A Celebrity’s Celebrity : Hal Roach Honored on His 100th Birthday--Almost

Please--don’t rush Hal Roach.

A couple of hundred of the legendary filmmaker’s friends and admirers gathered Sunday in Woodland Hills to celebrate his 100th birthday. But as Roach, the man who teamed Stan Laurel with Oliver Hardy and turned a group of child actors into “Our Gang,” pointed out, they were a couple of days early.

“I’ve got two more days to go,” Roach said in crotchety tones when he was asked how it felt to be 100. “I can talk about being 99 all afternoon.”

Ask him again Tuesday.

But no one seemed interested in discussing how Roach managed to make it to 100--a man who smoked and drank until recently. They came to the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement home to pay homage to one of Hollywood’s comedic founders, a man so revered by the film community that celebrities such as Charlton Heston modestly asked Roach if he remembered them.

For the most part, he did.

He tenderly asked Anita Garvin, who played Laurel’s wife on film and who lives at the home, if the staff was taking care of her. “Do they ever,” she said, and gave Roach a lipstick-laden kiss that had to be wiped off by his assistants before he made his entrance to the party.

Ever the showman, Roach handed out mechanical pencils bearing the inscription: “Compliments of Hal Roach. 100th Birthday.” He held court from a pillow-padded chair at the back of the retirement home’s assembly hall, accepting birthday wishes.

Roach is one of the founders of the home for retired film and TV industry workers. But he has never moved in. He still goes to the racetrack regularly, has a girlfriend, and said he feels fine except for occasional dizzy spells.

After scores of interviews with reporters from around the world, including German television and Voice of America, he joked: “I’m only an extra here.”

Hardly.

Roach landed in Los Angeles in 1912, three years after leaving his boyhood home in Elmira, N.Y., to work as a truck driver in Seattle and a mule skinner in Alaska. He was 20 then, earning $5 a day as an extra--which in those days was good pay.

Roach moved up quickly, to actor to assistant director to director, and by 1914 he used an inheritance of several hundred dollars to open a studio with a partner. Soon after, he had his own, Hal Roach Studios. His comedies survive as classics--on television, in cinema festivals and film classes.

Roach estimated that he produced 50 feature comedies a year over nearly 20 years. “That’s an awful lot of laughs,” he said.

If he had done nothing else, Roach would be remembered for teaming Laurel and Hardy in more than 100 films.

A pair of actors impersonating the duo greeted guests at the door. To Jackie Cooper, whose affections for the teacher Miss Crabtree were chronicled in the “Our Gang” series, Jeffrey Weissman, the actor posing as Laurel, said: “Nice to see you in long pants.”

For Bevis Faversham, the actor playing Oliver Hardy, meeting Roach was “like meeting the Pope.”

Film critic Leonard Maltin’s 5-year-old daughter, Jessica, shyly hugged her father’s leg and seemed generally unimpressed by the party until Cooper knelt down and asked: “Do you remember Jackie? In love with the school teacher?”

Jessica nodded.

“I was your size then.”

Jessica shook her head.

“They never believe it,” Cooper said, standing up.

Cooper said later that Roach was so successful because he knew instinctively what was funny. “It was called showmanship,” Cooper said. And, he added, there is precious little of it left in Hollywood.