But Clint or Duke sitting on a horse was nowhere near as interesting as Clint or Duke in a gallop. Hollywood wanted action — warriors on paint horses circling a wagon train where John Wayne, say, is seen aiming his Winchester; cut to the next frame, where a warrior takes a bullet in the chest and his pony goes down violently in a cruel rain of dust.
Horses of the 1920s and 1930s who became famous by being partnered with prominent cowboy actors were prized and often highly trained, some even to fall on command; and what they could not do, their doubles did. But the equine extras, the “wild mustangs,” the run-of-the-mill ponies ridden en masse in posses and Indian bands — how were they made to fall with such dramatic effect? Tripwires were often used, and the injuries and deaths that occurred among animal actors were simply part of the price to be paid for entertainment. “Horse spectacle,” the movie directors labeled it.
The tripwire device was called “the Running W.” It had its roots in ranch work when cowboys would cure a horse of running away by tying a rope from the horse’s front legs, through a ring on the saddle and up to the pommel. A fleeing horse soon fell, but just before he did the cowboy would yell “Whoa.” The horse learned to avoid a fall by obeying the call. Yakima Canutt, who won an Oscar in 1966 for a lifetime of Hollywood stunt work, first deployed the Running W to produce dramatic shots of horses pitching to the ground.
It worked like this. Off camera the film crew drove a post, called a “deadman,” deep into the ground. Two lines of piano wire were strung from just above the horse’s hooves up the front legs and then back to the girth. Beneath the horse’s belly, these lines met inside a closed metal band shaped somewhat like a W (thus its name). A single line of wire was led out from behind the horse for several hundred feet, coiled beside the deadman and the end securely fixed to the post.
The stuntman’s job was to ride a horse at a hard gallop to a spot, sometimes marked by a kerchief in the sagebrush, where the line would all be played out. At that point the wire, invisible to the camera, stopped the horse cold, yanked out his legs and sent him crashing to the ground. Ejected from the saddle, the rider hoped to spare his bones by rolling. The horse, of course, got no warning. Sheepskin-lined hobbles at the fetlocks, affixed with rings, spared the horse cuts to the legs, but that was all he was spared. Yakima Canutt claimed to have done three hundred Running W leaps without ever crippling a horse. He blamed amateurs for the fact that Running Ws killed countless horses and hurt or maimed many men.
The Running W demanded extraordinary expertise on the stunt director’s part if death or injury was to be avoided. The piano wire had to be precisely gauged so it broke without too much strain as the horse’s front legs were drawn up to his chest. Otherwise a complete somersault that broke the horse’s neck or back was likely. Even if the horse was spared physical injury, the psychological damage from the severe and unexpected fall — the horse’s loss of confidence — was permanent.
In The Hollywood Posse, the author Diana Serra Cary recounts her father’s life as a Hollywood double but also offers the horse’s perspective. Early in the book a horse the director calls the “stunt bay” is introduced to the new stuntman: “Jack checked the cinch on the big bay, who was edgy as hell. He fought back when the prop man threaded the wire through the leather hobble on each foot. It was obvious the bay had been put through this stunt before, and didn’t take a shine to it. His muzzle and the white blaze on his face were crossed with scars where the hair had grown back a different color.”
In this scene Jack is supposed to be a member of a posse chasing outlaws, one of whom turns in the saddle and shoots Jack dead. Jack must go down hard. Which he does, along with the big bay. Imagine Jack in the lead with riders alongside, all in a full gallop. Jack scans the ground for the flash of red bandanna that will give him his warning. As soon as he sees it he kicks both feet from the stirrups, and instantly the ground rises up to meet him. He keeps rolling amid the dust and “a forest of horses’ legs” and is miraculously not trampled by the bay or the posse. When horse and man stand, each considers the other.
The dazed horse seems astonished to find himself alive after yet another felling, and the stuntman feels he owes the horse an apology for putting him through it. “That’s one helluva way to treat a good horse,” he says as he leads the bay, piano wire in tow, back to the rope picket line.
The Hollywood Posse includes some distressing photographs of horses who did not find themselves alive after one of these action shots. One photo shows a horse on the ground, the hobbles still on the fetlocks, the piano wire clearly visible. He has been shot by someone from the American Humane Association after breaking his leg in a manufactured fall. The cutline reads: “He was dead. No more work on location that day. The general attitude was of men ashamed of their jobs. Among the spectators, a woman wept bitterly. She knew the horse well, for it belonged to her husband.”
Another photo, taken during the filming of The Three Mesquiteers in 1940, shows four horses going down at once in Running W scenes: two horses have struck the ground hard with their noses. Some of these films were made in five days on low budgets; doubles and horses were expendable items. Cary argues that The Charge of the Light Brigade, shot in 1936, features some of the most dangerous group Running W stunts in movie history. Close to a thousand horses were used on the set of that film, which saw horses dying every day during shooting. Stuntmen were also injured daily and one died when he broke his neck in a fall.
The ruthlessness of directors became a cliché. In a scene in The Englishman’s Boy, Guy Vanderhaeghe depicts a slow-witted stuntman named Miles on a big black gelding named Locomotive. The horse is what the cowboys called “a croppy” — his cropped ears posted a warning of his mean temper. The stuntmen all refuse to ride Locomotive, despite the director’s taunts and challenges to their manhood. Promised a part in a future film, Miles finally steps forward.
Shorty, a cowboy at the center of this mesmerizing novel, does what he can to help poor Miles. He paces out the length of piano wire and pegs a marker into the ground. “Miles,” he says, “when you see that there white hankerchief coming up on you, you kick your feet out of them stirrups because when that fucking widow-maker runs out of wire he’ll go ass over tea-kettle and when he does you ain’t going to want to get hung up in them stirrups — you going to want to get throwed clear. Throwed clear, understand? Otherwise, you going to smash up bad, like an apple crate.”
Miles spurs Locomotive into a full gallop and is watching for the handkerchief, but suddenly the horse is somersaulting with Miles’s feet still planted in the stirrups. Locomotive lives, as does Miles, but the rider limps badly and passes bloody stools for the rest of his days. There was no handkerchief to be seen: the director had instructed a camerman to remove it surreptitiously. The all-important action shot was worth more than a man’s, and certainly a horse’s, life.
In the early version of Ben-Hur, filmed in 1925, up to 150 horses were reportedly killed and several men severely injured. Posed publicity shots from that film depict clearly dead horses in a chariot pileup. Much like a Roman emperor, the producer had offered rewards ($150, $100 and $50) for the first three drivers over the finish line. But the 1959 version, starring Charlton Heston, apparently occasioned no serious injuries to man or horse despite many crashes and spills. The directors had taken enough care, or so they claimed, that no animals died on the set. Something had happened between Ben-Hurs to change the way Hollywood used animals in general and horses in particular.
The turning point had come in 1949 with the filming of Jesse James, shot at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. The film gained infamy among animal rights advocates.
It starred Henry Fonda and Randolph Scott, and near the end the brother train robbers are fleeing a posse that has them trapped at a precipice. One brother whacks his horse on the flank. In the next scene, shot from the lake about seventy-five feet below, the horse tumbles head-over-hoof into the water before landing in a vile spray of water. Then the f
ilm cuts back to the cliff, where a second horse gets slapped and is seen tumbling. Accounts of the episode vary: we may be seeing the second horse falling or, more likely, the first unfortunate animal — same leap, but this time shot in a tighter frame, with more light and from a different angle. In the ensuing frame, the two brothers are swimming alongside their horses and the posse is left behind.
But the scene at the cliff did not fool everyone. One, possibly two, horses, died that day. One version in a book on the history of stuntmen reported that the horses originally shied in terror at the drop, so chutes had been built and the stuntman and two horses pushed off the cliff. Outraged viewers complained loudly and bitterly. That same year the American Humane Association (AHA) was founded to govern the use of animals in film.
The result today is that any film employing animals typically includes an explanatory note at the film’s end assuring viewers that no animal was harmed during the shoot. “We even protect insects,” says Ed Lish, a field training officer with the AHA in Los Angeles. “Anything in front of the camera, you cannot harm. We look at scripts beforehand, we mark the animal action and make recommendations on how to do this or that safely.”
Doubtless, abuses still occur, but not on the scale that once was the custom. Falling horses are now trained to do just that, and then only onto prepared beds of sand. Horses working around guns and explosions are fitted with cotton in their ears. And the tripwire has been banned. When a horse leaps from a cliff, the height is trimmed to ten feet or less, and only trained horses are given the task.
I did not lack for horses as a child. Film and television teemed with them. At my grandfather’s farm near Tamworth, Ontario, where we often spent summers (compensation for Nakina winters), I had them in the flesh — giant plow horses, a gray named Queen, a bay called Molly. My grandfather saw the farm dog as a working animal, ignored the cats, left the hens and geese to my grandmother, and while I can remember him calling gently to the cows (co-bas, co-bas), it was the horses he prized. They were the only animals Leonard Flynn really talked to.
I have a photograph — black-and-white, of course — of me at four years of age standing on a hay wagon, reins in hand. I look stern and my gaze is forward — to the horses. Maybe I absorbed some of my grandfather’s passion. But at some point, when I could read, literary horses came into view.
The first horse book I ever read was Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty — a Christmas present. It was hardcover, with each of its glossy color plates lying under its own little blanket of snow-white onionskin paper. That book, along with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, would occupy a special place in my little library. It is psychologically telling, I suppose, that they are nineteenth- and eighteenth-century books, respectively, about horses, solitude and voyage. The boy who read them would grow up a Luddite who prizes horses, periods of quiet time alone and travel.
I liked Black Beauty’s simple elegance, rejoiced in its sense of comeuppance. When Dick the plowboy tosses stones at Beauty and the other colts, he is sacked for his crime by the farmer. Another boy stealing Beauty’s oats is similarly caught. But Beauty’s life and fortune are tied to his masters, this one kind, that one ruthless. “I hope you will fall into good hands,” Beauty’s mother tells him. “But a horse never knows who may buy him, or who may drive him. It is all a chance.”
Surely no coincidence, many writers who first led us into the inner lives of horses were women. The contemporary writers of horses I most admire are women: Maxine Kumin, Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, Vicki Hearne. The old stereotype is still more true than not. Girls and women tend to befriend their horses and to rely on gentle persuasion. Boys and men are more likely to use muscle in an attempt to dominate the horse. Women writers were drawn to the tender territory of horse and child, and they plumbed it long before male writers did.
Marguerite Henry wrote at least ten books about horses, including Misty of Chincoteague. Mary O’Hara created My Friend Flicka and others in that series. But it was Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty that set the tone for the others to follow. Suddenly, beast of burden and warrior horse had to make room for noble companion and equine personality.
We live in an age of numbers, so perhaps some numbers about Sewell and her book are in order. I chanced upon a Penguin edition of the book published in 1972, which looked much thumbed and yellow with age. Eleanor Graham had written the introduction and noted there how difficult it had been to find a publisher for the book — a first book written by someone past fifty and on her deathbed.
When Black Beauty was published on November 24, 1877, London bookshops ordered fewer than one hundred copies for the entire city. But by 1935 the publisher had notified Sewell’s niece that world sales were in the vicinity of twenty million copies. By the 1970s the book was thought to be the sixth-best seller in the English language.
It had taken Anna Sewell seven years to write — proof once more that time, not just talent, creates fine and enduring books. Moral vision does, too.
Anna Sewell was a deeply religious woman, born a Quaker, who used Quaker “thees” and “thous” all her life. After an injury, she was left lame in both feet and navigated outside in a pony carriage. She would hold the reins loosely in her hand, never using the whip and always talking to the pony as if the pony understood.
Sewell had read an essay on animals by Horace Bushnell, who argued that animals, as much as humankind, live to do the will of God. That notion haunted her. “I have for six years,” read a note found amid her private papers, “been confined to the house and to my sofa, and have from time to time, as I was able, been writing what I think will turn out a little book, its special aim being to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses.”
The Sewell family believed that Black Beauty, the horse at the center of the book, was modeled on Bessie, Anna’s brother’s horse. They recognized Bessie’s spirit and courage, good sense and affection, and her uncommon speed.
Black Beauty chronicles the life of a horse and is told from that horse’s perspective, giving voice to every equine in the book. Here is Beauty on the sensitivity of a horse’s mouth: “Oh! if people knew what a comfort to horses a light hand is, and how it keeps a good mouth and a good temper, they surely would not chuck, and drag, and pull at the rein as they often do. Our mouths are so tender, that where they have not been spoiled or hardened with bad or ignorant treatment, they feel the slightest movement of the driver’s hand, and we know in an instant what is required of us.”
In one episode in the book, a clear sample of the horse’s acute sensibility, Black Beauty is about to take his driver, John, and his master, Squire Gordon, across a wooden bridge during a violent storm in near darkness. Beauty stops, refusing to cross, even after a light touch from the whip. At that moment, a man at the tollgate runs out with a torch to warn them that the bridge was washed out in the middle. Had they gone on, all would have perished.
In an ensuing conversation Beauty hears his master say that “God had given men reason, by which they could find out things for themselves; but He had given animals knowledge which did not depend on reason, much more prompt and perfect in its way, and by which they had often saved the lives of men.” The incident at the bridge may well have been based on historical precedent. I have heard and read similar stories.
Anna Sewell would also have known the fate of horses in war. The Charge of the Light Brigade, that folly inflicted on men and horses only a few decades before Black Beauty was written, must have been fresh in her mind. The accounts I have read seem mirrored in Sewell’s book as Captain, an old war horse, tells his story to Beauty:
From the right, from the left, and from the front, shot and shell poured in upon us. Many a brave man went down, many a horse fell … Fearful as it was, no one stopped, no one turned back … Some of the horses had been so badly wounded that they could scarcely move from the loss of blood; other noble creatures were trying on three legs to drag themselves along, and
others were struggling to rise on their fore feet, when their hind legs had been shattered by shot. Their groans were piteous to hear, and the beseeching look in their eyes as those who escaped passed by and left them to their fate, I shall never forget.
Marguerite Henry surely read of Black Beauty. She wrote several classics of her own: Misty of Chincoteague, King of the Wind and Black Gold. There is enough subtlety in the characters and enough genuine detail to counter Henry’s own insistence that the heart be warmed, that the tale end happily.
A horse called Black Gold did indeed win the 1924 Kentucky Derby. The book gives a keen sense of that horse, his line and the people close to him. In his youth, the horse’s Irish jockey, Jaydee Mooney, had tended the horses that pull funeral coaches. One of his jobs was to “take the vinegar” out of the horses by riding them just before the funeral so they would look more stately in the procession. The job taught him something important about riding: “The chief thing, he discovered, was to be one with the horse, to be part of him, motion for motion.”
Black Gold is out of a filly named Useeit (she was so tiny as a foal she could barely see out the half door of her stall, and thus the name) and by a fine Kentucky Thoroughbred stallion named Black Toney. It is Useeit, an Oklahoma filly bred by Osage Indians, almost as much as her famous foal, Black Gold, who wins the reader’s heart.
The tale is clear, never muddied; the writing, admirably simple; the metaphors, aptly chosen. As Useeit matures, she got “round and solid as an apple. And her eyes, always beautiful, became so full of health and liquid light that one was stopped by their brilliance.” Her brown coat had a sheen, “like a plain brown boulder made glossy by the water that flows over it.”
Wild About Horses Page 16
