Stuntwomen

by Mollie Gregory

  Stuntwoman Annie Ellis—as great in a car as she is on a horse. (Courtesy of Annie Ellis)

  Stunt work can be dangerous, because no one knows “what will happen till it is happening.” But some stunts turn out to be fun. By 1992, Annie had graduated to car work and was doubling Jamie Lee Curtis in Forever Young; Annie’s brother David was stunt coordinator. In one scene, she was supposed to skid a car down a mountain road, dodge in front of a semi, and plow through a fence—with Mel Gibson and Elijah Wood in the backseat. “David told me, ‘now don’t crash.’ He was serious, but I laughed. I wasn’t going to crash. He said, ‘You’ve got real actors in your car.’ Like I didn’t know that. I took off, three or four cars came at me, I cut around them, did head-ons and near misses with people and cars. After the first take I turned around to see if the ‘real actors’ needed medical attention. Elijah Wood with those huge blue eyes, and Mel Gibson—they were both grinning, like, ‘Oh, can we do that again?’ Priceless.”

  Marguerite Happy, a rodeo rider turned stuntwoman in the 1980s, described the satisfaction she gets from doing stunts: “My aunt and uncle owned a stable in Salinas, California,” she said. “I used to ride there with my cousins. We wanted to really run them [the horses], but we were always told, ‘Don’t come back with sweaty horses.’ That got us in trouble. Imagine my joy as a stuntwoman to do chase scenes on horses or in cars without getting into trouble! I’d spent years learning how to stay in a saddle. Now I get to fall off! I get to crash cars, jump cars, and go 110 miles an hour! I’m not a high-fall person, but sometimes I get to be pushed or shot off buildings—it’s in the script. We get to hit the decks in explosions, fire automatic weapons, play cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers. We get to play aliens!”

  Marguerite married stuntman Clifford Happy, whose parents, Don and Edith, had been top rodeo riders. “My mother-in-law, Edith, was one of the few women inducted into the Pro Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame,” Marguerite said. “And my sister-in-law, Bonnie Happy, a great trick rider, is president of USA, the United Stuntwomen’s Association.”5 Like Kym Washington’s mother, Bonnie’s didn’t want her to do stunts. But in 1980, when her brother Clifford urged her to give it a try, twenty-five-year-old Bonnie took his advice. Since then, she has done all kinds of gags that had nothing to do with her prowess on a horse.

  There is considerable lore about horses and stunt work, and in a very real sense, horse and rider are partners in a gag. While working on Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman (1993–1998), Bonnie was supposed to do a “hippodrome”—ride through town, shooting both her pistols, while standing on the back of the galloping “101,” wrangler Rudy Ugland’s great stunt horse. “You have to set the pattern of the stunt for the horse,” she said, “but the director and others kept changing it.” Finally, they got it on the fourth take. “Afterward, I thanked the director for ‘waiting until my horse gave me the trick so that I could do what you wanted me to do.’ You’re only as good as what your horse gives you, and you have to set him up for it so he doesn’t fail either.”

  Bonnie Happy, an expert trick rider, is currently president of the United Stuntwomen’s Association. (Courtesy of Bonnie Happy)

  One of Bonnie’s first stunts on Matt Houston (1982–1985) proved that anything can happen, as her stunt partner Jimmy Nickerson knew from his experience with horses and fast cars.6 In the scene, a runaway horse was supposed to drag Jimmy for a short distance, and then Bonnie was supposed to save him. “On a drag like that,” she said, “you’re holding a release gizmo, you push the button and that releases you from the drag. Before the stunt, I’m watching a special effects guy run tape around it and I can’t figure how, with all that tape, the release trip will work. But I was new; I thought the guy must know what he’s doing. We start the stunt and suddenly Jimmy’s horse goes wild, dragging him over rocks, around the exercise rings, and Jimmy’s not releasing the trip. I’m behind him and he yells, ‘Bonnie, stop me! It’s not releasing.’ I go to the right so he doesn’t hit the parking lot as the wranglers try to rope him from the left. The horse looks up and slows down enough for me to grab him.” Who knew the horse would go berserk and Bonnie would have to save Jimmy for real?

  Other surprises aren’t as dramatic, but they can be taxing. When Donna Evans and Tracy Keehn Dashnaw began to do stunts in 1983, they were amazed that their good looks worked against them. Because coordinators often hired their girlfriends to do easy spots, it was widely assumed that any pretty “stuntwoman” who showed up on the set couldn’t do anything. “Tracy and I had to show we were the real thing, we could get the job done,” Donna said. “We really hung it out there, and if we got hurt, oh well.” When a scantily clad Donna calmly and deliberately submerged herself in icy river water, the coordinator gushed, “I haven’t seen anyone tougher!” But Donna later said, “You want to see tough? Tracy’s a top rodeo rider, and those cowgirls are really tough.”

  In Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, Bonnie Happy shoots up the town on “101.” (Courtesy of Jeff Ramsey)

  Tracy Keehn Dashnaw—a lot tougher than she looks. (Courtesy of Tracy Dashnaw)

  The delicately pretty Tracy doesn’t look tough, but in the 1980s, stuntwomen gave tough a whole new meaning and proved that pretty and tough are not incompatible. (In earlier decades, stuntwomen were rarely hired to do stunts that would prove how tough they were.) Tracy’s stepfather, a rodeo cowboy, had taught her to ride and rope, and with two older brothers, she was a tomboy. At age ten, Tracy rode motorcycles; by eighteen, she was working as an extra, doing little stunts, barrel racing in rodeos, and attending Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley, majoring in theater arts. “Came a time I had to decide if I went to class or made money. I chose money. Today I drive cars, but horses got me into the business.”

  Tracy was off and running in 1983 in Veracruz, Mexico, riding a horse hard and fast in the opening sequence of Romancing the Stone (1984). The big-budget production hired two other stuntwomen: Jeannie Epper and her daughter, Eurlyne. Jeannie was one of the founders of the first Stuntwomen’s Association and a mentor to many. In 1983 she was forty-two years old and had worked for thirty years, but never as a stunt coordinator. Her friend Terry Leonard, also forty-two, was a rough, tough, six-foot-plus cowboy. In 1981 he had performed an iconic stunt on Raiders of the Lost Ark—a truck drag á la legendary Yakima Canutt’s stunt in John Ford’s Stagecoach. Terry and Vince Deadrick Jr. co-coordinated Romancing the Stone.7

  Unlike her mother, Eurlyne loved high work. “But I wasn’t sure I wanted to do stunts,” she said, “because I’d go on sets with my mom and it was so boring.” Romancing the Stone wasn’t boring for Eurlyne or anyone else. One of Jeannie’s stunts became a classic, even though it seemed ordinary enough in the script. According to Jeannie, “It was anything but simple. It took two and a half weeks, every day, three or five times a day, riding a mudslide 200 feet down the side of a mountain.” Because the slope was so steep, the crew had to put down cargo nets about every 50 feet to stop Jeannie and Vince Deadrick from sliding all the way to the bottom. Then the crew would lay down another net, and they’d do another slide. Being stopped by the nets gave them a chance to reposition themselves. “It was very hard to stay in the position we had to be in for the ride down,” Jeannie said. “We’d get jumped around, upside down, and I almost drowned once when I went down headfirst and got a mouthful of water, rocks, and dirt.” Stuntwoman Caroline Day wrote that Jeannie’s careening plunge down the mountainside “hurt just to watch. They were beat up, it was cold, they were wet.”8 Charles Champlin, arts editor of the Los Angeles Times, called it “a tumbling, rumbling, cascading fall down a mud slide.” Vince Deadrick told him, “It was the most physically demanding stunt I’ve ever done.”9

  Before leaving for Mexico, Jeannie had questioned another stunt in the movie: a jump out of a car as it went over a waterfall. “The waterfall was very high, the water was rough. I’d never done anything like it before. I wanted the chance to turn it down if I felt it was more than I could do.”
Jeannie, who is deeply religious, said: “I went to my hotel room and actually got on my knees before God and said, ‘I don’t know what to do. What should I do?’ The answer I heard: ‘Do not do it.’ I went downstairs and told Terry I couldn’t do the gag. He said he was never going to let me do it anyway. I could have gone back to Hollywood and told everybody he didn’t let me do it, but he made me say no! I used to call decisions like that my gut feeling,” she said, “but after that movie I started to call it my God feeling.” Terry and Vince did the now famous waterfall gag, and it was voted the year’s most spectacular stunt.10 Romancing the Stone became a top grossing film of 1984.

  When Jeannie got home from Mexico, she found that her husband had decamped with her brother’s wife. One person observed ruefully, “He must have had a death wish. You don’t do that to the Eppers.” Her former husband lived, and Jeannie kept working, but she was at a crossroads that had nothing to do with her domestic trials. “There’s a transition before you realize that you should not do a stunt versus doing it and coming out the hero,” she said. “You begin to think you’re invincible. And you’re not.” She wanted to stop hitting the ground and use her experience to stunt-coordinate—a common path for men but not for women. It never happened for Jeannie, but it would for others who came later.

  Mary Albee was the first woman to sustain a career as a stunt coordinator. She had no family in the business and didn’t know much about the film industry. She was working as a movie extra to help pay her tuition at California State Northridge, where she was a music major. When director Walter Grauman asked her, “Can you talk?” she said that she could.11 “He gave me dialogue with Leslie Nielsen [on Crisis in Midair (1979)]. Afterwards people congratulated me. I was clueless, but of course, getting those lines meant I could join SAG.” That break launched her remarkable career. In 1986 Mary began to stunt-coordinate episodes of L.A. Law and Leo & Liz in Beverly Hills. Later, the largely male International Stunt Association (ISA) interviewed her as a potential member. Mary has a sweet smile but the composure of one who cannot be intimidated. “I guess I got in,” she said, “because when I was asked, ‘What would you do if you don’t get in the group?’ I said, ‘It’s not going to hurt my career. Maybe it’ll hurt your career.’ The president then was an old cowboy, and he goes, ‘Well, how come I never worked with you?’ I said, ‘How come I never worked with you?’”12

  The popular TV series Murder, She Wrote (1984–1996) ran during the golden age of affirmative action, but the show rarely hired female writers, directors, or stunt coordinators. Slowly, that began to change. “It’s always who you know,” Mary said. “My boyfriend then told me production executives at Universal wanted to interview female coordinators. Someone had realized, ‘It’s a girls’ show!’” They found a girl assistant director, a girl writer, and a girl stunt coordinator—Mary—who worked on more than 100 episodes.

  Although women rarely stunt-coordinated, the industry was increasingly hiring them in other positions. “Alice [West] was a secretary in a New York film company,” Mary said. She “came to LA, got into the DGA training program, became a production manager, a first assistant director, then a producer.”13 West hired Mary to coordinate Ally McBeal (1997–2002). “Ally McBeal was a blast because writer-producer David Kelley inspired us,” Mary said. “He challenged us creatively. We had a great team that blended together wonderfully”—special effects, visual effects, and stunts. “On one episode Kelley wrote, ‘Christina Ricci, wearing a teddy with a G-string, goes into her bedroom and her bed is a swimming pool with a diving board! John’s on the bed, she walks up, does a full one-and-a half somersault dive off the board in pike position and lands on all fours with her head in his crotch.’ Now that’s a great stunt! We had two days to figure out how to do it physically and visually,” Mary said. “We designed a special harness, the seamstress made the matching G-string and laced the harness, and we hired a stunt girl, a high-diver. Usually the actor falls into the shot at the tail end of the take. I didn’t want that because if we’re going to go through all this, I wanted Christina to drop from six or eight feet and come out of the somersault so we know she actually did it. She’s in the harness, the operator tips her over, and [she] lands on her back with her legs up over her face. We thought it up in one day, built the harness, tested it the next day, and shot it the third day.”

  When Mary began to do stunt work, her parents “were not thrilled with it,” but her mother took pictures the first time Mary did a high fall with Tom Morga on Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1983). Later, while Mary was working on Murder, She Wrote, her father was still encouraging her to go back to school and get a real job. “I told him how much I made. He was rather surprised. I asked him how much he made, and that was the end of the conversation. He was a geology professor at Cal Tech. He’s a good guy but didn’t understand you can have a great career without going to school for a piece of paper to qualify for a job.” As it happened, a few years later Mary felt burned out and, in a unique move, left the business to study medicine. She was slaving away at UCLA when a producer for David Kelley called. “Did I want to do a new series? Did I want to get my director’s card? Absolutely!” The series, Snoops (1999), didn’t last long, but Mary was back in the game.14

  As good as the 1980s were for some stuntwomen, SAG statistics in 1985 were not encouraging: men performed 86 percent of all stunt work; stuntwomen performed 14 percent, and most of that involved doubling actresses.15 For African American stuntwomen, the opportunities were bleak, to say the least, but Kym Washington made a career anyway. Her big break came on The Color Purple (1985), when she doubled Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey.16 “When the movie was released it had been shaved down from what we shot,” Kym said, “but it had a sequence of teaching driving to ‘Miss Daisy,’ as we called her.” Kym learned how to drive cars, which became her specialty, and the film began her long association with Whoopi Goldberg. “Many stuntmen doubling actors in action movies become part of a family,” she said. “It’s a good working relationship for both, but it is so rare for women. Whoopi had a loyal friendship with us—her stand-in, her hair, makeup, costume, and I was her stunt double. Few of us have a family like that. Jeannie Epper had it with Lynda Carter on Wonder Woman, Jadie David had it with Pam Grier, and I had it with Whoopi.”

  Whoopi Goldberg and Kym Washington working together—a rare opportunity for women. (Courtesy of Kym Washington)

  A couple of years after The Color Purple, Kym was working on Airwolf (the show she’d invited her mother to see), which was known for its explosions and cars crashes. “It was great to work on,” Kym said, “but it did have its problems,” including injuries and deaths. The year 1985 was a particularly bad one for stunt performers: stunt coordinator Ron Rondell’s twenty-three-year-old son, Reid, was killed in a helicopter crash on Airwolf; on the same show, stuntwoman Desiree Kearns suffered severe burns and sued Universal; stunt pilot Art Scholl was killed on Top Gun; Max Maxwell was injured on Invasion USA; and stuntwoman Carol Daniels, who had worked since 1960, sued Warner Bros. for multiple injuries suffered when she was buried under ten tons of sand on Shadow Chasers.17

  “In the quest for realistic movie and television thrills,” Michael Szymanski reported in 1987, “10 people have been killed and 4,998 injured in California productions since 1982.” According to stunt coordinator Kim Kahana, “Stunts in movies are looking more real because they are, and stunt people are being hurt and killed because of that. It’s the realism that’s killing us.”18 Regulations helped, but in 1987, five years after the Twilight Zone disaster, industry sources observed that, “aside from a different atmosphere, little has actually changed in the way movies are made.” Regulations were proposed by labor and management groups and presented at hearings before the California legislature. Few were enacted, however, “after many directors, actors and producers argued that further regulation of the industry would do more harm than good.”19

  Meanwhile, stuntwomen were taking the usual risks and work
ing hard in the mid-1980s. One of them, Eurlyne Epper, pulled off a dicey swan dive from the side of a steep hill in Hot Pursuit (1987).20 She had never done anything like it, but Eurlyne had always been good in the air. Only when she got to the site of the dive in Mexico did she find out that the water below was only about eight feet deep, barely covering huge chunks of coral. “I had to judge the angle of the dive to miss the coral,” Eurlyne said. “I couldn’t push off too hard. It had to be a shallow dive, and if I’d missed, it would have killed me.”

  Around the same time, in a scene from The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Donna Evans and Christine Baur were being blown out a door at the top of a staircase. Actually, when they stepped on the pedal of a hydraulic device called an air ram, it hurled them forward into the air. “Donna came off an air ram,” Chris said, “crashed into the wall, hit the landing, and went into a stair fall. I jumped off a ram into the air, did a cartwheel over the landing, and hit the ground.”

  Elsewhere, Tracy Keehn Dashnaw and Annie Ellis staged a glorious fight in Fatal Attraction, raging from room to room and ending in the petrifying bathtub scene.21 Kym Washington doubled Whoopi Goldberg, playing a narcotics cop in a series of hilarious disguises, in Fatal Beauty (1987). That same year, on the pilot for Beauty and the Beast, Donna Evans jumped from a car, dislocated her shoulder, but finished the stunt. And Marguerite Happy made sure there was enough room between the train and the trestle before she agreed to hang out the train window.