Stuntwomen Page 5

  The object of the studios’ doubling game was to have it both ways. While publicly denying that their stars were doubled, they secretly used doubles to protect their actors. For Destry, Universal could declare that “no doubles” were used and be backed up by the press. But six years later, Variety reporter Florabel Muir outed Dietrich’s double in the Saturday Evening Post. “When you saw Marlene Dietrich’s historic barroom brawl in Destry Rides Again, you were not looking at Marlene, but at Helen [Thurston]. That fight, incidentally, made such a hit with fans that fistic brawls involving girls have been favorites with producers ever since.”56

  It’s hard to imagine that a pro like Helen Thurston would tell a reporter she’d doubled Dietrich if she hadn’t. The Dietrich-Merkel fight might have looked great to the reporters present during the filming, but how did it look to the camera? After seeing the rushes, Marshall and Pasternak may have decided to reshoot with doubles to improve the punches, the falls, or the timing. If the scene was reshot, technicians on set would know who was doubling, but revealing such a secret could have serious repercussions.

  “On the screen, we are shapes, and not faces,” stuntwoman Frances Miles said.57 Going over the fight frame by frame, in some shots Dietrich’s slender, oval face appears to be round, like Helen’s; in other shots Merkel’s face looks angular, unlike her own. At normal speed, a stunt goes by so fast it’s impossible to tell whether it’s the star or the stuntwoman being punched. Stunt doubles learn how to hide their faces. “The whole idea is not getting noticed, not being identified,” stunt coordinator Conrad Palmisano said years later. “You get good at not letting your face be seen in a stunt.”

  To insiders, that fight became a stunt within a stunt, and as the story about it spread, Helen Thurston’s reputation grew. After Destry, she went back to Republic. A year later, director William Witney was planning a serial “around a girl,” the first since the advent of sound. Jungle Girl starred Frances Gifford, and in terms of history, Helen was the best double around. She became a superlative stuntwoman, one of the few in the 1930s whose skills sustained the onscreen position created by Winnie Brown, Helen Gibson, and the action serial actresses.

  3

  Television

  More Stunt Work—If You Can Get It

  Now, girls, please be very careful. I don’t want any of you hurt.

  —New director quoted by Florabel Muir,

  “They Risk Their Necks for You,”

  Saturday Evening Post, September 15, 1945

  “These girls sometimes have more guts than any man,” stunt veteran “Breezy” Eason declared. He directed the second unit on a 1945 swashbuckler called The Spanish Main and had hired Betty Danko and Helen Thurston to do the fencing stunts, which RKO paid them to learn. Betty, who also wrote poetry and composed music, had twenty years’ experience doing stunts; Helen had eight.1

  “Actor Paul Henreid thought all this talk about Helen being a toughy was a lot of nonsense,” wrote one reporter. When he stepped up to Helen, she “grabbed his arm, boosted him onto her shoulders, got the proper balance, gave him the old spin—and deposited the surprised actor right on the floor . . . Helen turned to 212-pound Eric Alden, a stuntman standing nearby, laughing. Before Alden got the smile off his face, he was up and over—beside Henreid.”2

  As Helen was up to her old tricks, twenty-six-year-old Polly Burson was facing facts in Denver, Colorado. Her grandfather had been a champion bronc buster, her parents owned a riding and roping show, and she had become a rodeo champ in Europe and the United States, including four years playing Madison Square Garden in New York City.3 But Polly was no longer at the top of her game. “I was going back down to the fifteen, ten, and five shows where I’d started. I didn’t want that. I had to change my life.”4 Polly had no real education and few options, but her mother had worked in rodeos with Babe DeFreest, who had left the circuit for the movies. “I figured maybe I could use my trick riding and sort of fall back on the movies. I called Babe about my chances, and she said, ‘Get in! There’s room for you!’” Polly had lots to learn about stunts, but she had style—she was a genial, self-deprecating, wisecracking athlete with enormous appeal. She and her new husband, Wayne Burson, arrived in Los Angeles in the spring of 1945. She recalled, chuckling:

  Helen Thurston lifts Bud Abbott over her head in Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops (1955). (Courtesy of Michele and Sean Fawcett)

  Now in those days the Screen Actors Guild was closed, and what that meant I had no idea, but you had to have a card to get a job and you had to have a job to get a card. I kept bugging the studios until one day Babe recommended me for a serial, The Purple Monster Strikes [1945]. She doubled the star, Linda Stirling, and I doubled Mary Moore. At that time she was married to Clayton Moore, who was not the Lone Ranger yet. Babe and I had to do a fight on the edge of a cliff and then fall off it, but when we got up there, I looked down and said, “Babe, there’s no damn way we can get there from here.” It was about seventy-five feet to the bottom. They’d built a platform down there and the grips and all the men held up a round firemen’s net. Babe said, “Don’t bounce, grab something and go to your back.” I don’t know if the wind blew me off, Babe pulled me off, or I stumbled off, but we both hit right on the X. I made $150 and thought, my God, this is the gravy train! Then I didn’t work for a month.

  Polly had no idea she would soon board the big gravy train—Paramount Pictures’ The Perils of Pauline.

  Compared with Pearl White’s 1914 serial, the 1947 movie directed by George Marshall was child’s play. Marshall had boosted Helen Thurston’s career in 1939 in Destry Rides Again, and he would do the same for Polly when he hired her to double Betty Hutton. Marshall asked Polly if she had ever done a “transfer” onto a train. “I said, ‘The only way I ever got on a train was I handed a porter a quarter and stepped on.’ Mr. Marshall just stood there looking at me, so I said, ‘No, I haven’t, but here we go.’”

  Back then, directors knew the kinds of stunts they wanted and the players to do them. In this case, Marshall didn’t want Polly to ride up to the boxcar on her horse, grab the bar, and pull herself onto the train. He wanted her to leap from the horse to the train.5 “I’m up on a hill a couple of blocks away from the train and the railroad tracks,” Polly said. “It’s straight downhill and I have to judge the time I’ll need to get to that first boxcar behind the coal car. I had to get in position to reach it. I wasn’t behind, but I was whipping the horse to get to my ladder on the car. And that’s timing. I had the best darn horse under me, I hated to admit it, but she was a mare. I reached the boxcar and—I jumped onto it!” Polly and her galloping horse seemed fused together until she rose up in a graceful, liquid leap toward the moving train, and as she sailed off, the horse kept racing with the same unbroken rhythm. She landed perfectly. “I had to stay between cars and shoot back at the Indians chasing me,” she said. “Then I had to crawl up and run along the boxcar into the coal car, run along it into the engine room, around the engineer, and up to the cowcatcher. I did that three times. I couldn’t figure what the hell was wrong. When I came real close by the engineer, it was George Marshall! He said he’d been a frustrated engineer since he was a kid. I said, ‘Mr. Marshall, I wish you’d have practiced with somebody else.’”

  Polly Burson quickly became known as “a fearless, peerless stunt rider.” One stuntman said she had the best timing he’d seen “in a woman.” Timing is crucial to any stunt, and it can’t be taught. Polly developed it riding relay races. “You’re on three head of horses, you ride each one half a mile. When you come into the stretch, you must be in position to get into your station to change horses. If you’re not, you won’t make it. Your head has to tell you how to do it, and you have to start thinking about it after a quarter of a mile. That’s timing and I found I had it on the transfer from my horse to the train.”

  That was the only riding stunt in The Perils of Pauline. According to Polly, she couldn’t have done the other stunts without the help
of the men on the set. “Betty Hutton playing Pauline is onstage singing and dancing,” Polly related, “but the audience is hollering, ‘We want a stunt!’ She runs up a catwalk behind the curtain to a landing high above the stage where great big ropes, darn near eight inches in circumference, hung alongside the curtains. She grabs one, swings across the stage and back, across again, and drops to the stage.” As Hutton’s double, Polly was expected to do the action, but Marshall was still working out how to do this stunt with the men. “Back then, a lot of little men were wearing wigs” and doubling for actresses, an irritated Polly recalled. After two stuntmen tried it and failed, the prop men urged Polly to tell Marshall that she wanted to do it. “They forced me, almost. So I did and he said, ‘You really want to do it?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, I do.’ I was so scared if you’d asked me to spit, I wouldn’t have been able to.”

  The stuntmen’s mistake, Polly realized, was that they couldn’t complete the full swing because they hadn’t let the prop and effects guys help them. “It was the macho in the men, that’s all I could figure,” she drawled. “When you swing through the first time, you have to turn, come back, then turn around again, but by that second time you’ve lost your momentum. When I did the turn, two men put their hands right on my butt and pushed me. I went way up again, turned, went down about thirty-five feet, dropped off, landed on my back, and it was done! But I didn’t have the clothes on!” she shouted, laughing. “I wore the Betty Hutton wig, but no one thought I could do it so they hadn’t shot it! I had to get in costume and do it again.”

  After World War II the studios were minting pictures in all denominations—Two Years before the Mast; The Lost Weekend; Sorry, Wrong Number; The Trouble with Women. In 1916 canny, farsighted Adolph Zukor (Famous Players) and Jesse L. Lasky (Lasky Feature Play Company) had merged their businesses, forming a film distribution company called Paramount Pictures. Today, the Paramount studio on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood looks as stately and picturesque as it did in 1947. That year, on the studio’s back lot, Polly Burson met Lila Finn. They were different in many ways, but they shared a love of travel and were friends for the next fifty years. At the time, Polly had two years in stunts; Lila had ten years. Polly, a brunette, was an accomplished horsewoman; Lila, a blonde, was an expert swimmer and a volleyball champ. Polly loved a rowdy good time with friends and told great stories with wry humor; Lila, more reserved, was “a lady who knew what she wanted, planned for it,” and went after it. Polly spent her money; Lila invested hers. When they met on the lot, Lila had joined the swirling hordes in Cecil B. DeMille’s extravaganza Unconquered (1947).6 Polly became Paulette Goddard’s second stunt double.

  One major sequence of Unconquered was shot in Idaho on the Snake River, according to Polly, Lila, and others who spoke to Bill Mayer of Variety in 1977. Downriver by the falls, where the water was choppy, canoes full of Indians chased the one bearing Lila and Ted Mapes, Gary Cooper’s double, heading for the steep drop ahead.7 As they went over the falls, DeMille wanted them to grab onto a tree limb. “But when they tried it,” Mayer wrote, “the branch broke threatening to hurl them into the current and dash them against the rocks. Camera angles and other strategies could have eliminated the danger, but DeMille insisted on realism in all its fine-spun and constantly visible detail.”8 Special equipment was brought in to secure the limb. “My mom [Lila Finn] and stuntman Ted Mapes were in a canoe shooting through some pretty significant rapids,” Barry Shanley said, “and then the picture cut to a long shot of the waterfall.” As the canoe is perched on the crest, Ted grabs the branch of an overhanging tree, Lila grabs him, and the canoe plunges over the falls. Onscreen, they hang from the limb and then swing forward into the sheet of water. The scene cuts to Ted and Polly bursting through the curtain of water and landing on a rocky ledge behind the falls, soaked but safe. “They hired Polly to be the stunt double under the waterfall,” Barry said, “and that scene was done on a soundstage.” Lila, Polly, and eleven stuntmen worked on Unconquered. At a time when stuntmen often doubled actresses, “Polly showed that horseback riding is a great equalizer between the sexes,” Lila wrote. “She was so versatile and so popular, it was a wonder the rest of us got a chance to work!”9

  Polly Burson riding high on her beloved horse, Pat. (Courtesy of Polly Burson)

  In 1945 movie attendance was at an all-time high, but soon the blows came fast and hard from different directions. First, the dream factory lost its control of theater chains in the 1947 Paramount Decree, which radically changed the way studios had operated for the past thirty years. By 1950, a new home-entertainment gadget called television began stealing away their audiences. The movie industry fumbled for a magic key—it tried 3D and Cinerama—to bring audiences back. Producers resurrected ideas from old low-budget movies, such as crime or love stories, and they produced feature-film knockouts like High Noon and Shane (westerns were safer than stories of social problems during the regressive 1950s). When every stratagem failed to halt the growing appeal of the small screen, the studios went into the TV business.

  Meanwhile, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) scoured the nation for Communists and then narrowed the hunt for Reds to Hollywood. Many individuals from the film industry, mainly writers (including the “Hollywood Ten”), were forced to testify at congressional hearings. The result was the notorious blacklist, which lasted into the 1960s. In these oppressive years, fear and cowardice reigned, friends betrayed friends, and guilds and unions adopted a more conservative mode to avoid any hint of the militancy they’d embraced since the 1930s. Although the turmoil was nationwide, the effects on Hollywood set off a chain of reactions.

  The old studio production system was forced to change, given the studios’ loss of theater ownership and the growing number of independent film productions. A flood of B picture producers and directors moved to television. They created weekly comedies, mysteries, and westerns that, in a way, resembled longer versions of silent movie serials.10 TV shows were considered second rate, but they gave everyone in the movie business, including stuntwomen, a whole new market for their work.

  Whether they played on small black-and-white screens at home or on wide-screen Technicolor in darkened theaters, most movies and TV shows focused on men’s adventures. Behind the scenes, men controlled the studios, the productions, and the film crews, and stuntmen orbited action stars such as John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, and Robert Mitchum. Stuntwomen, in contrast, often worked alone on the set, limited to performing whatever little action the female star might do. Now, thanks to television, at least there were more sets.

  Stuntwoman May Boss attributed her early success to the numerous TV westerns being shot all over Los Angeles. “I could fall a horse. That’s where you come flying towards the camera and boom! The horse goes down.” Agile, tough, and pretty, with sharp blue eyes, May said, “If I stick my tongue out, I’m five-four.” Her father had owned and trained racehorses in New York, and she really wanted to be a jockey. “I was a great size for it,” she said, “but those jocks did not like women on the racetrack. They told me, ‘We’ll box you in, we’ll knock you over the rail.’ They don’t fool around. They’re nasty. It was a hostile environment and they still don’t like women.” Once May realized she had no future as a jockey, she went to the rodeos. “There the guys treated you like a sister,” she said. “I pretty well taught myself trick riding and I got lucky. I rode a horse that had just one speed—full on. Very quickly I got the reputation.” She worked all the big shows in the United States, and she liked “never know[ing] for sure what’s going to happen next.” Trick riding involves showmanship, and according to May, she “learned that from Dick Griffith, the classiest trick rider ever. He went around the arena in the opening parade and all he did was take off his hat and brought the whole crowd with him. He had dark skin and his wife made him white clothes with no fly! I don’t know where he put his equipment in those costumes and I didn’t know him well enough to ask. I had long blonde hair and when I
did a drag my hair swept the ground. It looked really dangerous. Showmanship.”11

  May earned a living, but she was divorced and had a son, Clay, to support, so money was tight. She rented a house in the San Fernando Valley that happened to be near the home of John and Frances Epper. John, a former member of the Swiss mounted cavalry, had immigrated to America in the 1920s, where he became a renowned stuntman. The Epper children—Margo, Jeannie, Stephanie, Tony, Gary, and Andy—followed him into the stunt business. In fact, everyone in the neighborhood seemed to be in the “picture business.” May’s next-door neighbor was Roy Rogers’s trainer. He helped her get work as an extra, and May began to learn about stunts.

  She had some close calls. “I was driving wagons. I don’t remember what TV show it was, but the director said, ‘I want you coming flying around this corner and I want you’—I love it when directors do this—‘I want you to stop your wheels right there.’ That’s virtually impossible with two head of horses. I kept my mouth shut. If it works, great, if it doesn’t, can’t be done. I was lucky that day, nobody got hurt and I stopped ‘right there.’” She learned to be wary of a stunt when part of it was out of her control. “You can be hurt when you have to leave part of a stunt to someone else,” she said. On another occasion, she learned that stuntmen know what to do in a crunch:

  May Boss hoisting a stuntman up and over. (Courtesy of May Boss)

  I was almost burned to death on a TV show when too much fire-retardant gel was applied to my back and ran down my legs. Too much gel feeds the flames. On the other side of the door I was supposed to come through, one fireman had a blanket and the other held an extinguisher. Two stuntmen were on set just to watch. I was set on fire and I’m a torch! I go through the door, I’m supposed to scream and I’m screaming for real. The firemen freeze, but the stuntmen go into action. One grabs me by the throat and knocks me out. The other grabs the hose and sprays it on me. Next week I’m in the mountains with my son, lying in the snow, and it sure felt good.