At home with the unhappy bride

Harold Lloyd and Mildred Davis at HOME 

(transcript of article)

Intimate glimpse of the Lloyds at their new and ornamental home which Harold built especially for Mildred, his bride

by Grace Kingsley

I was dashed up to the house in Annie.

If there is anything I do love, it is being dashed up.

Annie is short for anniversary, She is a new sport model roadster given by Harold Lloyd to his bride, Mildred, three months from the day they were married. They give each other presents every month, and call the day their "anniversary". Next anniversary, Harold is to give Mildred a solid gold vanity case.

"What do you give Harold?" I asked Mildred, after I was inside the house, and everything was explained to me.

"Oh, things I want for the house!" explained Mildred with her airy little laugh.

Mildred is looking lovely these days - a fit gem for that beautiful big house of theirs - built for Mildred especially, and according to the plans she selected. So if the sideboard and the closets aren't just right, she has no one to blame but herself.

It is a very big house for such a little girl - but bright, high, airy, luxurious without being heavy is the way - and so homey, somehow!

If there are any such things as human vibrations, they surely exist in this love nest. You feel just that sort of exhilaration suitable to a honeymoon house, the moment you enter the place.

Mildred welcomed me. Harold is a hard-working husband, and hadn't come home yet.

"Why, Harold gets up at five in the morning, and doesn't get home until six at night!" exclaimed Mildred.

"And are artists really temperamental to live with?" I asked.

Mildred looked awfully earnest - for her.

"Oh, nobody can know how untemperamental and kind and thoughtful Harold is who hasn't lived with him," she answered fervently.

But with all her happiness - Mildred wants to go back to the films.

"I see all the other girls getting ahead," she said, "and I want to, too, I'm getting way behind. Don't you think that if a woman has ever used her brains and her talents, it is hard to give up her work?" she asked wistfully. I agreed with her, even though way down deep in my heart, I felt just a wee bit of sympathy, too, with Harold in his desire that Mildred should be content as a housewife.

"You see, Harold tries to tempt me with boxes of candy," laughed Mildred, "but I've gone on my diet," she added resolutely, "just a lamb chop and a bit of pineapple three times a day. Oh, I can't look a little lamb in the face these days, and I begin to pine the moment I look at a pineapple. I'm taking more slimming baths, too."

"And Harold is going to give his consent to you going into pictures?" I asked.

"Yes! I don't know what happened to Harold. I think somebody must have been talking to him. Maybe it was Douglas Fairbanks. Anyway, Harold came home one day and said he wouldn't stand in my way - that in after years I might blame him if he hadn't given me my chance. 'Dearie,'  he said, 'I don't want you to feel, when we get older, that I have stood in your way.' That was awfully nice of him, wasn't it?"

Still, it would appear that while Harold is quite in sympathy in general with Mildred's film aspirations, when any particular offer comes it is wrong, in one way or another. So I have my suspicions - just suspicions, mind you - that Harold is playing a very canny game - telling Mildred she may return to the screen, but sort of waiting until he can take her to Europe and get her mind off her career.

But goodness knows, I wouldn't crimp his game for anything!

They are going ahead, Harold and Mildred, next April, you know. It is all quite thoroughly settled about that. They are going merely to Europe however, and are reserving Asia and  Africa for a later date.

It was just as Mildred was telling me all about it, that Harold came in after his day's work.

Mildred is still a new enough bride to fling herself into her husband's arms when he comes home at night, and Harold is a (end of page).

BLOGGER'S NOTES.  When I first saw this page from a 1923 magazine story about Harold Lloyd and Mildred Davis, blissfully cohabiting in their new "honeymoon" home, I thought: OK then, can I blow it up? Will this flyspeck type yield anything useful? Meaning: if I enlarged it enough, could I get a transcript? Turned out I could (though it took forever, and I had to guess at some words).

At first it just seemed like the normal Hollywood promotional piece, the two newlyweds settling into their elegant-but-"homey" new home - but then I thought, wait. Mildred was being portrayed as some sort of featherbrained, breathless little girl, with some truly insulting phrases being used to describe her: "Mildred looked awfully earnest - for her." "It is a very big house for such a little girl." "So if the sideboards and closets aren't just right, she has no one to blame but herself." And as for the two "lovebirds", Harold, as it turns out, isn't even home. He gets up for work at 5:00 a.m., then disappears until he comes home at 6:00 p.m. (presumably to have his dinner). In this story he's a no-show, a non-entity, though Mildred refers to him constantly.

While assuring us all that Mildred is perfectly happy in her new home, the writer of the piece reveals something kind of heartbreaking: Mildred says she misses being in films, is afraid she's falling behind, and wants to ask Harold for permission to jump back in. Harold has sneakily appeared to give his consent (which, of course, she needs to do anything at all), all the while planning to whisk her off to Europe to take her mind off the whole thing.

And that's not counting the boxes of candy he plies her with to ruin her actress's figure. But the truly ridiculous line in this phony-baloney puff piece is her "diet" of lamb with pineapple. "Oh, I can't look a little lamb in the face these days, and I begin to pine the moment I look at a pineapple."

OH. . . COME. . . ON.

This is not a real interview. This person, this "Grace Kingsley", has never been anywhere near the huge, pretentious, elegantly excessive sprawl known as Greenacres (and you'll notice Kingsley never even mentions it by name, or gives more than the sketchiest of generic descriptions). 

The only part that seems to ring true is the saddest part: "Don't you think that if a woman has ever used her brains and her talents, it is hard to give up her work?" The interviewer ponders what she has said. "I agreed with her, even though way down deep in my heart, I felt just a wee bit of sympathy, too, with Harold in his desire that Mildred should be content as a housewife."

Should. Content. Housewife. 

Worst of all is that Mildred is given absolutely no credit for the amazing career she built for herself pre-Harold. Her well-established performing talent and luminous camera presence explain why he purposely approached her to be his next leading lady. That sort of stellar opportunity doesn't come along unless you are well prepared for it.

After I had transcribed this, the whole thing began to clang.  "Grace Kingsley" could be anyone, because I do not believe for one minute that he or she ever TALKED to Mildred Davis (whom no one ever called Mildred - she was always Mid or Molly). This person, whom I suspect was male, never took the trouble to drive up that monstrous hill to Greenacres, but just cobbled together bits of information from "sources" such as rumor, hearsay and other magazines. Photos of the couple at Greenacres were ubiquitous. As for Mildred's "contentment" and willingness to give up a brilliant film career, all that was soon to be taken out of her hands. In their innermost circle, it was known that the two "had to get married": Harold had knocked up his co-star and was required to marry her to save face.  Mostly his.

I don't know what to say about all this, and I don't want to say anything at all about the worst of it. Just that the truth seems to be too harsh for fans to take, then as now. Who was there to blow the whistle on Grace Kingsley? He or she was just doing his/her job. For all I know, this person DID go to Greenacres and hear Mildred prattle on about a little lamb. But somehow, the whole thing just seems too contrived to be believable.   

Harold Lloyd, the Christmas fanatic

When I began to research Harold Lloyd to write my novel The Glass Character, there was almost nothing about him on the internet. The photos were tiny, grainy old black-and-white things, likely scanned out of books. Believe me when I say, there were hardly any books about Harold, let alone novels (and mine is the only one I know about, though the reading public doesn't even seem to know that). 

At any rate, this set of family photos is kind of nice. This one depicts, left to right, a grinning Harold, his devastatingly handsome son Harold Jr. (a. k.a. Duke, or as he was familiarly know, Dukie), and the lovely Mildred Davis. The three family cocker spaniels figure large in this, BUT - what about that Christmas tree? It looks nothing like the pregnant-looking, ornament-stuffed, legendary tree he became known for. But knowing Harold, he'd have trees all over the place, so this is likely not the main one.

This is more like it, though the tree is still in a state of evolution (you can actually see a bit of the branches). I don't know who the two people on the right are - family friends, likely. The little girl in Harold's lap is his granddaughter Suzanne, now the keeper of the Lloyd legend. 

Mildred looks lovely in this, as usual. Again, I wonder if this could be the main tree. The dogs are simply gorgeous.

Here we have the tree in all its bulging glory. The tall man in back is family friend and Lloyd bit player Roy Brooks, who's in my novel, with Dukie and Suzanne and Mom. 

If I am cracked down upon for daring to share these photos (which are reproduced many thousands of times on Pinterest, Twitter, and countless other pages), no one will be surprised. It is well-nigh impossible to find the provenance of internet images, though I have squeezed the Google and TinEye reverse image sites to no avail. It's my fate to be made an example of,  I guess, though I have to take consolation in loving Harold and being fascinated with him for all these years. He's the reason for the season.

And he belongs to everyone. Remember that.

Every day is Christmas: Harold Lloyd's Christmas tree

Harold Lloyd was a Christmas fanatic. He was a fanatic about a lot of things, including painting, handball, microscopy, the Shriners, and beautiful women with no tops on. But let's stick to the Christmas tree for now.

When he was a boy, growing up dirt-poor in Nebraska, they probably had something - you'd have to be pretty impoverished not to be able to cut something down in the woods, drag it home and decorate it with some paper garlands and strings of popcorn.

But once he was in the chips, Christmas took on a whole new meaning.

I sometimes get a mental image of Harold rolling around in dollar bills and throwing them up in the air, not because he was greedy (though he was apparently a lousy tipper), but because it was fun to have money at last.

Never again would the family have to skip out in the night to avoid paying rent that they didn't have.

As you can see here, some of these ornaments were absolutely huge. Most were handmade European things that remind me of Faberge eggs. Over the years he amassed an incredible 10,000 ornaments (hard to believe, but this is Harold Lloyd, folks, and he never did things by halves), most of which were kept in a vault somewhere in his huge estate, Greenacres.

It took weeks for him to decorate this thing, which was constructed from three gigantic fir trees lashed together. Then one year when he was about to dis-assemble it, he decided, ah, hell, isn't it really Christmas all year long? So the tree stayed up.

This pose with a red-jacketed Harold is obviously an earlier incarnation because you can still see parts of the tree. It doesn't have that bulged-out/pregnant/I-think-I'm-going-to-explode look it took on in later years.

In fact, this tree looks really nice to me. Has a nice shape, a nice sparkle, and TONS of ornaments already. But Harold never knew when to stop.

The little girl in the red pajamas is Harold's granddaughter, Suzanne, now keeper of the Lloyd legend. Due to family circumstances, Harold was like a father to her, and it must've been fun to have a grandfather like that, even if he was hard to keep up with. This surely must have been taken in the middle of the decorating frenzy, given the appearance of the tree in the first photo.

It always strikes me that the great geniuses of the world are little boys who never grow up. They retain that mental flexibility and ability to dream and actualize those dreams without adult restraints. They also retain temperament and a degree of childishness, which Harold did. He had a hairtrigger temper by all accounts -  I learned that from Kevin Brownlow's superb documentary Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius, a major source of information for my research, and it was Harold's brother-in-law who said it. So I'm not just making up stories. He really did have flaws. I say this because I sometimes wonder if I somehow inadvertently pissed off someone in the Lloyd family by portraying him as less than perfect in my book. At any rate, the silence from them has been deafening. But as I've said before, Kevin Brownlow has been wonderful to me, so maybe I'd better be happy with that.

It's still possible to buy some of those 10,000 ornaments today. In fact, they're listed on eBay right now, eight ornaments for $2500.00 USD.  That's uh, three hundred and. . . that's lotsa money per ornament. Eight would be about enough for my tree.

POST-POST POST: As you well know, Wikipedia is my Bible, especially when I don't feel like plodding through a dozen web sites for information which may or may not be right. It's a sad and poignant story, what happened to Harold's estate after he died in 1971. The upkeep on the gargantuan place was basically unworkable. The huge lot had to be subdivided and sold off in parcels in the '70s, but the house still sits on top of the hill in Benedict Canyon, somewhat updated from its falling-down days. It's nice to know it's still there and being looked after.

Several movies were shot at Greenacres in the '70s, including a Lylah Clare-ish, Sunset Boulevard-esque, cheesy TV movie called Death at Love House with Robert Wagner in it (Harold's close friend), but the video clips I could find were so Godawful I could not include them here. I couldn't even make a decent 3-second gif.

History after Lloyd's death

Plans for preservation and a museum





Christmas tree in 1974

Lloyd left his Benedict Canyon estate to the "benefit of the public at large" with instructions that it be used "as an educational facility and museum for research into the history of the motion picture in the United States." For a few years the home was open to public tours, but financial and legal obstacles prevented the estate from creating the motion picture museum that Lloyd had intended. Among other things, neighboring homeowners in the wealthy community were opposed to the creation of a museum hosting parties and attracting busloads of tourists.

In October 1972, the Los Angeles Times visited the property and noted that it had "the feel of Sunset Boulevard," bringing to mind the line spoken by the young writer when he first visits Norma Desmond's home: "It was the kind of place that crazy movie people built in the crazy 20s." The house appeared to visitors in the 1970s to be frozen in time at 1929. One writer noted that nothing had been moved or replaced, changed, or modernized, from the books in the library to the appliances in the kitchen and the fixtures in the bathrooms. 

Noted columnist Jack Smith visited the estate in 1973 and wrote that "time stood still", as Lloyd's clothes still hung in his closet, and the master bedroom and living room "looked like a set for a movie of the 1930s." A Renaissance tapestry presented to Lloyd as a housewarming gift by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks was still hanging in the hallway.

The house also had Lloyd's permanent Christmas tree loaded with ornaments at the end of a long sitting room. Jack Smith described the tree as follows:

"At the end of the room, dominating it like some great Athena in a Greek temple, stood the most fantastic Christmas tree I had ever seen. It reached the ceiling, a great, bulbous mass of colored glass baubles, some of them as big as pumpkins, clustered together like gaudy jewels in some monstrous piece of costume jewelry."

POST-POST: I just thought of something else. As usual! Somewhere, I know not where, I read in my research that there was a TV special called Citizen Lloyd which aired shortly after Harold's death. There was scant information about this, but I can't help but see the title as an allusion to Citizen Kane and Xanadu, the great echoing mausoleum inhabited by Charles Foster Kane. Parallels have also been drawn to Sunset Boulevard with its algae-choked swimming pool and demented German manservant with the duelling scar. 

Though Harold never employed Eric von Stroheim to look after the place, there is an eerieness to all this. Perhaps it's Stroheim's ghost that haunts Greenacres. I know Annette Lloyd got to tour the place at some point, and I never will, though Death at Love House gave me a rather macabre glimpse of it. It is, indeed, frozen in time, the furniture threadbare, the swimming pools brimming with scum.

A few years from now, I have a feeling "someone" will make a movie about Harold Lloyd, and it will have all my ideas in it. There are enough copies of The Glass Character circulating, all of which seemed to fall into the Grand Canyon without an echo. 

But I wonder what happened to that TV special, if someone still has a tape of it moldering in their basement and will some day decide to put it on YouTube.

Stranger things have happened. But not much.

The Glass Character: a novel by Margaret Gunning

Every day is Christmas: Harold Lloyd's Christmas tree

All right, I guess I've put this off about as long as I can. It's time to deal with the little issue of Harold Lloyd and his Christmas tree.

Harold was a Christmas fanatic. He was a fanatic about a lot of things, including painting, handball, microscopy, the Shriners, and beautiful women with no tops on. But let's stick to the Christmas tree for now.

When he was a boy, growing up dirt-poor in Nebraska, they probably had something - you'd have to be pretty impoverished not to be able to cut something down in the woods, drag it home and decorate it with some paper garlands and strings of popcorn.

But once he was in the chips, Christmas took on a whole new meaning.

I sometimes get a mental image of Harold rolling around in dollar bills and throwing them up in the air, not because he was greedy (though he was apparently a lousy tipper), but because it was fun to have money at last.

Never again would the family have to skip out in the night to avoid paying rent that they didn't have.

As you can see here, some of these ornaments were absolutely huge. Most were handmade European things that remind me of Faberge eggs. Over the years he amassed an incredible 10,000 ornaments (hard to believe, but this is Harold Lloyd, folks, and he never did things by halves), most of which were kept in a vault somewhere in his huge estate, Greenacres.

It took weeks for him to decorate this thing, which was constructed from three gigantic fir trees lashed together. Then one year when he was about to dis-assemble it, he decided, ah, hell, isn't it really Christmas all year long? So the tree stayed up.

This pose with a red-jacketed Harold is obviously an earlier incarnation because you can still see parts of the tree. It doesn't have that bulged-out/pregnant/I-think-I'm-going-to-explode look it took on in later years.

In fact, this tree looks really nice to me. Has a nice shape, a nice sparkle, and TONS of ornaments already. But Harold never knew when to stop.

The little girl in the red pajamas is Harold's granddaughter, Suzanne, now keeper of the Lloyd legend. Due to family circumstances, Harold was like a father to her, and it must've been fun to have a grandfather like that, even if he was hard to keep up with. This surely must have been taken in the middle of the decorating frenzy, given the appearance of the tree in the first photo.

It always strikes me that the great geniuses of the world are little boys who never grow up. They retain that mental flexibility and ability to dream and actualize those dreams without adult restraints. They also retain temperament and a degree of childishness, which Harold did. He had a hairtrigger temper by all accounts - hey, folks, I learned that from Kevin Brownlow's superb documentary Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius, a major source of information for my research, and it was Harold's brother-in-law who said it. I'm not just making up stories. He really did have flaws. I say this because I sometimes wonder if I somehow inadvertently pissed off someone in the Lloyd family by portraying him as less than perfect in my book. At any rate, the silence from them has been deafening. But as I've said before, Kevin Brownlow has been wonderful to me, so maybe I'd better be happy with that.

It's still possible to buy some of those 10,000 ornaments today. In fact, they're listed on eBay right now, eight ornaments for $2500.00 USD.  That's uh, three hundred and. . . that's lotsa money per ornament. Eight would be about enough for my tree.

POST-POST POST: As you well know, Wikipedia is my Bible, especially when I don't feel like plodding through a dozen web sites for information which may or may not be right. It's a sad and poignant story, what happened to Harold's estate after he died in 1971. The upkeep on the gargantuan place was basically unworkable. The huge lot had to be subdivided and sold off in parcels in the '70s, but the house still sits on top of the hill in Benedict Canyon, somewhat updated from its falling-down days. It's nice to know it's still there and being looked after.

Several movies were shot at Greenacres in the '70s, including a Lylah Clare-ish, Sunset Boulevard-esque, cheesy TV movie called Death at Love House with Robert Wagner in it (Harold's close friend), but the video clips I could find were so Godawful I could not include them here. I couldn't even make a decent 3-second gif.

History after Lloyd's death

Plans for preservation and a museum





Christmas tree in 1974

Lloyd left his Benedict Canyon estate to the "benefit of the public at large" with instructions that it be used "as an educational facility and museum for research into the history of the motion picture in the United States." For a few years the home was open to public tours, but financial and legal obstacles prevented the estate from creating the motion picture museum that Lloyd had intended. Among other things, neighboring homeowners in the wealthy community were opposed to the creation of a museum hosting parties and attracting busloads of tourists.

In October 1972, the Los Angeles Times visited the property and noted that it had "the feel of Sunset Boulevard," bringing to mind the line spoken by the young writer when he first visits Norma Desmond's home: "It was the kind of place that crazy movie people built in the crazy 20s."The house appeared to visitors in the 1970s to be frozen in time at 1929. One writer noted that nothing had been moved or replaced, changed, or modernized, from the books in the library to the appliances in the kitchen and the fixtures in the bathrooms. 

Noted columnist Jack Smith visited the estate in 1973 and wrote that "time stood still", as Lloyd's clothes still hung in his closet, and the master bedroom and living room "looked like a set for a movie of the 1930s." A Renaissance tapestry presented to Lloyd as a housewarming gift by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks was still hanging in the hallway.

The house also had Lloyd's permanent Christmas tree loaded with ornaments at the end of a long sitting room. Jack Smith described the tree as follows:

"At the end of the room, dominating it like some great Athena in a Greek temple, stood the most fantastic Christmas tree I had ever seen. It reached the ceiling, a great, bulbous mass of colored glass baubles, some of them as big as pumpkins, clustered together like gaudy jewels in some monstrous piece of costume jewelry."

POST-POST: I just thought of something else. As usual! Somewhere, I know not where, I read in my research that there was a TV special called Citizen Lloyd which aired shortly after Harold's death. There was scant information about this, but I can't help but see the title as an allusion to Citizen Kane and Xanadu, the great echoing mausoleum inhabited by Charles Foster Kane. Parallels have also been drawn to Sunset Boulevard with its algae-choked swimming pool and demented German manservant with the duelling scar. 

Though Harold never employed Eric von Stroheim to look after the place, there is an eerieness to all this. Perhaps it's Stroheim's ghost that haunts Greenacres. I know Annette Lloyd got to tour the place at some point, and I never will. I'll die before that happens. In spite of all my efforts to flog it, the book I toiled over for seven years has fallen off the face of the earth. Except for wonderful Kevin Brownlow, no one connected with the film industry has shown the slightest interest in it, or in helping me actualize my dream.

A few years from now, I have a feeling "someone" will make a movie about Harold Lloyd, and it will have all my ideas in it. There are enough copies circulating, all of which seemed to fall into the Grand Canyon without an echo. And because I am so utterly powerless, there will not be a damn thing I can do about it.

But I wonder what happened to that TV special, if someone still has a tape of it moldering in their basement and will some day decide to put it on YouTube.

Stranger things have happened. But not much.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA