My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [50]
Before I left, I invited Stan to come see us shoot The Dick Van Dyke Show. We were getting ready to shoot “The Sam Pomerantz Scandals,” an episode that featured the cast putting on a variety show to benefit a friend, and it included a sketch with me and actor Henry Calvin as Laurel and Hardy. I explained that everyone on the show would be honored if he were able to attend. But he politely declined, saying he wasn’t up to it.
I didn’t push. I knew that he never went out in public.
After the “Pomerantz” episode aired in early March 1963, I called Stan up and asked for his opinion. Knowing that he was going to watch, I had gone to great lengths to be as meticulous as humanly possible to get every detail right, and I thought I did a pretty good job, too. Stan agreed. But then he spent the next forty minutes reviewing my performance and giving me notes. He said that he had always used paper clips as cuff links. He also said that he always took the heels off his shoes, which was what gave him his trademark stance and walk. He went on and on, talking about the smallest of small details. It was the best lesson in comedy I had ever heard. I wish I had taken notes.
“You did a good job,” he said. “It was the best impersonation I have seen.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“There is one more thing,” he said.
“Yes?”
“The hat was a little off,” he said.
“I knew it,” I said. “Yours and Ollie’s had flat brims. Mine curled slightly. I tried to find one like yours. I even tried ironing the brim on my derby.”
He laughed.
“Young man, why didn’t you just ask me?” he said. “You could have used mine.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
“Well, God bless,” he said, and then he hung up.
On February 23, 1965, Stan died after suffering a heart attack. Reporters came to my house for comments. As I stood in the front yard giving interviews, a sprinkler burst, causing me to jump and dance around while getting soaked. I was sure it was Stan’s doing, one last funny bit. He left his derby to me, though it was never found among his belongings.
Still, I was immensely touched. To me, it was like the passing of the baton, both an honor and a responsibility.
His funeral at Forest Lawn brought out Hollywood comedy legends Buster Keaton, Hal Roach Jr., Patsy Kelly, and Alan Mowbray, among others, but at the request of Stan’s wife, I delivered the eulogy, which I began by stating what to me was the obvious: “Laurel and Hardy are together again—and the halls of heaven must be ringing with divine laughter.”
Stan did not want his funeral to be a solemn occasion and in fact had written a warning to all of us: “If anyone at my funeral has a long face, I’ll never speak to you again.” Buster Keaton reportedly told people that Stan was the funniest of all the great film comics, funnier than Chaplin, funnier than even himself. I could not have agreed more.
“In the wee hours of one of his last mornings on Earth,” I said in my eulogy, “a nurse came into Stan’s room to give him emergency aid. Stan looked up and said, ‘You know what? I’d lot rather be skiing.’ The nurse said, ‘Do you ski, Mr. Laurel?’ He said, ‘No! But I’d lot rather be skiing than doing this.’
“Stan once remarked that Chaplin and Lloyd made all the big pictures and he and Babe made all the little cheap ones. ‘But they tell me our little cheap ones have been seen by more people through the years than all the big ones. They must have seen how much love we put into them.’
“And that’s what put Stan Laurel head and shoulders above all the rest of them—as an artist, and as a man. He put into his work that one special ingredient. He was a master comedian and he was a master artist—but he put in that one ingredient that can only come from the human being, and that was love. Love for his work, love for life, love for his audience—and how he loved that public. They were never squares or jerks to Stan Laurel.
“Some of his contemporaries didn’t criticize Stan favorably back in the thirties. Some of