Rest in Peace, actor / producer Norman Lloyd, who died a few days ago in California, at the age of 106. You may remember him as the elderly Dr. Daniel Auschlander, in the very fine hospital-opera Saint Elsewhere; and gracious, that was a long time ago. Lloyd worked very often with his good friend Alfred Hitchcock, as an actor in his movies and as a producer of Alfred Hitchock Presents. That was Lloyd you saw hanging by his fingers from the crown of the Statue of Liberty, in the movie Saboteur, with Bob Cummings trying to grab hold of him -- in vain.
Lloyd was a really sharp man, and a good man too, by all accounts. He was one of those guys in Hollywood who didn't fool around; he and his wife Peggy Lloyd were married for 75 years. A short time before she died, she asked him how long it had been, and when he said it was seventy five years, she quipped, "It should last." Touche!
Apparently he was still working at age 100 ... My gosh, what a wealth of stories he must have had, because he started early (graduating from high school at 14), and he never left the trade, and he knew everybody. A producer gets to know more people sometimes than an actor does. Ed Begley Jr., his co-star on Saint Elsewhere, still invited him to dinner once a week until a few years ago.
Lloyd was a big baseball fan, and, growing up in Brooklyn, he fell in love with the Dodgers, for good. Think of this: Norman Lloyd watched the 1926 World Series between the Yankees and the Cardinals, when he was an 11 year old boy, going on 12. Who was on that field? Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Rogers Hornsby, and a good list of other Hall of Famers -- Tony Lazzeri, Earle Combs, Waite Hoyt, and Herb Pennock for the Yanks, and Jim Bottomley, Jesse Haines, and Grover Cleveland Alexander for the Cards. Alexander was an old guy by then -- his career had begun in 1911. It's likely that Lloyd saw Alexander pitch, because the veteran appeared in 3 of the 4 games in Yankee Stadium, winning 2 and saving 1 -- coming into game 7 to save it, after he had won game 6 the day before, pitching all nine innings. And we had among us in Hollywood a kid who saw that Series ...