AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN McCABE
PART 2
By Alonso Lasso

In your second book, you emphasized Stan's creativity. Do you feel Stan has been given enough credit for his lasting contributions to the art of film comedy?

Well, I think he's given enough credit in respect to what he expected from it. That is, it was always known in the profession that he was the operative person creatively there, and since his death I think recognition has come. I think principally, if I may say so, through my books and my determination to reveal that creativity is why I wrote the books in the first place.
     There is in the works now, by the way, a very detailed personal biography of Stan being written by Fred Lawrence Guiles, the biographer of Marilyn Monroe and Marion Davies. Fred just sent me the first draft of the first three hundred pages to look over. It is going to be a detailed biography and I am happy to help him. In fact he will be up here later this summer to go over the final manuscript with me. His book will show much more fully than I have done Stan's personal life. It will bring up things that I never brought up although of course I had knowledge of them. The tangled marital discords and a slight drinking problem.
     The reason I never went into them is that frankly I loved the man too much and just couldn't do it. This may be a weakness for a biographer, I don't know. Not that Fred doesn't feel affection for Stan; these things happen to have been true—and the truth should always be known no matter how harsh it might seem to be. But I'm not the one to say it about Stan's private life.

In the later years, did Babe Hardy ever express a wish that he had been more creatively involved in the films?

Oh, no he was perfectly satisfied. That's why the team was in such a state of harmony. He was perfectly content. He'd have ideas from time to time and would express them. They would be listened to with great attention and respect. He felt that he was doing what he should be doing. Incredibly, he thought of himself as a straight man more than a comedian. What he meant by that was that he felt he was really more of an actor than a professional comic and that's certainly borne out by the fact that he was able to create that tremendous character of his so beautifully and so humorously.

Forgetting for the moment the later films made for M-G-M and "Atoll K," when you watched the films with Stan, did he ever talk about wishing a certain sequence had been done differently or that he would have done the cutting another way? Was he the sort of artist who never was satisfied with his efforts?

Not really. He was quite happy with what had been done. He would feel at times that there should have been a little more attention paid to some aspect of production. But the thing he resented bitterly—and one can absolutely share his feeling—is when a particular thing he had worked out was cut out capriciously, as the famous instance in "Swiss Miss" where the bomb was planted in the piano, and the sequence cut; So you now have this meaningless shot of Stan crashing against the piano. Of course, he was supposed to be drunk but a vital dimension of the scene is gone—and he would wince every time he saw it He said, "Now, why they ever cut that, I will never know." Sometimes this happened after he had gone away on holiday and when he came back the release print had such a cut. I think why such cuts happened was because Roach features booked through Metro had to conform to a certain time.
     They couldn't go over a certain time limit and thus the cut. But that was a wretched thing to do. They could have cut something else other than the bomb plant scene for instance. And later in "Swiss Miss" that lovely little, enchanting little ten minute patter song between Stan and Babe and Charles Judels who played the man who sells the cheese. They had a marvelous little song about th varieties of traps, mouse traps—and that ten minute beauty was hacked down to about thirty seconds. What was left was just the tag end of that lovely song.

In your opinion, what is their single best sequence or maybe a sequence that is repeated in several films?

It is so difficult to answer because I have so many I love and they're all so beautifully done. I suppose the one that always makes me laugh the most is the strangled rhetoric bit when Stan explains something and then Babe says "Let me have that again!" and Stan comes up with a weird transmutation of his original and then Babe says "That's a good idea!" I love those bits dearly.

What do you think is their best overall film, either feature length or short?

Well, again one goes into personal taste and I suppose it is always connected with memories of your family watching it with you or something like that. I would feel very deprived if I didn't have "Swiss Miss." I must say I also love "Way Out West." One has to answer that question in the way a mother answers "Who's your favorite child?" There is no such thing; you love them all and are aware of the defects and the virtues in them all.

How do you think the television series—which was in the works when Babe had his stroke—would have fared given the boys' ages and the state of television at the time?

Superb. It would have been great because, first of all, Stan had complete control and he was going to be doing something that he knew very, very well—the English pantomime form. He had many memories of music hall days having been in the business from the age of sixteen.
     Music hall and the English pantomime have all kinds of possibilities for comedy film. I think it probably would have been the best they ever did—and that's part of the great waste when death comes.
     There's no question that it would have been a tremendous comeback for them and that these would have been classic stories. I have no doubt as to that.

If you had to talk about one lasting memory, one moment (one each of the boys), what would you choose?

Well, I think that with Babe Hardy it would be his magnificently courtly manners. I remember I went into his dressing room one time with a lady friend and I loved the way he treated her. The only word I can think of is "gallant." The way he fussed over her. She was no one special, no celebrity, but she was to him. She was a lady. He regarded her as he regarded all women—except floozies—as a lady, so he treated her that way. I recall he offered her a chair with true courtliness, gallantly. That's the chief word that comes to mind. That's my strongest memory of him. And of Stan it was always that lovely, superb laugh of his.
     He would say something, something deceptively grave. It would sound for a minute as if he were serious. I would look properly serious to accomodate to this—and then I'd realize he was kidding me. Then he would look at me and break into this delightful horse laugh. It was very loud, had almost a whinny-like quality to it, deeply infectious. You had to laugh not only at what he had said but at his laughter itself. He was a man born for laughter. That's one of the points I've been making to Fred Guiles about Stan's inherent self.
     My basic biographical viewpoint on most people is that you must get down to a fundamental question, "What is their function in life?" All interesting people do have a function stemming from heredity principally. People who are not happy are those who never realize their function; happy people are those who do. And Stan was supremely happy. He was happy because when he was very young he fell in love with laughter and it was the one love he was true to all of his life. That and the lovely lady he finally married, Ida. In a sense he was paying back God or Destiny for that tremendous gift of being able to craft such magnificent laughter by giving more laughter. So it was a delightful round-robin and we were all blessed for it.

—Classic Film Collector (Fall 1977)