The Pastures of Beyond (15 page)

It also gave me the reputation for being a little bit crazy.

At a Hayward, California, rodeo, I was taking photographs of a bullfighter clown named Slim Pickens as he was taking on Brahma bulls with a cape. I was immersed in my work, lying flat in the middle of the arena and getting great close-ups. Often the bulls would boil through Slim's cape and pass right over my body.

I was suddenly aware that Slim was standing there in the arena, looking down at me. “Kid,” he said, “you're either the bravest man I ever saw or the dumbest.”

The bull riding was about over for the day, but there was something Slim wanted me to do. “They're just about to turn out a fighting bull called Little Buck,” he said. “I'm going to fight him Mexican-style with my cape, and I'd sure like to have a good photograph. You think you could get me one?” Little Buck turned out to be a photographer's dream and charged Slim time and again. At times, the bull would threaten to gore me on the ground, but I lay still, and it would lose interest and go back to fighting Slim. Out of these shots, Slim selected one which would be reproduced in gold and put on a silver belt buckle. Slim was proud of that buckle and wore it for the rest of his days. For me, it was the start of a friend-

ship that lasted nearly forty years.

The bulls continued to hold a fascination for me. I had learned cape techniques in southern France, and was intrigued by the beauty of well-executed passes. Every inch of the cloth seemed under control, and when I should have been studying I took out my Mexican
capo grande,
and practiced until my arms ached. When I went to a rodeo, I began to specialize in Brahma bullfight photographs, perhaps because the clowns always needed good publicity shots and there was

no one else willing to stand out there and take close-ups. The clowns always assured me that they would take care of me, but time and again I would be all alone facing a charging Brahma. Often it took a cool head and a quick side step to prevent injury.

At the time, one of the great rodeo producers on the West Coast was a big Englishman named Harry Rowell, who had a ranch in the Bay Area at Dublin Canyon, near Hayward. Harry had come to America by jumping ship in the San Francisco Bay, and managed in time to put together a great rodeo business and a coterie of talented cowboys who made a sometime livelihood following Rowell's shows. Few promoters cared more for their cowboys than Harry, who paid the funeral expenses for many a destitute cowboy, and helped many another contestant through the off-season.

I got into clowning and bullfighting quite by accident, when a talented black clown named Felix Cooper was injured in an automobile accident and failed to show up for a Rowell rodeo. Harry had been watching me dodge bulls as a photographer and shoved me out into the arena to take Cooper's place.

When the clown is in the right place at the right time, he can save a fallen rider from serious injury by leading the charging bull away. That afternoon I worked close to the bulls and managed to save a few cowboys from being gored. It doesn't take much to turn a bull rider into a friend when you've saved his butt.

The barrel man that day was an old circus clown named

Zeke Bowery, noted for his work entertaining crippled children. Zeke had several clowning contracts coming up in California and Nevada and needed a good bullfighter to team with him. He hired me, and soon on my weekends at the university I was not only taking pictures at rodeos but clowning. Even at the height of six foot five, I was fast on my feet and could succeed as a bullfighter where I had struggled as a bronc rider. Zeke and I worked in tandem to distract the bull. While I used a cape, Zeke had a heavily reinforced wooden barrel just big enough to hold his small frame that he would roll out into the arena during the bull riding and would duck into whenever a bull charged.

Harry Rowell owned a waspy Brahma bull named Twenty Nine, who had crippled the famous clown Homer Holcomb for life in Kezar Stadium. Twenty Nine had the sneaky habit of stopping just short of your cape and tiptoeing toward you. Since Brahma bullfighting depended upon the man using the forward motion of the bull, the man had little chance to escape. Twenty Nine could hit a man harder than any bull I ever saw. At a rodeo in Red Bluff, California, Zeke had just ducked into his barrel as Twenty Nine charged, and was clutching his handhold desperately when that big bull hit the barrel so hard, it hurled it through the air some sixty feet and over the arena fence, knocking Zeke unconscious. It wasn't long after that Zeke retired to gentler pursuits.

In 1948 I clowned with Slim Pickens in San Francisco's Cow Palace. I might have come out of that experience with a big head had not a
San Francisco Chronicle
reporter lauded my performance but misspelled my name.

In May of 1948, I took a photograph of a young man bucking off Harry Rowell's Number Thirteen bull at the Point Reyes rodeo. The photograph became a
Life
magazine Picture of the Week, and the bull, a big, painted animal, was renamed Life Magazine. The bull was eventually sold to Christianson Brothers in Oregon, but he took the name with him.

Capitalizing on my opportunity, I rushed to New York and bluffed my way into the Time-Life Building to the office of the
Life
picture chief, Bob Girvan.

Mr. Girvan was out at lunch when I sat down before his desk. The desk was covered with photographs he was obviously considering. I acted fast when the man came in. Before he could ask me who I was, I blurted, “Mr. Girvan. You have such a flow of superb photographs going across your desk. How do you decide if a photograph is great enough for your magazine?”

Bob Girvan paused a moment in thought. “I have to have the feeling, ‘My God, how did the photographer ever capture that!'”

“You're right,” I said. “And doesn't that apply to great poetry, great literature, and great art?”

By the time the man had gotten around to asking me who I was, he knew he had been had. I pulled out a copy of my recent Picture of the Week and told him my ideas for stories I wanted to do for
Life
. He settled on a story on rodeos, gave me a check for $2,000 and all the photography supplies I could carry, and told me to meet him in San Francisco in September. I was off and running as a
Life
photographer.

That summer, I traveled widely with Slim, Margaret, and Margaret's little daughter, Daryle Ann. One week we would be in Billings, Montana, the next in Penticton, British Columbia, then Ellensburg, Washington. I blew the $2,000 advance on the story the first month and then was forced to live on what my slender rodeo and photographic talents could provide.

I did some suicidal things while photographing bulls, thinking that Slim Pickens was at my side and would save me. In Billings, Montana, the management cut the arena in half so the bulls would fight more. This gave me a far better opportunity for photography. I was doing some close shots of Slim fighting when a bull ran through his cape and headed straight at me. I turned and ran, leaping up the wire fence just as the bull nailed me in the seat of the pants. The wire panel sagged backward under my weight, pinning me on top of the animal.

Someone in the audience took a photograph, and there was Slim with a big grin on his face, pointing to my wallet pocket, showing the bull where to hit.

There was a camaraderie about that summer quite unlike anything I had ever known. I became friends with cowboys I'd only watched from afar. Often I traveled with Slim and his family. We camped together, cooked together, and shared our liniment bottles, for bruises were never far away. Between rodeos we spent restful days fishing western streams or on dude ranches such as the 4K in Dean, Montana, which was owned by Mickey Cochrane, the baseball player, and Frank Book, who owned the Book Cadillac Hotel in Detroit. When we left the 4K, an underage girl stowed away in the backseat of my jeep, and I didn't find her until I had crossed two state lines and an international border. Scared, I drove like a madman to catch up with Slim and Margaret, and turned the young lady over to Margaret's keeping. The girl thirsted for an exciting, adventurous life like ours, but her father had arrived at the 4K just after we departed and was not pleased to find her gone. We heard over the radio that there was a manhunt on for the cowboys who had kidnapped her. We sent her home with a calf roper who was heading back to the States and failed to notice how young she was.

Before long, we were back in Montana. Slim and Margaret were invited to a barbecue by two all-time great lady bronc riders, Marge and Alice Greenough, and took me along. I had met their brother Turk, who was then married to Sally Rand, a famous exotic dancer. I had expected the Greenough girls to be big and tough like Turk, but here were two slender, lovely women who could have been pouring tea at a garden party.

The rodeos were hard work, but there was always time to relax. We would often arrive a day or two before a rodeo and give the horses time to get over the trip. Slim owned a big Appaloosa named Dear John and a pinto mule named Judy. John had been trained to buck on cue and could outperform most rodeo broncs. Riding him was part of Slim's clown act. Slim would rope and bulldog off the mule, Judy, to the delight of the crowds.

Often we would set up camp behind the chutes, amongst the livestock trucks and pickups hauling horse trailers, greeting new arrivals as they came. There would be bronc riders braiding new bucking reins and working over their bronc saddles, bull riders working rosin into chaps and bull ropes, ropers swinging loops, and trick riders exercising horses and practicing runs. Inevitably there would be cowboys playing cards on a bale of hay covered with a blanket or playing pitch with pennies against the tire of a cattle truck.

Montie Montana, the great trick rider and roper, would generally be there caring for his horses, and I would wander over to help him. Montie's horses came first with him, and I don't ever remember seeing one of his horses that wasn't groomed to shine. Montie had worked in many an early movie with such greats as Tom Mix and William Boyd (Hopalong Cassidy), and if I hung around until after the work was done, I could usually tease out a story or two.

Montie and I remained friends for years. When he was in his eighties and still performing, he got two plastic knees. I was talking with him on the telephone and I said, “Montie, don't those artificial knees interfere with your lovemaking?”

“Only when I have to beg for it,” Montie replied.

One morning, Slim and I had finished exercising the horses and were sitting in the shade of the grandstand, talking about fishing, when a cowboy named Bud Linderman came up. Bud was a brawny, curly-haired, hard-drinking, brawling black sheep of a great rodeo family, but he was a champion cowboy. According to Slim, Bud won most of his fights by jumping in quickly and putting out a cowboy's lights before the man even knew there was a fight happening. He had killed a detective at Madison Square Garden with one punch and was generally feared. Bud had been in a fight the day before, and the police had broken it up before Linderman had a chance to clobber his opponent. Now as Bud joined us, we could see his hapless cowboy opponent doing laps around the racetrack.

“What in hell's that dumb S.O.B. doing?” Bud asked Slim. “He's training to whip you, Bud,” Slim said with a grin. Bud sat and watched as the cowboy did his laps around

the track. Finally, when the man staggered by one more time, gasping for breath, Bud got to his feet. “I guess he's developed his muscles well enough by now,” he said, and went down to the track to beat the daylights out of the cowboy.

In Red Bluff, California, I was mugging wild horses in the wild horse race. In this race some dozen or so wild horses were turned out all at once into the arena. Each horse wore a halter and trailed a lead rope. My two partners and I latched on to a horse that looked as though he could run a little and won the first day's prize money. On the second day, we scrambled to grab the same horse. We had a big Klamath Indian for an anchor man, who held on to the lead rope. My job was to mug, that is leap past the horse's front feet as it struck at me and grasp its head in a headlock, while the rider threw his saddle on the horse, cinched it tight, and vaulted up, ready to ride. The rider had just gotten the saddle cinched when Bud Linderman, who had been watching us, knocked him aside, leaped into the saddle himself, and rode the horse down the track to the finish line. We were all pretty disgusted when Bud won first money on our horse and our saddle.

I was working a rodeo in Lodi, California, when I next saw Bud. I was in a motel, and Bud was having a fight with his girlfriend in the room next door. Things were getting pretty loud. The only bathroom was down the hall, and as I went down the hall in my bathrobe, Bud grabbed me by the collar, dragged me into his room, and threw me on top of the woman in bed. I was scared and embarrassed, and the woman looked ready to die of fright.

What saved us both was that Bud started to build a cooking fire right on the rug, and suddenly alarms were going off, and the woman and I were able to escape in the smoke.

In Tucson, Arizona, Bud was raising hell in the drunk tank when the jailers subdued him by squirting him with a fire hose. Bud caught pneumonia, and soon died. Slim Pickens claimed that he went to see Bud in the hospital and could hear the man cussing three floors away.

“What the hell are you mad at, Bud?” Slim asked.

Bud grinned sheepishly. “I was just lying here reading the funny papers and caught myself siding with Dick Tracy.” Bud excluded, the Lindermans were a great Montana family. Bill Linderman was as fine a gentleman as I ever met,

and one of the most talented cowboys that ever lived.

In September, I met with Bob Girvan and showed him the photographs I had taken. The editors of
Life
decided to do a Speaking of Pictures story of me taking pictures, and sent a
Life
photographer named Jon Brenneis to photograph me at the Merced, California, rodeo. The spread came out in the November 1, 1948, issue.