Fifty Shades of Harold Lloyd: outtakes

My Harold Lloyd doll: I got my mojo working

NO! This is NOT my Harold doll, notnotnotnotnot. This is a horrifying clip depicting a Harold Lloyd windup toy from the 1930s, one that actually appears to still work. The Harold we see here has a sad affliction, some sort of seizure disorder that causes explosions of frenetic movement. He doesn't walk so much as flail along. Toys like this are worth plenty, and are uniformly hideous. I've even gone into this subject in past posts, and frankly I'm pretty sick of it.

So we know that Harold toys have existed for a long time. There were even Harold dolls, sort of, which consisted of two flat pieces of oilcloth sewn together with a uniform pattern stamped on them.

But soft! What's this??

 

 

It's a Harold with features, a face, hair, in three dimensions even. And glasses.

 

 

A Harold complete with white straw boater and bowtie. A soft and cuddly Harold, unlike those tin things that scare the hemoglobin out of me.

A Harold with blue eyes and glasses and hair like he had, sort of wavy and slicked-back.

 

 

A Harold who can doff his hat.

 

A sitting Harold.

 

 

 

And, most importantly. . . a Harold with SADDLE SHOES!

 

 





I am not too shy to tell you that I made this doll myself, and with no pattern. He evolved under my hands. I had certain feelings when I began this project. I'd been thinking about dolls and writing about dolls (and if you're following this blog, you'll be tired of the whole subject by now) and their strangeness, creepiness. There's something eerily powerful about a human making an image of a human. It goes back to the Venus of Willendorf or something. It has juju, cachet, mojo, power.

 

I feel like I lost track of my mojo a long time ago now, and I want it back. It's funny that, though I initially got very excited about this project, I then fell off it for a while and didn't particularly want to do it.

I think it was the misery and despair of realizing that no one seems to have the slightest interest in publishing my novel, The Glass Character, a fictionalized treatment of Harold Lloyd's life and loves.  Part of me died when that happened, for I had so many hopes for it and STILL think it's the best thing I've ever written.

It dropped with a clunk. It was like throwing a pebble into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

So I needed Something. I don't believe in voodoo or anything (though obviously some people do), but I wonder if I might be able to beguile a sort of reverse voodoo here, to have some sort of power over somebody's attention or perception or influence or something.

To get someone to notice.

Harold got noticed, believe-you-me. He stood out. Part of it was his fierce ambition, part of it his sleek and slightly vulpine good looks, blue eyes crackling with intelligence and life force.  A hell of a lot of it was a talent that was surprisingly slow to bloom. Even by his own admission, some of it was "luck", whatever that is, which is maybe what made him so incredibly superstitious.

(I just remembered something from several years ago, a very strange story. My granddaughter Caitlin, then only about five, found my DVD set of The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection. She saw the photo of the man with the glasses and his hair standing on end and looked at me strangely, then asked, "Grandma, is that you?"

"Yes," I said. "It's me."

"Can we watch this?"

"Of course. But we'll just play the good part."

So I put on Safety Last, the climbing scene, and all through it she was totally absorbed. Every once in a while she'd say, "Ah!" or "Oh!" when it looked like he might fall. At one point Ryan, only about 3, mosied in, put his hands over his eyes and said, "He's gonna faw! He's gonna faw!" He watched the rest of it through his fingers.

But after the clock-hanging scene was over, the spell seemed to be broken. "That's not really you, is it, Grandma." It wasn't a question.

"No, it isn't. It's a man named Harold Lloyd. I wrote a book about him."

A little while later I could tell she was still thinking. I asked her what she was thinking about. Then she looked at me and said the most remarkable thing.

"You're Harold Lloyd, and Harold Lloyd is you.")

You can't throw your heart over the jump and have your horse get halfway over it and get impaled on it and throw you off so that you land on your head and are paralyzed for life. So much for THAT adage. And it's NOT true that "you can do absolutely anything you want in life, so long as you keep on trying". That's the biggest piece of bullshit I've ever heard, and do you know what? I hear it EVERY DAMN DAY, along with "everything happens for a reason" (childhood cancer? Random shootings? The Holocaust?) and "God never gives us more than we can handle" (so then why are our prisons and mental hospitals always full to overflowing?)

And here I go into a rant again. I need my Harold doll, someone to watch over me. And though I know this sounds incredible, his eyes, the rather rudimentary blue eyes that I embroidered on myself, DO appear to follow me around through those glasses, the glasses that made Harold who he was.

I made him. I made his face, his eyes, his body, his shoes and hat. Without me he'd be bits of yarn in a basket, nothing. He is me; he is mine.

It's the Harold Lloyd doll!

Oh, I never should've gone there! Never!

Every instinct of decency in my body told me not to go there. And I went there. Am I out of my mind?

I am under enchantment, there's no other explanation. Walking through the waxy, pollen-scented underworld of Marina Bychkova and her ball-jointed porcelain dolls, haunted by the memory of Victorian post-mortem photography displaying dead people propped up with staring eyes: it all got to me, I guess, and then I remembered a little black-and-white photo of "something".

Something from my scanty but cherished collection of Harold Lloyd books.

This. This thing, this strange thing. Free Harold Lloyd Dolls While They Last from the Piggly Wiggly. What the fxxx is the Piggly Wiggly??

The fact that you can still buy one of these things from antique doll sites is more than creepy. They average $175.00 and strike me as, well, probably knock-offs, or the cloth would be all brown and greasy like cloth goes when it's turned rotten.

Or loved to death.

The doll looks too fat to be Harold, who was pretty lean and toned from all those stunts, and I can't figure out why his feet are turned backwards.

Okay, next comes the Harold Lloyd paper doll, and I have even more trouble believing this is authentic. When I was a girl you didn't punch out paper dolls (don't take that the wrong way), but cut carefully around them with scissors. It was a tricky business because the paper was so flimsy, and vital parts were often lopped off. But I wonder how such a fragile artifact could ever be so well-preserved. Perhaps he was printed on card stock, making him nice and stiff?

Whatever. I really like the upside-down Harold: he did, after all, hang off the hands of a huge clock in his best-known movie Safey Last!, and was often upside-down in one way or another.

I should apologize for this, but I'm in so deep now I must continue. This thing puts Marina Bychkova's fair lilies of the funeral parlour to shame. It's a hideous object, something that I presume has a big key in its back, and I have to admit at one point during my research I wanted to buy one. It's something like a thousand dollars, but when I discovered it doesn't walk (a Harold toy that doesn't WALK??), I gave up on it. What it does, if it's working at all, is wag its head back and forth, probably with an awful grinding noise. I think its eyes crank open and shut, and the big seam above its upper lip implies that its mouth also moves. In light of the fact that he was in silent movies, this doesn't make much sense.

                                                   

I'm beginning to feel a little sick. This is a Harold Lloyd bell. That's right. A bell. It rang, probably like an alarm clock.  I think there must have been a Harold Lloyd clock somewhere, maybe with a tiny bespectacled man hanging off the hands. But this is just so useless. Why would anyone want a Harold bell?

Old toys creep me out, sort of like those bisque dolls with sunken eyes and cracked, mottled skin. The sarcophagus look. Tin things kind of shrink up and warp and look tarnished, and the paint flakes off. But the representation of Harold is hideous to begin with, like a nightmare. The back view of the bell looks sort of like an upside-down kamikaze angel made of lead.

Excuse me, I'm going to go lie down for a while.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm 

Rah, old dolly!

Har.