Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  She gave me a pinch-eyed look. “All you cowboys ride the same.”

  At another time or coming from somebody else, that might have rankled, but we were sipping whiskey and sitting thigh to thigh on a driftwood log on the beach at Santa Monica, and I had intentions for the way the night might go.

  There weren’t many stunt girls back then. In the year I worked in the movies I met maybe three or four. They were always girls who had grown up with horses, and some were the daughters of stuntmen who had gone into the family business, the way True had. A stunt girl would double for the actress when the script called for a fast gallop or jumping a fence or a pony express mount, and they’d step in when the script called for a woman clinging to the seat of a runaway wagon or inside a careening stagecoach, which was the usual trouble females fell into in those movies, but there wasn’t much work for them for the simple reason that most of the oaters didn’t have roles for women.

  Lorraine had doubled for Dolores Waterman for the long wagon chase in Laredo Days, which is where she’d met True. A girl holding on for her life on a bouncing wagon seat behind six galloping horses is pretty much at the mercy of the driver sitting next to her, and True was one Lorraine had learned to trust. She had a couple of impressive scars, which she eventually showed me—one on her hip from a bad fall off a Roman chariot—but she complained more about the hot, itchy wigs she had to wear, the skimpy or confining costumes, and the unnecessary risk-taking of some of the men she worked with than about the bones she had broken.

  When I met Lorraine, I was still working mainly for Cab O’Brien, but I was hoping to get calls from some of the other ramrods around town. The work I did for Cab was mostly just riding fast and getting shot, and I was ready to branch out, plus I wanted a location job, if not in the Chihuahua Desert or the Rockies, at least up at Lone Pine or Tehachapi. I started saving money with the idea of buying a car so I wouldn’t have to rely on buses and streetcars to get to the sets and so I’d be ready to drive myself to Lone Pine when the time came.

  Then what happened is Cab needed somebody to ride like hell down a steep canyon wall, and I said I would do it. There were eight of us riding that day, and none of the others argued for it. No rancher in his right mind would have asked a horse to go down the side of that canyon—it was the closest thing to a sheer cliff. But I made the ride in about five or six jumps, steering the horse so he’d land on a bit of ledge just long enough to gather his hindquarters under him before springing down to the next. The horse was a big brown gelding, and he couldn’t check himself quick enough at the bottom, but when he sprawled and fell I rolled off him as if it was planned, and as he got to his feet I jumped on and rode him out, right in front of the camera.

  Cab lit into me. “I asked you to ride straight down, not go hopping rock to rock. Next time you better do the fucking scene exactly like I tell you.”

  But he used the shot—I imagine it looked pretty good—and after that the word must have gone around, because I started getting calls from other ramrods. Not location shoots, and I was still doing a lot of straight riding and falling, but every so often I got paid for other kinds of horse work—riding through a burning barn, racing along a wooden sidewalk or up the staircase inside a saloon or a hotel, riding hell-for-leather across streams, the water flying up in sheets. One time I was riding into a river when the horse balked and sent me over his head; I popped up from the water, swung onto him from the wrong side, and we lunged on out. The ramrod used it without saying a word to me about sticking to the scene.

  I did some pony express mounts, doubling for Dick Hayes, and I put on a balsa-wood vest under my shirt and got killed with an arrow a few times. For a Three Mesquiteers movie, I rode up to the front of a two-story hotel, caught hold of a rope dangling from a flagpole, and swung up onto the balcony. And I ran a horse through a bank window once, which turned out to be harder than it looked. You had to blindfold the horse so he couldn’t see what was coming, then spur him from a standstill to a gallop in about three jumps, and pull off the blinders at the last minute, when it was too late for him to quit. Flying through that candy-glass window in a shower of crystal sugar, I started to think I was some kind of top-notch stuntman.

  So I was riding all week, going out to parties on Saturday night, and then taking the bus over to the Studio Club on Sunday to see a movie with Lily. I had told her about the parties without telling her that I was bringing girls back to True’s house, but I imagine it wasn’t hard for her to guess. I didn’t give it a minute of thought at the time, but I know I was acting loutish and rough in those days, out at the edge of wild, which Lily must have seen. I would show up at the Studio Club on Sunday smelling of stale sex, and then I’d make thinly veiled remarks to girls behind the popcorn counter or pretty girls we passed on the street. Acting like a top horse, as we used to say.

  I asked her once, about a year after I had gone back to live with my folks, why she didn’t throw me over when she figured out what I was up to and the girls I was bedding. She laughed. “Jesus, Bud, you didn’t shock me, you made me feel dead on the vine! You were acting in movies, going to Hollywood parties, drinking whiskey, sleeping with pretty actresses, and I was still living in a dormitory with a bunch of office girls. Jesus.”

  Well, she had come to Hollywood with the idea that a woman who wanted to make it in the movie business had to be as bold and shameless as the men, but the most shocking thing she’d done up to that point was take up smoking. I was nothing but a green ranch kid, but I had managed to fall in with a rowdy crowd of movie people, doing what Lily imagined young people in Hollywood must all be doing. So she didn’t think about throwing over our friendship. What she began to think about was finding a way to lose her virginity. “How could I write about sex if I hadn’t ever experienced it?” is what she always said about that, but it went along with her belief that a Hollywood life should look more like the one I was living than the one she had settled into.

  Right around this time she landed a spot as a junior writer working under Dale Lampman and began working on scripts with Bob Hewitt; the timing was either lucky or luckless, depending on your point of view.

  The writers were all men at the time, but Lampman had had women writers working for him in the past, so of course Lily was looking for a way to be noticed. She’d been thinking that if she stopped Lampman as he came through the office and asked him for some advice, she might be able to impress him with her judgment of scripts and the good, crisp prose in her synopses. She was clear in her own mind that he wouldn’t take this as flirting.

  But then one day when Lampman came out of Marion’s office, he crossed through the reading room, came straight to her, and perched himself on the corner of her desk. She was caught off-guard, but she could be pretty unflappable, so she pushed back in her chair as if she was the one who had called him over, and she closed the script she’d been reading and held it up to him. “Don’t bother with this one,” she said. “It’s a Crime Doesn’t Pay, very badly written.” As if she was Bette Davis in Front Page Woman.

  This seemed to amuse him. He took the script, glanced at it, dropped it back on the desk. Then he adjusted his seat and said, “I hear you want to be a writer.”

  She hadn’t made this a secret—she had told Marion as much when she was first hired. “I have some stories I’ve been sending out,” she said. She didn’t tell him she had brought her Texas Ranger script into the office for one of the other girls to read and report on but had heard nothing about it afterward.

  She hoped he’d offer to take a look at one of her stories himself, but instead he pushed out his thick lips like he’d tasted something bitter. “Waste of time. A screenplay done on spec is a sign of weakness. You’re letting everybody know you’re too young and green to land a contract. Or a failing writer trying to hold on.”

  She knew too little about it to argue, but this was Lily. She frowned and argued anyway, because his tone provoked her. “A good script should rise to the top of the pile, no
matter if it’s on spec.”

  He made a slight scoffing sound and shrugged—her opinion was nothing to him. “A woman can make it as a writer in this business, but she needs to get her foot in the door first. You want to get on as a writer, you ought to find somebody else’s piece-of-crap script, polish it up, and show it to whoever heads up the writers. Show him you can put lipstick on any damn thing—that’d be one way to get in the door.” He smiled slightly, stood, and strolled away. But then he stopped at another girl’s desk, a girl named Elaine, and leaned in close, speaking too softly for anyone to overhear. Elaine’s hair was blond, she wore bright lipstick and skirts that showed off her legs.

  He might not have been serious, Lily knew, but she took home the Crime Doesn’t Pay—it was badly written, but the plot had promise—and stayed up all night in the typewriter room at the Studio Club, rewriting the whole thing. She brought the old version and the freshly typed pages back to the office in a paper folder, and when Lampman walked by her desk again she held it out to him. “I heard you’re the one who heads up the writers,” she said.

  He laughed, took the folder from her, and went away without saying whether he would read it. But he brought it back the next day, threw it loosely into her lap, and sat again with his hip resting on the corner of her desk. “It ain’t great, but it’s pretty good,” he said—out of the corner of his mouth, like George Brent in Front Page Woman. He smiled briefly, then leaned back and looked around the room as if he had lost interest in her. It was half a minute before he looked down at her again. “I told Marion I’m giving you a try as a junior writer. If it doesn’t work out, you’ll land back here. Tomorrow, come over to the writers’ building and I’ll give you some other piece-of-crap thing to start on.” He leaned in and touched his knuckles lightly against her chin. “Good girl,” he said.

  In the morning, when she tapped on the door of his office, he yelled out something that could have been an offer to enter. He was reading a sheaf of manuscript pages, and she stood at his desk a minute or so before he looked up and handed her a four-page scene from a crime drama that Dick Hayes was set to star in. “Something’s wrong with it, too grim or something, see what you can do.” He went back to his reading without saying anything else.

  She went out into the hallway. The Barracks was partitioned into several small rooms, many of them windowless, and she looked into several until she found two men sitting at a desk. One was typing as the other one leaned over his shoulder, smoking a cigarette, frowning down at the words as they rolled off the keys. There was a small window in one wall, but the venetian blind was closed to keep out the daylight.

  “Find an empty desk in an empty room,” the typist said without looking up. Lily hadn’t asked them anything.

  She went into one of the small, windowless rooms, and in a couple of hours she rewrote the scene in the Dick Hayes movie and turned it in. Lampman didn’t look at the revised pages, just tossed them onto a pile on his desk, then stood up and poked around in the bookshelves behind him until he found the book he was looking for. He reached it out to her. “Write a treatment for a picture,” he said, and picked up his own reading again.

  What she turned in a couple of days later was not a film treatment but a carefully reasoned four-page opinion that the book would never make a movie. Lampman put the report on top of his pile of papers and said without looking up, “I’m busy. Ask around, find something to work on.”

  Gradually she learned not to bother him when his door was closed—to turn in her projects to a box on the hallway floor. He seldom offered an opinion about her work. She thought he might send her back down to the reading room when he got around to reading her report on the novel, but one of the other writers told her it was a project several people had already wrestled with—that Lampman knew it would never make a movie. So after a couple of weeks she took his silence to mean she was now officially a junior writer.

  She spent some of her time in the Barracks working on her own screenplays, which all the junior writers were doing, and some of the time helping out other writers with their projects. And then she helped Bob Hewitt finish a two-reel comedy for one of Sunrise’s minor stars. Movie programs in those days always included a few one- or two-reel short films—newsreels, comedies, travelogues, cartoons—and the junior writers had a better chance of getting a two-reel picture on the floor than a feature. So after they finished work on the comedy, she and Bob wrote and submitted a lot of ideas for short comedies and cartoons. The staff writers were on six-month contracts, but the junior writers were hired week to week, and throwing a lot of ideas out there was how they kept themselves employed.

  Well, this wasn’t what she had hoped for. Lily wanted to be writing about real human conflicts, real people and their problems, but was stuck writing trivial scripts with dancing animals and idiotic plots for pratfall comedians. The Dick Hayes crime drama she had written a scene for was filmed without her scene, and as far as she knew, none of the two-reel stories she and Bob wrote or proposed ever made it onto the screen. She wrote an audition piece for a young actress Lampman had said was in line to be the studio’s new star, but the ingénue’s name never made it into lights.

  Still, she was working—writing—at a busy studio. And while she waited for an assignment or a reaction to a script, she and Bob visited the outdoor sets and the sound stages, and they went into a cutting room and watched an editor at a Moviola machine, cutting strips of film and splicing them together, shaping the first rough cut into something resembling a picture. Lily wasn’t star-struck—she knew that the actors and directors she was watching were nowhere near Hollywood’s best. But she kept a notebook in her pocket and wrote down everything she saw and heard. In later years, whenever she talked about her beginnings in Hollywood and the seven weeks she worked at Sunrise Pictures, she rarely mentioned Marion Chertok or Dale Lampman. She talked about those second-rate directors and what she’d learned from watching them make their second-rate movies.

  I only saw Bob Hewitt one time, when he brought Lily to the hospital after I was hurt; I don’t think we spoke a word to each other. I can tell you Bob wasn’t much to look at. He had russet hair and a chin that sloped back to his neck. The most interesting thing about him, as far as Lily ever said, was that he got her jokes.

  When Lily met him, Bob had just come out of college in Chicago or Boston or someplace like that. He had ambitions to be a story editor at a big studio, but while he waited for one of the periodic shakeups at Warner Brothers or Paramount to open a door he could walk through, his uncle, who was an attorney for a couple of studios, had finagled him the job at Sunrise.

  Lily told me he was a decent-not-great writer but a top-drawer critic, with an ear for good dialogue. After she showed him Death Rides the Sky, he told her his uncle might be able to get the story in front of someone at RKO if she changed a couple of things. And while the two of them were working on the revision, Lily and Bob wound up sleeping together.

  Later on, when she wrote about this part of her life, she said Bob was the first man to show interest in her. Well, I had shown interest, and she had told me we couldn’t be friends if I thought she was fast. Years later, when I brought this up, she said she didn’t care if Bob thought she was fast—her feelings for Bob weren’t complicated by friendship. But there might have been more to it than that.

  Once she had made up her mind to lose her innocence, she wanted to get it over with: she thought she might not have another chance unless she married, which she didn’t plan to do. But she had ruled me out: I was acting pretty reckless in those days, and though Lily would never have admitted it, she was a little bit scared of the whole “having sex” thing. So it’s not hard to guess why she picked Bob Hewitt to give her a past—he was genial and safe, and he was the boy at hand.

  Lily always sounded perfectly clear on her reasons for just about anything she did.

  26

  AFTER SEVEN WEEKS AT SUNRISE, Lily got fired the same day Steve Deets got in a wreck,
which we’ll get to next. When she told me she’d been let go, she said it was on account of the studio not having enough work to keep the junior writers busy, but this was a lie. Later, when this all came out, she said, “Bud, you were such a goddamned cowboy back then.” I guess she had good reason to think I was inclined that way—that I might go after Lampman like I thought I was Tom Mix or Buck Jones. We both knew a cowboy hero wouldn’t let a man get away with molesting a woman.

  I didn’t hear the real story until about 1949, and if I thought Lily would have wanted it to stay off the record, I wouldn’t be writing about it now. But she went ahead and wrote about it herself, more or less, in Dangerous, the first picture she and Mike Beahrs produced together; and she told it again in her Hollywood memoir, though she left out all the names; Lampman was the head of Lighthouse Pictures by then, and Lily had become savvy about Hollywood politics. So both times she told the story she told it slant, and it seems to me I can only tell it straight, the way she finally told it to me.

  After she moved over to the Barracks and became a writer, she saw less of Dale Lampman. She mostly saw him in the commissary where they ate lunch every day, and it was a crowded place, with actors and actresses and extras in costumes—Roman gladiators, cowboys, women in ball gowns—all of them in heavy layers of makeup, streaming in from the sets to grab a bowl of soup or a sandwich. The writers sat together at their own table, but Lampman never joined them: he and Marion Chertok sat together at a small table off in the corner.

  Then one afternoon when she was walking through the western street on her way back from lunch, he swung in alongside her. “I’ve been thinking I might give you a piece of the Louis Jossup script, see if you can do something with it.” This was a project she had heard people talking about, a comic western with a lot of problems; several writers had worked on parts of it. “Jossup doesn’t like the saloon scene. Thinks it won’t work for his slapstick.”