Falling From Horses (28 page)

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.

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.”

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.