“CHARLIE”, “DOUG” AND “MARY”
The famous trio at play after a strenuous day at the studio.
It is due to the old-fashioned gentleman in Lloyd that he will tolerate no suggestion of anything broad, anything Hogarthian in his comedy. One day one of his advisors came to him and said, “I’ve got it, Speed, a bit of business that will go over big!”
When he heard what it was Lloyd retorted promptly, “Not on your life! If I can’t be funny and clean, too—why, then I’ll decide to be just clean.”
This year Lloyd tells me he expects to make about a million dollars. Yet it was not so many years ago when, according to his own amused word, his most cherished ambition was to be able to buy a silk shirt. His start toward this goal is as original as anything offered in the annals of motion-picture success.
When just a youngster out of high school Lloyd came to Hollywood with the intention of going into motion-pictures. Motion-pictures, however, seemed to have an equally firm intention of keeping him out. Every studio to which he applied turned him down, and finally he hit upon a unique “open sesame.” Noticing that everybody who was in costume passed through the forbidden portals without challenge, Harold decided that there was nothing obligatory about a sack coat. So he got himself a costume, and from that time forth he has stayed on the inside.
While working as an extra in one of the studios he met another young extra named Hal Roach. After some time the two of them, with only several hundred dollars to sustain their resolution, decided to go into business for themselves.
“I wasn’t any meteor, I can tell you that!” comments Harold in relating his experiences of these early days. “But we did succeed in selling a few pictures the first year. The next we sold more. Still, that limited success of ours did not seem to get me much nearer to the silk shirt. The fact of it is that we were terribly poor in those days, for every cent we made we put back into our pictures.”
This indomitable desire to improve his films makes every one feel that even “Grandma’s Boy,” that story where his irresistible comedy is developed from the most vital psychological situation he has yet chosen, is merely a starting-point in the triumphs of characterisation that await him. Anent this picture of his, Lloyd told a friend of mine that the tribute to “Grandma’s Boy” which he most appreciated came from Charlie Chaplin.
“Charlie wrote to me as soon as he saw it,” he confided to this friend, “and what do you suppose he said? Why, that the story was an inspiration to him to do his own very best work, to be contented with nothing else for himself.” And then, his dark eyes glowing with pleasure, he added, “Just fancy what that meant to me—coming from Chaplin!”