It was sometime around fifteen years later that the reputation of a deadly half white/half Mexican gunfighter named Johnny Madrid reached the ears of Californians. The reputation was that of a scoundrel, but a scoundrel with lightning-fast prowess with a pistola. From the accounts of eyewitnesses and dime-store pulp writers, he had the quickness in killing of Tom Horn, the accuracy of aim of Annie Oakley, the nasty disposition of John Wesley Hardin, and the lack of human empathy of William H. Bonney. He was one of the most feared killers who rode the Mexican side of the border, known by the peons in the pueblos he passed through as El Asesino de Rojo (translation: “The Murderer in Red”), due to the fancy red ruffled shirt he always wore.
But it wasn’t till three years ago that one of Lancer’s former Pinkerton detectives sent him a telegram that informed the cattle baron that his long-lost son was indeed alive and living under the name Johnny Madrid.
The old man cried for three days, with nobody on the ranch understanding why.
However, now that Murdock Lancer’s battle with Caleb DeCoteau and his land pirates had graduated from the simple loss of cows to the tragic loss of life, it was only a matter of time before the cattle baron hired killers of his own. But before that inevitable day arrived, Murdock had one crazy idea. He would track down and get word to his two long-lost sons, John and Scott. He’d wire them enough money to travel to Lancer Ranch, with an offer of a thousand dollars apiece for just listening to his proposition.
His offer was simple. Help him defend the ranch against Caleb and his killers, and once they’d driven off these pirates, Murdock would equally share his entire empire with his two sons. It was a generous offer, but it was no gift. They’d have to earn it. And they’d have to keep from getting killed by Caleb and his boys.
But if they were willing to help Murdock prevail against these rascals and were willing to put in the blood, sweat, and tears it took to run a successful ranch this size, all three Lancer men would be equal partners. And if all these things miraculously worked out, Murdock Lancer and his long-lost sons would finally, at long last, be a family.
All in all, not a bad premise for a TV series, Rick thought. Good story and good characters.
A little reminiscent of Bonanza and The High Chaparral, but darker and more violent, more cynical.
For one, Murdock Lancer is no Ben Cartwright–like, stern but fair and compassionate patriarch. He’s a real uncompromising son of a bitch. You could imagine both former wives getting fed up with his shit real quick and hightailing it away from this bitter bastard first chance they got. And the horse-faced actor Andrew Duggan (who Rick did a play with once) they got to play Murdock doesn’t have a folksy bone in his body. He’s hard as a bar of iron and about as lovable. The character of Scott Lancer is more the likable good guy found on sixties’ western shows. But his fancy Eastern-dandy wardrobe definitely gives him a different look. He makes earlier dandies like Bat Masterson and Yancy Derringer look like saddle tramps. And his past as a former Bengal Lancer is an intriguing backstory. But it’s Johnny Lancer/Johnny Madrid that is the no-shit unique western-TV-series lead. Dalton’s Jake Cahill was about as antihero as western-TV-series leads ever got. But Johnny Lancer/Johnny Madrid, at least in the pilot script, goes far further than Jake was ever allowed to go.
The handsome, roguish, mysterious Johnny Lancer who steps off the Royo del Oro stage is the type of character that usually guest-stars on western TV shows, not stars in them. That type of character usually shows up on Bonanza’s Ponderosa Ranch, or The Big Valley’s Barkley Ranch, or The Virginian’s Shiloh Ranch, and they’re young, cocky, sexy, and a little dubious. They make friends with Little Joe, or Heath, or Trampas, but at some point, usually in the first act, we learn they have some sort of dark secret. They’re either on the run from somebody or from something, or they’re running from who they were or something they did or didn’t do. Or they’re in the area for some clandestine reason (usually revenge, planning a robbery, or to meet somebody from their past). We (the audience) know they’re shady. But we also know we’ll have to wait till the third act before we find out: Is the character a bad guy or a misunderstood good guy? And in the third act, Michael Landon or Lee Majors or Doug McClure either helps them redeem themselves or shoots them dead. These characters are always the best roles on the show, and the guys who specialized in playing them usually went on to become stars (Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Darren McGavin, Vic Morrow, Robert Culp, Brian Keith, and David Carradine).
But the role of Johnny Lancer, while written like a guest star, is the no-shit lead of the fucking series. And he’s not anything like any of the other cowboys riding the range on the big three networks.
Whoever this fucking guy Jim Stacy is, Rick thinks, he sure fell into a big piss pot full of luck when he landed this role.
But Caleb DeCoteau isn’t just a standard-issue heavy either. It’s a damn good part and he has some of the script’s best dialogue. As he walks the dusty deserted streets of Royo del Oro, Rick goes over some of his lines, making his way to the saloon on the western back-lot set. As he walks by one of the western businesses on the main drag, he catches a glimpse of his reflection in the glass of one of the windows. The sight makes him stop for a moment and examine it.
Looking at the end result in the makeup-trailer mirror, surrounded by the wig girl and the wardrobe girl and the director, he wasn’t that keen on the results. Unless somebody reads it in TV Guide, who the fuck’s gonna even know it’s me, is what Rick really thought. But now he’s gotten a little more used to it, walking around (the boots feel good), seeing himself reflected in the western-styled picture window surrounded by a Wild West environment, this look ain’t bad. He liked the hat from the get-go, but it’s the brown hippie jacket that’s really growing on him. The fringe hanging off the sleeves is pretty swell. He starts pointing and gesturing with his arms and watching the effect in the window reflection. The way the dangling fringe emphasizes his movements is pretty neat. He can do a lot with that. Not too shabby, Rebekkah, Rick thinks. He also thinks:
It doesn’t look like me. But maybe Sam’s right, that ain’t such a bad thing. It does look like Caleb. Maybe not the Caleb I pictured in my mind when I first read the script. That Caleb just looked like me. I mean, if they want me, they want it to look like me, right?
But maybe Sam has a point. At least when Johnny Lancer kills me, he won’t be killing Jake Cahill.
But staring at Caleb in the window staring back at Rick, he sees something else. He sees a little of what Marvin Schwarz was talking to him about in his office yesterday. At one point he called Rick “an Eisenhower actor in a Dennis Hopper Hollywood.”
Looking at his reflection in his whole Caleb DeCoteau regalia, he understands a little more clearly, and a little less defensively, what Marvin Schwarz was getting at. Shaggy-haired guys are the style of the day. And that guy in the window in the fringe jacket could be Michael Sarrazin. Sans pompadour, Rick looks not only like a different character but a different actor. He’s worn his hair the same way for so long, somewhere along the line the pompadour became him. But now? Examining his reflection in the window without it? He doesn’t look so much like an aging cowboy actor from the fifties anymore. He kinda looks like a with-it modern actor. This guy isn’t an Eisenhower relic. This guy could be in a Sam Peckinpah movie.
After Rick tears himself away from his own reflection in the window and the reflections about his career in his head, he spots Caleb’s commandeered saloon, the Gilded Lily, out of which his character runs his murderous gang of rustlers. As he approaches the front porch of the saloon set, he sees a director’s chair with his character’s name on it. On TV shows, series regulars get a director’s chair with the actor’s name written on it. But guest stars usually get chairs with their character’s name on it, because oftentimes they’re not cast till a few days before.
Sitting next to his empty director’s chair on the wooden walkway directly in front of the swinging saloon doors is the little g
irl dressed in the period clothes he saw talking to Sam when he first arrived. He doesn’t know her real name and can’t remember her character’s name, but she plays Murdock Lancer’s eight-year-old daughter (by yet another mother, but this one didn’t skedaddle the first chance she got. Instead, she tragically broke her neck when she was thrown from the beautiful strawberry roan Murdock gifted her for their third-year anniversary. The same strawberry roan Murdock Lancer shot in the head once he got home from her funeral).
Later in the script, Caleb will kidnap the little girl and hold her for ten-thousand-dollars ransom.
The kidnapping of the child will end up being the emotional turning point in the story. While Johnny Lancer was brought to town by his father to defend the ranch against Caleb and his men, the screenwriters of the pilot had a twist in store for that standard scenario. One, Johnny hates the father he hasn’t seen since he was ten years old. And two, as luck would have it, unbeknownst to anybody on the ranch, Johnny Madrid and Caleb DeCoteau both know and like each other. At any rate he likes Caleb a damn sight better than the father he blames for the death of his mother. Getting revenge for his mother by killing his father has been a dream of the son since he buried her eighteen years earlier in the Ensenada dirt.
A revenge that Caleb DeCoteau is quite successfully executing. Which ends up putting Johnny in the difficult, but dramatically rewarding, position of having to decide not only which side is he on but who is he? Lancer or Madrid? With Caleb’s kidnapping of the child being the emotional catalyst that ultimately pushes Johnny over to the side of the angels and sets him up for a weekly western television show alongside his newfound family.
Rick has a scene with the young actress later today where he negotiates his ransom demands with Scott Lancer, as the little girl sits on his lap with a pistol barrel pressed against the side of her temple. But it’s tomorrow when he and the little girl will have their biggest scene together. As he examines the little dishwater blonde from a distance, sitting in her director’s chair reading a big black hardcover book, she looks to be about twelve years old. She’s spending her lunchtime sitting on the set by herself, with no adult guardian or no sign of a lunch. She doesn’t raise her eyes from the book she’s reading when he walks up to the saloon’s front-porch steps. Not even after he clears his throat and says, “Hello?”
Oh boy, he thinks, this little bitch is gonna be a pip. Hitting his greeting much harder, he repeats, “Hello?”
Raising her eyes from the book opened up in her lap, apparently annoyed, she says, “Hello,” to the hairy cowboy standing at the bottom of the porch steps.
Holding up the western paperback in his hand, he asks her, “Would it bother you if I sat next to you and read my book too?”
She looks at him, poker-faced, with the bitchy timing of a pint-sized Bette Davis. “I don’t know. Would you bother me?”
That was pretty clever, Rick thinks. What, does this little squirt walk around with a team of gag writers supplying her bitchy comebacks to rhetorical questions?
“I’ll try not to,” Rick softly replies.
She lays the big black book on her lap and examines him for a moment, then turns to the empty director’s chair, examines it, and looks back at Rick again. “That’s your chair, ain’t it?”
“Yep,” Rick says.
“Who am I to tell you not to sit in your chair?”
Removing his cowboy hat and giving her a gracious bow, “Nevertheless,” he says, pouring on the charm, “I thank you kindly.”
She neither giggles nor smiles, just lowers her eyes back to her reading material.
Fuck this fucking little cunt, Rick thinks. So, noisier than need be, his cowboy boots clomp up the wooden steps of the porch. He heads to his director’s chair, climbs himself backward into the seat, making the slight moaning sound he always makes when he climbs himself backward into his director’s chair.
She ignores him.
He then removes his fucked-up pack of cigarettes from his black Levi’s pants pocket, takes one from the sweaty crumpled pack, and sticks it in his mouth underneath the horsetail glued to his upper lip. He lights his cancer stick with his silver Zippo in the flashy (noisy) way of a fifties-era cool daddy-o. After he’s accomplished setting the end on fire, he slams the lid of the Zippo closed with what looks like a diagonal karate chop; metal slams down on metal with a loud snap.
She ignores him.
He takes a big drag of his cigarette, filling his lungs with smoke, the way when he was a younger actor he used to watch Michael Parks do, only in hungover Rick’s case the exhale triggers a coughing fit, which causes him to cough up another one of his green-mixed-with-crimson loogies, which splatters in a colorful glob on the wooden walkway.
That she doesn’t ignore.
A look of horror crosses the little lady’s little face, as if Rick just pissed in her Wheaties; she stares in disbelief at both Rick and the gooey loogie refuse on the ground.
Okay, that was a little too much, Rick thinks, so he sincerely apologizes to his little co-star. She tries to blink the image out of her eyes as her head lowers back down to find the place in the big black book where she left off.
The fact is, after assuring her he’d try not to bother her while she was reading, he’s frankly done nothing but. And he’s still not through. Pretending to read his paperback, as he tries to mask that he’s digging a stubborn booger lodged up his nose, he asks her casually, “You don’t eat lunch?”
She answers back flatly, “I’ve got a scene after lunch.”
Rick asks her, “Yeah?” As if he’s saying, So?
Now he finally gets her attention, so she closes the book, lays it in her lap, and turns to explain to him her methodology.
“Eating lunch before I do a scene makes me sluggish. I believe it’s the job of an actor—and I say actor, not actress, because the word ‘actress’ is nonsensical—it’s the actor’s job to avoid impediments to their performance. It’s the actor’s job to strive for one hundred percent effectiveness. Naturally we never succeed, but it’s the pursuit that’s meaningful.”
Rick just stares at her for a beat or two without saying anything, till he finally says, “Who are you?”
“You can call me Mirabella,” she says.
“Mirabella what?” he asks.
“Mirabella Lancer,” she says obviously.
Rick waves that away with his hand and asks, “No no no, I mean, what’s your real name?”
Again she answers in a tutorial-like fashion. “When we’re on set, I’d prefer to only be referred to by my character’s name. It helps me invest in the reality of the story. I’ve tried it both ways, and I’m just a tiny bit better when I don’t break character. And if I can be a tiny bit better, I want to be.”
Rick doesn’t really have anything to say back to that. So he just smokes.
The young girl who calls herself Mirabella Lancer looks the cowboy bedecked in the fringe rawhide jacket up and down with her eyeballs and says, “You’re the bad guy, Caleb DeCoteau,” she says—not asks—and she pronounces the name like Jean Cocteau.
Rick blows out some more cigarette smoke and says, “I thought it was pronounced Caleb Da-kota.”
As she turns back to her big black book, Mirabella says like a know-it-all smarty-pants, “I’m pretty sure it’s pronounced day-coc-too.”
Watching her read her book, he asks her sarcastically, “What’s so interesting?”
She looks up from the book, not getting the sarcasm, “Huh?”
“What are you reading?” he asks again, minus the sarcasm.
The serious little girl does a serious spike in girlish enthusiasm, as she excitedly bubbles, “It’s a biography on Walt Disney! It’s fascinating,” she reviews. Then she opines to her fellow actor, “He’s a genius, you know. I mean a once in every fifty or hundred years kinda genius.”
Finally Rick asks the question he’s dying to know: “What are you, twelve?”
She shakes her head no. She’s
used to adults making that mistake, and she likes it when they do. “I’m eight.” She hands the big black book about Walt Disney over to Rick for him to examine. He looks down at the book and thumbs through the pages, asking her, “You understand all these words?”
“Not all of them,” she admits. “But half the time the context of the sentence gives you a pretty good idea of the meaning. And the words I really, really can’t figure out, I make a list of and ask my mom.”
Impressed, as he hands the book back to the little girl he says, “Not too shabby, eight years old—your own series.”
As she retrieves the book to her lap, she qualifies his compliment: “Lancer’s hardly my series. It’s Jim, Wayne, and Andy’s series. I’m just the ‘little tyke’ series regular.” Then, pointing her tiny index finger at the actor, she tells him, “But just you wait, one of these days I’m gonna get a series of my own. And when I do,” she warns, “watch out.”
This little girl is un-fucking-believable, Rick thinks. In his career he’s met and worked with a lot of unbelievable child actors. But before Lillie Langtry here, the most unbelievable one he ever saw was an eleven-year-old boy, whose name he sure as shit don’t remember but who he’ll never forget. The year before he landed Bounty Law, he was cast in a series pilot that never was picked up; it was called Big Sky Country. And it starred boring fifties’ leading man Frank Lovejoy. It was the story of a widowed town sheriff (Frank Lovejoy) and his family. Rick played the oldest son, and there was an eleven-year-old brother and a nine-year-old sister. The show was passed on by the network, but it was produced by the television production company Four Star Productions and was screened once for the makers at their screening room. At the screening, which Rick attended, he bumped into the eleven-year-old little boy who played his younger sibling, in the men’s room at Four Star. Rick headed for the urinal as the little boy finished washing his hands in the sink. If the series had been picked up, and if it had been successful, these two would have worked together for the next five years or longer. Rick would’ve watched this little boy turn into a teenager and maybe a man before his eyes. The young lad would become like either a real brother to him or just an annoying younger colleague, or maybe both. Because of this association, they coulda been linked together for the rest of their lives. Or, like what happened, the show doesn’t get picked up, and this is the last time in their lives they’ll ever see each other. As Rick removed his pecker from his pants and pointed it at the urinal wall, he asked over his shoulder how his young co-star was doing. The little actor told him, as he harshly wiped the wetness from his hands with a paper towel, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing. I’m getting rid of my fuckin’ agent, that’s for goddamn sure!”
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Page 16
