Falling From Horses (18 page)

The ranch had a permanent little western town with dummy fronts and some roofed three-wall and four-wall buildings where players and crew could stay overnight if they needed to and a livery barn with a small tacked-on corral for horses to stand in the shade under some cottonwood trees. A dozen White Oak horses were already saddled along a picket line when I got there, and another dozen were loafing in the corral. The White Oak wrangler, having nothing better to do, helped me get the Belgians unloaded, and then we stood around talking while we waited for our horses to be called up for their scenes.

This other wrangler, Verle Miller, was a little guy who had been a jockey until he got tired of starving himself to make weight. He was wearing calf-high jockey boots and a Spanish beret, which didn't impress me, but he knew horses, and he'd been around the movie business for three or four years. He knew a fair bit about the nutty studio goings-on and the tricks of the trade, and he was full of stories about the parties he'd been to and the famous stars who were his pals. I thought at the time this was mostly bullshit, but I heard later that going to the races was a popular pastime for the upper-crust Hollywood crowd, and a lot of actors cozied up to Verle because of his inside knowledge about horse racing.

What they were shooting that day was a Wichita Carson movie. Nobody remembers those now, but I had seen a couple of them. Wichita went around masquerading as a desperado on the run from the law, which was a trick to fool the bad guys. In some movies he was secretly a marshal or a sheriff, but in others he was just a stranger riding into the middle of a local feud. He would seem to take up with the outlaw gang until the crucial moment, when he'd drop the pretense and fight on the side of the outgunned homesteader and his pretty daughter.

In this particular movie Wichita had to prove his mettle by mastering a wild horse the outlaws had set him on. At the cheaper studios where I'd been wrangling horses, they would have filled in the bucking-horse scenes with short ends clipped from other oaters. I've seen some where they didn't even bother to try to match the horse's color or the shirt the cowboy was wearing. But Verle pointed to a pair of black horses stabled in the barn that he said were stunt horses brought in for that scene. One was a trained bucking horse and the other one was trained to rear up and paw the air or toss his head and paw at the ground like he was looking for somebody to trample.

I had the opinion, after working with rough-broke ranch horses over the last year, that a lot of horses would buck and rear for just about any reason you could name or no reason at all, so I wondered why the hell anybody would go to the trouble of teaching them to do it. Why not just bring in a rodeo bronc, is what I wondered. But of course this was the movies, and they needed a horse who would rear up on cue and one who would start bucking at a signal and buck just enough to look good but not so much as to toss the rider. Plus, they didn't want a mean horse rampaging around the set or running off when they were filming him outside a fence. Later I heard people say it could take a year to train a horse to buck and act wild at a signal, maybe bare his teeth and look ready to fight but then calm right down and go back to being gentle when the cameras quit turning. There were only four or five horses in town who could fill that bill, and White Oak didn't have one. The ramrod had hired these two horses straight from their trainer, a guy named Dale Rybert.

Rybert had his own small stable out in the valley, half a dozen horses trained to do all sorts of tricks, and he had trained some famous horses belonging to movie stars. In those days it was common to see a horse's name and picture on the lobby card alongside the cowboy star, and I had always thought those horses were trained by the actors who rode them. But the actual trainers were men I'd never heard of until Verle rattled off some of their names; it was Verle's opinion that Dale Rybert should have had his name on the billboard right up there with the horse.

Rybert was hanging around the barn that day keeping an eye on his animals. He must have been about fifty, balding in front, wearing wire-rim eyeglasses and carrying about twenty pounds of spare tire around his middle. If Verle hadn't told me who he was, I wouldn't have guessed him for a horseman. He was hatless, sporting tan trousers with neat creases and turned-up cuffs, and a crisply ironed white shirt buttoned to the throat and closed with a little bolo tie. The two-color steep-heel boots showing under those trouser cuffs looked handmade, though, which saved him in my estimation.

After a while a couple of men came over to where he was sitting tipped back in his chair at the front of the barn, and the three of them put their heads together. One of the men was the ramrod—the guy in charge of the horse stunts—and the other was the film's director.

The ramrod on this movie was Cab O'Brien, a hard-drinking redheaded Irishman from Mississippi who had stunted for ten years before moving up to boss. I would get to know Cab pretty well in the next few months, but that day I knew only what Verle told me. “That's Cab O'Brien over there,” he said, pointing him out. “He's a son of a bitch.”

Directors liked to hire Cab because he had a great eye for action and he could crank out the scenes fast, but among the crew he was known for taking risks with his stuntmen and for being hard on horses, which was more than likely the reason Rybert was staying close to his valuable animals that day.

Cab's specialty as a stuntman had been transfers—jumping from a horse to a stagecoach or a train. A lot of stuntmen could do transfers, but Cab was known for a fancy one: he'd stand right up on the saddle, which is a trick-riding stunt, before leaping over to the tailgate of the coach. After he became a ramrod, a young guy got busted up trying to run Cab's stunt. The kid had been training with Cab, and some people—Verle was one of them—thought Cab might have intentionally coached the kid to fail so he could go on being the only guy in the world who could do that trick, even now that he was a boss and no longer doing the stunt.

Well, I didn't care about Cab's reputation. I hadn't come down to Hollywood for the chance to ride herd on a bunch of horses. If that was all I wanted, I could have stayed up in Oregon and kept working for P Ranch or someplace like that. The Indian I'd met, Lee Waters, had told me that working for a stable might eventually put me in the way of a riding job, but Diamond was the wrong outfit for that. Any stunt director who wanted to goose up the action just knew to get his horses from some other stable; they all knew Harold was dead set against any of his horses taking a fall. I'd been with Harold more than three months at this point, and until that day at Las Cruces I hadn't worked on a picture that had a ramrod—somebody I could hit up for a riding job.

The wild horse scene was being set up on a patch of bare dirt about twenty yards from the livery barn, so I hung my heels on the top rail of the corral, where I could still keep half an eye on Harold's draft horses like he wanted me to but get a bird's-eye glimpse of some real moviemaking for a change, and maybe, if the chance came up, put myself in front of Cab O'Brien.

The star of the Carson movies was an actor named John Barlow. A few weeks later I made a picture with Barlow and found him to be a decent sort of guy who didn't know much about horses and didn't pretend to. At Las Cruces he showed up for only a couple of shots and wasn't there more than five minutes. They filmed him hauling back at the end of a long rope, with one of Rybert's trained horses at the other end going into a stiff-kneed crow hop as Rybert, off-camera, gave him a hand signal; then they shot a close-up of Barlow smiling out of the side of his mouth and saying a few honeyed words to the “tamed” horse as they stood eye to eye. Then he was gone as quick as he'd appeared, and the stuntman stepped into the setup.

The stuntman that day was Steve Deets, who didn't look much like Barlow up close but had roughly the same build and the same dark brown hair, and when you put him in the Wichita costume and shot him from behind, or a few yards off with his hat pulled low, the camera couldn't see the difference.

The crew played around with the reflectors to take shadows off the scene, and then they repositioned the camera right down on the dirt and aimed upward, so when they filmed the horse rearing off his front feet, his hooves would seem to just about scrape the clouds. From that angle Deets, playing Wichita, would appear to be right up under the horse's big chest as he hung on to the shortened rope. They filmed that shot in one take, then broke the setup and scurried around preparing for the next shot.

While they were getting set up, O'Brien and Rybert stood off to the side arguing over something to do with how much Deets weighed, and when they rolled film again I saw what the argument must have been about. The scene had Deets pretending to wrestle with the horse to get him saddled, and at one point the horse reared back and lifted Deets off his feet and slung him around, as if to try to shake loose of him, and then Deets brought his legs up and hooked them on top of the horse's withers so he was hanging upside down under the horse's neck.

Rybert didn't want his trained horse injured, that much was clear—if something happened to make the horse afraid of rearing up, he sure wouldn't have been as valuable for movie work. And it looked to me like the horse wasn't happy to have Deets hanging on him that way—he flattened his ears and widened his eyes until the whites showed. But this was a stallion about sixteen hands, and he didn't look delicate; he was muscled through the neck and shoulders, might have had some draft horse in his bloodline. And as soon as the camera quit rolling and Deets let go of the horse, Rybert went up and fed him a handful of something he fetched out of his pocket, maybe an oatmeal cookie, and right away the horse relaxed his neck and ears—such a quick switch that I had to wonder if I'd been wrong, and his wild-eyed look had been faked for the movie.

Then they brought around the bucking horse, who was smaller, a gelding, and not as good-looking as the rearing horse. He wasn't even quite the same color—a dark blue roan, not black—and he didn't have much more than a snip of white on his muzzle; they'd painted his face white to match the other horse. Up close, anybody would have known the difference, but they wouldn't be using him for close-up shots, and he'd be in motion the whole time.

They ran a bunch of shots of the horse bucking Deets off or seeming to—Deets would stick for a couple of jumps and then bail off, brush down his clothes, and climb right back in the saddle again; the horse would stand quietly under him until Cab called “Action!” and Rybert gave the signal to start a new round of bucking. They ran half a dozen shots one after the other, with Deets varying the way he came off the saddle each time. This seemed like plenty to me, and when Cab said he wanted one more, Deets smiled slightly and said, “You bet,” and I thought I heard something in it. Maybe Cab did too, because he ran three or four more takes before he gave Deets a look and said, “I bet that'll do you.”

The last thing they filmed was Wichita riding the wild horse to a standstill. I never did see the finished movie, but I expect that at the end he'd have been handing over that horse, meek as a housebroken dog, to the sodbuster's pretty daughter. The gelding was a straight-up bucker who circled slowly to his left, no head spins or fakes, nothing rough or fancy, and Deets was able to make it look pretty, his body in perfect rhythm with every jump, his left arm swinging in a high arc and his spurs raking from high on the shoulders to well behind the cinch. He had a throat latch on his hat and he let the hat come off so it billowed out behind him on the jumps. They ran the camera slow for the bucking scenes so the film could be speeded up to make it all look wilder and rougher than it was. If I haven't already said so, this was a trick they used a lot in those old cowboy movies.

If this had been a rodeo show, I imagine almost anybody could have stuck on that horse until the horn blew—it wasn't the kind of ride that would have put you in the money. But Cab, standing next to the camera, twirled his finger in a silent gesture to keep shooting, and they ran film for nearly two minutes. Even a straight-up bucker would begin to hammer your spine on a ride that long—my teeth started to ache just watching it—and I could see the horse looking more and more annoyed, beginning to get serious about bucking Deets off. Rybert stood off to the side, frowning. But when Cab finally signaled the end of the shot, the horse settled right down. Deets climbed off the saddle, brushed the dust and horse hair off his costume, and walked off deliberately on his boot heels without a sign of a limp. There might have been a little color in his face, but it didn't look to me as if he'd broken much of a sweat. He found a bench under the awning of one of the false fronts, sat down, and lit up a cigarette.

That was all they needed for the wild horse scene, so the crew went off to set up in another part of the ranch. Rybert led his winded horse back to the barn, and Cab climbed into a car with a couple of other men and drove off. I had been hoping to get a chance to talk to him, but he was gone too quick.

Verle was over at the corrals saddling up a lot of horses for the background players, and I knew I should have given him a hand—I had some time to kill until they were ready for the Belgians—but I went over to where Deets was sitting and parked myself on the other end of his bench.

I wanted to say something admiring about his long ride, but I couldn't think how to do it without sounding like I was after something. Which of course I was. Finally I said, “I heard Rybert's religious about that horse, so I guess you had to be pretty careful how you put spurs to him.” There hadn't been a bit of blood showing on the horse, even after a two-minute ride, so I figured he must have blunted the tips of the spurs and then, with Rybert standing there watching him, been careful not to plant them in the horse's hide.