He called her Stanley, she called him Ollie.
That was the beginning, that was
the end, of what we will call the Laurel and Hardy love affair.
She was twenty-five, he was
thirty-two when they met at one of those dumb cocktail parties where everyone
wonders what they are doing there. But no one goes home, so everyone drinks too
much and lies about how grand a late afternoon it all was.
They did not, as often happens,
see each other across a crowded room, and if there was romantic music to
background their collision, it couldn’t be heard. For everyone was talking at
one person and staring at someone else.
They were, in fact, ricocheting
through a forest of people, but finding no shade trees. He was on his way for a
needed drink, she was eluding a love-sick stranger, when they locked paths in
the exact center of the fruitless mob. They dodged left and right a few times,
then laughed and he on impulse, seized his tie and twiddled it at her, wiggling
his fingers. Instantly, smiling, she lifted her hand to pull the top of her
hair into a frowzy tassel, blinking and looking as if she had been struck on
the head.
“Stan!” he cried, in recognition.
“Ollie!” She exclaimed. “Where
have you been?”
“Why don’t you do something to
help me!” he exclaimed, making wide fat gestures.
They grabbed each others arms,
laughing again.
“I-” She said, and her face
brightened even more. “I-I know the exact place, not two miles from here, where
Laurel and Hardy, in nineteen thirty, carried that piano crate up and down one
hundred and fifty steps!”
“Well,” he cried, “let’s get out
of here!”
His car door slammed, his car
engine roared.
Los Angeles raced by in late
afternoon sunlight.
He braked the car where she told
him to park. “Here!”
“I can’t believe it,” he
murmured, not moving. He peered around at the sunset sky. Lights were coming on
all across Los Angeles, down the hill. He nodded. “Are those the steps?”
“All one hundred fifty of them.”
She climbed out of the open topped car. “Come on, Ollie.”
“Very well,” he said, “Stan.”
They walked over to the bottom of
yet another hill and gazed up along the steep incline of concrete steps toward
the sky. The faintest touch of wetness rimmed his eyes. She was quick to
pretend not to notice, but she took his elbow. Her voice was wonderfully quiet.
“Go on up,” she said. “Go on.
Go.”
She gave him a tender push.
He started up the steps,
counting, and with each half-whispered count, his voice took on an extra
decibel of joy. By the time he reached fifty-seven he was a boy playing a
wondrous old-new game, and he was lost in time, and whether he was carrying the
piano up the hill or whether it was chasing him down, he could not say.
“Hold it!” he heard her call, far
away, “right there!”
He held still, swaying on step
fifty-eight, smiling wildly, as if accompanied by proper ghosts, and turned.
“Okay,” she called, “come back
down.”
He started down, color in his
cheeks and a peculiar suffering of happiness in his chest. He could hear the
piano following now.
“Hold it right there!”
She had a camera in her hands.
Seeing it, his right hand flew instinctively to his tie to flutter it on the
evening air.
“Now me!” She shouted, and raced
up to hand him the camera. And he marched down and looked up and there she was,
doing the thin shrug and the puzzled and hopeless face of Stan baffled by life
but loving it all. He clicked the shutter, wanting to stay here forever.
She came slowly down the steps
and peered into his face.
“Why,” she said, “you’re crying.”
She placed her thumbs under his
eyes to press the tears away. She tasted the result. “Yep,” she said. “Real
tears.”
He looked at her eyes, which were
almost as wet as his.
“Another fine mess you’ve got us
in,” he said.
“Oh, Ollie,” she said.
“Oh, Stan,” he said.
He kissed her, gently.
And then he said:
“Are we going to know each other
forever?”
“Forever,” she said.
*And that was how the long love affair
began.
They had real names, of course,
but those don’t matter, for Laurel and Hardy always seemed the best thing to
call themselves.
For the simple fact was that she
was fifteen pounds underweight and he was always trying to get her to add a few
pounds. And he was twenty pounds overweight and she was always trying to get
him to take off more than his shoes. But it never worked and was finally a
joke, the best kind, which wound up being:
“You’re Stan, no two ways about
it, and I’m Ollie, let’s face it. And oh God, dear young woman, let’s enjoy the
mess, the wonderful mess, all the while we’re in!”
It was, then, while it lasted,
and it lasted some while, a French parfait, an American perfection, a
wilderness from which they would never recover to the end of their lives.
From that twilight hour on the
piano stairs on, their days were long, heedless, and full of that amazing
laughter that paces the beginning and the run-along rush of any great love
affair. They only stopped laughing long enough to kiss and only stopped kissing
long enough to laugh at how odd and miraculous it was to find themselves with
no clothes to wear in the middle of a bed as vast as life and as beautiful as
morning.
And sitting there in the middle
of warm whiteness, he shut his eyes and shook his head and declared, pompously:
“I have nothing to say!”
“Yes, you do!” she cried. “Say
it!”
And he said it and they fell off
the edge of the earth.
*Their first year was pure myth
and fable, which would grow outsize when remembered thirty years on. They went
to see new films and old films, but mainly Stan and Ollie. They memorized all
the best scenes and shouted them back
and forth as they drove around midnight Los Angeles. He spoiled her by treating
her childhood growing up in Hollywood as very special, and she spoiled him by
pretending that his yesteryear on roller skates out front of the studios was
not in the past but right now.
She proved it one night. On a
whim she asked where he had roller-skated as a boy and collided with W.C.
Fields. Where he asked Fields for his autograph, and where was it that Fields
signed the book, and handed it back, and cried, “There you are, you little
son-of-a-bitch!”
“Drive me there,” she said.
And at ten o’clock that night
they got out of the car in front of Paramount Studio and he pointed to the
pavement near the gate and said, “He stood there,” and she gathered him in her
arms and kissed him and said gently, “Now where was it you had your picture
taken with Marlene Dietrich?”
He walked her fifty feet across
the street from the studio. “In the late afternoon sun,” he said, “Marlene
stood here.” And she kissed him again, longer this time, and the moon rising
like an obvious magic trick, filling the street in front of the empty studio.
She let her soul flow over into him like a tipped fountain, and he received it
and gave it back and was glad.
“Now,” she said, quietly, “where
was it you saw Fred Astaire in nineteen thirty-five and Ronald Colman in
nineteen thirty-seven and Jean Harlow in nineteen thirty-six?”
And he drove her to those three
different places all around Hollywood until midnight and they stood and she
kissed him as if it would never end.
And that was the first year. And
during that year they went up and down those long piano steps at least once a
month and had champagne picnics halfway up, and discovered an incredible thing:
“I think it’s our mouths,” he
said, “Until I met you, I never knew I had a mouth. Yours is the most amazing
in the world, and it makes me feel as if mine were amazing, too. Were you ever
really kissed before I kissed you?”
“Never!”
“Nor was I. To have lived this
long and not known mouths.”
“Dear mouth,” she said, “shut up
and kiss.”
But then at the end of the first
year they discovered an even more incredible thing. He worked at an advertising
agency and was nailed in one place. She worked at a travel agency and would
soon be flying everywhere. Both were astonished they had never noticed before.
But now that Vesuvius had erupted and the fiery dust was beginning to settle,
they sat and looked at each other one night and she said, faintly:
“Good-bye…”
“What?” he asked.
“I can see good-bye coming,” she
said.
He looked at her face and it was
not sad like Stan in the films, but just sad like herself.
“I feel like the ending of that
Hemingway novel where two people ride along in the late day and say how it
would be if they could go on forever but they know now they won’t,” she said.
“Stan,” he said, “this is no
Hemingway novel and this can’t be the end of the world. You’ll never leave me.”
But it was a question, not a
declaration and suddenly she moved and he blinked at her and said:
“What are you doing down there?”
“Nut,” she said, “I’m kneeling on
the floor and I’m asking your hand. Marry me, Ollie. Come away with me to
France. I’ve got a new job in Paris. No, don’t say anything. Shut up. No one
has to know I’ve got money this year and will support you while you write the
great American novel–”
“But–” he said.
“You’ve got your portable
type-writer, and a ream of paper, and me. Say it, Ollie, will you come? Hell,
don’t marry me, we’ll live in sin, but fly with me, yes?”
“And watch us go to hell in a
year and bury us forever?”
“Are you that afraid, Ollie?
Don’t you believe in me or you or anything? God, why are men such cowards, and
why the hell do you have such thin skins and are afraid of a woman like a
ladder to lean on. Listen. I’ve got things to do and you’re coming with me. I
can’t leave you here, you’ll fall tomorrow. That means you, Paris, and my job.
Your novel will take time but you’ll do it. Now, do you do it here and feel
sorry for yourself, or do we live in a cold-water walk-up flat in the Latin
Quarter a long way off from here? This is my one and only offer, Ollie. I’ve
never proposed before, I won’t ever
propose again, it’s hard on my knees. Well?”
“Have we had this conversation
before?” he said.
“A dozen times in the last year,
but you never listened, you were hopeless.”
“No, in love and helpless.”
“You’ve got one minute to make up
your mind. Sixty seconds.” She was staring at her wristwatch.
“Get up off the floor,” he said,
embarrassed.
“If I do, it’s out the door and gone,” she said. “Forty-nine seconds to go, Ollie.”
“Stan,” he groaned.
“Thirty,” she read her watch.
“Twenty. I’ve got one knee off the floor. Ten. I’m beginning to get the other
knee up. Five. One.”
And she was standing on her feet.
“What brought this on?” he asked.
“Now,” she said, “I am heading
for the door. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve thought about it more than I dared even
notice. We are very special wondrous people, Ollie, and I don’t think our like
will ever come again in the world, at least not to us, or I’m lying to myself
and I probably am. But I must go and you are free to come along, but can’t face
it or don’t know it. And now-” she reached out. “My hand is on the door and-”
“And?” he said, quietly.
“I’m crying,” she said.
He started to get up but she
shook her head.
“No, don’t. If you touch me I’ll
cave in, and to hell with that. I’m going. But once a year will be forbearance
day, or forgiveness day or whatever in hell you want to call it. Once a year
I’ll show up at our flight of steps, no piano, same hour, same time as that
night when we first went there and if you’re there to meet me I’ll kidnap you
or you me, but don’t bring along, and show me your damn bank balance or give me
any of your lip.”
“Stan,” he said.
“My God,” she mourned.
“What?”
“This door is heavy. I can’t move
it.” She wept. “There. It’s moving. There.” She wept more. “I’m gone.”
The door shut.
“Stan!” He ran to the door and
grabbed the knob. It was wet. He raised his fingers to his mouth and tasted the
salt, then opened the door.
The hall was already empty. The
air where she had passed was just coming back together. Thunder threatened when
the two halves met. There was a promise of rain.
*He went back to the steps on
October 4 every year for three years, but she wasn’t there. And then he forgot
for two years but in the autumn of the sixth year, he remembered and went back
in the late sunlight and walked up the stairs because he saw something halfway
up and it was a bottle of good champagne with a ribbon and a note on it,
delivered by someone, and the note read:
“Ollie, dear Ollie. Date
remembered. But in Paris. Mouth’s not the same but happily married. Love Stan.”
And after that, every October he
simply did not go to visit the stairs. The sound of that piano rushing down
that hillside, he knew, would catch him and take him along to where he did not
know.”
And that was the end, or almost
the end, of the Laurel and Hardy love affair.
There was, by amiable accident, a
final meeting.
Traveling through France fifteen
years later, he was walking on the Champs Elysees at twilight one afternoon
with his wife and two daughters, when he saw this handsome woman coming the
other way, escorted by a very sober-looking older man and a very handsome
dark-haired boy of twelve, obviously her son.
As they passed, the same smile
lit both their faces in the same instant.
He twiddled his necktie at her.
She tousled her hair at him.
They did not stop. They kept
going. But he heard her call back along the Champs Elysees, the last words he
would ever hear her say:
“Another fine mess you’ve got us
in!” And then she added the old, the familiar name by which he had gone in the
years of their love.
And she was gone and his
daughters and wife looked at him and one daughter said, “Did that lady call you
Ollie?”
“What lady?” he said.
“Dad,” said the other daughter
leaning in to peer at his face. “You’re crying.”
“No.”
“Yes, you are. Isn’t he, Mom?”
“Your papa,” said his wife, “as
you well know, cries at telephone books.”
“No,” he said, “just one hundred
and fifty steps and a piano. Remind me to show you girls, someday.”
They walked on and he turned and
looked back a final time. The woman with her husband and son turned at that
very moment. Maybe he saw her mouth pantomime the words, So long, Ollie. Maybe
he didn’t. He felt his own mouth move, in silence: So long, Stan.
And they walked in opposite directions along the Champs Elysees in the late night of an October sun.