In Pursuit of a Fine Mess of Memories

Every now and then I go out to look for Laurel and Hardy. I visit the concrete Silver Lake steps where they dragged the piano crate in the 1932 Academy Award-winning short, “The Music Box.” I drive through Culver City intersections where they spurred masses of people into hat-stomping (or pants-ripping or pie-throwing) riots. A few weeks ago, I dined at an Indian restaurant inside the building they drove by in an old Ford in their 1929 film, “Bacon Grabbers.”

“Damn,” I thought, “missed ‘em by 65 years!”

Last June 16, Stan Laurel’s birthday, I went to Forest Lawn in Burbank to visit his grave. The spirit of Laurel and Hardy movies, at least, seemed to be with me. I got lost cruising around the cemetery in a car that squeaked like a shrieking peacock and repeatedly drove past a funeral in progress, complete with a delicate, tinkly harpist. The solemn mourners eyed me with increasing fear at each pass. I resisted an impulse to scratch my head and smile helplessly.

When I finally found Laurel’s resting place (after taking a wrong turn that led me to Buster Keaton’s), I deposited some sort of mutated snapdragon that was all my budget allowed and whistled the old Laurel and Hardy theme song, also known as “The Cuckoo Song.” You know how it goes--ending with that repeating “COO-koo, COO-koo.” Well--and this is the God’s truth--when I finished, the mockingbirds picked up the “COO-koos.” I couldn’t decide whether it was poignant or eerie. Or funny.

And, yes, on the way out I got lost and squeaked past that funeral again.

I am not alone in my odd pursuit of Stan and Ollie. Lots of other people go out and look for them, too.

There are, for such people, two guidebooks to the pair’s movie sites: the painstakingly researched “Pratfall” (Vol. 2), written by Bob Satterfield and friends and published by the Valley-based Way Out West Tent of the Sons of the Desert, the durable local chapter of the international Laurel and Hardy appreciation society; and “Following the Comedy Trail,” by Leon Smith, a former Los Angeles Police Department detective who includes Laurel and Hardy and “Our Gang” locations.

Why such interest? It occurs to me, with the 102nd anniversary of Oliver Hardy’s birth Tuesday, that aside from originality and comedy, “the boys” symbolized love, bravery, friendship, dignity, perseverance, undying loyalty and innocence in the face of merciless absurdity and chicanery. I have no argument with Kurt Vonnegut’s appraisal of them as angels in his novel, “Slapstick.”

And there’s a little more to it. Tied up in my periodic searches for Laurel and Hardy, and in the guidebooks, is a search for old L.A.--that more innocent series of communities connected by great, formidable Pacific Electric lines.

To wit, when I see a Red Car cruising down Hoover Avenue in the duo’s “Hog Wild” (1930), I drink up the scene, trying hard to imagine what it must have been like to ride on that Red Car. When I see Stan and Ollie haul that crate up those pristine steps in that young Silver Lake neighborhood, I am there, trying to breathe that less complicated 1932 air along with them. The movies--and their remaining landmarks--are time travel.

I went out looking for Laurel and Hardy again a few weeks ago, at the Hollywood Heritage Museum. It seemed a good place to try. The Silent Society and the Society of Operating Cameramen were hosting a fund-raiser there for a commemorative plaque to be placed at the foot of the “Laurel and Hardy Steps” in Silver Lake. The evening’s program featured a few old comedies shot at the steps--including “The Music Box”--and Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury read aloud his old short story, “The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair” (published in “The Toynbee Convector”) for the crowd of 50 or so. It concerns two lovers united because they liked to look for Laurel and Hardy. Most of their dates, in fact, are spent picnicking at the steps.

Sensing a kindred spirit, I later phoned Bradbury. The author offered that the museum reading had moved him to resurrect an unpublished 30-year-old short story also focusing on Laurel and Hardy and to polish it up. (“So we’ll see now if we get someone to publish this,” he said, incredibly enough. “You can never tell.”) He summarized the story.

“It’s called ‘Another Fine Mess,’ ” Bradbury said. “In it, the ghosts of Laurel and Hardy run up and down the (Silver Lake) stairs late at night. This woman who lives nearby hears them shouting at 3 o’clock in the morning, goes out, can’t see anything, and hears the ‘music box’ (piano crate) tumbling down the steps.

“She calls her friend, who’s an expert on motion picture history, and they both go out and listen. And they say to each other, why are they here? Why are they letting the ‘music box’ chase them down the stairs, and then come up again? And they theorize, well, maybe they want to hear one last time, ‘We love you.’ Maybe we didn’t give them enough love while they were alive. Could that possibly be?”

(In actuality, it could. Biographers suggest that the comics, especially Hardy, who died in 1957, probably did not realize how deeply they were appreciated.)

“And finally, one of the ladies leans forward and calls down the steps into the darkness, ‘You know, we love you. You don’t have to come here and haunt the steps anymore. You can be at peace because you know that my friend here and I love you.’ Then they hear the voices going down the stairs, and they have second thoughts. They say, ‘Well, don’t go away forever. Once a year come back here so we can say it all over again, “We love you.” ’ And then they stand there, both of them weeping, and the sounds disappear down into black and white Los Angeles.”

*

After our chat, I drove into Technicolor Los Angeles--specifically, to the steps (between 923 and 935 Vendome Street). They’re surrounded by homes now and overgrown with bougainvillea and jade plants. The placid and civilized little neighborhood of “The Music Box” has long given way to graffiti, bars on windows and back yards full of Dobermans.

I walked up and down the 131 cracked stairs where Stan and Ollie played Sisyphus with a piano, slavering guard dogs snarling at me. I pictured their horse-drawn delivery wagon in the street below, and Laurel yelling up the stairs to beleaguered Hardy that an angry cop wants to talk to “the other monkey,” meaning Hardy.

I knocked on a door of one home that does appear in the movie and talked to a nice young guy named Jiro Yamaguchi, a classical Indian percussionist who plays Thursday nights at nearby Paru’s. He told me that people come by “every couple of weeks” to look at the steps and that “they tend to be a little older.”

I found evidence of the visitors. A gentleman named Mauro Simonini had carefully printed two messages on the steps, in large black letters. The first read, in Italian: “A S. Laurel & O. Hardy, con affetto, Mauro Simonini, Livorno, Italia, 10-16-93.” The second referred to the pair as “Stanlio” and “Ollio,” their characters’ Italian-esque names in the 1931 feature “Fra Diavolo.” It read: “A Stanlio e Ollio, i grandissimi con infinito affetto--Mauro.” (Translation: “To Stan and Ollie, the great ones, with infinite affection.”)

I stood there, reflecting on the people who look for Laurel and Hardy: Ray Bradbury, who looks in his typewriter; members of the Society of Operating Cameramen and the Silent Society, who are looking in a plaque; Mauro Simonini, who came halfway around the world to seek them in the old L.A. steps of Silver Lake; the Sons of the Desert, who celebrate their work and memory all year long--and me. And it struck me that a person couldn’t ask for any greater gift. So happy 102nd, Ollie. Con infinito affetto.