June Havoc
in Gentleman's Agreement (1947)
Born	Ellen Evangeline Hovick November 8, 1912 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Died	March 28, 2010(2010-03-28) (aged 97) Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.
Occupation	Actress, dancer, director, writer
Years active	1918–1990
Spouse	Bobby Reed (1929–19??) Donald S. Gibbs (1935–1942)[1] William Spier (1948–1973)[2]
Children	April Hyde (April 2, 1930 – December 28, 1998)
Parents	John Olaf Hovick Rose Thompson Hovick

June Havoc (November 8, 1912 – March 28, 2010)^[3][4] was a Canadian-born American actress, dancer, writer, and theater director. Havoc was a child Vaudeville performer under the tutelage of her mother.^[5] She later acted on Broadway and in Hollywood, and stage directed, both on and off-Broadway. She last appeared on television in 1990 on General Hospital. Havoc was the younger sister of burlesque entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee.

Life and career[link]

She was born as either "Ellen Evangeline Hovick" or "Ellen June Hovick," in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, probably in 1912, although some sources indicate 1913. She herself was uncertain of the year – according to The New York Times obituary, her mother forged several birth certificates.^[6] (Her mother reportedly had five birth certificates for her.^[6])

Her lifelong career in show business began when she was a child, billed as "Baby June".^[7] Her only full sibling, Rose Louise Hovick (1911–1970), was called "Louise" by her family members. Their parents were Rose Thompson Hovick (1890–1954) and John Olaf Hovick, a Norwegian American,^[4][8] who worked as a newspaper advertising man.

13 November 1927 ad in the Decatur Review

Following their parents' divorce, the two sisters earned the family's income by appearing in Vaudeville, where June's talent often overshadowed Louise. Baby June got an audition with Alexander Pantages (1876–1936), who had come to Seattle in 1902 to build theaters up and down the west coast of the United States. Soon, she was launched in Vaudeville and also appeared in Hollywood movies. She couldn’t speak until the age of three, but the films were all silent. She would cry for the cameras when her mother told her that the family's dog had died.^[9]

In December 1928, aged 15 or 16, Havoc, in an effort to escape her overbearing mother's ambitions for her career, eloped with Bobby Reed, a boy in the vaudeville act. Rose reported Reed to the police and he was arrested. Rose had a concealed gun on her when she met Bobby at the police station. She pulled the trigger, but the safety was on. Eventually, Reed was released and June married him, leaving both her family and the act. The marriage did not last, but the two remained on friendly terms. By the age of 17, she had an affair with an older married man, Jamie Smythe, reportedly a big-time marathon promoter. He fathered her only child, April Hyde (April 2, 1930 – December 28, 1998),^[10][11] who was an actress in the 1950s known as April Kent.^[12]

June's elder sister, Louise, gravitated to burlesque and became a well-known performer using the stage name Gypsy Rose Lee. June adopted the surname of Havoc, a variant of her birth name. She got her first acting break on Broadway in Sigmund Romberg's Forbidden Melody in 1936. She later starred in Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey on Broadway. Havoc moved to Hollywood in the late 1940s, appearing in such movies as Gentleman's Agreement. She married for a second time, in 1935, to Donald S. Gibbs; they later divorced. Her third marriage, to radio and television director and producer William Spier (1906–1973), lasted from January 25, 1948 until his death.^[6]

Havoc and her sister Gypsy continued to get demands for money from their mother, who had opened a boardinghouse for women in a 10-room apartment on West End Avenue in New York City, the property rented for her by Gypsy, and a farm in Highland Mills, New York. Rose shot and killed one of her guests (who, according to Erik Lee Preminger, Gypsy's son, was Rose's lover and had made a pass at Gypsy). The incident was explained away as a suicide and Rose was not prosecuted.^[13]

Rose died in 1954 of cancer. The sisters then were free to write about her without risking a lawsuit. Gypsy's memoir, titled Gypsy, was published in 1957 and was taken as inspirational material for the Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents Broadway musical Gypsy: A Musical Fable. June did not like the way she was portrayed in the piece but was eventually persuaded not to oppose it for her sister's sake. The play also sparked such famous songs as "Small World", "Together (Wherever We Go)", and "Everything's Coming Up Roses". The play and the subsequent movie deal assured Gypsy a steady income. Gypsy Rose Lee died of lung cancer in 1970, aged 59, and is interred at Inglewood Park Cemetery, in Inglewood, California.

Havoc wrote two memoirs, Early Havoc and More Havoc. She also wrote a play entitled Marathon '33, based on Early Havoc with elements of They Shoot Horses, Don't They? The play starred Julie Harris, and ran briefly on Broadway.

Death[link]

Havoc died at her Stamford, Connecticut home on March 28, 2010, at age 97.^[14] Her body was cremated and her ashes were scattered in the garden of her Connecticut home.^[2]

Honors[link]

Havoc was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play in 1964 for Marathon '33,^[15] which she also wrote.^[16]

Legacy[link]

The June Havoc Theatre, housed at the Abingdon Theatre in New York City, was named for her in 2003.^[17][18]

Filmography[link]

Features[link]

Short subjects[link]

• Hey There! (1918)
• Hedda Hopper's Hollywood No. 6 (1942)

Television work[link]

• Willy, as Wilma "Willy" Dodger, a lawyer for a vaudeville troupe in New York City (CBS, 1954–1955)
• What's My Line? January 18, 1953 Mystery Guest
• The Mother Bit (1957) Studio One program
• Mr. Broadway (1957)
• The Untouchables – The Larry Fay Story (1960)
• The June Havoc Show (1964) (cancelled after a few weeks)
• The Outer Limits: Cry of Silence (1964) with Eddie Albert and Arthur Hunnicutt
• The Boy Who Stole the Elephant (1970)
• Nightside (1973)
• The Paper Chase episode "The Clay Footed Idol" as Mrs Margaret Peters (1979)
• Search for Tomorrow (cast member in 1986)
• Murder, She Wrote ("The Grand Old Lady," 1989) -- an episode introduced by Angela Lansbury's leading character and starring Havoc as a guest mystery-solver from the past, told in the era she lived in.
• General Hospital (cast member in 1990)

References[link]

External links[link]

Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: June Havoc

• June Havoc at the Internet Movie Database
• June Havoc at the Internet Broadway Database
• June Havoc at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• June Havoc at Find a Grave
• Baby June (June Havoc) in the 1918 Harold Lloyd film, On the Jump

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2012)

"The Man" is a slang phrase that may refer to the government or to some other authority in a position of power. In addition to this derogatory connotation, it may also serve as a term of respect and praise.

The phrase "the Man is keeping me down" is commonly used to describe oppression. The phrase "stick it to the Man" encourages resistance to authority, and essentially means "fight back" or "resist", either openly or via sabotage.^[1]

History[link]

The earliest recorded use^{[citation needed]} of the term "the Man" in the American sense dates back to a letter written by a young Alexander Hamilton in September 1772, when he was 15. In a letter to his father James Hamilton, published in the Royal Dutch-American Gazette, he described the response of the Dutch governor of St. Croix to a hurricane that raked that island on August 31, 1772. "Our General has issued several very salutary and humane regulations and both in his publick and private measures, has shewn himself the Man." ^{[2][dubious – discuss]} In the Southern U.S. states, the phrase came to be applied to any man or any group in a position of authority, or to authority in the abstract. From about the 1950s the phrase was also an underworld code word for police, the warden of a prison or other law enforcement or penal authorities.

It was also used as a term for a drug dealer in the 1950s and 1960s and can be seen in such media as Curtis Mayfield's "No Thing On Me", William Burroughs's novel Naked Lunch, and in the Velvet Underground song "I'm Waiting for the Man", in which Lou Reed sings about going to Uptown Manhattan, specifically Lexington Avenue and 125th Street, to buy heroin.

The use of this term was expanded to counterculture groups and their battles against authority, such as the Yippies, which, according to a May 19, 1969 article in U.S. News and World Report, had the "avowed aim ... to destroy 'The Man', their term for the present system of government". The term eventually found its way into humorous usage, such as in a December 1979 motorcycle ad from the magazine Easyriders which featured the tagline, "California residents: Add 6% sales tax for The Man."

In present day, the phrase has been popularized in commercials and cinema, featuring particularly prominently as a recurring motif in the 2003 film School of Rock.^[3][4][5][6]

Use as praise[link]

The term has also been used as an approbation or form of praise. This may refer to the recipient's status as the leader or authority within a particular context, or it might be assumed to be a shortened form of a phrase like "He is the man (who is in charge)." One example of this usage dates to 1879 when Otto von Bismarck commented, referring to Benjamin Disraeli's pre-eminent position at the Congress of Berlin, "The old Jew, he is the man."^{[7][dubious – discuss]}

In more modern usage, it can be a superlative compliment ("you da man!") indicating that the subject is currently standing out amongst his peers even though they have no special designation or rank, such as a basketball player who is performing better than the other players on the court. It can also be used as a genuine compliment with an implied, slightly exaggerated or sarcastic tone, usually indicating that the person has indeed impressed the speaker but by doing something relatively trivial.

See also[link]

• Absentee landlord
• Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
• New World Order (conspiracy theory)
• Ruling class
• The Establishment
• Power elite
• Corrections officer
• YTMND

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Lighter, J.E. (Ed.). (1997). Random House Dictionary of American Slang. New York: Random House.

George Raft
from the trailer for Invisible Stripes (1939)
Born	George Ranft (1901-09-26)September 26, 1901 New York City, New York, U.S.
Died	November 24, 1980(1980-11-24) (aged 79) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1929–1978
Spouse	Grace Mulrooney (1923-1970; her death)

George Raft (born George Ranft; September 26, 1901 – November 24, 1980) was an American film actor and dancer identified with portrayals of gangsters in crime melodramas (mob films) of the 1930s and 1940s. A stylish leading man in dozens of movies, today George Raft is mostly known for his gangster roles in Billy Wilder's 1959 comedy Some Like it Hot, the original Scarface (1932), and Each Dawn I Die (1939), and as a dancer in Bolero (1934) and a truck driver in They Drive by Night (1940). Raft's real-life association with the New York mob gave his on-screen image an added realism.^{[citation needed]}

Early life[link]

Raft was born on September 26, 1901^[1] in Hell's Kitchen, New York City, the son of Eva (Glockner) and Conrad Ranft. His father was born in Massachusetts, to German immigrant parents, and his mother was a German immigrant.^[2] His parents were married on November 17, 1895 in Manhattan, and his sister, Eva, known as "Katie" was born on April 18, 1896. Although Raft's birth year has been reported to be 1895, the 1900 Census for New York City lists his elder sister, Katie, as his parents' only child with two children born and only one living.^[3] On the 1910 Census, he is listed as being 8 years old, and his birth record can be found in the New York City birth index as being 1901.^[1][4] A boyhood friend of gangster Owney Madden (and later a "wheel man" for the mob"), Raft admittedly narrowly avoided a life of crime.^[5] Raft spoke German fluently, having learned the language from his parents.

Dancer[link]

As a young man he showed aptitude in dancing which, with his elegant fashion sense, enabled him to gain employment as a dancer in New York City nightclubs, often in the same venues as Rudolph Valentino before Valentino became a movie actor. Raft became part of the stage act of flamboyant speakeasy hostess Texas Guinan and his success led him to Broadway where he again worked as a dancer. Raft later made a semi-autobiographical film called Broadway (1942) about this period in which he plays himself. He also worked in London as a chorus boy in the early 1920s. Fred Astaire, in his autobiography Steps in Time (1959), says Raft was a lightning-fast dancer and did "the fastest Charleston I ever saw."^[6]

Vi Kearney, later a dancer in shows for Charles Cochran and Andre Charlot, was quoted as saying:

Oh yes, I knew him (George Raft). We were in a big show together. Sometimes, to eke out our miserable pay, we'd do a dance act after the show at a club and we'd have to walk back home because all the buses had stopped for the night by that time. He'd tell me how he was going to be a big star one day and once he said that when he'd made it how he'd make sure to arrange a Hollywood contract for me. I just laughed and said: 'Come on, Georgie, stop dreaming. We're both in the chorus and you know it.' [Did he arrange the contract?] Yes. But by that time I'd decided to marry... [Was he (Raft) ever your boyfriend?] How many times do I have to tell you ...chorus girls don't go out with chorus boys.^{[citation needed]}

Gangster icon[link]

In 1929, Raft relocated to Hollywood and took small roles. In Taxi! (1932) with James Cagney and Loretta Young, Raft has a colorful unbilled dancing role as Cagney's competitor in a dance contest who wins only to be knocked down by Cagney's loonily pugnacious character. His big break came later that same year as the nickel-flipping second lead alongside Paul Muni's raging killer in Scarface (1932), and Raft's convincing portrayal led to speculation that Raft was a gangster. Due to his life-long friendship with Owney Madden, Raft was a friend or acquaintance of several other crime figures, including Bugsy Siegel and Siegel's old friend Meyer Lansky. When Gary Cooper's romantic escapades put him on one gangster's hit list, Raft reportedly interceded and persuaded the mobster to spare Cooper.^[7][8] Orson Welles explained to Peter Bogdanovich in their interview book This is Orson Welles that, as Raft's career accelerated, the actor was particularly an idol and role model for actual gangsters of the period in terms of dress and attitude.

Wm. Holden and Raft in Invisible Stripes

He was one of the three most popular gangster actors of the 1930s, with James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson; Raft ranked far above Humphrey Bogart in fame and boxoffice clout throughout the decade. When the studio refused to hire Texas Guinan, the performer upon whom one of the movie's characters was based, because of her age, Raft advocated for the casting of his friend, Mae West, in a supporting role in his first film as leading man, Night After Night (1932), which launched her movie career.^[9] Raft appeared the following year in Raoul Walsh's energetic period piece The Bowery as Steve Brodie, supposedly the first man to jump off Brooklyn Bridge and survive, with Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, Fay Wray and Pert Kelton. Raft memorably dances into the picture in his opening scene wearing a derby.

Some of his other movies include If I Had A Million (1932; an episodic ensemble film in which he plays a forger hiding from police, suddenly given a million dollars with no place to cash the check), Bolero (1934; in a rare role as a dancer rather than a gangster), Limehouse Blues (1934; with Anna May Wong), a brutal and fast-paced adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key (1935; remade in 1942 with Alan Ladd in Raft's role as a result of the success of the remake of Hammett's The Maltese Falcon), Souls at Sea (1937; with Gary Cooper), Spawn of the North (1938; with Raft garnering top billing over Henry Fonda and John Barrymore), two with Humphrey Bogart: Invisible Stripes (1939) and They Drive by Night (1940), with Bogart in supporting roles, Each Dawn I Die (1939; with James Cagney and Raft as convicts in prison), and Manpower (1941; with Edward G. Robinson and Marlene Dietrich). Although Raft received third billing in Manpower, he played the lead.

Unexpected career decline[link]

The years 1940 and 1941 proved to be Raft's career peak. He went into a gradual professional decline over the next decade, in part due to turning down some of the most-famous roles in movie history, notably Raoul Walsh's High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon; both roles unexpectedly transformed Humphrey Bogart from supporting player to a major force in Hollywood in 1941. Raft understandably chose Raoul Walsh's Manpower over The Maltese Falcon because the latter film's director, John Huston, had never directed before and a racier pre-Code version of the film already existed. Raft was also reported to have turned down Bogart's role in Casablanca (1942), although according to some Warner Bros. memos, this story is apocryphal.^[10]

Following the release of the espionage thriller Background to Danger (1943), a film intended to capitalize on the success of Casablanca, Raft demanded termination of his Warner Brothers contract. Jack Warner was prepared to pay Raft a $10,000 settlement, but the actor either misunderstood or was so eager to be free of the studio that it was he who gave Warner a check in that amount.^{[citation needed]} Raft is widely believed to have been functionally illiterate, which could account for the confusion.

Judy Canova and George Raft pictured in 1979

Raft's career as a leading man continued through the 1940s with films of gradually declining quality and his career spiraled steadily downward as a result until the iconic star was finally limited as a box office draw.

During the 1950s he was reduced to working as a greeter at the Capri Casino in Havana, Cuba, where he was part owner along with Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante.^[11] In 1953, Raft also starred as Lt. George Kirby in a syndicated television series police drama titled I'm the Law, which ran for one season and was one of the earliest instances of a movie star of his previous calibre accepting the lead in a TV series. Raft wound up occasionally accepting supporting roles in movies, such as playing second fiddle to Robert Taylor in Rogue Cop (1954).

He satirized his gangster image with a well-received supporting performance in Some Like it Hot (1959), but this did not lead to a comeback, and he spent the remainder of the decade making films in Europe. He played a small role as a casino owner in Ocean's 11 (1960) opposite the Rat Pack. His final film appearances were in Sextette (1978), reunited with Mae West in a cameo, and The Man with Bogart's Face (1980).

Ray Danton played Raft in The George Raft Story (1961), which co-starred Jayne Mansfield. Raft himself excoriated the movie's inaccuracies upon its release.

In the 1991 biographical movie Bugsy, the character of George Raft was played by Joe Mantegna.

Raft has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for contributions to Motion Pictures at 6150 Hollywood Boulevard, and for Television at 1500 Vine St.

Personal life[link]

Raft married Grayce Mulrooney, several years his senior, in 1923, long before his stardom. The pair separated soon thereafter, but Grayce, a devout Catholic, refused to grant Raft a divorce, and he remained married to and supported her until her death in 1970. A romantic figure in Hollywood, Raft had love affairs with Betty Grable, Marlene Dietrich, and Mae West. He stated publicly that he wanted to marry Norma Shearer, with whom he had a long romance, but his wife's refusal to allow a divorce eventually caused Shearer to end the affair.^[5][12]

In 1967 he was denied entry into the United Kingdom (where he had been installed as Casino Director at a casino known as the "Colony Club") due to his underworld associations.^[13]

Death[link]

Raft died from leukemia at age 79 in Los Angeles, California, on November 24, 1980. Two days earlier, Mae West had died and their bodies were at one point alongside each other in the hallway of the same mortuary at the same time. Raft was interred in Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Filmography[link]

• Queen of the Night Clubs (1929) with Texas Guinan
• Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929)
• Side Street (1929) with Tom Moore, Owen Moore, and Matt Moore (Raft unbilled dancer)
• Quick Millions (1931) with Spencer Tracy and Marguerite Churchill
• Goldie (1931) with Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow
• Hush Money (1931) with Joan Bennett and Myrna Loy
• Palmy Days (1931) with Eddie Cantor
• Scarface (1932) with Paul Muni and Ann Dvorak (Raft flips the nickel in his breakthrough role)
• Love Is a Racket (1932) (scenes deleted)
• Madame Racketeer (1932) with Alison Skipworth and Richard Bennett
• Night World (1932) with Lew Ayres, Mae Clarke, and Boris Karloff
• Dancers in the Dark (1932) with Miriam Hopkins
• Taxi! (1932) with James Cagney and Loretta Young
• Winner Take All (1932) with James Cagney
• Night After Night (1932) with Mae West as a fictionalized Texas Guinan (Raft's 1st leading role)
• Under Cover Man (1932) with Nancy Carroll
• If I Had a Million (1932; Raft plays a man on Death Row)
• Pick-Up (1933) with Sylvia Sidney
• The Bowery (1933) with Wallace Beery, Fay Wray, and Pert Kelton (Raft 2nd billed)
• The Midnight Club (1933) with Clive Brook (Raft 2nd billed)
• The Trumpet Blows (1934) with Adolphe Menjou
• All of Me (1934) with Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins (Raft 3rd billed)
• Bolero (1934) with Carole Lombard and Ray Milland (besides Scarface, Raft's signature film)
• Limehouse Blues (1934) with Anna May Wong
• Every Night at Eight (1935) with Alice Faye and Frances Langford
• The Glass Key (1935) with Edward Arnold
• She Couldn't Take It (1935) with Joan Bennett
• Stolen Harmony (1935) with Lloyd Nolan and William Cagney
• Rumba (1935) with Carole Lombard
• Yours for the Asking (1936) with Dolores Costello and Ida Lupino
• It Had to Happen (1936) with Rosalind Russell
• Souls at Sea (1937) with Gary Cooper (Raft 2nd billed)
• You and Me (1938) with Sylvia Sidney (with bizarre musical interludes by Kurt Weill)
• Spawn of the North (1938) with Henry Fonda and John Barrymore
• I Stole a Million (1939) with Claire Trevor
• The Lady's from Kentucky (1939) with Ellen Drew
• Each Dawn I Die (1939) with James Cagney (Raft 2nd billed)
• The House Across the Bay (1940) with Joan Bennett
• They Drive by Night (1940) with Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino, and Humphrey Bogart
• Invisible Stripes (1940) with William Holden and Humphrey Bogart
• Manpower (1941) with Edward G. Robinson and Marlene Dietrich (Raft 3rd billed but played the lead)
• Broadway (1942) with Pat O'Brien and Broderick Crawford (Raft plays himself as a young B'way dancer)
• Background to Danger (1943) with Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre
• Stage Door Canteen (1943) with an all-star cast
• Follow the Boys (1944) with Vera Zorina
• Nob Hill (1945) with Joan Bennett
• Johnny Angel (1945) with Claire Trevor and Hoagy Carmichael
• Whistle Stop (1946) with Ava Gardner and Victor McLaglen
• Nocturne (1946)
• Mr. Ace (1946) with Sylvia Sidney
• Intrigue (1947) with June Havoc
• Christmas Eve (1947) with George Brent, Randolph Scott, and Joan Blondell
• Race Street (1948) with William Bendix and Marilyn Maxwell
• A Dangerous Profession (1949)
• Johnny Allegro (1949) with Nina Foch and Will Geer
• Outpost in Morocco (1949) with Marie Windsor and Akim Tamiroff
• We Shall Go to Paris (1949)
• Red Light (1949) with Virginia Mayo, Gene Lockhart, and Raymond Burr
• A Dangerous Profession (1949) with Ella Raines, Pat O'Brien, and Jim Backus
• I'll Get You For This (1951; AKA "Lucky Nick Cain") with Coleen Gray
• Loan Shark (1952) with Dorothy Hart
• Dramma nella Kasbah (1953; AKA "The Man From Cairo")
• I'm the Law (1954; 3-episode TV series)
• Black Widow (1954) with Ginger Rogers, Van Heflin, and Gene Tierney (Raft 4th billed)
• Rogue Cop (1954) with Robert Taylor and Janet Leigh (Raft 3rd billed)
• A Bullet for Joey (1955) with Edward G. Robinson (Raft 2nd billed)
• Around the World in 80 Days (1956) with David Niven and Marlene Dietrich (Raft cameo)
• Jet Over the Atlantic (1959) with Guy Madison and Virginia Mayo (Raft 3rd billed)
• Some Like It Hot (1959) with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon (Raft 4th billed)
• Ocean's 11 (1960) with the Rat Pack (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop)
• The Ladies Man (1961) with Jerry Lewis (Raft cameo)
• For Those Who Think Young (1964)
• The Patsy (1964)
• The Upper Hand (1966) with Jean Gabin (Raft 2nd billed)
• Five Golden Dragons (1967) with Robert Cummings and Klaus Kinski
• Casino Royale (1967)
• Skidoo (1968) with Jackie Gleason and Groucho Marx
• Madigan's Millions (1968)
• Hammersmith Is Out (1972) with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Peter Ustinov
• Deadhead Miles (1972)
• Sextette (1978) with Mae West and Timothy Dalton (Raft cameo)
• The Man with Bogart's Face (1980)

Short Subjects:

• Hollywood on Parade No. A-9 (1933)
• Hollywood on Parade No. B-5 (1933)
• Hollywood on Parade No. B-8 (1934)
• The Fashion Side of Hollywood (1935)
• Screen Snapshots Series 18, No. 4 (1938)
• Meet the Stars #6: Stars at Play (1941)
• Hedda Hopper's Hollywood No. 2 (1941)
• Hollywood Park (1946)
• Screen Snapshots: Vacation at Del Mar (1949)

Footnotes[link]

• 1900 United States Federal Census, Census Place: Manhattan, New York, New York; Roll T623_1109; Page: 4B; Enumeration District: 642.
• 1910; Census Place: Manhattan Ward 12, New York, New York; Roll T624_1025; Page: 19A; Enumeration District: 668; Image: 1104
• Ancestry.com. New York City Births, 1891-1902 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2000.
• New York City Grooms Index, http://www.italiangen.org/NYCmarriageresults.asp?kind=exact&Esurname=ranft&Efirst=&CertNbr=&StartYear=&EndYear=&B1=Submit.
• New York City Birth Index, familysearch.org, https://beta.familysearch.org/s/recordDetails/show?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fpilot.familysearch.org%2Frecords%2Ftrk%3A%2Ffsrs%2Frr_655994601%2Fp1&hash=MPAfKvgWGXfZ5STyuqUCQxOVNk8%253D.
• Social Security Death Index, Ancestry.com.

Further reading[link]

• Beaver, Jim. George Raft. Films in Review, April, 1978.
• Lewis, Brad. Hollywood's Celebrity Gangster. The Incredible Life and Times of Mickey Cohen. Enigma Books: New York, 2007. ISBN 978-1-929631-65-0.
• Parish, James Robert. The George Raft File: The Unauthorized Biography. New York: Drake Publishers, 1973. ISBN 0-87749-520-3.
• Wallace, Stone. George Raft-The Man Who Would Be Bogart. Albany: BearManor Media, 2008. ISBN 1-59393-123-9.
• Yablonsky, Lewis. George Raft. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1974. ISBN 0-07-072235-8.

External links[link]

Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: George Raft

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: George Raft

• George Raft at the Internet Movie Database
• George Raft at the TCM Movie Database
• George Raft at the Internet Broadway Database
• George Raft at Find a Grave
• George Raft at Virtual History

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2011)

The iconic clock scene in Safety Last!

Harold Clayton Lloyd, Sr. (April 20, 1893 – March 8, 1971) was an American film actor and producer, most famous for his silent comedies.^[2]

Harold Lloyd ranks alongside Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as one of the most popular and influential film comedians of the silent film era. Lloyd made nearly 200 comedy films, both silent and "talkies", between 1914 and 1947. He is best known for his "Glasses Character", a resourceful, success-seeking go-getter who was perfectly in tune with 1920s era America.

His films frequently contained "thrill sequences" of extended chase scenes and daredevil physical feats, for which he is best remembered today. Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock high above the street in Safety Last! (1923) is one of the most enduring images in all of cinema.^{[citation needed]} Lloyd did many of these dangerous stunts himself, despite having injured himself in August, 1919 while doing publicity pictures for the Roach studio. An accident with a bomb mistaken as a prop resulted in the loss of the thumb and index finger of his right hand ^[3] (the injury was disguised on future films with the use of a special prosthetic glove, though the glove often did not go by unnoticed).

Although Lloyd's individual films were not as commercially successful as Charlie Chaplin's on average, he was far more prolific (releasing twelve feature films in the 1920s while Chaplin released just three), and made more money overall ($15.7 million to Chaplin's $10.5 million).

Early life and early roles[link]

Lloyd was born in Burchard, Nebraska to James Darsie Lloyd and Elizabeth Fraser; his paternal great-grandparents were from Wales. When he was a child, his parents divorced and Lloyd chose to stay with his father, who was always dreaming up grand get-rich-quick schemes that ended in disasters. They eventually ended up in Omaha where Lloyd had his first acting experience in a local stock company. He attended East High School and San Diego High School and received his stage training at the School of Dramatic Art (San Diego). In 1912, his father J. Darsie "Foxy" Lloyd was awarded the then-massive sum of $6,000 in a personal injury judgment (although this was split evenly between Lloyd and his lawyer) after being run over by an Omaha beer truck. Reportedly, on the toss of a coin ("Heads is New York or Nashville or where I decide!, tails is San Diego"), he and Lloyd moved west.

Lloyd had acted in theatre since boyhood, and started acting in one-reel film comedies shortly after moving to California. He soon began working with Thomas Edison's motion picture company, and eventually formed a partnership with fellow struggling actor and director Hal Roach, who had formed his own studio in 1913. The hard-working Lloyd became the most successful of Roach's comic actors between 1915 and 1919.

Lloyd hired Bebe Daniels as a supporting actress in 1914; the two of them were involved romantically and were known as "The Boy" and "The Girl." In 1919, she left Lloyd to pursue her dramatic aspirations. Lloyd replaced Daniels with Mildred Davis in 1919. Lloyd was tipped off by Hal Roach to watch Davis in a movie. Reportedly, the more Lloyd watched Davis the more he liked her. Lloyd's first reaction in seeing her was that "she looked like a big French doll!"^{[citation needed]} Davis retired from acting in 1923, and Jobyna Ralston became Lloyd's co-star.

From 1915 to 1917, Lloyd and Roach created more than 60 one-reel comedies.

Lloyd in A Sailor-Made Man (1921), his first feature.

Silent shorts and features[link]

By 1918, Lloyd and Roach had begun to develop his character beyond an imitation of his contemporaries. Harold Lloyd would move away from tragicomic personas, and portray an everyman with unwavering confidence and optimism. The "Glasses Character" (often named "Harold" in the silent films) was a much more mature comedy character with greater potential for sympathy and emotional depth, and was easy for audiences of the time to identify with. The Glasses Character is said to have been created after Roach suggested that Harold was too handsome to do comedy, without some sort of disguise; previously, he had worn a fake mustache as the Chaplinesque "Lonesome Luke". Unlike most silent comedy personas, "Harold" was never typecast to a social class, but he was always striving for success and recognition. Within the first few years of the character's debut, he had portrayed social ranks ranging from a starving vagrant in From Hand to Mouth to a wealthy socialite in Captain Kidd's Kids.

Harold Lloyd in Grandma's Boy (1922).

Beginning in 1921, Roach and Lloyd moved from shorts to feature length comedies. These included the acclaimed Grandma's Boy, which, (along with Chaplin's The Kid), pioneered the combination of complex character development and film comedy, the highly popular Safety Last! (1923), which cemented Lloyd's stardom (and is the oldest film on the American Film Institute's List of 100 Most Thrilling Movies), and Why Worry? (1923).

Lloyd and Roach parted ways in 1924, and Lloyd became the independent producer of his own films. These included his most accomplished mature features Girl Shy, The Freshman (his highest-grossing silent feature), The Kid Brother, and Speedy, his final silent film. Welcome Danger was originally a silent film but Lloyd decided late in the production to remake it with dialogue. All of these films were enormously successful and profitable, and Lloyd would eventually become the highest paid film performer of the 1920s.^[4] They were also highly influential and still find many fans among modern audiences, a testament to the originality and film-making skill of Lloyd and his collaborators. From this success he became one of the wealthiest and most influential figures in early Hollywood.

Talkies and transition[link]

In 1924, Lloyd formed his own independent film production company, the Harold Lloyd Film Corporation, with his films distributed by Pathé and later Paramount and Twentieth Century-Fox. Lloyd was a founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Released a few weeks before the start of the Great Depression, Welcome Danger was a huge financial success, with audiences eager to hear Lloyd's voice on film. Lloyd's rate of film releases, which had been one or two a year in the 1920s, slowed to about one every two years until 1938.

The films released during this period were: Feet First, with a similar scenario to Safety Last which found him clinging to a skyscraper at the climax; Movie Crazy with Constance Cummings; The Cat's-Paw, which was a dark political comedy and a big departure for Lloyd; and The Milky Way, which was Lloyd's only attempt at the fashionable genre of the screwball comedy film.

To this point the films had been produced by Lloyd's company. However, his go-getting screen character was out of touch with Great Depression movie audiences of the 1930s. As the length of time between his film releases increased, his popularity declined, as did the fortunes of his production company. His final film of the decade, Professor Beware, was made by the Paramount staff, with Lloyd functioning only as actor and partial financier.

On March 23, 1937, Lloyd sold the land of his studio Harold Lloyd Motion Picture Company to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The location is now the site of the Los Angeles California Temple.^[5]

Lloyd produced a few comedies for RKO Radio Pictures in the early 1940s but otherwise retired from the screen until 1947. He returned for an additional starring appearance in The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, an ill-fated homage to Lloyd's career, directed by Preston Sturges and financed by Howard Hughes. This film had the inspired idea of following Harold's Jazz Age, optimistic character from The Freshman into the Great Depression years. Diddlebock opened with footage from The Freshman (for which Lloyd was paid a royalty of $50,000, matching his actor's fee) and Lloyd was sufficiently youthful-looking to match the older scenes quite well. Lloyd and Sturges had different conceptions of the material and fought frequently during the shoot; Lloyd was particularly concerned that while Sturges had spent three to four months on the script of the first third of the film, "the last two thirds of it he wrote in a week or less". The finished film was released briefly in 1947, then shelved by producer Hughes. Hughes issued a recut version of the film in 1951 through RKO under the title Mad Wednesday. Such was Lloyd's disdain that he sued Howard Hughes, the California Corporation and RKO for damages to his reputation "as an outstanding motion picture star and personality", eventually accepting a $30,000 settlement.

Marriage and home life[link]

Lloyd married his leading lady, Mildred Davis, on Saturday, February 10, 1923. Together, they had two children: Gloria Lloyd (1924–2012),^[6] and Harold Clayton Lloyd, Jr., (1931–1971).^[7] They also adopted Gloria Freeman (1924–1986) in September 1930, whom they renamed Marjorie Elizabeth Lloyd, but who was known as "Peggy" for most of her life. Lloyd, for a time, discouraged Davis from continuing her acting career. He later relented, but by that time her career momentum was lost. Davis died in 1969, two years before Lloyd's death. Lloyd's son was gay, and according to Annette D'Agostino Lloyd (no relation) in the book Harold Lloyd: Master Comedian, Harold Sr. took this in good spirit. Harold Jr. died from complications of a stroke.

Harold Lloyd and future wife: Mildred Davis in I Do in 1921.

Lloyd's Beverly Hills home, "Greenacres", was built in 1926–1929, with 44 rooms, 26 bathrooms, 12 fountains, 12 gardens, and a nine hole golf course. The estate left the possession of the Lloyd family in 1975, after a failed attempt to maintain it as a public museum.

The grounds were subsequently subdivided, but the main house and the estate's principal gardens remain and are frequently used for civic fundraising events and as a filming location, appearing in films like Westworld and The Loved One. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Radio and retirement[link]

In October 1944, Lloyd emerged as the director and host of The Old Gold Comedy Theater, an NBC radio anthology series, after Preston Sturges, who had turned the job down, recommended him for it. The show presented half-hour radio adaptations of recently successful film comedies, beginning with Palm Beach Story with Claudette Colbert and Robert Young.

Some saw The Old Gold Comedy Theater as being a lighter version of Lux Radio Theater, and it featured some of the best-known film and radio personalities of the day, including Fred Allen, June Allyson, Lucille Ball, Ralph Bellamy, Linda Darnell, Susan Hayward, Herbert Marshall, Dick Powell, Edward G. Robinson, Jane Wyman, and Alan Young, among others. But the show's half-hour format—which meant the material might have been truncated too severely—and Lloyd's sounding somewhat ill at ease on the air for much of the season (though he spent weeks training himself to speak on radio prior to the show's premiere, and seemed more relaxed toward the end of the series run) may have worked against it.

The Old Gold Comedy Theater ended in June 1945 with an adaptation of Tom, Dick and Harry, featuring June Allyson and Reginald Gardiner and was not renewed for the following season. Many years later, acetate discs of 29 of the shows were discovered in Lloyd's home, and they now circulate among old-time radio collectors.

Lloyd in 1946, when he was appointed to the Shriners' publicity committee.

Lloyd remained involved in a number of other interests, including civic and charity work. Inspired by having overcome his own serious injuries and burns, he was very active as a Shriner with the Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children. He was a Past Potentate of Al-Malaikah Shrine in Los Angeles, and was eventually selected as Imperial Potentate of the Shriners of North America for the year 1949–50.^[8]

He appeared as himself on several television shows during his retirement, first on Ed Sullivan's variety show Toast of the Town June 5, 1949 and again on July 6, 1958. He appeared as the Mystery Guest on What's My Line? on April 26, 1953, and twice on This Is Your Life: on March 10, 1954 for Mack Sennett, and again on December 14, 1955 on his own episode. During both appearances, Lloyd's hand injury can clearly be seen.^[9]