The Glass Character: an excerpt (the glove scene)

The Glass Character:  an excerpt (the glove scene)

My third novel The Glass Character is a fictional account of a young girl’s experiences in Hollywood from approximately 1921 to 1932, in which she develops a relationship with silent film comedian Harold Lloyd which evolves into an obsession.


The story:

Muriel Ashford, a. k. a. Jane Chorney is working as an extra in a Harold Lloyd movie and will do anything to be close to him. Lloyd's right hand was badly injured in an explosion at the start of his career in 1919.  In this scene, Muriel comes upon him preparing his prosthetic right hand before facing the camera.

One day while I was trying to find a hat I was supposed to wear in the next scene (a hat with a veil, meaning my face would be totally obscured: what a great opportunity for an unknown actress like myself!), I stumbled upon Harold preparing himself to become the Glass Character.

He was usually quite secretive about this, so I was taken aback that he was dressing in the prop room. His character was only half there, still wearing the white pants he often wore on the set. His sweater was off, revealing a hard but hairless chest. Once again, without his glasses, I had the impression of a much-better-looking Douglas Fairbanks: all that was missing were the riding breeches and the self-important smile.

He was at a quarter turn with his back to me, and didn’t hear me at first. I began to literally walk backwards, knowing I should not be there, but unable to stop looking at him. Then, stupidly, I ran into a large metal pole (what was that doing there?), banging my head hard. My scalp began to smart so much that tears rushed into my eyes. At the metallic ringing noise, he started, suddenly turning around.

For half a second I saw confusion, even alarm in his eyes. Then he quickly covered it with his usual smiling graciousness: “No, no, come in, Muriel. (He knew my name?) I’m just getting ready.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean. . .”

“It’s all right, don’t be.”

There was something strange about Harold’s eyes. You couldn’t get away from them. But he was so pleasant most of the time (I had never been at the receiving end of one of his famous explosive tirades) that you wondered if you were imagining it. His eyes tugged hard, drew you in as if you were being pulled on a chain. I gave way to the tug, and stood shyly while he fiddled with his prosthetic glove.

All the while he talked to me in the most flattering way, asking about where I had come from, how it felt to be working in movies, about my aspirations.  I am afraid my responses were stilted and not very truthful. The fact was, I wanted to be Mary Pickford, and fast. This sitting in the background reacting as a choir with two dozen pretty but untalented girls was wearing thin. Most days I did not even see Harold.

While he worked at the glove, which had to fit as tightly as a second skin, I saw what was left of his right hand. I was very surprised that he would allow me to see this, though I knew he did not wear the prosthesis in public, rightly believing that hiding it would only make it more apparent. Oddly enough, maybe due to his magician's sleight-of-hand, nobody ever seemed to notice it.

I had assumed there would be some vestige of thumb and forefinger left, but they were sheared off clean, with half the palm gone. Later I was to find out that the doctors had to keep removing tissue to prevent gangrene.

The glove was hardly just a glove. That was only the part that showed. What held it on was a tightly-wound bandage reaching all the way up to his elbow. At times the edge of that bandage showed just past his cuff, but the primitive cameras of the day did not reveal it. 

When the glove was on, he held both hands out in front of him.

“Quite a sight, eh?” he said, with a little Harold smile. Not a trace of self-pity. There were certain emotions he simply would not harbour.

“So what do you think?” It was an impossible question, even a bit cruel. What was I supposed to say?

“It looks fine, Mr. Lloyd. I’m grateful you recovered so well.”

“Please – “

I knew what he meant.

I fought to get the word out. “Harold.”

He gazed at me a moment with a speculative look. I allowed myself to wonder if he was going to kiss me, or do worse, which seemed to be his way of breaking in new girls. But I knew I was too far down in the pecking order (so to speak) to receive this kind of favour.

“Muriel, would you do something for me?”

In my heart, I said: anything, Harold. Anything.

“Would you dance with me?”

My heart dropped. Dance, as in the razz-ma-tazz contests he and Bebe Daniels used to win almost every night with their fire-breathing versions of the Charleston and the Black Bottom?

“I – don’t know what you  - “

“Like this.” He reached out with his good hand, touched my shoulder, drew me to him very gently.

My head reeled. I could smell his white makeup, the pomade in his hair. He pulled me into his orbit, and propelled me around so lightly that I soon forgot my utter incompetence on the dance floor. I was reminded of Arab sheiks who controlled their steeds with a silk thread.

This close, I could feel his radiant body heat. Harold wasn’t very tall (he had fought as a bantam-weight in his youth), so we were almost the same height, and at one point his forehead lightly bumped against mine.

We slow-danced (as slowly as Speedy could ever slow-dance) for one complete turn around the room. Thank God it was early enough that no one came in.

Then he put me away from him. Did not step back, did not push me, but  put me away.

“Thanks, Muriel. Just wanted to see if I could still do it.”

“You can do anything.” As soon as the words had escaped, I knew I had gone much too far.

(CODA. It's rare to find a photo of Lloyd without his prosthesis, but a couple of them do exist. In this one he is bowling with a custom-made ball to be used with three fingers.)

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The Glass Character: synopsis

THE GLASS CHARACTER  

A novel by Margaret Gunning

Published in April 2014 by Thistledown Press

I would like to introduce you to my third novel, The Glass Character, a story of obsessive love and ruthless ambition set in the heady days of the Jazz Age in the 1920s. This was a time when people went to the movies almost every day, living vicariously through their heroes: Valentino, Garbo, Fairbanks and Pickford. But comedians were the biggest draw, and broad slapstick the order of the day - with one very significant exception.

Standing beside Keaton and Chaplin in popularity and prowess was a slight, diffident man named Harold Lloyd. He hid his leading man good looks under white makeup and his trademark black-framed spectacles. Nearly 100 years later, an iconic image of Lloyd remains in the popular imagination: a tiny figure holding on for dear life to the hands of a huge clock while the Model Ts chuff away 20 stories below.

With his unique combination of brilliant comedy and shy good looks, Lloyd had as many female followers as Gilbert or Barrymore. Sixteen-year-old Muriel Ashford, desperate to escape a suffocating life under her cruel father's thumb, one day hops a bus into the unknown, the Hollywood of her dreams. Though the underside of her idealistic vision is nasty and fiercely competitive, she quickly lands extra work because of her Pickford-esque ability to smile and cry at the same time.

When her idol Harold Lloyd walks on the set, her life falls into a dizzy whirl of confusion, attraction, and furious pursuit. Muriel tries on and sheds one identity after another: bit actress, waitress in a speakeasy, "girl reporter", script writer - while Lloyd almost literally dances in and out of her desperately lonely world, alternately seducing her and pushing her away.

While researching this book, I repeatedly watched every Lloyd movie I could get my hands on. I was astonished at his subtlety, acting prowess and adeptness at the art of the graceful pratfall. His movies are gaining new popularity on DVD (surprisingly, with women sighing over him on message boards everywhere!). The stories wear well and retain their freshness because of the Glass Character's earnest good nature and valiant, sometimes desperate attempts to surmount impossible challenges.

Introduction: Why Harold Lloyd?

The Glass Character is a fictional account of a young girl’s experiences in Hollywood from approximately 1921 to 1962, in which she develops a relationship with silent film comedian Harold Lloyd. Though I did extensive research in exploring the era in general and his life in particular, this story is not intended to be a biography of Lloyd. My main purpose was to communicate atmosphere: the excitement, exuberance and joy of these “high and dizzy” times.

Though I have the greatest respect for the memory of Harold Lloyd, who is in my mind one of the most charismatic performers in screen history, I did not wish to paint him as a two-dimensional figure or a saint. Though his behaviour is not always exemplary in this story, I tried to portray him as I came to believe he was: a human being of enormous complexity, phenomenal talent, and a basic midwestern decency that served him for a lifetime. This is not the Harold Lloyd, but a Harold Lloyd, a personal, fictional portrayal of a supremely gifted artist based on deep research and multiple (and very enjoyable) viewings of his remarkable films.

With his boyish good looks and appealing everyman persona, Lloyd was no less than the inventor of an entire film genre: the romantic comedy. These sample remarks from YouTube (all by women) indicate a charm and magnetism that reaches across generations:

I think he was and still is one of the most attractive men ever to walk the earth. I absolutely love him!

Each time I watch his movies I fall in love a little more.  He is sooooooo funny and the most handsome man ever!

Talented, funny, smart, creative and damn gorgeous!

I find him really attractive with his glasses on, and you can’t beat that half-shy, half-sly smile of his.

I don’t want to say it but he is in my fantasies. . . sigh.

I doubt if George Clooney could inspire such rhapsodic praise.

When I sat down to write, words often tumbled out at a fever pitch. Many of the scenes came to me out of sequence, as if I were shooting a movie. Inspiration had a timetable of its own and sometimes happened on holiday (can you believe I almost missed the Grand Canyon?). This had never happened to me before, and I had to take a few leaps of faith to believe I could ever piece it all together.

Plunging into his pictures to such depth, I experienced an immediacy, even an intimacy I had never known before. I was breathing in the gunpowder and the dust and the sweating horses and the she-loves-me/she-loves-me-not flowers and the white greasepaint. I could hear “roll ‘em” and “cut!” and “damn, we’ll have to do that again.” I was seeing that wonderful “half-shy, half-sly” smile of his in person. 

Though Lloyd’s work has been gloriously reborn through the medium of DVD, he is still too frequently seen as a bronze medallist after those two other legendary figures from the silent age: Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. It’s time to throw away useless comparisons and hierarchies (is Picasso “better” than Van Gogh? And how about Rembrandt – why does the poor fellow always come in third?), and appreciate Lloyd’s movies for what they are. He is so much more than the “everyman” of popular description. His Glass Character is a subtle, slightly surreal, heart-touchingly brave and boyish silent clown, and if you don’t watch out, he will take up residence in your heart, perhaps for good.

This is Harold Lloyd the way I see him. I hope you enjoy this story.

This could be the start of something big

 

 

Just this. . . the merest hint of something I'm working on now. I haven't forgotten you, Harold! I've just been in mourning over the complete lack of interest I've had from publishers for my novel about your life, The Glass Character. But this experience far exceeds the success or failure of a mere book. It will live in Greatness.

Harold Lloyd: I would do anything for love

Reading an excerpt from The Glass Character. Anything for love.

The unknown Harold Lloyd

The sad, sweet romantic: was ever a comedian more melancholy, more aware of the fragile depths of the human heart?

Intensity, asceticism, fierceness: do not mess with this Harold Lloyd.

The Barrymore profile, a reminder of his first ambition: to be a stage actor. And he never stopped looking like a leading man.

So much for the chaste peck we see at the end of most silent screen comedies. This kiss (with Jobyna Ralson, Why Worry?) sets the screen on fire!

Oh, mighty-my. Movie stars, on the town.

This man did nothing by halves.  Harold didn't just have "a dog". He had a kennel full of Great Danes the size of small horses. 

There is just something about the way he sits in mud. Has a style all its own.

Oh, Bebe! The energy of these two leaps across time.

(And note the gaze: he has what they used to call "bedroom eyes").

Would you trust this man with your girl friend?

Is he sitting in mid-air, on a magic carpet, or in a giant high chair? Even in a Brooks Brothers suit, he's Peter Pan.

Even Cary Grant never wore a tux this well. As they say in Nebraska: he cleaned up real nice.

The emotional climax of The Freshman: some idiot critic once said of Lloyd that he "lacked tenderness". It was one of those wildly inaccurate remarks that sticks like a burr. Whoever he was, I don't think he ever saw a single Harold Lloyd movie, and most definitely not this one.

Harold is never funnier than when committing suicide. Here he's taking poison in one of my personal favorites, Never Weaken; in Haunted Spooks he tries to shoot himself with a water pistol.

(By the way, did anyone ever stop to ask how Harold managed to extract humor out of such a dark subject? It's yet another example of his genius, so quicksilvery that if you blink you might miss it.  I do not think his mind was operating at the same velocity as the rest of us.)

Without the white makeup and glasses, Harold was almost unrecognizable. He could go about incognito, and unlike most stars who want to be recognized, he believed it was a benefit to him and afforded him privacy.

I love this picture with Hal Roach: both of them look like youngsters. And that devastating flashbulb grin. But what's that weird halo doing above his head?

This, this, THIS is why women love Harold Lloyd, even now! In spite of all his good intentions he is always getting bruised and battered and humiliated. You want to take him home with you. In fact. . . you do.

No one courted with more delicacy.

Movie stars aren't like the rest of us. That's why they're movie stars.

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Look, everybody: it's Harold Lloyd!

It's not every day that you open a dusty old book and discover a treasure trove of sheer magic.

But the laws of the probable can take an unlikely turn, if the subject matter happens to be Harold Lloyd.

Though I finished writing my Lloyd-inspired novel The Glass Character about a year ago, my research (if you can call such an enjoyable pursuit research) continues. I just keep winkling out more books, most of them very old and long out of print. On a Harold Lloyd message board, I saw a discussion of a book called Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy by William Cahn. I had never heard of the title or the author, but I started digging on the internet, and before I knew it I was ordering a copy.

It's sad but understandable why most books about Harold Lloyd are yellowed and musty and rather out of date. For a very long time he was viewed through a pretty inferior pair of glasses (so to speak). He was always seen as a distant third to Chaplin and Keaton, which confounds me every time I watch one of his charming and wonderfully-crafted pictures. 

There's only one reason I love Harold Lloyd so much (well, two, but I'll get to the other one): he makes me laugh. He makes me laugh myself teary-eyed, and gasp as I laugh, at his subtlety and insight and tremendous gift for creating audience identification.

But for decades, it seemed that nobody knew where to place him in film history except as an "also-ran". Richard Schickel wrote an unflattering book about him several years after his death, so I guess that was considered the last word on the subject.

Someone had the gall to say he "lacked tenderness",a barb which was completely inaccurate (for obviously that critic had never seen Girl Shy or The Kid Brother). He was labelled a "go-getter", for reasons that still confound me. Go-get what? All his struggles were motivated by love, usually unrequited love, which is why critics now believe that Harold Lloyd invented the genre of romantic comedy.

I don't know why it has taken all these decades to blow the dust off this magnificent comedic legend and restore him to his rightful place. That brings me to the other reason I love him so much: he is sweet and fierce and almost supernaturally beautiful, as witness the photos in this post. And he stayed that way all his life.

Today I received a fat brown parcel in the mail, an old cloth-bound book with no cover on it and that mellow, old-papery smell that I love. It was the Cahn book, dated 1964. I began to flip through it, disappointed that the photos were so small, and most of them not even of Lloyd.

When I isolated and tinkered with a tiny, smudgy photo of his famous glasses, however, they leaped off the page and almost scared me. These are the glasses that transformed Lloyd from a so-so Chaplin imitator into a comic genius, not just for the silent era but for all time.

What a shock! They're hardly there. Though they look dark on-screen, they appear delicate, with no glass in them,  and when I lightened the exposure, I saw that they weren't black at all but tortoise-shell. It's eerie to look at these: you're seeing the essence of a unique talent, someone who knew that an everyman figure would engage audiences as never before. It's as if his antics, struggles and disappointments say to his viewers, "Has this ever happened to you?" Ah, yes - it has - and that's precisely why we laugh so hard.

I had a bonus surprise when I opened the book: a yellowed, very neatly-creased newspaper clipping fell out of the middle. It's a review that appeared in the Washington Star on Sunday, January 8, 1978, not of the Cahn book but of another Lloyd biography by Adam Reilly (which I also have). Is this a sign? Of what, I wonder? There was something a little spooky about this, and the strange little masthead stub that the reader must have used for a book mark.

Who originally owned this book, and carefully preserved that neatly-clipped, yellowed review? Obviously it was a Harold fan, perhaps long dead. I look at the clipping now and realize it's unlikely anyone has seen it for 34 years. But when I take a closer look, I see something even more bizarre. That little Evening Star "bookmark" is dated August 24, 1964, making it nearly half a century old. 

Why this enigmatic time capsule; what could it mean? Why do such strange things always seem to happen around Harold Lloyd?

Harold, you pop up in the darndest places.

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Harold Lloyd: got a light?

This has to qualify as the strangest Harold Lloyd movie I've ever seen (and believe me, after spending more than three years writing about his life, I've seen plenty). It's only a minute and a half long, has no sound track (truly a silent film) and no plot to speak of. It's just him n' the chimp.

I don't know why this little gem was made - it looks almost like a screen test for the ape. It's unusual for several reasons: Harold still has an intact right hand (a horrible accident blew half his hand away in 1919), he's shown smoking a cigarette which he never did in real life (explaining his relative awkwardness), and he's in tighter closeup than usual.

This is startling, because it reveals why women loved him so much: the guy was simply gorgeous, with a clean handsome jawline, vigorous head of black hair and slightly bedroomy blue eyes. There was a boyish sweetness about him which never slid into Harry Langdon-esque creepy infantilism. Under the mild exterior he was a tough little scrapper, with a volatile temper that came directly out of his own hot-and-cold personality.

I love this man. I wrote a novel about him called The Glass Character, and I cannot tell you how I ache to see this get into the hands of readers. I want them to know, to feel, to see him as he was, and is. I made a total fool of myself in writing this, and though I think it's the best thing I've ever done, I do wonder if there is something star-crossed about my life, something that just short-circuits success and snatches it out of my hands just as I am about to grab it. If I could figure out why, maybe I could do something about it.

Whenever I discover something new about Harold Lloyd, some odd little thing like this minute-and-a-half-long mini-picture, it's as if I am given a tiny glimpse through an aperture or a magic portal. While I was writing The Glass Character, there were days when I felt as if I had stepped right through it. I did not want to come back. I don't know what is going to happen with my novel, and I know I shouldn't care this much, I'm just putting my heart out on the railroad tracks. But there's just something about him. He inspires that sort of feeling. It's spooky, because I realize that he doesn't try for it.

I can't define charisma, any more than I can define charm, but I know when I am in its presence. In this case, mere dying did not end it. It's still there, lightning in a bottle. If you think you know silent comedy, if you've seen Chaplin and Keaton and maybe Harry Langdon or Chester Conklin, you don't know this: there was a man, an extraordinary actor who never planned to be a comedian, who was able to make the most ordinary, hapless guy so compelling that you couldn't stop watching him.

Harold, Harold! I don' t know how I got in so deep. And I am not sure if I want to be saved or not.

The Glass Character: yearning

Do you know what it is to yearn?

Have you ever yearned, I mean really yearned?

Yearned for something you wanted so badly it scared you?

I write, not so much for a living but as a vocation, or devotion. Maybe even a covenant. I can't get away from it, it nags and drags at me, it will have me no matter what. Writers often have dry periods or times when they wonder if they will write again. And I've had them.

I've also had times when the desert suddenly flooded, the cracked earth dissolved into fertile soil and life sprang up, seemingly in seconds: abundant life, green, floral, almost prehistoric in its lushness.

You have to wait for it, for sure. No matter what the how-to-be-a-writer manuals tell you, it can't be forced. But then comes the next part. Real writers want to be published, because - logically - they want to share their stories. The storytellers of old did not sit by the fire alone, and if they had, we would have no myths, no fairy tales, maybe not even language as we know it now.

And oh how hard it is.

Just put out an ebook, everyone tells me. I could maybe figure out how to do it (did someone say prehistoric?), but how many readers would I have? The market is flooded with ebooks right now. There is no quality control that I know of: anything can be slapped up there, like a Facebook post. And that scares me. Might I get 200 readers? 300? . . . 20?

Would I be eligible (because hope springs eternal!) for the Giller, the Governor-General, the B. C. Writer's awards, and even the Booker? No, because it's a bloody ebook and, in spite of what everyone keeps telling me, not considered the equal of a paper book.

I've had paper books out twice, and though it didn't quite match up to my extravagant dreams of publishing, I felt proud of them and still do. You can't delete them, though you may have to go to the library to actually find one.

When I wrote about Harold Lloyd, I committed the unpardonable sin of falling in love with my subject. This is a bad thing to do. Maybe it makes people uncomfortable, I don't know. But I have that awful feeling right now of one of those drill-bits slowly penetrating my chest. A yearning, the way you'd yearn for someone who is dead, or a lover who has spurned you and moved on.

Summer is so beautiful right now, it took until mid-August to get here, and it will slip away in a couple more weeks. Meantime I can't forget about this. I want it so badly. And everyone, but everyone is trying to talk me out of my feelings. I guess you don't get to feel this way: or does it just make people uncomfortable?

When I fell into this novel, I was transported, and could not wait to get to the computer each day to see what would happen next. It was the most magical writing experience I have ever had. Now comes a kind of hangover. I feel cursed, sometimes, as if the thing I want most will always be just brushing my fingertips, like a balloon that bounces up and out of reach.

I've been told: if I don't care about it, then maybe it will happen. If I don't think about it, then maybe it will happen. This is magic penny thinking, also designed to make me stop doing this, stop stop stop. I am not much good at indifference, in spite of the fact that it accurately describes the atmosphere in which I grew up.

Harold, listen, I want to see you in print because you deserve it. You deserve to be a household name again. I am scrambling on the side of a mountain, losing ground, and something has been stuffed into my mouth.

"But writing should be its own reward! Can't you just enjoy the process?" What if someone had told that to Dickens, to Tolstoy, to Hemingway, to. . . all right, my work bears about as much resemblance to theirs as a lion to a mouse. But you get my drift. Don't you? Don't you?

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