Stuntwomen Read online

  Grace Cunard in The Purple Mask (1916). (Courtesy of the Robert S. Birchard Collection)

  The period from 1914 to 1918 was the zenith of serials starring women, but Pearl White, Ruth Roland, and Ann Little kept turning them out long after the vogue had crested. Pearl was known for her bravado, generosity, and good humor, despite a rough childhood in Springfield, Missouri. She began acting at age sixteen with a resident stock company in her hometown. From 1907 to 1910 Pearl traveled with a road company and appeared anonymously in films for the Powers Company.35 About seventy films later, she began her famous work at Pathé, starring in The Perils of Pauline (1914). Sequels and other serials followed.36 Aided by Pathé’s exciting story lines, its ceaseless publicity machine, tie-ins with newspapers, and her own determination, Pearl’s fame and salary soared. Ironically, as soon as actresses became well-paid stars, the studios hired men in wigs to double them, cutting them out of most of the stunt work that had made them special.37

  A tense but calm Pearl White in The Black Secret (1919), with Walter McGrail. (Courtesy of the Robert S. Birchard Collection)

  Ruth Roland and her horse in the serial Ruth of the Range (1923). (Courtesy of the Robert S. Birchard Collection)

  Ruth Roland doing an aerial stunt. (Courtesy of the Robert S. Birchard Collection)

  Ruth Roland rivaled Pearl White’s popularity. She was dubbed “one of the nerviest girls in pictures.”38 George Marshall (Destry Rides Again) directed two of the serials produced by her company. Marshall said, “She did everything herself. I remember I used to shoot at her feet with real bullets. Didn’t bother her none. Sometimes I wonder what would happen today if actresses had to do what Ruth did.”39 After headlining in vaudeville, Ruth switched to movies in 1908; later, thanks to her riding skills, she was cast in westerns, but her career took off in the serial drama The Red Circle (1915). She starred in eleven serials and produced six of them.40

  Like everyone else in the serial queen club, Helen Holmes was an ardent driver of fast cars before starring in the Kalem Company’s first serial, The Hazards of Helen.41 Hazards retained the chapter format, serving up a complete story every week for a record-setting 119 episodes from 1914 to 1917. Trains were integral to the story line, and Helen, a telegraph operator, was at the center of the action. In the first episode she almost didn’t get the job “because women lose their heads” in emergencies. But one man spoke up for her, and she was hired. For scores of episodes, Helen took on bandits, saved people in need, and never lost her head. Occasionally a handsome man rescued her, but usually the writers found some ingenious way for Helen to take action against the evil forces they’d dreamed up.

  Helen Holmes jumps onto a train in “The Midnight Limited,” an episode of The Hazards of Helen (1914). (Courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

  Although Holmes did many of her own stunts, Edward Sutherland or Gene Perkins sometimes doubled her, as did Helen Gibson, one of the first women (if not the first) to double a female action star.42 Gibson (born Rose Wenger) was one of five daughters, and her father encouraged her to be a tomboy. In 1909 she and a friend went to a Wild West show. “Enraptured,” they asked how they could get jobs on the show, which certainly seemed more appealing than their work in a cigar factory. They were told the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch in Ponca City, Oklahoma, “wanted girls who were willing to learn to ride horses.” Gibson made the cut, and in 1910, at age eighteen, she not only learned to ride a horse but also mastered the trick of “picking up a handkerchief from the ground” at a full gallop. When veteran riders warned her that she might get kicked in the head, she didn’t believe it would happen to her—a confidence stuntwomen have shared for decades.43

  Helen Gibson, ready to ride. (Courtesy of the Robert S. Birchard Collection)

  Rodeos ran from spring to fall, and the Miller Brothers’ Wild West Show ended its 1911 season in Venice, California. This allowed its riders to work in the movies during the sunny Southern California winter.44 That was how many riders got their start in the movies, including Tom Mix and Will Rogers. The Kalem Company hired Helen Gibson in 1912 to appear in one-reelers such as the memorably titled Ranch Girls on the Rampage. She earned $15 a week—“a big salary for a beginner.” She also rode in the Los Angeles rodeos, which is where she met future cowboy star Hoot Gibson.45 They didn’t consider marriage until they were performing in the Pendleton rodeo and needed to find overnight accommodations. Married couples were given preference when it came to hotel rooms, so, Helen recalled, “we decided to get married.”46

  Back in Los Angeles, Hoot doubled Tom Mix at the Selig studio, and Helen (still known as Rose at the time) began to double Helen Holmes in The Hazards of Helen. When Holmes retired after forty-eight chapters, Gibson replaced her, and the studio made her change her name to Helen. After the longest-running serial ended in 1917, Universal offered Gibson a three-year contract at $125 a week to appear in two- and five-reel pictures. By the time she formed her own production company, the business was changing. Prospects for women were dwindling as men recognized the profits to be made in the once underestimated movie business. Helen ran out of money before completing her first film, No Man’s Woman (1921); she obtained loans to finish it and then went bankrupt.

  Theater marquee for The Wolverine (1921), one of Helen Gibson’s last starring roles. (Courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

  Hoot was at the top of his career, but the marriage had ended, Helen said, and he avoided her. She scrambled to find jobs in a Wild West show, with the Keith vaudeville circuit, and in movies. She took “anything I could get, character parts and extra work.” Stunts saved her when she began to double stars such as Marie Dressler, Marjorie Main, and Ethel Barrymore. She worked for the next thirty years, securing her reputation as a stuntwoman. As she said, “Screen acting was often a matter of guts.” She certainly proved that.

  Today’s stuntwomen are the direct descendants of these silent movie actresses. In the glory years before the 1920s, their action roles in early movies—put in motion by automobiles and powered by demands for suffrage—changed the image and direction of women. Winning the vote in 1920 capped the brief period in which women dominated the film industry.47 Movies gained more respect in the 1920s as the onscreen stories and the audiences changed. After 1927, talking pictures increased production costs and profits until motion picture production was the fifth largest industry in the United States. The rash, risky exuberance of the silent era had vanished. And in many ways, so did the opportunities for women at all levels of production. For those who survived the 1920s, the 1930s would be even harder. But the story of stuntwomen was just beginning, and like the plot of a great movie, it had everything: humiliation, injustice, injury, death, determination, courage, excitement, and, finally, hard-fought success.

  2

  Blackface and wigs

  Men Take over Stunts

  In the fifteen years I worked in films, I never heard of a stuntwoman. The men wore wigs and women’s clothes.

  —Jewell Jordan

  An enterprising Los Angeles Times reporter went around town in 1935 asking, “Are women braver than men?” He hit pay dirt when he asked director Eddie Cline, who had started in 1913 with Mack Sennett’s Keystone Company. Cline knew what women could do. “They didn’t have to be asked twice to leap from 40-foot masts on ships or from bridges 60 feet above the water,” he said. “Those ladies had courage. . . . And they did all this not for glory but for $3 a day.” Lack of bravery was not the reason why so few “girl stunt players” worked in Hollywood. As Cline observed, “So many stunt men of small stature can double perfectly for feminine stars that we simply don’t need women in stunts.”1

  The exit of women from many levels of the motion picture business began in the 1920s, as “the big tent of the institutionalized circus”—the movies—became the most prominent industry in Los Angeles. Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) billed itself as “a city
within a city.” To the savvy author Carey McWilliams, a studio was more like “a beehive or a community.”2 By 1925, MGM’s beehive consisted of forty-five buildings and seventy-four stages on forty-three acres in Culver City. In a short promotional film, the studio boasted that it hired 100,000 extras a year, offered 200 dressing rooms, and operated a restaurant on the lot that served 2,000 meals a day. Its laboratory developed and printed 40 million feet of film a year—enough celluloid to stretch across the nation three times.3 MGM had organized all aspects of movie production into departments—publicity, story, wardrobe, camera, sets, props. Most of the department heads and all the directors were men. According to film historian Anthony Slide, departmentalizing the work may have slowly stripped women of their positions by making it harder for editors or writers to move into directing and producing. Slide does not believe that sound, which arrived in 1927, shut women out. “It cost more to make films and producers were unwilling to take risks with female filmmakers.”4

  In society and in the film industry, the attitude toward women had shifted. As a result, onscreen stories and actresses’ roles in them changed. These were lean times for stuntwomen; their positions were precarious, they earned less money, and the stunts deemed suitable for them to do were often silly.5 From the 1920s on, the central distinction was this: action women were not stars; they doubled stars.6 One writer of that time got it right: “Insurance companies issue no risks on their lives; their employment is irregular and uncertain, yet without them motion pictures would be like a country band with the brass and drummer missing.”7 Although men performed most stunts, a few daredevil girls slipped through. The best of them were champion swimmers or riders; most have been forgotten, but they were the “fearless girls” who built the bridge between the action-actresses in silent movies and the stuntwomen of later decades.8

  “Queen of the Hollywood doubles” is what acclaimed journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns called ninety-pound, five-foot-tall Winnie Brown. Winnie was “the best stunt rider and broncobuster and horse wrangler ever to wear chaps. The idol of real cowboys.” She leaped from the ninth story of a burning building and “rode a whirling, threatening jam of logs.”9 She did 100-foot falls over cliffs on horseback, for $5 a fall. “If you fall limber, you can’t get hurt,” she told a reporter for Picture Play; what she probably meant was, “Don’t tense up to do a stunt.”10

  Before her colorful movie career, Winnie broke mounts for the U.S. Army and was the only female member of the Mexican Border Patrol. At Universal she played Indian girls riding bareback, but she couldn’t make a living doing that, so she fell back on her other talent—dancing. According to a 1925 article, “She joined a dance academy as the paid partner of one and all, and for five hours a night after riding all day she danced.” In the 1920s drugstore cowboys were ubiquitous in Hollywood, and Winnie disdainfully described them as “short on horses and long on bull.”11 Great western riders and actors were part of John Ford’s “Wild Bunch” at Universal, and so was Winnie.12

  John Ford’s “Wild Bunch.” Winnie Brown is in the first row, third from left. Next to her is western star Harry Carey; Carey’s wife, Olive Fuller Golden; and Jane Bernoudy, champion horsewoman. (Courtesy of the Kevin Brownlow Collection)

  Even though stuntwomen didn’t get much work, a few stood out. A Universal casting director proclaimed that swimming champion Janet Ford “did things a man would not attempt.” Another, eighteen-year-old Loretta Rush, dived from the roof of a house into a blazing tank of water laced with gasoline. “The edges of the tank had been camouflaged to represent the banks of a stream”; a submerged partition divided the tank in half, and the gasoline had been poured into one side. Once Loretta was “into the blazing fuel, her body passed down into the cool water, under the partition, and up on the other side.”13 High-diver Mary Wiggins was cheered as the “best all-round performer, a real daredevil—she crashes cars and motorcycles, flies and stunts her own plane, she’s a tumbler and a parachute jumper.” An appealing brunette with a confident air, Wiggins came to Hollywood at age seventeen. Her feats included diving eighty-six feet from the Ocean Park pier, and if that wasn’t enough, she was tied up in a mail sack and thrown into a swimming pool.14

  These women, born in the early 1900s, would have seen the serials starring women, but there are few records of what they knew or felt. Maybe their limited opportunities as athletes and stuntwomen seemed normal to them. What they were up against is exemplified in a little 1933 film, Lucky Devils, which reflected the attitudes of the 1930s and the kinds of roles women were offered. Lucky Devils, a cinematic ode to stuntmen, starred Bill Boyd two years before he achieved fame as Hopalong Cassidy. It was produced by RKO, whose reputation was far less refined than that of MGM. David O. Selznick (who made Gone with the Wind seven years later) was stuck supervising forty pictures a year at RKO, most of them budgeted at $200,000 to $375,000. Lucky Devils was on the low end of that scale. One year into his job, drowning in the “gorilla film” King Kong, Selznick escaped to MGM on February 2, 1933, the day before Lucky Devils was released.15

  The film starts with a bank robbery—men crash through windows, swing from chandeliers, fire guns, and terrorize customers.16 One robber manhandles a switchboard operator, shoving her to the top of a staircase, where he punches her. The battered woman rolls down a dozen stairs and lands hard at the bottom. “Cut!” A young woman on the set rushes to the actress lying at the foot of the stairs. “I didn’t know girls could do such dangerous things!” the fan pants. “Will you sign my autograph book?”

  “Sure, honey, with love and kisses.” The “stuntwoman” grabs the girl, kisses her, and rips off his curly blonde wig.

  “You’re a man!” she gasps.

  “A stunt man! I double for the leading lady!”

  A man performed that stair fall, even though a number of women could have done it. For instance, Crete Sipple tumbled down a flight of eighty stairs in The Wanters (1923), and Aline Goodwin performed Scarlett’s big fall in Gone with the Wind. But in casting and in story lines, movies projected the proper place for both women and minorities, onscreen and off. Producers and directors hired white actors and stuntmen for almost every job, including roles that could have gone to African American actors, who had worked in movies since Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1903.17 In Lucky Devils, a black actor could have played Al, an aspiring stuntman with a monumental stutter, but actor Roscoe Ates was “painted down” with black makeup on his face and hands. White actors in blackface were so common that even Shirley Temple was painted down in The Littlest Rebel (1935). Like everyone else, African Americans were influenced by the movies, but the message in films “perpetuated the vision whites had of blacks” and condoned outright “racial bias by retaining a tradition of demeaning blacks.”18 Painting down and men doubling for women were not denounced by members of the Screen Actors Guild until the late 1960s. Both practices continued into the 2000s.

  In Lucky Devils, the stuntmen gather at their favorite bar and grill. The character Slugger (William Bakewell) is about to be married, but Skipper (Bill Boyd) says marriage and stunts don’t mix; married stuntmen worry about their wives instead of their hazardous work, so to stuntmen, “women are poison.” In separate incidents, as both men are about to do difficult stunts, their wives “lose their heads” and show up on the set, wailing and carrying on. As a result, the men’s stunts go wrong and people are injured. Women are weak and emotional, the film seems to argue. Though made before the Motion Picture Production Code delivered “morals” to movies in July 1934, the female roles in Lucky Devils do not resemble the dominant dames in other pre-Code movies such as Torch Singer, Frisco Jenny, Baby Face, Blood Money, and Blondie Johnson.19 These independent female characters went after what they wanted, whether that was high-level corporate work, a bank heist, an affair, or an abortion. Administered by Will “Deacon” Hays, a former postmaster general, the Code shut down controversial topics and ushered in studio-controlled censorship. The movies’ “circus-carnival atm
osphere completely vanished.”20

  The first decade of talking pictures hummed with pivotal changes and opposing contests: pre-Code versus post-Code; New Deal social programs; the growing influence of labor unions versus the increased power of movie studios; and studios’ huge profits in the midst of the grinding Depression. One historic change was already in play: motion picture workers became part of the American labor movement. At first, the studios controlled everything from talent to exhibition. Actors took whatever roles were assigned to them, whether they boosted or undermined their careers, and their fees were not negotiable. There were no rules for how long actors, directors, or crews worked each day and few safety regulations. Then, in 1933, five men and one woman risked their careers to form the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) to represent actors and stunt players who appeared in front of the camera.21

  “Hollywood tycoons had the notion that the industry was theirs to rule as they saw fit,” Carey McWilliams wrote. “Resourceful strategists, they fought the unionization of the industry by every trick and stratagem known to American employers.”22 But the rebel guilds took them on. When thousands of stars and contract players voted to strike on May 9, 1937, Louis B. Mayer of MGM and Joseph Schenck of 20th Century–Fox recognized SAG as the collective-bargaining representative for actors. The basic contract set the crucial minimum wage—the “scale” performers would earn—plus overtime and stunt pay; the number of hours performers could work; wardrobe allowances; and required meal breaks. The SAG minimum daily rate was $25 for actors, $35 for stunt players, and $5.50 for extras.