Mae Dahlberg: Stan Laurel’s Previous Partner

This is a tawdry tidbit well known to Laurel and Hardy fans, but not to the general reader: prior to his four legal marriages and prior to his screen teaming with Oliver Hardy, a woman named Mae Dahlberg (1888-1969) was Stan Laurel’s personal and professional partner.

Stan and Mae were a team on the vaudeville stage, she appeared in several of his early solo films, and she was his common-law wife, billing herself as Mae Laurel (she also took credit for creating that name; Stan’s real last name was Jefferson). Mae had sung and danced on the vaudeville stages of her native country, Australia, before coming to the States with her then husband and music hall partner Rupert Cuthbert circa 1913. Stan and Mae were a pair from 1917 through 1925, a goodly period of time. By all accounts it wouldn’t be unlike Mae to have ditched Rupert for Stan, who was considered an up-and-comer as early as that, a full decade before he did actually make it. That Stan was with Mae almost the entire time of his show biz doldrums is a key part of the story.

Dalhberg was a very driven woman, and that is obviously a necessary virtue in show business, up until the point where it becomes a vice. Folks liked their act, but nobody seems to have liked Mae. Furthermore, she seems to have been abusive of the easy-going Stan, something of a rarity in male-female relationships. There are accounts of overheard arguments from their dressing rooms, and even signs of physical abuse — on STAN! The “Burns” in the above Pantages ad was George Burns, who was among the folks who told about this.

Yet, Stan, with that excellent Fred Karno training and his inherited talent (his father was also an actor) was the more talented of the pair. The situation fueled that tension. And as opportunities for Stan arose, Mae always butted her way in and got a piece of the action. She was actually in over a dozen of his early solo films, several of which are extant. These include Nuts in May (1917, his first), Huns and Hyphens (1918), Bears and Bad Men (1918), Mud and Sand (1922), The Pest (1922), When Knights Were Cold (1923), Under Two Jags (1923), Frozen Hearts (1923), The Soilers(1923), Mother’s Joy (1923), Near Dublin (1924), Rupert of Hee Haw (1924), and Wide Open Spaces (1924).

Finally in 1925, a producer named Joe Rock did the necessary but unthinkable step to salvage Stan’s career: he paid Mae a substantial sum of money and bought her a one way ticket to Australia. To nobody’s credit, she took the deal. It is probably no coincidence that just about two years later Stan Laurel’s career finally began to take off.

That’s not the end of the story, though. In 1937, when Laurel was at the summit of his stardom, Mae returned for another pay-out, suing him for support, trotting out her old scrapbooks for the press and the judge. The case was eventually settled out of court. Mae died four years after Stan, in 1969.

To learn more about vaudeville, please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and for more on early silent comedy, please read Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.