– 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, then, 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.