Marriage Mill to the Stars

TURNED INTO A "NICE MESS." Here was Stan Laurel, the quintessential bungler in the old Laurel and Hardy comedies of the 1930s and '40s, driving from Los Angeles to Yuma to get married. To get married, for Pete's sake! You'd think he'd take along a road map, wouldn't you? Maybe he had other things on his mind. In 1946, Hollywood celebrities headed to Yuma in droves to get hitched, mainly because they could avoid nosey reporters there. Laurel, who was somewhat shy and protective of his privacy, thought Yuma was the perfect place for his wedding, especially because journalists of the day had made such a big deal out of the fact that he seemed to change wives with some regularity, and there was no point in giving them more fuel. Ida Kitaeva Raphael, Laurel's then-fiancée, later recalled their marriage in the book The Comedy World of Stan Laurel. In May 1946, Laurel learned that his divorce from his previous wife had been finalized. "So," Raphael wrote, "the next day we drove to Yuma,Arizona, to get married, and we drove all afternoon, drove and drove. Finally I smell some country smells-cows and barns and all that-and I said, 'Wait a minute. Where are we going? I think you've lost your way because I think we've wound up on the range.' Arizona, to get married, and we drove all afternoon, drove and drove. Finally I smell some country smells-cows and barns and all that-and I said, 'Wait a minute. Where are we going? I think you've lost your way because I think we've wound up on the range.' "He had lost his way. It was getting dark, then darker, and we got to Yuma very late because of this being lost. And the judge had to get up out of bed to marry us, just like a Laurel and Hardy movie. Then we got in the car and drove all night to San Diego where we put up in the Grand Hotel."

The wedding was, as she said, like one of his movies, but there was no script for this one and no Oliver Hardy there as best man. If Hardy had been along it would have been the perfect opportunity to use his exasperated often-repeated line to Stanley, "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!"

Laurel was not the only Hollywood celebrity to be married in Yuma. There were dozens and perhaps hundreds, including Tom Mix, Constance Bennett, Charlie Chaplin, John Barrymore, Claudette Colbert, Gilbert Roland, Franchot Tone, Victor Mature, Charles Boyer, Alice Faye, Tony Martin, Bette Davis, Loretta Young, Buster Crabbe, Gloria Swanson, Mary Astor and studio mogul Louis B. Mayer.

Like Laurel, most of these celebrities came to Yuma to escape publicity-the local paper published the marriage records of Yuma residents only. Even in Yuma, though, word could leak. When locals found out that Charlie Chaplin was in town to get married, Yuma Daily Sun photographer Bob Werley, who died in 1999, was sent out to shoot the wedding. "It turned out that Chaplin didn't have a witness, so Bob acted as a witness and also shot the wedding ceremony," said his widow, Julie.

But some celebrities no doubt also came to Yuma because getting married in Arizona was a speedier process than it was in California. Prior to 1957, Arizona did not require a blood test or a three-day waiting period. California, on the other hand, did. As a result, weddings became an enormous industry in Yuma due to its convenient location on the Colorado River at the Arizona-California border. In 1956, the year before the Arizona law changed to match California's, the county issued more than 18,000 marriage licenses; the year after the law changed, that figure dropped to 2,000.

During its marriage mill heyday, Yuma counted at least a dozen wedding chapels along the narrow streets surrounding the county courthouse. The late William Steen, who had been a justice of the peace in Yuma, once told me, "The wedding chapels were just little houses around here, and people would fix up the front room like a little chapel. At that time people had 'ordained' ministers living in these houses. There was only one justice of the peace, but a lot of people doing weddings.

"People were meeting the trains, meeting the buses-there were always people arriving who wanted to get married-and most of these wedding chapels, apparently, were making good money. I say that because I was on the police force at the time, and when we were making our rounds, if we found anybody who wanted to get married, we'd take them to these wedding chapels and it was always good for a couple of bucks. There was a lot of spin-off. It was a big industry."

Brothers Bill and Bobby Lutes still own Lutes' Gretna Green Wedding Chapel, a business founded by their father, R.H. Lutes, some 55 years ago. The chapel is named for the town in Scotland famous as an elopement destination. Bill Lutes recalled the halcyon days of the marriage business in Yuma: "My father was justice of the peace here for 14 years. I think he was defeated in 1952, but during the war years he was available for weddings 24 hours a day. There was a lot of military coming in here, and they wanted to get married before being shipped overseas. Every bus, every train that came in had someone on it wanting to get married. My father slept on the sofa in his bathrobe, and he learned to sleep about 15 minutes at a time. I was always running down to the railroad or bus station, running people over to the courthouse for a license. It was hectic. I played the organ at the weddings and also made up corsages for the brides. During the war, Dad was doing about 150 weddings a week. I don't ever want to work that hard again!"

R.H. was an enterprising businessman and politician, to put it mildly. During campaigns he had flyers printed that said "Vote for me. I'll marry you for free." He even had buttons made for high school kids that said "If I were 21, I'd vote for Lutes." At some point, he moved the house that is now Gretna Green Chapel to a spot next to the house owned by the clerk of the Superior Court. "When couples showed up in the middle of the night," Bill Lutes recalled, "he'd explain the procedure to them, send them next door for a license, and then they'd come back and he'd marry them."

According to Bill, not everyone could afford to pay cash for a wedding. "People left cars, roller skates, anything, and they'd always say they'd send a check when they got home. Most never did." Nancy Weber Lutes, sister to Bill and Bobby, recalled that one broke bridegroom offered his saxophone as payment for the ceremony. "I played that sax all through eighth grade," she said.

R.H. also owned the city's first taxi company and first bus line. He opened a cafeteria at the local high school, had a canal-dredging company and a restaurant-pool hall. He married many Hollywood celebrities, including Louis B. Mayer. After the courthouse wedding, Mayer supposedly asked, "How many businesses do you own, anyway?"

"Don't fall down the steps," R.H. replied. "I'm also the county coroner."

R.H. was, indeed, the county coroner. One day he presided at the marriage and coroner's inquest for the same couple. Bobby Lutes remembered the day with horror. "He'd married this couple and then, I guess, they went off and had some booze and they were driving through the pass east of town and they wrecked their car. A few hours after he married them, Dad was out there as the coroner dealing with their deaths."

Most of the marriages did not end so tragically, and not all of the Hollywood celebrity weddings were as hush-hush as Stan Laurel's or Louis B. Mayer's. Actually, Mayer's wedding started out as a secret, but the Los Angeles press got wind of the trip to Yuma and followed him to his lodgings at the Coronado Motel, which remains in business today at 233 S. Fourth Avenue.

Some weddings were anything but private. When Tom Mix married Mabel Ward on the steps of Yuma County Courthouse in 1932, 3,000 guests were present. "You should have been here back in those days. It was a wide-open town," Justice of the Peace Ersel Byrd told the Yuma Daily Sun many years later.

The fastest weddings took place at Reverend Coleman's Famous Drive-in Chapel. James Coleman, 81, still lives in the pink adobe house across the street from the lot where his drive-in chapel had been located.

Coleman said he was a Baptist minister ordained in 1952 at the Aquinas University of Scholastic Philosophy in Goldfield, Nevada. "I married 18,000 people and buried 905," he said. "Sometimes I'd marry a couple and then one would die, and the other would come back and ask me to bury them. The marriage business was more difficult for me, though, because in those days many people did not want to be married by a black man."

The resourceful Coleman came up with a plan to cover his bases. "I hired a white minister and also a Reverend Martinez," he said. "Martinez was Cuban but he looked Mexican, so I was able to keep the business going. I had people out who'd hustle couples off the trains and buses and bring them here, so you'd slip the guy who brought them in $6, and you'd keep $4. The ones you got yourself you'd get the full $10. There was so much business that it didn't matter if you were paying somebody to hustle them over here. In those days, there was about $1.5 million a year going through this town with the weddings. Everybody was making money."

Coleman said he'd marry people in their cars, but he also performed indoor marriages and his chapel offered amenities. "I had a dressing room for the women and one for the men, and both had huge mirrors, so they could fix themselves up."

If Coleman was resourceful, R.H. Lutes rated as an absolute genius. When blood tests became mandatory, Lutes opened a serology lab, which was run by his son Bill, who had studied biological sciences at the University of Arizona.

"He also retained Dr. Roy R. Knotts, who had been the physician at the Yuma prison," Bill said. "He put Dr. Knotts and his wife in a house behind ours. They'd draw the blood, I'd do the lab tests in 45 minutes, and they'd get married."

And what if the bride's or groom's test came back positive for certain diseases? "No problem," Bill recalled. "The law said as long as you were receiving treatment you could get married." Dr. Knotts, who functioned like a cupid with a hypodermic, would simply give them a shot and they would be on their way to the altar.

Nobody knows how long most of those marriages made in Yuma lasted, but considering Knotts' intervention, perhaps we might be able to say that the moonstruck couples at least gave it their best shot. Al

JANUARY THE SHINING MOUNTAIN

Visible from Phoenix, the Four Peaks ride on the horizon like an inconsequential dream, a faint presence. Four jagged little knobs, 50 miles distant. You'll be driving along a freeway or conversing with a client in a high-rise and, for whatever reason, you catch a glimpse of them and for the first time you actually see them. Suddenly you find yourself longing for them. Whether your desire runs to a group activity or to being solitary, remote and free, you want to be out there beneath the shining mountains. And all you need to do, it seems, is go.