Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  They never did get Death Rides the Sky onto the floor, but they went on writing together intermittently for years—they wrote The Huntington Affair and The Dry Years as a team. Crime noir is what they were known for.

  Sometime in the 1960s, when feminism was making its comeback, Lily wrote a scathing piece about Hollywood culture in the forties and fifties, the way women were held back, treated lightly—which as far as I can see hasn’t changed a lot in the years since. But she took a harsh view, too, of what she and Doc had to do to succeed in the movie business: “writing like men, writing for men,” is how she put it, then dolling themselves up in jewelry and lipstick for magazine interviews, pieces that always ran under a patronizing banner like “The Beguiling Script Girls of RKO.”

  It was while she and Doc were working together, watching their scripts rewritten beyond recognition, mangled by poor directors or self-important stars, that Lily went to a few Communist Party meetings. The irony, given that those meetings got her blacklisted for ten years, is that even there she found patriarchy the governing principle.

  Lily and Doc were friends for twenty-five years, right up until the end of Dorothy’s life. And early on, after Lily and Bob Hewitt stopped seeing each other, she and Doc had a quiet affair that lasted a few months. Lily has written about it, so I won’t say much more except that Lily was in the middle of her second divorce when Dorothy died, and the letter she wrote me afterward was shot through with self-loathing, heartbreak, regret.

  She and Mike Beahrs were married for nearly ten years, and they might have made it all the way except Mike died of lymphoma right around the time Lily was testifying before the HUAC. She was married twice more after that, but she may have loved Doc more than any of the men. It was just a different world back then, and even someone like Lily, someone who was always swimming against the tide, had to find her own way to live in it.

  The last picture Lily made before her decade on the Hollywood blacklist was The Golden West. By then she had begun to look at the western as our great American lie, and The Golden West had more to do with postwar repression and paranoia and the dark side of the cowboy mythology than with anything in a John Ford film. It took aim squarely at the cowboy’s bigotry, his fear of uppity women, swarthy foreigners, and government conspiracies, as well as the role our cowboy heroes have always played in the American fascination with violence. Solving every problem with his gun. Lily and Mike Beahrs financed the picture themselves—no studio would have touched it.

  She asked me to the New York premiere, but Simone was seven months pregnant with our daughter, so a six-hour plane ride wasn’t in the cards, and I wound up taking my mother.

  My mother had begun to take college courses through the public library and had joined the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society. She and my father didn’t follow politics, or they claimed not to, so I wasn’t sure if she would see what Lily’s film was getting at. But after the screening, my mother said to her, “Senator McCarthy ought to see your picture. It might do him some good.”

  Lily laughed. She had always liked my mother. “Well, this picture will either do him some good or land me in jail.”

  I had a teacher once who liked to tell us to grab our courage with both hands. At the time I thought this meant we shouldn’t cry when we were hurt. Cowboys never cried is what I thought she meant. But I think she must have meant Lily. Someone like Lily. Grabbing courage with both hands.

  29

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS after Steve’s wreck I got hired for a Civil War movie they were calling The Battle at Valverde Ford. The director was Albert Jamerman, who, like De Mille, had made a name for himself directing big-budget epics. He had hired an action director named Ute Renner, who had ramrodded war movies for a few major studios, movies with big infantry battle scenes. But Renner didn’t know much about horses, which is how he came to hire Cab O’Brien to coordinate the cavalry charges, and that’s how I came onto it.

  I can see, looking back, that Steve’s wreck out at Westerlund was the beginning of the end of my Hollywood days. But when I got called for Valverde I thought I had stepped up a notch. This was an RKO picture, my first for a major studio, and it was my first location shoot, a month in Arizona; they were putting up the crew in motels, feeding us three meals a day. At least a hundred riders had been hired in Los Angeles, and we heard they were hiring hundreds of local extras—it was a pretty big picture, even for RKO.

  The studio had arranged to drive all of us from LA to the locations around Flagstaff and Sedona—five hundred miles—in a caravan of buses driving straight through, day and night. But Dave Keaton had his old Franklin sedan, so five of us crammed into it and took two long days for the trip.

  It was the first time I’d been out of the city since I’d stepped off the Greyhound bus back in September. I wouldn’t say that I had forgotten what the real West could look like, but for months I’d been making movies on patches of ground fitted up with fake sagebrush and plaster rocks, so maybe I was a little more awake to the view outside the car than I otherwise would have been.

  The first part of that drive was just orchards and irrigated farms, then parks and hills dotted with live oaks, but gradually we came into country that looked a lot like places I knew around Harney County and Lake County—dry lakebeds, blackish crackling malpais, miles of flat grassland, sand, and sagebrush. We spent the night at a tourist court in Needles, then crossed over the Colorado River and drove back roads up into stands of pine and aspen around Brannigan Park, country that made me think about the Ochocos. That’s where my mind went on much of that trip—to Echol Creek, for the first time in god knows how long.

  And then we got into those copper- and sand-colored monoliths and buttes around Sedona. Parts of Arizona had been showing up in cowboy pictures since the twenties, so that country was weirdly familiar to me, but it was hard to let go of the feeling that it was a big plaster-of-Paris backdrop for a movie. Years later, when I lived in Flagstaff, it seemed to me that the San Francisco Peaks, Oak Creek Canyon, Red Rocks, exposed something false about the movies; but the first time I saw that area, it was the land itself that felt make-believe.

  They parceled us all out to lodging houses around Sedona and Flagstaff. I was put up at the Wagon Wheel, a rundown auto court right on Route 66, along with twelve or fourteen other guys. I roomed with Ralph Foster, who had been on that Wild Bill Elliott picture when I was getting started as a rider, and he’d been over at Westerlund with me when Steve got hurt. I hadn’t seen Ralph since Steve died, and all that first night at the Wagon Wheel I kept waiting for him to bring it up or thinking that I would. We were in bed with the lights clicked off before I said, “Too bad about Deets.”

  He just said, “Yeah.” And that was all either of us said about it.

  There’s a joke I’ve heard more than once—well, I guess it’s a joke—about marines getting ready to make a beachhead landing and the lieutenant telling them, “Nine out of ten of you fellows will be shot to hell before the day is over,” and every one of them looking around at the others, thinking, “Those poor sons of bitches.” That was me—hell, that was every stunt rider I met while I worked in Hollywood. But Steve had known he was done for—I had seen it in his face. He was forty years old and busted up for good. I had never seen a man look that scared, and I guess that might have been what Ralph and I didn’t want to talk about.

  Valverde, far from the main theater of the Civil War, was a little-known battle, but it was the only time in that war when a lancer company mounted a charge—a hundred men galloping on horseback, their nine-foot lances fluttering with little swallowtail flags. And Kit Carson had commanded the 1st New Mexico Volunteers in that fight, so probably somebody at RKO thought Carson would give their war movie a cowboy flair.

  For the climactic cavalry battle at Valverde Ford, Oak Creek was a stand-in for the Rio Grande; they had found a location with low banks where the creek spread out shallow and so clear you could see the hard sandstone bottom. For shooting the big encamp
ments and infantry skirmishes and the lancer charge, they had leased a private ranch in the valley east of Sedona, a thousand acres of pastureland with scattered oak trees, eroded rock formations streaked with bands of red and ocher and black earth, and creeks edged with willow brush. Country I’d seen in a dozen movies. Some of it a lot like country I’d lived in.

  They picked us up at five every morning, and before sunrise we were eating breakfast under canvas awnings in a dry grass field. And then we put on our hot wool cavalry uniforms and spent a lot of time waiting around. This wasn’t the kind of fast riding and hard falling I was used to on the two-gun cowboy movies. We had some big scenes to shoot, but it took days to get those set up. In the meantime they filmed us plodding along in formation at several different places on the ranch and in the canyon, with long shots of us sitting on our ponies, and then for three or four days we shot close-in scenes, swinging sabers and rifle butts on horseback and spurting squibs of blood. None of it was hard work, but the days were long, twelve or fifteen hours.

  I was used to riding in a posse or a bunkhouse crew, maybe a cavalry patrol, just ten or twenty riders at most. For the lancer scene in Valverde there were more than a hundred of us, a Rebel troop charging a line of Colorado infantrymen. We’d be galloping in a long battle line, charging across the field with leveled lances—nine feet of wood tipped with twelve-inch metal blades. They were props, the edges and tips not really sharp, but sharp enough to kill you if you accidently ran into the business end, so we spent a lot of our time the second week of the shoot just rehearsing the charge, getting used to riding at a gallop with the heavy lances couched.

  The director, Jamerman, had left Renner in charge of the action scenes, and Renner had left the planning and rehearsal of the lancer scene to Cab, but the day before we shot the scene, Jamerman showed up at the location, evidently just to let us know that this was his picture—that everybody, even Cab, was working for him. Cab had already gone over with us more than once how the scene was supposed to go, but he stood back and let Jamerman act the big shot, the director lifted above us in the bucket of a crane so he could see and be seen, shouting down through a megaphone to make himself heard.

  We were to ride like hell, he said, across a field rigged with tripwires, because this would give him the look he wanted: men and horses falling randomly, our charge broken by withering rifle fire before we got close enough to use our lances. And then he wanted us to loosely regroup for a second failed charge before staging a wild, panicky retreat. The movie’s star was Alan Greer, playing General Henry Sibley. Jamerman smiled slightly and made a loose salute in Greer’s direction when he said Sibley would lead the charge. And when the advance was broken, Sibley would lean out of the saddle to pick up a fallen battle flag and rally the men for that second charge.

  What I heard from Lily later on was that the real General Sibley was drunk for most of the two-day Valverde battle, hauled everywhere in an army ambulance because he couldn’t stay on his horse, and in any case he wasn’t a lancer. But Alan Greer was one of RKO’s big stars, and the movie had been written with him in mind.

  Greer was the real thing. He had grown up on a ranch and then worked for a wild west show before coming to Hollywood, so he did his own falls and jumps, his own mounts and dismounts. Rocking Chair, the big bay horse he always rode in the movies, belonged to him, not to any barn or studio. Greer had trained the horse to untie ropes and unlatch gates and limp along like he was sore-footed if the plot called for it.

  Working with the second unit, you don’t usually see much of the principals, but Greer never used a stunt double, so on this movie we’d seen quite a bit of him. He’d been in all the action scenes we had shot, and he’d been out with us the day before to rehearse the charge, not riding with a lance but brandishing a gleaming officer’s saber.

  Jamerman called down to Cab, “Sibley’s gotta stay in the saddle, I don’t want his horse going down. And I sure as hell don’t want my star to wind up in the hospital. You got that figured out?”

  “Yes sir. We laid out a clear path for him through the wires.”

  “I guess you’ve already been over that with Alan?”

  Cab was standing with his hands in his jeans pockets, as meek as I’d ever seen him. “Yes sir, we talked it over, and we walked it and rode it both.” He looked over at Greer, and Greer mimicked Jamerman’s loose salute.

  Jamerman turned back to the rest of us and brought up the megaphone. “So I guess now you men know your job! Which is to charge like hell and die bravely!” There was a slight delay and echo as his words made it to the back of our crowd, and he waited, smiling, as if he thought we might give him a rousing cheer. A stuntman had been killed making Charge of the Light Brigade, when he was thrown off his horse and landed on his own lance—everybody knew about it. Cab hadn’t brought it up, and it wasn’t anything we practiced, but word had gone around to all of us: drop the damn lance flat on the ground if your horse trips on one of the wires. Try not to skewer yourself or somebody else.

  So the silence went on for half a minute or so. Finally somebody called out, “You bet,” and a few others joined in, and Jamerman nodded and smiled, completely satisfied.

  I didn’t think I was nervous, but I woke up early on the morning of the filming—it was still dark, but I could feel the stars turning toward morning. I washed my face and got dressed and went outside, sat on a bench, and just for something to do I took out some paper and sketched the row of cars parked in front of the motor court. The first time I’d drawn anything in weeks. Finally the men in the other rooms started to stir and wake—I could hear their voices and coughs—and after a while a bus picked us up.

  The light had brightened by the time we got to the field, and then the sun broke suddenly in a red line along the low range of hills in the east. It was already warm, would be hot later, so after we had suited up in our lancer costumes we found what shade we could at the edges of the battlefield and waited to be told when it was time to do some riding. A few men got up card games, but I lay down on the dry grass, pulled down my hat, and tried to sleep.

  Cab and Renner and Jamerman were still parleying about how the charge would start and end and how long it would run. They were walking over the field mapping out details of the action, talking things over with the cinematographer—angles and focus for the three cameras. I thought the tripwires had been rigged the day before, but there were grips out on the field rigging more of them.

  Wranglers had brought in a hundred horses under saddle, crowded together inside a rope pen, but the one handling Rocking Chair kept him under a shade cloth away from the others, and every so often he walked the horse out and back so he’d stay limbered up while he was waiting for the action to start. Alan Greer showed up early with the rest of us, but nobody mistook him for an extra. An assistant brought over a canvas chair with his name stenciled on it, and he sat there reading a script. After a while he put down the pages, dropped his chin on his chest, and took a nap.

  It was noon before we got word they were ready to shoot the scene. The sun by then was hot, the sky pale with dust. The mountains to the west seemed almost white in the dazzling sunlight. We sorted out the horses and got mounted up, which took a while, and then a bunch of prop men went around handing up the lances. I was riding a tall, big-headed chestnut that day. He was nervous, skipping his feet, flicking his ears back, rolling the bit in his mouth—he didn’t like the small banners on the tips of the lances or the fluttering battle flags. I rode him in circles to quiet him down.

  Jamerman was watching from a wooden blind built around one of the cameras, but the action scenes were Renner’s responsibility, and he was letting Cab call the shots that day. We drew up in our battle line, and Cab, from the bucket of a crane lifted above the field, shouted over our heads his idea of a pep talk: “Y’all better make it look fucking good.”

  I wasn’t the only one on a nervous horse. The line broke again and again as horses danced out and had to be reined back in. I
don’t know what sort of moment Cab was looking for, but it was a long couple of minutes before I heard him shout the warning call. A puff of wind moved across the silence afterward, bending the flags, lifting a fine mist of dust along the battleground. Finally the whistle blew for the take. Alan Greer trotted his horse a few steps forward of the line. The chestnut, jittery, wanted to follow him, but I touched his neck, touched the reins, told him quietly, “Wait, wait, not yet.” I didn’t know his name or if he had one.

  As Greer lifted his saber, Rocking Chair whirled in a neat pirouette. “Ride like hell, boys!” he shouted, and we roared back our cheer, leveled our lances, and the horses all jumped out at once.

  By about the third stride the chestnut was wide open, and I could feel the power he had, the gather and reach of his springing legs. I tried to watch the ground as it streamed by, thinking to catch a glimpse of a tripwire before we were right on top of it, but my eyes blurred in the wind, and the grass in the field was tall under a veil of dust, and then horses started falling around me, horses and men both, and it seemed to me that the whole charge just collapsed in a matter of moments.

  A dark shape fell in our way, and the chestnut reared, swerving away from it. I leaned over his neck, and when he jerked his head he struck my cheekbone a hard blow. I think that might have been when I let go of the lance, but anyway it was gone. Alongside me a horse lunged suddenly to its feet, one of its hind legs dangling broken, and the chestnut sprang away from him, a sideways lunge, and then his hooves scrabbled, kicking a mass on the ground, a man on the ground, the thick sound of a hoof striking bone. My eyes burned. A hot flare of wind lifted the chaff of dry grass and dust, a dry fog that hid the field. Shapes rose up through the yellow cloud or fell through it, and I could hear men calling out and horses squealing their pain. The hack of my own breath was loud in my head, but I could still hear the thud of bodies striking the hard, dry ground. The chestnut ran, and I let him run. We were under the oaks at the other side of the field before I asked him to stop. I got down and stood, shaky, with my hands on the pommel. I could hear the horse’s winded breath, the labored rise and fall of his panic.