he: A Novel(40)
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 champagne 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.