Falling From Horses (30 page)

“Miss Shaw!”

Marion Chertok was standing just inside the room, her broad Russian face creased and flushed with anger. Lampman's arms loosened, and Lily bolted to the other woman. She was rabbity with fear, would have hidden herself behind Marion except the woman stepped away, turning a shoulder to fend her off. “Cover yourself up, missy—you are completely indecent. We cannot tolerate this kind of smutty behavior in our girls. Really, we cannot put up with it.”

This was so unexpected that Lily was struck dumb. She had not cried for years—she was fifteen when she'd made up her mind she was too grown up for weeping—but she broke into tears now, and her hands jerked and shook, buttoning the dress.

Marion turned from her to Lampman. “Dale—Mr. Lampman—you should get back to your work. I hope this fuss hasn't upset you too much.”

His face was bright with color, but he spoke smoothly. “Not at all, Marion. Girls with too much ambition, we both know they'll do anything to get ahead. I should be more vigilant.” He straightened his suit coat and walked past them both, through the batwings and out to the street.

Marion spoke to the far side of the room, without a glance at Lily. “Miss Shaw, it is the responsibility of women not to inflame a man's baser instincts. I have overlooked the tittle-tattle about you and Mr. Hewitt, but this behavior with Mr. Lampman is not tolerable, not a bit of it. Turn in your timecard. I don't wish to see you again.” She turned and followed Lampman out of the dim, cluttered saloon.

Lily picked up her glasses, bent them straight, and put them on. But it was several minutes before she went out into the sunlight.

In 1948 she was teaching a screenwriting class at a Hollywood night school when she met her first husband, a veteran of the Army Air Corps who might have stepped right out of her screenplay
Death Rides the Sky.
Mike Beahrs had family money, and he'd worked around the picture business before the war, so the two of them bankrolled their own production company, and Lily finally took the reins of a picture.

Dangerous
, their first production, was set against a showbiz background—a Los Angeles gangster with a latent moral compass and the salty, tough actress he falls for. In an early scene an assistant director gets the actress into a dark corner of the set and puts his hands on her. When a Russian woman interrupts the assault, it tripped old bells for me—I remembered the story about Marion Chertok riding with the Cossacks. This was ten years after Lily's encounter with Lampman, and I guess she didn't see a reason to go on lying when I asked her about it.

“Oh for Christ's sake, Bud, he groped me, that's all the hell it was. It scared me, that's all.”

But we both knew it could have ended differently—that she could have been raped.

She hadn't said a word to me about it when it happened. But she told Bob Hewitt, which even to this day can chasten me when I think of it.

AT THE TIME THIS HAPPENED
, I was making the movie that got Steve Deets killed.

When I met him, Steve had been riding in pictures half his life. He already had bad knees and had torn loose the moorings in one shoulder, which was a nuisance—his arm would fall out of its socket at any excuse. He got so he could pop it back into place, but it happened over and over. One of his specialties was being dragged by a horse, and if his shoulder went out while he was being dragged, he had a hard time reaching the release catch for the wire that went down his trouser leg onto the stirrup.

I'm not sure how much of this to get into—this isn't a primer on stunt riding—but I can't really tell you what happened without talking first about the way things were in those days, men and horses both disposable.

Being dragged by a horse, in particular, was a good way to get killed or crippled. There wasn't a lot of protection, just a close-fitting jacket, and if you bounced around you could wind up too close to the horse and get your head kicked in. If the horse veered past the pickup men and dragged you onto ground that hadn't been prepped, you might get run into a stump or a rock. And sometimes the release would hang up. But the gag paid quite a bit, which is why Steve went on doing it even after he wrecked his shoulder. In those days, skill was less important than nerve, but he had a lot of both.

When we were kids, Mary Claudine and I used to practice the mounts we saw in the movies—leapfrogging over the horse's rump into the saddle or swinging onto a horse that was already in motion, not using the stirrup. I think I was twelve or thirteen when I broke my wrist doing one of those pony express mounts, and we caught hell for it, both of us, because our playing around made my folks short-handed for the spring branding.

Steve Deets laughed when I told him about breaking my wrist. He had broken his, rehearsing one of his showy flying mounts. And he'd cracked a couple of vertebrae doing a second-story mount, which is jumping down onto a saddled horse from an upper porch or a staircase. I had tried that one, too, jumping off the roof of our woodshed with Mary Claudine standing below me holding the unsuspecting horse by the headstall. I jammed my spine so hard I was just about paralyzed for a couple of days, and when the horse bolted, he tossed me and Mary Claudine to the ground. We told our dad I'd been hurt when a bull took after me in the pasture.

The other thing Steve was known for was riding a horse off a tilt chute into a lake or river thirty, forty feet below. Just about any horse will balk at going off a cliff, so the grips would build a wooden chute at the brink of the bluff on top of a low, seesaw platform and grease the floor of the chute to make it slick. The rider would lead a blindfolded horse onto the chute, and once he was mounted he'd take off the blindfold and signal the grips, and when the platform tipped forward the horse would just slide off into space. They'd edit the film afterward so it seemed as if he'd galloped right up to the brink and sailed off gracefully into the water below.

The tilt chute was a risky fall for the rider—Steve had wrecked his shoulder the first time doing that stunt—and it was a notorious horse killer. If the horse hit the water on his back or neck, he'd just roll over once and drown. So no famous horse ever did the stunt—it was always some unlucky stable horse with similar markings doubling for the star. Even if the stunt horse died, the camera would pick up the real actor swimming to shore on his famous horse like nothing had happened.

When I saw Steve get wrecked for good, we were shooting a Wichita Carson movie out at Westerlund, a movie ranch in the Chino Hills, thirty or forty miles from the studio. It was far enough out of town that they put up the principal actors right there at the ranch in pine-walled cabins set down under some big old oak trees, but they ferried the rest of us, all the riders and the extras, back and forth from the studio every day in buses. We had to get to the studio by five in the morning to make the hour-long bus ride, get into costume if we needed to, and sort out the horses in time for first call; we didn't get back to the studio until around ten at night—the days damn near as long as when I'd worked for Harold. The main house had a dining room where they served all of us an elaborate spread at lunch and dinner, which I guess was to make up for the bus ride and the long hours, but most days by the time I staggered in from shooting I was hurting all over, barely able to muster the strength to cut a steak.

I had done quite a bit of riding for other ramrods by then, but this was a Cab O'Brien picture again. Steve didn't have much respect for Cab, but he rode for him anyway because Cab paid pretty well and kept his regular crew busy—he was popular with directors looking to shoot fast and cram in a lot of action.

At the end of the first week, we were filming a pitched battle between Wichita's men and some wild Indians, all of us on horseback crowded together in close combat, swinging at each other with rifle butts and tomahawks and long knives. This wouldn't have been any more risky than usual, except Cab had set it up to film along a dirt road carved into the side of a ridge, a road not even six feet across, with the ground falling steeply fifty feet on one side and rising up sheer rock on the other. The rock was streaked with bands of color and eroded away in weird vertical columns, which was Cab's reason for using the narrow road: he said he wanted the fight pitched against that wild-looking backdrop.

I should say here that besides Cab's reputation for paying good adjustments, he was well known for shaving his budget with “free” falls. He'd set up a situation where the chance of a big wreck was just about certain, but since the spills weren't planned he'd call them “unavoidable accidents” and get away with not paying the adjustment. This was one of those times, one of Cab's damn stunts made to look like straight riding except it was more dangerous than it needed to be. You could look at that narrow road and just know that horses would get crowded and pushed over the side. Before the take, Lon Epps and a couple of other riders had tried to get Cab to move the location or else set up some actual stunts, plan them out so there would be some control over what happened. Cab walked off while they were still trying to talk to him. “Just keep your butts in the fucking saddle like you're paid to. If you can't keep those fucking horses on the fucking road, I'll go look for somebody who can.”

Nobody was happy about it, but if you wanted to stay on his call sheet you didn't refuse.

Cab was riding in a crane with the cameraman, the two of them high overhead, when he called for action. Twenty of us were packed into that narrow road, clashing our weapons, the horses nervously jostling each other, maneuvering for footing, bumping up against the rock face, trying to keep away from the dropoff on the downhill side. When the whistle blew for the end of the shot, Cab rained down a storm of profanity: we were a bunch of fucking pantywaists, fucking sissies every one of us. So when the clapper sounded, we went at it again, hard and fast. I was in a scratchy Indian wig, flailing around with a rubber hatchet, thinking that if my horse stumbled I might wind up on the ground in the middle of the melee. I only halfway saw what happened, but I sure heard it, the panicked squeal when a horse slipped off the edge of the road. And then people shouting.

I guess Cab must have whistled for the end of the shot, but what I heard was the horse screaming—a sound I had never heard from a horse in my life—and I couldn't hear anything but that. It took the rest of us three or four minutes to bring our horses down off the road and around to the foot of the ridge. By then most of the crew was standing around the horse, but nobody was standing too close. This was Monte, the horse Steve always used as a double for Wichita's white stallion Sunday. He had shattered both his front legs, was thrashing his head in panic and anguish, scrabbling with his hindquarters against the rocky ground, raising a cloud of fine gravel and sand. I could feel the horse's screams, like violin strings pulled too tight in my chest and the bow scraping harshly across them. Steve was half pinned under the horse. He was pale and keeping very still out of worry the horse might get a hind leg high enough to kick him.

The prop master had doled out rifles that morning—the real thing, not rubber props—but nobody had a bullet. I was having a hard time just standing there, and I started turning over the question of whether a rifle butt striking the horse's skull just right could kill him quickly. But then one of the prop guys walked up to Lon Epps with a box of ammunition, and Epps jacked in a shell, stepped close, and shot the horse behind his ear. The silence afterward—the echo of the gunshot and the scream, the slow decay as the air absorbed the sounds—I felt that too, a reverberation inside my chest.

I helped some of the others lift the horse off Steve. By then the crane had come down to the ground. Cab walked over and watched us, and then, without seeming to aim the words at anybody in particular, he said, “Well, we got the shot, even with all the fuckup.” Nobody said anything.

After we moved the horse off Steve, there was a minute when we all thought he was okay—his legs weren't bent wrong, there wasn't any blood, he didn't look like he was suffering. His shoulder was dislocated maybe, we thought that might be all of it. But when Lon reached a hand down to hoist Steve up, he didn't take it. “I guess I better stay right here,” he said.

“Your shoulder's out?”

“Nah, not this time.” He was sheepish. “I guess I busted a gut,” the all-purpose term for badly hurt.

Cab said, “Christ. You want I should call an ambulance?” as if there was shame in it.

It was Lon who looked over at him and said, “Call the damn ambulance.”

Cab blew a wordless sound of annoyance and walked off to the ranch house. But then he yelled back over his shoulder, “Mike, get that fucking horse hauled off and move the setup for number four. The fucking day ain't done yet.”

Mike Tifflin made a brief, apologetic gesture to Steve before going off to shepherd the crew.

Lon Epps and three or four other riders who were Steve's friends sat down on the ground to keep him company until the ambulance showed up. I pulled off my wig and sat down too. We took out our smokes, and somebody lit one for Steve. His hand shook slightly whenever he lifted the cigarette to his mouth. It was a long wait. None of us asked him what part of his body was broken. Somebody made a remark about Cab and his “free” falls, and then we started passing around a few entertaining thoughts about how to get Cab himself in heavy plaster, hooked up to morphine in a hospital.

A grip drove over in a forklift truck, scraped up the dead horse, and drove off with it. The horse's head, bumping and dragging along the ground, left a smudged track through the dirt with a little dribble of blood and brain matter trailing through it. The soul that had made him a horse had already gone completely out of him; he was a stiff carcass only.

After a while John Barlow walked over from the house, dressed in his Wichita Carson outfit. He'd been working with the first unit, but he and Steve knew each other pretty well. Steve was doubling for John Barlow a lot in the days when I knew him: he liked Steve to fill in for him not just for the stunts but in any scenes where he was supposed to be riding faster than a jog-trot. And it was Steve who did all of Barlow's fancy mounts and dismounts.