The novel charts Stan Laurel’s life in 203 short chapters from his perspective as a retiree in Santa Monica, California.
After the death of Oliver “Babe” Hardy in 1957, Laurel retired from making pictures until his death in 1965.
It is the strength of their friendship that forms the basis of this book.
Connolly depicts Laurel’s early life as a vaudeville performer in British music halls, where he performed under the shadow of genius in the form of his compatriot Charlie Chaplin.
Chaplin, who Laurel understudied and accompanied on his first trip to America, is a constant lodestone, a distant presence whose comic talent is matched only by his unsavoury behaviour off screen – infidelity, predilections for underage girls and general all-round egotism: “Chaplin, as an artist, must be perfect because Chaplin, as a man, is so flawed.”
The ageing Laurel reminisces about his early and unsuccessful career in silent cinema and on the American stage, at a time when he “as yet has no persona, no character… He tries on personalities like masks, only to discard them”.
And it is not until Oliver met Hardy and the two collaborated in 1927 that he started to experience anything like box-office success.
Connolly is particularly good on the transition from silent cinema to the era of sound, and the differing demands it placed on performers: “Most of all, they must be aware not only of the camera, but also of the screen. They will be projected upon it, and the audience will project itself upon them in turn.”
At the same time, the older Laurel is keen to play his part in the comic tradition, believing himself “part of the same continuum, clowns bequeathed greasepaint from dead clowns, comics built from the bones of forgotten men”.
Connolly follows the double act’s career as they acquired wives with almost as much alacrity as they made films.
As well as performing in more than 100 shorts and features together, the pair clocked multiple marriages to several women, had a string of affairs and a litany of falling-outs with management – all while becoming two of the most famous people in the world.
According to the author’s notes, “He” started life as a potential monograph and it shows: despite the depth of research he has done into his subject’s lives, Connolly’s secondary characters, in particular the female ones, are largely one-note.
Of course, this may well be intentional, as the novel is told from the perspective of an older man whose only lasting partner in life – on and off screen – has been dead for some years.
Laurel’s memories are “just cinders of recollection. They hold no true heat. Only the memories of Babe retain warmth”.
This is a novel that charts the evolution of comedy in Hollywood during its first half century with a keen eye to detail but it’s one that strikes a wistful note, its ageing protagonist reflecting on “former glories… [which]… serve only to remind him that the era has passed”.
Nonetheless it is an entertaining account of early 20th-century celebrity and the two men whose lives to posterity “have become reflections, each of the other, an infinity of echoes”.
He by John Connolly (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99)