In
case the name doesn't ring a bell, he's the guy with the straw hat and Woody Allen
glasses, in the suit, dangling from a clock on the side
of a building so far above a busy avenue the cars below look like
ladybugs on wheels.
Harold
Lloyd.
Movie
comedian of the silent 1920s. Called himself the “Glass Character”
because his trademark glasses were fake. No glass in them. The guy
was a nut. Blew one of his hands to Kingdom Come fiddling with what
he thought was a stage prop bomb. It was real. Deliberately gave
himself powerful electric shocks to get his hair to stand straight
up. Did his own stunts—the clock dangle, the shocked hair,
pretending to trip and stagger on building ledges up in the sky,
netless—a brave, some would say foolhardy, genius. Nut.
Knowing
this and being acrophobic, I can't watch his movies anymore. It even
scares me to look at the photos. I'll let Margaret Gunning watch the
movies and look at the photos, and I'll read her reports. Well, then
again, I don't have to anymore. I've read her book, The GlassCharacter. It's all in there.
Margaret,
poor girl, is in love with Harold Lloyd. It started out as just a
fascination with soundless images. Love snuck up and struck her dumb
somewhere amid the exhaustive research she was conducting for a book
about what was then still just a fascination. Love. Alas. Margaret is
happily married and has two lovely daughters and four darling
grandchildren, yet is far too young to leap the gap into the day when
her beloved Harold held sway with the girls of a baby Hollywood.
Fortunately, for her and for us, she's a novelist. She has the skill
to weave the magic carpet to carry her backward in time to those days
of yore, those Harold heyday days, and set her gently down along the
path the love of her dreams must follow should he wish a rebirth in
the imaginations and hearts of admirers forevermore. She's woven that
carpet. It's large enough to take us with her on that long strange
trip. I rode along on a test flight. We made it back, and I'm still
agog.
When
we stepped off the carpet in la la land I saw that Margaret had
changed. No longer the familiar author of two of my favorite
novels—Better than Life, and Mallory—she'd become
sixteen-year-old Jane Chorney, a virgin and erstwhile soda jerk in
Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a terrible crush on movie idol Harold
Lloyd. Soon after we landed, Margaret /Jane (and later “Muriel”,
as you will learn) decided to pack up her meager belongings, cash in
her chips (two cents shy of fifty bucks) and head to Hollywood and
into the arms of her eternal love. I might have tried to instill
sense in her were I anything more than invisible eyes and ears.
Unfortunately I had lost my voice and corporeal substance upon
alighting in the Santa Fe dust.
So
it was off to Hollywood via a wearying, bumpy bus ride,
Margaret/Jane/Muriel full of glitzy dreams and innocence, and me
hunkered weightless, mute and unseen on her delicate shoulder.
I
won't say more. I took no notes and had to avert my gaze any number
of times during moments that really were none of my personal concern.
The Glass Character is Margaret/Jane/Muriel's story, not mine.
What I did see and hear, and learn during our holiday in history is
captured with such lucid, insightful poignancy I can't help but
wonder if Margaret didn't in fact remain there, dictating her journal
to a holographic image of herself in the distant future tapping on a
keyboard somewhere in a place called Coquitlam, B.C.
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