Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin came from England. One had been born in the north, in Lancashire; the other, in London. Both one and the other would mark history in the world of comedy; both made silent movies, wore bowlers, dressed formally although sometimes a bit ragged, radiated innocence and tenderness with their antics, and seemed clumsy. And they made people laugh. The two arrived in the New World in 1912 on the same ship that also brought other members of Fred Karno's troupe, the music hall impresario and who popularized the face-slapping gag. Arthur Stanley Jefferson was for a time the replacement for London's Charles Spencer Chaplin.
Karno's company had dissolved by 1914. And then Stan Jefferson and Charlie Chaplin went their separate ways. Chaplin created his character of the tramp; he worked for Keystone Studios, Mack Sennett's company; he founded United Artists with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.; he made about eighty movies; won three Oscars; he was married several times, had eleven children (eight with Oona, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill).
Stan Jefferson starred in the movie Lucky Dog with Oliver Hardy, a chubby American, who would later be his artistic partner for life in a duo that in our latitudes became known as El Gordo y el Flaco. The symbiosis between the two was such that when Hardy died in 1957, Stan had no desire to act again. By then it had been a while since he was not Stan Jefferson, but Stan Laurel. Mae Dahlberg, one of his partners (Laurel was married five times, two of them to the same woman), remarked that his stage name had thirteen letters, and out of superstition, she advised him to change it.
Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin came to New York on the same boat, and for a while they were roommates. Stan returned to England soon after and would return to the United States, where he would pair up with Oliver Hardy. It is said that while they lived in the pension, Charlie played the violin to hide the noise of the frying that Stan was preparing inside the room. But according to what is said, the relationship between the two was not ideal: Stan could never get out of Chaplin's eternal bench of substitutes and advance his artistic career.
In a typed letter, Stan sent to a friend in 1957, he revealed Chaplin's mood swings and that his former roommate was "mean and miserly." Despite this appearance that did not coincide with the image that Charlot radiated in his films, Stan believed that far from censoring him, he should be pitied because he was a person whose ideals had been distorted and who had lost all sense of decorum. Still, he admitted that Chaplin was the best artist in his field. Chaplin, for his part, does not dedicate a single line to Laurel in his autobiography.
Minutes before he died, in 1965, Stan told his nurse that he could safely go skiing. The nurse asked him if he knew how to ski. "No," Stan replied, "but I'd rather that than be here." And minutes later he died peacefully in his chair. Years later, in 1973, the Argentine writer Osvaldo Soriano published his first novel: Triste, solitario y final. An old, sick, and forgotten Stan Laurel enlists the professional services of an iconic whodunit detective, Philip Marlowe, also in the twilight of his career, to find out why no one was hiring him anymore.
In that novel, where some reality intersects with a lot of fantasy, Marlowe goes to the cinema to see a film of The Fat and the Skinny after his interview with Laurel and waits “for the Chaplin film to finish. He did not like that conceited little man, who always did badly in the movies and did well in life ”. In the novel, Soriano appears as himself, in a crazy duo with Marlowe whose purpose is to vindicate Stan Laurel for being ignored by Chaplin and also to take revenge on John Wayne because he had humiliated Oliver Hardy by giving him a minor role in The Fighting. Kentuckian.
Laurel's funeral was attended by Dick van Dyke, who had made contact with Stan after he found his name in the phone book. Another celebrity who went to fire him was none other than Buster Keaton, who assured him “Chaplin wasn't the funniest. I wasn't the funniest. Stan Laurel was the funniest." Keaton, whose dour expression is an anthology, may not have taken note of Laurel's grave warning in life: "If someone pouts at my funeral, I'll never speak to them again." Viviana Aubele.
For Stanley fans who want to find out a little more about his life, there is a biography: He, by the Irish writer John Connolly, which mentions the tumultuous relationship between Stan and Charlie. In this sense, the English theater company Told by an Idiot staged the beginning of this year: The Strange Tale of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel (The strange story of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel), a tribute with music and words to these two figures' comedies.
