Another screen performer who sailed a few choppy seas before coming into port is that delightful young comedian, Harold Lloyd. The first time I ever met Lloyd was at a dinner at which Chaplin was also present. The latter was talking on one of his favourite themes, religion or economics—I forget which—and his words, always clipped just enough to reveal his English birth, were coming thick and fast. I noticed that as he spoke a rather tall, rather serious-looking young fellow, who was one of a group in an opposite corner of the room, was looking at him wonderingly, almost wistfully. He himself was not saying a word.
“Who is that chap over there?” I asked of the man next to me.
“Oh, don’t you know him? That’s Harold Lloyd, the comedian.”
“Quiet fellow, isn’t he?” I remarked. “I’ve hardly heard him say a word.”
“He’s usually like that at parties,” replied the other man. “I’ve been around with that boy a lot and I’ve never once seen him cut up like Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. He says he doesn’t feel that way when he isn’t on the set—that it isn’t until he gets on the old horn-rimmed spectacles and the rest of the make-up that his comedy catches up with him.”
“What sort of a chap is he, anyhow?” asked I a few moments later.
The answer was prompt and incisive. “The nicest, kindest, most wholesome, most sincere young fellow in Hollywood. Harold Lloyd—why, he’s the sort of kid you’d just sit around and pray your daughter would marry!”
I hasten to say that there is nothing eccentric about the view of Lloyd just presented. All that I have since heard of the brilliant young comedian corroborates this first glowing account. When later on, too, I came to have a long talk with him any vestige of the scepticism normally induced by such universal praise vanished.
When I had this talk there was no trace of the silent young man who had first aroused my curiosity. In fact the shyness which sometimes overwhelms him at a party disappears entirely in a tête-à-tête or in a small group of friendly spirits. Then he talks a great deal. He expresses himself well and every word has a drive, the drive of his tremendous earnestness.
Lloyd, I think, would make a poor subject for psychoanalysis. He seems to have no complexes. He probably never caught any colds in his subconscious. A fine balance is the outstanding effect of his whole personality.