Harold and Bebe: spinning or slow?

This little snippet from Harold Lloyd's Young Mr. Jazz (1919) is meant to be comic dancing, a whirling-dervish sort of spin satirizing the jazzy steps of the day (though in 1919, this trend had barely begun). The bit at the end hilariously exposes Bebe's Daddy in a huddle with a sweet patootie he just picked up, a woman wearing a bizarre striped ensemble and a tall feathery hat. 

I couldn't help but take this gif and s-l-o-w-w-w it down, just to see how the mad whirl might look at a much slower speed. And look at this!

This is just about the most graceful dancing I've ever seen, more typical of Harold's natural skill as a dancer. Really, it doesn't look silly at all, does it? He's sweeping her off her feet.

But then. . . then I noticed something. It's possible that the original dance has been "sped up" just a little, by something called undercranking (literally, cranking the camera more slowly so that fewer frames per second are exposed, thus making it play back faster). Just look at the piano player - he's a jittery blur! In the second version, he appears to be playing at a more normal speed.

Everyone else in the frame is either carefully still, or only gesturing minimally. What made me think of this tweaking of speed was a tiny video I just saw on The Freshman, in which Harold does a fast-footed "jig" that becomes his signature. It goes so fast you can barely see his feet. I found out, with a bit of disappointment, that this too was tweaked to make it look faster than it was.

Damn!

"Step right up and call me Speedy!"

"St-e-e-e-e-e-p  r-r-r-r-i-i-ght  up and ca-a-a-a-l-l-l me-e-e-e. . . not very Speedy."

I don't know why the use of special effects in a movie should bother me. It doesn't, except that dancing was one of Harold's natural skills, one of those things he didn't have to formally learn. To see it enhanced/messed with is a bit disillusioning, but Harold was a filmmaker, and the result was all. Harold's nickname (which I am sure he came up with himself) was Speedy, which kind of makes me shake my head a bit for obvious reasons. He always pushed himself to go farther, faster, longer, than anyone else, and was ferociously competitive. So if he couldn't dance fast enough to create a  blur, he would make it LOOK like he could. 

One has to wonder how much insecurity lay beneath that charming exterior. I don't think Harold was moody or broody (though his temper could be explosive), but for all his inspiration, I don't think he was introspective. He always moved relentlessly forward. At what cost, we can only guess, for the lives of his children were troubled. They had all the problems of rich kids who had come from desperately poor parents. Harold was determined to give his children "everything he never had", but was that what they needed? The question goes unanswered. We only know he could  dance. Reminds me of those old Westerns where some cowboy shoots at the feet of the town drunk, yelling, "Dance! Dance! Faster!"

Harold comes calling

HERE AT LAST: Harold Lloyd in PROFESSOR BEWARE!

It's pretty incredible to FINALLY see this movie posted when I have been snuffling around for it for something like eight years. (This is, by the way, the second version I found. The first one, taken from a Russian web site, had an annoying buzzing sound in the background all through the movie.) All I could ever find were publicity stills - LOTS of them, more than for any other movie Harold ever did. 

I haven't even looked at this yet, as I posted it very late at night. It gave me a surreal feeling. Harold himself didn't like this film, and I think it was made in 1938, his doldrums period when he nevertheless was not quite ready to give up. His "glass character" (his own name for his film alter ego) didn't wear well with time, not because he didn't look good - he looked good for pretty much his whole life -  but because it was a little uncomfortable to see a 40-year-old man acting like he was 25. With one exception, the ferocious kiss in Why Worry?, his alter ego was almost virginal, and a virginal 40-year-old (who in several cases still lives with his parents) is just kinda creepy.

How does it feel to have this lost treasure at my fingertips? I'm not sure yet, because I haven't watched it. And of course it's not like the wild curiosity of a few years ago. But something has changed.  I cannot tell you why, but after pushing the whole subject away from me for over a year, I am "into" Harold again. 

 

I found a stash of copies of my novel yesterday and was a bit relieved - I could only find one, and found it hard to believe that I hadn't kept more than that. I sent out SO many copies to people whom I hoped would be interested, mainly in the film industry, and Kevin Brownlow was the only one who responded, albeit with a very brief enthusiasm which has since died. Rich Correll's initial keen interest (he actually phoned me, gave me contact information and seemed genuinely interested in doing something with it) and subsequent cold and baffling dismissal was nothing short of devastating. I am not sure what happened, but I suspect someone was running interference, and I think I know who it was. When the movie gets made and all my ideas are in it, it's going to be pretty heartbreaking. But I digress.

I have no idea why more photos, posters, lobby cards, and other forms of publicity exist for Professor Beware than for (even) Safety Last or The Freshman, when it disappeared from view for so many decades. But here it is. Sampling through it, so far I notice Harold's shrill, strident voice yelling and screaming a lot, and maybe this is one reason it didn't go over well. I have no idea why he didn't just use his regular, jovial Midwestern voice with its delightful tinges of Nebraska. Comics often have a persona with an obnoxious voice - Jerry Lewis comes to mind - but this one is pretty hard to take.

If you're interested in this movie, please watch it right away! It could easily be taken down for copyright reasons. It was shown on AMC just once, some time in the '90s, and there's a rumor it was on YouTube very briefly in 2015, but I don't know about that. I think I would have noticed it. But the powers that be at YouTube will likely re-inter this gem just to make sure we are deprived of all the best things on the internet. 

BTW, aren't these gorgeous? I'm afraid I don't own them. It's just an internet image. But in this case, as with so many things, the buildup was much better than the actual event.

Mad About the Boy: the lost lyrics

SOCIETY WOMAN:

I met him at a party
Just a couple of years ago
He was rather over-hearty and ridiculous

But as I'd seen him on the screen he cast a certain spell
I basked in his attraction
For a couple of hours or so
His manners were a fraction too meticulous

If he was real or not I couldn't tell
But like a silly fool I fell

Mad about the boy
I know it's stupid to be mad about the boy
I'm so ashamed of it
But must admit

The sleepless nights I've had 

About the boy
On the silver screen

He melts my foolish heart in every single scene
Although I'm quite aware
That here and there
Are traces of the cad 

About the boy

Lord knows I'm not a fool-girl
I really shouldn't care
Lord knows I'm not a school-girl
In the flurry of her first affair

Will it ever cloy
This odd diversity of misery and joy
I'm feeling quite insane and young again
And all because I'm mad about the boy

SCHOOL GIRL:

Home work, home work
Every night there's homework
While Elsie practices the gas goes pop
I wish, I wish she'd stop

Oh dear, oh dear
Here it's always, 'No dear
You can't go out again, you must stay home
You'd waste your money on that common Picturedrome
Don't shirk—stay here and do your work.'

Yearning, yearning
How my heart is burning
I'll see him Saturday in Strong Man's Pain
And then on Monday and on Friday week again

To me, he is the sole man
Who can kiss as well as Coleman
I could faint whenever there's a close-up of his lips

Though John Barrymore is larger
When my hero's on his charger
Even Douglass Fairbanks Junior hasn't smaller hips
If only he could know
That I adore him so

Mad about the boy
It's simply scrumptous to be mad about the boy
I know that quite sincerely
Houseman really
Wrote The Shropshire Lad about the boy

In my English prose
I've done a tracing of his forehead and his nose
And there is, honour bright
A certain slight
Effect of Galahad about the boy

I've talked to Rosie Hooper
She feels the same as me
She says that Gary Cooper
Doesn't thrill her to the same degree
In Can Love Destroy?

He meets with Garbo in a suit of corduroy
He gives a little frown
And knocks her down
Oh dear, oh dear, I'm mad about the boy

COCKNEY:

Every Wednesday afternoon
I get a little time off from three to eleven
Then I go to the picture house 

and taste a little of my particular heaven

He appears
In a little while
Through a mist of tears
I can see him smiling
Above me
Every picture I see him in
Every lovers' caress
Makes my wonderful dreams begin

Makes me long to confess
That if he ever looked at me
And thought perhaps I was worth the trouble to
Love me
I'd give in and I wouldn't care
However far from the path of virtue he'd
Shove me!

Just supposing our love was brief
If he treated me rough
I'd be happy beyond belief
Once would be enough

Mad about the boy
I know I'm potty but I'm mad about the boy!
He sets me 'eart on fire
With love's desire
In fact I've got it bad about the boy!
When I do the rooms
I see his face in all the brushes and the brooms!

Last week I strained me back
And got the sack
And had a row with dad about the boy
I'm finished with Navarro, (He thrills me to the marrow)
I'm tired of Richard Dix, (I sit through all his tricks!)
I'm pierced by Cupid's arrow
Every Wed-nes-day, from four to six!

'Ow I should enjoy
To let 'im treat me like a plaything or a toy
I'd give my all to 'im
And crawl to 'im
So 'elp me God, I'm mad about the boy

TART:

It seems a little silly
For a girl my age and weight
To walk down Piccadilly
In a haze of love

It ought to take a good deal more to get a bad girl down
I should have been exempt, for
My particular kind of fate
Has taught me such contempt for
Every phase of love

And now I've been and spent my last half-crown
To weep about a painted clown

Mad about the boy
It's pretty funny but I'm mad about the boy
He has a gay appeal
That makes me feel
There may be something sad about the boy

Walking down the street
His eyes look out at me from people that I meet
I can't believe it's true
But when I'm blue
In some strange way I'm glad about the boy

I'm hardly sentimental
Love isn't so sublime
I have to pay my rental
And I can't afford to waste much time

If I could employ
A little magic that would finally destroy
This dream that pains me
And enchains me

But I can't because I'm mad about the boy

Words and music by Noel Coward

Cartoon Harold Lloyd!

A few snippets from cartoons, previews and other animated features.

Bottoms up!

Harold toasts the New Year. What will 2019 bring? Walls or bridges?

Turkey trot: Harold walks his prize turkey home

 From the delightful domestic comedy Hot Water.

"I've made a huge mistake"

Hark the Harold

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

Harold Lloyd's foreign language posters