Stuntwomen Read online

  Stunt fights always work better when the pros do them. “The extras really punched and kicked,” Loren recalled, and “some were getting hurt. Mickey Rooney’s asking me, ‘What are we going to do tomorrow?’ I said, ‘Let me hire twenty guys and we’ll do it in half a day.’ The next morning Dick and I brought in real stunt guys, we did it in a half a day and it was perfect. Rooney was really pleased. ‘You stunt guys ought to get a group or something together.’ Dick and I talked it over for weeks. Nobody knew who the real stuntmen were, but if we had a group, producers and directors would know where to call. Six other guys helped us pick out the stuntmen, we had a meeting at the Screen Actors Guild, forty guys showed up, and every one was a real stuntman.”

  Loren and Dick cofounded the Stuntmen’s Association of Motion Pictures in 1961. No one could have predicted its success. The organization of stuntmen, stunt coordinators, and second-unit directors became a powerful group, wired to different levels of the industry, and it began to control most of the stunt work. Membership was by invitation only; to join, a member had to earn at least $10,000 a year (a few made as much as $50,000). One writer called it “a sort of elite fraternity of pros that keeps a watchful eye on the benefits of the trade.”5 The association became a one-stop shop for the services of stuntmen; this increased their paychecks and solidified their place in the industry. The organization’s unspoken, unwritten practice of hiring its own members built its true power. In 1969 membership totaled 135.

  The Stuntmen’s Association was openly discriminatory: women and minorities were excluded. According to Dave Robb, a reporter with Variety, one stuntman admitted (off the record) that the association didn’t want women because “they would create sexual problems. If women were part of the group, then they’d be hooking up with other people. If women were not there, they [the men] wouldn’t have to explain things to their wives.” One stuntwoman said, “If I’d been a stuntman then I would have been ashamed to look a stuntwoman in the face.”

  Some of the excluded still got work on the 300-plus movies made each year and on TV shows. The basic requirements were agility, coordination, style, and timing. A sense of humor helped lighten the strain of working with groups of different, often eccentric individuals. Later in his career, Loren Janes researched stuntmen from the silent movies to the 1980s and found that “the top all-round stuntmen, without exception, were gymnasts, acrobats, and divers. Many had college degrees, often in engineering. Those guys knew how to design an action because they had studied how to get a stunt done.”

  Stuntmen still doubled women, and white stuntmen were still “painted down” with makeup to double black actors. Beginners had a hard time breaking into the business. There were no stunt schools or SAG regulations regarding who qualified as a stunt person. The best way to join the ranks was to be born into or marry into a stunt family or to know someone in the movie industry. For example, May Boss had no connections, but her neighbor did, and he helped her get work; her riding skills did the rest. No one had to bend the rules to let her work—there were no rules. Other professionals, such as teachers and engineers, need credentials, but stunt work has always depended on physical ability, and the only real stunt school was the set. Hopeful neophytes worked because they were talented, made friends, wangled jobs as extras, did small stunts, and learned by trial and error. In this informal, unregulated way, they got a foot in the door and expanded their skills. One stuntwoman summed up: “Some girls got stunt jobs because their boyfriends or husbands were in it. Others knew from day one what they wanted and went after it; some fell into it by accident, and a few girls were born into stunt families.”

  Jeannie Epper was born into a stunt family, and Julie Ann Johnson fell into it. They both became leaders in the challenging years ahead. Jeannie’s father had performed stunts since The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1936. Thanks to his relatives in Switzerland, Jeannie had the opportunity to attend a convent finishing school there. For two years she learned new languages and made new friends. But Jeannie had grown up in the San Fernando Valley doing acrobatics and riding horses, and when she returned home, she was determined to become a stuntwoman because action was her real language.

  Jeannie Epper at about age twenty, before she became the stuntwoman’s stuntwoman. (Courtesy of Julie Ann Johnson)

  In the late 1950s Jeannie worked as an extra, doing little stunts. As a rookie, she didn’t immediately jump off a building; she had a chance to learn the craft by watching Polly Burson and May Boss do stunts that were usually done only by men. “As a woman, when you pull off something only men do, it raises respect for all women—it opens the door for women to do all kinds of things.”6 According to Jeannie, Polly and May “were my mama chickens, they taught me the ropes.” Jeannie also had a lot of support from her father and her siblings. More often, stuntmen trained their sons, not their daughters, but Jeannie recalled, “My dad saw that I was serious. When you’re young, you let people boss you around, because you think you don’t know enough, but my dad said, ‘You’re not doing that stunt. Go easy.’ He was really strict. He also said, ‘Don’t sleep with anybody in the business, because you’ll ruin your reputation.’ And I didn’t.” For years she listened to her father’s counsel shared at the dinner table. “His words saved my life a few times. The best advice he gave me was ‘you can tell a lot by looking in their eyes. A horse with bad eyes would buck you off. It’s something wrong inside them.’ I remember that when I talk to actors about doing a stunt. I really look at them and I can tell if they’re going to be okay or not with what I’m asking them to do. I was lucky to have a wonderful dad, but it was tough for me, too, because I had to be as good as a guy.”

  By 1967, Jeannie Epper had been doing stunts for about ten years. The six-year-old Stuntmen’s Association had a lock on the business, but the fundamental distribution of stunt work had not changed. Skilled white stuntmen, especially members of the association, worked frequently, increased their experience and their income, and could advance to stunt coordinator or second-unit director. A few skilled white stuntwomen worked often and made a living, but they never earned as much as the men, nor could they graduate to positions of greater authority. Talented black stuntman worked, but not very often, which meant they lacked opportunities to increase their experience. Talented black stuntwomen rarely found work.

  The decade of the 1960s delivered free love, flower power, the youth culture, Black Power, marches, and sit-ins. Young and old, black and white, sought to break down closed doors and seize long-denied opportunities. Stuntwomen and black stuntmen started to talk about forming their own stunt groups, and two separate incidents sparked their respective resolve.

  For the stuntwomen, the catalyst was Julie Johnson, who was on the hot seat for taking a “horse job” in the TV series Hondo (1967). “Some stuntmen did not want women doing stunts at all,” Julie said. “They didn’t mind making a girl look bad so they could say, ‘See? A girl can’t do it, we have to replace her, we have to put the wig on.’ They relished it. The horse job I did was one of those.” In the silent movie era, women didn’t get anywhere by saying no to a stunt, so they said yes to anything and then improvised. Fifty years later, experienced stuntwomen knew that saying yes could make their problems worse. They had to prevent rookies from taking jobs they couldn’t handle. A botched stunt reflected badly on all stuntwomen, and it justified the ongoing practice of men doubling for women.

  The women met in April 1967 at the Malibu home of Marilyn Moe and her husband, stunt coordinator Paul Stader.7 All those present had strong bonds to the community: Jeannie and Stephanie Epper; Patty Elder, who had married stuntman Eddie Hice;8 Regina Parton, whose father had once agreed to an equal fee split with Lila Finn.9 Lila was among the senior stuntwomen; Helen Thurston, Loretta Rush, and Stevie Myers had been working in the business for thirty years and were still at it. Polly Burson and May Boss were less senior but no less talented. Pretty Julie Johnson was considered promising, but no one knew much about her: she’d
come out of nowhere, wasn’t related to anyone, and had barely five years experience.10

  Julie Ann Johnson. (Courtesy of Robert Young)

  It was a beautiful spring night, and the women got right down to the problem—Julie’s horse job. “Why are you taking jobs you can’t handle?”

  “They lied to me about it,” Julie said.

  “If you say you can ride a horse,” May Boss warned, “you better be as good as a jockey.”

  “I know that,” Julie said, “but the stuntman just asked, ‘Can you ride a horse?’ I can, and I asked him to tell me exactly what he wanted. He said, ‘Just ride into town.’ So I agreed to the job.” What she hadn’t been told was that when the two cowboys accompanying her went inside to rob the bank, she was supposed to stay outside and control their horses. Just before the director called “Action!” a prop man handed her a heavy shotgun. She was expected to hold on to all three horses, as well as the shotgun, until the men ran out of the bank, threw her a bag of money, and leaped onto their horses. Then she had to mount her horse, carrying the gun and the moneybag, and gallop out of town. A minute later she was supposed to “race the horse,” and a rope was pulled across the street, where she would fall. They had put sand on the ground for her to land on, but the sand worried the horse; he bolted left and dumped Julie over his head onto the ground. She missed the sand. Disgusted, a stuntman yelled, “We’re running out of time for you to keep trying this. Let me have your clothes and wig. I’ll do it myself!”

  The few women who could have done it in one take were in Marilyn’s living room. “It was a royal setup to prove that a woman can’t do the job!” Stevie Myers yelled. The women groaned and jeered. “When are they going to hire a real horsewoman?” Polly grumbled. Cool, calm May Boss said, “No, I understand. Don’t we all understand?” They nodded, but it was hard to let go of their anger. Julie didn’t have the skills to do a horse job, especially one that changed just before it was shot.

  Jeannie Epper was eight months pregnant and had difficulty focusing that night. “Back then you were either a horse person or you weren’t,” she said. “If you were not really great at it, you were looked down upon. That happened to Julie. The other horse girls, Stevie, May, Polly, felt she took a job that was over her head. Today we have stuntwomen’s organizations. We bring the younger girls in to show them the ropes. No group did that for us. We were fighting for basic recognition as stuntwomen. We warned the girls that if they took jobs they couldn’t do as well as a guy or better, they were going to put a guy back in the clothes. That was the issue we were fighting—too many men were doubling women.” The senior stuntwomen wanted to select the best girls for certain jobs, just like the men did, but stuntwomen had no control over either stunts or hiring. Further, the new stuntwomen resented the older women’s interference and insisted on taking jobs they thought they could do. “It was a breakthrough time,” Jeannie said. “That’s why the girls were upset with Julie because they didn’t want her or anybody to set us back.” At the end of that meeting, the group decided to organize the first stuntwomen’s association.11 Julie was relieved when she was invited to join.

  The event that sparked the creation of the Black Stuntmen’s Association (BSA) came in 1963. Edward Smith had been an extra and an actor since the 1950s.12 While working on It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963),13 he saw a white stuntman being painted down to double Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. He complained to director Stanley Kramer, “Why isn’t a black stuntman doubling Rochester?” Kramer replied, “Well, find me one.” Smith tried, but, he said, “I couldn’t get no brothers nowhere.”14 As a result, Smith and Calvin Brown came up with the idea, and with the firm support of Marvin Walters, they formed the Black Stuntmen’s Association in 1967.15

  “The nature of the times catapulted the movies’ problem people of old into militants of new,” film historian Donald Bogle wrote. “No longer were sad-eyed black people trying to prove their worth in order to fit into white worlds. . . . Instead the headstrong militants appeared. . . . It started with sit-ins, boycotts and marches and ended with riots, demonstrations and a series of horrifying assassinations. In 1960, Negroes were quietly asking for their rights. By 1969, Blacks were demanding them.”16

  Racism in the film industry was so ingrained that the studios were called “plantations.” In 1943 Oscar-winning actress Hattie McDaniel had asked the Screen Actors Guild to form a committee to discuss the problems faced by black performers in films. “Los Angeles was a particularly cruel mirage for Black writers,” wrote social critic Mike Davis. Specifically, he was referring to Chester Hines, who got “a fresh start as a screenwriter for Warner Bros.” in the early 1940s. “Despite his formidable reputation as a short story writer for Esquire, Hines encountered an implacable wall of racism in Hollywood. As his biographer describes the incident, ‘he was promptly fired when Jack Warner heard about him and said, “I don’t want no niggers on this lot.”’ After that Hines retaliated, writing two blazing novels about Los Angeles ‘as a racial hell.’”17 SAG did not act on McDaniel’s request until 1972—twenty-nine years after the fact.18

  In the 1960s television and films began to feature more black actors—Sidney Poitier, Cicely Tyson, Bill Cosby, Ruby Dee, Harry Belafonte, Gloria Foster. The TV show I Spy (1965–1968), starring Cosby, was a hit. But according to reporter Tod Longwell, the struggle of the Black Stuntmen’s Association “is a lost piece of civil rights and Hollywood history.” Poitier observed that the BSA’s contribution “is all too often not remembered . . . they were quite a force.”19 The newly formed BSA did not go unnoticed, however. “White stuntmen were wary of its formation, concerned that they would be losing jobs to African Americans.”20 Early BSA members included Alex Brown, Henry Kingi, Ernie Robinson, and a few women who trained with them on weekends. “We’d look across the street and there’d always be cops in unmarked police cars, watching,” Kingi said, laughing. “We figured they thought we were another Black Panther group forming.”21

  “The guys worked with us girls just like we were guys,” Evelyn Cuffee said. “They didn’t slack up on us. When they got beat up, we got beat up.” Evelyn was separated from her husband and raising five children by herself. She eventually joined the Stuntwomen’s Association in the 1970s, but she was working as an extra when Eddie Smith “got the stuntmen together in a park in the late 1960s. I was the only girl, but soon Louise Johnson, Peaches Jones, and, later, Jadie David joined. Peaches was a cute little girl, very agile, and shy, too, but if she did something, she did it right. We all became friends, but back then stuntwomen hardly ever worked together. The guys in BSA showed us how to do fights, how to fall. I could throw a punch and I could take one—a good one.” She had grown up with six brothers in Mitchell, South Dakota, where her father worked in a bank. “We were the only black family in town. I did everything the boys did, track, football, basketball. It was rough, but they were my guardians.”22 In 1972 Evelyn worked on Buck and the Preacher, directed by Sidney Poitier. “Peaches did utility stunts—that’s when you do a lot of everything,” Evelyn said. “Louise and I did horseback riding. On one stunt, the bad guys were burning up the wagon train, trying to catch the women. I ran through a burning wagon when the guy chasing me slashed at me with a machete. I thought it was a prop, but it sliced right through a rope close to my face. Sidney said, ‘Oh, great, really good stunt!’” Being an African American and a woman “did not help my stunt career,” Evelyn said, “not on anything. We had a hard way to go. I’m sure the white girls had a hard way, too—those guys doing the hiring didn’t want women in there at all.”

  “We were members of everything—PUSH, CORE, the NAACP,” said Kingi. “Eddie [Smith] would call studios and say he was the Black National Congress leader of the African Society of Whatever-It-Was, he’d heard there was a problem, then we’d go in as the group and follow up. Every time Eddie would tell us, ‘We’ve got another situation,’ we’d say, ‘Okay, who are we today, Eddie?’ We were either going to do or di
e. We were not going to sell out or be bought out. . . . We all stuck together.” Some BSA members were “branded as troublemakers” because they competed for work with other “black stuntmen who did not make waves.” The white stuntmen “resented that we were taking money from their pockets,” Kingi said. “They also didn’t like taking orders.”23

  Evelyn Cuffee, tough and optimistic. (Courtesy of Evelyn Cuffee)

  Another “paint down” gave the BSA added momentum in 1971. Roydon Clark (James Garner’s regular double) was the stunt coordinator for Skin Game, and he hired white stuntman Jerry Brown to drive a stagecoach for Louis Gossett Jr. “‘It was a safety issue, not a black-and-white issue,’ said Clark, but he acknowledged ‘my decision almost cost me my career.’”24 Eddie Smith went on a mission and “complained to Warner Bros., naming a qualified black man—Tony Brubaker, later a top stuntman—called the NAACP, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Screen Actors Guild. Warner Bros. responded by including black stuntmen in all scenes involving general stunt work, and invited black stuntmen to train with veteran white stuntmen.”25 When requests for black stuntmen started to increase, Smith warned newcomers, “If you can’t do the job, don’t do it, because it just takes one guy to screw it up for everybody.”26 It was the same issue facing stuntwomen: each person in a marginalized group must prove that he or she is as good as or better than those on the inside. White stuntwomen had to scale a wall to get work, but it was a much higher obstacle for people of color.