IN THE COZY BANQUET ROOM of an Italian restaurant in Elk Grove Village, an annual dinner is about to commence. Present are nearly 30 minds with but a single thought: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
Some of those in attendance are wearing conventioneer fezzes. Others peer from beneath old-fashioned black bowlers that were the trademark of “the Boys,” as the Hollywood icons are known to the fans of their timeless comedy. Some of the sportier wear Hawaiian shirts. All were given leis at the door.
Over lasagna, manicotti, or spaghetti and meatballs, a fraternal anthem will be sung, commemorative toasts made, and modest prizes raffled off before the real business of the night will begin: the screening of Laurel and Hardy films. The attendees will laugh heartily, as if they had never before seen the unwitting Ollie blown up by a gas stove.
They are the Sons of the Desert, and they’re having the time of their lives.
THE SONS OF THE DESERT is the official, worldwide Laurel and Hardy appreciation society, named for one of the duo’s most memorable films. The Chicago chapter is called the Bacon Grabbers, also the title of a Laurel and Hardy film, a silent they made in 1929. Individual chapters of the Sons of the Desert are called “tents,” and there are an estimated 200 or more tents with 2,500 members throughout the world. Each is named after a Laurel and Hardy film (some tents share the same name) and each, according to the organization’s irreverent constitution, is “devoted to the loving study of the persons and films of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. “
Laurel was the thin, vacant-looking one, a British-born contemporary of Charlie Chaplin. Hardy was the mustachioed fat one, a native of Harlem, Ga. They appeared for the first time together, but not as a team, in the 1917 Laurel comedy, “Lucky Dog.” As contract players for producer Hal Roach, they were first teamed in 1926.
They made more than 100 films together, including “Sons of the Desert” in 1933. The movie, one of their best, begins with a charming moment that defines their onscreen relationship. Attending a meeting of a mythical fraternal organization called the Sons of the Desert, Hardy takes to heart the words their Exalted Ruler intones: “The strong must protect the weak.” Hardy gives his pal a benevolent glance. Later in the film, when Laurel’s bumbling ruins the pair’s best efforts to sneak home from the Sons of the Desert convention that their wives had forbidden them to attend, Hardy grumbles “Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.” It has become the pair’s signature line, except in the popular mind, it has mutated into “another fine mess”-probably because that was the title of a 1930 L & H film.
This year marks the Sons of the Desert’s 40th anniversary. The group’s founder, John McCabe, struck up a friendship with Laurel in 1953 after seeing the comedy team perform live in England, where McCabe was a student. McCabe went on to write the groundbreaking 1961 biography, “Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy.” He even married Rosina Lawrence, Laurel and Hardy’s co-star in the film “Way Out West.” McCabe met her at the Sons’ first international convention in 1978.
McCabe, now in his 80s, holds the honorary title of “Exhausted Ruler,” a classic Laurel malapropism from “Sons of the Desert.”
Scanning Laurel’s fan mail gave McCabe the idea to create a real-life Sons of the Desert. The letters all “seemed to have an underlying theme,” McCabe said in a phone interview from his home on Michigan’s Mackinac Island. “His fans wished there was some way to honor Laurel and Hardy. There was nothing really to perpetuate their fame. I was determined I would have something much more than a fan club. It would be socially active and yet concerned with scholarship.” His model was the Baker Street Irregulars, the Sherlock Holmes society, of which he had long been a member. “I suggested it to Stan. He thought it was marvelous, and even added to the organization’s constitution.”
The Sons’ motto is “Two minds without a single thought,” translated on the group’s crest in Latin (Duae Tabulae Rasae in Quibus Nihil Scriptum Est), which, in keeping with Stan’s wishes, gives the whole thing a “half-assed dignity.” After McCabe wrote of the organization and reprinted the constitution in his biography, he was deluged with mail from fans who wanted to begin their own tents.
The city of Chicago and the Bacon Grabbers, founded in 1969, loom large in Sons of the Desert lore. In the film, Chicago is the location of the Sons of the Desert convention. As part of his ill-fated scheme to go, Hardy fakes a “severe nervous breakdown” and is supposedly sent off with Laurel to Hawaii-hence the fezzes and leis on certain Bacon Grabbers this evening.
MARK YURKIW, 37, of Brookfield, is the Bacon Grabbers’ current Grand Sheik. As such, according to the constitution, he and his fellow officers “shall have absolutely no authority whatever.” But at the banquet he does ask the toastmasters to pay tribute to “Babe,” Hardy’s nickname, and “comic genius” Stan, as well as their frequent costars who’ve fallen into lamentable obscurity: Jimmy Finlayson, master of the double-take; Charlie Hall; and Mae Busch, toasted as “a delightful dame.”
Making the latter toast are Lee and Dee McBeath from suburban Bartlett. They have been married for 32 years. Oddly enough, they are not members of the Bacon Grabbers. In fact, Lee, 58, says, “We stubbornly refuse to join.” When asked why, he replies, tongue-in-cheek, “Have you seen them?” Instead, the McBeaths operate their very own two-person tent, Tree in a Test Tube, which hosted a Laurel and Hardy cruise in 1996.
But that doesn’t stop Lee and Dee from giving their brethren a hand. In preparation for the night’s festivities, and with a bow to their host restaurant, the Spaghetti Warehouse, Lee spent two months compiling scenes from movies and TV shows that feature pasta. Even the Laurel and Hardy offerings this evening, “Unaccustomed As We Are” and “Saps at Sea,” both feature hilarious spaghetti-eating sequences.
What do the Sons of the Desert mean to Lee? “Fun, laughter, friendship,” he replies, “which are all right there in Laurel and Hardy films. Notice Ollie always introduces Stan as ‘My friend, Mr. Laurel.’ “
Fellowship is at the heart of the “Sons of the Desert” anthem, which is sung after the toasts. Members join hands and sing, “We are the Sons of the Desert/Having the time of our lives./Marching along, two thousand strong/Far from our sweethearts and wives, God bless them. . . .”
Actually, sweethearts, wives and female fans of the duo are very much in attendance. Among them is Barbara Murshel, 67, from Wheeling. Unlike Baby Boomers who discovered Laurel and Hardy on television, Murshel says she first saw their films at Chicago’s Biograph Theatre. “I idolized them,” she says. “They brought people happiness, and in real life they were good friends. I never get tired of them.”
BUT IT IS MORE THAN AFFECTION for Laurel and Hardy that brings the Bacon Grabbers together. For many older participants, watching the duo’s films seems a safe haven from much of what passes for even family comedy these days. “It’s nice to see something [that’s just] funny. That’s harder and harder to find,” observes Matthew Morgenthal, 62, of Chicago, who is here with Linda, his wife of 37 years.
The organization’s constitution exhorts members to keep alive “the spirit and genius of Laurel and Hardy” while encouraging the preservation and screening of their films. It’s no easy task.
In a bygone era, when comedy was king, Laurel and Hardy were more than just a beloved comedy team. According to “Comedy Classics Reborn,” an essay that author and critic Leonard Maltin recently posted on his Web site, “They were pop culture icons; they were imitated and caricatured, beloved by people who saw them for the first time in the 1920s and those like me who came along in the television era.”
But other than their iconic poster gracing Joey and Chandler’s apartment wall on “Friends,” Laurel and Hardy have fallen off the popular culture radar since their 1970s revival on college campuses and in art theaters. Don’t get the members started on this. Between tangled rights issues and corporate indifference, it’s just another fine mess that makes their films difficult to find. Ask for Laurel and Hardy at Blockbuster, Yurkiw says, “and you’ll get, ‘Aren’t they the ones who do ‘Who’s on First?’ “
So the Sons of the Desert must be vigilant. Though now living in Northbrook, Gary Cohen still is Grand Sheik of his former San Francisco tent. “No one wanted to fill the shoes,” he said. But as long as they still meet, there is hope that the torch will be passed to a new generation.
Perhaps significantly, in attendance, with his grandparents, is James Nasiri, 10. “I think they’re really funny,” he said of the Boys. “I’ve told one or two of my friends about them. They enjoy them too.”
As the evening comes to an end, the majority of the Bacon Grabbers go on their merry ways, back to a world without movie comedy teams, and where bodily-function gags have replaced the pie fight.
Lee McBeath, though, is a strict adherent to the Sons of the Desert’s constitution. He lingers behind so he can make one final toast as decreed by Stan Laurel himself in Article VIII: “All members are requested to park their camels and hire a taxi; then return for ‘One more for the desert!’ “
