Falling From Horses (27 page)

Mike Tifflin was up at the crown of the hill, yelling through the bullhorn that we should come up there and regroup for another shot, and when I started my horse in that direction I passed Wen Luettgerodt, who had been one of the men riding a horse fall that day. He was walking along pretty slowly, smoking a cigarette, not showing any signs of wear, except his cavalry uniform was all brown with dust and he was missing his hat and there was a lot of chaff in his hair.

When I went by him I said, “I guess you've done that a bunch of times.”

He kept walking. “A few.” He looked up at me and smiled a crooked smile, and I saw he had blood around his teeth. “Another day another dollar.”

When we got up to where Mike was waiting, Cab was standing a few yards away chewing out the rider who'd been on the chestnut horse, and Mike told us the whole thing had to be run again because the horse stopping in his tracks had ruined the scene.

The horses who'd been tripped were wobbly and shaking, not in shape to do it again, so the wranglers brought in a fresh bunch, and the same men who had fallen the first time went ahead and rode the gag again, which saved me from giving it a try.

But I wound up doing three saddle falls that day, and it was after dark by the time I got back to the Los Feliz house. I was covered in dust, had grit in my teeth, my legs and back were aching, and my shoulders were purple with bruise. I fell asleep on the couch without the energy to wash up. I guess I thought I had pretty much arrived at being a movie cowboy. Although from where I am now, this strikes me as a belief grounded in a lack of information.

I WASN'T SURE
where I stood with Lily. Now that I was riding for the cameras, there wasn't as much waiting-around time, and it was hard to find a place to stash a drawing pad and pencil when we got called for our scenes, so I didn't have any sketches for her when we met up that Sunday. But the stunt riding gave me something to talk about, some chatter to keep the quiet from taking hold. She asked a lot of questions and seemed pretty interested in the answers, which suited both of us. I didn't take any of this for flirting, I took it to mean she was interested in every part of moviemaking and happy for me that I was finally riding in the movies. And for the time being, I took it to mean we had got past our dustup. Or mostly past it.

A couple of weeks later she started working as a reader for Sunrise Pictures, which gave us something else to talk about.

In those days, the head of the Story Department at Sunrise was Marion Chertok, a Russian woman of about forty who spoke with a heavy accent. People said she had ridden with the Cossacks during the Great War, which may have been somebody's idea of a joke or could actually have been true. What Lily told me—most of it gossip she had heard from girls at the Studio Club—is that Marion had been Ronald Vlackey's secretary in the silent-picture days when Vlackey himself had been the story editor at a tiny studio down on Gower Street, and as he had climbed up the ladder he had brought her along with him. Now that he ran Sunrise, Marion was his number two.

No one thought Marion and Vlackey were lovers—Marion was mannish and dour in her shapeless dresses, and Lackey was one of those studio heads who auditioned young actresses on his office couch—but everybody knew she was the only person whose judgment Vlackey trusted unreservedly; Marion Chertok and Ronald Vlackey together decided on every picture that was made at Sunrise. Marion wasn't the only female in Hollywood who had risen that high, but all of those women could have squeezed into a single booth at the Brown Derby, so it made Lily happy to be working for one of them.

Sunrise wasn't top drawer by anybody's measure, but they put thirty or forty feature films on the floor every year, and their readers were always looking for the next property that might be the basis of a film adaptation. They read screenplays written in-house or submitted on spec, novels and stage plays, galleys of books about to be published, magazine short stories, even opera librettos, newspaper features, court records of trials. You read quickly, and if you liked the story you wrote a three- or four-page report; if you didn't, a single page. Then the report went to Marion, who decided whether to pitch it upstairs to Vlackey.

Lily wasn't supposed to judge anything for literary quality. Marion had stressed to her that they were looking for stories that could be compressed and simplified, stories with a neat resolution. If it required too many trucking shots or establishing shots or expensive camera setups, it was probably out. And some of Sunrise's actors were barely literate, so a story without much dialogue was a definite plus—fewer lines for the actor to memorize. Almost half their movies were hay-burners—the Wichita Carson picture I'd ridden in at Las Cruces had been a Sunrise picture—so they were always on the lookout for a western that kept things simple: one street, one girl, one saloon, one hero, one villain at the head of an anonymous gang of henchmen.

When Lily told me about the illiterate actors and the one-horse stories the studio was looking for, she didn't make excuses for it. She said, “It's not real writing, it's almost the same thing I was doing for Mr. Buchanan. But at least I'll get a better idea what a studio is looking for. And I might be able to get somebody to read one of my scripts.” The job wasn't what she had come to Hollywood to do, but at least it was headed that way. She knew you had to get your foot in the door somewhere.

The Story Department that Marion was in charge of numbered at least twenty-five people: readers, stenographers, researchers, a couple of foreign-language translators, and a corps of writers. Most of them reported directly to her, but the writers had their own department head who reported to Marion, and that was Dale Lampman.

The writers' offices were in the back lot, an old wooden building called the Barracks, while the rest of the Story Department was housed in the big stucco building at the front of the studio grounds. The two offices were separated by a cluster of sound stages, shops, storage buildings, and a bunch of outdoor sets—a block-long western street, a two- or three-acre jungle, the false front of a city street. At least twice a day Lampman made the long walk through those sets to Marion's office, where they talked over scripts and story ideas for a few minutes behind closed doors. On his way out, he made a point of passing through the readers' room, where the women—they were all women in that office—turned pages and scribbled notes in a semi-quiet commotion. He liked to remind the girls that he had been a reader himself when he started in the business. Sometimes he paused and rested his hand on a woman's shoulder as he leaned over to deliver some bit of advice—“a little pearl of his wisdom,” as Lily said to me mockingly.

I never did see Lampman in the flesh, but over the years I've seen a few photographs. He was thirty or thirty-five then, a big guy, hook-nosed, with a soft face. He was not good-looking, and he had a lot of dark hair at his wrists and climbing up his neck from the collar of his shirt, but he had noticeably blue eyes, he wore well-tailored suits and ties, he combed his hair straight back from his forehead, and Lily said he smelled faintly of good aftershave. He had charmed Marion in some unspoken way—this was something everybody knew—and when Lily went to work there she heard the others speak obliquely about the girl whose position Lily had filled, a girl who'd been fired by Marion because she “hadn't got on well” with Mr. Lampman.

When Lily had been there a couple of weeks, one of the girls in the reading room told her in a lowered voice that Dale Lampman was “dangerous.” Lily had been around the picture business long enough by then—we both had—to have heard a few stories: men who claimed to be with a casting agency, holding interviews for new talent in a hotel suite late at night, men sidling up to young women in the dark corners and alleyways of a movie set, men with roaming hands adept at opening the buttons and hooks on period costumes. She knew what was being implied about Lampman.

But after his up-and-down inspection of her the day she started work—too thin and breastless, as she knew, and her thick eyebrows unplucked—he hadn't paid her a minute's notice. It had been clear to her for years that she was not the sort of girl who stirred a man's blood.

On the Sunday after she started at Sunrise, she told me everything that had gone on that week at the new job, the stories she had read and reported on, and what people had said to her. But she left out the part about Lampman being “dangerous.”

She may have had a few reasons to keep it to herself, but here is one: I had moved in with True Riddle by that time, had gone out partying with him on Saturday night, and I think when I saw her that Sunday I must have been strutting around like a young rooster. Put that together with the kiss I had tried to give her, and I imagine Lily thought I was not the right person to talk to about lechery.

A RIDER NAMED MASON
something-or-other had been doubling for the star in most of the stunts on that Wild Bill Elliott picture, but when they got ready to shoot a runaway Conestoga wagon, they brought in a wagon driver to play Bill, and this was True Riddle. He was a young guy, no older than me, but he'd been around the movie business all his life. His dad had starred in about a hundred silents for Mojave Pictures, playing Dusty Jones, a square-jawed cowboy hero, Mojave's version of William S. Hart. In a funny way Hollywood was a company town, a one-industry town. If True had been born in Detroit, he might have followed his dad onto an assembly line at General Motors or Ford, but in Hollywood he fell into the movie business. By the time I met him, True was driving all manner of rolling stock—horse-drawn wagons and stagecoaches, army ambulances, buckboards, Roman chariots, tallyhos.

I'd been driving teams around the ranch since I was four or five years old, and I thought I knew how to handle the leathers, but True Riddle was another story: he seemed to just send his wishes out through the lines so the horses could read them like coded telegrams. He was one of a handful of movie people who could handle a six-up at a full gallop, along with the tricky, dangerous business of cutting the team loose and bailing off the seat as the wagon overturned, which was what they were filming that day in the Elliott picture.

I had seen this stunt more than a few times on film without thinking much about how it was done. They had dug a narrow trench so that when the left-hand wheels rolled into it the wagon would tip over, but hell, I don't know how True could see where the trench was, coming at it from a few hundred yards back with all the dust raised by six horses at a full gallop. And then he had to pull the cable rig at the last minute to set loose the horses, and the wagon was already careening over when he jumped clear.

I had figured that if I got into the movie business I'd be riding horses. I hadn't wanted to drive wagons. But after I watched True do that stunt, and after I heard people talk about the other picture work he had done—driving rigs through floods, flames, and over cliffs, driving blind from a hiding place inside a runaway wagon—I started hanging around him whenever I could, hoping to pick up some advice. Well, it turned out he was like a lot of those specialty stuntmen, not willing to teach anybody else his secrets in case they ended up cutting into his own livelihood. About the only thing I heard from him was a story from the old silent-movie days before Yakima Canutt had invented the breakaway rig that set the horses loose. In those days, when the wagon flipped over it would bring down the horses too, and when True was a kid, watching the movies his dad starred in, he had seen horses tangled up in the wreckage, crippled or killed by that stunt. “My dad never liked the breakaway, he thought it looked phony,” he said. And he shrugged, not weighing in on the question himself.

Maybe he didn't want to tell me his secrets, but I was the first person he had met, the first one his own age, who knew how to harness a team and drive them. In southern California a lot of ranchers and farmers had already gone to tractors, and the old teamsters True had known as a kid, the ones who had taught him how to drive, were a thing of the past. I hadn't ever driven our wagon down the road at a flat-out gallop as was always happening in the movies—we'd never had a team run away on us, and there'd been no need to go that fast. On the other hand, True hadn't done any of the real ranch work I had done, the work my folks were still doing, everything handled the old way with horses. So he started pumping me for particulars about how I'd used teams for field work and feeding cattle and logging timber, as if every part of it was extraordinary or exotic. In the end I think he pried quite a bit more out of me than I managed to pry out of him, although now, looking back, I wonder if he ever expected to make use of what I told him.

We were the youngest guys on the set, which might have thrown us together anyway, and when True heard I was sleeping on a too-short sofa in a house with three other guys, he said he had a bed that nobody was sleeping on. I had been looking around for a rooming house I could afford, but at the end of that ten-day shoot I moved out of Dave Keaton's place over to the house True rented on Gordon Street in a little neighborhood off the east end of Sunset. True had the bedroom, but in the living room was a Murphy bed that dropped down from the wall, the mattress thin and sagging in the middle but an improvement over the sofa I'd been sleeping on.

And it was after I moved in with True that I started going to Hollywood parties, met a girl named Margaret, and finally sowed some wild oats.

True had a red DeSoto roadster and that long family history in the movie business, so a lot of his friends weren't the cowboy stuntmen we worked with but a young crowd of junior writers, assistant directors, actors, and actresses who were up-and-coming bit players. Pretty much every Saturday night he went off to one of their parties—a gathering at somebody's house out in Encino or the valley, where everybody stayed up until damn near daylight drinking beer and eating sardines. Or down to the beach at Santa Monica, where they'd stand around a bonfire roasting wienies and passing a flask of booze.