Harold LLoyd

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Harold Lloyd's granddaughter talks about living with a Hollywood legend
With his zany stunts, Everyman looks and comic genius, Harold Lloyd was the Tom Hanks of his era
Geoffrey Macnab
19 July 2007
www.independent.co.uk


Hooray for Harold Lloyd! If you were a TV-watching kid in the Seventies, you will probably remember the man in the spectacles and funny boater hat who dangled over the ledges of skyscrapers, hung from clock tower arms and otherwise risked his life in daredevil stunts. Harold Lloyd's World Of Comedy was popular with children all over the world, but Lloyd isn't nearly so much in evidence today. While films by his contemporaries, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, have been scrubbed down and regularly made available on television and DVD, Lloyd's work remains relatively hard to access.

But this is set to change if Suzanne Lloyd, the comedian's granddaughter and sole trustee, has her way. We are in the process of being bombarded by Lloyd. The Cambridge Film Festival has just staged a mini-retrospective, including an exhibition of his photographs. A nine-disc, 1,746-minute DVD set was released earlier this month. On Wednesday, there will be a "live" performance of Safety Last! (1923), with Carl Davis conducting the Live Cinema Orchestra. And one of his most fervent British fans, the comedian Paul Merton, is about to embark on a tour, during which he will show Lloyd's work.

Suzanne Lloyd has spent years proselytising on her grandfather's behalf. She knew him better than almost anyone. Her parents divorced in the early Fifties, not long after she was born, and she ended up living in Los Angeles with Harold. Although Lloyd's film career had ended by time of the Second World War, he remained an immensely powerful figure in Hollywood, right up until his death in 1971. If you judge a star by the size of his house, Lloyd was one of the elite. His Beverly Hills home, Greenacres, had 44 rooms, 26 bathrooms, 12 fountains, 12 gardens, a swimming pool, stables, a canoe run, tennis courts, children's playhouses and a nine-hole golf course.

This was where Suzanne lived for the first 20 years of her life. She speaks wistfully about what sounds like a pampered childhood. Her doll's house had running water, electricity, a telephone and a thatched roof. It was the size of a small bungalow. Home-movie footage included with the new Harold Lloyd DVD set shows Suzanne as a toddler, waltzing around it as if she is the lady of the manor. "You could make all the noise you wanted," she recalls. "My boyfriends used to have band practice up there and nobody cared about the drums and guitars being loud."

It took Suzanne some time to discover that her grandfather was famous. She knew he was missing the thumb and index finger of his right hand, but didn't like to ask why. Back in 1919, Harold Lloyd had posed for a photograph with what he thought was a make-believe bomb. The bomb, it turned out, was real. When it exploded, it ripped off his hand and blinded him. The event could have ended his career, but when he sight returned three months later, Lloyd was to do his finest work.

Harold Lloyd was born in 1893 and grew up in poverty in Nebraska. The family later moved to California, where Lloyd's father planned to open a pool hall. Like so many of his ventures this was a failure, but by the end of the First World War, Harold had become one of the most successful comic actors in Hollywood. Then came the accident. Not long before, the actress Bebe Daniels had broken off their engagement, saying he would never cut it as a comedian.

Most cinema-goers had no idea that Lloyd's right hand was so disfigured, that he had been blind for months or that he wore a prosthetic glove. Suzanne says: "It changed his whole idea of what he was going to do with film. He made a promise to himself that if he could get out of this, he would be the best at whatever he could do."

The Harold Lloyd who Suzanne grew up with was an enthusiastic photographer. One of his hobbies was taking pictures of nudes, including Bettie Page and Marilyn Monroe. Was it incongruous for a silent-cinema legend to be snapping away at naked models? Suzanne recently published a book of his nude photographs, and says the Fifties were more innocent times. "There were photography clubs at that time. Playboy was just breaking. That was a big fad – nude photography. It wasn't something perverted or twisted. It's so campy – it's fun, it's tasteful. It's not Hustler."

Among his other likely enthusiasms were the British Carry On films, the James Bond novels and – toward the end of his life – Star Trek.

Lloyd didn't just take photos of models. He went out and about with his cameras, too. Suzanne realised he had a reckless streak when she saw him striding into traffic or clambering up the Golden Gate Bridge to get better pictures. "He just did crazy things," she tuts. "He climbed out on top of the Seattle Space Needle to get shots." In hindsight, she sees such antics as a legacy of his film career. He may no longer have been appearing in movies, but that enthusiasm for getting the most unlikely and jaw-dropping shot never left him.

Occasionally, Harold Lloyd would show Suzanne a movie at Greenacres. To the little girl, the man on screen dangling from tall buildings or being chased by angry crowds looked nothing like her grandfather. In real life, Lloyd didn't wear glasses, other than for driving or watching television. She knew that he was active in Freemason circles and charity work. "I kind of thought he was a hospital administrator," she remembers. Then, in the early Sixties, when Lloyd edited a compilation of his shorts to show at Cannes, he took his granddaughter along to see a preview.

"I was eight or nine years old. I was sitting in front of him," she remembers. "The film starts, there is this clip of a guy climbing a building. They said it was my grandfather. I didn't think it looked like him. But it was really odd. Some of his smiles and expressions were like his. He was sitting right behind me and I kept turning round. The press asked: '"Weren't you just petrified that your grandfather was hanging out of a building?' I said, 'No, I kept turning around and he was OK.'"

As a kid, she had met many of her grandfather's famous friends without quite realising who they were. Among her classmates were the offspring of James Stewart and Lucille Ball. She talks about childhood visits on Thursday afternoons to a kindly family friend she knew only as Aunt Mary. It was only much later that she discovered this was Mary Pickford, the most successful female star of the silent film era. To the youthful Suzanne, America's Sweetheart was simply that nice lady "who had really great cookies in her kitchen".

It was only when Cary Grant – then at the height of his stardom – turned up at Greenacres that she realised her grandfather was at the heart of Hollywood. "I just couldn't believe it! I kept whispering to my grandfather – how do you know him?" Lloyd told her to be quiet. "But it's Cary Grant!" she replied.

She tells an even more poignant story about the day the Beatles came to town. Harold Lloyd hired a box at the Hollywood Bowl so that Suzanne and three of her friends could watch the band. Sitting next to them was the elderly star Edward G Robinson (of Little Caesar fame), also with his granddaughter in tow. While the girls went into paroxysms of excitement at the Beatles, the two Hollywood veterans sat together in a state of bemusement. After the concert, Lloyd took his granddaughter to meet the band. To his embarrassment, she was so nervous that she couldn't bring herself to utter a word in their presence.

She may have taken her time to discover that her grandfather was a movie star, but when she eventually did Suzanne immersed herself in his work. She studied film restoration, and as a teenager, she already knew how to handle nitrate from the running repairs she sometimes had to make on her grandfather's movies. "If things were gooey or deteriorating, I'd have to splice it, cut it, take it out," she recalls.

After Lloyd's wife – and frequent co-star from the silent era – Mildred Davis died in 1969, the comedian became increasingly reliant on his granddaughter, frequently asking her to accompany him on trips abroad or to screenings. Gradually, it became apparent that he was grooming her to administer the estate.

By this stage, Harold Lloyd was an immensely wealthy man. He had made more than 200 films and, in his prime, had outperformed even Charlie Chaplin at the box office. When he died in 1971, Suzanne was left to battle with all the lawyers who wanted to cash in on his estate. She was barely 20 and had been given responsibility for all of Lloyd's films. The lawyers' instinct was to raise money by selling them off as quickly as possible. Suzanne's goal, however, was to save the film stock, and for the last 30 years, she has been battling to restore her grandfather's reputation as one of the three geniuses of the silent era, alongside Chaplin and Keaton.

Ask her the secret of Lloyd's enduring popularity, and she suggests that Harold had an Everyman quality that even Chaplin and Keaton lacked. His persona was that of the likeable, clean-cut Everyman on the make. "He looks like Harry Potter's older brother, right?" Nothing about him has dated. "If he walked around in his glasses, suit and tie and regular lace-up shoes, you could put him on the street today and he would just blend in."

Harold Lloyd enjoyed a near universality of appeal. Kids rooted for him. Women liked him, too. Suzanne describes him as one of the founding fathers of romantic comedy. (Indeed, there is a hint of Hugh Grant in his dithering, self-deprecating charm.) Thanks to her efforts, he looks set to recapture some of that extraordinary popularity he enjoyed in his heyday in the 1920s.

"My grandfather's films weren't on television when Keaton and Chaplin's were," Suzanne admits. "I have got to make up for a lot of generations. It would be like if you took all of Tom Hanks's comedies and put them in the closet for 50 years. People would say, 'Tom who?'" Not so many people now are asking, "Harold who?" Even Suzanne is startled by how far grandpa's new-found popularity now extends: "His films are being shown on Dubai Airlines. Go figure that!"

The Harold Lloyd Collection (Optimum Home Entertainment) is out now

here's a bit of him put to music by Groove Armada



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I was a big fan of his films when they were shown in the 70s - whenever I saw other slapsticks after that I was always comparing them to him.