he could escape to the golf course. And how he, the speaker, worked far into the night. It had to be a stranger reading a quote from Stan Laurel. But it was Stan Laurel.

  Here again is something I’d forgotten. Stan’s real voice, in conversation, was not the voice of “Stan” in the movies. It was about ten notes lower. While not falsetto, his character voice used in the films was at least an octave higher than his own. His real voice was nearer baritone. I’ve never seen this mentioned.

  I’ll close with a little gem from my all-too-skimpy, semi-legible and fading notes of my first meeting with Stan. We talked about what he liked and didn’t like on television. “There’s one television show, lad”—I was twenty-four!—“that I just can’t abide. It’s the one with that panel of ultra-chichi folks. The one called What’s My Line? It sends me straight up the wall. I call it The Snob Family.”

  A man for the ages.

  OCTOBER 5, 2012

  How Are the Mighty Fallen, or Where’s My Friend?

  Do you have things you mean to do, and ought to do, but don’t?

  What is that? People you suspect are saner than yourself simply say: “Just go ahead and do it. What’s stopping you?” You agree. It’s sensible and should be done. But you don’t do it and you sit there and it starts to slip from your mind and you pick up an unread Vanity Fair or The Farmer’s Almanac and another year goes by.

  That’s how it was with me and Muhammad Ali. I mean, with Muhammad Ali and me.

  This will sound funny—peculiar to some—but there was a period in my life when I felt that Muhammad Ali was my best friend.

  I don’t mean an imaginary, worshipped from afar friend but a worshipped from “anear” one. He was on my shows a whole lot of times, we saw each other offstage and on, and the champ appeared to have a real fondness for me. I, of course, loved that and developed a deep affection for him.

  Years went by, his world and mine diverged, and about the time I realized we hadn’t horsed around together—neither offstage nor on—in quite a while, his illness struck.

  The thing put off was about my desire to see him again when he became ill, along with, I hope, an understandable reluctance to see that great eminence reduced by sickness. Years went by. And more years, and he got worse. I’ll never get over the regret. What was my psychoanalysis good for if I didn’t go and see my ailing friend?

  Finally, if not inevitably, circumstances brought us together again.

  The Norman Mailer Center gives awards to writers, and this, some weeks back, was its annual banquet. Ali and Mailer were friends, and Ali was the gala’s guest of honor. Among the distinguished guest speakers were such folks as Oliver Stone, Joyce Carol Oates (a boxing fan), Garrison Keillor, the LBJ immortalizer Robert Caro, and, deftly and wittily emceeing, Alec Baldwin.

  Events like this are always a seemingly unavoidable combination of sleep-inducing ennui and excessive length and make me swear if I ever get home from this one and to bed, I’ll never go to another one or to anything else. Ever.

  This was the exception. Ingeniously staged by the movie producer, writer, etc. Lawrence Schiller in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel’s imperial ballroom in Manhattan, this was a model of how to do it. With one especially tough problem to crack: how to present the largely immobilized guest of honor.

  Schiller’s solution: there was the usual center-of-attention stage with mike and lectern, but also a second one. In another part of the room a small theater was constructed with a well-raised stage and a handsome, closed curtain.

  The champ had quietly been placed there, and when he was introduced and the curtain revealed him, the elegant crowd, at their elegant tables, went mad.

  There, seated on what amounted to a throne, tuxedoed and in wraparound dark, dark glasses, sat the arguably greatest athlete of all time. The applause rolled on. He looked like an African emperor out of some romantic tale.

  A few of us, including his heroic wife, Lonnie, spoke briefly and reminisced, and the curtains closed. With much help, he was brought to a nearby table.

  Before dinner, for a sizable fee, for a good cause, of course, you could sit on a couch beside him and have your picture taken with the only three-time heavyweight champion of the world. A long line of well-heeled folk did before returning to, at the top of the scale, their $100,000 tables.

  Ali sat looking straight ahead and didn’t speak. While waiting for the line to clear, I asked Lonnie if there was any chance he’d remember me. She said there was a good chance, “but the problem is
he can’t speak to you. He can’t answer you.”

  I sat beside him and began a one-sided chat. It was a bit like talking to a statue, his features drawn downward by the illness and seemingly frozen. I’m not sure I would have recognized him.

  I kept talking in hopes of some sign, and after I’d said my name a few times and recalled fun and funny incidents from our good times together, the frozen-looking countenance continued to stare straight ahead. But then it stirred a little, and I hoped desperately he might turn toward me, or at least mouth my name—my mixed-blessingly recognizable voice seemed suddenly to have gotten through. It was not to be. But I honestly think—or maybe I just need to think—that a bell rang.

  Suddenly a large woman hove into view and said snippily, “We have a lot of people waiting in line.” I was being bounced. In fact, there were but three people waiting, and they were enjoying watching the two of us and were not irked.

  I wasted a good and useful line from Measure for Measure on her.

  “‘Dress’d in a little brief authority,’ are we?” I asked. After a bit longer, I moved away. There wasn’t much more to do or say.

  Boxing.

  It’s a brutish and disgusting sport and should probably be outlawed. (Sorry, Norman.)

  Few doubt that Ali’s sad state was caused by head blows, akin to NFL cranium smashing. At the same time, paradoxically, it’s an entertaining sport and, at its best, requires and demonstrates great skills, complex strategies, and mastery of technique.

  That’s what sets it apart—way apart—from that moron’s Punch and Judy show laughingly called “professional wrestling.” That sleazy, painstakingly rehearsed game of charades that requires more thespian skill than athletic prowess. A “manly art” requiring about as much manliness as crocheting.

  Paradoxically, what many describe as “men battering each other senseless” approaches, at its highest level, art. Should you need convincing on this, get ahold of the great A. J. Liebling’s masterpiece on the subject, The Sweet Science.