Timekeepers Read online

  I actually climbed that 14-storey building. What we did was put a wooden platform under me, two stories down, out of range of the camera, and shoot a sequence of me climbing a couple of stories, then stop and raise the platform for the next sequence. The platform was covered with mattresses but was only about 12-feet square and had no railings – if we’d had railings we’d have had to fasten the platform even further down, to keep the camera from picking them up. When I fell, I had to be careful to land flat on my back and not bounce. I did fall a couple of times, and was scared to death. That probably helped the picture.

  Did time let him down? No, the opposite occurred: time served. He got love and money and, in the most famous and desperate image in all silent cinema, a vision of Everyman successfully hanging on as time falls away. For now at least, we get to shoot another movie.

  One evening, in the spring of 2014, I phoned Suzanne Lloyd, Harold’s granddaughter. She had lived with Harold at his Greenacres estate for her entire youth, and when he died in 1971, with Suzanne aged 19, she took over the ownership of his films and copyright licences, and ever since she has been saving her grandfather from the disintegrations of time by safeguarding his reputation and boosting his exposure. When we spoke on the phone she was about to launch a new range of merchandising – mugs, cell phone cases, the usual fan junk – all with the classic Lloyd images: Harold under a scrum in The Freshman, Harold with his hair on end from High and Dizzy, Harold on the clock. In a few weeks it would be Harold Lloyd 100, the centenary anniversary of Just Nuts, regarded as his first proper one-reel film. The logo was already at the foot of his granddaughter’s emails: Harold dangling from his own giant glasses.

  I asked her why she believed the clock image was so enduring. ‘I think . . . I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think the movie had such an impact when it was made, and it was so thrilling, and it scared so many people. Even though some people don’t know who he is, they see that image and they go, “Oh, we know that guy”.’ When she’s not promoting his image, Lloyd is litigating against its use, and she talks of legal cases against those who have pirated his films and likeness without licence. The most common stolen image is Harold on the clock. ‘People think they own it,’ she said.

  Despite being his granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd used to call him Daddy. She sometimes still does. Her mother was Gloria, Harold and Mildred’s eldest, but Suzanne describes her as ‘very mentally unstable’ and unable to take care of her. Her parents divorced before she was two, and she only saw her father at holidays. Her grandparents became her guardians, and so Harold brought her up as her own. As a teenager she looked after his old nitrate films, a messy job. She remembers her grandfather taking her to meet the Beatles after a concert. She says that whenever he got depressed he would put a big piece of paper on the wall and write on it in red pen: ‘Why Worry?’

  Suzanne Lloyd told me she was planning Lloyd film festivals in Europe, and she does much to popularise his thousands of stereoscopic photographs, containing images of St Paul’s just after the Blitz and naked snaps of Marilyn Monroe and many other hot pin-ups, some of whom Harold is believed to have slept with.

  I asked her about his timekeeping, wondering whether he was punctual.

  Oh my God, don’t even get me crazy! Oh my God – punctual? My mother was so bad – she was always two hours late. So he used to go and lie to her, saying to meet two hours earlier than was needed. He was the most punctual person – unbelievable. He would stand at the bottom of the stairs and say, ‘Train’s pulling out of the station and you’re going to be left behind!’ He was on it, punctual, punctual. He was so in control, a good key issue with him. You knew he was in control.

  He always wore the same watch, a Rolex given to him by Bebe Daniels, who was Dorothy in the first, silent, version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1901), and appeared alongside Lloyd in several films, including Lonesome Luke Leans to the Literary (1916). His granddaughter said that Daniels was the first woman to break his heart, and he wore her watch until the end.

  _______________

  1 Spider-Man the superhero didn’t appear in Marvel Comics until 1962.

  2 According to Phillip L. Wenz (a full-time Santa Claus at a Santa theme park in Illinois, and a charter member of the International Santa Claus Hall of Fame in Santa Claus, Indiana), Strother was among the first to properly do the whole Santa shtick, and in so doing put less rigorous Santas to shame. Strother took Santa ‘to a level that included pure performance art’. I would so love to be making this up.

  3 The term ‘silent movie’ is a retronym, a word created to describe technological and societal progress. ‘Black-and-white television’ is also a retronym, as is the concept of the hardback book, the steam train and the analogue watch.

  4 The first movie flashback occurred in 1908 in the film Le fiabe della nonna, a grandmother telling a story that then dissolves to amplify the details. Another dissolve and we’re back in the present.

  Barry Salt has also made a painstaking study of the varying length of film scenes through the decades (i.e. the time between cuts). Analyzing hundreds of movies, he found that the average length of a scene of an American movie with standard projection rates in the 1920s ranged from 3.5 seconds in Don Juan to 7.5 seconds in The Magician. But in European movies it ranged from 5 seconds in the French films Eldorado and Poil de carotte to 13 or even 16 seconds in the German films Die Strasse and Scherben. This may be one reason why European films are often maligned for their slow pace. In the 1940s George Cukor and Howard Hawks had extended average scene lengths to about 13 seconds. By the 1990s, Salt had spotted a big difference between the fast-cut pace of mainstream Hollywood action movies (2.2 seconds per scene for Detroit Rock City and 2.6 in Deep Blue Sea) and many literate indie movies in the same year (the average scene in Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives lasted 28 seconds, while in Bullets Over Broadway it was an astonishing 51.9; Richard Linklater’s aptly named Slacker was 34.5).

  5 Many early D.W. Griffith movies appear particularly jerky compared to those of his contemporaries because he deliberately instructed they be filmed at 14 frames per second; the film historian Kevin Brownlow has suggested that he was just trying to squeeze as much as he could into the one-reel 1,000-foot restriction imposed upon him by his film company Biograph. Slowness brought its own dilemmas. The heat from a projector’s lamp would burn the film, and projectors carried a precautionary fire shutter which fell if the film was shown slower than 40 feet per minute.

  Wheels within wheels: ‘We never, ever, touch the movement with our fingers.’

  Chapter Seven

  Horology Part One: How to Make a Watch

  i) A Very Difficult Floor

  ‘You will be able to do this,’ an overconfident man in a well-lit room in a medieval town near the Swiss/German border tells me in the summer of 2015. ‘I can guarantee to 99.98 per cent that you will be able to complete this by yourself.’

  Before me on a low desk is a box of tools: a magnifying glass on a curled wire that attaches to my head and makes me look like an evil genius; a ‘tweezer’ that is heavier and sharper than the type used to sort stamps; a screwdriver with a head so thin it almost isn’t there; a wooden stick topped with suede; a pink plastic twig the size of a toothpick; a blue plastic compartmentalised tray that looks like the lid on takeaway coffee. And then there is the instruction: ‘If you lose or drop anything don’t try to find it, it’s a very difficult floor.’ And ‘we never, ever, touch the movement with our fingers. Why? Sweat. Your sweat will chew into the decoration of the movement roughly one to two months later, and then you can throw the watch away.’

  Yes, I am about to sort-of make a watch. I will disassemble a standard movement by removing screws, bridges and cogged wheels, and then I will try to reassemble it using memory, dexterity and an instructor called Christian Bresser. ‘Whenever we see golden springs we please do not take them out,’ Bresser continues, pointing to a tiny part on the silver disc in front of me. ‘A colleague of mine
released this wheel, and he was not paying attention, and it was under full power, and the wheel went straight into his eye and blinded him. So it’s always great to pay attention.’

  Until they get complicated, making a mechanical watch is a fairly standard thing, for almost all are made upon the same principles. A coiled mainspring (powered by winding or other means) drives a collection of wheels, which in turn causes the oscillation of a balance wheel several times a second. This oscillation is regulated by another set of gears known as the escapement, the mechanism that turns the watch hands the requisite amount at a constant rate – the hour hand once every 24 hours, the second hand once a minute. But before me on the table is, of course, something rather more complicated than this: 150 years of horological sophistication, an art so refined and intricate that a skilled watchmaker will squint and sweat and swear for 10 years to be worthy to build it. I have precisely 50 minutes.

  The headquarters of IWC (no one calls it the International Watch Company any more) lies in Schaffhausen, some 40 minutes’ drive north of Zurich on the banks of the Rhine, which has been a source of power, transport and inspiration since the company established itself in the late 1860s. For almost 150 years IWC has made elaborate and expensive timepieces for a discerning and loyal clientele, and its current range is not something a novice can usually make in 50 minutes. There is, for example, the Portugieser Minute Repeater, with its 46-hour power reserve, a Glucydur beryllium alloy balance, and a slide control that chimes the hour, the quarter-hour and the minute with two tuneful gongs (a mechanism that alone consists of around 250 parts), available in a platinum case and alligator strap for £81,900. There is the elegant Portofino, one for the ladies, perhaps, such as the Midsize Automatic Moon Phase with its 18-carat red-gold and 66-diamond case, with 12 further diamonds on the mother-of-pearl dial (beneath which hovers a ring displaying the Earth’s movement through the heavens), retailing at £29,250. There’s the Ingenieur Constant-Force Tourbillon, boasting an invariable amplitude of balance and thus near-perfect accuracy, a 96-hour power reserve, a double moon phase display for the northern and southern hemispheres, and a countdown dial to the next full moon, in platinum and ceramic at £205,000.

  And then there’s the model that made the company famous during the Second World War, the stark Big Pilot’s Watch, a massive simple dial with a huge glove-operable crown and an inner case with protection against magnetic fields and sudden drops in air pressure. First constructed in 1940, a revised model now has a recommended list price of £11,250. (Being Swiss, and interested in both money and neutrality, IWC sold its pilot watches to the RAF and the Luftwaffe, and both were grateful as they calibrated the best way to shoot each other out of the sky. Due to a navigational error in April 1944, Schaffhausen was bombed by an American pilot; the town suffered much damage and lost 45 lives, although the bomb that hit IWC fell through the roof and failed to detonate.)

  All these watches are very attractive. The most attractive thing about them is that they are not flashy or overbearing, and none of them, unlike many other watches at the top end of the market, resemble a Swiss Army knife. If you’re going to wear your money on your wrist, then it’s nice if you don’t cause offence while you’re doing it. IWC prides itself on making watches for purists, which may explain why the company is not as famous as some of its rivals and occupies an upper-middle tier in Swiss haute horologie, not quite at the altitude of Patek Philippe and Breguet, but certainly high enough to merit its own museum. The story it tells there is, predictably enough, one of glorious innovation and expansion: the building of its current factory on the site of a monastery orchard in 1875; its first wristwatch movement in 1915; the first automatic winding mechanism of 1950; the automatic diver’s watch of 1967 with pressure resistance to 20 bar; the world’s first titanium-cased chronograph of 1980, designed by F.A. Porsche.

  No one at IWC will give me even a rough estimate of how many watches it has made during its lifetime, or even how many it has made in the last year; it has become increasingly sensitive about such things since 2000, when it became, in exchange for 2.8 billion Swiss francs, part of Richemont, the luxury goods conglomerate which also owns, among others, Montblanc, Dunhill, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Vacheron Constantin and Cartier. But the company entertains visitors with many other statistics on its guided tour, such as the 659 parts required to make one of its magnificent Grande Complications, which is 453 parts more than there are bones in the human body.1 The tour involves the donning of white coats and plastic blue shoe covers, time in sealed air-pocket anterooms to minimise dust in the labs, and signs that read: ‘These demonstrating watches are complicated, fine mechanical masterpieces. Your guide would be glad to show you the functions of these watches, please do not try it yourself. Thank you for your understanding and have a nice day!’

  Along the way I saw men and women building layers of the less sophisticated models with manuals at their side; these are not the skilled artisans I would encounter later, but production-line staff employed after a few weeks’ training. (There is a careful distinction between ‘watch assembly’ and ‘watchmaking’. Watch assembly primarily involves piecing together parts that may have been assembled elsewhere, often manufactured by other companies, parts shipped in crates and compiled, much as one might make a car or any other intricate factory product that may, despite this intricacy, be learnt by heart. Watchmaking is another art altogether, something it would take years rather than weeks to learn, and requires not only steely patience and concentration, and a deep understanding of mechanics, but also practical inspiration; anyone can paint by numbers, only the few paint like Cézanne, Monet or Renoir). I then passed drilling and milling and polishing machines and swathes of lathes, and photographs of brand ambassadors Kevin Spacey and Lewis Hamilton. There are framed displays of IWC’s involvement with worthy causes and glamorous ones, including the education of underprivileged children in France, the Tribeca and London film festivals, and the protection of the giant iguana in the Galapagos Islands.

  I ended up in the Grande Complications lab where they produce the Portugieser Sidérale Scafusia, ten years on the drawing board, the most elaborate watch in the company’s history. Not only a constant-force tourbillon, not only a 96-hour power reserve, but also a display for sidereal time, which differs from solar time by a little less than four minutes each day, and will help the wearer ‘find the same star each night in the same position’ (the underside has a celestial chart showing hundreds of stars, which may, during production, be aligned to the customer’s personal location in the universe). The watch will make you feel important and insignificant at the same time, and will be accompanied by a bill for about £500,000.

  One of those responsible for this great feat is a German named Romulus Radu. Radu is 47, and has been with IWC for his entire career, but works at eye level to his desk, so that on first meeting he looks like a child. He needs to keep his back and shoulder straight, he says, ‘otherwise it would be like working for eight hours at a kitchen table’. He wears plastic pink gossamer caps on three fingers to improve his grip. He says he also works on the perpetual calendar, a watch offering a day/month/year display lasting 577.5 years. I asked what would happen to it after 577.5 years (self-destruction perhaps, or reversion back to a Casio?), but the answer was as inevitable as it was absurd: in the year 2593 the display will have to be corrected by one day, and ‘your local IWC boutique will be able to help with this’.

  ‘Not everyone has the hands for this job,’ Radu observes as he works on the base of a tourbillon. I suggest he must also have a particularly robust psychological constitution for the work he does.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because,’ I say, ‘I think I’d just go mad.’

  ‘Sometimes I go mad too, but only sometimes.’

  I look at the parts in front of him and his dashboard of screwdrivers, the thickest head thinner than a baby’s fingernail, and wonder how long he could concentrate without wanting to throw everything out of the window. />
  ‘Everyone has a bad day,’ he says, ‘but usually I can work for two or three hours on one part before I need a break.’

  A coffee break?

  ‘I have one in the morning and an espresso at lunchtime. One has to be careful.’

  Suddenly, looking at Radu’s work, I’m presented with the best reason to buy a watch when I don’t need one – because it is a masterpiece. Having simplified and mastered time more than a century before, the master watchmakers of Switzerland, Germany, France (and, until the 1950s, England) have had plenty of time to make adjustments. So they have complicated things.

  In May 1873, the American magazine Watchmaker and Jeweller carried an advertisement announcing the successful foundation of a company ‘with the object of combining all the excellence of the American system of mechanism with the more skilful hand labor of the Swiss’. IWC, founded five years before, was finally in business. The ad showed a palatial factory, which hadn’t actually been built yet, and a guarantee that its watches were ‘the least liable to get out of order’. The products – initially elaborate pocket watches on chains or brooches – came in 17 patterns and boasted stem-winding systems not requiring a key. They were offered at prices ‘that defy competition’.

  IWC’s founder, Florentine Ariosto Jones, had trained as a watchmaker in Boston before the Civil War and moved to Europe not long after its conclusion (he may have been injured in the fighting; some accounts suggest this is why we have only one adult photograph of him). Jones was in his mid-20s and perceived an opportunity: the possibility of applying advanced industrial techniques to the cottage-style specialisation of the master watchmakers of Geneva and Lausanne. Rather than make every watch from scratch, a base model could be established with interchangeable and replaceable parts using milling machines to make screws and escape wheels, and imported workbenches to make case decorations. The Americans (namely Jones and his associate Charles Kidder) would bring the production line, while the Swiss would provide something they are still famous for: the finishing school.