Stuntwomen Page 9
Props that break with a satisfying pizzazz are a big part of stunts. But improperly designed props can cause injuries. In Jeannie’s case, the wood of the picture frame should have been partially cut through so that it would break easily, not clobber her. Other breakaway props are deliberately constructed to fall apart, such as chairs made of balsa wood that shatter on impact. When stunt people crash through windows, they’re really shattering sheets of hardened sugar called “candy glass,” which breaks harmlessly, with no dangerous shards. Stuntwoman Evelyn Cuffee, who “ran like hell” in Buck and the Preacher, barely escaped injury in The New Centurions (1972). She played a customer in a bank that’s robbed by stuntman Calvin Brown. “Cal’s holding me hostage in front of him, waving the gun, and we’re supposed to go out the door, but he’s backing up, misses the door, hits a plate glass window and it breaks! He wasn’t supposed to go through it, but he did and I went with him.” That window was not made of candy glass.
Other African Americans hired to stunt-coordinate included Tony Brubaker, Alan Oliney, and Richard Washington, who had quit his day job as a deep-sea diver to devote his life to stunts. “In the beginning you do what you’re told,” he said, “but as you get older, you might say to the guy hiring you, ‘What if I did this instead?’ He looks at you, you don’t know if he’ll say ‘Okay’ or ‘Get out of here.’ If he says it’s a good idea, he tells the director and the director thinks he thought it up, so he gets brownie points and you get to create a little bit of action. When you’re the coordinator, you create it all. On Buck Rogers, I wrote every fight, blow by blow.”15 On one of his first stunt-coordinating jobs, Washington hired Jadie David to double Pam Grier in the 1975 movie Sheba Baby.
For Universal’s TV series Get Christie Love, stunt coordinator Paul Baxley hired Peaches Jones, the first successful black stuntwoman in Los Angeles, to double Teresa Graves in the title role as an undercover policewoman. Peaches had worked on shows like The Mod Squad in the 1960s; she and her dad, Sam Jones, were among the first members of the Black Stuntmen’s Association.16 “Patty Elder and Peaches excelled as stuntwomen, they were really well liked,” Jadie said. Jeannie Epper agreed, “but Peaches would disappear, then turn up and step right back into the work because she was so talented.” Jeannie was alluding to drug use, which increased significantly in the 1970s. According to Rich Washington, Peaches began to show up late or didn’t show up at all, and Jadie replaced her on Get Christie Love. “If Peaches hadn’t gone off the deep end,” Jadie said, “my career would not have gone as well as it did. I slipped in because she left a void. I’m real clear on that.” Drugs wrecked many careers, including those of talented stuntwomen Peaches Jones, who died at age thirty-five, and Patty Elder, who died at forty-eight.
Stunt coordinator Richard Washington with Don Adams on the set of The Nude Bomb (1980). (Courtesy of Richard Washington)
The rush of independent black films lasted from 1970 to 1975. “Then the door shut tight,” actress Gloria Hendry said. “We all fell off the track for years, except a black star here or there. Sounder or The River Niger didn’t come around too often.” Only a few stars and stunt people of color were able to build long careers based on their early work in those special films.
By the 1970s, the Stuntmen’s Association had about 140 members. The Black Stuntmen’s Association had 100 members, including 8 to 10 women. Rich Washington estimated that 20 BSA members made a living; of those, 10 did very well. The newest of the groups, the Stuntwomen’s Association, had 18 members.17 Respected horsewoman Stevie Myers was its president in 1971; Lila Finn presided in 1972. Most members agreed that although the stuntwomen’s group was helpful, it could not get them access to stunt-coordinating positions. Those years were frustrating and contentious. In February 1972 the Stuntwomen’s Association planned to release its first directory to publicize members’ abilities and credits, but a few members fought against the proposal. Two wanted to disband the organization altogether; the motion was voted down.18
These internal quarrels reflected a small, powerless group fighting itself. In time, the organization did improve its members’ professional standing, but it could not increase their employment. The association could only advise members not to take a stunt unless they could do it “as well as a man—or better.” The group promoted its members’ abilities, provided a place for them to vent, and gave them a chance to feel like a sisterhood.19 “I don’t know if it really helped us in our careers, unfortunately,” one stuntwoman said. Another pointed out that the men’s groups argued too and were “just as petty, trying to steal jobs from each other. You’d think the guys would go toe-to-toe, duke it out, but they were very nonconfrontational, they were just as bad as the girls. You can’t get ten stunt guys to agree on anything. Or stuntwomen.”
The male leadership of the Stuntmen’s Association ruled like an oligarchy, and some members were grumbling. In 1970 “about fifteen stunt coordinators had a stranglehold on the stunt business,” stuntman-director Hal Needham wrote in his autobiography. “They ran most of the features and a major portion of the TV shows being shot. They would hire each other first, and then if there were any crumbs left over, they would dole them out to their closest friends. The only way to get work was to have a talent nobody else had—or to suck up to them and politick your ass off.”20 Members wanted to “modernize” stunts, instead of reworking old gags originated by Yakima Canutt and Jock Mahoney.21 Westerns were fading; horses were out, bikes and cars were in. The dissidents weren’t happy about the money either. For every stunt, the coordinators negotiated the fees, but the rates had been set in the 1960s, and the rebels wanted a raise.22 Needham, Ron Rondell, Glenn Wilder, and fifteen other stuntmen decamped to form Stunts Unlimited in 1970. “Longtime friends hardly spoke to each other,” Needham wrote. “Stuntmen’s Association members would not hire Stunts Unlimited members, and vice versa. The Association thought—and hoped—Unlimited would fail. They could not have been more wrong.” Two years later, Stunts Unlimited had twenty-five members.23
Five years after that split, May Boss, Julie Johnson, Jadie David, Jeannie Epper, and Stevie Myers left the Stuntwomen’s Association and formed the Society of Professional Stuntwomen.24 Membership was limited to the top twelve stuntwomen, and the group’s goals were to increase safety, “help train new stuntwomen, and gain recognition for women as courageous and adventurous souls,” Janet Chase wrote for Cosmopolitan. “Facing perils unknown to their male colleagues, stuntwomen have had to wage war on the industry tradition of using men in drag to perform stunts for actresses, just as they’ve had to struggle for equal pay.”25
Stuntwomen were in the first stages of a classic David and Goliath confrontation. They and minority stunt players fought on parallel battlefields for similar goals, but in different ways. Dave Robb, who covered legal and labor issues for Variety and the Hollywood Reporter for twenty years, described what they were up against: “In the industry, if anybody had a problem, I was the complaint department. If you got a call from me, it meant you had labor or legal problems. Basically, I wrote about people getting screwed by Hollywood—in the unions or the minority groups. Of all the groups that seemed to be getting screwed the most, it would probably be a tie between stuntwomen and American Indians. For instance, both stuntmen’s groups didn’t allow women. One guy told me, ‘We don’t allow women, because it’s called the Stuntman’s Association,’” Robb recalled. “‘It’s not the Stuntwomen’s Association or the Stunt Person’s Association.’ He said that on the record. I think he was president of the Stuntmen’s Association.”26 He was. As Bill Lane (Dirty Harry, Ghostbusters) told Robb, “‘It’s a California corporation. It was set up that way (for men only) 22 years ago. At that time, they didn’t have the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) or any of that other **** like that.’”27 “But they were not just fraternal organizations,” Robb said. “They were also hiring halls, which had to be licensed by the state, which they were not, and by law, hiring agencies are not allowed to discriminate
based on gender or race or age. I don’t think they thought they were a hiring agency until I first brought it up to them. That they were doing something illegal never occurred to them. They would hire their own members. If you weren’t a member, you were boxed out. Women were actively being discriminated against right up through the 1990s.”28 But as Robb pointed out, “not all stuntwomen feel they are discriminated against. These women say they have their own stunt organizations . . . they don’t want to join the men’s groups, are treated well by the men and frequently hired by them. Others say that women are often the victims of sexual harassment by stuntmen and coordinators and that the only way to be hired by them is not to rock the boat. Minority and independent stuntmen have also complained that they are ‘locked out’ of Hollywood by the stuntmen’s organizations, few of whose members are black, Hispanic or Asian.”29
To improve their position, stuntwomen had to find a way to raise their professional standing, stop the practice of men doubling for women, and contest their near-total exclusion from another significant work category called “nondescript”—ND for short, which also stood for “no dames”—such as being part of a crowd scene that employed not only extras but also stunt people for a street brawl, for example. A stunt person in a crowd is only a blurred face, but coordinators didn’t hire women or minorities for those scenes. ND work might last for half a day or a week, and the SAG minimum rate in 1977 was $172.50 a day. “We almost never got any nondescript work,” said stuntwoman Evelyn Cuffee. Julie Ann Johnson charged that “cronyism among stunt coordinators contributes significantly to the dismal employment record of stuntwomen.”30 In the twenty years May Boss had done stunts, very few had been nondescript. “That was the worst,” she groaned. “They get an order for fifteen drivers, call up all the men they know, and then say, ‘Gee, we didn’t think of a woman for this.’”
The Screen Actors Guild’s 1963 nondiscrimination policy directed studios and producers to make “every effort to cast performers” in suitable roles “and in a manner where ‘the American scene’ may be portrayed realistically.” The “American scene” implied hiring people of different races, but the mandate to make “every effort” had no teeth; it did not specify women and was not enforced. “If you keep giving jobs to people who look like you,” Jadie David said, “they will get more experience and that qualifies them for the next job.” She knew she was sometimes hired because someone wanted to do the right thing; other times she knew she wasn’t hired because of her color, her gender, or both. “We fought that all the time. All the time. Stunts were dominated by people who did not look like me.”
Members of the BSA took on the system. “If a production painted a white stuntman black, it had to answer to a lot of people, and I was one of them,” Rich Washington said. “I was into affirmative action with the studios. That was the only way we could secure jobs.” In terms of approach, he and Eddie Smith were polar opposites, but they worked in tandem. “Eddie would rush in,” Rich said, and “he might threaten to cut your tires. I might talk about a lawsuit with the federal government. We played off each other, good cop, bad cop, and it worked.” But the more Washington spoke up, the more jobs he lost. “Finally, my wife said, ‘You’ve got to shut up.’” So he went to meetings and sat in the back row. One day at Universal he was pressed to speak up, and that led to another stunt-coordinating job.31 Washington had already developed a job-hunting strategy that consisted of “walking the corridors”—going to the studios’ production offices and asking about stunts on that week’s TV episodes. “I’d be told there was no one for black actors to double. That was my cue to say, ‘Okay, maybe next show,’ but I’d ask, ‘What about ND work?’ Nondescript wasn’t as good, but for a picture in the U.S., crowd scenes were supposed to be a mixed racial group. The guy hadn’t thought of it and sometimes he agreed I could work in a crowd scene. I saw it as a negotiation, like chess.”
Meanwhile, Bob Minor targeted the all-white Stuntmen’s Association and became its first African American member in 1972. “I wanted to and I did break the color barrier. I also wanted to be in the group that was well established. The BSA asked me to join, but I wanted to learn from experienced stuntmen who had made their mark, like stunt coordinator Carey Loftin, who did Bullitt, Terry Leonard, Roydon Clark, and Max Klevins. I was always a big supporter of the Black Stuntmen’s Association and later as a stunt coordinator I hired many African American stunt people from the group.”32
Jadie David ticked off the problems faced by women “in this male-oriented business. Stuntwomen double only when there’s a scripted stunt for an actress, but there aren’t nearly as many roles for us as there are for men.” Women weren’t hired for nondescript work because the men doing the hiring preferred guys. Jadie and other women also lost jobs when the actors didn’t want to risk “hurting women.” On other jobs, there might be “the macho thing” in addition to “a money factor. A big stunt might yield a $2,000 adjustment fee and another might yield $200,” Jadie said. “A guy would rather have his friend make the $2,000 and so-and-so can make the $200. Finally, though I have not personally run across this, sometimes I’ve had the feeling a guy would rather do a stunt because he’d hate to see a woman do it as well as he could.”33
Women were virtually stalemated: if they remained silent, nothing would change, but speaking up could have serious consequences. In the stunt community, someone who made “disloyal complaints” could be labeled a troublemaker, and that could end a career. According to Joe Ruskin, first vice president of the Screen Actors Guild and cochair of the Stunt and Safety Committee, the stuntmen’s group was “a community unto themselves. The women are blackballed for complaining. I’ve heard it out of the mouths of the stunt ladies.”34 Nonetheless, the women did speak out—at the Screen Actors Guild and to the press. “It just came to a point when we realized we were not in the Dark Ages anymore, and we said, ‘Give us a shot, let us try at least,’ ” Jeannie Epper said. “It took a while. . . . We had to really get our actresses to say, ‘Hey, we don’t want some hairy-legged guy doubling us.’ And we began proving that we could do what we said we could do.”35
Women and blacks had to fight for a chance to work and for the opportunity to fail. “A black person has to be perfect just to be equal,” Bob Minor said. “When you’re black, you cannot make mistakes. If I wasn’t perfect, they’d say, ‘I gave him a chance and he failed.’ But when you fail, you learn! The next time I’ll drive at this speed instead of that speed.” One stuntwoman said, “It was like we had to be Olympic-class athletes on every single stunt”—an impossible standard. “Often when people try to do their jobs under great adversity and discrimination they become stronger,” Dave Robb noted. “They become real heroes and heroines. Stuntwomen weren’t only brave to do the stunts, they were brave to be working in an industry that really didn’t want them.”
In 1964 Charlton Heston, president of the Screen Actors Guild, had appointed Kathleen Nolan to the Hollywood Screen Actors board.36 Peppy and tenacious, she jumped into battles that involved actresses, minorities, and stunt people. She had been acting since age five and had appeared in many television series (The Real McCoys, Burke’s Law, The Big Valley); she knew “the stunt community—the best of the bunch.” In 1972 she formed the first SAG Stunt Committee. The year before, Writers Guild of America member Diana Gould (Family, Sisters, La Ciociara) had petitioned her organization to form an official Women’s Committee. She argued that female writers needed to discuss and act on their professional concerns, and the WGA agreed. Kathleen Nolan and Norma Connolly also created the SAG Women’s Conference Committee in 1972 “to erase ways women are stereotyped on and off the screen, work for equal opportunity for employment, regardless of sex . . . [and] reshape the media image of the American female.”37 That year, SAG established the Ethnic Minorities Committee as well.
These committees rocked with arguments—and action. They made underemployment of minorities and women a central issue. The Screen Actors Guild, along wit
h groups like the NAACP, worked hard to desegregate Hollywood.38 The guilds turned out riveting statistics to wake up the industry and the public. The numbers proved what women and minorities already knew: they did not write, direct, or act in nearly as many shows as white male guild members did. Bolstered by a Brigham Young University study, SAG claimed that 81.7 percent of TV roles were male, and only 18.3 percent were female.39 Norma Connolly, chair of the SAG Women’s Conference Committee, said, “The underemployment of actresses, especially those over forty, is emotionally and financially devastating. It’s a disaster.” A later survey found that actors and actresses aged twenty to twenty-nine shared equally in jobs and earnings; however, at age thirty to thirty-nine, women’s wages and jobs declined by about half, and by their forties, almost three times more men than women were employed.40 The careers of actresses and stuntwomen were also much shorter than those of their male counterparts, who always seemed to be working. “According to the casting director of one of Hollywood’s top TV series, stunt coordinators do indeed hire the stunt personnel for their respective shows. ‘The stunt coordinator does all of that (the hiring). . . . They are the ones who know all the guys. They run their own small empire. It’s the most incredible fraternity I’ve ever seen.’”41
Even when proven stuntwomen were present on the set, men still put on wigs and did the stunts.42 “Get the wigs off men” became the slogan the women took to the SAG board, the Stunt and Safety Committee, the studios, and the press. “Oh, yes, I was out there running my mouth about getting the wigs off the men,” Jadie said. “Being a stuntwoman wasn’t just a job to me—it was a way of life. I was a woman and a person of color, and I used to wonder where my allegiance lay. When we addressed the lack of work for people of color, it seemed that men benefited most from our efforts. When we addressed the lack of work for women generally, women of color were overlooked. Many times that was disheartening for me.” The crusade to amend the guild contract to prevent stuntmen doubling for women and to stop “paint downs” went on for years.