Stuntwomen

by Mollie Gregory

  21. Quoted in John Baxter, Stunt (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 282–83, citing Picture Play, May 1916. Mary Fuller (1888–1973) acted in many films from 1907 to 1917; she also wrote eight shorts, including The Golden Spider and A Princess in the Desert.

  22. Dorothea B. Hering, “The Sensational Feats of Motion Picture Stars,” Munsey’s 71 (December 1920): 412–19; The Film Index: A Bibliography, 3 vols. (New York: Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 1941–1985). The Film Index was compiled by participants in the Writers Program of the Work Progress Administration, New York.

  23. Kalton C. Lahue, Bound and Gagged: The Story of the Silent Serials (New York: Castle Books/A. S. Barnes, 1968), 277–78.

  24. Daily Milwaukee News, January 1, 1860.

  25. Sandra Gabriele, “Towards Understanding the Stunt Girl” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, May 17, 2003), www.allacademic.com.

  26. Samuel Butler’s February 17, 1878, letter is cited in Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), 16:998.

  27. Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, 102–10, 114–15.

  28. Ibid., 105.

  29. Kathlyn Williams (1879–1960) acted in many other films until 1935; she also wrote six films and directed two of them: The Last Dance (1912) and The Leopard’s Foundling (1914).

  30. Quoted in Slide, Silent Feminists, 118–19.

  31. Mary Fuller, Kathlyn Williams, Helen Gibson, and Ann Little had long lives; Grace Cunard and Helen Holmes died in their sixties.

  32. Grace Cunard (1893–1967) was born Harriet Mildred Jeffries, but Universal chief Carl Laemmle renamed her “after the steamship lines he used on his trips home to Germany” (Kevin Brownlow to the author). Cunard starred, produced, and directed from 1913 to 1921 and wrote about a hundred scripts; she acted in the 1930s and did bit parts in the 1940s.

  33. Acker, Reel Women, 162, citing Gerald Perry, “Sanka, Pink Ladies and Virginia Slims,” Women & Film 1, no. 56 (1974): 82–84.

  34. Francis Ford (1889–1953) acted in scores of films (The Quiet One, Stagecoach), as well as writing, directing, and producing.

  35. Drew, e-mail to the author, February 23, 2010.

  36. The first sequel was The Exploits of Elaine. Its chapter titles were as action-packed as the serial itself: “The Clutching Hand,” “The Hour of Threes,” “The Blood Crystals.” White’s last serials were Plunder (1923) and Perils of Paris (1924). See “Death Balks Pearl White Plans for Film Comeback,” Los Angeles Times, August 5, 1938.

  37. See Acker, Reel Women, 250–51, regarding male doubles for White.

  38. A. L. Wooldridge, “Girls Who Risk Their Lives,” Picture Play, March 1925, 111, quoting stuntman Bob Rose.

  39. John Dreyfuss, “George Marshall, Director, Dies,” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1975.

  40. Ruth Roland’s (1892–1937) company produced several movies in the early 1920s, including Ruth of the Rockies, The Timber Queen, White Eagle, Ruth of the Range, and The Haunted Valley. See Read Kendall, “Death Calls Ruth Roland,” Los Angeles Times, September 23, 1937.

  41. Helen Holmes (1892–1960) wrote and directed episodes of The Hazards of Helen and The Railroad Raiders. She and her husband, director John P. McGowan, formed their own production company, Signal Film Corporation. William Drew confirmed Holmes’s birth date as 1892 (1900 census).

  42. A letter from Leo S. Rosencrans, February 5, 1917, mentions the male double for Helen Holmes in episode 12, “The Main Line Wreck,” of The Hazards of Helen (file V413, Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences).

  43. Gibson, “In Very Early Days,” 34.

  44. Kevin Brownlow, “The Cowboy in Hollywood,” in The War, the West, and the Wilderness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 290.

  45. Hoot Gibson (1892–1962) was a rodeo champ before appearing in Shotgun Jones, Buckshot John, and Action.

  46. Gibson, “In Very Early Days,” 29. See also Brownlow, War, West, and Wilderness, 253.

  47. Clift, Founding Sisters, 4.

  2. Blackface and Wigs

  1. Jack Carleton, “Are Women Braver than Men?” Los Angeles Times, August 18, 1935, 116, courtesy of Valerie Yaros, historian, Communications Department, Screen Actors Guild (SAG). In 1940 Eddie Cline directed The Bank Dick and My Little Chickadee with Mae West and W. C. Fields.

  2. McWilliams, Southern California Country, 337–42.

  3. MGM Studio Tour (MGM, 1925), aired by Turner Classic Movies, 2010.

  4. Slide, Silent Feminists, 134–35.

  5. See Baxter, Stunt, 281–82. For instance, Audrey Scott became the riding double to the stars—Greta Garbo, Rosalind Russell, Clara Bow, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Judith Anderson. Scott wrote I Was a Hollywood Stunt Girl (Philadelphia: Donovan, 1969).

  6. One exception was actress Bebe Daniels (1901–1971), who reportedly performed many of her own stunts. See Eddie Cantor, My Life Is in Your Hands (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928).

  7. Wooldridge, “Girls Who Risk Their Lives,” 16–18.

  8. Swimmers from the 1920s and 1930s included Mary Wiggins, Janet Ford, Loretta Rush, and Elsie Ware; riders were Frances Miles, Evelyn Finley, Vivian Valdez, Vera McGinnis, Winnie Brown, Audrey Scott, Crete Sipple, and Marilyn Mills.

  9. Adela Rogers St. Johns, “Stunting into Stardom,” Photoplay, December 1922, 39.

  10. Helen Klumph, “Bust ’Em Cowgirl!” Picture Play, January 1925, 17. Winnie Brown’s movies include The Iron Trail, The Prairie Trail, Campaigning with Custer, Trail of the Lonesome Mine, and Captain Courtesy.

  11. Ibid., 16.

  12. Brownlow, War, West, and Wilderness, 292–93. According to Brownlow, Olive Carey told him in a June 1980 interview, “So many tumblers came from lumber towns because as kids they could practice falls on sawdust piles.” Brownlow to the author, June 4, 2008.

  13. Wooldridge, “Girls Who Risk Their Lives,” 18. In the 1920s and 1930s Janet Ford worked on The Steel Trail, The Sideshow, and The Furies. Loretta Rush’s (1906–1972) credits from the same era include Flowing Gold, Catalina Here I Come, Fay Wray’s double in King Kong, Jean Harlow’s double in China Seas, and Three on a Honeymoon. Rush worked into the 1950s.

  14. Carleton, “Are Women Braver than Men?” 116. Mary Wiggins (1910–1945) worked on Love at First Flight and His Unlucky Night; she doubled Barbara Stanwyck in Union Pacific and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night. In 1940 she appeared in an eighteen-minute Warner Bros. short, Spills for Thrills, directed by De Leon Anthony. See “Veteran Woman Stunt Artist Ends Own Life,” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1945, 1A.

  15. Thomas Schatz, Genius of the System (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 127–29.

  16. Stuntman Bob Rose (1901–1993) played Rusty McDonald in Lucky Devils and did some of the stunts. He started in the business in 1919 and sometimes doubled Ruth Roland in her serials. At the time, no stunt players were credited by name.

  17. The following films featured black actors: Birth of a Nation (1915), The Emperor Jones (1933), Judge Priest (1934) with Lincoln Perry, Green Pastures (1935) with Rex Ingram, and They Won’t Forget (1937) with Clinton Rosemond.

  18. Gary Null, Black Hollywood: The Black Performer in Motion Pictures (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1975), 39.

  19. Other pre-Code (1933) films were Duck Soup, Ecstasy, She Done Him Wrong, and 42nd Street. See Complicated Women, 1929–1934 (Timeline Films, 2003), based on the book by producer Mike LaSalle.

  20. McWilliams, Southern California Country, 333.

  21. SAG’s founders were Berton Churchill, Grant Mitchell, Ralph Morgan, Charles Miller, Kenneth Thomson, and his wife Alden Gay. Among those who joined in the first year were James Cagney, Robert Montgomery, Fredric March, Jeanette MacDonald, and the Marx brothers.

  22. McWilliams, Southern California Country, 348.

  23. Studios did not recognize the Writers Guild as the collective-bargaining agent for writers in motion pictures until October 1940.

  24. Kim Fellne
r, “Gil Perkins: Union Activist [second of a two-part oral history],” Screen Actor, Summer 1981, 32. Fellner was the director of public relations at SAG. This oral history is valuable not only for Perkins’s accounts of his own stunts but also for his recollections of the stuntwomen he worked with.

  25. Stuntwomen’s SAG membership supplied by Valerie Yaros, e-mail to the author, August 19, 2008.

  26. According to some sources, the industry began to open up for women in the 1960s. However, the 1970s were the key period for awareness and action. Based on my interviews for Women Who Run the Show (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), the failure of SAG, the Writers Guild of America, the Directors Guild of America, and other unions to recognize discrimination against women and minorities continued well into the 1990s and persists today to some degree.

  27. Jewell Jordan’s (1917–2009) films include Ninotchka, New Moon, Ever since Eve, and The Good Earth.

  28. Lila Finn (1909–1996) also doubled Veronica Lake, Olivia De Havilland, and Ida Lupino. She worked on It’s a Wonderful Life, Heart Beeps, Legal Eagles, Suburban Commando, and Predator 2. One of the original Venice bodysurfers and volleyball players, Finn was a member of the USA volleyball team.

  29. Author interview with Barry Shanley. He practiced law in Beverly Hills for twenty-seven years, specializing in civil, personal injury, and business litigation.

  30. Paul Stader (1911–1991), a stunt coordinator and second-unit director, often doubled Gregory Peck, John Wayne, and Cary Grant.

  31. SAG, “Stuntwomen’s Oral History Project,” April 2, 1981, 7. The interviewer is not credited, but it was probably Kim Fellner. Lila Finn did a stair fall in The Stunt Girl, a short produced by Jerry Fairbanks and directed by Robert Carlisle in the 1947 Paramount documentary series Unusual Occupations.

  32. Lila’s knife stunt was for Just Off Broadway (1942). Fall Girls, a 1987 Group W television short, included stuntwomen Lila Finn, Debbie Evans, and Diane Peterson.

  33. David Lamb, “Stuntwomen Stand on Feats,” Los Angeles Times, November 29, 1971, D1–D3.

  34. Murray M. Moler, “Want a Dainty Gal Bodyguard? Helen Thurston Can Qualify,” Waterloo (Iowa) Daily Courier, February 7, 1945. Lila Finn joined SAG on July 29, 1937; Helen Thurston joined on November 17, 1937.

  35. Author interview with Sean and Michele Fawcett, grandchildren of Helen Thurston (1909–1979). Helen married Jimmy Fawcett on January 1, 1929, when she was nineteen years old. Her films include Star Spangled Banners, Anne of the Indies, River of No Return, and The Great Race.

  36. Florabel Muir, “They Risk Their Necks for You,” Saturday Evening Post, September 15, 1945, 27–35. A former police reporter for the New York Daily News, Muir was the Los Angeles correspondent for the Daily News and a Variety columnist. Muir cited stuntwomen Frances Miles, Betty Danko, Nellie Walker, Jeanne Criswell, Evelyn Smith, Mary Wiggins, Aline Goodwin, Ione Reed, Vivian Valdez, Loretta Rush, and Opal Ernie.

  37. Paula Dell’s credits include Camelot, Logan’s Run, Above the Law, Circle of Power, and Star!

  38. William Witney, In a Door, into a Fight, out a Door, into a Chase: Moviemaking Remembered by the Guy at the Door (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996), 202.

  39. Herbert Yates, owner of Consolidated Film Industries, formed Republic Pictures to produce and distribute movies.

  40. In 1939 Helen Gibson appeared in Stagecoach and The Oregon Trail; Nellie Walker was in Born to Be Wild and Wyoming Wildcat; and Babe DeFreest (1907–1986) was in The Roaring West, The Tiger Woman, Zorro’s Black Whip, and Perils of Nyoka.

  41. Witney, In a Door, 141–43.

  42. Stuntman Jimmie Dundee doubled Cary Grant. According to Valerie Yaros, SAG historian, stunt performers received $35 a day in 1937.

  43. In the 1950s the gaffer of a stunt was called the “ramrod,” and he had to be a strict disciplinarian; a ramrod’s original job was “to ram home the charge of a muzzle-loading firearm” (Webster’s Third International Dictionary, 1971). Today, a gaffer is the chief electrical technician on a film, but the term also refers to a stunt person who runs the stunts.

  44. Steven Bach, Marlene Dietrich, Life and Legend (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 250.

  45. McWilliams, Southern California Country, 339–40.

  46. Second-unit director Yakima Canutt created the famous stunt in Stagecoach; Aline Goodwin doubled Margaret Hamilton, and Betty Danko was a stand-in for the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz; Richard Talmadge was second-unit director and stunt coordinator for Beau Geste; Marie Bodie and Ione Reed doubled Maureen O’Hara in The Hunchback of Notre Dame; and Audrey Scott was the riding double for Bette Davis in Dark Victory.

  47. Brownlow, e-mail to the author, February 23, 2010.

  48. Muir, “They Risk Their Necks,” 27.

  49. Aline Goodwin (1889–1980) also worked on The Rainbow Trail, King Kong (doubling Fay Wray), The Wizard of Oz, Leatherstocking, and The Sky Rider. Hazel Hash Warp (1914–2008) was a rodeo rider (Bozeman [Mont.] Daily Chronicle, www.legacy.com).

  50. Bach, Marlene Dietrich, 249, 251–52. Finally budgeted at $768,000, Destry Rides Again was released three months later, on November 29, 1939. See also the documentary Marlene Dietrich: Her Own Song (2001).

  51. Jon Wilkman and Nancy Wilkman, Picturing Los Angeles (Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2006), 170–74.

  52. Among George Marshall’s (1891–1975) many films were You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man and The Blue Dahlia. He also directed the television series I Love Lucy and The Odd Couple. His granddaughter, Christine Anne Baur, is a stuntwoman today.

  53. Una Merkel (1903–1986) acted in silent movies and was a comic character actress. She was in The Fifth Horseman and 42nd Street, was a Tony nominee for Summer and Smoke, and appeared on the TV series The Red Skelton Show and Playhouse 90.

  54. Maria Riva, Marlene Dietrich (New York: Galantine Books, 1992), 493–94.

  55. Quoted in Roy Pickard, Jimmy Stewart: A Life in Film (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 38. See also Charles Higham, Marlene: The Life of Marlene Dietrich (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 192–93.

  56. Muir, “They Risk Their Necks,” 34. She did not reveal Una Merkel’s double. Among the stuntwomen who might have done it were Betty Danko, Mary Wiggins, Aline Goodwin, and Loretta Rush.

  57. Ibid., 27. Frances Miles (1907–2004) worked on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Scarface, and The Devil Is Driving.

  3. Television

  1. Muir, “They Risk Their Necks,” 34. Betty Danko (1903–1979) probably doubled actress Binnie Barnes, playing the Anne Bonney role. Danko’s other credits include 45 Fathers, All American Toothache, Slightly Static, and Made in Hollywood.

  2. Moler, “Want a Dainty Gal Bodyguard?”

  3. Lila Finn, recalling Polly in the program book “The Perils of Polly,” presented by the United Stuntwomen’s Association and Burbank Elks to Honor Polly Burson, March 15, 1986. See also Barbara De Witt, “Ride ’em Cowgirls,” Los Angeles Daily News, March 7, 1995.

  4. Polly Burson (1919–2006) was born Pauline Shelton in Ontario, Oregon. Her credits include Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Cops, The Crimson Ghost, Barefoot in the Park, Heller in Pink Tights, Vertigo, Some Like It Hot, McLintock! Spartacus, and How the West Was Won. She received the Golden Boot Award from the Motion Picture and Television Fund and was inducted into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame, the Hollywood Stuntmen’s Hall of Fame, and the National Cowgirl Museum Hall of Fame.

  5. Bill Mayer, “Living Dangerously—By Design,” Daily Variety, Forty-Fourth Anniversary Issue, 1977.

  6. Arthur Rosson (1886–1960) directed the second unit on Unconquered and probably coordinated the stunts with DeMille, who knew the action and the stuntmen he wanted. Unconquered opened on October 10, 1947. Rosson worked with DeMille for years as associate director and second-unit director; their collaborations included Ten Commandments and King of Kings.

  7. Actor and stuntman Ted Mapes began working in 1929 and often doubled Gary Cooper.

  8. Mayer, “L
iving Dangerously.”

  9. Finn, “Perils of Polly.” Lila Finn also doubled Paulette Goddard in a dive off a ship into the ocean in DeMille’s Reap the Wild Wind.

  10. See Sklar, Movie-Made America, 274–85.

  11. “Stunt Rider Prefers Denim to Chintz,” Omaha Evening World-Herald, September 19, 1966, 15. May Boss worked on Marnie, Mary Poppins, The Hallelujah Trail, Fort Dobbs, Nevada Smith, The Way West, Westbound, The Last Sunset, How the West Was Won, and Mackenna’s Gold.

  12. Among the stuntwomen listed with Teddy’s in 1954 were Helen Thurston, Loretta Rush, Lucille House, Lila Finn, Stevie Myers, Polly Burson, May Boss, Sharon Lucas, Shirley Lucas, Evelyn Finley, Martha Crawford, Opal Ernie, Donna Hall, and Evelyn Smith. William Gordon Collection, folders 551 and 453, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Gordon was a casting director at 20th Century–Fox). Teddy’s service still operates today; other similar services are Joni’s, Bill’s, and Missy’s.

  13. John D. Ross and Mark Ivis, “Robert Herron: 80, Unbreakable and Still Going Strong!” Inside Stunts, Summer 2004, 15.

  14. The stuntwomen in Westward the Women were Opal Ernie, Evelyn Finley, Polly Burson, Donna Hall, Edith Happy, Lucille House, Sharon Lucas, Stevie Myers, and Ann Roberts. Others were credited as “pioneer women.” There were nineteen stuntmen.

  15. Quoted in Challenge the Wilderness (1951), a thirteen-minute short produced by MGM. Charles Schnee wrote the screenplay for Westward the Women.

  16. Edith Happy doubled Dorothy Malone in The Last Sunset. Her daughter, Bonnie Happy, is president of the United Stuntwomen’s Association.

  17. During our interview, Polly Burson didn’t mention stunt-coordinating on Westward the Women to me. Nor does a 1986 tribute book cite her as stunt coordinator for the film. Since she didn’t coordinate all the stunts, she may have felt she wasn’t entitled to the credit. No stunt coordinator is listed in the film credits.

  18. William Wellman Jr. was featured in 180 movies and TV shows; he is the author of The Man and His Wings (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Publishers, 2007) and Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel (New York: Pantheon Books/Random House, 2015). In the 1930s and 1940s Evelyn Finley (1915–1989) worked on The Diamond Queen, Sheriff of Medicine Bow, Gunning for Justice, Valley of Vengeance, and The Texas Rangers. “The great female equestrians of the movies included Nell O’Day and Betty Miles. Evelyn Finley was one of the top riders, far better than most of the male cowboy stars of that period. Finley played the heroine in dozens of 1940s westerns, but her best work was stunt doubling and riding for many of Hollywood’s famous lady stars” (Stunt Players Directory Memorial).