Super aturday! THE FRESHMAN and Harold Lloyd Shorts on BHTV

Join us tonight for a “Super Saturday” program on BHTV!

From 8:00pm PST – 11:00pm PST tonight, Saturday 2/6, tune in to BHTV for a full slate of films including THE FRESHMAN, YOUNG MR. JAZZ, GET OUT & GET UNDER, and more.

Visit BHTV Live to watch! Locals can also tune in on Channel 10 of the Spectrum cable network.

SAFETY LAST! and I DO on Beverly Hills TV

TONIGHT! (12/24)

Join us at 7pm PST on Beverly Hills TV for a Christmas Eve Harold Lloyd double-feature!

SAFETY LAST! will be showing at 7pm, followed by I DO at 8:30pm.

Visit BHTV Live to watch! Locals can also tune in on Channel 10 of the Spectrum cable network.
 

My tree has 40 baubles – that is nothing – Harold Lloyd had 8000

By Kylie Klein-Nixon

A close-up of the decorations on the tree. This was a fraction of the complete installation.

I thought I had gone overboard with my Christmas decos this year, until I read about Harold Lloyd’s efforts.

Back in the 1920s, Lloyd was a silent movie superstar. Scenes of his slapstick derring-do in such films as Safety Last! (1923) and High and Dizzy (1920) have, along with Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp and Theda Bara’s smokey-eyed femme fatale, came to symbolise the entire era.

The highest-paid star of 1920, he indulged himself – as famous rich people will do – in a huge mansion (44-bedroom Green Acres) filled with everything his heart desired and what Lloyd’s heart desired was Christmas tree ornaments.

HAROLD LLOYD ESTATE/EBAY
A postcard, sold on Ebay recently, from Harold Lloyd’s Green Acres estate in the early 1970s, shows the tree in all its gaudy glory.

“Over the years, my grandfather had collected thousands of ornaments from all over the world,” Lloyd’s granddaughter, Suzanne. who grew up at Green Acres, would say years later.

“I remember a jewel encrusted ostrich egg and a sequined football. I particularly loved a Christmas ball given to him by his friend, makeup artist Wally Westmore, that was a miniature diorama depicting a bespectacled Harold in a red bathrobe trimming the tree.”

And those were just the standout pieces.

According to HaroldLloyd.com, the tree was so large and eye-popping it became a tourist attraction in its own right – there was even a postcard at one point. The collection was said to have included more than 8000 ornaments by the time he died in 1971, enough for three trees the same mammoth size.

US LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The gallery at Green Acres was dominated by the giant tree, dripping with baubles.

Reinforced with steel rods and bamboo, it was actually several trees tied together, standing about 18 feet (6.1 metres) tall and 36 ft(19.3m) feet round.

According to the LA Times, by the 1950s the tree was said to be worth about US$25,000 (NZ$35,300), which by today’s measure is about $936,000 (NZ$1.32 million) – and that does not take into account the vintage value of the pieces on the tree.

According to the silent film appreciation blog, Silentology.com, the family would start putting the tree up in early November, in order to have it all up and ready to go for Christmas. It would stay up till March.

By the 1960s, when the tree was in full, gaudy bloom, the Lloyds started leaving it up year round.

Actor Dick Van Dyke opens a gift in front of Harold Lloyd’s giant Christmas Tree some time in the late 60s or early 70s.

People came from far and wide to be photographed with the tree. There is a picture of Dick Van Dyke posing in front of it from some time in the late 1960s.

Lloyd’s glorious ode of Christmas maximalism gives me a serious case of tree envy.

Like him, I am a fan of vintage, figural baubles, such as the kind sold by New York’s John Derianand the Mac Daddy of figural bauble, Christopher Radko.
Pure gaudy escapism, Lloyd’s over-burdened tree would not be out of place today, when so many of us started putting our trees up, à la chez Lloyd in November in an earnest bid to make a terrible year go a bit faster.
This year too, the quirky, ironic and even cheeky glass baubles were everywhere.

I finally got my dream bauble: a Christmas pickle. A silly US tradition, probably started, like Santa, as a marketing ploy; the idea is to hide the little glass pickle in the tree and the first one to spot it gets some chocolate.
From Typo’s bare-bottomed Santas, peanut butter jars and “Christmas pickles”, to Bed Bath and Table’s golden glass camels and much-coveted glittery rainbows, to Citta’s charmingly quirky Christmas pooches, these plastic-free decorations are future decor heirlooms.

They are so delicate and of the moment, they are bound to be popping up in far future Trade Me sales commanding crazy prices as pieces from Lloyd’s collection sometimes purportedly do.
But that is not why we buy them, is it? No. People like me, and my Christmas soul mate Ann Free, who has a collection of about 600 Christopher Radko baubles, buy them because they are just so adorably dinky.

STUFF
I have got a long way to go before my tree can match Harold Lloyd’s gorgeous gaudiness but he has certainly given me something to aim for.

And because there is something nostalgic, yet irreverent, about them that makes the usually staid, conservative and Victorian-ness of Christmas seem fresh.

Source: stuff.co

Hunting for Harold Lloyd’s Legendary Christmas Ornaments


By: Messy Nessy


Harold Lloyd probably isn’t a name that rings many bells in the 21st century, but spoiler – he’s one of the most influential film comedians of the silent era, making up the the first trio of the silver screen’s laugh-makers, alongside Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. With his signature straw boater and round horn-rimmed glasses, he made 200 films, and did all his own stunts, his most famous being the iconic scene from Safety Last (1923), which sees him hanging from the hands of a giant clock at the top of an early skyscraper. But besides the movies, there’s something else that Harold Lloyd’s name is synonymous with – the Christmas tree. For all-year round, Lloyd kept the most magnificent tree in the land, standing in the orangery of his Beverly Hills estate at 20 feet tall, 9 feet wide and almost 30 feet around, covered in $25,000 worth of ornaments collected from around the world.

Harold Lloyd in Safety Last
Harold Lloyd with one of his trees

In the Lloyd household, Christmas was no small affair, kicking off before Thanksgiving and eventually becoming a year-round experience. In the early days, the groundskeeper of the Green Acres estate in Benedict Canyon was responsible for the tree’s construction starting in October, and would buy several pine trees, wiring the branches together under Harold’s supervision to make one enormous tree that would be the canvas for the family’s ever-growing collection of ornaments. Lloyd and his wife, actress Mildred Davis, and their family would then spend the next two months hanging thousands of ornaments right up until Christmas Eve.

© Harold Lloyd Company.

It was such a production that the tree would stay up until March, but by the 1960s, Harold made the decision to make it a permanent fixture of his estate. Having discovered a method to fireproof his tree, he was even able to perfectly preserve the pine scent all year round.

Notice you can’t see his right hand? An accident on set with a bomb mistaken as a prop resulted in the loss of the thumb and index finger of his right hand. Harold never allowed it to be photographed without it’s artificial fingers glove.

 

At its largest, the tree held some 5,000 ornaments, “and we still had enough left over to decorate three more trees just as big!” remembers Lloyd’s granddaughter Suzanne…

The tree held one-of-a-kind rare ornaments valued in the hundreds of dollars when they were first purchased in the `30’s and `40’s … I remember a jeweled encrusted ostrich egg, and a sequined football (a reference to the college football hero Harold Lloyd played in his most popular film, “The Freshman”). I particularly loved a Christmas ball given to him by his friend, make-up artist, Wally Westmore, that was a miniature diorama depicting a bespectacled Harold in a red bathrobe trimming the tree.

Lloyd died in 1971 and his Beverly Hills home was opened as a museum, with his mighty tree as the central attraction. After just a few years however, the museum closed in 1975, which sadly meant the end of Harold Lloyd’s Christmas spirit. The house was auctioned off with much of its contents and the tree was inevitably destroyed. Over time, the fate of Lloyd’s legendary collection of ornaments has been seemingly lost.

Various online sources have spotted some eBay sellers auctioning off “what they purport to be ornaments from the Lloyd tree” or the Harold Lloyd Trust. We found one active sale using the Lloyd provenance here and here. Advice is to be skeptical.

For reliable reference however, Harold himself was a keen photographer, and his estate maintains a large collection of the 3D photographs of the tree and its ornaments, which shows many of the blown glass pieces in close-up detail.

Take a good look, because if you’ve been known to collect rare vintage Christmas tree decorations – one of Lloyd’s lost treasures might just be hanging from your branches!

Source: Messy Nessy