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.

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Harold Lloyd: you can't keep a good man down

Drink was, in fact, the curse of the family. Mildred (or “Mid”, or “Molly”, as Lloyd called her) had been an alcoholic from some time in the forties, when it is said she wanted desperately to divorce Lloyd. In her late years a full-time nurse was employed mainly to see that her perfume bottles did not mysteriously get filled with booze, that her habit of drinking Listerine did not get out of hand. In a pathetic family – “a disaster”, as even Lloyd’s kindly friend Simonton put it – she was perhaps the most pathetic member. One thinks of her – never a very mature, forthcoming or stimulating person – wandering the halls of the great house, her husband either absent or preoccupied by one of his interests, her children all gone, and none of them bearing her any very kind feelings, caring mainly for her two companionable poodles and her booze, and one sees the end results of the flaws that, almost from the first, people had detected in Lloyd’s art – its abstractness, its mechanical quality, its lack of real warmth. It is all dreadfully sad.

Harold Lloyd: The Shape of Laughter, 1974

This was one of the more disturbing passages I found in my relentless quest for information about Harold Lloyd. In fact, this whole book sells Lloyd short in just about every facet of his life, but never is it more hurtful than in this personal attack on his family.

One wonders, in fact, if he knew or cared about the surviving members of Lloyd's family, about their feelings for him. He seems to have assumed no one was left who cared two figs about him, or if they did, that they weren't significant enough to merit a modicum of respect.

At the same time, this critic - and I don't name him to cover MY ass, not his! - is one of those unassailable figures in "cinema" (a step up in snobbishmess even from "film") whom no one ever really questions. Even to this day, his work is hugely influential. What puzzles and offends me almost as much as his nasty cracks at his family is his description of Lloyd's art: "its abstractness, its mechanical quality, its lack of real warmth."

This description seriously makes me wonder if he ever saw a Lloyd film, or if he perhaps only saw those "knockabout" one-reel comedies made before 1920. Harold Lloyd features like Girl Shy, Safety Last!, The Freshman and The Kid Brother are so far from "mechanical" that I cannot fathom his comments; Harold's films have moments of pathos and even tenderness that never fail to bring me to tears. The gags are graceful and ingenious, particularly in The Kid Brother where he plays a sort of male Cinderella, washing clothes in a butter-churn and hanging them out to dry on the string of a kite.

I did find out some things about Harold Lloyd and his family, in particular from a more recent bio written by silent film historian Jeffrey Vance in collaboration with Harold Lloyd's granddaughter (whom he raised), Suzanne Lloyd. The book is honest and forthright about the sometimes-serious problems the family had; it was hardly a snow job. But as with most families, the dynamics were complicated, and joy and celebration often ran neck-in-neck with sorrow. To call Lloyd's home life "dreadfully sad" is to miss the point.

Alcoholism is a family pattern, with stubborn roots deeply buried in the soil of generations. Though Harold did not drink, some of those around him did, and it inevitably did them harm. But it's absurdly unlikely that his former leading lady Mildred Davis spent her final years wandering around the halls of their mansion like a ghost. Moreover, "it is said" does not pass as a particularly reliable source of information, and in fact can often mean nothing at all. It's as bad as that godawful phrase "studies show", which too many people seem to swallow without question.

I wasn't there, so I don't know exactly how things were at Greenacres, but I honestly don't think they were anything like this. I do know that the word "mechanical" stuck to Lloyd's films for decades, mainly because people seemed to take this critic's word as gospel. It did irreparable harm for decades and kept his movies buried for far too long.

There's a Lloyd revival going on, thank God, which proves that these descriptions are inadequate and highly inaccurate. In his Everyman's search for love (which is at the core of most of them), Harold Lloyd invented a new genre: the romantic comedy. It could even be argued that he broke ground in screwball comedy with the delightfully wacky Why Worry? I haven't seen every Lloyd film, but I've seen as many as I can get my hands on. The features he made after 1920 are nuanced and three-dimensional. His Glass Character tugs at the heart. But since that cold, abstract label was pinned on him shortly after his death and his work was either unavailable to the public or adulterated practically beyond recognition, it was accepted in the movie world without a lot of question.

This book ends with an acknowledgment section that I find almost harrowing. This is a direct quote:

When Time-Life Films, which will be re-releasing most of Lloyd's films over the next four years, invited me to attempt this critical-biographical sketch of the comedian, it had already commissioned a veteran correspondent of the Time-Life News Service to interview as many friends, relatives and co-workers of Lloyd's as he could find. His remarkably thorough dispatches were placed at my disposal for this book, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge my indebtedness to him. I am sure he would like me to express gratitude to those who provided him information.

This means The Shape of Laughter (a bizarre title that basically means nothing) was not written from primary sources and in fact had "contractual obligation" written all over it. He simply took someone else's material, believed it without question, and wove it into a book. No doubt the correspondent's opinion of Lloyd's work, whatever it was, must have been mixed in to this rehash. It makes one wonder if Time-Life wanted the glossy seal and cache of this particular critic to boost book sales, even if he didn't really write the book. Or did he simply owe them one? Such things are known to happen, but if you ever raise it as a possibility, all hell breaks loose, along with a storm of vitriolic denial.

An even more intriguing clue to the near-disappearance of Lloyd's films after his death is provided by Kevin Brownlow, arguably the world's foremost expert on silent film.

Two years after Lloyd died in 1971, Time-Life signed signed a distribution deal for his films and handled them with a tragic lack of understanding. The shorts were packaged with a commentary in the style of Pete Smith ("Poor Harold! It's doom for the groom unless he gets to his room!"), which effectively sank them without a trace. The features were spared the commentary, but insensitive, honky-tonk scores and the elimination of entire sequences often crippled their effect.

May I add to that the constant, annoying, ridiculously exaggerated sound effects?

In spite of all the factors that came together to compromise the integrity of Lloyd's work, it remained intact in the vault, sleeping, awaiting a second life. No one could have predicted the huge advances in film restoration that would strip the grey veils off his masterpieces and reveal them clean as new. No one could have predicted that Turner Classic Movies would get behind this renaissance, drawing more and more people back to pictures that are so vibrant and well-made that tired old comparisons to Chaplin and Keaton no longer apply.

Lloyd only "comes third" in some people's minds because they weren't there, and because they have had their viewpoint skewed by outdated, poorly-researched critical commentary. The best remedy for this is to buy the superb DVD movie set The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection and watch the hell out of them. I guarantee you, once you start, you won't ever be able to stop.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

The day I saw Harold's shorts

I want to tell you about a really bizarre dream I had last night. Let’s see if I can make the weird pieces of it fit together. Someone, maybe my mother when she was younger, was holding up a baby, swinging it like a prize turkey from the straps of a front-carrier. She said something like, “Do you want this?” I was a bit embarrassed because I wasn’t sure. Then I saw Suzanne Lloyd, Harold Lloyd's granddaughter, and it appeared that she was giving the baby to me. She was sort of bequeathing it to me in a way that was actually very tender. So I said yes. Then I realized the “baby” was a reborn doll, one of those silicone things that looks so real it’s creepy. Nevertheless, I began to take care of the doll exactly as if it were real.

This dream didn’t lead to anything, but, like most dreams,  just trickled away. In spite of how it sounds, it wasn't clear who the baby was supposed to be (though it was a boy with black hair). I was once told that baby dreams represent the rebirth of self. Hooey, really, unless rubber dolls express the soul. 

So what IS a doll, anyway: a representation, a symbol? We still seem to need them. Right now as I write this, a Harold Lloyd doll sits on my desk, perpetually smiling. I designed him a couple of years ago, stitched him together and made him saddle shoes and a little straw hat. A juju, no doubt, emanating a spooky black-and-white power. 

Which brings me to my central point:  yesterday, for the first time in my life,  I saw Harold Lloyd’s shorts.

Shorts. Yes. Specifically, these were his first popular films, made between 1917 and 1919. He had just latched on to his Glass Character (the eccentric name Lloyd used to describe the “glasses character” that made him famous), and was testing it out in one-reel comedies that raced along at a terrific pace.

Before these came on, I was having another attack of “Lloyd synchronicity”. I’ve written about this before: strange coincidences, encounters with the name Lloyd or even images of Harold himself. The other day, I could tell it was starting again: I watched a quirky show called William Shatner’s Weird or What?, an episode in which the name Lloyd appeared three times (two different scientists, and a producer). I thought to myself: OK, I’ve had the trifecta, so what if I had a fourth? You don’t need a fourth, a little voice in my head warned me.

Only a moment later I changed channels, and . . . there was my fourth. My hair nearly stood on end, just like Harold’s: it was a stylish little animated segment, only a few seconds long, of a cartoon Harold Lloyd swinging from a huge clock, the image that made him famous all over the world.

So my trifecta had somehow evolved into a quadrifecta. But this was before the shorts, which I encountered quite by accident the next evening when I flipped to Turner Classics, my default channel. (This is my sanctuary when “reality” TV and other mediocre programming becomes too much, or not enough.) There was Suzanne Lloyd, yes, the same Suzanne Lloyd as in my dream, talking to Ben Mankiewicz about the restoration of Harold’s early one-reel comedies.

The early comedies! I hadn’t seen them, because for the most part they weren’t available, or existed only in muddy unrestored versions. I had that pulled-back-and-forth feeling I always get when faced with a new Lloyd treasure. I wanted to see it, and I didn't want to see it.

I saw it.

The only reason I wouldn’t want to see it is the fact that a few years ago, I wrote a novel with Harold Lloyd at its core. At this point, editors and publishers are kind of looking at it and not seeing it. I even had one tell me, “I don’t think the public is interested in silent movies” (and this was right around the time The Artist, a silent movie about silent movies, was winning the Best Picture and Best Actor Oscars). What I`m getting now is, “The 1920s is too out of date, no one wants to read about it.” So the Jazz Age is boring?  I want to say to them: does the name Jay Gatsby mean anything to you?

Harold, Harold! If only you hadn’t smiled that way. I don’t know, he's contagious or something, and somehow (after all these years) he finds his way into your heart. This is why he got so famous to begin with (along with certain other things, like charisma, inventiveness, great stories, dramatic acting skills – and, to top all that – being damn funny!).

So what started all this? Why Harold Lloyd? I was initially led into this exploration by seeing his back. Not many actors can act with their back, but he could.  I had Turner Classics on and was half-asleep, when a “figure” appeared walking in a certain jaunty manner, walking away from the camera I mean. All we saw was his back. I found myself saying out loud, “That’s Harold Lloyd.”

I don’t know how I knew.

Of course I remember seeing the iconic photo of Harold dangling from the hands of a huge clock 20 stories up. It was in some big coffee-table book of my childhood, a book I loved – I think it was called The Movies or some-such thing. I don’t know if I ever saw a film clip of that scene – perhaps, in one of those awful compilations that used to appear in movie theatres in the 1960s. Awful because shown at the wrong speed, horribly edited, and scored with clangy ridiculous music, not to mention embarrassing narration which was completely unnecessary in an age when story was conveyed visually and didn’t need idiotic explanations.

Anyway, the hunt was on for YouTube snippets, and I quickly found them and became addicted. I didn’t even think of writing about him at that point because the task seemed too huge. I was digging around the internet and finding things, putting scraps together into a meaningful whole. I had ordered the Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection on DVD, but I hadn’t seen it yet.

It was a Sunday afternoon, I was sitting in my office not thinking of anything, in a sort of twilight state, when – something landed on me, “fell” on me like those big anvils in cartoons. BONGGGG. My next thought was, “Oh, noooooo.”

No, because an idea had fallen on me that I knew I couldn’t say no to. An idea that would probably kill me, or at least break my heart.

Then it was: you have to. No, no! You must have the wrong person.

Reluctantly, I rolled up to my computer. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to sketch a little, to get some ideas down.

Three hours later I looked up, and I realized I had the nucleus of my novel. Cells had begun to split and multiply like mad. I was powerless in the hands of Harold.

In spite of my early trepidations, this was the most enjoyable writing project I had ever undertaken. I couldn’t wait to get to the computer every morning, couldn’t wait to solve another mystery. The story evolved and evolved.  I became, I suppose, wildly overconfident, just certain that this novel would be snapped up somewhere, that someone else would feel the same way I did.

At the same time, that weird “Lloyd synchronicity” began, coming thick and fast. At the peak of it, it was averaging three or four times a day: a street sign, a name on the side of a train, an actor on TV, a  realtor, a bull terrier. One tiny movie, The Wrong Box with Michael Caine, had three (or maybe four) Lloyds in it. It was spooky, but I never figured out what it meant.

One day, driving towards North Vancouver on a busy highway, we crossed an ordinary residential street that intersected the road, leading to what looked like a pastoral small town. I was almost annoyed when I saw that it was called Lloyd Avenue. The town was like Brigadoon, weird and highly unlikely. I glanced to the right and said, “Oh, NO.” There was a huge church just sitting there as if it had popped up out of the ground. GLORIA PENTECOSTAL TABERNACLE. I saw two street signs intersecting: the church was at the corner of Gloria and Lloyd.

I guess I’d better tell you that Gloria was the name of Lloyd’s daughter.

And oh, there was more! Watching old Twilight Zone episodes, I always had an eerie feeling when the end credits came on. Well might I have felt strange: one night the name Suzanne Lloyd flashed on the screen. Not the same one, of course, but an actress with the same name. Not "close" but bang-on.

I won't count all those other strange things, such as pictures jumping off the walls or setting a knife down on the edge of a plate and hearing it buzz for about ten seconds (only to have it stop, then start again), or losing things and finding them in a different part of the house. No doubt it was seismic activity, or the weird energy that turned the TV on and off by itself when my daughter hit puberty (not a ghost, my medium friend assured me, but concentrated energy manifesting in all sorts of weird ways). I also can't explain why none of this scared me, though at times it could get annoying.

But publishers don't care about psychic phenomena, real or imagined. They want to make money, and one can't blame them. Though quite a few houses wanted to see the work, I wondered if they were actually reading it. I kept hearing that things were tough all over, that lots of writers were being affected by the economic downturn and the fact that “people don’t read any more” (a blatant untruth).

Battlescarred, I retreated. I retreated for a long time. About eleven months. I did not want to see Lloyd movies or read Lloyd material, and I certainly did not want to look at my manuscript. I assumed it was over.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a strange sort of thaw. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I woke up and found myself back in Lloyd territory again, maybe looking at pictures at first. Throwing out a crumb about the novel. I posted something on Facebook, when my Facebook account had been dormant for a year. The Lloyd synchronicity that had come so thick and fast, then vanished just as quickly, started up again. Was I imagining the whole thing?

When I saw Harold's shorts, he came racing frenetically back into my life.

I don’t regret all of this, or maybe I do, or else I am just powerless. Whenever I am about to walk away, the path doubles back.  I am reminded of one of Harold's title cards: "Now then, everybody hold on tight, we're going around a curve." As the song says, there is always something there to remind me.

It’s kind of like a marriage that didn’t work out. Yet you can’t quite quit the person, still want to see him, DO see him and then sort of regret it. I saw Harold's shorts yesterday because I couldn’t get enough of him, this dazzlingly charming, rascally young man who probably had no idea how famous he was going to be (and for how long).  Along with everything else that was extraordinary about him, he was absolutely gorgeous.

At the same time, I felt like my heart was caving in.

Well, can’t I just enjoy his films and forget about the novel? Does the word “no” mean anything to you? The novel is my love letter, not just to Harold but to his times. Most silent comedies got buried: they rotted from neglect, burst into flames or were just thrown away. Was that OK, had they had their few minutes on-screen and in history? Were they even relevant any more, did anybody care?  

Why should we care? Those little flickers of captured magic will never happen again.  They cannot happen again because those times are gone, that style of comedy, that style of living and breathing and being, is long gone, and this is the only moving record we will ever have. And we will never have Harold again, because that kind of genius does not happen twice.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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Blogger's Post-post. Though I decided not to change or update this piece, written several years ago, there WAS a development about a year later: Harold got published, or I did, or, at least, The Glass Character did. Though it was a thrill for me to be in print again (I do have two other novels, dear readers, that you can still snag on Amazon if you really want them), I was to find out the hard way that publishing had changed in the few years I had been away: it got harder, a LOT harder to make a go of it. Sales weren't great, and unfortunately, in this age of likes and views and clickbait, the numbers are everything.

I get depressed about this sometimes, yes I do, but I have no regrets about my Harold journey. After much discouragement, I decided to keep up my Harold Facebook page, in part due to the sheer volume of material I collected about him over five years or so. It would be nice to share it with people who love Harold. So it ain't over yet. I still harbour this dream. . . every novelist has it, so please don't look at me that way! I want some Hollywood producer to see the light on this thing, and make it into a big-box movie.

What frustrates me is that I know such a thing is possible, in that I believe the potential is there - the quality is there. What would I be doing wasting my time writing junk? But it's a million light years away because I have no "connections". I'm a good writer, but a lousy hustler. So the book kind of went the way of my other two novels. 

Nobody warns incipient writers about this - that the writing is the easy part - and even getting a publisher, relative to the rest of it, is easy too. What's hard, and absolutely indispensible in the industry, is "making it", and that is ALL about numbers and nothing else.

But you know, people, you can still buy my novel! Just click on the link (above) to my Amazon Author Page. It's all there - all three of my novels, in fact. The flip side of the Darwinian ruthlessness of the internet is that nothing ever quite goes away. It just goes on sale. On Amazon.com.