He cannot see any natural light because the picture is being made on just five indoor sets. He can no longer even see the cameramen because each operator has to climb inside the box of the camera and seal it shut behind him. And now four cameras are required where previously two, or just one, would have sufficed: two for long shots, two for close-ups.
Finally, they are filming at night because Hal Roach is making an Our Gang picture at the same time, and Hal Roach possesses just one set of sound equipment. The kids can only work until five o’clock, which means that he and Babe and Thelma Todd and Mae Busch and Edgar Kennedy will be forced to give up six evenings for this picture. Mae Busch suggests to Hal Roach that Hal Roach hire dwarfs instead of kids for the Our Gang picture, and film them from a distance. Hal Roach pretends not to hear. Hal Roach has to be pretending, because nobody can fail to hear Mae Busch. Mae Busch’s voice could guide ships to shore.
Lewis Foster, who is directing, calls for quiet, and now more than ever he misses the voices and the din. He and Babe make their entrance, and he can feel the sweat pooling at his back, and his make-up has congealed to deprive his face of expression, and his throat has dried, and he knows that when he opens his mouth only a hoarse shriek will emerge, like the cry of a disappointed bird. Babe is talking, but he cannot follow Babe’s words. He has a line, but what use is a line if it cannot be spoken?
Babe finishes talking.
Babe waits.
He opens his mouth, and two syllables emerge, his first words of recorded speech on film.
—Any nuts?
81
It is early the following afternoon. They are watching the first dailies. More importantly, they are listening to the first dailies. The cast is present, and the director, and the writer, and the four cameramen, and Hal Roach.
Hal Roach is unhappy with Edgar Kennedy’s voice. This is how Hal Roach expresses his unhappiness:
—Jesus, Edgar Kennedy sounds like a fairy.
Edgar Kennedy is a light-heavyweight boxer who once goes fourteen rounds with Jack Dempsey, the Manassa Mauler. If anyone has ever previously expressed the view that Edgar Kennedy sounds like a fairy, particularly within earshot of Edgar Kennedy himself, then that person has not stayed vertical for very long, and may in fact be dead.
But this is Hal Roach, and this is a picture, and Edgar Kennedy has never heard himself speak on screen before. Hal Roach is right: Edgar Kennedy does sound like a fairy, even to Edgar Kennedy. So Edgar Kennedy spends the rest of the day practicing a deeper voice, and when the evening’s filming begins, Edgar Kennedy recites his lines like one who has been gargling gravel, and Edgar Kennedy will sound that way for the rest of his career until Edgar Kennedy dies, too young, of throat cancer.
Because, as has already been established, fate likes a joke.
Filming is completed. His voice is fine, and Babe’s voice is fine. They sound as they should, although perhaps Babe’s voice is softer and higher than his appearance might suggest, just as Babe’s movements are more graceful, and Babe’s footsteps lighter. Babe’s Georgia accent also grows more pronounced as Babe tries to ingratiate himself with Thelma Todd, who plays Edgar Kennedy’s wife. He notices it during filming, but says nothing of it to Babe. It is one more example of Babe’s brilliance, and Babe’s process of building a character by augmenting it with small blocks of the real.
His own performance, he recognizes, is less nuanced. Even after all this time, he does not yet have Babe’s skill of working with small gestures, but the problem appears more pronounced in this picture. He puts it down to his concerns about his voice, but he also accepts that he will never be an actor the way Babe is an actor. He will always be a denizen of the stage transposed to the medium of film. Babe, subtle and unselfish, helps to mask his flaws. Babe is the reason he is a star.
With filming at an end, Babe’s work is done. Babe retires to Myrtle, and golf courses, and gambling, although not necessarily in that order, while he works on the edit.
The edit is a challenge.
No cut can be made without an awareness of how it may affect the sound, so the picture is harder to tighten. The previews are even worse, because the laughter of the Audience drowns out the dialogue, and the next line is obscured. In future, he decides, they will have to leave pauses between lines so that the Audience can laugh, which means the pictures may have to become less naturalistic as a consequence, and more like stage performances.
And even after previews and cuts, edits and reshoots, Unaccustomed As We Are is still not as he might have wished it to be, but the critics love it, and the Audience loves it, and Hal Roach loves it. Hal Roach loves it so much that Hal Roach rushes its release ahead of the three silent comedies he and Babe have already completed, and which now seem dated. So besotted are the theaters with sound that they pay Hal Roach more for this two-reel comedy than they would for a feature, because with Unaccustomed As We Are Hal Roach deviates from his old formula of selling a year’s slate of pictures in advance and instead makes the exhibitors begin to pay picture by picture.
And Hal Roach is right about Mack Sennett. Talking pictures herald Mack Sennett’s demise, and Mack Sennett dies bankrupt.
82
At the Oceana Apartments, he recalls an exchange from Unaccustomed As We Are. Even decades later, he experiences no difficulty in summoning to mind the lines.
Edgar Kennedy, believing the boys to be hiding a woman with whom one of them may be having an affair, helps them to cover their tracks, not realizing that the woman under concealment is his own wife.
Making whoopee, huh? If you fellas are gonna take chances, you better be more careful.
He celebrates the release of the picture not at home with his family, but in Alyce Ardell’s apartment. He celebrates by fucking Alyce Ardell in her bed.
The big thing is, you got to keep it as far away from your wife as you can.
He has heard the talk about Alyce Ardell. Some say she is a gold-digger, but she has never asked him for money. He thinks there may be other men whom she does ask, but he does not want to know of them. If Babe suspects where he has been—and it may be that Babe does—nothing is said.
We married men, we gotta stick together.
83
At the Oceana Apartments, Unaccustomed As We Are will never appear on his television screen. The soundtrack discs have been lost, and he is not sure if a usable print still exists. He always preferred the silent pictures anyway, but it is no consolation.
Perhaps Unaccustomed As We Are has joined the ranks of the lost. If so, he will be sorry. It may not have been perfect, but it has a personal significance as the duo’s first talkie, even if no one else was exercised enough to preserve it.
He and Babe argued on the set of the picture. Or they argued on one of their pictures—this he knows—and it may as well be Unaccustomed As We Are. He holds that it may have been their only real argument. It is the sole argument he can remember, which means that it is either their only falling out or their only significant falling out. Either way, if a man is to recall a disagreement with his friend, then let it be one such as this.
Babe has his vanities. They are minor, but on occasion they rouse themselves to preen. One of Babe’s vanities is his hair. Babe does not like to see his hair in bangs. Babe prefers his hair to be slicked back and tidy, because Babe perspires under the lights.
But the Audience loves to see Babe’s hair smeared upon his forehead. Babe’s hair is a kind of barometer, a physical manifestation of the deterioration of any given set of circumstances. For the most part, Babe plays along, but not on this day. Babe announces that his hair will not be worn in bangs. Perhaps Babe, too, is feeling the pressure on the set. He tries to convince Babe that the bangs are necessary. Babe refuses to accept this. Voices are raised. Time is wasted.
Eventually, Babe settles for a degree of dishevelment. Apologies are exchanged. But he always knows when Babe is feeling low, because Babe starts complaining about his hair.
This, the
n, is the sum total of harsh words exchanged in all their years together.
84
Hal Roach is stretched. Hal Roach is a man on a rack. The rack is not uncomfortable, and comes with booze and cigars, but it is a rack nonetheless. In 1929, Hal Roach Studios will release close to fifty pictures, which means that Hal Roach will release close to fifty pictures, because Hal Roach is the studio.
Hal Roach tries to keep life informal on his lot. There is little security, and employees are identifiable only by the small brass numbered pins they are required to wear. It is not uncommon to see actors running errands for Hal Roach’s parents, who live in an apartment on the property. Everyone eats in the studio commissary on Washington Boulevard.
Hal Roach has built the reputation of Hal Roach Studios by ensuring that every film made has some measure of involvement from himself: an original story idea, a suggestion for improvements, even Hal Roach as director. If it does not, then by definition, it is not a Hal Roach picture.
Neither does Hal Roach make pictures in a hurry. This is not Poverty Row. The creative teams are given time to work. One has to spend money to make money, but one must have the money to spend in the first place. Hal Roach has money, possibly a great deal of it, but is also aware of how easy it is to go from having a great deal of money to having no money at all.
Hal Roach is amiable in public, but worries in private. Sometimes, when particularly vexed, Hal Roach plays the saxophone or the violin. Hal Roach finds this conducive to thought and reflection. Music flows through the lot, and the staff surmise that it is best to leave Hal Roach alone.
Hal Roach is playing his saxophone.
Hal Roach is being left alone.
Elmer Raguse is still complaining about damage to his equipment. Hal Roach believes that if Elmer Raguse were permitted to do so, Elmer Raguse would sleep on the lot each night alongside his valves and microphones, or find a way to take them home to bed with him.
Hal Roach has underestimated the impact that sound will have on his pictures. Hal Roach realizes that dialogue is not simply a spoken version of Beanie Walker’s title cards, that speech is not merely an adjunct to pantomime, that music and action and words must now work in unison. Hal Roach has always prized story, but sound recording has changed the manner in which every future tale will be presented. Someday soon, Hal Roach knows, a comedy will be made in which the humor arises from dialogue alone. Hal Roach would very much like that comedy to bear his name.
And there are rumors of affairs among his stars. There are always rumors of affairs—these people are alarmingly promiscuous—but Hal Roach needs to be kept aware of them, just in case fires must be extinguished.
Some of these rumors are more troubling than others.
Alyce Ardell has been glimpsed on the lot, or near the lot, or has passed the lot waving from a train window, naked from the waist up, while the Columbia Saxophone Sextette plays “Frogs’ Legs.” The details are unimportant. This is a family business. Discretion is required.
A quiet word with one of his stars may be necessary.
Most of all, Hal Roach feels control over his studio slipping from his hands, although Hal Roach cannot express this fear aloud. The business details are accreting, and the more successful Hal Roach becomes, the more these matters take precedence over his desire to remain involved in the creative side.
Hal Roach misses this creative aspect, because the fewer opportunities there are to exercise one’s creativity, the harder it becomes to maintain. Already the ideas and gags are not emerging from him as frequently as before. The studio still has a lot of good gagmen, but it can always use more. The more generous of the stars farm out any gags they can’t use, or those that would be better served by another actor, but this is not the same as having someone who can move from picture to picture, set to set, offering guidance and expertise. A steady hand on the tiller is essential, and it can no longer be Hal Roach’s alone.
Reluctantly, Hal Roach sets aside his saxophone and summons his father. Dad Roach is the company treasurer, but also a useful sounding board for his son. Hal Roach cites some of his concerns to his father, although Hal Roach chooses not to burden Dad Roach with the detail about Alyce Ardell, semi-naked or otherwise.
What you need, says Dad Roach, is an ideas guy, someone who knows comedy but also understands how to run a business involving comics. Someone from vaudeville, maybe?
Hal Roach does not think so. Anyone worth hiring from vaudeville is already on the books, just as the stages have been emptied of any actor who can walk in a straight line while stringing together a coherent sentence. Everybody now wants to be in pictures. In the vaudeville houses, the bottom of the bill has moved to the top, and the openers are now the finale. Soon the only act left on vaudeville will be the Cherry Sisters.
But Dad Roach is correct in his assessment. They bat around a few names, but none feels right.
If that’s all, Dad Roach eventually says, I have to get back to your mother.
Hal Roach thanks his father for coming over.
—Happy to help. By the way, is it true what they’re saying about Alyce Ardell?
85
He has never enjoyed working alone, and now it is no longer necessary. Just as he has found in Babe a way to bring out the best in himself as an actor, and thus imbue his character with life, so too does he surround himself with others who can aid him in molding and expanding his material.
Come on, fellas, he will say at the end of a day’s filming, as the crew begins to disperse, I got some sodas back in the dressing room.
And along will follow Jimmy Parrott, and Frank Butler, and Charlie Rogers, who is generally billed as Charley Rogers and cannot seem to convince anyone to spell his name correctly. Charlie Rogers is another exile from across the water. He likes having Charlie Rogers around. It’s sometimes whispered that Charlie Rogers doesn’t have an original idea in his head, which is not to say that Charlie Rogers’s head is empty of ideas: it’s just that none of these ideas is Charlie Rogers’s own. But Charlie Rogers has played every British music hall, and has memorized every good gag performed on their stages, and any gag that Charlie Rogers doesn’t remember, he does. Between them, they are a walking, talking history of stage comedy.
Babe rarely enters these conclaves, unless the light is too bad to play golf, or his luck hasn’t been good, or Myrtle is being tougher to live with than usual. On those occasions, Babe will take a seat and join them in a soda, although these are sodas in name only because this is serious work, and serious work requires a serious drink. The liquor comes courtesy of Richard Currier, the film editor, who has connections. They’ll raise their glasses and shoot the breeze for a while, and then it will begin: dumb ideas, half-dumb ideas, good ideas; gags explained, gags pantomimed, gags practiced. The best of them get written down, the worst discarded, the remainder worked on until it can be determined if they should be saved or sacrificed. But he marshals these men, and the final decision is his. Babe generally just laughs along, but when Babe does speak, everyone listens.
By the end of a week of these meetings, they will have a six-page action script.
He doesn’t care that it isn’t his name on the script, because a script is simply a guideline. It never contains the best laughs; it just lets everyone know where they have to stand while they wait for Babe and him to come up with something better on the set. But his name is above the title alongside Babe’s, and this is the important part. Let Beanie Walker, the head of editorial, receive the dialogue credit, even if Beanie Walker is dying on his feet since the advent of sound, and maybe adds only a couple of lines that actually make it to the screen.
If Beanie Walker notices this, then Beanie Walker does not say.
Beanie Walker does not attend the gag meetings, which is just as well because Beanie Walker is odd. Beanie Walker rarely speaks, and never laughs. Beanie Walker just says “Yeah” when an action script meets with his approval, which is the equivalent of a lesser man breaking out the champag
ne and calling for dancing girls. Beanie Walker smokes like Prohibition is about to apply to cigarettes from midnight, and has some kind of obsessive disorder. Beanie Walker never marries, and keeps company with cats. Eventually Beanie Walker quits on Hal Roach, and pretty soon after that, Beanie Walker dies.
Writers come and writers go.
Gagmen come and gagmen go.
Directors come and directors go.
Only he and Babe remain constant.
But these are his scripts, his camera positions, his edits, his directions. It does not matter who calls “Camera!,” who calls “Quit!.” They are his pictures—his and Babe’s.
He does not seek the credit.
He does not need the credit.
All he desires is the freedom to work.
86
He hears it from the lips of Warren Doane, who hears it from the lips of Hal Roach himself, but he is still not sure that he believes it.
Hal has hired who? he says.
—Fred Karno. Your old boss.
He cogitates on this information for a moment.
—But why?
Fred Karno is on his uppers. Fred Karno has gone broke from building lavish follies on islands in the Thames, and from fighting court cases, and from living beyond his means. Fred Karno has also, in return for promises of roles, accepted sexual favors in theater backrooms from so many young women—or, as is more likely, prised these favors from them with grasping fingers, and through force of body and will—that there are not enough plays and revues in the whole of England to fulfill Fred Karno’s obligations to his conquests, even if Fred Karno has any intention of fulfilling them to begin with, which Fred Karno probably does not.
So, like many a scoundrel before him, Fred Karno has fled west. But promises of money and work come to nothing. Fred Karno is an impresario, a British theatrical legend, and behaves like one. Fred Karno proves baffling at best to his American cousins, and Fred Karno is equally baffled in return. But Fred Karno is an old stager, and so hides his confusion more successfully.