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264 THE BIG SCANDALS
But there were compensations ; so that actresses should be able to conjure up an over-plus of emotion — practically all acting of the " middle " period of the silent film was over emphatic and intense — a little orchestra would sit at the side of the set and dispense bittersweet music.
It was the day of the big comedians — Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle, and of the big scandals, too.
Arbuckle created a world-wide sensation because a girl died in suspicious circumstances at a party which he gave. Tried and acquitted, he was nevertheless hounded off the screen by the Women's Clubs of America and had to change his name to William Goodrich before he could act small parts and direct a few short subjects in order to make a living again.
Bebe Daniels, who has made some three hundred films, gave me this first-hand account of the Harold Lloyd period :
Bebe, whose father was a theatre manager and whose mother was an actress, was a child player on the stage. One of her first roles was as Lewis Stone's son in a melodrama, but child labour laws prevented her continuing her stage career. There was then no such ban on film work. Accordingly she played at the Selig studios and then joined the 101 Bison company at Santa Monica. She nearly always played the same part — the heroine's kid sister.
" I was", she says, " invariably kidnapped by the Indians and rescued by the hero". By the time she was eleven she was doubling for the stars in trick riding shots ; when she was thirteen she applied to Harold Lloyd for the job of leading lady and got it.
Lloyd was then playing a character known as Lonesome Luke. He wore a little moustache, big boots and a tail-coat, but, fearing that people would say he was imitating Chaplin, he changed his type entirely, donned horn-rimmed glasses, nicely creased trousers, and a half-belted jacket, and styled himself Winkle.
Bebe Daniels got thirty dollars a week and Lloyd got fifty. The studio was without artificial light, therefore most of the films were made on location. But when there was no light, photographically speaking, even for location work, they sat in the studio and played games. They had an orchestra, for what it was worth, and Lloyd played the drums and the producer, Hal Roach, the saxophone. Bebe Daniels strummed on a ukulele. " We had a lot of fun", Bebe Daniels says.
" We never had a script. We would start with an idea and work