Browning in Buckskin Read online

  Movie star autobiographies are all crap. They make themselves look good and everyone else look bad, or they just make everyone look good. It's not like that in the movies; actors are erratic and directors, writers and producers are crazy. Movie people can go from being sweethearts to vicious bastards in a second. Drink and drugs have got a lot to do with it, of course. It's confusing. Where was I? The Plainsman, that's right. Like all movie acting, it was mainly suiting up in buckskins and chaps and waiting around to be told what to do. But I remember a couple of things . . .

  There was a scene where an Indian had to deliver a speech about the victory they'd had at the Little Big Horn. Longish speech. The script just had a gap for the words, and one of the script girls asked the players if there was anyone who could speak Cheyenne. I looked around and saw that Charlie Stevens wasn't there. He was playing Indian Charlie in the movie, and since he was Geronimo's grandson I suppose he spoke Apache, if anything, but he still might have been hard to fool. As I say, my time among the Canadian Indians had given me a smattering of their language, and I could string a few sentences together, mainly about rivers and fish and snow and such things, but I didn't think it'd make much difference. Not many Cheyenne went to the movies in those days. I put my hand up and said, 'The moon is waning over the pine trees,' or something to that effect.

  'Great,' the script girl said, 'Is that Cheyenne?'

  I put on a solemn look and nodded.

  'Go to costume and make-up, please. Right now.'

  I went to the costume department and got fitted out with a long skirt and moccasins, tomahawk, armbands, braids, headcloth, the works. They didn't have to darken me because the sun had already done that. A few streaks and dabs of warpaint, and I was ready. Then it was off to a fake forest they'd built on the lot – a dozen or so pine trees, boulders and a thicket. There was a clearing with a low burning campfire in the centre of it. As we approached the set, the script girl told me that the Indian had to ride up to the clearing, leading another horse and singing a song. Then he was supposed to get off his horse and approach the campfire. Then Gary Cooper would come out from behind a tree with a gun, and the Indian would spout for a couple of minutes about kicking shit out of the white man.

  'Sounds easy,' I said, although my knees were shaking. I'd never spoken a word in front of a camera in my life.

  'You can ride, can't you?'

  'Sure. I'm a good rider.'

  She pointed to where two horses with blankets for saddles and a pack horse were tethered. 'Yours is the one on the left.'

  'What's the other one for?'

  'It's for,' she looked at her notes, 'someone called Quinn.'

  'Eh?'

  'Didn't I tell you? You're the stand-in. Mr De Mille's not quite sure about Quinn. If you have to do it, it's better to use another horse. These movie horses don't like having different people up, one after another.'

  'Is this Quinn a Cheyenne?'

  'Says he is, but he looks more like a Mexican to me. Stand there.'

  I watched while Tony Quinn had a conversation with De Mille. One of the technical men looked to be interpreting. They got whatever it was settled, and Quinn used a rock as a mounting stool. A novice, I thought. He'll probably fall off. He didn't fall. He trotted up all correct, hopped down and stood near the fire, looking around. Then all hell broke loose. I could hear De Mille shouting and Quinn babbling away in Spanish to the technician. He's blown it, I thought. I'm in. I got a bit closer so De Mille could see me. I understood enough Spanish to gather that Quinn was asking what fucking song were they talking about.

  'Get somebody else,' De Mille said. 'Get somebody else.'

  I moved forward.

  Then Gary Cooper walked up, and De Mille told him to sit down and wait. 'I don't think this kid's going to work out.'

  I was about to signal to Coop when he pushed his hat back and scratched his forehead. 'Aw, give the boy a chance. It's his first picture and he's confused. Give him a chance.'

  De Mille said something about wasting Cooper's time.

  Cooper sat down. 'I don't mind. I saw the kid in the makeup room. Nice kid. Give him a break.'

  I could have brained him with a tomahawk. Instead I stepped forward and said a few words in Canadian Indian to Quinn who stared at me. I winked at Cooper who gave one of his slow smiles.

  'Hi, Dick,' Cooper drawled, 'what's that you said?'

  'I said, "Give the kid a break."'

  That got a laugh and suddenly De Mille was all business. 'Okay, we'll try it. Tell him to sing anything he knows in Cheyenne.'

  I stepped back and they got to work. Some kind of transformation came over Tony Quinn. He looked taller and older, and when he looked up it seemed that he was directly in touch with the sun and the wind. What he said was pure gibberish, but it sounded great and they did a perfect run-through. I wandered off among the rocks and smoked a cigarette. After a while the script girl came running up. 'Get back there,' she said, 'they're having a fight.'

  Hope leapt inside me. 'Who? Cooper and Quinn?'

  'No, Quinn and Mr De Mille.'

  I hurried back in time to hear Quinn shouting at De Mille about being an Indian, and how an Indian wouldn't ride up and let a white man pull a gun on him. I didn't hear what De Mille said, but there were trees and ropes and about a hundred people standing around, and I expected De Mille to give orders to lynch Quinn. But he didn't. He nodded and waved and the technicians started changing the set-up. For a bit player!

  They shot the scene quickly. Quinn did his speech, and they got it in one take. De Mille shook his head. I heard him say, 'I hope you'll come back and see me in a few days. I'd like to talk to you about putting you under a personal contract.29

  [Browning breaks off, and the bottle rattles violently against the edge of a glass. There is a long pause before the voice resumes. Ed.]

  It's so goddamned unfair!

  18

  Word soon got around on the Paramount lot that Richard 'Dick' Browning Esquire wasn't your run-of-the-mill bit player. I hadn't got the speaking part, of course, but it had been noticed that I knew Cooper and had made a good joke in the presence of C.B. It mattered. I don't mean that I became buddy-buddy with Bing Crosby, Cary Grant and Maurice Chevalier, who were all working at Paramount then, but I was nodded to by certain executives and directors, and I got invited to parties.

  I forget what happened at most of the parties for the obvious reason, but I remember the poker games with Paramount players after the day's work was finished. There were some hard-doers working on The Plainsman – Lane Chandler, Tex Driscoll, old Franklyn Farnum, James Mason (not the English actor), and Bud Flanagan, who later became a bigtime actor as Dennis O'Keefe. Charlie Stevens sat in sometimes. Tony Quinn didn't.

  'One Indian in a card game's enough,' Chandler said on one occasion when he was in a fine mood on account of holding good cards.

  'If Quinn was here there'd still only be one Indian,' Stevens said.

  We all had a laugh at that, although you could never be sure about actors and Indian blood in those days. It was whispered that Tom Mix had a touch, but I don't know whether or not that was true. Certainly you didn't find the Burt Reynolds type, proud of it, around the town. Names were a worry, too. I doubt that Dennis O'Keefe liked to be reminded about Bud Flanagan. William Humphries, who worked on The Plainsman, was 'Humphrey' in some pictures and 'Humphreys' in others. We had a Cora Shumway on the picture who was probably stopped right there by her name, and a Stanhope Wheatley who, I guess, sounded too good to be true. God knows what his real name was.

  All this is leading to my other main memory of working at Paramount in 1936. After a heavy day's shooting, in which I played a cavalry trooper for one scene and a skulking Indian for another, I sat down for a few hours of poker with some of the other players. Driscoll, the boss of the school,30 had squared it with the security people for us to use the set of Buffalo Bill's cabin (where the Indians' faces appear at the windows, if you've seen the movie.) We had ga
s lamps, a pine table and a dirt floor which, I have to say, some of the older players used as a spittoon.

  There were seven or eight of us, not a lot of money in the pots and a good atmosphere. (I suppose it was a Friday and we all had money in our pockets.) We'd play a few hands and then drop out to yarn, smoke or go for beer and cigarettes. I was at the table with Flanagan, Stevens and another man I didn't know. For some reason I was wary of him from the start, without any clear reason. I've had these feelings about certain people all my life – probably a headshrinker could tell me why, but I've never wanted to know. He was a small individual, mid-thirties but smooth-faced, grey-eyed, with slicked-back fair hair and a way of rolling cigarettes that was familiar. He dealt.

  I looked at my cards. Lousy as usual. 'Three.'

  Stevens sat pat; Flanagan took cards. The dealer took one.

  I forget how the bidding went. I know I dropped out early, partly because of my poor hand, and partly because those grey eyes were giving me trouble.

  'I'm out,' I said.

  The dealer looked at his hand. The grey eyes bored into me across the top of his cards. 'Thass a shame,' he drawled in broad Texan. 'Still, ah admire a man who knows when to quit.'

  I grinned and nodded. This kind of hamming was part of the fun.

  'Yup, ah do admire that. Ah really do. What's yore name, pardner?'

  An alarm bell rang, but too far back and too faintly. I tapped my cards into a neat pile. 'Dick Browning.'

  'Is that right, mate?'

  The backblocks Australian accent cut through my beer, tobacco and good fellowship fug like tinsnips through lead. I glanced at the other players, desperately trying to gain time. No support.

  'And who're you?'

  'My name's Colin Carter and I'm from Bourke, New South bloody Wales. You're not trying to tell me you're not Australian are you, mate?'

  'I . . . I've lived there.'

  Charlie Stevens spat on the floor. 'Are we playing poker, or what?'

  'Yeah,' Flanagan said. 'Raise you, Colin.'

  'Out.' The grey eyes were like x-rays. He rolled another cigarette, and I recognised the style as pure Australian, 1st AIF. Oh, Christ, I thought. He knows!

  'Your buck and my doe,' Stevens said.

  I don't know who won the pot. I sat there, trying to place the man sitting opposite. He smoked calmly and kept on looking at me as if I was an interesting painting on a wall. I tried to look unconcerned, which is something I'm good at, even when my bowels are turning to water. I struggled to place him but without success. Farnum won the hand, and I was too unnerved to keep playing. I wanted to leave, but I couldn't just walk away from Carter. I left the table, poured a beer from the pitcher and asked one of the other men sitting out what Carter did.

  'Stunt man,' he said. 'They say he's good.'

  'He looks it.' I watched Carter handle his cards, make quick decisions and shrewd bets. He glanced at me from time to time, and I tried not to look furtive. Stunt men were crazy, dangerous bastards on the whole, best avoided. The only hope you had if one decided to attack you was that he'd be too drunk to be effective. They drank a lot to dull their aches and pains. Carter wasn't drinking. He won a pot and pulled out of the game. He pocketed his winnings and sauntered over towards me. A little guy, five foot six in his shoes, but without an ounce of spare flesh on him. And those damned piercing eyes.

  'Ever been to Bourke?' he asked, using the Australian voice.

  'No.'

  'Great little town, Bourke. Wish I was back there now.'

  'Why aren't you?'

  He rolled a cigarette in the soldier's way, with both ends twisted and the tobacco loose so it'd burn quickly. You didn't always have time for a leisurely smoke in the trenches. 'I dunno. When the war finished, I sort of drifted around. Got a taste for travelling. Wound up here falling off horses for a living. Were you in the war?'

  I nodded. My mouth was too dry to speak.

  'What mob?'

  'RAF, I was a flyer.'

  'Not trying to let on you're a Pom?'

  I collected myself and decided to take a firmer line. He was a lot smaller than me after all, and the other men wouldn't have let a fight get out of hand. Besides, a bit player outranked a stuntman. 'Look here, Carter,' I said, 'quit quizzing me, okay? I've spent time in Australia, England, Canada, South Africa and here. Mexico, too. I've been all over. What's it to you?'

  He squinted through his cigarette smoke. 'I was in France in June, 1918. We got pinned down by a Hun sniper outside some shitty little town. Bastard picked off two of my best mates. We had a good sniper in the Company, name of Hughes. Only laid eyes on the bloke once or twice, but I saw him shoot a Jerry officer through the head at a thousand yards.

  I remembered the shot. One of my best. I suppressed the impulse to say 'Probably luck' or something just as stupid. I kept my mouth shut.

  'We really needed him that day. I reckon he could've got the Hun, or at least made it so hot for him we could go on. I went back to find him, and do you know what?'

  I drank some beer.

  'Why's your hand trembling, mate?'

  'I remember flying over the trenches,' I said. 'Got hit a few times. Well, my kite did.'

  Carter ignored that. 'Like I say, I went looking for Hughes, and they told me he'd isolated during the night. It cost us ten good men to get past that bloody sniper.'

  'Why are you telling me this?'

  'You look like that yellow rat Hughes to me.'

  I forced a dry laugh. 'That's ridiculous.' I felt myself relax as I saw the slight doubt in Carter's eyes. If he'd actually been in my unit or had seen me up close and often he might have been sure, even though I'd changed in eighteen years. But he wasn't sure. 'Tell you what, Carter. It's a good story. Why don't you get it down on paper. You might be able to sell it to the movies.'

  'Colin,' Farnum called from the table, 'we need a player here with balls.'

  Carter gave me one last piercing stare and then went back to the table. I drank some more beer, chatted about the shoot with someone and left soon after. Driving the Olds back to Venice, I sang a few verses of 'Waltzing Matilda' and had a few nips of rye to cheer myself up. What's that quotation about a brave man dying once and a coward dying a thousand times? Never seemed quite right to me – the coward survives a thousand times.

  I kept a weather eye out for Carter and was careful not to get caught on my own in some isolated part of the lot – remember, they had small deserts and ravines and forests and all sorts of miniature bushwhacking places. I didn't see him more than once or twice and, although he looked at me as if he'd like to hang me from a tree branch, he didn't make any trouble. The filming went on quickly and smoothly. De Mille knew what he wanted, and how to get it. I did all I could to get myself into prominent positions, but there were plenty of others doing the same thing, so it wasn't easy.

  One day I was standing around waiting for a take when Cooper wandered over to me. He was carrying a Winchester rifle and a book. He put the book down on a log and sat on top of it.

  'Guess you're not going to read that, Coop,' I said. 'Less'n you can read it with your ring.'

  Cooper laughed. 'I haven't read four books in my whole life and I don't plan to start now. People're always giving me books to read, telling me what great movies they'd make. You read much, Dick?'

  I shook my head. 'When I'm reading, I always feel there's something else I should be doing.'

  'Right.' He raised the Winchester. 'Now, hunting's a different matter. Remember how you told me you was a shooter in the war?'

  I did remember. It was in a night club when I was working on Hells Angels.31 'Sure,' I said.

  'You told me something about sighting, but I forget quite what it was.'

  I took the rifle and automatically lifted it into the sniping position, which is a particular shooting style – very loose but compact, making the smallest possible target. Open sights and a lot of shoulder support.

  'You sure look the part,' Coop said.<
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  One of De Mille's assistants was signalling for Cooper, and I handed the rifle back. Then a feeling as cold as a wind from the Canadian Rockies crept over me. I glanced to my left and saw that Colin Carter had been watching us from no more than twenty feet away. My mind raced. What he'd seen was bad enough, but if Carter spoke to Gary I was a dead duck. But stunt men didn't just amble up and chat to major stars, and Cooper wasn't very approachable by nature. There was only a couple of days' shooting left, and then God alone knew where any of us would be. If I could just keep out of Carter's way for those few days, I reckoned I'd be all right. He could spread rumours about me, of course, but in Hollywood any talk about you, even if it's bad, is better than no talk at all.

  Nothing happened the next day. On the last day of shooting they were doing the scene in which Jean Arthur takes a bullwhip to one of the town roughs. I suppose they kept the scene until last in case she broke her arm using the whip – she was a small, frail-looking woman, but she made a lot of movies and is still alive, so I guess she must have been pretty tough. I landed the job of the rough, and I was glad to get it. I got suited up in flannel shirt and dungarees and fitted out with a holster and a six gun. Then I went to the set – dirt road, horse trough, hitching rail, store fronts with nothing behind them, boardwalk.

  They were setting up the scene, and for the first time in Hollywood I was given a chair to sit on. Jean Arthur was sitting a short distance away. She lifted the bullwhip and waved to me. I waved back.

  'Hey,' I said to one of the technicians, 'can she use that thing?'