Stan Laurel lived the last years of his life in retirement, answering fan mail (he got a lot) and occasionally welcoming some fan who wanted to come visit him. As I explained in this article, I had an opportunity to go meet him and I foolishly put it off and put it off until it was too late. Which reminds me: I haven't kicked myself for over a week about that.
Laurel also chatted on the phone with many of his correspondents and followers. He was even listed in the Santa Monica telephone directory.
One person who developed a brief fan-type relationship with him was an actor named Don Marlowe who had a handful of minor credits in movies and TV shows in the fifties and (reportedly) a close friendship with Bela Lugosi…and some reports say he was even Lugosi's agent for a time. As you'll see, most of the information about Mr. Marlowe is a little dodgy. It is not in question though that he had a brief fan-type relationship with Laurel at least via telephone, though they do not seem to have been as close as Marlowe would later insist.
One day around 1964, Marlowe phoned Laurel for a chat and unbeknownst to Stan, the call was recorded. A few years after Stan passed, Marlowe began marketing a record he produced of part of the call, selling it in film magazines as "Stan Laurel's Final Interview" and suggesting it was issued with Laurel's consent. Neither claim was apparently true. Then at around the same time, Marlowe also published a semi-autobiography about growing up in the movie business called The Hollywood That Was. It was not a very good book and film scholars ripped it apart for inaccuracies.
The loudest charges, because they seemed to be a matter not of bad scholarship but of outright lying, had to do with Marlowe's claims to have been one of the youngsters in the Our Gang comedies, playing the role of Porky. Even the dates didn't check out on that one. If Mr. Marlowe had been born when he said he was born, he would have been around 13 years old at the time when Porky was about five in those films. But he got away with his masquerade for a while because little had been researched about those movies then. There was no book one could consult to find out that the character of Porky was played by a person named Eugene Lee, not Don Marlowe. Eventually though, there was.
I saw Mr. Marlowe in person once — at Larry Edmund's Book Store on Hollywood Boulevard. He seemed like a kind of frantic little man and a kind of desperate hustler. At that moment, he was trying to hustle more copies of his book and his Stan Laurel record to a store that couldn't even sell the ones they already had on their shelves. Film magazines were lambasting him and sometimes refusing to accept his advertising and the proprietors of Larry Edmund's were treating him with similar deference.
Then as now, I was a huge fan of Laurel and Hardy but I had declined to buy the record on general principles. I kinda wanted to hear it but I didn't want to put money in that man's pocket. That day, I was buying another book on my favorite comedians and when Marlowe saw me carrying it towards the checkout table, he said, "Hey, I see you like Laurel and Hardy. You have my record, of course…last interview my good friend Stan Laurel ever gave." I wish I could recall exactly what I said to him in reply but I'm sure it was not nice. Marlowe died in 1978.
Still, I always wanted to hear that record and thanks to YouTube, I finally have. The speed is a little off and Marlowe isn't much of an interviewer but here it is. It's a bit under seven minutes…