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 is 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 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.")
Also, at one point Louvish decries critics who have read too much subtext into L&H's simplistic plots. Yet he goes hog-wild (pardon the L&H pun) on phallic imagery, suggesting that Mae Busch's constant widow of L&H's short Oliver the Eighth wants to chop off an organ considerably below Ollie's neck, and even shamelessly stating later (in his take on Their First Mistake), "What remains erect for Oliver Hardy is not his penis, but his dignity." Eeew!!
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 plagiarism. 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.
(C) 2006, Steven Bailey.
Related link:
Our site's interview with Stan and Ollie author Simon Louvish
