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[Ian Elliot]

An AP piece from December 1938, if it can be trusted, tells us about the pachyderm's identity and career:


QUEENIE’S LEGS AND EYES ARE SUMPIN’ DESPITE HER 3 TONS

HOLLYWOOD—Her legs—oh my!—are more statuesque than Dietrich’s.

Her eyelashes are darker and longer than Connie Bennett’s—and more genuine.

Three and a quarter tons of charm, seven-feet six-inches of curves, she carried on today the artistic tradition of stars like Jiggs, the chimpanzee; Slicker, the seal, and Skippy, the wire-haired pup.

You can’t minimize Queenie. She is the first elephant in Hollywood to have the No. 1 role in a non-jungle movie.

The name of this production is “It’s Sping Again,” but it’s adapted from a novel called “Zenobia’s Infidelity.”

It has a cast featuring Oliver (Babe) Hardy, Harry Langdon, Billie Burke and Alice Brady, but Queenie as Zenobia, they admit, sticks out head and shoulders above them all.

As the property of Langdon, a medicine man known as Prof. J. Thorndyke McCrackle, Queenie conceives an undying adoration for Hardy, a Mississippi county doctor, when he straightens out a knot in her aching tail.

First, however, the doctor applies a stethoscope to the general area of her heart. “What do you hear?” asks the professor. “Nothing,” says Hardy, “except a 21-gun salute.”

Queenie loves Hardy so deeply and follows him to such lengths that Langdon files suit for alienation of affections. There is a courtroom scene with Queenie barred from the witness stand. And there’s an ending, but we can’t tell you what it is yet.

This isn’t Queenie’s first picture. She is 26 years old, a circus graduate, and she debuted in films three seasons ago with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper in “O’Shaughnessy’s Boy.” It was her toughest bit. She carried a tiger on her back.

This year she’s worked in “I’d Give a Million,” “Boy Meets Girl,” and “Gunga Din,” the last being a second-fiddle part to that elephantine veteran, Anna May.

[booklover]

[booklover]

The Roach publicity machine was partially to blame for "Zenobia" failing at the box office. If you are going to build up Langdon and Hardy as a team, then make them an actual team, rather than making Hardy the star of the film and giving Langdon a supporting role. I think most, perhaps all of us can now look at Zenobia as a fairly entertaining curio, but I can imagine how disapointed fans of both comedians must have been when exiting the theatre.

[Ian Elliot]

The Roach staffers may have felt that Langdon and Hardy enacting Laurel and Hardy style comedy was not working. What's in the newspapers, then as now, can't be taken as true unto itself but I've seen an anonymous syndicated item relating that the first scenario for this film was written for Roland Young, then re-drafted for Laurel and Hardy, either before or at the time of their break up. The item, dated October 1938, tells that Hal Roach has returned from a vacation to find production, with Langdon in for Laurel, "held up" because "the Laurel role is not suited to Langdon and it must be revised".

Just to defend the Roach/UA publicity people, by the time ZENOBIA was about to release in the Spring of 1939, the Roach/Laurel dispute had been resolved, and what was presumably planned as a principal selling point, "Langdon and Hardy", was now defunct.

[Bill Cassara]

Now we know the elephant's name was "Queenie." What convinces me is there was a reference to the Gunga Din movie where Queenie played stand in to the more mature Anna May.

Anna May was also in Sennett's "Smith's Candy Shop" as well.
Thanks again Dean and everyone.
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Bill Cassara