Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  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.

  24

  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 thin
g 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.

  The parties I had gone to in Harney County had mostly been in barns and community buildings, and the principal entertainment was school kids singing “The Streets of Laredo” or “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” And for the past couple of years I hadn’t been to any parties at all, just dance halls and bars near the ranches and rodeos I was working at, where the principal entertainment was drinking beer and getting into fights. I felt I was a little rough around the edges for the crowd True hung around with—girls in pastel dresses and boys in suits and ties. But I was working on not giving a damn if people thought I was rough, and I was feeling halfway cocky now that I was riding and falling off horses in the movies.

  So the first Saturday night after I moved into his house I rode with True in his DeSoto out to a party in the valley.

  He stopped on the way and picked up three girls waiting for him in front of a house in Thousand Oaks. I was wearing my bib-front shirt and my good hat and boots, and when the girls looked me over I guess they all thought I was an actor. One of them, a tall brunette wearing eyebrow pencil and red lipstick, smiled and said, “Hi,” and crowded into the front seat with me and True, her thigh pressing up against mine.

  When we got to the house where the party was, a couple of dozen people were already there. A pinochle game was going on in the kitchen, and a few couples were dancing to music from a console radio—Kate Smith singing “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain”—but mostly people were drinking beer and standing or sitting in the crowded rooms talking about the movie business.

  True knew enough of the people there that he just waded right in, which left me standing like a post, so I walked through the house until I saw where they kept the beer, and then I leaned against a wall and nursed the bottle and acted like I was watching the card players. I wasn’t there very long before the brunette who had smiled at me in the car came up and leaned on the wall next to me. She was drinking something amber-colored in a glass, not beer. She took a sip and glanced over at me and said, “Are you in the cowboy pictures?”

  I said, “Yeah, I’m riding for Republic right now.”

  I don’t know if she got the import of my naming a big-gun studio. She peered at me over the lipstick print on the rim of her glass and pretended to look disgusted. “You cowboys are all crazy. I knew one who broke his leg, and now he’s got a limp and has to use a cane. You should try to get into real acting.”

  I looked down at my boots and said, “They were shooting a fistfight the other day and I was in the scene. Maybe that makes me an actor.”

  She gave me a coy look and touched the scar in my eyebrow with her pinky finger. “Well, that’s better than falling off horses. Did you get hit in the eye?”

  I glanced at her and kept a straight face. “I was riding down the street while they were filming the fight, and I’m pretty sure my left boot made it into the picture.” I had told this to Lily a couple of Sundays earlier and she had said dryly, “Ha ha ha, funny boy.” The brunette gave me a blank look. I finally had to smile to help her get the joke, and then she laughed briefly, her mouth opening to show her white teeth, her salmon tongue.

  Her name was Margaret. She had brought a flask of whiskey in her purse, and she was drinking it with a splash of lemonade. I hadn’t yet developed a taste for hard liquor, but I thought I could choke it down if it was doctored with lemonade, so when I finished my beer she made me one of her whiskey sours. We sat on the floor in a corner of the kitchen and she told me she was an actress. She didn’t say which movies she’d been in, but she talked about various stars as if she knew them. She said she was twenty-six years old—by my lights, an older woman of vast experience. We had two or three drinks, and then we wound up outside, sitting on a picnic table in the dark yard. When I kissed her, I could smell her sweat and our whiskey breath and her cloying lilac perfume. After I’d kissed her a few times, she put her hand high up on my thigh and squeezed. I had to work up my nerve, but I fumbled a hand inside her brassiere.

  In the wee hours, True drove us back to town. There were so many of us crammed into the car that Margaret sat in my lap, pressing one of her breasts against my arm. Every so often she wriggled her behind against my thighs, like she was just rearranging her seat, and I was stupid enough to be embarrassed by my hard-on.

  When we got to the house where the girls lived, Margaret walked off with the others, swaying her hips, and she didn’t look back. Driving away, True said to me, “Margaret likes to fuck.”

  In the last couple of weeks, I’d heard that particular vulgarity from Cab O’Brien’s mouth often enough to become halfway used to it. I just answered, “I figured.” I had grown up with certain ideas about girls—the ones who were marriage prospects and the ones who let men do things to them—but there didn’t seem to be any judgment in what True had said about Margaret. In his crowd, it seemed, promiscuity just meant you were fashionable.

  There were always too many people packed into the houses at those weekend parties, and for the next couple of Saturdays all I managed with Margaret was some furtive groping in dark corners. But then True got hired for a picture on location in Arizona, and he was gone for a couple of weeks. The studio hauled the crew there in a chartered bus, so he left the DeSoto for me to use. I acted the big shot, driving myself to the set all week, and on
Saturday I went without him to one of the parties. I picked up the girls as usual and afterward drove them back to their house in Thousand Oaks. When the others got out of the car, Margaret scooted closer to me and laid her head on my shoulder.

  We were already drunk, and we drank some more when we got back to True’s house, so let me just say that it didn’t go as I’d hoped. We managed to get our clothes off, and then, after I’d fumbled around a while, I started to weep in drunken stupidity and frustration. She murmured something pacifying and pulled my head to her breasts and fell asleep, and after a while I did too. But when the sun came up, I woke her and tried again, and she blearily helped me figure out what goes where. It was one of those gifts a woman will sometimes bestow on a boy, and I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with liking to fuck. It wasn’t optimal sex, nowhere near, and it was over in seconds, but I halfway remember the way the daylight came through the blinds and lit up the fine fuzz of hair on her soft belly and breasts.

  25

  I TOOK MARGARET back to True’s house a couple of times, but then she moved on to someone else and so did I. It’s not as if every girl at those parties was looking to have sex, but some were, and some of them wanted to have it with me. Most of them were actresses, but one was a stunt girl named Lorraine. She had grown up in North Carolina riding English, and she had a pretty low opinion of cowboy horsemanship. “You boys all ride fast as hell, but you don’t have any kind of seat,” she told me.

  I wasn’t sure what she meant by “seat,” but I said, “You haven’t seen me ride.”