Stuntwomen Read online

  Before pagers and cell phones, anyone who needed to contact stunt people called Teddy O’Toole’s, a 24/7 answering service in Hollywood. Teddy’s staff could track them down. They also helped new producers looking for specific types, such as “a stunt girl about five feet tall who can do high falls.” The women answering the phones knew the height, weight, hair color, size, and specialty of all Teddy’s clients, which included fifteen stuntwomen and eighty-one stuntmen in December 1954. The male-female ratio of six to one hasn’t changed much today.12 Stuntman Paul Stader, who had worked with Lila Finn on The Hurricane, adapted his sister-in-law’s answering service exclusively for stunt players and told all his friends to sign up for it.13

  When May Boss heard that a woman named Polly Burson was the ramrod (stunt coordinator) on a feature titled Westward the Women, she called Teddy’s to find Polly:

  She answered in that gruff voice of hers and I said, “I hear you’re looking for trick riders.”

  “Are you a trick rider?” Polly said.

  “Yes.”

  “You got your SAG card?”

  “No.”

  Polly hangs up! Well! I sure don’t want to know her!

  May got her SAG card, but not in time for that show.

  Westward the Women (1951) told a very different story of the West, and it employed practically every working stuntwoman around.14 This unique experience must have given the women a fleeting sense of the camaraderie stuntmen enjoyed on every job. Westward the Women covered the 2,000-mile cross-country trek of 100 women on foot, horseback, or prairie schooner. Buck (played by Robert Taylor), the leader of the wagon train, says, “‘Take a load of good women across hell? If we’re lucky we’ll only lose one out of three!’”15 Crusty William A. Wellman directed a cast led by Taylor, Denise Darcel, and Hope Emerson.

  Stuntwoman Bonnie Happy grew up on a horse. Her mother, Edith, was an expert rodeo rider.16 “Mom drove a four-up for Polly,” Bonnie said, “and on that show [when] you . . . hear somebody say, ‘Okay, Hap’—they’re talking to my mom. The women got together, named Polly their stunt coordinator, and Wellman agreed. She took care of the women’s stunts and the men on it took care of theirs. So she was the first woman to stunt coordinate. Polly was a pistol.”17

  “Wild Bill” Wellman—good-looking, brilliant, and sometimes irascible—had directed movies since 1920. His most famous, Wings, won the first Oscar for best picture in 1927. It is hard to imagine him saying, “You girls decide who’s coordinating,” but Westward the Women was a unique picture. “Oh, yes, Polly stunt coordinated,” said the director’s son, actor William Wellman Jr.:

  My dad liked stunt people. Frank Capra wrote the story, but his studio wouldn’t let him make it because it was a western, so he took it to my dad who liked it and MGM made it. For two weeks before shooting, dad set up training for the women, how to handle the wagons, the shooting, and the bull whips. The men did stunts the women didn’t want to do or my dad wouldn’t let them do, like the falls. He cast actresses who were good riders and stuntwomen, like Evelyn Finley. He thought she was the best rider of all.18

  Tragedy hits in Westward the Women when they cannot slow the first wagon descending a steep incline. (Courtesy of the William A. Wellman Collection)

  Shot on location for eight weeks in Utah, Westward is an exciting, warmhearted story that focuses on the women’s determination and courage. When the wagons are forced to go down a steep incline—more cliff than hill—the script calls for the first woman who attempts it to die. In the ensuing silence, Buck yells, “All right, who’s next? C’mon, it’s been done before, the only difference was it was done by men!” One of the women, six feet tall and about 200 pounds, says, “By men, huh?” She breaks the moment of defeat, the women get back in their wagons, and she’s the first in line.

  Little has been written about the remarkable stuntwomen who worked on that movie. “Sharon Lucas was a great rider,” said stuntman Loren Janes, “and she was the first stunt girl I ever worked with.” He did his first stunt—an eighty-foot dive off a cliff—on Jupiter’s Darling (1954). Sharon was Esther Williams’s riding double. Loren recalled one incident when Sharon proved her mettle:

  After dinner, Sharon and I were walking down the street, when two stuntmen came out of a bar, walked behind us saying, “Look at the butt on that gal.” I turned to get them to shut up, but Sharon said, “No, no, don’t.” They kept making these remarks and she kept telling me, “No, no,” so we kept walking and all of a sudden she spun around! One was a great big guy and the other was a little guy with a big stuntman reputation. She hit him first, then the other. They both went down and just lay there. She turned around and kept right on walking with me. I’ll never forget that. She was a fantastic gal.19

  The families of Stevie Myers and Lucille House were in the business of supplying horses and livestock to the movies. Short and dark-haired, Stevie looked like “a leather saddle,” one stuntwoman said with affection. Respected for her expertise, she trained and rented horses and ran her father’s ranch in the San Fernando Valley. “She had a real direct manner,” May Boss said. “Lots of stuntwomen then were female-ish, which put Stevie off. Horses are men’s work, herding, cleaning, currying.” Other young stuntwomen said Stevie’s forthright manner influenced them to speak up in the tough, liberating 1970s.

  Stevie Myers, a real horsewoman. (Courtesy of Julie Ann Johnson)

  Lucille House’s father owned one of the world’s largest movie-livestock supply companies. The year before Westward the Women, Lucille had doubled Maureen O’Hara in Tripoli (1950), which, according to stuntman Chuck Roberson’s autobiography, was filmed in “the sand dunes of Indio, California, known as Hollywood’s Sahara. It was hot before the sun came up.”20 A World War II veteran, Roberson was new to stunts, as were the other men who worked on Tripoli—Little Chuck Hayward, Terry Wilson, and Bob Morgan. Their leader, Cliff Lyons, had been a stuntman since Beau Geste in 1926. Lucille was the only stuntwoman on the film.21 Costumed in robes and burnooses, each man had been assigned a camel to ride, and Roberson’s camel snatched the burnoose off his head and tried to eat it. “I was tugging and pulling when I heard a feminine voice behind me. ‘Watch out! Get that camel away from the horses! Bill told me he gave you Henrietta,’ she said. ‘She’s in heat.’” Roberson had been told the camel’s name was Clyde! “I saw this girl, who seemed to know so much about the mating habits of the female camel, was dressed in an Arab costume complete with veil. ‘My name’s Lucille House.’ I recognized the name,” Roberson wrote. “Next to Polly Burson, she was the best stunt girl in Hollywood.” Lucille gave him advice as they rode up and down the dunes. The temperature climbed to 120 degrees, and then “someone turned on forty wind machines. Suddenly, a real Santa Ana wind roared up from the south and blew the machines away. Instead of packing up and heading for cover, the director [Will Price] decided to take advantage of the sand storm. I stuck by Lucille.”22

  Kidding around is part of life on the set and on location, and whether the target is male or female, it’s both a joke and a test. May Boss and Polly Burson could certainly take a joke, but their first work had been in the more female-friendly and egalitarian rodeos. The stunt culture was quite different. In the 1950s “about ten or twelve stuntmen—‘boss stuntmen’—ran the business. If they didn’t know you, you didn’t work.”23 The women, few in number and relatively powerless, competed intensely for the one job open to them—doubling for actresses. “A gal I met doubled girls in westerns,” May said. “I was new. I’d tell her I heard of a job on X, and she’d say, ‘I’ve got that job.’ And I believed her! Then I began to catch on. If that woman couldn’t handle a stunt, she’d take the job anyway and give it to a boy. She’d never hand it off to a woman.” A stunt could be taken away from a woman for any reason; maybe the director thought it was too dangerous for her, or the stunt coordinator decided to replace her with his girlfriend. Stuntwomen also had to contend with the “girls on location,” who couldn’t do stunts
but were hired from the stunt budget to sleep with the crew. “The business is all about who you know, and in some cases who you blow,” one reporter said. “One stuntwoman said she had to bring her kneepads when she wanted to get a job.”

  Roberson described how some stuntwomen were hired. Director Raoul Walsh was hunting for “stunt girls” to double Jane Russell in The Tall Men (1955), starring Clark Gable and filmed on location in Durango, Mexico. “Walsh picked the girl by reputation, not by her ability as a stunt girl,” Roberson wrote:

  Joe Behm, the production manager on the picture, brought three girls to Walsh to be interviewed. “This is Polly Burson,” he said. “Best stunt girl in Hollywood. She can do anything—rear mounts, drags, transfers, falls, you name it.”

  “What kind of home life does she have?” asked Walsh.

  “She’s a model wife and mother, faithful to her husband. . . .”24

  “Okay,” sighed Walsh, “I get the idea. . . . Bring in the next girl.”

  Joe ushered in Sharon Lucas, who stood smiling sweetly before old Walsh. . . . Joe whispered to him, “She’s not as good as Polly but she can still stunt pretty well.”

  “How is she off the horses?” asked the old man.

  “She’s been married about eight years and has a couple of real cute kids.”

  Walsh waved his hand in dismissal. “Bring in the last one.”

  “I don’t think you want this one,” warned Joe, ushering in Sue Brown [not her real name]. Sue had big boobs and an “easy” look about her that made the old man sit up. . . . “Tell me about this one.”

  “As a stuntwoman she stinks. . . . About the only thing she’s got going for her are those boobs.”

  “Couldn’t tell it wasn’t Jane [Russell], from a distance,” the old man smiled.

  “Yeah, but she’s not worth a shit as a stuntwoman. The only thing she knows how to do is screw,” Joe concluded.

  “That’s good enough for me!” said Walsh. “We gotta keep the crew happy, you know.”

  “The end result,” Roberson wrote, “was that the crew got happy and I got a stuntwoman who didn’t know whether to ride her horse or kiss it.”25

  Skill and talent didn’t count. Polly and Sharon may not have known at the time why they weren’t hired for The Tall Men, but they probably found out.26 The budget could have afforded both stunts and sex—a good stuntwoman and a good-time girl. But supplying sex to the guys trumped everything. And if the girl who was hired couldn’t do a stunt, no problem! A man would put on a wig, do the stunt, and earn the extra pay. No one has calculated the financial loss to the skilled stuntwomen over the decades who were passed over for women who were willing to “keep the crew happy,” or the impact on the women who were, in effect, prostitutes.

  May Boss tackled the “location girl” tradition when she doubled Suzanne Pleshette on Nevada Smith (1966). This was her first time working for director Henry Hathaway, and one of the locations was in the bayous of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. May recalled:

  They’d hired about six women for “night work.” They were called “rice paddy girls.” The assistant director tells me to go to wardrobe to get my rice paddy outfit. I said, “No. I’m hired to double the girl.” He went off. Soon Mr. Hathaway yelled, “May!” I went up to him and he said, “Why aren’t you a rice paddy girl?” “Because I wasn’t hired for that.” I walked away. The crew was standing around, trembling for me. The next day he did it again. “Why aren’t you a rice paddy girl?” I told him, “I wasn’t hired for that kind of work and besides, I’m being paid! Those girls are doing the night work for free.”

  May took a big risk. Stunt people, and particularly the women, were expected to be cordial and to comply with the director and the key stuntmen. A ramrod had the power to hire, and he could give a woman’s stunt to a man with no explanation. Almost no one bucked the system, for fear of not being hired again and for fear of losing her colleagues’ trust, which is crucial in stunt work.

  More often, May and Polly were well respected. “But we were females making a living,” May said, “and some guys gravitated to women like us to get into pictures. About a dozen men are working because Polly helped them,” she said with a resigned chuckle. “We were good friends and we went on interviews together. One job was to dance with a bear,” May said. “The director said to the trainer, a Russian, ‘Show the girls what to do.’ He opens the cage, jerks the bear out, says a few words to him, the bear raises his paws, gives him a bear hug, and pretty quick the trainer’s turning real red, the bear’s not letting go, and Polly says, ‘It’s your job, Bossie!’ That’s what she called me. ‘Just take off your panties and toss ’em under his nose!’ She’s laughing her head off and she walks out!”

  It may have been easy to refuse the job with the bear, but work was hard to find. And even the best stuntwomen earned less than men for almost all stunts, a fact that was rarely reported until Florabel Muir brought it up in 1945. “Thrill directors agree that stunts are worth more than they cost, and that the studios get off very cheaply indeed, considering the risks the girls run. Over the years, the girls do not average more than $100 to $150 a week.”27 The gnawing inequity came up again and again, but in the 1950s there wasn’t much they could do about it. “There were so few stuntwomen,” Polly groaned. “We had Helen Thurston, who couldn’t spell horse, but she was a hell of a trampoline artist, and we had Lila Finn, a hell of a swimmer.”

  Then came Lila’s big coup, doubling for Sandra Dee in A Summer Place (1959). Stuntman Regis Parton (widely known as Reggie) doubled Troy Donahue.28 As Lila’s son recalled:

  She and Troy were supposed to take a sailboat out, turn it over, and get washed up on the beach. The director waited for a big enough storm to make it look realistic. When it finally came, it was so big the Coast Guard, which was supposed to accompany their sailboat, refused to go out. As a swimmer, my mom was confident she could handle anything. She and Reggie took this little boat out. They were completely on their own. They got past the breakwater, but one of the first waves dashed the boat on the rocks. They tried to push it off, but waves kept coming. They dived in, swam through the waves and back through the breakwater. When she came home she told me it was the biggest one-day payday a stuntwoman ever had. Because she and Reggie had done the same stunt, she’d demanded the same adjustment pay—and she got it. I think it was $2,500 or $3,000. She figured that if the Coast Guard wasn’t willing to go out it had been really dangerous, so she and the stuntman hung together and got themselves a really nice adjustment.29

  An “adjustment” is the amount over the SAG daily rate that all stunt people receive. In the past, when a stuntman and a stuntwoman did a gag together, the man negotiated the adjustment for both of them with the director or gaffer. Even when taking the same risks on the same stunt, the woman usually received a lower fee, presumably because she had less physical strength or less experience. Most women accepted whatever was offered because complaints could get them labeled as troublemakers. Lila had to speak up for herself, but Reggie held the key to her triumph when he supported the equal split. Today, women are more likely to speak up for their fair share.

  A year later, an off-the-cuff idea from Mickey Rooney increased the stuntmen’s control and management of their work—the first stuntmen’s association was formed. A few years after that, stuntwomen formed their own association. Though never as powerful as the men’s, it clarified the action they had to take to improve their standing. Not one of those changes would be easy.

  II

  Taking on the System

  and Fighting for Change

  1960s–1980s

  4

  Stunt Performers

  Organize

  We were fighting for basic recognition as stuntwomen.

  —Jeannie Epper

  On an episode of the 1950s TV series Your Show of Shows, star Sid Caesar played a “stunt double being beaten, hanged up and blown up in a series of gags. The handsome leading man steps in for the hero in close-ups,
followed by the fawning adulation of the director and leading lady, while the dazed, bloodied and broken stuntman staggered about in the background, totally ignored. That’s show biz.”1

  Movie folklore praised them, but Caesar’s skit showed their real status. “The industry’s plebeian jocks, the stunt men,” producer Saul David wrote, “have always seemed special and pure—a kind of gentle warrior caste like Kurosawa’s samurais, menacing, high-principled and comfortingly for sale. Stars and executives who will rage if you speak discouragingly about Hottentots will talk about stunt men as if they were Arabian horses.”2 Even today, one stuntwoman said, “the industry’s perception is that we’re dumb, reckless daredevils, and we don’t read books. No one assumes I went to college and studied Shakespeare.”

  In 1960 stuntmen greatly improved their position. Of all the changes that engulfed the movie industry, the resignation or retirement of longtime studio heads, producers, and directors was one of the most significant. They had known every aspect of the business, and their departure left a vacuum that was hard to fill. In the shifting sands of what had once been terra firma, corporations began to take over the studios, and talented young producers, directors, and entrepreneurs mounted their own independent productions.

  Twenty-nine-year-old Loren Janes and thirty-five-year-old Dick Geary each had about seven years of stunt experience in 1960.3 That’s when they agreed to work on a film called Everything’s Ducky, which it was not—not on that movie and not in the industry.4 However, change and confusion often lead to opportunity. One scene in the nutty comedy starring Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, and Jackie Cooper was frustrating Dick and Loren. “After three days trying to work out a big fight between twelve marines and twelve navy guys,” Loren said, “Mickey Rooney takes me aside and says, ‘Why is this so bad? These guys don’t know what they’re doing.’ I said they weren’t stuntmen, they were extras. Dick was the only stuntman on the navy side and I was on the marine side. We knew what to do; the other guys didn’t.” The moguls who had run everything since the 1920s were gone, and the corporations that had taken over the studios “were managed by new guys or independent producers who didn’t know a stuntman from a farmer. The producers on that show had hired extras because they were cheaper. They couldn’t do the job.”