When Harold Lloyd stopped in Chicago in the spring of 1923, publicists for his new film, Safety Last, wanted him to appear on the south tower of the Wrigley Building and dedicate its clock with a bottle of champagne. The stunt was modeled on the film’s heart-stopping scene in which Lloyd’s character–a lowly department store clerk–caps his ascent of a 12-story building by dangling from the minute hand of the clock on top. Lloyd went up to the 26th floor, where a steeplejack was supposed to don his coat, hat, and trademark tortoise-shell glasses and double for the star while suspended in a rope seat. At a 1969 seminar in Los Angeles, Lloyd recalled that his stand-in then dropped out due to the high winds, saying, “Gentlemen, I need the money but I don’t want to commit suicide.” As Lloyd told it: “So I got a megaphone and I went downstairs. I got on a taxicab. I got the crowd’s attention, and I told them exactly what happened. I told them I did not want to commit suicide. Of course, it became a big joke. We got tremendous play in all the Chicago papers, more than if we had gone through with the stunt.”
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Lloyd is often ranked by critics behind the more idiosyncratic Chaplin and Buster Keaton, though he bested them at the box office. One secret to his success with fans may have been his habit of routinely screening as many as seven versions of a film for test audiences. He continued this practice in the early 60s when he put together edited compilations of his films, which he’d kept out of distribution for decades. “I went to screenings with him, then we’d go home and add up all the cards,” recalls his granddaughter Suzanne Lloyd, executive producer of the documentary Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius and coauthor of the lavishly illustrated book Harold Lloyd: Master Comedian. In a 1923 Ladies Home Journal article Lloyd claimed that he satisfied moviegoers by achieving “a certain standardization of comedy” and “blending of average tastes,” a marketing strategy that seems startlingly contemporary.
