John McCabe, 84, Laurel & Hardy Scholar
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John McCabe, a Shakespearean scholar and show business biographer whose 1961 book on Laurel and Hardy was considered the definitive work that brought the comedy duo the critical respect that had eluded them, died last Tuesday in Michigan. He was 84.
The affectionate book, “Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy,” came out of a chance meeting McCabe had while studying Shakespeare in Stratford-on-Avon. After he saw the pair perform at a music hall in England, he flipped a coin to determine whether he would go backstage to meet them.
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were kind, cordial and displayed the “innocent gentility that marks their screen characters,” McCabe recalled in the book. “It was rather like discovering that Santa Claus really existed.”
As McCabe scanned Laurel’s fan mail, he got the idea to create the Sons of the Desert, a fan appreciation club that takes its name from the 1933 Laurel and Hardy movie considered one of their best.
The club’s motto – “Two minds without a single thought” – was said to have been supplied by Laurel, but another founding member, comedian Orson Bean, said he has a hunch that line came from McCabe.
“His vision for the Sons of the Desert came through, that Laurel and Hardy sense of let’s get together, watch a movie and get drunk. They have kept the vision alive,” said Mr. Bean.
“The fact that Laurel and Hardy are to some degree household words almost 80 years after they began making films is due in no small measure to Jack McCabe and his work,” said Randy Skretvedt of a Sons of the Desert chapter – or “tent” – in Orange County, Calif.
When Skretvedt began working on his 1987 book, “Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies,” he sought out McCabe, whom he called “the great guru of Laurel and Hardy scholarship.”
The two kept up a correspondence, and McCabe often enclosed what he called “something written in Stan’s hand,” a news clipping on which Laurel had written amusing notes in the margins.
As a longtime professor at Lake Superior State College in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., McCabe’s love of literate mischief came into play when he and two other professors established the Unicorn Hunters. The group got publicity for the small public school by staging such events in the 1970s as burning a snowman on the first day of spring and issuing an annual list of banished words.
Typical entries from the original list in 1976 was “meaningful: has lost all its meaningfulness.”
McCabe also wrote 10 other books, including “Cagney by Cagney,” an autobiography of actor James Cagney that McCabe ghost-wrote in 1976. Mc-Cabe followed it with an authorized biography in 1997. He also wrote biographies of George M. Cohan and Charlie Chaplin.
McCabe, who appeared as a child as an actor with stock companies in Detroit, received a doctorate from the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham in England.
At the Sons’ first international convention, McCabe met his second wife, Rosina Lawrence, who co-starred in the Laurel and Hardy film “Way Out West.” They were married for 10 years, until her death in 1997.