This Day in Film History (Birth of Harold Lloyd, Silent ‘Man on the Clock’)

Apr. 20, 1893— Harold Lloyd, a comparatively neglected “third genius” in a silent-comedy triumvirate with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, was born in a humble, three-room home in Burchard, Neb. It was a far cry from the 44-room mansion on a 16-acre Beverly Hills estate that he built from his earnings as the progenitor of “daredevil comedy.”

You won’t find a Lloyd character making a cute appearance in a TV commercial, as Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” did for IBM in the 1980s. Nor will you see many retrospectives of his work, as Keaton has enjoyed courtesy of worshipful film historians.

It’s a surprise, then, to learn that Lloyd made more films and more money at his height than these now more celebrated contemporaries. And though he never achieved the same level of success in the sound era that he did in the silent period, he took to the talkies with a greater eagerness than Chaplin and Keaton.

Unlike those two stars, Lloyd learned the art of comedy not through vaudeville but on movie sets. Though he started as an extra with Universal Studios and worked for a while with Mack Sennett, his principal early association was with Hal Roach (later, the producer of the films of Laurel and Hardy and the Our Gang comedies). 

There he tried several knockoffs of Chaplin’s tramp—“Just Nuts,” “Willie Work,” and “Lonesome Luke”—before, feeling creatively stagnant, he stumbled on the infinitely adaptable figure, though with his own distinct look and style, that would make him famous: “The Boy Next Door” or, more familiarly, the “Glasses Character.”

Benjamin Wright astutely noted three years ago that the transformative effect of Lloyd’s famous horn rims: “For Lloyd, the glasses make him seem common and they also challenge the general perception that men with glasses are more serious and astute, a perception that perhaps helps Lloyd elicit greater laughs.” Or, as the actor marveled: “At a cost of 75 cents they provide a trademark recognized instantly wherever pictures are shown."

Not long after he developed his distinctive persona, however, Lloyd’s career almost ended before it had a chance to really take off. An accident, incurred while posing for a photograph with what he thought was a fake bomb, cost him a thumb and a forefinger. Thereafter he concealed the damage by wearing flesh-colored prosthetic gloves and hiding his right hand whenever photographed.

Perhaps the most famous shot in silent-film history came in Lloyd’s Safety Last! (1923), when his character dangled frightening but determinedly from a clock tower high above a heavily-trafficked street. The scene was shot so realistically that many viewers (including critic Walter Kerr, in his otherwise authoritative The Silent Clowns) believed that it was actual. 

But Lloyd’s own description, years after the fact, had already divulged, amid its laborious explanation, that an elaborate sequence—i.e., technical tricks—was required to convey the impression:

“We did the final scenes of that climb first. We didn't know what we were going to have for the beginning of it. We hadn't made up the opening and after we found that we had, in our opinion, a very, very good thrill sequence, something that was going to be popular and bring in a few shekels, we went back and figured out what we would do for a beginning, and then worked on up to what we already had.”

The whole thing involved building small three- and four-story buildings on hills, followed by clever editing—and, finally, the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief.

Why has Lloyd’s reputation stayed largely in decline while Chaplin and Keaton continue to be remembered? Several explanations, all with a certain amount of plausibility, have been offered over the years:

*Critics wedded to the “auteur” theory do not adequately credit Lloyd as the principal creative force of his films. Lloyd did not particularly care about receiving credits as a director or writer for any of his movies—after all, as head of the company that produced his films, he was intimately involved in the careful shaping of gags. But, in the eyes of some critics, the lack of these additional critics led his overall creative contribution to his movies to be overlooked.

*The limitations of early TV, with their small screens and plethora of commercials, so annoyed Lloyd that he refused use of his films to be shown, thereby limiting exposure to a potential younger generation of fans. As owner of his work, Lloyd feared loss of control in the then-new medium. Not just smaller screens, but incorrect projection speeds and a multitude of commercials ensured that viewers would not be able to appreciate his work under the same conditions as a filmgoer in the 1920s. Eventually he was prevailed upon to release two compilations in the early 1960s: Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy and Harold Lloyd's Funny Side of Life.

*Much of Lloyd’s early work was lost in a fire on his estate. In August 1943, a nitrate fire and explosion destroyed many of the films that Lloyd had bought from their distributor five years before. The loss mortified Lloyd, an early film preservationist. Because many of the lost movies were made before 1919, there has been less chance to analyze the development of his art over time.

*The ever-optimistic nature of Lloyd’s “glasses” character has not been universally embraced by critics who favor the darker undertones in Chaplin and Keaton. “Harold Lloyd—he’s surely the most underrated [comedian] of them all,” observed Orson Welles, his friend and fellow magician. “The intellectuals don’t like the Harold Lloyd character—that middle-class, middle-American, all-American college boy. There’s no obvious poetry to it.” In contrast, Chaplin's critique of capitalism was front and center in Modern Times, and Keaton's triumphs offer onscreen occur as much in spite of as because of his actions--an almost existentialist conception of human beings' ability to shape change.

Lloyd's breathless energy manifested itself not just in the comedies he created at his peak but in the hobbies he pursued afterward: philanthropy, chess, bowling, microscopy, painting, and especially 3-D photography (in his last two decades he took close to 300,000 stereo slides).

"If great comedy must involve something beyond laughter,” critic-novelist James Agee wrote in his influential 1949 essay on silent comedy, “Comedy's Greatest Era,” “Lloyd was not a great comedian. If plain laughter is any criterion — and it is a healthy counter-balance to the other — few people have equalled him, and nobody has ever beaten him."

Most filmgoers don’t even realize that much of what they are watching today originated nearly 100 years ago with Lloyd. Those frenetic Jackie Chan films requiring breathtaking athleticism and comic skill from its star? That, surely, is from the Lloyd template. The romantic comedy involving an average guy winning out against overwhelming odds by sheer manic energy? Part of the Lloyd brand. The names of the titular heroes of the Farrelly Brothers’ Dumb and Dumber? Harold and Lloyd—duh!!!!

Even Lloyd’s many possessions have shown up on the big screen. Paramount borrowed his Rolls Royce to serve as William Holden’s vehicle of pleasure in Sabrina, and his mansion would be used in The Godfather (1972), Westworld (1973), Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Commando (1985).

“The more trouble you get a man into, the more comedy you get out of him,” Lloyd once noted. In 1953, four years after the failure of his last sound film, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, Hollywood bestowed an honorary Oscar on the “good citizen” and “beloved Freshman" who had “permanently dislocated the funny bone of America,” Harold Lloyd.

Quote of the Day (James Agee, on Chaplin’s Tramp)

“Of all comedians he worked most deeply and most shrewdly within a realization of what a human being is, and is up against. The Tramp is as centrally representative of humanity, as many-sided and as mysterious, as Hamlet, and it seems unlikely that any dancer or actor can ever have excelled him in eloquence, variety or poignancy of motion.”— James Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” Life Magazine, September 3, 1949, from Film: An Anthology, edited by Daniel Talbot (1966)

His first appearance onscreen, as a swindler, was all wrong and audiences stayed away. But his boss, Mack Sennett, gave him another chance. Rummaging through the studio’s costume closets, 24-year-old Charlie Chaplin pulled together the accouterments of the character who would make his image among the most famous in history: “Pants baggy, coat tight…hat small, shoes large,” he recalled in his autobiography. The finishing touch was a toothbrush moustache meant to camouflage the character’s age.

When audiences got their first look at The Tramp in Sennett’s Kid Auto Races at Venice on this date 100 years ago, the young actor became famous overnight. The Tramp would make his last appearance on film 26 years later, as a barber, in Chaplin’s first talkie, The Great Dictator, when the other half of the actor's screen time was devoted to satirizing the murderous leader whose moustache (unfortunately) resembled his own, Adolf Hitler's. But for most audiences, the last real time The Tramp was on the screen was in the silent that Chaplin released, stubbornly, nine years after the introduction of sound, Modern Times (1936), as his beloved character wiggled away down the road with Paulette Goddard.

The article by the great film critic (and very fine novelist) James Agee quoted above listed actor-writer-director-producer Chaplin as one of the four great “silent clowns” (the others being Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon). Of the four, Chaplin enjoyed the longest success, became the most controversial (because of his leftist politics and taste in very young women) and endeared himself to posterity most enduringly. When cold, corporate IBM wanted to recast its image in the 1980s with its personal computer, it brought the rights to the image of the Tramp and used it in a series of well-received commercials.

Last month, Susan King wrote a perceptive article for the Los Angeles Times describing “The Evolution of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp”—of how he knew little about film when he came to Sennett’s studios; how the character tended to be rowdy in its initial incarnation; and of how it started to take full shape with the release of The Kid in 1921.

Quote of the Day (Noah Smith, on Technology and Labor)

“What do we do if and when our old mechanisms for coping with inequality break down? If the ‘endowment of human capital’ with which people are born gets less and less valuable, we'll get closer and closer to that Econ 101 example of a world in which the capital owners get everything. A society with cheap robot labor would be an incredibly prosperous one, but we will need to find some way for the vast majority of human beings to share in that prosperity, or we risk the kinds of dystopian outcomes that now exist only in science fiction.”—Noah Smith, “The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots,” The Atlantic, January 2013

(The image accompanying this post is from, of course, Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s last embrace of silent film—a movie about the disruptive effects of new technology, made nine years after sound had rendered obsolete a whole style and generation of film personnel.)

This Day in Film History (Chaplin Tramps Out of Court a Loser in Paternity Suit)

June 6, 1945—America had embraced Charlie Chaplin, a onetime London street urchin with a Dickensian childhood, when his “Little Tramp” became perhaps the most easily recognizable and loved silent-film character. But the movie star felt an increasing alienation from the U.S. when a Los Angeles judge refused to hear an appeal ordering him to pay child-maintenance fees —even though three different paternity tests determined that he had not fathered the little girl.

Chaplin found himself in this predicament because of a liaison with Joan Barry, a 22-year-old aspiring actress that he considered casting in his adaptation of a Paul Vincent Carroll play, Shadow and Substance (a project never completed). The resulting sex scandal and legal morass bore some resemblance to one 50 years later involving another beloved big-screen funnyman, Woody Allen.

Both Chaplin and Allen achieved fame by virtue of screen personae—nebbishes with idealistic attitudes but little prowess toward the opposite sex—with no relation whatsoever to their real selves. Both saw their careers damaged, at least initially, in their fifties because of affairs with females three decades their juniors. And both cases were sparked by nasty splits from romantic companions who had appeared (or were slated to do so) in their films.

Chaplin’s case lacked the sense of transgression of Allen’s (the latter’s young lover, Soon-Yi Previn, was the adopted daughter of paramour and muse Mia Farrow, so the affair gave off the whiff of quasi-incest), or some of the piquant details that made the latter a daily tabloid bonanza (e.g., Farrow discovered the affair when she found nude photos of Soon-Yi in the Woodman’s apartment).

But, though almost certainly innocent of the charges brought against him, Chaplin had followed a years-long pattern of (mis)behavior that made him vulnerable to scandal.

Over the prior three decades, Chaplin had cheerfully entered into one sexual relationship after another, with his more famous amours rumored to include Paulette Goddard, Louise Brooks, Hedy Lamarr and Marian Davies. Nothing remarkable about that in the skirt-chasing male warrens of Hollywood..

What was remarkable, however, was that a high percentage of these involved women who were very young—sometimes only in their mid-teens. In fact, while Charlie grew older, his type of woman barely budged at all in age. Here’s a fast rundown:

* Hetty Kelly, his first true love (she was 15, he 19);
* Mildred Harris (she was 16, he 29);
* Lita Grey (she 16, he 35);
* Georgia Hale (she 19, he 35);
* Joan Barry (she 22, he 51—we’ll get to this in a second); and
* Oona O’Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill (she 18, he 54)

Some of these women ended up going to the altar with Chaplin. It’s a safe bet, however, that the one he regretted was Barry. A fast review of her pre-Charlie history will show why he came to feel this way:

* She came to Los Angeles at age 18 and soon had been arrested for shoplifting from a department store;

* Short of funds, she became the kept woman of a shoe salesman, and even after the relationship sometimes registered herself in hotels as “Mrs. Mark Warner”;

* Before long, she had set her sights considerably higher—on oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, who kept her, for awhile, in high style;

* Still with her sights on Hollywood, she came to a party on board the yacht of Spencer Tracy. No liaison resulted from that, but the same night she met Chaplin, to whom she began to pour out her frustrations about getting a job in the film industry.

Chaplin—now a major success in his own right—was very sympathetic, and before long he’d signed her to a contract. What did he see in her—another Katharine Hepburn? At least another Edna Purviance, a prior co-star (and lover) of his?

Well, he explained, in slightly elevated language, considering the subject matter, a couple of decades later in his autobiography: “Miss Barry was a big handsome woman of twenty-two, well built, with upper regional domes immensely expansive which…evoked my libidinous curiosity.”

Two years later—after Barry had shown up, unannounced at points, on his doorstep; after she had engaged in one inexplicable outburst after another, including getting drunk and breaking the windows of his home; after he’d been induced to pay for two of her abortions; after she took him to court, claiming that a baby she carried to term was his; after she’d reneged on a deal between his lawyers and hers that, if two paternity tests established he couldn’t be the father, she wouldn’t pursuit the case further—well, after all that, this Renaissance man of film, who even composed a well-known theme for his movie Limelight, was not singing “Thanks for the Mammaries.”

Barry’s charges dovetailed with efforts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation—which had him on its radar screen since the early 1920s—to bring Chaplin to ground.

The Roosevelt administration, which wanted the public to see the Soviets as a firm partner in the Grand Alliance against the Axis powers, took little if any notice of Chaplin’s woolly-minded statement that that Stalin’s purges had been “a wonderful thing” (“In those purges the Communists did away with their Quislings and Lavals, and if other nations had done the same there would not be the original Quislings and Lavals today.”)

But J. Edgar Hoover did, and his agents began to compile evidence that Chaplin had violated the Mann Act, a piece of legislation from the Progressive Era with an excellent intention—stopping young women from being forced into prostitution—but which had, over the years, been used to selectively punish people (such as boxer Jack Johnson) who had somehow violated social mores with a consenting adult.

Chaplin ended up acquitted of violating the Mann Act, but the judge in the Barry case refused to dismiss her charges, because the paternity tests that had exonerated Chaplin were not generally used in California courts. Until the state legislature passed such legislation, the case had to proceed, he ruled.

The first paternity trial was a mistrial; Chaplin lost the second, and was forced to pay $75 a week to Barry’s daughter Carol Ann, with an increase to $100 as her needs grew until she reached the age of 21.

In 1953, Joan Barry was committed to a mental institution by her mother after having been found walking on the street barefoot muttering, “This is magic.” In that same year, California adopted a law to accept blood tests to determine paternity, and the ruling against Chaplin in the paternity suit was overturned.

But it was too late for the star. His 1948 film Monsieur Verdoux (in the image accompanying this post), about a bluebeard who is compared favorably to thieving capitalists, further soured a public that had loved the Little Tramp. Four years later, while attending the London premiere of Limelight, Chaplin's re-entry visa was revoked because he was deemed a “security risk.”

In 1972, enough time had passed so that the perfect storm that had nearly engulfed Chaplin decades earlier—his unwary private behavior and the McCarthyism that wildly exaggerated his political naivete—could abate. Returning to Hollywood to accept an honorary Oscar, he was greeted, at last, rapturously, as this pioneer of film comedy deserved to be.

This Day in Film History (What Happened on “William Randolph’s Hearse”?)

November 21, 1924—Three Hawaiian guitarists played at the funeral of Hollywood player Thomas Ince, but the man who had just made a deal with him and thrown a birthday party for him was not among the industry friends who gathered for the sad event.

Those were only the latest of the bizarre, inexplicable events surrounding his hurried departure a few days before from the yacht of William Randolph Hearst. The incident sparked a three-quarters-of-a-century scandal and mystery involving the tabloid publisher; his mistress, silent-film comedienne Marion Davies; and Charlie Chaplin, who had been paying Davies a great deal of attention.

The Ince case was addressed directly onscreen in Peter Bogdanovich’s fine 2002 drama, The Cat’s Meow, as well as in a mystery co-written by none other than Heart’s granddaughter, Patricia Hearst, Murder in San Simeon. What fewer people realize is that it formed a long-unknown backdrop to the controversial, thinly fictionalized version of the publisher’s life, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.

Ince ended up on the 280-ft. yacht, the Oneida—subsequently nicknamed by Hollywood wags “William Randolph’s Hearse”—because Hearst and Davies wanted to throw a party in honor of his 43rd birthday. There was no reason for the producer-director not to come—the vivacious Davies threw the type of galas that people talked about for the rest of their lives, and Hearst wanted him in a good mood as they moved to conclude a major business deal. (Hearst desired to use Ince’s Culver City studios as a base for Cosmopolitan Productions, the production company he’d used to propel Davies to stardom.)

In his epic life of the publisher, The Chief, David Nasaw sounds like one of those exasperated historians forced to slap down innumerable far-fetched conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination in Dallas: “Today, seventy-five years after Ince’s death, there is still no credible evidence that he was murdered or that Hearst was involved in any foul play.”

I, for one, am also impatient about every cockamamie conspiracy theory that comes down the pike. Unfortunately, so many odd things happened after Ince stepped aboard the Oneida on the 15th that it’s impossible not to believe that something happened and that somebody wanted badly to hide it. The only question is, what was being hidden?

Hearst’s initial statement claimed that Ince had, after that night, complained of acute indigestion. A doctor took him off the yacht and escorted him home, where he died a couple of days later.

Here’s the problem with this:

* Virtually none of the guests aboard that night could agree on what happened.

* No logs, records or photos exist of the events.

* Hearst was known to keep a gun aboard the yacht.

* Only one guest that night—the doctor escorting Ince off the yacht—was formally interrogated by the authorities.

* Ince’s body was cremated before an autopsy could be concluded.

* Ince’s widow, having received a trust fund from Hearst, took off for Europe as soon as she could after the cremation.

* One guest, Louella Parsons, movie editor for the New York American, insisted she had not been in attendance, even though she had been seen at the studio, waiting to depart for the yacht. Hearst rewarded the extraordinarily ambitious Parsons for her see-no-evil stance with a lifetime contract.

* Another yacht guest, actress Margaret Livingston—Ince’s mistress—had her salary raised afterward.

Most of the subsequent speculation about Ince’s fate resulted from three factors: a) the extremely cozy relationship between Davies and Chaplin (which even Nasaw catalogs at some length); b) Hearst’s realization of, and jealousy over, this; and c) the paranoia of Hearst, one of the inventors of modern tabloid journalism, that his beloved Davies—not to mention the wife he would not leave and did not wish to hurt—would be badly damaged by scandal.

So, what did happen? Take your pick, but just remember: In Hollywood, whatever you hear, no matter how unlikely, there’s at least an 80% chance it could be true:

* Hearst hired an assassin to shoot Ince. (This theory was credited by later San Simeon guest Herman Mankiewicz, who used it in a screenplay called American—which, once Orson Welles heavily edited it, became Citizen Kane. Welles dropped Mankiewicz’ incident to make it just a wee bit more possible to claim his film was not based on the publisher’s life--and, of course, avoid a libel suit.)

* Hearst found Chaplin and Davies together, went to find a gun, causing Davies to scream and Ince to come out to help—only to be accidentally shot by Hearst.

* Hearst and Ince were together, looking for medication late at night to soothe his indigestion, when Hearst mistook Ince for Chaplin and shot him.

* Hearst, Chaplin and some other guests were struggling over the gun when it went off, with one bullet entering Ince’s room and accidentally killing him.

* One of the newer theories, trotted out in a 1997 Vanity Fair article, is that Hearst accidentally stabbed Ince through the heart with Davies’ hatpin.

The rumor that threatened to blow the case wide open came from Chaplin’s secretary, Toraichi Kono, who told his wife that Ince was bleeding when he’d been taken off the yacht. San Diego D.A. Chester Kemple heard so much scuttlebutt coming out of this that he brought inb Daniel Carson Goodman, a Cosmopolitan exec who no longer actively practiced medicine but had escorted Ince off the boat, to see what he had to say.

According to another guest on the boat, Gretl Urban, Hearst had warned Goodman as Ince was taken off the boat not to let anyone know the producer had been on the Oneida. Was Hearst nervous about violating Prohibition? Or was there something more?

Aside from the issue of Hearst's own possible culpability, there was the matter of Davies' involvement. Two years before, a welcome-home party thrown by her sister on Long Island had ended suddenly when another female guest fired a bullet into the mouth of her husband. (This was most inopportune for Hearst, as he was in the middle of a gubernatorial campaign in New York.)

Gretl Urban wrote later that after getting off the boat, Goodman had "completely lost his head and fabricated so many impossible tales and acted so super-discreet that the press and everyone else ashore were convinced he was covering up some horrendous crime." But whatever he said to the San Diego authorities, the D.A. seemed disinclined to pursue the matter. Kemple issued a subsequent statement saying he was satisfied with what he heard, and that anything else related to Prohibition infractions would have to be investigated by the L.A. District Attorney. The latter never followed it up.

At this stage, given that no other witnesses were formally questioned about the events, we are unlikely to know what transpired that night. But it seems pretty clear, given the several people connected with the events who were suddenly amply rewarded, that Hearst had gone to extraordinary efforts to buy their silence.