Laurel and Hardy and Todd: While best known for her mysterious, high-profile 1935 death, Palisadian actress Thelma Todd appeared in six shorts with comedy’s pioneering duo

By Michael Aushenker | Contributing Writer

Unfortunately, when you think of Thelma Todd, you think of her death.

The actress, who was found deceased at age 29 on Dec. 16, 1935 of automobile exhaust inhalation inside the garage of her Pacific Palisades home, was possibly murdered … just nine years after making her Hollywood debut in the 1926 film “Fascinating Youth.”

Aside from her legend as the Palisades’ doomed starlet, people familiar with the platinum-blond, Massachusetts-born movie star know that she parlayed her fleeting fame into Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café, located at 17575 Pacific Coast Highway at Port Marina—in the impressive manse where Paulist Productions long existed until recently—and catered to her fellow showbiz brethren (plus characters of ill repute who may have facilitated her death).

What many who have heard of Todd do not realize is that the budding actress on the MGM lot had played roles in six Laurel & Hardy shorts; half of these—for different reasons—are of serious import among the 79 shorts and 27 full-length features that the pioneering comedy duo co-starred in from 1921-51.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, of course, were the groundbreaking motion picture comedy duo—skinny Brit from Northwest England and short-mustached, rotund Southerner from Georgia, respectively—who carried a wildly successful series of theatrical comedies produced by Hal Roach on downtown Culver City’s MGM lot (today home to Sony Pictures Studios). Simply put, the derby-wearing simpletons were the archetypal comedy duo; cinematic ancestors of Abbott & Costello, Martin & Lewis, Cheech & Chong, Bill & Ted, Lloyd & Harry, Harold & Kumar and basically any comedy featuring two half-wits as protagonists.

Roach and Lewis R. Foster are co-credited as directors on the 1929 Laurel & Hardy short “Unaccustomed As We Are,” featuring Todd as the wife of a jealous police officer who gets caught helping Laurel & Hardy’s bumbling vaudeville actors aboard a train. Packed with rail-travel shenanigans, “Unaccustomed” is significant as the first Laurel & Hardy talkie.

In her brief career, Todd managed to work with the two greatest directors of Laurel & Hardy shorts: James Parrott and James W. Horne as well as Roach himself, who helmed 1931’s “On The Loose.” In this anomaly in the Laurel & Hardy filmography, the duo only appear as a 41-second punchline in a short starring Todd and ZaSu Pitts playing “themselves”—young apartment mates complaining about a bunch of bad dates at Coney Island. The closing gag: a knock at the door reveals Laurel and Hardy, who ask the girls out to Coney Island. (Todd and Pitts send them running off by hurling ornaments at them.)

What “On The Loose” was, in fact, was an attempt by Roach to turn Todd and Pitts into the female Laurel & Hardy equivalent, with Todd the straight person to wacky Pitts. This attempt foundered: Pitts left Hal Roach Studios in 1933, and Patsy Kelly was matched with Todd, but the series never sparked.

Todd’s best Laurel & Hardy role may be as Lady Plumtree—American wife of dapper, eccentric British aristocrat Lord Leopold Plumtree (Charles K. Gerrard, with the funny laugh)—in “Another Fine Mess,” a bona fide classic from 1930 directed by Parrott. Parrott (only 41 when he passed) not only worked on Roach’s other popular series of theatrical shorts, “The Little Rascals,” and guided Laurel & Hardy favorites “County Hospital” and “The Chimp,” he also directed arguably the most iconic Laurel & Hardy short of all: 1932’s “The Music Box,” in which the duo, as partners in the Laurel & Hardy Transfer Company, must hoist a piano up a winding outdoor staircase.

The plot of “Another Fine Mess” is delicious, hilariously opening with Laurel & Hardy on a run by foot from the cops. The policemen soon reveal to us that the evidently homeless duo (pushing park benches together) is wanted for vagrancy. On the lam, Laurel & Hardy duck into a mansion shortly after resident Colonel Wilburforce Buckshot—played by frequent Laurel & Hardy foil James Finlayson (originator of the “D’oh!” reaction—sorry, Homer!)—is off to South Africa on safari. While hiding in the vacant mansion, Hardy assumes the identity of Col. Buckshot while Laurel must impersonate both butler and maid after the Plumtrees, responding to an ad, arrive to rent the mansion. Quite smitten with “Agnes,” Todd’s Lady Plumtree insists that the maid stay with her and her husband. As Lady Plumtree playfully pushes Agnes on the divan, Laurel (in drag as Agnes) shoves back … a bit too hard. Then the real Col. Buckshot, who had forgotten his bow and arrow, returns home and Laurel & Hardy’s charade unravels.

A year later came the Horne-helmed, near-classic “Chickens Come Home,” a hilarious romp in which Hardy, a successful businessman heading Laurel & Hardy Fertilizer Company, announces a mayoral run. On cue, a floozy from his pre-marriage past, played with gusto by Mae Busch (an inspiration for Betty Boop), shows up from the fog of his past to blackmail him with a then-scandalous photo of her sitting on his shoulders at the beach. Hardy, with inept Laurel’s help, must keep his greedy former flame from showing up at Hardy’s home, where demure Mrs. Hardy (Todd), hosts a dinner party. Hardy’s anxiousness builds as he entertains guests, crooning “Chickens Come Home” at the piano while buckling from the full knowledge that trampy vamp Busch is heading over. “Chickens” also benefits from Finlayson as the knowing butler trying to trip up Hardy.

Todd also appeared in two of the odder Laurel & Hardy entries, both feature-length. In 1933’s “The Devil’s Brother” (as known as “The Bogus Bandits, Fra Diavolo”), Laurel & Hardy play wannabe thieves Stanlio and Ollio in 18th-century northern Italy. They take up with notorious bandit Fra Diavolo as he romances Todd’s Lady Pamela, from whom he plans to steal. “As the flirty wife, Todd was perfectly in the light opera tradition,” observed William K. Everson in his 1967 “The Films of Laurel and Hardy.”

Todd’s final film role, released posthumously in 1936, was in the feature-length “The Bohemian Girl,” a cinematic adaptation of Michael William Balfe’s opera starring the boys as henpecked gypsies in 18th-century Austria. Todd originally played the Gypsy Queen. After she died during production, all of her scenes were re-shot; her character retooled as the Gypsy Queen’s daughter with Zeffie Tilbury playing the Queen and Busch filling in for Todd. One of Todd’s scenes remained in the final cut as tribute: her musical number “Heart of a Gypsy.”

If it wasn’t for her awful demise, Todd might have largely gone unnoticed in these comedies. Usually cast in the generic wife or affluent girlfriend roles, she did not radiate as much onscreen heat as, say, Busch. However, Todd had much promise. She was a shrewd, ahead-of-her-time businesswoman capitalizing on her fame by branding herself with a Palisades café. She was also at the very beginnings of what could have been—what should have been—a long Hollywood career. One thing’s certain: Her part in the canon of comedy greats Laurel & Hardy is solidly and forever cemented in history.

As for her mysterious, unsolved death? It was ultimately ruled accidental. However, during the trial, one piece of evidence presented to prove to the jury that she was not suicidal was a Christmas card Todd had mailed out that arrived to her friend after she was found dead. The recipient? Stan Laurel.