I was seven years old when my father burned to death in an arsonist’s fire. His scorched remains were put in a wooden box, and after my mother and I put that box in the ground, the ground we walked on began to crumble beneath our feet. I was an only child. My father had been my only father, and my mother had been his only wife. Now she was no one’s wife, and I was a boy without a father, the son of a woman but no longer of a man.
We lived in a small Jersey town just outside New York, but six weeks after the night of the flames, my mother and I left that town and moved to the city, where we temporarily holed up in my mother’s parents’ apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street. My grandfather called it “a curious interregnum.” By that he meant a time of no fixed address and no school, and in the months that followed, the cold winter months of late December 1954 and early 1955, as my mother and I tramped through the streets of Manhattan in search of a new place to live and a new school for me to attend, we often took shelter in the darkness of movie theaters …
A first draft of the first part of the book was completed before Ferguson left New York in mid-October. Seventy-two typed pages written in the two and a half months between the army physical and the flight across the Atlantic, roughly one page per day, which was the goal Ferguson had set for himself, one decent page per day and anything beyond that to be considered a miracle. He hadn’t had the nerve to show that unrevised portion of the book to Gil or his mother, wanting to present them with the finished product only when it was well and truly finished, but most of the films he had seen with his mother during the Curious Interregnum were discussed in those pages, along with the Curious Interregnum itself, and then the beginning of his career at Hilliard, his war with God and the self-destructive program of willed failure, the countless forays to movie theater balconies to watch more Hollywood films with his mother during the Glorious Oblivions period, followed by his mother’s new start as a photographer and the transformation of his once bright playroom into the darkroom where she developed her pictures, eleven and a half months of his early life beginning on the morning of November 3, 1954, when his mother told him his father had burned to death in the Newark fire, and ending on the afternoon of October 17, 1955, when Ferguson turned on the television in their third-floor apartment and stumbled across the Cuckoos theme song and the credits announcing the first Laurel and Hardy film he ever saw.
It took a couple of weeks for him to adjust to his new surroundings and make his peace with the smallness of his room, but by November first he was back inside the book, having prepared for the “Stan and Ollie” section by making a complete list of their films while still in New York and then, with his stepfather’s help, arranging with Clement Knowles, the head of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art, to watch all the Laurel and Hardy films in their collection, often by himself on Moviolas, sometimes projected for him on larger screens, and because Ferguson wrote down a detailed account of each film he saw, the films were fresh in his mind again when he began writing about them in Paris. Remarkably enough, only one book had been written about Laurel and Hardy in English, a 240-page double biography by John McCabe that was published in 1961, but other than that nothing, not one other book in English that Ferguson was aware of. Ollie had died in 1957, and the not terribly old Stan (seventy-four) had died in February 1965, not six months before Ferguson conceived of his plan to write about how the two of them had saved his life ten years earlier, and once he began that section of the book, he couldn’t help thinking about the opportunity he had missed, for nothing would have made him happier than to have sent Stan the manuscript of his book when the final draft was done. As with the articles he had written as a student in New York, Ferguson’s approach was all about looking at the movies themselves, the movies as he had first seen them as an eight- and nine-year-old boy, with no biographical information about his bowler-hatted friends, no historical information about how the team had been formed in 1926 by director Leo McCarey at the Hal Roach studio, and nothing about Ollie’s three marriages and Stan’s six marriages (three of them to the same woman!). Beyond writing his book, and fully just as important as writing the book, the subject that dominated Ferguson’s thoughts most persistently was sex, and yet even now, at the advanced age of eighteen, he found it nearly impossible to imagine Stan Laurel having sex with anyone, let alone with his six wives, three of whom had been the same person.
He pushed on through November, December, and halfway into January, concluding the second section of the book by recounting his grandparents’ surprise visit to the apartment on Central Park West in December, laden with the bulky presents of roll-up movie screen, sixteen-millimeter movie projector, and the ten cans of Laurel and Hardy shorts, a section that for some unfathomable reason was precisely the same length as the first, seventy-two pages, the last paragraph of which read: Little matter that the projector had been bought secondhand — it worked. Little matter that the prints were scratched and the sound sometimes seemed to be coming from the bottom of a bathtub — the films were watchable. And with the films came a whole new set of words for me to master—“sprocket,” for example, which turned out to be a far better word to think about than “scorched.”
Then Ferguson lost his way. The third section of the book, which in the intervening months had been given a new title, “Junkyards and Geniuses,” was meant to explore the differences between art films and commercial films, mostly the differences between Hollywood and the rest of the world, and Ferguson had given much thought to the filmmakers he had chosen to write about, three Hollywood junkmen who had excelled at making good commercial products in a wide range of genres and styles (Mervyn LeRoy, John Ford, Howard Hawks) and three geniuses from abroad (Eisenstein, Jean Renoir, and Satyajit Ray), but after spending two and a half troubled weeks trying to get his thoughts down on paper, Ferguson understood that the subject he was writing about had nothing to do with the rest of the book, that he was writing another book or another essay and that there was no room in his book about dead fathers and struggling widows and crushed little boys for speculations of that sort. It came as a shock to realize how badly he had misconstrued his project, but now, on the strength of that wrong turn, he felt he knew how to fix the damage. He put aside the first twenty pages of “Junkyards and Geniuses” and went back to the first section, which he now divided into two sections, “A Curious Interregnum,” which covered his post-fire, pre-Hilliard days in New York and ended with the words his mother had spoken to the woman selling tickets at the movie theater on the Upper West Side—Butt out, lady. Just give me my change—and “Glorious Oblivions,” which began in a different spot now, with Ferguson walking into Hilliard on his first day of school there, but still ended with the television and his first Laurel and Hardy film. In the third part, he added some paragraphs about his mother’s reaction to the two morons and explored the daily duties gag a bit more thoroughly, but the chapter still ended with the word scorched. Then he added a fourth section, “Dinner in the Balcony,” which he now understood was the logical conclusion of the book, the emotional heart of the book, and how could he have been so blind and so dumb as to have ignored that scene with his mother in the living room, to have considered leaving it out of the book when in fact everything in the book had been building toward that moment, and so, over three mornings in mid-February, three mornings of devastation and utterly focused work, feeling more alive in the words he was writing than with any other passage of the book, Ferguson wrote the ten pages he needed to write about breaking down and confessing to his mother, about the deluge of tears that had poured out of them as they sat on the living room carpet, about the silent-God-no-God-anti-God rehash and the reason for his bad marks at school, and then, after they had dried their tears and pulled themselves together, of course! — off they went to the movies at Ninety-fifth Street and Broadway, where they ate hot dogs in the balcony and washed them down with fizzless, watery Cokes as his mother lit up another Chesterfield and they watched Doris Day sing one of the stupidest songs ever written, Que Sera, Sera, in Hitchcock’s Technicolor version of The Man Who Knew Too Much.