Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  TWO

  THREE

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  FOUR

  FIVE

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  SIX

  SEVEN

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2014 by Molly Gloss

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Gloss, Molly.

  Falling from horses / Molly Gloss.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-544-27929-2 (hardcover)

  1. Trick riding—Fiction. 2. Stunt performers—Fiction. 3. Motion picture industry—California—Los Angeles—Fiction. 4. Horsemanship—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.L65F36 2014

  813'.54—dc23

  2014016712

  eISBN 978-0-544-27989-6

  v1.1014

  PROLOGUE

  WHEN I WAS NINETEEN YEARS OLD, I took off from home, went to Hollywood, and worked in the movies for a year or so. This was back before the war, 1938, 1939. Jobs were still hard to come by in those days, but they were making cheap cowboy pictures as fast as they could churn them out, and I met a bronc rider at the Burns Roundup who told me you could get work down there if you could fall off a horse without breaking any bones. Or, if you broke one, at least not cry about it. He’d been working in the movies himself, but he went back to rodeo because bronc riding was duck soup compared to stunt riding, he claimed, and he wasn’t looking to get killed or crippled.

  Well, I was foolheaded in those days, looking for ways to get myself into trouble—carrying too much sail, as we used to say—and all I’d been doing for the past year and a half was picking up ranch work when I could and riding rodeo without ever making much money at it. I figured I might as well get paid for what I was good at, which was bailing off.

  When I was a kid I’d had the idea that the cowboys made those two-gun westerns more or less the way we played games, one of us saying, “Okay, you get shot this time.” I had some notion that they’d put me on a silver-trimmed saddle and a flashy pinto and I’d be riding hell-for-leather alongside Ken Maynard or some other cowboy star.

  I was still only a half-baked kid, so I guess you could say I didn’t know any better, but when I got down to Hollywood I ran into plenty of men thirty and forty years old who’d come into town with that same idea, fellows hanging around Gower Gulch in their pawnshop cowboy clothes looking to get hired to be the next Tim McCoy. Well, I wound up in a picture with Tim McCoy. I rode in a Ken Maynard movie, met Harry Carey, Hoot Gibson, all those actors, which doesn’t mean much anymore—kids these days wouldn’t know who the heck I was talking about. But back then every kid was cowboy-proud, cowboy-crazy, even the ones like me who’d grown up riding horses and working cattle and should have known better.

  I was late coming to understand that the cowboy pictures didn’t show much about real ranching. You never saw a movie cowboy hauling salt up to the high pastures or building fence around a haystack or helping a heifer figure out what to do with her first calf. Those movies were full of bank robberies and stage holdups, feuds, galloping posses, murderous Indians, and claim jumpers—nothing I ever saw growing up. But in the movies it all made sense. A bad guy was to blame for whatever had gone wrong, and at the end everything turned out right. If death came for anybody in the picture, it was always clean, unlingering, unsuffering. If somebody you cared about was dying, they had the strength and breath for last words, and that seemed to make it almost okay. I don’t remember actually thinking my life in Hollywood would be like the movies, but some of that must have come into my mind.

  The plain truth is, some of those cowboy stars I admired turned out to be sons of bitches, or fakes who couldn’t ride worth applesauce, and what I did for the movies was mostly act like I was shot and fall off horses that were a long way from flashy. There were more than a few days I wondered if it was worth it. I saw men get busted up, I saw horses killed, and I discovered there wasn’t a bit of glory in making those damn movies.

  All that picture business was finished for me a long time ago. For that matter, you could say Hollywood is finished with the cowboy. I used to have to cross the street to keep away from whatever hay-burner was playing in town, used to turn off the television to keep from seeing all those horse operas every night of the week—I just knew too much about how they got made. But now I can’t recall the last time I saw a horse on the screen. Seems to me the movie cowboy has gone downtown and into outer space: now it’s all squealing tires and things blowing up, every picture trying to make a bigger fireball than the last one.

  I might be tempted to think the whole country is done with cowboys, except every so often I open up the newspaper to see some Yale or Harvard lawyer who’s gone into politics, posing in his new white Stetson and ironed Levis, sitting on a tall horse and squinting into the camera like he’s spent his whole life in the West Texas sun, and I think, Well, there it is again.

  I will say right here that this isn’t the whole story of my life; somebody else will have to take that up after I’m dead. The time I studied with Benton, the work I did for the Autry Center, the frescoes in Santa Fe and Carson City and the Truman Library, the book art for Jack Schaefer—none of it would have happened if I hadn’t grown up the way I did and spent that year riding horses in the movies. When I was starting out as an artist, I thought I would just paint what I knew of life in the rural West, a life where people did real work, significant work, and the risk and the suffering were real. But I floundered for a long time, feeling I didn’t have the language to say anything new. It was Lily Shaw, arguing with me in letters that went back and forth between us for thirty years, who helped me see where my Hollywood year fit into things, the intersection where the West I knew growing up cuts across our great mythmaking machine, which is Hollywood. And the way those two things have always bent and shaped each other, have always been so tightly bound together they can’t be untangled. I grew up with Tom Mix as the model for how to be a cowboy, so I know I was tangled in it myself.

  What I want to write about is what I saw and did down there in Hollywood and what it meant—what it means—in my life and work.

  I am writing this for Lily. And also for my sister, and in some way for my parents, which I guess will become clear elsewhere in these pages.

  ONE

  1

  MY FOLKS WERE STILL LIVING UP IN OREGON in 1938, but they had lost the Echol Creek ranch a few months after my sister died and were back to hiring themselves out, taking work wherever they could get it, like they’d done before I was born. So I guess I shouldn’t say I took off from home, because in ’38 they were running a small outfit for an absentee owner in Klamath County, over around Bly, and I nev
er did think of Klamath County or any of those hired-help places as home. Home, to my way of thinking, was the ranch on Echol Creek, where I had lived all my growing-up years. After we left there I headed out on my own, picking up work for the big spreads around Harney County and following the rodeo some, so I’d been sleeping in barns and bunkhouses and bus stations for the past couple of summers, spending just a few weeks in the off-season bunking with my folks at whatever ranch they were working at. None of that was “home.”

  Then what happened is that I won second-place prize money off roping a calf at the Chiloquin Roundup and I made up my mind to buy a bus ticket to Hollywood.

  That was toward the end of September. I hadn’t seen my parents since sometime in March, and here I was, not more than fifty miles from where they were living, but instead of hitching a ride to Bly to spend a few months helping them feed cows, I caught a ride to Klamath Falls. I had a well-used roping saddle with me, a handmade Hamley that old Arlo Gantz had given me after I saved his dog from drowning in a mud sink. I sold the saddle to the fellow who gave me the ride, and then I just got on a bus and went south. I figured if I took the bus straight through, sitting up to sleep, and if I scraped by on candy bars and coffee, I’d have enough money left over to see me through the first couple of days in Hollywood until I landed work—this is what I thought.

  I caught a short-line bus in K Falls right after daybreak and rode it down to Weed. There’s some nice cattle country along the first part of that road, and when you see it early in the morning, the cows casting long shadows across the grass, the sun flashing off the windows of the ranch houses, you can talk yourself into thinking ranching is what you ought to be doing with your life even if you damn well know better. The air was clear as a bell that day: you could see all the way to the Trinity Mountains, their ridges white with early snow but stained orangey red by the sunrise.

  That’s not the main thing I remember from the ride to Weed, though. I hadn’t ever crossed the Oregon state line and had only seen Shasta as a little knob against the distant sky. The biggest mountain I’d seen up close was Steens, which is nothing but a big fault-block slab. But when the bus got to the top of the pass around Mount Hebron, suddenly there was Shasta, as big as you please, a white ice cream cone of a mountain, like the ones kids draw even if they’ve never seen such a thing. When we topped out a second time up above Grass Lake, those massive shoulders seemed to rise straight up from the valley floor. From the bus stop in Weed it looked like I could reach out and touch the big knurl on the side of that mountain. I wished I had paper and pencil to try to sketch it—that’s what I remember.

  And then, on the interstate bus, I met Lily Shaw. She wrote about that bus ride in her Hollywood memoir, so maybe you will find these next few pages familiar ground. But she and I had some different memories of that trip, so maybe not.

  Even then Lily was just about fearless and too smart by half, and she had a blunt, outspoken manner that all her life people took for arrogance, but she wasn’t much more than a kid, twenty-one or maybe twenty-two, leaving home for the first time, so everything you may know about her—the marriages and the lovers, the films, all that business at the McCarthy hearings, everything she wrote about in her Hollywood tell-all, everything written up in her obituary—was still to come, waiting out there like weather over the horizon. She had graduated college without ever having lived away from home: the University of Washington was a half-hour streetcar ride from her parents’ house on Queen Anne Hill. So the two nights she spent on the Greyhound bus traveling from Seattle to Los Angeles were the first nights in her life she had not slept in her own bedroom.

  She’d been on the bus for the better part of a day and a night when I got on in Weed. Her dress was wrinkled, her eyeglasses all smudged up with fingerprints, her hair greasy-looking and askew. Well, there weren’t many empty seats, and she and I were the only people older than twelve and younger than forty on that bus, so I guess that’s why I sat down next to her. She looked over and said, “Hi,” and I said, “Hey,” and for a while that was it.

  When you head south out of Weed you’ve got Shasta right there on your left shoulder for the next ten or fifteen miles, and I just couldn’t get enough of looking at it, staring past Lily in the window seat. Those ice cream cone mountains are a dime a dozen around Seattle, so she wasn’t as taken with the view as I was. Mostly she occupied herself with what was in her lap, a couple of cardboard folders stuffed full of typed pages. She turned the pages over slowly, reading and sometimes scribbling a few words in pencil in the margins. Once in a while she looked up and stared into the middle distance. She jiggled the pencil or tapped it when she was trying to think of a word, and she kept jiggling her feet and twirling a lock of her bangs or playing with the collar of her dress, pleating it and then smoothing it out and pleating it again.

  I didn’t have a lot of experience with girls, but it crossed my mind that she might think I was sneaking looks at her under the cover of looking at the mountain; I thought she might be wondering whether I found her pretty. She wasn’t pretty, at least by my standards back then. She had thick, dark eyebrows that just about met over her nose—she hadn’t yet begun to pluck them—and she was so skinny there was nothing to fill out the front of her wrinkled dress. Plus the dress was bright green with an orange collar, which might have looked all right on the right girl, but it threw an orange pallor onto her face. I didn’t have any interest in her, not in that way, and I figured I had better be clear about it. So I said, “I wonder if you’d mind switching seats. I like looking out at the country going by.”

  It took her half a minute to lift her attention from that pile of pages and figure out what I had just said. She looked over at Shasta as if she had not realized it was there and then cut her eyes briefly to me. “Well, all right, but I might want to switch again later.” After we changed seats, she immediately went back to her reading, and I realized she wasn’t interested in me—that none of this had been on her mind at all and she just had a lot of twitchiness in her.

  We stopped at Dunsmuir for lunch. The big mountain was behind us now, and I was beginning to feel that the steep woods around there were too much like the wooded ridges I had known back home on Echol Creek, so when we climbed back on the bus I asked if she wanted to take back the window seat. She shook her head and said, “No, that’s all right. This twisty road is making me queasy,” and I nodded and said, “It’ll do that,” as if being road-sick was something that only happened to girls.

  After Dunsmuir the road went from bad to worse. These days the interstate highway has taken out a lot of the kinks, but the road used to closely follow the Sacramento River, with a lot of zigzags through the canyon, plus a steep grade to boot. And they were doing a lot of rerouting just then, cuts and fills and gravel detours, because they had started building the Shasta Dam, which when it was finished would put parts of the old road underwater. They hadn’t yet built or rebuilt the masonry guardrails on some of the sheer dropoffs, and the northbound cars, feeling crowded on the curves by our big bus taking up the whole lane, would sometimes lay on the horn as they scraped past us with inches to spare. From the window seat I had a nice bird’s-eye view of every close call and the edge of the road where it fell two or three hundred feet down a steep rock face to the river. Given where I was in my life then, I began hoping the bus would go up on two wheels on one of those curves, and I leaned my weight against the window to help it along.

  Lily stuck with her reading for a while, and anyway, being Lily, she wouldn’t have admitted to nerves, but we were taking the curves pretty fast, and when she closed the folder of pages and asked me where I was from and where I was headed, I figured it was to take her mind off the curvy road and the likelihood of our bus plunging into the gorge. I don’t know if that’s right—she has written otherwise—but it’s what I thought at the time.

  I told her I was going down to Hollywood to work in the cowboy movies, which caused her to perk up slightly. She said she was h
eaded there too, to get into the business of writing for the movies.

  She asked if I was an actor, and I told her I was just expecting to ride in posses and such, which wasn’t really acting. Then I told her what I’d heard—that the work was mostly riding fast and pretending you’d been shot off your horse. She had never been on a horse in her life, but she’d seen enough cowboy movies to know what I meant. “You might have to jump onto a runaway buckboard to save the girl,” she said, “and maybe shoot the gun out of the bad guy’s hand.” She said all this with a straight face—she had a dry sense of humor and never liked to give away that she was joking. It wasn’t exactly a test, but if I’d taken her for serious I imagine she might have decided I was too dumb to bother with. My dad had always made fun of the bloodless fistfights, though, and how the hero’s fancy horse was bulletproof even when other horses were falling dead all around him, so I figured Lily was mocking those movies in the same way. I said, serious as church, “Lucky my six-shooter never runs out of bullets.” She smiled slightly and gave me a sidelong look, and I believe that was when she made up her mind I might be worth talking to.

  Lily Shaw was the most straightforward, unconcealed person I’ve ever known, and she had a bold streak in her already, like she was heading to Hollywood to burn down the town. It’s one of the reasons I took to her. But I should tell you right now: when we met, I was the one who was more reckless. I had been nursing a dangerous streak for a couple of years, which she took for boldness, and I imagine this is one of the reasons she took to me.

  I didn’t tell her where I was from—nothing at all about Echol Creek. I told her about picking up ranch work, traveling around to rodeos, working as a cook’s helper on a dude ranch. She didn’t tell me a whole lot about her life either. She said she had been writing for the women’s pages of the Seattle Times, but she had a letter from a friend of her dad’s, promising to put her to work in his Hollywood talent agency. His clients were mostly actors and actresses, but he had a few writer clients and he needed a secretary to read the stories they sent in and maybe go at them with a red pencil, which she figured would be more fun than her work for the Times, writing about casseroles and table etiquette. What she really wanted to do was become a screenwriter herself; the pages in her lap were a couple of screenplays she had written.