It was, however, I hope, a praiseworthy effort to attract enough
people long enough to learn at least the identity of a man to whom
millions of movie goers owed much of their pleasure and not a few of
their near heart attacks.
The wonderful name Yakima Canutt almost always appeared on the
screen but you had to be very quick to catch it because it came when
the movie was over and they started what is known as the credit
crawl which these days, since every carpenter and assistant make-up
man has to have his name printed in letters as big as the stars,
ought to be called the whizzing credit roll.
You'll guess the crucial breathtaking part that Yakima Canutt
always played when I tell you that, watching the breathtaking feats
of horsemanship performed by Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, John Wayne, it
might have been a comfort for you to know that Rogers, Autry and
Wayne were cosily sitting up with the cameraman or the director -
that the body falling from a horse over a cliff or being dragged at
a gallop through a mile of mud or dust or leaping from one bare back
to another 10 feet away was the tough and by then pretty battered
body of Yakima Canutt - the greatest stuntman in the history of the
movies.
To fill in a little more about him: he was born in the far
western state of Washington just a little over a hundred years ago.
He was a ranch hand since boyhood and joined rodeos and Wild West
shows which toured the country with great dash and valour once the
Indian had been tamed and penned off in reservations.
In his early 20s he became the world's rodeo champion and pretty
soon in Hollywood's early 20s he was beckoned and begged to fill in
for the handsome male cowboy stars, who with the increasing
popularity of the Western movie, needed somebody to perform the
appalling stunts that tended to rough up the handsome profiles of
the originals.
Canutt's name was Enos Edward Canutt but it was in the small town
- famous for its rodeo - of Yakima, Washington that he'd made his
name and that was the name he stayed with. It was granted by the
most sceptical prop man and the most self-important star that Canutt
performed the most dangerous and the most spectacular stunts ever
seen on the screen. It was attested by the X-rays that by the time
he was approaching 40 he'd broken most of the bones in his body.
Patched up he retired to direct other less gifted stuntmen. In
the teeth of the best medical opinion he defied mortality and died
at the astonishing age of 91.
Well I recalled him and some of his more excruciating gymnastics
this week when Roy Rogers died - the singing cowboy. One generation,
at least, found its spokesman on Tuesday in President Clinton who
said: "There will be a lot of sad and grateful Americans especially
of my generation."
President Clinton was born in - I can't believe it - 1946. What's
he doing telling us about the Second World War and the Berlin
airlift? I believe him when he says Roy Rogers was his hero but the
generation just before him that had seen most of the Roy Rogers 91
feature films and probably bought Roy Rogers lunch baskets and slept
on camping trips on Roy Rogers blankets - that generation, in a Life
magazine national survey conducted among children - at the time
Clinton would have been minus two - the three greatest Americans
named were Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Roy Rogers.
This reputation will astound previous generations who think back
to Gene Autry, to Tex Ritter, to Tom Mix not to mention the
commanding figures of John Wayne and Gary Cooper. And how about the
most brooding, most realistic cowboy of them all, who from much
roaming out west as a youngster in the 1970s knew that the cowboy
tended to be more than anything a land pirate, greedy to intrude on
the homesteader's land, in many ways a hustler and sometimes a
reformed killer or shootist. This man was 50 when he became the
world famous film cowboy. I'm about the only living person who
remembers him - William S. Hart - so I won't even mention his name.
But I don't think Roy Rogers's resounding popularity in the late
40s and early 50s - when there were 2,000 or more Rogers fan clubs -
I don't think it's difficult to explain. He represented for the
young the lighter myth of the cowboy. Daring, of course, a good
horseman, properly devoted - as the Constitution requires - to his
horse Trigger. Having a pretty wife, always kindly, always coming
out top man. America then had come out top dog and was set for a
dozen more years of prosperity and general cheerfulness under
President Ike.
What a rollicking time the 50s was. When he first appeared the
New York Times said of Roy Rogers: "He has a drawl like Gary Cooper"
- Gary Cooper never had a drawl by the way - "and a smile like
Shirley Temple." The studio didn't like that and suggested he use
some special drops to widen his eyes. But to their great relief his
young fans liked his crinkly look and since Gene Autry had gone off
to war - I mean for real, in life - Roy Rogers became the king of
the cowboys and from then on solidified his image protecting the
weak, being kind to animals, doing good deeds every day - a singing
Boy Scout.
But if other times require other heroes that means in the history
of the Western movie another type of cowboy. I never fail to marvel
anew at the hold that the cowboy figure has on Europeans - maybe on
Asians too, I don't know - but I read only the other day in a
biography that when at the very end of the 1950s Nikita Khrushchev -
on his first, I believe, visit to the United States - was asked by
President Eisenhower if there was one American more than another he
wished to meet - Khrushchev didn't hesitate: "John Wayne," he said.
That time close to the threat of nuclear war with the Soviets and
not far away from the nightmare of Vietnam was no time for the kids'
cowboy - a crooner who was kind to animals and old ladies. Mr
Khrushchev and other Europeans used to confess very reluctantly that
the American they most admired and feared was the tough hombre, and
nobody met the formula more impressively than John Wayne.
Before we talk about what he came to mean to so many millions of
people I think it's worth noticing how rarely, if ever, a movie
cowboy hero was born to the trade. Roy Rogers was the son of a
shoemaker in Ohio christened one Leonard Slye, whose ambition was to
be a dentist. Gene Autry was a telegrapher at an Oklahoma railway
junction who sang on a local radio station. John Wayne was born in
the Midwestern state of Iowa, christened Marion Morrison. And after
winning a football scholarship to the University of Southern
California, raised heaven and earth and also Cain to get rid of the
first name of Marion.
He was a big 6' 3" labourer on the Fox lot when the director -
the Western director John Ford - saw in him the very symbol, the
right man to stand or ride or fight against the brilliant far
horizons and bulging clouds of Ford's Western scenes.
Wayne was ideally matched to his time. He was most famous in his
50s in America's doom-ridden 60s - the era of the feared Soviets, of
riots, assignations, youth's drug culture, the rise of feminism
against just such macho images as John Wayne personified.
In his enormously popular The Green Berets and True Grit he came
to be for many more millions than the ones who loathed or mocked him
the all-American, grim-jawed, super patriot that a country
floundering for an acceptable positive image seemed to yearn for.
But before him, before Roy Rogers and long after William S. Hart,
there was a man who for people long familiar both with the West and
with the American characters who peopled it as late as 60 years ago,
there was Gary Cooper. A man who, for most Americans, during the
anxious Hitler days of the 30s personified the heroic myth of the
taut but merciful plainsman who dispenses justice with a worried
conscience, a single syllable, a blurred reflex action at the hip
and who faced death in the afternoon as regularly as the matador but
on Main Street and for no pay.
Incidentally no stuntman filled in for him. He was a superb
horseman and the best shot Hemingway had ever seen.
It was in two films, appropriately named the Plainsman and High
Noon, that Cooper best filled this glowing and probably glowingly
false picture of the town marshal, heading down the railroad tracks
back to duty with that precise mince of the cowboy's tread - the
rancher's squint that smells mischief in a tumbleweed, sees round
corners and is never fooled.
Gary Cooper's representation of this hero was not a tough guy
necessarily brutal to withstand the brutality of his enemies - he
represented every man's secret image of himself: the honourable man
slicing through the daily corruption of morals and machines. He
isolated and enlarged to 6' 3" an untainted strain of goodness in a
very male specimen of the male of the species.
