Love from Daddies Toady boy

By age 16, "Toady boy" Harold Lloyd was already getting used to a few things: (a) he was not going to excel at everything, especially not English composition, (b) his father wasn't going to be around very much, and (c) he'd spend most of his life trying hard to be liked.

The fact that he mainly was liked didn't seem to stop him. Being an actor was part of that desperate drive for approval, and he pursued it with the same fever that informed all his major life activities (including the pursuit of women).

Lloyd was a fox. He was a doll. It wasn't just his looks, it was something about him, something unattainable. You never truly touched the core of him. He's generally lumped in with Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the Holy Three of silent comedy, but this inclusion goes a lot farther than the fact that all three had problems with the written word (in Lloyd's case, aggravated by the fact that the family moved every three months or so).

 

His intelligence was uneven, typical of the genius who burns fiercely in some areas, but sputters lamentably in others. I love these letters however, with their boyish, Tom Sawyer-ish syntax, blooming gift for storytelling, and endearing spelling errors which you might see in the writing of a nine-year-old.  I also like his reference to the peach of a girl he's "pretty much stuck on", and the reference to the turkey: "mabe you think he wasn't good". This kind of rural idiom is almost Mark Twain-ish, though Lloyd came from Middle America and had a slight cowboy twang rather than a drawl.

A gift can be a burden. Lloyd didn't drink or even smoke, perhaps afraid of what those habits had done to some of his cohorts (not to mention family members, including his wife, former co-star Mildred Davis). Instead he kept a blur of activity going, pursuing multiple hobbies after his screen career ended in the 30s. He took 3D pictures of naked women (no kidding, tens of thousands of them!). He studied micro-organisms in his basement. He painted abstracts, often staying up until 3 in the morning. He bred and showed dogs: not just any dogs, but Great Danes! And by now you're probably getting the picture.

If a man has a Christmas tree with 20,000 expensive Tiffany ornaments (which he kept up all year: imagine taking all that stuff down), if he regularly orders the entire catalogue of a record company and hooks up stereos in every room of the house (read: mansion), if he. . . well. He had to win every card or golf game, or he could be downright surly. He'd demand a rematch and kept playing until he won. He had to win. If you win every game, it isn't a game any more, or certainly not a competition.

He insisted his staff and friends call him Speedy. Kind of a weird nickname: perhaps Daddie gave it to him (he whom the family named Foxy!). I've seen video of his later years, which absolutely fascinates me for some reason, and he doesn't seem wired or pressed or urgent, except that he is. At one tribute, he stands on the stage at the front while people (Jack Lemmon and Steve Allen among them) fire questions at him. He sort of swaggers back and forth in an odd way, and he gestures openly with the hand that had almost been blown in half in a hideous accident in 1919. I think the swagger is disguised nervousness - all that insistence on winning surely must reveal an awful lot of insecurity - and perhaps a desire to bolt out of there. He also looks something like a naughty little kid, the kind who "only" has to go to the Principal's office three times.

It was said Harold Lloyd never grew up. Not completely. He was a boy in a man's body, a Peter Pan. His youthfulness could be delightful, but I'd guess it could also be a pain.

The quote at the beginning of this post is from a book by Tom Dardis called The Man on the Clock. It's one of the better Lloyd bios - not that there is any overabundance of them, and there's a lot I'd still like to know about his private life. But the end of the biography is disturbing.

This is what happened. His wife's brother, a doctor, paid him a visit in 1970. "Davis hadn't seen his brother-in-law for some time. He was shocked by Harold's altered appearance and immediately placed him in a hospital for further tests. His suspicions were correct. Harold's cancer had spread to his legs and chest. Dr. Davis recalls that the cancer raced through Harold's body with ferocious speed."

Further treatment did no good, and Harold was told that he had something like six months  left to live and that he needed to put his affairs in order. He took the news quietly, went upstairs and shut his bedroom door. Three weeks later he was dead.

Even the disease that claimed his life was accelerated, speedy, but then, that was his nature. He  had to win the game, you see, or else he just wouldn't play.

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


 

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

Jumping frogs and other phenomena of the literary swamp

I've been on a bit of a Mark Twain kick ever since I saw a superb PBS documentary about his life a few months ago. I got a copy of the DVD, along with two massive biographical tomes, the kind you can hold in each hand to attain rippling biceps in only three weeks.

I want to reread Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to see how much they've changed since my youth (ahem), but until then I tread deep water in these books, packed with too much information. Twain wasn't the nicest fellow, was an egotist, was moody, was often suicidal, and definitely pushed his own agenda. Good thing, too, or the following harrowing scene (which took place when Twain was still relatively young, but with a growing readership) would have erased Huck Finn from our collective memory:

"Sam, 'charmed and excited', had every reason to believe that a contract would be extended to him as soon as he walked through Carleton's door. So certain was he of this that he dashed off a private letter to his sponsor at the Alta, John McComb, in early February, boasting that he was about to 'give' Carleton a volume of sketches for publication. The paper printed a brief summary of this letter for Mark Twain's followers in mid-March - nearly a month after Sam had kept his appointment with Carleton, and been given the bum's rush.

"He never forgot it: his diffident arrival in the publisher's office at 499 Broadway, the brusque statement of the clerk that Mr. Carleton was in his private office: his admission to the great man's quarters after a long wait; Carleton's icily impersonal greeting: 'Well, what can I do for you?'

(Editor's note. This would happen to me on a good day. But wait! Here comes the best part.)

"Sam's abashed response - that he was keeping an appointment to offer a book for publication - triggered a temper tantrum from Carleton that lives in the annals of bad editorial judgement. . . Whatever the impetus, Carleton treated his speechless visitor to a vintage New York-style tongue-lashing At the end, he swept his arm around the room and delivered the coup de grace that will forever be associated with his name:

'Books - look at those shelves. Every one of them is loaded with books that are waiting for publication. Do I want any more? Excuse me, I don't. Good morning."

After this, the biographer Ron Powers cites the infamous "Whales, Mr. Melville?" (to which I add, "Scribble, scribble, eh, Miss Bronte?"). These can be lumped in with "These guitar groups are on their way out" (Beatles) and "Who's this Bob Dylan?" ( - oh, and - one of Twain's early magazine stories found an enthusiastic audience, but unfortunately the editor spelled his name Mark Swain.)

There are whole books full of "famous rejections", which are supposed to make the aspiring writer jump up from his/her bed of suicidal depression, all fluffy and flumphy like freshly-plumped pillows. It doesn't work, however, because greatness has a way of coming through no matter what. Or does it? How many Huckleberry Finns languished in drawers somewhere, only to be thrown in the fire a la Thomas Carlyle when the weather got cold?

It's too depressing to contemplate.

Man walks into a publisher's office. Disreputable-looking, shabby clothes, big intimidating cookie-duster of a moustache and untameable head of (red) hair. Obviously a bad character. Has this manuscript he thinks he can sell me, haven't looked at it yet and haven't got time. Worked as a rough-and-ready reporter out West somewhere, has nothing to say to a sophisticated New York audience. Wrote one story, something about a jumping frog, that was published all over the country, but who wants to hear about a jumping frog? This fellow seems to have a million ideas spilling out of him, and we can't have that. He'll stain the Wilton carpet. Uncouth, he is. Smells like tobacco and gin. A man's man, with feverish ideas. But the stunned look, the look of a small child who has been slapped instead of kissed, reveals him to be just another no-talent who can't take his rejections like a man.