Harold Lloyd was to the 1920’s what Cary Grant was to the 30’s and 40’s, Jimmy Stewart was to the 50’s and 60’s, and what Harrison Ford and Tom Hanks are to the present day. He was an Everyman.

Harold Lloyd was the cinema’s “first man in space.” He was a product of the movies. His comedy wasn’t imported from Broadway or the British Music Hall. He began his career just as the art form was created. He learned to use the camera the way other comics used a bowler hat or a funny walk. He was the first filmmaker to put an average guy up on the screen –a guy with faults, and fears, “the boy next door.”

Of all the silent film comedians, Harold Lloyd was the most profitable. His films out grossed Chaplin and Keaton put together. He pioneered new camera techniques and was the first filmmaker to preview his films to a test audience. He was the number one box office star two years in a row. His movies were adored. He was a world famous star. Even today, at film festivals around the world, the response to his comedy attests to Lloyd’s comic genius.

In recent years, his work is often overlooked. Not because his films are dated, or that his humor is no longer funny. Lloyd is unknown because in later years, Harold refused to let his films be shown on television. His humor built one joke on top of another, a roller coaster ride, and he didn’t want his movies chopped up by commercial interruption. Because Harold Lloyd owned all his films, he was free to do as he pleased.

In his later years, he devoted his time to running the Shriner’s Hospitals for Crippled Children and introducing his films to college campuses. In 1952 he received and honorary Oscar for being a “Master Comedian and Good Citizen.” He died in 1971 at the age of 77.

In a film career that spanned more than 35 years, Harold Lloyd made more than 200 comedies. Today over 80 titles still exist. Virtually all of Harold’s classic feature works survive. In the last few years, the films have been restored by UCLA and The Harold Lloyd Trust. Both Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925) are on the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.

Included in the new DVD set, The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection is a featurette with Suzanne Lloyd filmed at Sue’s childhood home, Greenacres. Sue was interviewed in the courtyard outside the breakfast room and around the magnificent grounds for hours talking about the house and what it was like growing up in this fabulous estate. Here are some of the behind-the-scenes photos from that day.

I personally was overwhelmed by the house and grounds. The place is massive. Today, the house sits on six acres. I couldn’t possibly imagine what it was like when it was just over sixteen acres!

Construction began on Greenacres in 1926 and was completed in 1929. At a cost of $2 million dollars, the Italian Renaissance mansion had forty-four rooms built in a square around a central court yard. The living room featured a 35mm projection booth and a 30 rank Aeolian Duo-Art pipe organ.

The lush grounds that surrounded the house featured seven formal gardens, twelve fountains, and a nine-hole golf course. There was a waterfall that plummeted down a mountainside into the canoe run. A tunnel ran completely around the Olympic-size swimming pool and featured underwater windows to view and photograph swimmers.
According to Suzanne, there wasn’t one of the 500 trees on the estate that Harold didn’t personally shop for, and he knew every one by name and species if anyone ever asked.

Greenacres was a self-contained world. It had its own 50,000 gallon reservoir well that supplied spring water for the swimming pool and all the fountains and lakes. Sixteen full time gardeners maintained the grounds with plantings supplied from nearly two acres of greenhouses. An additional fifteen servants took care of the family, from chauffeurs, cooks, and butlers to several men who looked after the 80 plus Great Danes.

I’m happy to report that over 75 years later, the house and remaining acres are in spectacular shape. They are maintained with the utmost care. The playhouse, stables and clock tower looked like they had been built yesterday. Certainly there was no indication that the playhouse was almost 80 years old.

We filmed in the rose garden, the poplar garden, the tennis court, Gloria’s playhouse and the beautiful circular front courtyard. As the home is no longer owned by the Lloyd Estate, we weren’t given permission to film inside the house, (I did peek into as many windows as I could) but we were allowed into Gloria’s playhouse. The vaulted ceiling allows an adult to stand up. The living room has a fire place and working electricity. The kitchen and bath, (scaled for an 8 year old) have running water. I had to crawl into the bedroom as the ceiling was too low for me to stand up. I can only imagine the fun that children must have had in this house over the years. Sue recounted how she had played in the house when she was a little girl just as her mother, Gloria, had played there with childhood friends, Shirley Temple and Jane Withers.

Wandering around this immense estate you don’t even realize that the grounds are less than half of what they once were. How sad it must have been to sell it off and see it subdivided. It wasn’t until I came to a stairway off Harold’s library that it even occurred to me. Here was a stairway with a circular rail that now goes nowhere. You circle down and right back up. Originally this was the staircase that led to the cascades.

I stood at this dead end, looked out and tried to imagine the rows of cypress trees that lined the cascades. A fountain stood at the end of the trees. Off that fountain was a lily pond. Across the long winding drive was the pool and pool pavilion. Below that the garages, greenhouses, hand ball court, kennels, film vaults — all gone. The canoe run that ran around the property, the waterfall, the mill house and the nine-hole golf course — all gone. In the aerial photo of the estate, find the road in the upper left that curves down. If you continue that curve around the house, past the front gate, and go back up to the right, that’s what’s left of Greenacres. Everything below that curve has been destroyed.

Another thing I never fully understood about the house until I visited was the long tunnel that held the Rogues Gallery and led to the game room. I never understood where this mysterious game room was. The tunnel runs from the main house under the side lawn and ends in a room UNDERGROUND. In the aerial photo, it’s under the big lawn on the right side of the house.) One of the two tall towers in the yard is a smoke stack for the fireplace. Because the house is on a hill top, the game room is built right into the side of the hill. It has windows on one wall that look out over the canyon. Amazing! Because this was the only room in the main house that had a bar, it wouldn’t be uncommon to find the party ending up here. Harold tells the story that Chaplin entertained until 4am one night because guests wouldn’t let him go home.

What a magnificent home this must have been when Harold Lloyd lived here with his family. For those who have heard or read about this famous Hollywood home, seeing it was even more exciting. You can view the featurette on the New Line DVD, The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection V.3.

Chuck Johnson
The Harold Lloyd Trust

Check out Harold in this issue of Variety!

 

It started sometime around Thanksgiving. My grandparents would take me downtown to the train yards where the annual shipment of trees would arrive for the holiday season. We would pick out three large Douglas firs and they would be wired together to make one enormous, fantastic Christmas tree. It sat at one end of the garden room rising 20 feet in the air. It was 9 feet wide and almost 30 feet around. Imagine the amount of presents that can fit under a tree that is 30 feet around!

It took from Thanksgiving until Christmas to decorate the tree. Over the years, my grandfather had collected thousands of ornaments from all over the world. 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. The tree also held homemade ones that Harold received from his charity work.

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.

One Christmas, I was with Daddy shopping for more ornaments in Saks Fifth Avenue. He plucked more and more ornaments off the store’s white-flocked display tree unable to decide which ones to purchase. Finally, he realized that every ornament on the tree would look nice at Greenacres and quickly decided right then and there to buy them all. Since there was no room on the tree at home, his impulse purchase had to include Sak’s white-flocked display tree as well! So the 12 foot, completely decorated tree, was shipped off to Greenacres and found a home in our front entrance hall. I have no idea where Saks put their presents that year after Harold left a gapping hole in their Christmas display.

One year we counted over 5,000 ornaments hanging from the tree and we still had enough left over to decorate 3 more trees just as big! Every year the tree grew larger to hold more ornaments; then one year it became a permanent fixture in our home. It was simply too large, too decorated and too engineered to disassemble. So we had it fireproofed and celebrated Christmas every day of the year!

A few years back, Christopher Radko recreated two of Harold’s most beautiful ornaments: “The Rose” originally given to Harold by silent film siren, Gloria Swanson, and “Holiday Bounty” a colorful ornament from friend and fellow silent film comedian, Charlie Chaplin. I was thrilled to have these ornaments added to the Radko collection. Now everyone can have one of Harold’s ornaments on their own holiday tree.

–Suzanne Lloyd

By Annette D’Agostino Lloyd

Silent film has seen somewhat of a resurgence in popularity in recent years, with increased live theatrical screenings and greater visibility via such cable television channels as Turner Classic Movies, which hosts Silent Sunday Nights and airs pre-talkie pictures frequently during the week as well.

It is widely known that, in the early days of television, Harold Lloyd was reluctant to allow his films to be shown in this medium, due to stricter time slots, choppy editing and commercial breaks which interrupt story flow. Lloyd felt, and rightly so, that his films need to be seen in their entirety, undisturbed and uncut. However, I feel (and if I might be so bold as to put words in the great man’s mouth) that Harold would wholly embrace cable TV, with its more comfortable scheduling, and its ability to show a film without interruption; for similar reasons, he’d love DVD. As such, I think he would be mighty happy about the way his films are being reintroduced to new generations. He would, no doubt, be thrilled that new audiences are finding out what Lloyd aficionados already know – my top three reasons why Harold Lloyd is important.

His films are not as dated, and are still funny.

Comedy in the early part of the silent film era was very different than we know it today. In those days, primary comedy was found in the unusualness, the strangeness, and the quirk of characters – in short, the more unlike normal people you were, the funnier you were perceived to be. And, cinematic comics ran with that concept – even Harold Lloyd, once he established himself as a comic actor (note that, as an early stage actor, and even in his earliest film roles, Lloyd best liked serious, heavy and villainous roles, claiming that they “had more bite to them”). Harold’s first two main screen personas, Willie Work and Lonesome Luke, were as strange as could be, both in physical appearance and in situations, and especially in personality. Yet, even though he knew he was meeting the needs and demands of his audience, Lloyd was very dissatisfied with his gimmicky characterizations, and knew he could do better.

And do better he did: pioneering an entirely new kind of comedy – the humor to be found in the ordinary man – with his Glass Character, introduced in Over the Fence (1917). Now, after over two years of weekly Willie and Luke visitations with film audiences worldwide, Lloyd presented a Boy who wore normal clothes (not the overly tight or loose-fitting garb usually seen), boasted minimal makeup (no phony mustaches, chin pieces, triangular eyebrows, or pasty-faced foundation), and generally looked like a guy who could live down the street from anyone. The only “gimmick” Harold had to this character was a pair of lensless horn-rimmed glasses. “At a cost of seventy-five cents,” wrote Lloyd in his 1928 autobiography, “they provide a trademark recognized instantly wherever pictures are shown. They make low-comedy clothes unnecessary, permit enough romantic appeal to catch the feminine eye, usually averted from comedies, and they hold me down to no particular type of range of story.”

More on that in a moment. However, in breaking from the norm, by revolutionizing comedy, by presenting a persona who was not engrained in his time, Lloyd created films that are not as dated as some others of his era. Sure, the cars in his films are of his time; the architecture, the furnishings, the situations scream of long ago – but Lloyd’s Glass Character, in looking like us, doesn’t instantly invoke thoughts of generations past. And, in so doing, his humor – the situations he found himself in, and his demeanor in facing them – is still funny. Which leads me to something Harold noted earlier …

The Glass Character changed with each film.

Lloyd mentioned how the Glass Character adhered to “…no particular type of range of story.” Sure: by looking like the common man, Harold was truly the rubber band of comedians, able to be stretched in numerous possible directions, easily, flawlessly, brilliantly.

In no period is this more visible than during the years in which Lloyd made his silent features, 1921-1928. With four years’ worth of Glass Character experience under his belt, in which he refined and perfected the comedy to be found in the everyman, Harold undertook a series of pictures which show why his Glass Character is one of the most ingenious and versatile personas ever screened. In the span of those 11 films, he changed with each release – in personality, in motivation, in style. And, in so doing, with each successive movie, he captured new audiences who could actually relate to a comedy character. Realistically speaking, this was revolutionary.

You see, on the whole, few of us know extreme poverty, social outcastness, and obvious physical unusualness; many of the situations presented in general silent film comedy have no real meaning to us – we could never be in most of the predicaments seen on the overall screen. (This is why a large segment of silent film comedy is no longer funny to us, and why some of what was silent film drama and tragedy conjures a chuckle in this day and age.) However, looking at the silent Lloyd features, we can see ourselves, running rampant, through one or more of his characterizations: rich loafer who finds himself by getting a job and saving his girlfriend (A Sailor-Made Man); shy coward who finds his inner strength need not be housed in a talisman (Grandma’s Boy); poor country doctor who inspires patients to find health through enthusiasm (Dr. Jack); young country boy in the big city going to extremes to impress his girl (Safety Last!); wealthy hypochondriac who finds that he’s only sick in his head (Why Worry?); shy boy who is cured of his stuttering and his cowardice by finding his first honest love (Girl Shy); henpecked husband who uses unusual methods to quiet his in-laws (Hot Water); college boy who finds his popularity through sport (The Freshman); pompous rich man who finds real riches through love (For Heaven’s Sake); the runt of a strong family flexing real muscle by saving his family from ruin (The Kid Brother), and flip city kid who becomes a man by saving NYC’s last horsecar (Speedy). Just think about what it must have been like for audiences of the 1920s, after years of watching comedy characters who were social and personal misanthropes, to finally see a humorous persona who actually reflected their lives! It is no wonder that Harold Lloyd was rewarded with popular and box office supremacy, winning scores of popularity polls, and earning more money in total than any of his contemporaries. Silent era audiences loved Lloyd … and his adaptability to each of our personalities and sensibilities makes him an enduring legend to this day.

The Lloyd films are supremely family-friendly.

I am the proud Mama of Matt, born in 2004, child of an era of popular culture that, frankly, holds much to be desired. I note this because, from infancy, Matt has been watching the films of Harold Lloyd (having a Mama who is his most vociferous biographer in this generation doesn’t hurt, either…). Our son asks to watch “Uncle Harold” and, even at his young age, laughs at what he sees. I chalk this up to one huge quality the Lloyd films boast: enthusiasm.

It can be generally noted that most, if not all, of the Lloyd films (even most of the shorts, and the sound features as well) have keen optimism as their centerpiece. Harold Lloyd, in his Glass Characterizations, believes that he can overcome whatever obstacle is thrown his way, and faces adversity with fervor and passion. He smiles a lot; we like him, and on the whole, we can see why others like him too. He catches the gaze of females – for many women, he’s perceived as a good catch – his upbeat demeanor and confidence are inspiring. My husband (Scott Lloyd) once noted to me how Harold Lloyd embodied the type of man who he’d like to grow up to be: “I was never quite as optimistic, brave, courteous, funny, or courageous as Harold was in his films,” wrote Scott to me in 1997, “but he became an icon and was always a symbol of the type of person I wanted to be. A fundamental thing our society lacks today is a body of positive role models for young people. Harold was that role model for me and it affected my life deeply.”

What parent wouldn’t find comfort in classic films that actually present trusted role models? That is but one reason why I always encourage families to watch and enjoy the Lloyd films, either in theatres, on cable, or on DVD – parents will never be ashamed, embarrassed, puzzled, or bewildered by these wonderful pictures – they are golden family anchors.

I could go on and on (and on) about why Harold Lloyd (to coin a phrase) rocks my world. It pleases me immensely to be offering this sampling of my feelings to HaroldLloyd.com, the official website of the Harold Lloyd Estate and Film Trust. I am honored to have been asked to contribute, and encourage more contemporary scholars, critics, and fans to do the same, both here and at my neighboring website, HaroldLloyd.us. I honestly feel it is vital to continue to reintroduce Harold Lloyd to new generations, through exposure of his films, and critical reassessments of his work. And this can be done through HaroldLloyd.com and HaroldLloyd.us, which I like to think of as the Internet equivalent to Beverly Hills and Cannes: brother and sister sites, both trumpeting the same noble mission, that of sharing why, in his time and ours, Harold Lloyd is important.