An American Comedy

By Harold Lloyd, Wesley W. Stout and Richard Griffith

This autobiography by an influential silent film star gives an insider’s view of the motion picture industry in the early twentieth century.
 
It’s one of the most enduring images in film history: a young man in circular glasses, dangling from the hands of a clock high above Los Angeles. The actor performing this daring stunt was Harold Lloyd, a highly successful comedian from the silent film era. Lloyd made nearly two hundred comedies, both silent and “talkies,” between 1914 and 1947. He is best known for his “Glass” character, a bespectacled everyman who captured the mood of the 1920s. In this fascinating autobiography, which was written just around the time sound was revolutionizing cinema, Lloyd chronicles his experiences as a performer and producer of silent films, preserving firsthand details of Hollywood’s bygone period. This extraordinary memoir, originally published in 1928, discusses actors both comedic and dramatic, stage to film adaptations, producers, directors, and primarily, how early silent movies were made. It is a must-read for film historians and movie buffs alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781504082266

Harold Lloyd

Harold Lloyd (1893–1971), was an American actor, comedian, and stunt performer who appeared in many silent films. Considered one of the most influential comedians of the silent film era, Lloyd starred in nearly two hundred comedies, from early black-and-white shorts to feature-length “talkies,” between 1914 and 1947. His bespectacled “Glass” character was a resourceful, ambitious go-getter who matched the zeitgeist of the Roaring Twenties. His films frequently contained “thrill sequences” of extended chase scenes and daredevil hijinks. His bespectacled character hanging high above the street from the hands of a broken clock tower in Safety Last! (1923) is considered one of the most famous images in all of cinema.

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An American Comedy

Harold Lloyd

From The Freshman (1925): life can be like the movies.

Introductory Note

BY

RICHARD GRIFFITH*

This is Lloyd’s only autobiography, and no other biography exists.† It seems incredible, especially in this day when so much is being published about the movies.

The lack of a definitive late book on Lloyd reflects the disesteem in which he has traditionally been held by the movie highbrows. They do not like his optimism. His calculated comedy methods have been labeled mechanical and let go at that. His wealth and success have naturally been held against him. But it’s the optimism which chiefly sticks in the highbrow craw and accounts for the continued fundamental lack of interest in him and the continued rating of him below Chaplin, Keaton and even Langdon. Weltschmerz is hard to find in him, and Weltschmerz is of course essential.

This is largely nonsense. The boy with the glasses character is as full of significance as Keaton’s frozen man from Mars, and of greater significance than Langdon’s old baby. To a Lloyd, life’s perils are to be overcome, but they are real perils none the less and by no means entirely exterior, as alleged. What is probably his masterpiece, Grandma’s Boy, is full of both peril and horror, decidedly interior.

Scene from Mad Wednesday, by Preston Sturges, with Harold Lloyd, Jimmy Conlin and Jackie the lion. A further twist in the danger-on-the-window-ledge motif.

Be that as it may, this is a valuable book for the film scholar and for anyone who truly loves the film medium per se. Lloyd’s account of his early struggles underlines and fleshes out the emerging fact that basic film comedy technique was invented just before films became the dominant form of entertainment—invented by those self-taught men of the theatrical underworld who entertained uneducated people with whom they were in everyday close contact. What they invented, in their vaudevilles, circuses, stock companies and tent shows, owed a minimum to theatrical tradition and a maximum to their knowledge of their audiences; they mostly thought it all up themselves as they went along. To such men, and they included Sennett, Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon and Arbuckle, films were not only the road to fame and fortune but also a golden, entirely unexpected opportunity to expand their powers of invention beyond the limits of the stage to a limitless field which, they soon discovered, was that of the universe itself. Exactly how they made this discovery, and the exuberance with which they made it, are well rendered in Lloyd’s book—as well as the painstaking artistry they developed: that urge of the early film-makers to, in Lillian Gish’s words, make every shot accurate, true, perfect.

Nowhere else, to my knowledge, is film comedy construction discussed in so much detail. Rudi Blesh’s book on Keaton is excellent on Keaton’s vaudeville days and on his earliest films, but thereafter strangely peters out. The two other Keaton books, and the innumerable books on Chaplin, fall far short of this first-hand description of comedy film-making, which is also, in its way, a description of the psychology of the film experience.

How good it would be to have a book devoted to what happened to Lloyd after 1928—his successful passage of the talkie test, his gradual awareness that the tide of taste was running against him, his efforts to adapt and his eventual prudent retirement. As well as some account of his abortive comeback, under the auspices of Preston Sturges and Howard Hughes, in the strange film variously titled Mad Wednesday and The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.

*This is a slightly abridged and edited version of a written note Mr. Griffith prepared for Dover Publications in June 1969. His death occurred before he could write a full introduction to the Dover edition of An American Comedy; this brief but incisive statement must stand in the place of that introduction.—

THE PUBLISHER

.

†The autobiographical articles in Photoplay, May-July 1924 and December 1925, are earlier than the present book. The brief biographical sections in William Cahn’s book Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, N. Y., 1964) take the story into the sixties, but are only outlines of a biography.—

THE PUBLISHER

.

Contents

IMain Street

II The Meanest Cowboy of the West

III Bumps and Brodies

IV Magic Glasses

VThe Night Life of Hollywood

VI Recipe for a Laugh

APPENDIX

: The Serious Business of Being Funny—an interview with Harold Lloyd conducted and edited by Hubert I. Cohen

INDEX

List of Illustrations

The Freshman: life can be like the movies*

Scene from Mad Wednesday*

Harold at the age of three

Harold Lloyd in propria persona

Wearing the lensless glasses

Harold’s father, J. Darsie (Foxy) Lloyd

Harold and his mother

Speedy and Foxy reading fan mail

Assorted adventures: (1) Selling shoes

(2) Saying a prayer

(3) Singing a hymn*

(4) Riding a motorcycle

(5) Threading a needle

(6) Causing consternation

(7) Losing an automobile*

(8) Cleaning a mirror*

(9) Brandishing a bomb

(10) Punishing a lady*

Assorted adventures: (1) At a train station

(2) In the subway*

(3) On shipboard

(4) With Mildred Davis

(5) With Mildred Davis and a third party*

(6) At a dance*

(7) On a trolley

(8) Hand caught in a vase

Early make-up character studies

Two phases of the Lonesome Luke character

The Rolin Company in Westlake Park

The first phase of the glass character

From A Sailor-Made Man

Two stills from Grandma’s Boy

From Hot Water*

Safety Last: the opening shot

Safety Last: hanging on to the clock*

Safety Last: the face of the clock gives way

Safety Last: suspended above Los Angeles

Safety Last: danger on the topmost cornice

Safety Last: the heroine on the roof

Why Worry: the giant in number 15 shoes

Why Worry: the hypochondriac and the giant*

Why Worry: trouble in Latin America

Why Worry: the insouciant idler

The Freshman: the college boy’s room*

The Freshman: being measured for the prom suit*

The Freshman: having the suit basted*

The Freshman: the suit disintegrates

The Freshman: the tackling dummy’s severed leg

The Freshman: a lesson from the coach*

The Freshman: retrieving the ball*

The Freshman: eager to get into the game

The Freshman: the great game*

The Freshman: hero of the hour*

From For Heaven’s Sake*

Speedy: the flip city youth

Speedy: a Hollywood replica of Sheridan Square

The Kid Brother: authorizing the medicine show

The Kid Brother: saving Mary from the masher*

From Feet First

The Lloyds at play

The Lloyds in their garden

Harold playing handball

Mrs. Lloyd on the tennis court

Gloria, the Lloyd heir, at the age of one

*The photographs marked with an asterisk were acquired from Cinemabilia in New York: the publisher is grateful to Mr. Ernest Burns.

I

Main Street

Birth was one of the least interesting things that ever happened to me; but there must be an opening shot in a war, tears at a wedding, a raccoon coat on a sophomore and a birth in a biography, experts tell me.

The Lloyd family lived in seven different authenticated Nebraska and Colorado towns, some of them twice or oftener, in my first fifteen years. The towns were Burchard, Humboldt, Pawnee City, Beatrice and Omaha, Nebraska; and Fort Collins and Denver, Colorado. No two of us can agree, can even reach a compromise, as to the order of these movings, and no one kept a diary; but fortunately for the necessities of biography there is no dispute as to the fact, the place or the time of my birth. The place was a frame cottage in Burchard, a town of 300 in the First District of Nebraska, just then represented in Congress by a young man named William Jennings Bryan. The time was April 20, 1893, a few days in advance of the outbreak of the silver panic and of the opening of the Chicago World’s Fair, neither of which events was associated with my birth at the time, or later. The former, however, may very well have left its mark upon me, for a long period of national hard times set in with the panic and the journeyings of the Lloyds began when I was a year old.

In this third paragraph I stop to serve fair warning—or unfair, as you prefer—that I am not a funny man off the screen. In pictures I am as funny as I know how to be, like the job and have no secret sorrows that I am not John Gilbert or Adolphe Menjou; but I have no desire to be or knack for being comic in my off hours. Such comedy as there will be here—and there should be plenty of it—will lie in the humor of events, not in any conscious effort of the author to be cute.

The Lloyds went to Southeastern Nebraska in pioneer times from Pennsylvania, my grandfather opening a general store in Burchard. My mother, coming out from Toulon, Illinois, to visit Nebraska relatives, met and married my father there. I was the second of two children, five years younger than my brother Gaylord.

The first move from Burchard was only a hop and a skip twenty-two miles eastward along the Kansas City-Denver line of the Burlington to Humboldt, a place of some 1200. All our Nebraska homes, Omaha excepted, were within the First Congressional District. A man named Bennett had picked up a photographer’s outfit, head pincers, birdy and all, cheaply in Chicago, moved it to Humboldt and opened a studio. He knew photography but lacked capital; my father had some capital and no photography, so they became the firm of Bennett & Lloyd, Cabinet Photos a Specialty.

It would be a better story if Master Harold Clayton Lloyd, having been exposed to a camera at this early age, had never recovered and sat around drumming his heels thereafter waiting for the motion picture to be born that he might get in front of a camera taking 960 pictures a minute where only one grew before. That was not the way of it. When, at length, I stumbled into pictures it was as a stop-gap at three dollars a day to fill a hungry stomach. The studio at Humboldt was an episode that I know of only by hearsay and the further evidence of a portrait taken by my father which I have reason to fear will be printed along with this text.

The photographic adventure was not a success and we moved next to Denver, where my father clerked in a shoe store. On the theory that anything that is worth telling is worth telling accurately, a family council was called at the beginning of this task in the hope of agreement on an authorized and official version of our route. Up to our first arrival in Denver, my father, mother and brother agree; thereafter there are three accounts which cross and recross one another. One has us moving from Denver to Fort Collins, back to Denver, thence to Pawnee City, returning to Denver; next to Beatrice, thence to Omaha, once more to Denver and back again to Omaha. It will do as well as another; the point is that we moved. Father and mother admit that we moved; they protest only that we were not so continuously in motion as I remember.

Perhaps not, but this restlessness was not so unusual as it sounds to-day. The same dissatisfactions and optimisms that sent the pioneers across the Mississippi in search of a promised land kept many of them moving when the grass turned out to be not so green as it first had seemed. The population was in a constant state of being shuffled and reshuffled.

It still goes on; nearly 1,000,000 persons have moved to Los Angeles since I first came here.

There are two kinds of poor boys in America—the Tom Sawyers and the Huckleberry Finns, and Hollywood is full of examples of each who have reached the top in pictures. If you remember your Mark Twain, Tom’s family was the kind that used to be described as poor but honest. That is, they were self-respecting; and, in a place where all were poor, suffered no penalty for poverty. Tom was young Sammy Clemens himself. Huckleberry was the kid from across the tracks whose lawless life Tom envied. His family was shiftless and not altogether respectable, as well as being poor. They usually were described as white trash.

The mammas of the old home town unanimously predicted a bad end for the Huckleberries, and the Huckleberries frequently defied the mammas and environment and grew up to be first-rate citizens. It would be easy to make this more exciting by putting myself down as a Huck Finn, but it would not be true. I was a good example of a Tom Sawyer. As people went in the West, we were not poor; my father was better off than most of his neighbors, to begin with, for he had a little capital. But as others grew moderately prosperous with time, we slipped back a little, until we were, in the United States sense of the word, poor. In our lowest ebbs I went to live with various aunts and grandmothers, and my schooling went on, interrupted only by the intervals of moving.

These visits further complicate the question of where and when. For example, the family never lived in Durango, Colorado, but I did on two occasions. So when I tell a story as happening in Beatrice or Omaha or Denver, I tell it as I remember and do not guarantee the time or place.

My argument, if I haven’t lost you, is that I was average and typical of the time and place. Supposing Atlantic City had been holding Average American Boy contests, with beauty waived, I might have been Master America most any year between 1893 and 1910. This is assuming that the average boy before the war was moderately poor, that his folks moved a good deal and that he worked for his spending money at any job that offered.

In two things I was exceptional—freckles and a single-tracked ambition. Authors always make their boy heroes red-haired and freckle-faced, and you may suspect the freckles were double exposure. Wrong. My hair is black, but I was as freckled as Wesley Barry. Though much dimmed by time, they can be seen yet. As to ambition, I cannot remember ever of wanting to be an engineer, fireman, policeman, bakery-wagon driver or any of the other pre-Lindbergh goals of boys. As far back as memory goes, and to the exclusion of all else, I was stage crazy. There is no accounting for its strength and persistence, for it began before I ever saw a play, and there were no actors, so far as we know, in either my father’s or mother’s family.

Gaylord was bitten by the same bug less severely, but long before he got his first job backstage I already was playing theater, with the loose hats and caps in the house as my actors. We lived in a duplex apartment, an aunt living across the hall. She owned a large couch, probably one of those trick furnitures that double by day as a davenport and by night as a bed. It was my stage. Taking off my shoes, which was required by my aunt, I would sit tailor fashion on the couch with the hats ranged in front of me. I invented and spoke their lines and moved them about. Of the plays, I remember only that they were as full of violence as Shakspere’s own. This was a regular diversion, they tell me. I recall the game better at a time when hats ceased to satisfy my critical sense and were replaced by false faces left over from Halloween. From masks I graduated into real make-up before my teens.

In other matters I had a family reputation of being fickle. For instance, I had a succession of hobbies, each ridden furiously for a time, then abruptly tossed aside forever; but through all I played actor, and at the first opportunity became one.

That is well ahead of my story, however. Before the stage claimed me—or, more precisely, I claimed the stage—for good, I held more assorted boy jobs than a stock actor plays parts in a season. Not that there will be any order to these kid recollections. I put them down ramblingly, much as they come back. The excuse for putting them down is that they describe pretty accurately an average American Boy.

It was about the time of the hat-and-cap theater that I first ran off. That is what it was called, though it seems to have been no more than an unauthorized excursion. I was about five, and with a boy my age strayed to the Platte River. We investigated its stone-skipping and stick-floating possibilities and, following downstream, came to a paper mill, where we spent most of the day. No one appears to have asked us our business; probably we were taken for an employee’s kids. Certainly we went into the processes of paper making most thoroughly, for I remember bringing home a sample of the pulp in each of the stages of manufacture. After the paper mill, we explored a lumber yard; then, dusk coming on, hooked on the rear of a South Denver street car. The car happened to stop at our corner, and on the corner brother Gaylord was waiting