Stuntwomen Page 4
The first SAG office on Cherokee Avenue in Hollywood was across the hall from the newly minted Screen Writers Guild (later the Writers Guild of America).23 Stuntman Gil Perkins cheerfully recalled that for weeks, the line of people waiting to join the guild stretched from the door of the building and down the street, “like you were going to a great movie.”24 Stuntwoman Loretta Rush became member number 3766 on October 13, 1934, two years before SAG was fully recognized.25
Now known formally as SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), SAG’s long history attests to its rugged battle for artists’ rights. However, one consequence of the labor movement was not immediately apparent. The new guilds became part of the institutional demotion of women. For the next forty-five years, the male-dominated guilds and unions did not recognize or confront widespread discrimination in the industry until women and minorities forced the issue in the 1970s.26
In the fifteen years she worked in films, Jewell Jordan never heard of a stuntwoman, even though she was one of the few women who actually performed stunts.27 “The men did the stunts,” she said. “They wore wigs and women’s clothes.” Jewell was a teenager in the 1930s, and she heard all the conflicting talk about the unions battling the wicked studios versus the genial family atmosphere of the studios headed by princes of the realm like Jack Warner and Adolph Zukor. “I’ll tell you this,” she said, “there was order” in the studio system. “Sam Goldwyn’s company produced Wuthering Heights and we knew who to go to with a problem. I’m sure the studio wanted to make money, but it had an artistic side and everyone wanted to make a good movie. We were in the terrible Depression, we were looking for opportunity, contract players could take dancing, singing, elocution, and we took a personal pride in doing a good job.” Jewell worked in the studio system from 1927 to 1943. “I earned three dollars and fifty cents a day as an extra or a performer. I handled ‘special action,’ the rough stuff.” She wasn’t athletic and didn’t like to take risks, but she did it anyway. In Tarzan Escapes (1936) she had to fall off the limb of a tree onto a mattress. “I dislocated my hip,” she said, “but they grabbed hold of my leg and pulled it right back in place. It hurt only for the moment.”
Jewell Jordan did the “rough stuff.” (Courtesy of the Jewell Jordan Mason Collection)
Jewell and her sisters grew up in a neighborhood near MGM. The school they attended, St. Augustine, offered a pool of eager youngsters and became a prime source of casting for the studio. “Father O’Donnell got me a job at age ten at MGM,” Jewell said, and these acting jobs helped her and her sisters “pay for our education.” Jewell entered the realm of movie stars. “They had a mystique about them because they didn’t let it all hang out. Laurence Olivier was very cold and aloof on Wuthering Heights, but David Niven was a joy to be around. Marlene Dietrich was funny—she made fun of herself. In Destry Rides Again she wore a skin-tight beaded gown. When asked if she’d had lunch, she said, ‘Of course not. If I had an olive, it would show.’” One night, Jewell was one of the few actors present for a shoot at the train station on MGM’s Lot 2. “The picture was Camille and it was Robert Taylor’s twenty-fifth birthday. He was so enthused about his career and working with Garbo. She was gorgeous, such a mystery person. I liked not knowing everything [about her]. We don’t have to.”
Jewell Jordan doubled child actress Sarita Wooten in Wuthering Heights (1939). In one scene, a huge dog attacks young Cathy as she tries to climb over a garden wall. She screams when the mastiff’s jaws clamp on her leg and the dog drags her off the wall. “I wasn’t scared,” Jewell said. “I’m not of that nature. I felt things were going to work out. I never thought about being hurt” (much like Helen Gibson, who wasn’t afraid of being kicked in the head by a horse). The next day, Jewell’s leg was black and blue from the pressure of the animal’s jaws, but she arrived at the studio for a fitting. “Merle Oberon, who played the adult Cathy in the film, noticed my leg, even though I had on hose and high heels. Merle couldn’t figure out why I was at the studio. Even though my leg hurt, I put up with it because in those days you could build a career. I loved every minute of it. I didn’t have any bad experiences. If I had, I would never have sued or complained. This was my job. You went forward.”
Two other stuntwomen who worked in the thorny 1930s had influential careers. In 1937 twenty-seven-year-old Lila Finn was in Pago Pago, Samoa, doubling for Dorothy Lamour in The Hurricane.28 “She jumped at the job,” her son Barry Shanley said. “She loved to travel. She was adventurous, incredibly persistent, and absolutely opposed to giving in or giving up.”29 That film swept Lila and another young diver, Paul Stader, into the work they would do for the rest of their lives.30 “My mother did all the swimming and diving for Dorothy Lamour,” Barry said, “but the producer and the director were concerned about the Hays Commission and its industry censorship guidelines, because in one scene, after she drops the sarong, they shot footage of her naked, diving into the lagoon.”
Blonde, five-foot-three Lila came from Venice, California, a beachfront recreational area near Santa Monica. It had been founded in 1907 as the American version of the Italian original. The Venice Hot Salt Water Plunge, a huge pool fed by fresh filtered seawater, could hold 2,000 bathers. As a child, Lila dived off the spectators’ balcony for coins tossed by tourists. “We banked them in our mouths,” she said. Later, as an accomplished stuntwoman, she branched out from water work to do other stunts. Stair falls were her favorite. Sometimes a director knew what he wanted, she said, “but usually you thought out how to do it, or asked someone. . . . They are the most rewarding because everyone thinks they look great. They’re quite simple, actually. I shouldn’t say that. You’re at the top of the stairs . . . you get down and start rolling this way, then that way. I’ve done at least fifty of them.”31 Lila was not a daredevil, but she once let a man throw knives at her; he outlined her body “with knives, then cross[ed] the hatchets, one on either side of my head.”32 That was one scary stunt. “He told me to look at the ceiling so I wouldn’t move and you can bet I didn’t budge a millimeter.”33
Acrobat Helen Thurston met Lila Finn in the 1930s. They were the same age, they each had a son, and they became single moms after their husbands’ deaths. Their first stunt jobs were lucky career boosts, doubling for stars (Dorothy Lamour and Katharine Hepburn) in big films (The Hurricane and Bringing Up Baby) with major directors (John Ford and Howard Hawks). This allowed them to join SAG immediately instead of toiling as extras. They had something else in common: Lila had dived for coins in the Venice Plunge, and Helen began “her acrobatics by trick dives into the Sacramento River.”34 Helen was one of eight children, and her father, a Baptist minister with a drinking problem, regularly uprooted his family. Finally they settled in a tiny house in Redding, California. “They always had some meatless stew on the stove,” Helen’s grandson Sean Fawcett said. “The kids were always looking for something to eat. Helen craved meat and when she was older, doing acrobatics, she’d fry up a steak or pork chop, sit down, and eat it without vegetables or side dishes.” She ran away as soon as she could, probably at age sixteen or seventeen, joined a traveling acrobatic troupe, and married acrobat Jimmy Fawcett.35 Helen “mothered a son and saw Europe and the United States from a trapeze bar.”36
As the Depression deepened, vaudeville acts started to fail. Helen, Jimmy, and their son moved to Los Angeles sometime around 1936. They hung out with acrobats and stuntmen on Muscle Beach in Santa Monica. “Helen was blonde, pretty, about five-six, quite strong, but very feminine,” recalled Paula Dell. Nine years younger than Helen, Paula was a teenage acrobat and future stuntwoman. Helen “could do all kinds of stunts,” she noted. “Later, she doubled Lucille Ball in movies and on TV. When you see Lucy fall, that’s Helen!” In the 1930s Paula and Helen were performing outside the norm. “Helen inspired me,” Paula said. “Today, women are much more athletic, but back then girls did not do stunt work. My sister was a really good tumbler; there probably weren’t
six women in LA that tumbled as well. She got married and had five kids. I was the one that had a burning desire to be the performer.”37
Helen and Jimmy headed to Republic Pictures in the San Fernando Valley. The studio operated like a hard-up repertory company, turning out low-budget B pictures with experienced but often irreverent production teams (for instance, on the day after Pearl Harbor, someone commented at a staff meeting, “Anyone who quits Republic to join the army is a coward”).38 Herbert Yates had formed Republic in 1934 by merging several “poverty-row” companies, including Mascot, Monogram, Liberty, and others specializing in mysteries, serials, and westerns.39 A small staff of writers, directors, and producers relied on a rotating stable of actors and stuntmen. These included actor-stuntman David Sharpe; Yakima Canutt, soon to be a celebrated second-unit director (Stagecoach); and “Breezy” Eason, who would direct a second unit on Gone with the Wind. Stuntwomen at Republic included former serial star Helen Gibson, Babe DeFreest, and Nellie Walker, said to be the only stuntwoman under contract to Republic.40 Republic’s “Hollywood Colony” was an interconnected group of pros who had worked in silent movies or were related to families in the business. One of the writers was Barry Shipman, the son of Nell Shipman, famous for her wildlife sagas.
Helen Thurston working out on Muscle Beach. (Courtesy of Michele and Sean Fawcett)
At first, Republic director William Witney wasn’t too keen on an act involving three acrobats. “It started with two men and a girl doing a ballroom waltz,” Witney wrote in his autobiography. “They twirl the girl around gracefully, then something goes wrong, she lands in a chair and goes over backward.” The men pick her up and start the routine again, but “she spins one of the guys off the stage into the pit. He crawls back and the free-for-all is on with the gal coming out the winner.” The performers were Ken Terrell, a former Mr. America; Jimmy Fawcett, a “great high fall man and all-around athlete”; and Helen Thurston, who “became the number one stunt girl in the entire picture business.”41 Witney made them part of his stunt team for serials.
Anyone looking for work had to hustle all the studios. When Jimmy snared a bit part in Living on Love at RKO, someone noticed that Helen Thurston was about the same height as Katharine Hepburn and asked her, “Are you afraid of wild animals?” Helen said she didn’t think so, and she was hired. Bringing Up Baby, a comedy directed by versatile, stone-faced Howard Hawks, starred Hepburn, Cary Grant, and “Baby,” a leopard.42 The film used split screen, rear-screen projection, and other optical effects to misrepresent the leopard’s actual distance from the cast. Surrounded by the nonsense and tumult of a movie set, Baby had her moods, but Helen was deft and up for any challenge.
By this time, the career path had been set for stuntmen, but not for stuntwomen. The studio system involved a maze of departments, most of which impacted stunt work. In production, the “first unit” films scenes with dialogue and actors; the “second unit” augments the first unit by filming stunt sequences, landscapes, animals, and objects—scenes without dialogue. The second unit includes a smaller camera crew and the action director, a position well above that of first assistant director. The work of the two units is edited together to create the finished film. In this hierarchy, a stuntman could move up to “gaff” stunts, or coordinate the stunts of a movie; later, he could direct a second unit. The gaffer planned the action of a stunt, such as deciding the direction and speed of a car that flips into a lake.43 In the late 1960s the gaffer’s job became more powerful, taking on the functions of a “stunt coordinator,” who selected and hired the stunt players. These management positions were ideal for older stuntmen who didn’t want to keep hitting the ground. Second-unit director, a major promotion, brought membership in the Directors Guild of America.
In 1939 the studio system was at its pinnacle. “All the elements of a popular art coalesced at a moment of maturity,” film executive Steven Bach wrote, “sharp and fresh, without cynicism for the audience.”44 Ninety percent of all films made in America came from Hollywood, but unlike other industries, movie production inflicted no environmental blight on the land. That year, the studios produced 376 films, employed 30,000 to 40,000 workers, spent about $190 million to manufacture the films, and paid $90 million in salaries.45 And they released some of the best movies of all time: Dark Victory, Destry Rides Again, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Gone with the Wind, Ninotchka, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, and many others.46 Along with these legendary movies came legendary stunt sequences, including the one Helen Thurston performed, doubling for the star, in Destry Rides Again.
All stunt people dwelt in the long shadows of the “doubles.” In movie productions, the stars, directors, producers, writers, and sometimes cinematographers are known as “above the line” contributors, or those who influence the creative direction of a film. Wardrobe, set design, technical crews, and stunts are “below the line.” Stuntwomen worked not only below the line but also under the radar.
According to historian Kevin Brownlow, the need for stunt doubles began right after The Great Train Robbery in 1903. That movie used stop-motion: the cameraman stopped filming, “a dummy was substituted for the engineer,” the camera started rolling again, and the dummy was “thrown from the train. The audience was unfamiliar with such tricks, but they caught on so quickly that a stuntman or stuntwoman had to be employed for such scenes.”47 The use of doubles developed to protect stars from injury, but since this arrangement was a trade secret, it enhanced the stars’ box-office appeal. For example, because a sixty-foot dive off a boat appeared to be done by the star, the actor reaped the benefits. “The secret of who doubles whom, and when, is one of the most jealously guarded of studio mysteries. Nobody wants the facts known,” wrote reporter Florabel Muir.48 A big, brusque redhead, Muir specialized in writing about Hollywood celebrities and underworld figures, and she broke the code of silence about doubles in her 1945 account of stuntwomen.
A stunt double is selected for her physical resemblance to a star as well as her ability to perform the stunts required by the script. In Gone with the Wind Vivien Leigh had three doubles—Aline Goodwin, who worked on the film for a year; Lila Finn; and possibly Hazel Hash, a horsewoman from Montana.49 Lila Finn did the fire scene, depicting the burning of Atlanta. “My mom is on the horse-drawn carriage as the buildings are collapsing near them,” Lila’s son revealed. “She also told me she was used as a body double for Leigh in the ‘I’ll-never-be-hungry-again’ scene—a silhouette shot with her hand raised against the sky. When she saw the finished picture she wasn’t sure if the shot was of her or Vivien Leigh. They may have shot Leigh doing it, too. You can’t really tell.” Aline Goodwin did Scarlett’s tumble down the stairs, but Hazel Hash claimed credit for it. Important scenes were sometimes shot more than once with different doubles, and any one of those versions could end up in the final cut. That’s part of the mystery of stunt work.
In the pantheon of 1939 films, Destry Rides Again contributed its own doubling mystery in “the champion cat fight of all film history.” The “amusing little western” began shooting without a budget and only half a script on September 4, 1939. “Hitler was taking Poland as Marlene [Dietrich] was taking the San Fernando Valley,” Bach wrote.50 Throughout the 1930s, European camera and sound technicians, actors, producers, composers, and authors had found work and refuge in Hollywood. They brought culture to what those on the East Coast considered a cultural wasteland.51 Once war broke out in Europe, casts and crews on sets all over Hollywood, including Destry Ride Again, anguished about friends and family trapped abroad.
From the first shots of Marlene Dietrich rolling a cigarette in a noisy saloon, then throwing a drink in the face of a cowboy, it’s clear that Dietrich’s character, Frenchy, takes no prisoners. George Marshall, who had been directing comedies, westerns, and serials since 1916,52 hired Helen Thurston, known for her fighting skills, to double Dietrich. Marshall and his stunt coordinator, Duke York, had cooked up a knockdown saloon brawl betw
een Frenchy and townswoman-with-a-beef Lily Belle, played by Una Merkel.53 The two women are like wrestlers on speed, tussling on a table, rolling on the floor, growling, kicking, and punching until Destry (James Stewart) pours a bucket of water on them. When Lily Belle flees, Frenchy grabs a gun and aims it at Destry. She lobs the gun at him, jumps on his back, rides him like a bronco, falls off, and flings a chair as he slides out the door.
On the set of Destry Rides Again (1939). (Courtesy of Michele and Sean Fawcett)
According to Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Riva, her mother had tried to persuade Marshall “to let her do her own stunt work for the saloon fight. He said no! The stuntwomen had been hired, rehearsed, and would deliver on film a wild and rowdy brawl with their usual expertise. Dietrich and Una Merkel, properly bloodied and disheveled, would then take their places” for the close shots. Universal’s top producer, Joe Pasternak, might have gone along with Dietrich’s request, except for the risk of injury—the fight had been planned for professionals. “But the prospect of the enormous publicity that would be generated . . . finally outweighed any objections the worried studio could come up with.” Besides, Marshall could always reshoot later with the stuntwomen, if necessary. On the day of the shoot, the set was jammed with press from Life, Look, the wire services, and fan magazines. A first-aid station had been set up outside the soundstage. The stuntwomen were on the “sidelines, ready to take over,” Riva wrote. “Merkel and Dietrich took their places, the cameras rolled, my mother whispered, ‘Una, don’t hold back—kick me, hit me, tear my hair. You can punch me too—because I am going to punch you!’ and with a snarl, jumped on Merkel’s back, knocking her to the floor.”54 When it was over, the spectators on the set burst into applause. The fight became part of movie lore. Merkel said she and Dietrich had no rehearsal; they just did whatever Marshall wanted: “We punched and slapped and kicked for all we were worth!” Later, she said, “I looked like an old peach, green, with brown spots. And I felt rotten, too.”55